Interview with Dr. Tadej Troha in Mladina
The weekly magazine Mladina published an interview with Dr. Tadej Troha "Half-hearted adaptation to climate change and scraping the budget are not enough. They are sand in the eyes."
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From the article:
"Tadej Troha is a researcher and Head of the Institute of Philosophy at the ZRC SAZU. He lectures at the Department of Pedagogy and Andragogy at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana and at the Graduate School of the ZRC SAZU. In June, he became a councillor at RTV Slovenia, and he is always in the public eye in one way or another. He is extremely critical, not only of the previous government - criticism of the former government was an intellectual necessity - but he is also dissatisfied with the government we have today. He is not just referring to Robert Golob, to his ministers, to the mistakes they are making. It seems to Troha that we have less and less of a state, a state that works for the public good, a state that can think ahead, a state that has smart strategies, plans or even a vision of how to solve problems. And at a time when the future has already outpaced us, a weak state is something to be truly feared.
Many people think that we have a state to regulate services, to build roads, to regulate schools, others say that the state, a community without ideology, does not exist, even if it is empty or radically centrist. My thesis is sharper: do we even have a state anymore?
T. Troha: " Even the question of the function of the state is raised in a concrete context. Therefore, it is first necessary to find out why we feel that we no longer have it. Why do we feel it is not working? We have no clear idea of what the state is supposed to be, but at the same time we are somehow convinced that it does not function. It is probably because we have already missed some things, and it is a question of whether they are even fixable. We can talk abstractly about the importance of public services, about education, about health, about public transport, but once the concessions to private companies are a fait accompli and become a matter of fact, the calls of principle for public services to be provided by the state become hollow. Let us look at transport. It is only the state, in cooperation with neighbouring countries, that can strategise and manage the development of transport flows. Our state, on the other hand, first grants concessions for bus services to private companies, even though it could have organised them on its own a long time ago, and then sets up a special public transport management company, which merely coordinates the private companies. But the business logic is fundamentally different. It seeks profit first and foremost, and no amount of coordination will eliminate that. As a result, public transport will never be organised in the way passengers would like it to be through the granting of concessions. It is hard to imagine, for example, a public company selling a bus ticket without a guarantee that you will be able to board it. As it is happening now.""
