Born just one hundred years ago, Goran Yarmin won his first Nobel Prize, that of literature, at the very young age of forty years after writing thousands of pages of a complex, autobiographical, scientific, psychological, economic and very literary which he knew how to make available to all.
His second Nobel Prize, that of economics, was awarded to him forty years later in a totally new but not really unexpected way. The rest of his work had grown so densely that it surpassed all that had ever been written both literaryly and economically, throwing down all the theories that tried in vain to keep the world at the beginning of the 21st century. He had thus fully and faithfully imagined today's global society. Many saw no prodigy convincing himself that he was merely a time traveller as his vision had been perfect, anticipating by twenty years all technological advances, predicting all industrial revolutions, all new economic and political paradigms, all societal changes.
One of Yarmin's few interviews had recently been given on the occasion of his 100th birthday. This intervention had been an opportunity for him to refute his detrac
tors: – Goran Yarmin hello, began the journalist, what do you say to all those people who think you have the power to travel in time and especially in the future?
– I reassure them, I did not invent a machine for this, unfortunately, and then I do not believe in the possibility of time travel. All the stories and scenarios that have tried to do so collapse at some point like a bad soufflé. The only possible journey can explore only the past, by the contemplation of the stars, by the collection of the deepest layers of the rare eternal ice that we have left, by the careful study of peatlands. So yes, understanding our history allows us to better understand our future. That's just what I'm trying to do, observe and understand.
– In one of your first novels, "Amazonia", you were already anticipating the empowerment of women when it is only today that they hold the highest responsibilities in the whole world.
– It was not very complicated to predict, just a step back from history, compared to the stupidity of men who remained martial, mimetic and gregarious leading us towards more wars, more inequality, unbridled lure of gain until we saw the the failure of the market, religion and democracy. It had to stop at the risk of human beings disappearing prematurely even though we all know that our world will die out without man just as he was absent when he was created. Claude Levi-Strauss reminded us of this just one hundred years ago, the year I was born. The woman with her spirit so different was for me the only way to survive as many others had previously foreshadowed, especially Houellebecq – who continues to inspire me today – with her "DEMAIN SERA FEMININ". He had just not anticipated that women would be so courageous and intelligent to deprive men of their power through the generalization of Medically Assisted Reproduction followed by the legal confiscation of ballot boxes. The physical strength, the only secular and undisputed advantage of men over women, was thus overcome by the spirit such as Ulysses crushing the Cyclops.
– In "Econominus", another of your founding novels, you foresee the disappearance of the market and thus of money, "this mad invention of the man who almost precipitated his fall" as your hero puts it.
– Yes, it is also true, but again I have only observed. Be careful, to say this would mean that I am the only one who possesses this power, that the rest of the world is not capable of it, that everyone is stupid. No. The dumbest human being on earth could see the devastation wrought by money. Inequality has become unbearable, economic and state neo-feudalism, corruptions with industrial dimensions, mafias more powerful than a state. We couldn't continue on that path. Despite all the warnings the financial markets continued to believe that the land was flat, to apply outdated laws based on large numbers without taking seriously the accidents and statistical variations out of norms that yet multiplied. Pension funds, their shareholders and traders who became their slaves could not win. The probabilities that finally allowed us to understand our universe have shown their limits when they are too strictly applied to the economy. At the same time, electronic money became even more volatile than cash became the blessed refuge of all trafficking, of all corruptions on global scales that far exceeded national and even continental powers. This had to be stopped at the risk of a return to the Middle Ages.
"In this particular case, the policies have even gone beyond your vision," continued the journalist, "by also removing from the Act any notion of individual property. What did you think when the decree was ap
plied? – I feared the civil war at first and then I realized the courage and the need to do so. The massive increase in taxes during the first quarter of our century forced the wealthy to pay well beyond their resources except to conceal everything that was beginning to become widespread. Collective ownership became the only way out. There was no point in owning anything. Goods and objects have regained their simple utility value through intelligent sharing via networks.
– You didn't convince at the time. It took decades for science to advance, for the world to swing dangerously to the edge of the precipice to see the correctness of your vision burst into the open.
