Cry Power Podcast with Hozier and Global Citizen - Episode 9 - President Michael D. Higgins

What language do you speak?

@Helvetica I do speak English and was only hoping for an English transcript. The accent made a few parts difficult for me to understand.

I'm also a non-native english speaker and it's really hard to understand Michael D. Higgins. I would love a transcript.

it comes out when you're around somebody from homeland

What good has higgins done "for the world"?

"jingoism"

HIGGINS: And I could never do it. At times it would create-it has-when I would, much later after I worked in a factory, I worked then as a clerk then I got-borrowed some money then I went to England. And I had to finish first or second to get a scholarship. But what one was doing was you were trying to escape from the repetition of something that you had encountered. Now people, what do people call that? In some parts-some sociologists? They say that’s good for you: the meritocratic society. Many people, a majority, I wouldn’t wonder, for the last thirty or forty years in Europe have been voting for that version of a society to say they must all be continually competing with each other. But, moving on with it, it led me to other things which was a great benefit in my life later. Sally O’Neill, who is there behind me, my great colleague who died last year in Guatemala in an accident. She fell into a gorge with three other United Nations workers. Well Sally and I-Sally was my companion in looking at massacres. We wrote about the-I wrote, and we gathered information on the massacre at [El] Mozote in El Salvador in the 1980s. We were in [mumbled place names]. She was with me in Colombia and more recently we’d-we were there during the Somalian famine and so forth. And one of things about it, in a way, it’s not easy for everyone to do to leave yourself open to these circumstances that you will see in front of you. You sent me in a question about it. I’ve said to you something about how I began, as it were, to have this recoil from the humiliation that is the base point of poverty. The next part of it is what I really mean by empathy. It arises if you were then as a trained academic as I was then, is do you talk about all the issues in the abstract or do you engage with them? The reason, I think, that I went into these situations in refugee camps and… I remember running to the top of a queue with a child in my arms in Somalia who later died before I got to the top of the queue. And when I think of Sally, in many cases we would go out, because the killings were taking place during the nighttime. The bodies were dumped in a rubbish dump and you would know from the way the hands were tied at the back or if the stomachs were opened or whatever who was responsible for this. And then the bodies would be moved to the morgue. We would have relatives looking for, you know, “Did you see so and so?” “Did you see?” and so and so, and so and so… Now the most interesting thing about what you are dealing with in the world-this isn’t just me talking and recollecting about that, but for ten years the massacre at El Mozote, Morazán was denied. We were told we had invented this. I gave an interview to the New York Times and that’s what, in fact, encouraged the interest in it originally. There are forensic anthropologists today laying out the bodies of all of the people of this village in which just a few people survived. I went back as President of Ireland to visit El Salvador. The first time I arrived I was arrested at the airport in 1982 and I was asked to leave the country, but now I was back and I was getting the keys to the city of San Salvador, but more importantly-the head of the government-I was getting an award in Parliament. I went on to Costa Rica where the Inter-American Court had called the very thing [which] had been said that we had invented as genocide. And it’s one of the very few cases which has been recognized as that. But I want to help them analyse what is the choice between the first…Be it on only basis of race and color, gender, in relation to means, body size, body shape, or whatever. It is absolutely important that people have to make sure that no one is ever humiliated. The next part of it is that all of the violences are in fact recognized, and not only interpersonal violence-I speak about this that often--but the violences of institutions and the violences of language. We’re actually trying at the moment where in relation to linguistic patterns and language many people are told that really even within media and journalism as the pressures of the market come on and you have to get on your short piece of time and so forth, there’s a great aggression in the language. The next thing is to be able to recognize all the violences. Then the choice after that is as to whether in fact one becomes involved. And that’s one, well you might call-songwriters would know all about that and that is about averting the gaze.
HOZIER: Mhmm.
HIGGINS: Do you look away? But the one thing about it is that what you should do then to be of most value, I think, is that you can’t be just a voyeur on the grief of other people or on the circumstances of other people. The very, very best thing to do is to take your trained competences and be of value. The next part after that then is in relation to when you arrive at the age I am now-78. The thing is that the thought occurs to you very much that you’re running out of road and all of the rest of it, but the one thing that is very much to me is you can up another gear. I was in Athens recently. I gave the Aristotle Address this year at the invitation of President Pavlopoulos. But, I was really interested there in the limitations of reason in a way, and I use a phrase very, very much that I’ve used before and that is this: that you mustn’t allow cold reason to quench the music of the heart. Now, what I meant by that in many cases is, I’ve said that you in fact have to be useful in of all these situations, but you can’t go cold to the point at which you are not in fact actually taking what is in front of you into you.
HOZIER: Mhmm, mhmm.
HIGGINS: And that’s where, I think, this is very, very interesting in relation to your own life and songwriting and that. I think it’s many cases, in the end a word I’m now using-I liken to these small words, the word like “resonance” you know, like a court or something that’s trembling and so forth. But it is really about how children take the world into themselves and how children are taken into the world. And it’s very, very radical to say that all of the children should in fact be able to enter the world without fear and equally in the same way that the world shouldn’t come at all of the children and create fear. Well why should it be radical? Isn’t one of the great failures that we haven’t reached the point? And the point is that they’re really not succeeding there in relation to issues such as global poverty and nutrition and so on. But to have almost in the Anthropocene to put the entire planet itself and its survival for future generations into peril is now something that has actually-which is very good-frightened the world and all generations. The most dynamic reactions are coming from very, very young people. I think what people really need now is a new paradigm. A new paradigm of connection between ecology, economy and forms of social cohesion. In other words, being able to deliver the sufficiencies of life. Then people will argue about what they want beyond that, their own way. But that raises a question for the people listening to your song, “Cry Power” [“Nina Cried Power”] and all of the rest of it. And that is that you won’t be able to do one branch of this on its own. Even if you changed tomorrow all the different consumption patterns, it wouldn’t be enough. So what you have to now try and do is combine three kinds of radical consciousness: a radical consciousness about the ecology, and your consciousness about economy-forms of economy-and a consciousness about in fact actually society and consumption in conclusion and so on. That really has relationships in relation to the world of work and relation to the public world and whatever. So in exactly the same way, I think the most powerful thing now would be a form of economic literacy. Therefore what it does-economic literacy, widely achieved, would then protect you against fake news. It protects you against fake facts, it enables you to exercise informed political choices between things that have to be chosen between, for example, in relation to a health environment, work and so forth. It enables you to have a responsible involvement and so on. And probably maybe one of the complaints I would become next involved in, I’m going to speak a little about it later on today, is in fact actually the importance of economic literacy in being an infrastructural tool to enable the coming together of these three forms of consciousness that I speak.
HOZIER: Yeah.
HIGGINS: Now, I’ve spoken too much.
HOZIER: No, no, no. No.
HIGGINS: You must ask me a question.

