Harsh Mander: Is there a way out of today’s cruel and unkind world?
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This is a transcript of the keynote address delivered by Harsh Mander on Albert Schweitzer Day in Aspen on July 1.
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We are living through profoundly troubled times. So much that is most precious in our world is badly broken – kindness, justice, love, courage, caring, compassion and empathy.
Look at the world today. Democracy is crumbling in country after country. We see the hubris of highly centralised, opaque decision-making that abandons the poor and is worryingly crony capitalist.
Never before in human history have so few men owned so much. Unimaginable levels of wealth are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, while millions continue to endure desperate hunger, dead-end insecure jobs at dirt wages, homelessness and disease.
A trillion dollars is the wealth today of one single man. If he spends a million dollars every single day, it would take 2,700 years for his wealth to get exhausted. Yet one in 12 people in the world sleep hungry every night, one in two are denied affordable healthcare, and one in five children are malnourished.
The pandemic dramatically laid bare, with ruthless moral clarity, the catastrophic public costs of inequality. Millions of lives could have been saved if over many decades, states had made much greater investments in public health...