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tually change the prevalent ideology of those people who are not in
contact with the reality of their own countries .
KA:
There were certain ideas that led to the creation of the systems
that exist now, which are heavily weighted toward state ownership
and state control.
HS:
Those ideas were the same ones that were prevalent even in
your country three hundred years ago. There was a time in the
world when most people actually believed that the only people who
had a right to govern and imagine rules and take care of society were
those people who had inherited the power to do so , kings , and
princes, and the lords , and the wealthy landowners . That was the
prevailing ideology of the Western world . So, it is not surprising that
it should be prevalent in Latin America and most of the third
world.
It
is the natural state of things .
What's happened since the nineteenth century is that only a few
countries , not more than eighteen or twenty, such as yours, have
found out that to empower people creates more prosperity and cre–
ates more equality. But let me tell you, it's a very revolutionary state
of affairs . You're really islands of liberty and democracy in the
world . The rest of us are just coming out of our ignorance as facts
demonstrate that the old systems can no longer work. What occur–
red a long time ago in Western Europe was that there were mass mi–
grations towards the cities and that these mercantilist systems could
not cope with the multiplicity of desires for consumption and desires
to produce . And the market economy and democracy arose as the
most viable systems to allow for all of these different wills and desires
and energies to coordinate . What's happened in my country is that
up to thirty years ago, since most people were still in the countryside
and only the minority of Peruvians were in the cities, democracy, if
you will , and the market economy were't really deemed an absolute
necessity , simply because the third world ran along pretty well for
those who were in power with the mercantilist system, but in the
course of the last thirty years , as a result of the migrations , our cities
have quintupled, and they're no longer manageable.
KA:
Isn't there a step missing here between the situation that existed
in feudal times and the situation that exists now in Latin American
and in many of the African countries - the difference, that is, be–
tween the wealthy nobility owning all the land and the property and
the state owning all the land and the property, even though the peo–
ple who control the state bureacracy are usually the wealthy elites?
Isn't that difference the result of Marxist ideology?
