 ychydig o'r sganddol. If you watch television or you go on the internet, if you read the newspapers, when is it that you start shouting or crying or whatever and it's impossible that this is happening in this western free prosperous society? Well I think in a way what's perhaps been revealed recently by the collapse of the model, the neoliberal model, the collapse, the Wall Street thing that was being signified that stands for a much bigger catastrophe in a way that's based also on a kind of delusional kind of thinking that we've all been caught up in. It's not just that one can't divide us and them. In a way there was a kind of logic that drew everyone into it that has perhaps now been exposed in its delusional aspects. Which of course the media also often play into in terms of the world that represents the crisis. That's one scandal we definitely have to address. Rory, is there any scandal you can point that it's real scandal that this is happening in our society? A very interesting one over the last ten years which fascinates me from an advertising background is that in a sense what you've got to be really afraid of is those vessels of persuasion which aren't ostensibly persuasive. Advertising and propaganda. People understand there's an ulterior motive and they have a certain resistance to them or at least a certain cynicism towards them. There's a very peculiar assumption that pervaded the entire western world. I mean it's worth remembering that the banks were totally irresponsible lenders but they also had completely irresponsible borrowers on the other side. I don't know if you can actually put the blame entirely squarely in one place or the other. And there's a very peculiar narrative which pervaded all news media which is that property wasn't a form of consumption. It was an asset. And that a rise in property prices was portrayed as universally good news on the news. And that always struck me as strange. No one actually portrays a rise in petrol prices as great news to those people who have half a tank full of petrol in their tank and for whom their car has suddenly become slightly more valuable. We see it as a cost of living. And there was something very peculiar there if you looked at sort of endless programs that suggested the highest end of man was to install decking outside his house and to improve his own home. And what was peculiar about that is it wasn't a point of view. It just became a universal assumption. And that's when these ideas seem to be actually most dangerous. But it is worth making that point that we talk about irresponsible lending and we're absolutely right to do so. And we're absolutely right to criticise the neoclassical economic model which is a psychologically blind model of human action which did quite a lot of harm. But there were peculiar behaviours in other places as well. Roger, so far both Daniel and Rory are talking about a scandal of a kind of economic model. Are there other scandals? Scandals or is it... What would you say that this is the real agrace le fan? I mean, what's... Yes, I think the... I guess my view is not very fashionable. I think that the real scandal of Western civilisation today is atheism. And I know that some people might say well, there you are, more power to scandal in that case. Just as I think the real scandal of the Middle East today is theism of an irrational kind. And I've always hoped that we could hold on to our inherited sense of the sacred without going over the top as our Muslim friends do. And it seemed to me for a while in my youth that this could even be achieved. But I recognise that it hasn't been achieved and all these things that have just been said by Rory and Daniel, the growth of, if you like, of contagious irresponsibility. Not only in economics, but in personal life and social life. All this, in my view, proceeds from that fundamental loss of the sense that some things are sacred. We'll get back to that as well. Now the world has always been a dangerous place and remained a dangerous place. Always scandals in the world and there are scandals today as well. But what is a scandal and what is not is also determined by our own perception whether we see something as a scandal. And in this respect I would say that our world is not that bad. Because for us, for example, the genocide is a scandal. Masmer, that is a scandal. For Humairos or for CP Afrikanos, that's a no scandal. Obviously, if you conquer the land, get to destroy it. Everyone to murder, that was fine. That was heroism, no scandal. So I think if we include in the problems of the scandal certain things which our followers did not consider as scandals, I don't believe in progress, it is partially a kind of progress in comparison to the 20th century which was, in my mind, the greatest scandal of modernity. With all these totalitarian societies, with all these millions and millions of corpses in Europe, in comparison with this dictatorship, with this mass murder, we are not living at the present moment in the scandals world, although there are many scandals in this world. Alan, in irrespective of... Eichnus moved, if I may say so, from communism in your youth when you were a student of Lukach to somebody who is... You no longer consider yourself a communist, do you? Of course, of course not. Of course, at that time, when I considered myself as a communist, I believed in the Paris menu script of Karl Marx, that is the unity between Gatung's vision and individual person, which is a total utopian, maybe not just un-realizable, but also in my present view, undesirable. But I believed in this, but never believed in real existing socialism. That's a totally different question. And I never used the term Marxism-Leninism, as was Marxism what never a Leninist, because Lenin discovered, Lenin invented the totalitarian party. Everyone imitated him, invented the totalitarian party. So I did not call myself Marxist. Lenin but Marxist, yes, because I had my own Marx. This Marx is very utopian, like your Marx. It was very utopian, it was a beautiful idea and conception, which I still believe a wonderful dream, but I don't think it has political reality. Alan, Rysyn, one of the book you published, The Communist Hypothesis, where you argue that communism is still a good idea. From that perspective, what do you see as the big scandals of the society you live in? I think the most important scandals in the world today, but not only today, from the beginning of history, in fact, is that we perfectly know that practically all men and women in the world are able of doing something, of creating something, of thinking something, and this ability is practically reduced to nothing for a great majority of human beings today. It's not a question only of poverty, of oppression and so on. It's a more radical question, which is that the humanity is very distant from its proper possibility of creation and of life and of existence. Maybe in contemporary capitalism we can clearly see that millions and millions of people are, from the point of view of capitalism itself, no useful at all. They are practically nothing, in fact. That is the scandal. The scandal is when millions of people are considered practically as nothing, not only in their existence, but in their capacities, in their possibilities. So I think, like Marx, in some sense, that you are now too in a prehistoric sequence of humanity. And we must begin the history of mankind really. And communism was only for Marx the name of this process, the name of this possibility, the name of the true beginning of history after many centuries of destruction, struggle, class struggle, revolution and so on. And for him, capitalism was just the form just before the possibility of a new beginning. And I think we must recognize the truth of this idea because we can observe that the capitalist which is today at the scale of the planet cannot be the construction of a future.