Tibor Kapu: We warmly welcome everyone. I wouldn’t call it revenge. At this table right now I don’t feel that brave.
We’ll see how it turns out in the end.
We’ll see how it turns out in the end. As you’ve seen, this isn’t my first conversation with the Prime Minister, but now we’re in completely different roles. I’ll try to do my best, even though I’m not a skilled interviewer. I can see the heights ahead of me, and I hope that next year I’ll be nominated in the “Journalist of the Year” category, but this year it’s been completely impossible. I’d like to say in advance that the questions will probably not be the usual ones, even though the Prime Minister has been appearing in many interviews and reports lately. I also believe that this will be the most exciting part of the evening, as it will be about science...
Wait, wait, wait a minute...
Okay, yes, let’s wait a little, okay. We’ll see, we’ll see, we’ll see. So there won’t be any surprises, I’ll mainly talk to the Prime Minister about science and society and similar issues, if you don’t mind.
The questions will influence me.
I wrote down the questions so that I wouldn’t make too many mistakes, so now I’ll be partly reading and partly speaking off the cuff. My first question, Prime Minister, will focus on the fact that one of the most important catalysts of social change – at least in my opinion – is technology. We could even joke that engineers rule the world – as I’m a mechanical engineer myself. I hope that many people share this view. It’s also a fact that technology is influencing ever more aspects of our lives. It’s difficult to find statistics on this. In China, every year more than three million people graduate in the STEM sector, if I’ve read the statistics correctly, and roughly 40 per cent of graduates have a technical background or a similar science background. In Hungary this figure is slightly lower, at around 30 per cent. My question is this: How can we strengthen human resource training in Hungarian society, and indeed in Europe, to produce more people who are capable of driving this development and the world forward in terms of technological innovation?
Tibor, first of all, thank you very much for allowing me to be here with you on stage today. Congratulations on your achievement!
Thank you very much!
And also, through the thoughts you’ve expressed on your achievements, for the place that you’ve carved out for yourself in the hearts of many Hungarians – let’s say those on the Right or with nationalist sentiments, but perhaps also some on the Left. The truth is that I’d like to ask a question, if I may be so rude. Of course it’s a good question. I was also thinking about this three or four years ago. Using all kinds of techniques, we’ve made decisions that have sought to increase the proportion of people in higher education with technical degrees. But for more than a year now, I haven’t been thinking about that, but rather about what will happen to them. Because in the meantime I’m trying to understand this thing called artificial intelligence. It’s very difficult to determine exactly what it is, and a significant portion of the literature on artificial intelligence warns us – the decision-makers – that some professions will disappear. And now I’m wondering whether, in our enthusiasm over the past few years, we’ve trained a large proportion of young people in something that artificial intelligence will either eliminate or transform – forcing us to completely rethink the whole thing. So now I’m more inclined to think that, of course, it would be good to have as many computer scientists as possible ; but, according to the articles, this is one of the professions doomed to extinction, with artificial intelligence decimating the profession – not completely eradicating it, but decimating it. So now we need to think about how, while we still haven’t even finished our previous task, even as we’re training many more engineers, IT specialists and high-tech professionals, we should now be training people for the next era – without abandoning what we’ve started. So what I’m trying to say is that we – the political decision-makers, as well as you, the explorers – aren’t interested in what already exists, but in what will be. And in the world that is to come I believe that different skills will be needed, and we should now be thinking about what specific forms of technical training we need to come up with in order to be able to hold our own in the coming era which is knocking on our door – or kicking it down.
Thank you very much for bringing up the topic that leads into my next request. Political decision-makers: traditionally, I think there are relatively few technical intellectuals among them – although there are exceptions, of course. The last time I was at a similar event, Dr. Orsolya Ferencz – who’s also here with us today – received tremendous applause. I hope that will be the case again today. Not only her, but also László Palkovics and István Tarlós. There are examples of technical intellectuals becoming political decision-makers. If we’re talking about this being the direction we’re heading in, how can we help this happen, how can more people work their way into decision-making roles?
Dear Tibor, I’ve tried this, and I’ll mention a name: we made a minister of József Pálinkás. That didn’t particularly encourage me from my position to make up for the lack of representation among the technical intelligentsia. But to be fair, I owe him something: I owe him something that I think leads to the answer to your question. Because once, as minister, he persuaded us to go to Switzerland, where there’s this marvel called CERN. I don’t know what it is, this future researcher...
