Noam Chomsky - The Essentials

what I focus on frankly is based on a very elementary moral principle I realize it's almost universally rejected but I'd still like to reiterate it our prime concern should be our own responsibilities we should our prime concern for anybody should be the predictable consequences of your own actions I mean it's very self it's very convenient and you know to be self righteous and to talk about somebody else's crimes so you know if you were a Russian commissar in the nineteen seventies they'll be very convenient to concentrate on US crimes but the important thing to do in Russia was not that I don't care whether soccer I've said anything about US crimes what you care is what they're saying about their own society and something they can do about and the same elementary moral principle applies to us the focus of our attention should be on what we can do what we are doing what are the options for us to try to terminate major crimes in which we're involved and there are plenty of them and to mitigate harm and atrocities elsewhere and there's a lot that we can do well we have to be careful about the term American exceptionalism and for whether it's not at all exceptional every imperial power has bathed the same way sometimes worse so it's just normal and Furio practice it's called exceptionalism but nothing about that of course it's called it it's supposed to be exceptional in that we have the highest ideals so maybe we make mistakes but it's always with the highest ideals that's American exceptionalism except that too is true of every just about every imperial power so when the British were destroying the world they were always doing it was the absolutely highest ideals the leading figures leading intellectuals and people like John Stuart Mill estimable people were describing England as an angelic country beyond anything that anyone's ever imagined people can't understand now marvelous we are and so on the French were the same but hard to find an exception said that the course of history may be determined to a very significant degree by what the people of the United States will have learned from the catastrophe meaning of course the Vietnam War what in your opinion have we learned from this experience I would say very little unfortunately at the time I wrote that which I guess was seven or eight years ago what I had in mind was that there are really two different ways of looking at this catastrophe one can look at it as a failed venture a mistake something which was it was a mistake because it failed mistake because it failed but perfectly all right if it succeeded and I think it's probably fair to say that at least among intellectuals people who are who write and speak publicly a letter harsh on the intellectuals I think that totally unprincipled - I mean I think the dominant view is that if we had gotten away with it a little bit RI but we couldn't get away with it so therefore was stupid and their globe we should get out but you know worse than a crime it was blunder something of that story now if that's all that's learned from it I think I'd know it they've done future history it will have shown that there are limits to American imperialism and your opposition has been on moral grounds that it was wrong from the outset although you said your opposition came 15 years too late well active opposition came 15 years too late I think the time for active opposition should have been about 1950 or a little later but I didn't become really actively engaged in opposing the war until about 1964 65 at that point the United States was very deeply involved in what if we were honest we would call aggression against South Vietnam that's in fact what it was but I had of course always been opposed to the war the war actually began for the United States in 1950 and from 1954 to 1960 the US had a kind of a Latin American style terror regime in place and there wasn't any joke they killed about 60 or 70 thousand people but there was no protest zero when Kennedy took over they escalated it to a pretty soon it became a direct the u.s. attack still no protest I mean through the early sixties you couldn't get anybody to sign a petition I mean nobody would come to a meeting I remember we used to try to organize meetings on Vietnam some of the few people student a couple of students a few others who were interested but we'd have to put together half a dozen topics I mean Iran Venezuela you know six other top and then maybe you get more people than organizers by the time by 1965 or 1966 it was becoming a big issue but protests were met with extreme hostility I mean take Boston right here there's a pretty liberal City well we couldn't have public protests against the work they'd be violently broken up these speakers would be saved from being murdered only by hundreds of state police and it would be praised that the protests would be the attack on the protesters would receive be praised in the liberal media I remember mine my wife who had two little girls my wife and the two kids went to a women's protest it was you know it's like you're not throwing stones just people walking around with children and this was in Concord it's a suburb quiet professional upper middle-class suburb and they were attacked people throwing tin cans and tomatoes and so on and the that was considered right it wasn't until late 1966 that there was enough of a change so you could you really had substantial public opposition and that's five years after the war was started by then there were hundreds of thousands of