Sep 9, 2006 11:30:00 AM cite

Fred Matser: What are the basic dignities? Well, I think the most important I would say is to realize that we all live in a finite world, which was created by infinity, and in my way of looking at, divine infinity. We all in a way are part of a holy creation. The Earth is an expression of that, animals, nature and mankind. I think it's very important that we respect ourselves and that we respect the other. And with that respect that we all respect each others in our own free will, the free will to make choices, to choose function from dysfunction, to choose that power in respect to the other, that he or she does the same. Another aspect that I would like to express of a basic dignity is love. The fact that we have the power to love unconditionally ourselves and to love unconditionally the other as well as the animals and nature, it is important to constantly be aware of that and reinforce these values in one another. Apart from that, we all live together and of course, we have our responsibility. It is important to help one another to remind us of our own responsibility for our choices and to be accountable for that, to help and inspire one another, to help and empower one another.

by Fred Matser

Sep 9, 2006 11:30:00 AM cite

Galsan Tschinag: This is a question of which the solution lies in the hands of the colonial powers which are at the same time the administrators of the banks and caches of weapons in this world. Therefore this question can't be answered for the moment. But they aren't the only persons responsible if worldwide the human dignity is all the time violated. Very often it is the people themselves who despise their own dignity by smoking, snorting, drinking, lying, lusting, whoring and killing. And you could add other things to this list of vices.

by Galsan Tschinag

Sep 9, 2006 11:30:00 AM cite

Geert Lovink: One could start listing basic dignities like the right to life, but these things are all contested and they mean different things in different cultures and even in different times, in different decades. So I personally don't think that we should even try to define these basic dignities. There is a declaration of human rights. There are many declarations, in fact, and we all know that they are of little use in terms of conflict and if you take for instance the whole issue of abortion, in fact the human rights declaration is of very little use if you compare it; if you take one side of the argument and then the other. So I don't think to talk of basic dignities is the right starting point for this. I would say how can we enforce these values inside cultures in such a way that they get very, very deep and that they are not just something superficial, that some government somewhere or some transnational body somewhere decided; but that human right values become part of a culture, instead of seeing them as something that is imposed from the outside by the so called international community or even by so called global civil society.

by Geert Lovink

Sep 9, 2006 11:30:00 AM cite

Giora Feidman: It’s not the question why they deserve or we don’t deserve. We must integrate dignity. It’s the first thing that we feel to everything in life. Of course, I will say also for a tree, of course to an animal, and no question about another person. Dignity even I will say is not real force. Dignity, no question about that, include respect, include tolerance, include benevolent. This will bring us to the truths of existence. This is a cosmic glow. My teacher Lee Enzi told me so. Through benevolence and tolerance, we understand that we had the experience to feel what is the narrowness of intolerance. The dignity will be a result of that. It is very simple; it’s very, very simple. We are one family that came to this physic life to be in a process of a spiritual growth through any system that you decide, the mean and the [treat] cultivation.

by Giora Feidman

Sep 9, 2006 11:30:00 AM cite

Gladman Chibememe: The basic dignities for me would be: the right to life and right to have information. The fact that a person also need to have the opportunity to have access and opportunities to be able to lead a meaningful life. In this case, if we say that humanity deserves the right to life, it means we have to respect their lives. We don't have to just create situation in which they will -- that will result in the loss of life, unnecessary wars, terrorism. Those things are bad, because once that is done, the dignity, the right to life is going to be compromised. People have got the right to information. We need to have that information to be informed of what is happening. It is really really unfair to have things happening and important people without even knowing what they are doing and what is happening. It is in this case quite important to have those rights and those dignities, liberty, and those dignities embraced in all the systems.

by Gladman Chibememe

Sep 9, 2006 11:30:00 AM cite

Hans-Peter Dürr: After all it is the optimal development of personality, which is not restricted to physical components, but especially to the emotional and even more to the mental abilities human beings have. To tell them that every human being is unique and that it is your obligation to develop your abilities in a way to make this uniqueness important in a larger context. It is your task to bring in your personality, to play a part in the concert of voices and by this enabling society to reach a higher level of development, which has a higher flexibility, reaching a higher form of consciousness so to speak. In this regard everyone will be of importance. Development of personality does not ask for development in one direction only, without connections to others. Everyone should look for development, which is in accordance with the entire system. Today this is often called sustainability and I like to call it making life livelier. Considering life as a whole, which we want to promote.