HOZIER: No, absolutely. You’ve kind of-you’ve touched on so many things I’d love to come back to. What you were describing there also earlier on about the meritocracy that pits people against one another-in competition against one another.
HIGGINS: And I think maybe what I’ve now [done] is if I was to turn around-where the-to turn-the opposite of this would have been a kind of republic of vulnerabilities and possibilities.
HOZIER: Yeah. Yeah.
HIGGINS: What is in the case of the-it’s the distinction, if you like, I suppose, this way of putting it, it’s the distinction between wants and needs. There are identifiable needs that would make it possible, for example, for us to eliminate global poverty. They could enable us to meet basic nutrition needs, there remains housing needs, education needs and so forth. But [unclear] still left with people who in many, many cases is their wants are different and wants is where-and that kind of-what I meant by extreme individualism as well. It had a kind of-it was at a time, the last forty years, it was a very specific period of history, you know, with the classic phrase of late Mrs. Thatcher-gosh-“There is no such thing as the social…” and so forth. The deal was that you are constant reaching in a kind of erratical version of the self with an unlimited set of removing any obstacle of the state or any obstacle of so forth. That the market, which was a new kind of natural law, which had been brought in by people like Friedrich von Hayek and others and some of the Chicago school. Imagine in my time, can you imagine a professor, Milton Friedman and his wife Rose going down after the death of Allende and bringing the graduate class with them to run the country? To reconstruct Chile. And even now, the present demonstrations in Chile, part of it is because they were stuck with the 1980 constitution that was established during Pinochet’s time. Because even after you could get him out of the politics he was still the head of the army and he was still there as a figure and so forth and so on. Only recently, I think, President Bolsonaro has been saying…
HOZIER: (quietly) Yeah.
HIGGINS: …to the former President of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, that “If it hadn’t been for Pinochet, your country would like Cuba,” or whatever like that.
HOZIER: Yes, yes.
HIGGINS: The exchanging of insults. I think that people need to call that out. But the great part all of that in the end of it is such tyrants are few and the people are many.
HOZIER: Yes.
HIGGINS: But what the people need to do is the people must be equipped with all of the tools that they have in relation to like the literacies and the scholarships and so on. I think that it’s an exciting time for all-an exciting time to be alive. The other thing about it is that in relation to-it isn’t the case of a person doing the music world and then becoming interested in politics as if they’re in separate… No, they’re all connected. Because there are new voices coming from Africa, there are voices coming up from the earth. It must be wonderful. I often think about it all. Would I have given up all this politics and everything like that to have the talent of some of the musicians I see and hear and things like that? I think… It’s so wonderful. It’s not reduceable to anything. It’s training. It’s hard work. It’s perseverance. It’s belief and all of the… But and then there’s something special in it too. And the most special part of it all is the respect for the audience. I love to put on when I…I have something here from him somewhere… I was at one of Leonard Cohen’s performances down in-here in Dublin
HOZIER: Mhmm.
HIGGINS: And we sat there drinking chicken soup, I remember and things like that. And you know, there’s a lot who-it was useful to me at the time. I remember the pieces were “Ring the bells that still can ring,” you know.
HOZIER: “Forget your perfect o…”
HIGGINS: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in,” and so forth. (emphatically) “Forget your perfect offering.” That was the best plan-that’s the second-the most important line. Yeah, I forget. Yeah, that’s right. And it’s so important in a way he says that you could lose a lot of yourself if you allowed yourself to be pursuing perfection. The thing to do is to give it a lash.
HOZIER: (chuckles)