American troops rampaging around South Vietnam the word of course extended to the rest of Indochina and nobody knows how many people were killed because nobody counted salmon another interesting thing about the Vietnam War is we have no idea what the cost is worth to the Vietnamese I mean for the United States we know down to the last person and the big post-war issue is finding the bones of American and pilots but nobody has any idea how many of them he's done you asked us after September 11 one of your points we got to look in the mirror we being America or the West and a look in the mirror at our own was that a way of saying look people like bin Laden our angry at us for good reason by what I was saying the statement of mine that you just quoted is a very conservative statement in fact it was articulated by George Bush's favorite philosopher Jesus Christ who pointed out famously defined the notion hypocrite a hypocrite is a person who focuses on the other fellows crimes and refuses to look at his own that's the definition of hypocrite by George Bush's favorite philosopher when I repeat that I'm not taking a radical position which is just elementary morality I don't get it Gnostic here and religious on it but I do want it this is not religion this is elementary morality if people cannot rise to the level of applying to ourselves the same standards we apply to others they have no right to talk about right and wrong or good but even in right and look there's nobody pure but an argument estimate I know that the US has committed atrocities however they did out more brutal regime the Taliban there wasn't there was David Warren but he's not a moral thing to do they did get rid of a brutal regime there's a celebration okay fine a little bomb Israel and get rid of the brutal regime there let them bomb was Becca stun and get rid of the brutal regime they say the Taliban but no they're not the same they're brutal regimes but let's go back a stage the goal was not to oust the Taliban that was not a warring that was a war aim that was picked up several weeks after the bombing started okay and let's go back suppose that we and there doesn't look like a list a long list of brutal regimes around the world which ought to be overthrown but not by somebody bombing however let's go back to the late late October when the after three weeks of bombing when the US and its British client decided to shift the war aims to overthrowing the Taliban regime there was a meeting sponsored by the United States in Peshawar Pakistan of a thousand Afghan leaders they unanimously condemned the bombing and said it was undermining their efforts which they thought could succeed to overthrow the Taliban regime from within the u.s. is doing it just to show off their muscle you want to so the question of whether the overthrow a regime here that arises and I think the Afghans are right regimes should be overthrown from within and in this case it was probably very likely that that would succeed it was a small beautiful group highly unpopular plenty of opposition to it which could have been organized from within and that's the way to overthrow regime if we want to overthrow the regime of Uzbekistan now a great favor but it happens to be not very different from the Taliban the way to do it would not be the bomb was Beckett's done but to support internal democratic forces and let them do it and that generalizes around the world now Robert Kaplan who writes about foreign policy I spoke to him recently about his book war your politics and I put some of your points to him he said about the distinction between the terrorist States and you call Israel America and the terrorist States that America calls the Taliban he said I wish Noam Chomsky had been with me in Romania in the 70s or the 80s just one of the seven or eight Warsaw states with just one of the seven or eight prison systems with 700,000 political prisoners adult choice a foreign policy is made on distinctions the argument that Chomsky makes has no distinctions because a difference between the quantity and the kind of dictators that America supported and the quantity and the kind of things we went in in Kanye's world for 44 years so let's take his example of my aunt Ceausescu hideous regime which he forgot to tell you the United States supported I supported right till the end as did Britain so the example that he gave is a perfect example and it's a small example because we support much more brutal regimes but Suharto was one of the worst killers and torturers of the late 20th century the United States and Britain supported him throughout he is our kind of guy as the Clinton administration said in 1995 a horrible atrocity is in fact you know when he came into office in 1965 with a coup the CIA compared it to Hitler Stalin and now it led to total euphoria in the United States and Britain a massive support when he carried out even worse atrocity comparable atrocities elsewhere the couple of you know 100,000 people killed then hundreds of thousands later full support continued right through the end of his rule in fact continued past his rule in late 1999 when they were rampaging and destroying what was left of East Timor the US and Britain continued to support him and I can continue through the world like this what cabulance Kaplan says that that there is a distinction that everyone's got some blood of their hands but he says ah we have significantly less blood because what we are soft imperialist really state terrorists so like when we supported his example Ceausescu and Romania