Particle accelerator.
...there’s a particle accelerator, and he believed that a prime minister should see it and understand it, because doing so makes it much easier to understand the future role of science than reading ten volumes would. So I went there with him and took a look. As Tibor says, it’s a particle accelerator, but what’s interesting about it isn’t that the particles move fast, but that when they’re moving fast enough… I didn’t understand the essence of it, of course, but I did understand that the point isn’t that the particles move fast, but that when they’re moving fast enough, they collide. And then all kinds of processes take place, and they try to record and then analyse the moment when they collide. That’s what it’s about. Ultimately, it’s about the Big Bang. And then I asked this question – because of course I don’t understand technical matters, but I understood what it was about, the Big Bang. I asked this question: “If we manage to accelerate the particles to the right speed, they collide well, and we can capture that moment and analyse it, will we get an answer to the question of whether God exists? Is there a Creator behind the Big Bang, or will it turn out that no one’s there, just a physical process?” And that’s also my answer to your question.
You’ve approached it from quite a distance, Prime Minister...
The head of CERN told me that we don’t research why something has happened or why it has happened, but how it happened. And since engineers are people who research how things have happened, politicians need to understand why things have happened and why they will happen. So these are two separate disciplines. It’s very rare to find engineers who are interested in finding answers not only to how things have happened, but also to why they’ve happened. This is why, in my opinion, there are fewer engineers in politics than lawyers like myself or people from other fields, such as the social sciences. It’s a bit complicated, but perhaps that’s how it is. Yes, long live József Pálinkás!
The next question. When I was in space and looked down at the Carpathian Basin, I was really seeing one nation. I always say that our ancestors made a very good decision when they moved us here with the Miracle Stag, because the Carpathian Basin is really easy to spot from up there. But, let’s face it, the months ahead of us will be about political rivalry. I think this is natural, and political polarisation can now be considered a global phenomenon. It’s rearing its head in many countries – at least that’s what I see. What can the domestic political elite do to ensure that we get through the next few months in such a way that when we wake up on 13 April, we still feel that there are ten million of us living in this country and that we have to continue living alongside one another, regardless of what happened the night before?
I plan to wake up and think about how great it is to live in this country. But we’ll see about that when we get there. The idea that “our ancestors chose this area well” is something that preoccupies me these days – even though at first glance it has nothing to do with my work. But the question is about who chose this area. Because, you see, in school we learned that it was chosen by Grand Prince Árpád. But the most intriguing question that I’ve seen amplified in Hungarian public and scientific discourse in recent months is whether or not we were Avars. It’s a very important question. The as yet unknown answer to this question could change everything, by the way. And then we wouldn’t be talking about a thousand years, but more. Polarisation – this is the word that Tibor has kindly used to describe today’s global politics. Let’s first examine whether your description holds, because I’m afraid it does so only with caveats. In my opinion, it’s not the case that public life and politics are polarising everywhere in the world today. That’s only true in the West. We’re making the mistake of classifying Western phenomena as global phenomena. I remember when the financial crisis – which we called the “global” financial crisis – broke out in 2008–09. Sometime in the following year or two I was in Vietnam, I think, giving a speech in which I talked about “the 2008–09 global financial crisis”. The Vietnamese people said, “What? What? We didn’t have that here! Where was this global crisis?” Because they didn’t know about it, they somehow missed it. I just want to say that in most of the world there’s no polarisation, but quite the opposite: forces are coming together, forces are reorganising, new great powers, forces and countries are rising. This is precisely because they’re able to unite the forces within a given society; and instead of polarisation, there’s growth and development. There is polarisation in the Western world. The question now is why this is happening. Of course quite a few books have been written about this. I’m not claiming that I’m the only one who knows this, or that it’s exactly as I say it is, but what I’ve observed is the following. There’s polarisation in the Western world because there’s failure. The political system that we’ve built on the foundations of Anglo-Saxon thinking and based on the Anglo-Saxon language – and which we now call modern democracy – is a failed form of government. It’s not unsuccessful in terms of political results, which is something which could be discussed; but it makes societies unsuccessful – or it can’t help societies to be successful in a changing world. That’s the problem. We can look at a world, a country, a continent – we can look at America. But