HIGGINS: The other thing about it all is that if you were in many, many, many cases-I keep on saying that wouldn’t it be great now to have the energy of that person all over again? I could do with another half-century myself because the things that I’m curious about. But that’s how it is.
HOZIER: I think people would be thrilled. And, also it would have been very interesting to see you as a musician, but I think, also, we would have robbed Ireland of a very necessary, very uh, very wonderful voice.
*INTERVAL*
HOZIER: The Cry Power podcast will explore the U.N.’s 17 global goals: a series of objectives that aims to end extreme poverty, reduce inequality, and tackle climate change by 2030. To take action on any of these issues we talk about on the show go to GlobalCitizen.org/CryPower and get involved.
*INTERVIEW*
HOZIER: You’ve been an outspoken critic of war. You know, you spoke out against the Iraq war, I remember, during the time. You would have witnessed the legacy of war in your own family. You had two members of your family, I believe…
HIGGINS: Yes. Well my-all of my family were involved in the War of Independence, including my father, my uncle, my aunts and so forth. But when the civil war came, my uncle, who was a kind, good man, he joined the National Army. But my father didn’t accept-was among those who didn’t accept the treaty. My father spent 1923 in Tin Town in the Curragh. But the other side of it was the bitternesses that followed the Civil War. My father, before, during the War of Independence was working for a company, a grocery company, wholesale, there for £130 a year and £50 travelling expenses. After he came out of the encampment, no one would hire him. And he had to start life all over again-live in as an apprentice to a grocer at just £25 a year, and so on. Then there was this awful way in which, if you like, depending on whose side you were on, the people were treated appallingly for applications for pensions or whatever. I don’t believe it-we got on. We didn’t pay anything huge, I think, or a big price for it. My aunts, for example, my aunt who reared me-I think I have a poem in one of my books about, “Oh Katie, I am making my way along the lane of hazel,” and it’s a tribute to her and her kindness and her interest in these two children that she and her brother had acquired and for which she expended a great deal of love and care and so on. But I think the relationship that was the damaging one was between my father and my uncle who really, I don’t think ever repaired their relationship. I worked very, very much when I was-became president in relation to trying to get people to understand 1916, because remember, there were people in Dublin here who lost people in World War I and then who were-people who were injured in World War I who were afraid to come out because they were now in a new atmosphere and so on. And I spent a great deal of new work that I-I took on work of Richard Kearney’s work, Paul Ricœur’s work, and Hannah Arendt’s work on what is involved in memory and the difference between how do you make a choice between what you will, if you like, commemorate, and what’s the significance, and how can you do it and engage with the memories of the other and narratives? I still do that. I had some unionists here last week who were talking to me, well we were talking about, how do you get on with all of this? The one thing you can’t do-no more than in the scholarship we discussed earlier-is invent some kind of amnesia. That’s deadly. That won’t work at all, because you must have to face these things. I do say, it was one of my, which I haven’t said to anyone, now that I think of it… It would’ve been so much more helpful if in the last decades as people became sophisticated about it. If the European countries had in fact set about the same task in relation to Africa.
HOZIER: Mhmm.
HIGGINS: You would be able to understand. And there’s one great error in all of the scholarship that when I was studying first in the ‘70s in particular. I was studying migration. And that is there’s an assumption that the world is sedentary.
HOZIER: (quietly) Mhmm.
HIGGINS: Most of the social sciences are bent on the notion that the world is fixed and sedentary. And it isn’t. The fact is there has always been a majority of people on the planet moving.
HOZIER: Mhmm.
HIGGINS: So therefore, migration is in fact the common condition.
HOZIER: Mhmm.

