Rudi Rizman: We Voluntarily Turn into Slaves

Dr. Rudi Rizman, a political scientist and sociologist who was invited by Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Noam Chomsky to Russell's tribunal, spoke candidly about a world where nearly six billion people live under authoritarian regimes, democracy is eroding, artificial intelligence is pushing people into isolation, and intellectuals too often chase points and publications instead of raising their voices publicly. Rizman laid out a brutal diagnosis of our times – from Gaza, Ukraine, the USA, and China, and explained why he adheres to Gramsci's principle: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.

You belong to the intellectual elite, yet you exude a humility that is becoming a rare trait in the world of social media. It is especially often found in people who can least afford it because their role should be more visible.

Today, almost everyone feels like they own the truth. Even those who rely on knowledge and arguments find themselves in a kind of "mental wave of atoms" through which they try to convey insights, but such a voice is poorly heard. We are trapped in a Kafkaesque world where we neither know nor want to know who is responsible for it and, above all, why they are guilty.

Europe is running out of fuel; in my opinion, that fuel is intellectuals. Do you share this feeling?

We are bidding farewell to the world heralded by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, from thinkers like René Descartes, who taught us to doubt everything. We are entering a world well predicted by George Orwell, if I mention a "literary" sociologist, and Thomas Hobbes, if I add a philosopher. Hobbes saw a world without rules and international law as a world of homo homini lupus, man is a wolf to man. Today, we don't have to look far for proof. We see it on screens and the front pages of newspapers. It concretely manifests in Gaza, in Ukraine, and even more drastically in parts of the world that the Eurocentric media space almost never writes about, such as Sudan.

What feelings overwhelm you when we repeatedly see the bitter images of wars on newspaper covers?

By nature, I am a very emotional person. For months – over two years – we have been encountering images of children wrapped in white sheets. This fills me with a sense of co-responsibility, and all I can do is talk or write about it. When I accompany my two granddaughters to school in the morning – one is seven, the other eleven – I can't shake off the almost guilt that they can regularly attend school, while children in Gaza haven't attended classes for two years. Israeli genocidal policy has stripped them of their humanity. People who don't go to school don't acquire the civilizational knowledge that enables them to function and respect the world. I saw similar scenes six decades ago when I was involved in Russell's tribunal. Cameras then captured children from a Vietnamese village fleeing from school after being sprayed with chemical weapons by a helicopter – burning torches, ten- and twelve-year-olds. There are many such stories, one of them being the massacre of 5000 unarmed villagers in My Lai, which I recently described in an article in Delo.

Are you surprised that a nation with such a tragic history and collective memory, like the Jewish people, is doing things today that are very similar to what they themselves experienced?

It is almost inconceivable. We cannot put ourselves in their shoes. But if we realize that we Slovenians also have actions on our collective conscience that are incomparable to our idealized self-images, such as the erasure of 25,000 people after independence, it should not surprise us that a crime can be committed even against one's historical experiences. We must understand it through politics and political interests. Today, 5.8 billion people live in authoritarian regimes. Only a good quarter of humanity has the relatively bearable privilege of living in – at least formal – democracy. Authoritarian leaders need the tools of war and fear to sustain themselves. With fear, they subjugate people, and the logic of continuously producing enemies extends their rule. The pendulum of history moved towards democratic transition for a while, even in Slovenia, but then it swung back to the time of authoritarian leaders. I would recommend intellectuals read Étienne de la Boétie's book Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. It talks about how people literally, voluntarily, enter into this relationship. What bothers me the most is how many people are willing to stay silent – until it is their turn.

Today, more than 5.8 billion people live in authoritarian regimes, such as North Korea, led by Kim Jong Un. PHOTO: Reuters

Is it almost necessary for a thinking person and intellectual today to clearly state what is right and what is wrong? It seems to me that people are retreating into their bubbles, becoming numb, and giving up on the world.

Unfortunately, many from "my kind" underestimate the role of soft power, or as you might say, "soft superpower." They forget that this power can prevail at some point. What power did the Protestant reformer Martin Luther and the American civil rights activist Martin Luther King wield, and finally, our own Primož Trubar? What power did Nelson Mandela wield? Václav Havel? I do not underestimate this power.

Walls, like the Berlin Wall, must first be torn down in the minds, and then with pickaxes. A Polish colleague once told me an anecdote about a man he saw repeatedly running into a wall. He stopped for a while, then repeated the same. When the acquaintance asked this man why he was doing it, he replied that he simply felt good when he stopped. This wall metaphor can be applied to many cases of sociologists and other dissidents in authoritarian, but also democratic regimes, who faced punitive sanctions, lost their jobs, or ended up in court.

I see my engagement as an investment in something that may not happen in my lifetime – and it is still worth it. History knows very few periods without wars and even fewer periods of true democracy; the wave of darkness usually lasts longer than the short periods of light. An additional problem is that we live in a world of metrics. In the neoliberal world, citations, points, and the reputation of journals matter. Many in the fields of social sciences and humanities succumb to this logic and forget about empathy, care for humanity, and a decent society. This is a significant shortcoming.