we can also look at the European Union: there’s failure, the standard of living is declining, to have the same standard of living as yesterday you have to work more today than you did yesterday, and you think that the way the world’s going will offer your children a lower standard of living than you were able to achieve. These are all characteristics that exist in the Western world today. In other words, the Western model of government at this moment – it wasn’t always like this, but now it is – is unable to maintain success in the societies where it was invented. And since political combat takes place within the framework of this system, within the system of contest for democratic government, when it fails the contest becomes polarised. Because when there’s failure, we have to talk about responsibility: Who fouled up, what did they foul up, who’s responsible for the failure? We’re not talking about who will make it successful, or how it will be successful – that’s not what the Western world is talking about when it goes online. The question is who’s responsible for the failure. And if an economic system is unsuccessful, and in a global economy undergoing a process of re-wiring, the Western economic system is currently unsuccessful, this will result in political polarisation. If we just look at the European sphere, for example, there’s a war on the European continent. Do European democratic governments have an answer to the question of peace and war? No! Then there’s migration. Do European democratic governments have an answer to what we should do about migration, how we should manage it, how we should prevent it, or how we should integrate it? They have no answer to this! We have an answer, but the West doesn’t. Or take the issue of competitiveness: if we look at research and development, at global patents mapped against nations, we see that in patents, technology, and so on, the Chinese are beating everyone else hands down. We’re living in an era of economic uncompetitiveness. Does the Western world – and Europeans in particular – have an answer to how we can become competitive again? It has no answer! If not one country among all the democratic governments of Europe – except for us, incidentally, but that’s another conversation – has answers to the world’s three most important issues today, the three most important issues in European life, war, migration and competitiveness, then we have to ask whether there’s a systemic problem behind all this. In that case we’re not talking about isolated problems, but about a general problem with democracy and democratic systems of government which, having failed, can only garner political support not by offering solutions, but by finding those who were responsible. This leads to polarisation. This is the situation. This is what I think is behind it. If we understand this, then we’ve understood something important; because the solution isn’t within politics, but in finding the forms of government, programmes and measures that will provide answers to these crucial questions and enable us to make a country successful. I’m convinced – and in this I’m obviously biased – that since 2010 we’ve built a system of government and economy that has answers to these questions. It has answers to war, migration, and lack of competitiveness. I think we’re lucky, and that Hungary is a successful country. Those who want to come to power are trying to convince us otherwise – which is understandable. But for the others – who aren’t us, but who are part of the European Union and are unsuccessful – it would be a huge problem if they had to admit that there’s at least one successful country that’s doing something different from them. The intellectual consequences of this are obvious. So I see Hungary as a country that’s managed to avoid the failure that leads to polarisation; and therefore in my opinion the polarisation in Hungarian public life – if there’s a measure for it – is certainly lower here than, say, in France or Germany, not to mention the United States. So I’d be cautious about viewing ourselves as a highly polarised society in political terms; because when we look at the international context, this isn’t the case. The fact is that we have a strong government and a large majority in society which can be translated into political will and success. This is the Hungarian model at the moment – even if it’s disputed, even if when it comes to Hungary you want to present it differently, or you want to show a different movie. I apologise for being biased and for going on so long.
Allow me to be biased. There’s been talk of success and competitiveness, of initiatives. I know of one initiative that’s definitely been a success, and that’s the HUNOR [Hungarian to Orbit] programme. We must appreciate these moments of national unity. I know it wasn’t so long ago that the Irish beat us at the Puskás Arena, and we talk about it with a heavy heart; but HUNOR is there, and the HUNOR team won, winning the hearts of the Hungarian people. We have a good team now, we’re united, we have a good leader and a good coach. We have SMEs that have joined us, we have researchers who have been inspired and have sent countless experiments into space with us. We’ve worked together on ideas, and all twenty-five experiments that we took to the space station were successfully completed. Can we – colleagues and researchers and those who worked on this huge, ambitious project – count on continued support from the Hungarian government? And where does the Prime Minister see the future of Hungarian space research heading?