HIGGINS: Now here you have a situation, let us say, if you take the way in which things get completely out of hand. If you take (in?) the total amount of people of African origin who have been seeking to get into the European Union, and you put it in perspective, it’s uh, let’s say a million and a half or something like that. There have been millions of people travelling all over the face of Africa and they’re responding to climate-they’re responding to desertification, the disappearance of the grasslands. There’s movements here and so forth and so on. And yet now because in fact people have created this hostile notion that we’re trying to keep Europe safe from these people that it is actually criminalizing something that has been happening across the face of Africa…
HOZIER: Mhmm.
HIGGINS: …in a way. So that this is-this is tragic stuff.
HOZIER: (quietly) Mhmm.
HIGGINS: All of this is manageable. You might say that, “Here he is rambling away now,” whatever, but the fact is, no… That’s all I can do now. A different time-you were very kind in your description of my different activities in my different periods of my life, particularly that those traumatic periods in the ‘80s when I took-no, it’s not a risk, I suppose. But this is what I can do now really, is to try and work and share ideas. And I do that, that’s what I do these days.
HOZIER: You talk a lot about the Irish experience as-to do with migrancy.
HIGGINS: Yeh.
HOZIER: And also, you know, we have a huge history of being migrants ourselves…
HIGGINS: Yes.
HOZIER: …being refugees ourselves, you know, and the struggles of that and the difficulties of that on the, let’s say, on the coffin ships 150 years ago. And as you put it earlier on, the results of a kind of an insatiable global economic culture…
HIGGINS: Yes.
HOZIER: …which has of course led to a, umm-if you have a surplus of resources in one area of the world…
HIGGINS: Yeah. Yes.
HOZIER: …you’re gonna have a deficiency in others.
HIGGINS: Oh, I-you’re so right. You can’t really achieve this new paradigm of balance-ecology, economy and society-without doing trade totally differently. The notion that-there are a couple of things about it. One is that the planet is capable of producing accelerated growth, or even growth as we have now. No one can seriously hold that view. You have in fact actually changed your definition. Now where you are-where the real issue is, where the real intellectual work is: how do you manage to convince people? Then there are people who have never got past the point of sufficiency. They can’t be asked to carry the greatest burden of adjusting to climate change. But that’s why also you therefore have to transfer science and technology to these areas. And you also have to have a very, very serious look at the notion of intellectual property and the notion of patents. The notion of who is being rewarded by this and who is being punished by arguing for the infinity of patents and so forth and so on. The other thing then is relation-to look at the way we are doing it. If you are going to in fact take all the doctors and nurses from Africa and Asia into the Western system while you have huge medical needs in these areas…
HOZIER: Yeah.
HIGGINS: …and then if your approach is to that-that raises the issue which we haven’t-we’d be here for a month if we did in relation-where Mariana Mazzucato’s work is very, very important. What I worry mostly about is hiding in the bushes behind this argument about migration and movement and everything are, I think, racist categories.
HOZIER: Yes. Yeah.
HIGGINS: And it is about race, I think.
HOZIER: Mhmm.
HIGGINS: The point about it is, is that in the whole thing, the whole philosophy about it-and yet at the same time there it is as the central issue in all the philosophy.
HOZIER: Mhmm.
HIGGINS: How are you to construe the other?
HOZIER: Mhmm.
HIGGINS: Is the other coming to you as a friend? Is the other coming to you as a source of new wisdom?
HOZIER: Mhmm.
HIGGINS: In Somalian culture, people used to have contests-has he got a new word? That they used to have word contests. Are-Should you be afraid? This is the important part about it where the European thing goes totally wrong.
HOZIER: Mhmm.
HIGGINS: And that is in which you define the other and you say that you have to protect yourself from these ways…
HOZIER: Yes. Yeah.
HIGGINS: …of otherness coming towards you. And then a question in my new cases is, what is it about them that would make you think like that?
HOZIER: Mhmm.
HIGGINS: And you wouldn’t be at it very, very, very long before you would find the old…
HOZIER: Right.
HIGGINS: … racism surfacing. So that’s why racism has to be called what it is.
HOZIER: Yeh.

