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INTERVIEWER
Will the poet always be the permanent dissident?
PAZ
Yes. We have all won a great battle in the defeat of the Communist bureaucracies by themselves—and that’s the important thing: they were defeated by themselves and not by the West. But that’s not enough. We need more social justice. Free-market societies produce unjust and very stupid societies. I don’t believe that the production and consumption of things can be the meaning of human life. All great religions and philosophies say that human beings are more than producers and consumers. We cannot reduce our lives to economics. If a society without social justice is not a good society, a society without poetry is a society without dreams, without words and, most importantly, without that bridge between one person and another that poetry is. We are different from the other animals because we can talk, and the supreme form of language is poetry. If society abolishes poetry it commits spiritual suicide.
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