Noam Chomsky - The End of History

what is the likelihood that the US public which is indeed becoming or cynical there's no question about that what's the likelihood it will just turn away from questions like politics and foreign policy and so on is that yeah yeah well you know I look you can't predict tomorrow's weather right to try to predict human affairs is totally hopeless if you look at the record of predicting human affairs it is a you know you might as well draw watts or something it's a much too complicated business to predict it's the kind of thing you try to do something about you know predict if you look at past history you can find all kind of analogies and differences so for example take the United States in the 19th we spin through periods this is not the first period of the kind we are now experiencing I mean it's never identical to what happened before but there is a kind of a cycle there's a there you look through history of the United States from England with two most advanced society democratic societies since the early 1820s there have been repeated periods which have been called have been held you know as the end of history utopia the masters the people are driven down into apathy and cynicism the guys who bought on the place where on everything perfection has been reached the first such period was in England in the 1830s remember that the classical Adam Smith was not the founder of what's called classical economics he was pre capitalist he had also a weird ideas some would put him aside but something like what's called neoliberalism is in the work of Ricardo and mosses and other economist of that period and they would had to teach a very hard lesson a new lesson new in human history the lesson was that human beings had absolutely no value okay they have no intrinsic value that's new you know to go back to say feudal society everybody had a place maybe a lousy place but a place you know he had a right to a certain place in the society and you belong there in the society somehow responsibility to keep you there even if you were slate but they had a new there was a new idea coming along post enlightenment post classical liberalism post Adam Smith or Jefferson and that was coming along in England roughly in 1820 and that was that people had no rights they have only the rights that they can obtain in the labor market period if you can't get enough to survive in the labor market then starve or go somewhere else now in those days you could go somewhere else like you know you could go to the United States or Australia or Canada little problem about some people living there but that wasn't too serious so that sort of meant something that was the message and that's not easy to teach people you know it's kind of hard to drive out of people's heads this strange idea that human beings have some intrinsic rights apart from what they can gain in the labor market but it looked by that I think 1830s as if it had sort of once it was written into the legislation you know look fine and so on there was only one small problem the British Army was spending most of its time and effort putting down rebellions because people couldn't get it into their thick heads that they don't have any rights so they did all kind of crazy things they were Meuse meaning you know strange things happening and finally some even worse happened the idea started to spread that if we don't have any right to live you don't have any right to rule and that was serious you started getting charkas charted hum the you know the labor movement started organizing I was all very subversive and fortunately the science which according to Ricardo had the with equivalent the Newton's laws of gravitation the science turns out to be kind of flexible so it changed a little bit and it suddenly turned out that yeah you have to have something like what later on the school of social democracy so the there is a right to live but you have to have a social contract and so on okay you go back to another 30 40 years say the 1880s look like the same thing was happening again there was talk about perfection finality nobody has any right and so on and so forth again the thing blew up same was going on in the United States in one because they did establish a pretty stable social contract which can only change very recently in fact in the United States which had a much harsher history in this respect the 1890s were a period of real violent repression of individual rights they're called the gay 90's and they were gay for some people but not for working people in western Pennsylvania for example I don't go through the history but you ought to know it if you don't and then it looked like utopia again okay by the 1920s it really looks perfect so there's a important book on labor history by Americans of the leading labor historian David Montgomery who you know University it's called the rise and fall of the house of labor and the fall of the House of labor that he's talking about is the 1920s that's when labor was completely smashed the leading figure in the labor movement Eugene Debs was in jail because he refused to recognize the nobility of wilson's war the unions were completely smashed you couldn't have meetings I mean you know it's very undemocratic I mean in fact he calls it a very undemocratic America but it looks like perfection finality and the history wonderful ten years later the whole thing blew up you could ask that the question you were asking could have been raised then in fact could have been raised in the gay 90's - or at 18:30 I turned out ten ten years later the whole thing blew up workers are taking over factories I mean that half a step before kicking out the walkers altogether and just running them there was not the and they were the United States was forced into a kind of social contract called the New Deal the 19th of the big attack huge corporate propaganda you know big you know fear concern about this by the 1950s it looked like it was back in shape again that was a period of quiescence very little happening people are cynical and apathetic end of ideology it was cold in those days nineteen sixties everything blew up again by now we're into your lifetimes you know what happened and right after the 60s the ferment of the 60s again the same story and attempt to drive everybody back into their holes narrow the sphere of democratic participation you know put the wealth back where it belongs into the pockets to the rich folk and so on and that carried just pretty much in till today well it's a repetition you know it's not the first time and furthermore it's not just the cycle it's a cycle it's a spiral that goes upwards so you look think about each one of these periods you're better off than last time so for example now there's like a problem about the maintaining depending Social Security and many defending some kind of medical care for somebody okay let's say the elderly and the poor there were that was a problem in the 1920s because there was no Social Security there was no medical care in fact even in the nineteen to 1960s there was no problem about defending medical care because it wasn't any okay and if you look case by case I think what you find is a gradual growth in I would call it's a value so I'd call it civilization bulletin whatever you like but anyway a pretty steady change in something which is a recognition of some kind of intrinsic human rights and you get it beaten down and then you start again but from a higher level and I think we're - higher level now than ever before you know in these past cycles so where's it going to go next your guess is as good as anyone elses no one's ever been able to predict in the past we can predict now you can just say that yes we're back in another familiar period and it could lead to something like you know the movements of the 60s and the 30s or it could lead to fascism nobody knows

Channel: Chomsky's Philosophy

Views: 92,515

Rating: 4.9389896 out of 5

Keywords: Chomsky, Noam Chomsky, Politics, End of history, Capitalism, Market, Rights, Human rights, Class, Class struggle, Labor movement, History, Propaganda, Dialectic, U.S. history, social contract, individual rights, progress

Id: Vg3gOFWfpck

Length: 8min 56sec (536 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 27 2017