right to the end that's good how about killing several million people in Vietnam how about killing hundreds of thousands of people in Central America in the 80s leaving four countries devastated beyond you know beyond that maybe beyond recovery nor does it disqualify been that the fact that this quality that bin Laden is a terrorist or that say the Taliban or a terrorist state that fact doesn't disqualify them from bombing Washington what disqualifies from doing that is even as even they were not maganda they shouldn't do it Kaplan's can't understand trivialities the triviality here is that nobody's compelte right-wing jingoist slike kaplan is comparing atrocities by various countries what honest people are saying this seems to be incomprehensible is that we should keep to the elementary moral level of the Gospels we should pay attention to our own crimes and stop committing them this would be true even if we were killing one person okay and it's even more true when we're killing millions of people let's bring it to the bigger picture than just because it the question he says we all agree with the gospel this is nasty if you leave people alone they'll kill each other yeah and that's why what you need was he cause is an organizing hegemon an overwhelming power which is always times yeah which is always asking rights because we and why is it us because we have the power and we have a massively subservient intellectual class of which is an illustration which will support us atrocities no matter how awful they are it's real politic that shows off in another land with his gospel that he says we forget gospel I'm talking about the most elementary morality if a person doesn't understand that am i right to talk okay if you don't understand that you pay attention to your own crimes you have no right to talk it talks about Machiavellian version sometimes we do a bad thing to protect our democratic and our good institutions and the justices and how are we protecting our democratic institutions by supporting mass slaughter in southeastern Turkey in the last few years without supporting our democratic institutions was it supporting our democratic institutions not ours but anybody would Kaplan argue that the nation state has a right to use any means necessary to protect its sovereignty oh then then he's justifying the truth she's saying Milosh if it's had any other right to anything he wanted to repress the customers and Albanians everything do we needs a Constabulary a force a central force in this case it's American America because it's a superpower to sometimes use unjust means in the service of just causes what are the just causes what was the Just Cause in for example slaughtering Kurds in southeastern Turkey what was it just cause I can what was the Just Cause in supporting Suharto when he wiped when he killed a couple hundred thousand landless peasants in Indonesia went on to become one of the biggest torturers in the world and then destroyed slaughtered a third of the population of East Timor what was it just cause what was it just cause when we invaded South Vietnam forty years ago this is the 40th anniversary of the public announcement of the u.s. attack on South Vietnam ending up killing millions of people leaving the country devastated is still dying from chemical warfare what was the Just Cause what was it just cause when we fought a war to a large extent against the Catholic Church in Central America in the 1980s killing hundreds of thousands of people every imaginable kind of torture and devastation what was the Just Cause can I continue yeah we were the Just Cause for people like Kaplan is we did it therefore is it just cause you didn't read that in the Nazi archives - everyone has to line up and sing the Hosanna - our leaders that's the job of intellectuals round up the chorus so they all sing praises to your leaders while they march in the parade and tell you how magnificent we are now that's the historic task of intellectuals no not just here I would say historic test I mean let's go back the state of World War one you know far enough away so we can think about it what it intellectuals do during World War one well you know first thing that happened is 93 leading German intellectuals published a manifesto calling on their colleagues of the rest of the world to support Germany and it's magnificent to aim to bring justice and peace to the world what are the West be your American intellectuals do exactly the same thing in fact they all lauded their the magnificence of their own leaders there were some exceptions a Muslim end up in jail on both sides so in Germany Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht objective were in jail in England Bertrand Russell objected he was in jail in the United States Eugene Debs is the leading figure and US labor in the 20th century and a socialist presidential candidate he went to jail for raising my all the questions about Woodrow Wilson's war and others were just repressed you know like Randolph Bourne was kicked out of all these journals and so on because they didn't join the parade and intellectuals are supposed to join the parade and they do exceptions are so rare you know you can practically list them and there are exceptions and there are honorable ones acting most of them are in the third world give you put a few but in the West most intellectuals are very loyal and submissive why is there hatred against us there George Bush's famous question well everyone knows the answer to this a couple of days after the I mean they have to