In a way, nostalgia is being revived in these times. More and more people are emotionally recounting the former Yugoslavia, returning to Ivo Andrić, who speaks of connection through human destinies and the symbol of the bridge. How do you understand this phenomenon?

I am glad you mentioned Ivo Andrić, who was one of my first youthful professional role models – as an ambassador in Nazi Germany and simultaneously a writer. Such ambassadors are almost non-existent today. Today, they mostly write reports that serve politics. They lack the breadth and former vocation that Andrić had. I ventured into science, but with the awareness that I must convey my work to the wider public. Of course, I cannot imagine making similar steps as Havel, Mandela, or Martin Luther King, but I can contribute my "atoms of waves" towards a more friendly future, also for my descendants. When you talk about optimism, let me remind you of Antonio Gramsci's maxim: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. This is an extremely important value for me. Both are forms of soft power worth investing in, even though today it is not exactly the main guiding principle of intellectuals, if I limit myself to them.

Let's remember your friend Umberto Eco. Which of his thoughts do you find most relevant today, as a kind of compass for thinking and action?

With Umberto Eco, I met during my lectures at his University in Bologna and also at Harvard, where he occasionally lectured. I particularly remember our drive from Treviso to Ljubljana when the plane couldn't land in Trieste due to fog, as our university awarded him an honorary doctorate. This drive also took place in dense fog, and during it, he talked to me about death, actually about two deaths; the death of an old friend, historian Jacques Le Goff, author of the notable book Intellectuals in the Middle Ages, and his awareness of his own mortality, which his illness had already begun to remind him of, prematurely ending his life.

He told me that in his last book, he set himself the task of confronting death among other things. He believed that death in this confrontation could not ultimately prevail over life. The book is composed of artistic images that humanity should remember even after the death of their creators and listen to what they convey.

Among the central ones, he highlighted Guernica by Pablo Picasso, an image of a world he sensed would move towards the dispersed violence we experience today: Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, the Yugoslav carnage... He was very aware of where the authoritarian rule of Silvio Berlusconi was leading, who was a kind of precursor to Donald Trump. Trump is his much more brutal, multiplied copy. Italy has not yet recovered from him, and even worse awaits America.

He also reminded me of Stefan Zweig, who fled to Argentina from Nazism and decided with his wife that they did not want to live in such a world. This is not my message to today's intellectuals. My message is the opposite: in such a world, it is even more worth living and fighting. Be like Gramsci: he spent 20 years in a fascist prison, continued writing, and persisted. We must fight – not only for ourselves but for our descendants and society as a whole.

You said that the fight for good in chaos is a fight with the highest added value.

We live in a world that multiplies violence, wars, and authoritarian tendencies, again according to Gramsci. We must remember the brave people who took the good side of history in the most difficult times, the partisans who went into the forests. The latter is not an option today, but it is an analogy: even now, people resist systems like Trumpism in various ways. Some by writing, others in civil society and on the streets. Let's remember the stories of survivors from the Dachau or Mauthausen camps, Anne Frank and her diary. This is a message that today's Israeli politics should hear, but it does not. I have many friends in Israel who are brave and persist, even at the cost of their careers and their families. Trump admires Vladimir Putin, the North Korean dictator, the Chinese leader. Under his pillow, he had Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler – we cannot say he is not sincere. Everything he does today, he essentially predicted. He wants to destroy the plural political system and the existing international legal order and return us to a world where power, money, and the market rule, and decent politics have no chance.

Sometimes I fear conspiracy theories, but with the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence, I wonder if there isn't some higher plan. New technologies are isolating us. Cafes and pubs, once spaces of lively conversation, are emptying, and alternatives, let alone revolutions, are not being thought of there, but their attention is colonized by a few square centimeters of screen.

Do you think modern man spends too little time socializing?

Indeed, cafes and pubs, where ideas and rebellions were once born, are empty. Let's remember the cafes in Vienna, where on Herrengasse 14 in Café Central, Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky, Robert Musil, Zweig, and others gathered and pondered. People with great intellectual competencies today often "work" only with their computer, tomorrow with a robot. Artificial intelligence, tools like chatgpt, and other tools of post-truth addiction on social networks have become friends, lovers, allies, and doctors for many. The problem is that there are no charismatic leaders clearly warning about this. Artificial intelligence allows us to reach "truth" very cheaply – someone provides it to you instead of you critically thinking and self-reflecting to reach it yourself. This is toxic and destructive for society. Especially when the space of scientific and rational insights is occupied by much more fascinating conspiracy theories.

Margaret Thatcher predicted a society where "there is no such thing as society, there are only individuals." This is the fundamental ideology of market rule. The market ultimately decides which explanation or theory – even conspiratorial – will take hold: usually the one that can be marketed and monetized.

