 Culture always established some social rankings between those who cultivated and reached it and advanced it, and those who avoided, disdain, or ignored it, who were excluded from culture for social and economic reasons. Up until our time, there were cultured and uncultured people, and between those two extremes, people who were more or less cultured or more or less uncultured. This classification was quite clear for the whole world because the same system of values, cultural criteria, and ways of thinking, judging, and behaving applied to everyone. Nowadays, everything has changed. The notion of culture has expanded so much that it has simply vanished, although no one dares to openly acknowledge it. We wanted to do away with the elites who morally disgusted us with their privilege, disparaging and discriminatory sarcasm, whose very name clashed with our egalitarian ideas. Over time, from the different trenches, we were refuting and eliminating that exclusive corpse of pedants who believed they were superior, who bragged about how they had monopolized knowledge, moral values, spiritual elegance, and good taste. But what we obtain is a pyrrhic beast victory, a cure worse than the disease, living in confusion in a world in which paradoxically everything and nothing is culture since there is no way to know exactly what culture is. In the most cultivated circumstances and societies in history, culture consisted of hierarchies in the broad range of insights that form knowledge. On an all-encompassing morality requiring freedom and enabling expression of the great diversity of humanity, but firm in its rejection of all that vilifies and degrades the basic notion of humanity and threatened survival of the species. It was an elite comprised not by reason or birth or economic or political power, but by the effort, talent, and work completed and with the moral authority to establish in a flexible, renewable way an order of importance of values in the arts, science, and technology. It must return to this if we are to avoid moving blindly without direction like robots toward our disintegration. Culture can be experiment and reflection, thought and dream, passion and poetry and a constant profound and critical review of all certitudes, convictions, theories and beliefs. But it cannot be separated from real life, true life, life lived which is never that of platitudes, of artifice, sophism and frivolity without the risk of disintegrating it. It may seem pessimistic, but it is my impression that with an irresponsibility as large as our irrepressible vocation for games and entertainment, we have made culture one of those showy but fragile castles in the sun which falls apart at the first gust of wind. Thank you very much. Where will this elite come from? Well the elite... Why is it that the democracy needs elite? I don't think... Well, it is not only democracy, it's also culture, it's particularly culture what needs elites. What we should try to fight against is the idea that the elite is a kind of privilege of rich people or influential people. This is of course intolerable. Absolutely, we should be against this kind of elites. But I am thinking in an elite that is born out of the vocation effort and talent of people. A society like a real democratic society in which opportunities are open to everybody. Some have this vocation. Some have the vocation of philosophy, history, humanities, as others have the vocation of scientific knowledge, technology. Well the cultural elite should be born out of these three exclusive reasons, vocation. If you have the vocation, hard work and talent. Not everybody has the same kind of talent. Not everybody has the same vocation. Not everybody is able to invest effort in the same way. Well the ideal democratic culture elite is an elite born out of talent, efforts and vocation. This will not disappear. The idea that elite by essence is undemocratic is completely absurd. You mentioned that the biggest crisis we are facing is the crisis of education. The question is how is it possible that the richest part of the world which is the West is suffering from this crisis of education? Because I think the society has advanced too much and the educational system has not been advancing at the same pace. And I think there is a kind of abyss between the problems that modern societies face and the kind of educational system that we have. We are not preparing through our educational system the kind of professionals and technicians and scientists and humanists that the kind of society that we have our day needs. And this is something that has, I think what happened in, I mentioned May 68, because it's very interesting, I think in May 68 this feeling of distance into the educational institutions and the social reality of our days was perceived. But the problem is that the kind of solution that was fine was absolutely counterproductive. The destruction of authority, the idea that education was something that deeply was impregnated with the idea of repression. The idea of Foucault was so largely shared. And if not shared in a way that was the heir of the rebellion of the youth people was contaminated with these ideas. So the destruction of authority instead of solving the problem of education aggravated it, aggravated it. And until now we don't have models to follow, so we have to create the new models. It is said that maybe in very remote kind of places there are now schools and universities that have found, but what is a paradox is that the most advanced and modern countries of the world have such crisis in education and don't find a way to reconstruct the educational system. It's one of the challenges that we have, that our democracies have in our days. But there is probably an even more powerful reason next to the betrayal of the intellectuals and the ongoing betrayal of the intellectuals. And that is explained so beautifully and intelligently by Dostoevsky and his legend of the Quentinquisitor, that your whole notion of a culture and looking into the abyss, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, or the wish for freedom is overruled by the fact that people want to be happy. And that happiness and the pursuit of happiness, that's the main goal. And for happiness, science, technology, commercial world, images are much more helpful than the difficulties of your concept of culture. But what do you understand by happiness? Because I think the problem, the key to the problem is there. If happiness is to be in total agreement with the world and with you live as it is, this is what the definition of happiness is. So probably the most happy people in the world are the idiot people, you know? People without imagination, without critical spirit, people that are totally conformed with the kind of life that they have. If this is happiness, idiots are very happy people, you know? And I don't want to be happy in this way. I prefer to be very unhappy, but enjoying this possibility of criticizing the world that is around me, I prefer to be unhappy thinking and imagine a better kind of world for me and for everybody and for my sons and my family and my friends. I don't think literature makes people more happy. Well, it produces a great pleasure when you read a great book. But after, when you have finished the book, the effects are, you are more prepared to be unhappy because of the good literature that you have read.