HOZIER: Which is, just I suppose either, just to end on a positive note: something that you are most proud of in your career, and something that you are very, very hopeful and excited for in the future?
HIGGINS: What I really like now, what I think is better, as well, is-I would love to see inter-generational stuff getting deeper in a way. Accepting, for example, in many, many cases what is thereafter. We are now here and the rest of it-the one that I-Why did I, why do I like dance and so forth? I think at different times, different senses are privileged. It’s very fascinating that in ancient philosophy the stomach and the heart were privileged above the brain. It’s quite late that you get to that. But equally, in the same way, I think, now in relation to-the elimination of fear is the important thing. And the one thing about it is that-when I was just, when I was in my 20s, I remember, in the sociology module. What’s a wonderful thing anywhere is when a person says, “I could do that.” To have every child and every person of any age and whatever at it-actually being able to say, looking at something, “I’d love to try that,” or, “I could do that.” To privilege the curiosity of freedom in the world in that way. And that, the main, main thing about it in many, many cases-we’re only a very small way out of the liberation of the body. And one of the things-if you take all of the-if I had one great-one of the great shorter name it would be to see a widespread global movement against violence and including domestic violence and addressing the issues of violence. And then, the opposite of that, this idea of the coin, is people’s comfort and lack of fear in dealing with things associated with the body and the mind difference, in a way. And that’s all achievable. The important thing is to keep saying, and it is. It’s all achievable. Uh, I might be gone myself, but… I said to Noel Brown-there’s a photo I have over there-we used to always say, what would it be now, right-the question you asked me just now. And we used to always say the same thing. It would be that hundreds and thousands of people would run past us making better demands than we’d been making. That would be my answer to…
HOZIER: That’s beautiful. Beautiful.
HIGGINS: *laughs*
HOZIER: Very, very beautiful, I have to say…
HIGGINS: *laughs*
HOZIER: I don’t think the people of Ireland will let you go anywhere for the next half-century, if they have anything to say about it.
HIGGINS: Very good.
HOZIER: Thank you so, so much. I couldn’t tell you how much of an honour…
HIGGINS: Now that’s plenty…
HOZIER: *chuckling* Thank you.
*OUTRO*
VOCALS: And I could cry power. Power! Power. Power!
HOZIER: Cry Power is made in association with Global Citizen, a movement of activists all over the world who are using their collective voice to end extreme poverty by 2030. You can head to GlobalCitizen.org/CryPower to take action on any of the issues we talk about on the show and earn tickets to gigs all over the world by signing petitions, writing emails, or sending tweets to world leaders. Don’t forget, you can subscribe to the Cry Power podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts, right now. Thank you so much for joining me. This is Hozier and this is Cry Power.

Michael D Higgins is no Angel he's well in with them Epstein boys

@BABY YODA ok I have no idea but I'm sure he did more good than bad in this world

@Mimir Wrong miss lioness have a good day do some research bless.

@BABY YODA cant even spell my name anyways I don't care

@Mimir I'm not English I don't care Tá mé Gaeilge agus bródúil as a bheith