distinguish two things here there's a category of people called intellectuals their task is to make up fabrications that protect power and divert attention from what's obvious and indoctrinate people and so on and they've concocted all sorts of complicated stories about globalization and you know failure under the modern world this that and the other thing okay we and they envy us because we're so wonderful etcetera etcetera are we put all that aside that's standard propaganda let's talk about what is plainly the case and it is in fact discussed by serious people like say The Wall Street Journal so a few days after the September 11th The Wall Street Journal - it began running serious stories in which they investigated opinions of people in the Islamic world who they are interested in what they called money Muslims the ones with rich ones the important ones so bankers international lawyers directors of multinational corporations people who are right inside the US system who certainly have no opposition to what's called globalization effective part of it who certainly hate in Laden because he's trying to kill them you know but who nevertheless agree with much of what he says and what they say is their opinions are that the United States supports brutal and corrupt regimes which block democracy and modernization and development they oppose particular policies like the decisive US support for the 35-year military occupation of Palestinian territory which has been harsh and brutal and relies crucially on US military and diplomatic support when you read those papers that Israeli helicopters and jets are attacking Palestinians that's total fabrication US jets and US helicopters which happened to be piloted by Israeli pilots are attacking those concentrations that's what oughta be said Israel doesn't manufacture helicopters were f-16 and they understand all that they know that the US has been blocking any diplomatic settlement for thank you for 30 years since about offered one in 1971 it's not reported here and in the West it's not talked about much but they know it the and they know what's going on there they also know perfectly well that the US and Britain are carrying out operations against Iraq which are devastating the civilian society and strengthening said on the saying and they also remember as Westerners like to forget that the US has NOAA and Britain and France and Holland and so on have no opposition objection to have a saddam hussein's crimes you know that for sure because they support supported Saddam Hussein right through the period of his worst crimes gassing the Kurds unfollow chemical weapons they continue to support him very happily he remained a good favoured friend an ally of the West which helped provide him with the means for developing weapons of mass destruction when he was really dangerous so they listened when Tony Blair and Madeleine Albright condemned Saddam because you know the ultimate monster even gassed his own people they listened but they add the words that are excluded in the West they say yeah he committed those crimes with your support like a rather crucial omission which you never hear from Tony Blair or in the rest but they are not that indoctrinated so that you remember that there was elementary truths and those are other reasons why if you want there's hatred against us furthermore there's definitely nothing new about this anybody who wants to understand any of it knows exactly where to go you go to the Declassified US record us a very open society we have Declassified records of internal deliberations from the past all these questions came up decades ago so in 19th and had the same answers in 1959 fifty-eight personal year for many reasons look I'm not talking about internal record the US so the Eisenhower administration discussed three major crises for the United States one was Indonesia one was North Africa third was the Middle East all Islamic countries all oil producers the question arose whether the Russians were involved that was dismissed as ludicrous no Russian involvement it's just independent nationalism in the three countries which is the main Christ then Eisenhower pointed out with regard to the Middle East his words approximately he said there is a campaign of hatred against us not by the governments but by the people and that that was an issue that was discussed no globalisation you know no they hate us because we have McDonald's and none of this stuff why is there a campaign of hatred against us well the National Security Council have discussed it is the highest analysis and planning body and they said the problem is that there's a perception among the people of the region that the United States supports corrupt and harsh regimes which prevent democratization and development and so because of its interest in controlling Nereus oil and they said it's hard to counter this perception because it's true and furthermore it should be true because we should support those regimes in order to maintain our control over Near East oil so therefore there is a campaign of hatred against us by the people who see that we're robbing their resources and preventing democracy and development but you know we can't do much about it because that's what we ought to be doing well you know like I say no McDonald's no and Venus Eyre magnificence no globalization just perfectly obvious things the same reason why there was a campaign of hatred against England from the people of India or against Holland from the people of the East Indies and so on and so forth now you