by Hans-Peter Dürr

Sep 9, 2006 11:30:00 AM cite

Harry Wu: The basic dignities of each human being are the same without any difference. It is a great problem that how we can get our basic dignities respected. Whether do we let so many people go without dignities or not? I think it is hard to say, because these people themselves have the problem of how deep they understand their own dignities.

by Harry Wu

Sep 9, 2006 11:30:00 AM cite

Helena Norberg-Hodge: I believe that the basic dignities that people deserve are first of all the right to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves, the right for expression, the right for real democracy. And why are these not allowed? Why is it that so many people go without them? We come back again to the creation of a highly centralized power structure that has been created essentially through economic pressures. The economy link to knowledge and technology has created a suprastructure, a type of dominant techno sphere that’s imposing itself on societies worldwide. One way to think of it is as a club of corporations and banks that are gaining profit by imposing on the world notions of growth and progress that actually go against the interests of the majority. At the moment, that corporate and banking elite is creating a situation where more and more identical products are being sent back and forth. Literally, wheat exported from Australia to England, from France to Australia, California oranges in Australia at a lower price and local oranges, milk exported from the UK about 100,000 tons a year and 100,000 tons imported. Why? This is creating an economic dependence in which more and more people are marginalized, more and more people are struggling to pay for the rent, to pay for education and to pay for their food. Why? Why are people also feeling insecure in their jobs even at higher and higher levels? Because of the centralized control that in turn has now controlled our governments, in turn controlled academia and the media. We are in a desperate position to rethink basic assumptions, because the basic assumptions have been removed from us.

by Helena Norberg-Hodge

Sep 9, 2006 11:30:00 AM cite

Homero Aridjis:

by Homero Aridjis

Sep 9, 2006 11:30:00 AM cite

Jerry Mander: Answertext will be available soon.

by Jerry Mander

Sep 9, 2006 11:30:00 AM cite

Jesper Green: The basic dignity that human beings deserve is respect. It’s very simple. If you don’t give them respect or when you as a person don’t deal respect or respect other people then you can’t expect them to respect you. They can respect you in a fearful kind of way but that’s not kind of real respect, I guess.

by Jesper Green

Sep 9, 2006 11:30:00 AM cite

Jodie Evans: Self-respect, to be seen, to be heard, to be allowed to have the basic needs so that they can have a fulfilling life. The right to just be alive. Basic human shelter and food. I love that the question included the word dignities because I think that's something that's so missing and at least in the culture that surrounds me is a sense of dignity. And that's the word that creates why we allow people to go without it. That we lack our own dignity of humanity, we lack our own sense of value and self-love and that somehow life as sacred, life in all its forms, the earth, animals, ourselves. We have been so contorted and we've lost our connection to that very essence that we could live in a time, you know basic human dignities, I mean that we, for me as being someone from the United States, how easily we can read that 300,000 innocent Iraqis have died is a total lack of any dignity of humanity much less that we let some huge number on this planet live in poverty, live in abject poverty, live without any consideration. In my travels, though, I find that in those situations, I find much more human dignity in people who are living closer to the ground with less than we have in our bloated economy and desolate landscape in the West. So it would be nice if we learned that dignity or went back to that dignity for ourselves.