If I may take two steps back to jump the hurdle presented by your question, I must begin by saying that what you’re doing is particularly important – because we’re a defeated country. We’re grappling with the question of how to turn a defeated country into a victorious one. This is an extremely difficult task, because we suffered defeat after World War I, we lost our territories, our population, all our natural resources – everything. What we call Hungary remained a completely unviable piece of land, unviable according to modern economic thinking. And at present we’re unable to correct this decision. There were attempts to do so in the 20th century, but they proved unsuccessful from our point of view. So, at this moment, we can’t correct the thing that made us unsuccessful and defeated. But you cannot live if you constantly think that you’re a defeated people. Somehow you have to win – because the world is still made up of winners and losers. You mustn’t classify yourself as a loser, you mustn’t allow others to classify you as a loser, and you certainly mustn’t classify your own kind as losers. That’s not possible, because it won’t lead to a happy life, or even life at all – it will lead to nothing. So we must turn this losing situation – this objectively losing situation and losing nation – into a winning nation. I believe that this is Hungary’s political mission. This is what every Hungarian government should be doing and thinking about all the time. What metrics are there? If you can’t cure the problem at its root, how can you still be successful under these conditions? How do Hungarians measure this? We’ve figured out pretty well how to compensate for our essentially losing situation. What do Hungarians look at? The Nobel Prize. We’ve been talking about Krasznahorkai – another Nobel Prize winner. It doesn’t matter that he’s said and written things about the Hungarian nation that you wouldn’t read to your children. But a Nobel Prize is still a Nobel Prize. One more. Olympic gold medals. Here we have the master among us, who added three more. Olympic gold medals. Oscars. Visuality, the modern world, film, the entertainment industry. Oscars. The fourth: the current performance of the Hungarian national football team. This isn’t a question of sport, but this is the most popular and biggest game in the world, in which we were once winners – but now we’ve become losers. So, limiting ourselves now to football in the grand historical context, this is a yardstick for how from this losing position we can become winners again. If it doesn’t work there, it won’t work on a large scale either. It’s no coincidence that I’m so determined to make it work there. These are four such metrics or criteria, and I think – and this brings me to your question – you’ve introduced a fifth, which is fantastic: the question of contributing to universal human knowledge through the exploration and discovery of the world beyond Earth, the world beyond Earth, or the extraterrestrial world. And after forty years we have astronauts again, we have research again, as you’ve said we have small businesses, we have an ecosystem that we’ve managed to develop. So we also have a fifth category in which we can measure success. What you’ve done – because you went into space – is certainly why many people love you. Well, that’s true, but the real reason for the love is that you’re the Hungarians who went into space. This means something more: we’re there too, we’re someone too, we’re also part of this most complex, most difficult world that belongs most to the future, beyond Earth. We’re there too, we’re doing it too. We’re not big, but I wouldn’t use the word small: we’re not as big as those larger than us, but we’re there with serious weight, serious results – and we can even increase this. In influencing the future, in influencing the future of humanity, we can play an even greater role in space exploration than we’ve played so far. This is what you’re saying. And so my answer is that there’s no question that if there’s a national government, and this idea is the defining mission behind all our decisions, then it’s the Hungarian government’s duty to ensure that space exploration and the Hungarians involved in it are contributing to achievements at the top of the world, that are visible to everyone. So not only can you count on this, but – to put it in public law terms – it’s the Hungarian government’s constitutional duty and historical mission to support all such new areas, should they emerge. And this is regardless of whether or not you like space exploration.
There are a few hundred people who are witness to this, so thank you very much for this kind of promise. My last question. I see that we don’t have much time left, but this is perhaps what interests me the most – and then I’ll have one more question if time allows. We can see that, on a global scale, space exploration is now turning back to the Moon. After fifty years we’ll probably – or hopefully – return there; and then perhaps we’ll go to Mars. It’s also possible that we’ll populate that, after we’ve established a colony on the Moon. There are still many obstacles to this. However, if we become a multiplanetary species, I imagine that there are relatively few interviews today where this word comes up as it can with you, Prime Minister. Prime Minister, on a historical scale – looking back over the past, say, two thousand years – what lessons can be applied when creating a new society, a new civilisation, in a new area? What mistakes must we avoid in order for this to be a prosperous society, say, on the surface of a new planet? Over to you!