– Again, no magic. No extraterrestrial model was proposed to us – and we now know that there will never be one since we are definitely sure to be the only living beings in our universe – as no theory could distance us permanently from chaos. Only the quantum computer was able to give us objective answers since it did not need to be programmed by man and therefore influenced by him. And I still say here that I have not intervened in any way in the design and manufacture of QuantiK. The only credit goes to John Kappa, he is the hero you are looking for, the first to have really tamed the Qubits. But he is too modest, I know him well, he would not fail to praise Planck, Einstein, Turing, Von Neumann and other big names even before admitting to you the importance of his own work.
– You still understand the astonishment of the whole world when the QuantiK calculator has validated all your theories. Many saw it as a deception and it took many months to remove the doubt scientifically.
– Yes, I understand perfectly. After all, Einstein also waited a few years before general relativity was proven by observation and definitively validated today thanks once again to QuantiK. Nice nose to history! Einstein fought all his life so that physics would not have to be random and it was probabilistic quantum theories that proved him right in the end. I'm not a scientist, I didn't expect so much recognition. I didn't want to impose anything on my books. It was primarily fiction, enlightened, but fiction all the same. Never has a novel really changed the world you know. I honestly didn't think mine could influence him.
And yet. You've since gained tremendous notoriety. To all world leaders, in all scientific and economic communities, on all information networks while you are completely absent, that you do not want to meet anyone physically or do any of the lectures that you're so much wanted. Why this invisibility? It's hard to believe an excess of modesty.
– Indeed, it is not of that order. Rather, it is a question of staying as far away as possible from any source of interference, any negative or even positive influence that would distort my vision, my analysis. I have never sought only pure fiction, unattached in any reality of the moment. Why did these fictions actually be confused with the real world many years later? I do not know myself. If I were a believer I would think that I was only the medium of a higher or divine force. I'm not.
"Yes," said the journalist, "you have also brilliantly exposed it to us in Philonatura", your last novel published ten years ago now where you describe a world without religion, soothed, in which man and his only spirit are at the centre of a nature without more God to lead it.
"This world is far from ideal," Yarmin replied. Fiction just allows me to imagine the human relationships that might exist in the absence of divine beliefs, including also the Economy, the supreme God of the market that has certainly done as much if not more victims than all religions Met. Then these relationships between individuals of course take on another dimension but they also reveal sources of heartbreak, betrayals, new joys too, but above all more positive thoughts based on altruism and unconditional love. But once again I have only followed the path already set by illustrious predecessors for the most part philosophers. I only take a different path.
– Religion is less present today than before, but it is still there. Do you regret it
? – I don't want to prescribe any of my texts, I'm not an essayist, definitely. I simply note that religion, whatever it may be, was also a matter of men. Its decline is easily understood with the empowerment of women. We all come from the same cosmic origin, from the same stardust. We now know that the Big Bang is not the origin of EVERYTHING, that it is also only a tiny part of the puzzle of life, that other universes parallel to ours exist, where time and space no longer exist or not yet . Would there be several Gods who wouldn't even know each other? Is there really a single origin to EVERYTHING? I don't believe it. For this, time would have to be universal, that it existed without us, but it was men who invented it as the Gods they created to console themselves to be so small. The notion of time is also religious. We will have to get rid of it one day like the gravity that is plaeting us on the surface of our poor planet. Only the intelligent and reasonable mind has the ability to overcome these forces, to understand the universe as a whole and even beyond without the need to travel physically. Everyone can thus by simple experiments of thought, thanks to his imagination and his intelligence be transported to the other side of the universe, which is still impossible for our poor bodies… For now! Thanks once again to QuantiK, wormholes can become reality before long, like all cosmic phenomena purely thought at the beginning of the twentieth century by all those genius physicists deprived of our technology and including quantum mechanics, the expansion of the universe, black holes and other gravitational waves have since been verified.
– When is your next book? Finish questioning the reporter.
"Very soon, at the beginning of spring, but you will not be able to get me to confess its subject," concludes Yarmin with a mischievous half-smile.
– So I won't try to give us interesting clues. The journalist also smiles with an overheard tune.
– Another big thank you to you Mr Yarmin for this exclusive interview and for having received us so well in your wonderful house so warm.