Technology quickly addicts people. In some countries, such as Norway, they are already seriously considering and even acting on when and how the use of digital technologies is good or harmful for children and young people because they simply stop thinking for themselves. Instead of being subjects, these tools become the subject, and people become objects.

This may even be a worse form of addiction than drugs, and we do not yet have therapies for it. Every technical invention has ambivalence: a knife can be useful at lunch or deadly. The same applies to artificial intelligence.

Perhaps it is not surprising that China is experiencing a new boom. Colleague Zorana Baković pointed out the parallel between binary logic 0-1 and traditional Chinese philosophy of yin-yang, light-darkness. In this context, I wonder how Europe will fare, will it find itself on the bright or dark side of history?

If I were an expert in biotechnology, I would first talk about the bipolarity of the brain and how it can be easily deceived. I notice this in myself already with added sugar in coffee – the brain must be consciously directed all the time, nothing is automatic – if this works, it means you will sweeten your coffee to the detriment of your health.

It is similar with society. In many countries, we face the erosion of democracy. Authoritarian politicians, not just Trump, Putin, Viktor Orbán, Aleksandar Vučić, and others, including in our country, operate with fear: of migrants, of homosexuals, of "others." This is not a policy that, according to Erich Fromm, pursues the goals of a good and healthy society.

At the same time, I am pleased that there is a vital civil society in Slovenia that resists this. This is hope that democracy can indeed be strengthened in the medium term, not just eroded.

Why should we support entrepreneurship in such a world?

First, the question is, what kind of entrepreneurship. This is similar to the metaphor with a knife or the invention of atomic energy – both civilizational inventions were not initially intended for killing. The key is what the fundamental goal is.

The goal of entrepreneurship should be the well-being of all people, of course proportionate to their contribution and with the awareness that we must take special care of the socially and health-disadvantaged. Entrepreneurship that does not account for society is not healthy entrepreneurship. The prevailing global neoliberal policy does not pursue this goal and is thus ultimately detrimental to entrepreneurship. I am not referring to small and medium-sized entrepreneurs, but to the current digital oligarchs who are leading the world into a new crisis, similar to the one in 2008 or, if we go further back, 1929. Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, along with some godfathers of artificial intelligence, such as Geoffrey Hinton, predict the imminent burst of the overinflated information bubble, which is extremely energy-consuming and requires trillion-dollar investments in building databases, but ultimately does not bring profit anymore.

When I started my professional career, income disparities were 1:8, 1:10, maybe 1:15. Today, these ratios are unimaginable. True entrepreneurship has nothing to do with this, it is different with large corporations. I don't know what an individual can do with 350 billion euros or Elon Musk with a trillion. For society and a responsible person, it would be better to allocate it to education, healthcare, preserving the planet, and not to projects about human colonies on Mars or investments in artificial intelligence tools that are supposed to replace humans.

A healthy economy also thinks about others. Others are not hell, as Jean-Paul Sartre said, others are the condition for a solidarity society. This is what Amartya Sen, my former professor and Nobel laureate, talks about when he writes about the development of India: the real breakthrough began when the country started distributing wealth more fairly.

Slovenia is about 700 times smaller than India, we almost all know each other. Precisely for this reason, it would be easier to establish fairer relations if there were political will and the necessary moral imperative.

Let's conclude with Slovenia. What trait do you think will enable the Slovenian nation to survive in the future?

The same trait that enabled two million Slovenians not only to survive in history but also to establish their own state. This is a political miracle in the world that we do not appreciate enough. Just think of the Kurds – more than 15 million of them, scattered across several countries, who do not have their own state. Armenia has one, but the path to it was fraught with genocide. The Jewish people paid a terrible price, which part of the Israeli political leadership and also their citizens unfortunately forget today.

The fact that we have our own state is a reason for optimism and at the same time an imperative. In the brutal time we live in, we must take a step forward towards a decent and healthy society, as Erich Fromm writes about. Here, social sciences, humanities, as well as entrepreneurship and economics have a lot of work to do. We also have a vibrant civil society that points this out. This is our great opportunity.

And we will probably seize it if we ask ourselves important questions. What question would you pose to society today?

My question would be whether society, in terms of collective consciousness and collective responsibility, even knows where it is heading. Does it know who its true allies are and can it renounce false political prophets and rely on its own strengths? This same question can be transferred to the dilemma we face as individuals in making sense of our lives. The answer is, of course, not simple. These days I have been listening to Porgy and Bess by George Gershwin and I can once again discern that for people who find themselves in a world where "we have more than enough of nothing," the only alternative is resistance.

Or as a simple Slovenian proverb says, rely on yourself and your own horse, meaning take responsibility for your decisions and your future. Or even better with Ivan Cankar, that a nation must write its own judgment.

And as Rade Šerbedžija says in the film Before the Rain: Choose a side.

Exactly. And choose the right side.