That’s kind of you. I don’t think even minds far more sophisticated than mine could give a definite or even reliable answer to that question. I know this because I sometimes talk to them, these high-tech guys, if I may call them that, who perform all kinds of magic down there in the valley – such as the idea of a Mars colony, which also comes from there. I tend to think about this – regardless of them, this has preoccupied me for quite a long time: whether it’s permissible for us, for humanity, whether it is part of our mission, whether it was the intention of our Creator for us to go beyond Earth and create a galactic civilisation, or however one should put it. And I leafed through the Bible, or tried to, to see if I could find a sentence that referred to this. But all the sentences relating to the idea of populating always refer only to the Earth. I don’t know if this shuts the door on a scientific possibility – perhaps not; but what’s certain is that I didn’t find any sentence in the Scriptures that would take the reader or the believer beyond the idea of populating the Earth, that would take them to an extraterrestrial world. Perhaps theologians should read more thoroughly, and perhaps they’ll find something like that, but I haven’t. The second statement is that we won’t be able to curb human curiosity. As with most things that are good, most things that are problems also stem from the fact that humans are creatures who are simply intrigued by the unknown. Many problems come from this, but also many good things. People look for ways to satisfy this passion, and one of these is exploring outer space. So I’m sure that governments, major owners of big capital and global corporations will spend a lot of money in satisfying this human passion and curiosity, and they’ll create all kinds of settlements on the Moon, on Mars, and who knows where else. The question is whether or not this will be for the benefit of humanity, whether or not it will be good for us, and if it’s good, then where it will end – because, if I understand things correctly, there are so many galaxies. I don’t understand astronomy, but I watch it on TV, and I see that there are so many galaxies that reaching each one would be a very serious life project – even for God, I think. So there’s a limit to this... These are inconceivable dimensions. The human brain can’t conceive them. But we must prepare ourselves for a multitude of technical innovations, discoveries, inventions and experiments that will attempt to create a liveable environment for humans in otherwise uninhabitable areas. There are some areas on Earth that are completely uninhabitable, and yet we’re trying to create conditions suitable for human life there. So why shouldn’t we be able to do that on the Moon, or even on a planet called Mars? So these things will happen. I don’t think the process of efforts in this regard will be linear, because if you look at space exploration from the beginning, there too the waves tend to be sporadic. So it’s not a straight line of development. There are times when for twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years, there’s simply no money for it, no American president who’s interested in it, and the critical mass of power and will that would launch new extraterrestrial ventures doesn’t come about. That’s why I think these things happen in bursts. Suddenly it starts, and it’s a sensation for a year or two. Maybe there’s some business in it, and if there’s business in it, then it becomes more sustainable. I think this process can’t be stopped until humans destroy themselves technologically, say, with a nuclear war, sending themselves back to the Stone Age. But it’s more likely that they have the tools and scientific knowledge that make it possible to create this type of environment on extraterrestrial surfaces. So I think that’s what will happen. I think we should be there. Even if we don’t have answers to these fundamental questions, I’d advise against Hungarians wanting to stay out of it. We’re surrounded by the world’s best and brightest people, research institutes and countries; and we should always be there, learning as much as we can, bringing that knowledge home with us, and contributing in some way to these great kinds of human endeavour. So, in short, my answer is yes rather than no.
And then, to conclude our conversation, a real surprise...
Sorry, I’m not stepping down. I’d like to pour cold water on the opposition’s hopes here and now.
A truly surprising question. I’m very lucky that nowadays I talk to children a lot, and I try to inspire them. There are lots of questions they always ask about outer space. One of them is how we go to the toilet in outer space. I was lucky enough to take part in a camp for Hungarian children in Sydney, where I had to give a half-hour technical deep dive – because, when I got to the eighth question, which was precisely about that, I gave up and said, “OK, let’s discuss this in full scientific detail.” I’m not going to ask that question, but another common one.
And I’m past the age of being interested in the realisation of biological processes of a different nature. So we can move on, yes.
Prime Minister, if you had the chance, what would you take into space?
It depends on whether I’m fleeing or simply on a trip – they’re not the same thing. Obviously, if I’m on a trip, then we’re not talking about my children. But obviously I’d take photos of my grandchildren. For example, I’ve just received a Hungarian flag from you that’s been to space. I’d take that with me, and if I ever came back I’d give it to the next Viktor Orbán as a gift, just as I received it from you. I’d definitely take a football.
A Puskás jersey?
And a pocket knife, a pocket knife, a Székely pocket knife, I’d definitely take that. Once I had that, I’d be pretty much set.
I learned from the Hungarian Armed Forces that a spark striker is something you always need.
Ah!
Starting a fire in space is quite dangerous.
Yes.
I learned from the Hungarian Armed Forces that a sparkler is something you always need.
Ah!
Starting a fire in outer space is relatively dangerous.
Yes.
Thank you very much for joining us this evening. I don’t think I’ll be shortlisted for “Journalist of the Year” next year – but we’ll see when that honour comes around. Thank you very much for your attention.
Go for it! Don’t give up! Don’t give up!