by Jodie Evans

Sep 9, 2006 11:30:00 AM cite

John Gage: Basic dignities for all human beings begin at the beginning with life, with the sense of freedom from constraint. We find globally patterns established over millennia of inequalities of those who have found an advantage, finding increasing and always more and more powerful ways to maintain those advantages. So, your question, how can we let so many people go without these basic human rights results -– the results you are referring to stem from patterns of inequality that have been created in law, created in regulation, created in family structure, created in patterns of discrimination and prejudice, created in patterns of exclusion. Those that have attempt to exclude those that do not have; those that believe their group has the truth do not give respect to other groups because they know what those other groups do not possess, the truth that they have. So, your question, why do we let so many people go without human dignities, a question at the bottom of what individuals have in their minds, how do they view other people, do they view them as members of their family, of their tribe, as equals, as someone that they can listen to, share something with, or do they view them as something not human, other different? That view of other human beings, as those excluded, those beyond a boundary, leads to the denial of essential human dignities to everyone. One cannot deny to an individual one feels in your family, the rights, the dignities of a human being. You can, if you are able to exclude someone by putting them in the category of other, you can say to yourself, they are not human, they do not deserve the dignity and treatment that all of those in my family are enabled. So, I think at the bottom, we alter the way we consider the human family that alters the way that dignities are distributed among all [audio ends].

by John Gage

Sep 9, 2006 11:30:00 AM cite

Jonathan Granoff: The basic human dignity that every human being deserves is to be treated the way you, yourself, want to be treated. Those basic human dignities are beyond verbal expression. They reside within your own conscience. The way in which you yourself would want to be treated is the way in which others want to be treated. And we in fact treat others the way we treat ourselves. When we have a divided heart within ourselves, when we have anger witching ourselves, we treat others in that divisive, angry fashion. So the first way of understanding how others want to be treated, the first way to understanding human dignity, is to understand the dignity within oneself. The capacity of caring, the capacity of service, the capacity that every mother has when she gets up at three in the morning to feed a crying child, that everyone experiences when they have love for another, these dignify us. The sacrifices we make for those whom we care about and for whom we have love. The issue now is not - you know whether people have love and caring, 'cause they do - soldiers have love and caring for their nations, on all sides in conflicts. The issue is developing the sense of universal caring, and the sense of the unity of the human family. We let people go without them because we're in denial of our human unity. And denying our human unity is a diminution of our own personal treasure, which is our own humanity. If we have a heart without those treasures, what value do we have.

by Jonathan Granoff

Sep 9, 2006 11:30:00 AM cite

Jonathan Meese: What is a basic element? What is dignified? What does every human deserve? What does it mean, if people have to live without something? Aren't we those arrogant ones who claim that people are not able to live without anything? This question is full of question marks, I cannot answer anything, I cannot recognise anything. This question is based on our own haughtiness. People does not deserve anything. Dignity does not need human. Elements obey themselves. The fundaments are to be found in the universe. Life is not the human, human is not the total life. The total revolution lives without humans as well. Is this evil, is this good? Is it possible that the most dignified existence is the total revolution itself and shouldn't we let it live as it wants to? What is the spirit of economic? Those who are able to define existence full of dignity are just followers. Those who specifies the definition life full of dignity are tyrants. Those who define the dignified life is only mean. Nobody knows what human dignity is. Only the human dignity knows itself. Human dignity is defined by itself. It is an inherent principle. The arbitrariness of the beauty and the mood of nature will follow its path as it wishes. This is art.

by Jonathan Meese

Sep 9, 2006 11:30:00 AM cite

José Manuel Prieto: What does man need to live with dignity? To live with dignity , I think that man needs more than anything all that what allows him to develop all his possibilities, his opportunities. I believe, that a dignified life can be a life of richness, a life where we submerge ourselves in our destiny, the way that allows us to put into practice all those opportunities and to [catch] those dreams. I think that this would be the pattern, would be the the way I defined a dignified life. About the issue of allowing or not to allowing other people to live without these values, well, I don’t think that these should be imposed on anybody. I believe that everybody should understand their importance and should fight for them. We can discuss with the people about these values, we can discuss about what a dignified life is, from our point of view, but never strive for imposing our view of what is a dignified life, never strive for imposing our view of how to achieve a dignified life. I think this is something to think about in a public discussion, in public consideration, always having in mind what ought to be a principle: a dignified life is a life that allows to advance all the opportunities, to put into practice all the dreams. I think, that is a dignified life.

by José Manuel Prieto