Inside Yoga 97 (27/1/14)
I recently read a profile of Uruguay’s president, José Mujica, in the Guardian, and was taken by this “different” kind of politician. He is a president who avoids the trappings of power and demonstrations of opulence. He has forsworn a state palace in favour of a farmhouse, donates the vast bulk of his salary to social projects, flies economy class and drives an old Volkswagen Beetle.
Mujica has been called the poorest president in the world, but has said: “If I asked people to live as I live, they would kill me.” He lives in a small but cosy one-bedroom home set amid chrysanthemum fields outside Montevideo.
Since becoming leader of Uruguay in 2010, Mujica has won plaudits worldwide for living within his means, decrying excessive consumption and pushing ahead with policies on same-sex marriage, abortion and cannabis legalisation that have reaffirmed Uruguay as the most socially liberal country in Latin America.
Lao Tze, the author of the Tao Te Ching and source of Taoist teachings, once wrote, “If you realise that you have enough, you are truly rich.”
But the president, who is best known as Pepe, says those who consider him poor fail to understand the meaning of wealth. “I’m not the poorest president. The poorest is the one who needs a lot to live,” he said. “My lifestyle is a consequence of my wounds. I’m the son of my history. There have been years when I would have been happy just to have a mattress.”
He shares the home with his wife, Lucia Topolansky, a leading member of Congress who has also served as acting president. He is proud of his homeland – one of the safest and least corrupt in the region – and describes Uruguay as “an island of refugees in a world of crazy people”.
This unusual president has a refreshing view of our modern world.
“I’m just sick of the way things are. We’re in an age in which we can’t live without accepting the logic of the market,” he said. “Contemporary politics is all about short-term pragmatism. We have abandoned religion and philosophy,” and he adds: “What we have left is the automatisation of doing what the market tells us.”
The president lives within his means and promotes the use of renewable energy and recycling in his government’s policies. At the United Nations’ Rio+20 conference on sustainable development last year, he railed against the “blind obsession” to achieve growth through greater consumption.
But, with Uruguay’s economy ticking along at a growth rate of more than three per cent, Mujica accepts he must deliver material expansion.
“I am trying to expand consumption but to diminish unnecessary consumption … I’m opposed to waste – of energy, or resources, or time. We need to build things that last. That’s an ideal, but it may not be realistic because we live in an age of accumulation.”
“We can almost recycle everything now. If we lived within our means – by being prudent – the seven billion people in the world could have everything they needed. Global politics should be moving in that direction,” he said. “But we think as people and countries, not as a species.”
Once a revolutionary, still a revolutionary, he adds: “The world will always need revolution. That doesn’t mean shooting and violence. A revolution is when you change your thinking. Confucianism and Christianity were both revolutionary.”
To read more about this President, see Guardian article at http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/13/uruguay-president-jose-mujica or look him up on Google, as there is plenty about this president, who reads rather like the little boy in the fable, The Emperor’s New Clothes, who pointed out what is really happening. And it terms of yoga, he is on track as yoga is about achieving a balance in our inner and outer world.
Any questions and comments, see the box below this article