crushed people under your boot they don't like it so this campaign of hatred against in fact what they what they were discussing internally in 1958 is the same as what the Wall Street Journal found and in nineteen in 2001 you know and for the same reasons because the policies haven't fundamentally change so that's so we understand I mean the Wall Street Journal only was concerned with a lead opinion if they'd gone down to the slums of Cairo they would have gotten stronger opinions but the same kind and more different ones also because in the slums of Cairo they wouldn't like the fact that the wealth of the region is going to the west and not to the people of the region the ones who The Wall Street Journal was talking about are quite happy about that because they are part of the ruling elite and they enrich themselves while the resources go to the west so they are part of the imperial system so you get different opinions if you bother to ask people in those so-called streets but fundamentally it's the same so there's a campaign so there's a bin Laden's messages certainly resonate some people agree with a lot of the things he's saying about 80% of Egyptians for example I say that the most important issue to them is the crushing of the Palestinians so when they hear of bin Laden say they agreed does not do it they like him or hate him on the other hand there is a clique of terror of radical Islamists who were organized and trained and brought together by Western intelligence for their own purposes and I've continued to do for 20 years just with Havel I said they were going to do so while some things are obscure I don't think the what state does function according to what you call the minimal levels of honesty is their stamina generates our power centers the only thing that imposes constraints on them is either outside force or their own populations so the United struggle criticism critical dialogue that's exactly why the intellectuals who were talking about are so adamant at preventing people in the United States and Britain from learning the most elementary facts about is it possible that if you say no state functions not English what happens the United States for example is far more civilized than it was 40 years ago just take that March 9th this March happened to be the 40th anniversary of the public announcement by the Kennedy administration that the US Air Force is bombing South Vietnam it also initiated chemical warfare to destroy crops initiated napalm started driving millions of people into concentration camps to separate them from the guerrillas or they knew what they were supporting this was all public did we commemorate the 40th anniversary no why because 40 years ago nobody cared if the government announces ok we're going to start bombing another country and use chemical warfare to wipe out their crops and drive them to concentration camps fine not a problem so there was no protest in their discussion now there's more proximal yes because the country has gotten more civilized no US president today or for the last 20 years could conceivably do what Kennedy could do with total impunity 40 years ago and the reason is because there was massive popular protest opposed by the intellectual classes of course who hated but it did it led to all sorts of things including opposition through aggression and violence it also spawned the contemporary civil rights movement the feminist movement the environmental movements and all sorts of other things and it imposed important constraints on street violence that's how we got rid of slavery that's how we got rid of feudalism that's how it's moving towards an emancipation from these slowly yes over over time there has been agonizing Glee slow progress but very real always opposed by the states by the intellectuals who support violence and atrocities and try to justify them and try to prevent the population from knowing about them but fortunately their control is limited and therefore the state look like at the end at the end at the end I think state sort of dissolve because I think there are legitimate structures but that's a long time that's it but the end of the nation state that you foresee in the vision I don't foresee anything what I'm saying is that as long as people ordinary people are able to free themselves from the doctrinal controls imposed on them by their self-appointed betters and mentors I as long as they're able to do this they'll continue to be able to struggle for peace and justice and freedom and limitations on violence and constraints on power as they've been doing for hundreds of years and I don't see any end to that where it'll end up in the long run I can tell you where I'd like it to but I wouldn't even dream about that the immediate problem is to free ourselves from the shackles imposed very consciously by the kind of people you're talking about we don't want the facts to be known and for very good reasons but if people know the facts they're not going to tolerate them so they're afraid to prevent them from knowing you have to indoctrinate them you have to tell them stories about how we're really good guys and if we use violence must be for the general good because we represent the course of history you know that's the job of propagandists for power and violence and it's the task of populations to free themselves from those kinds of controls and domination your view what's wrong with private ownership of the means of production we should not have relations of hierarchy dominance subordination centralized control over the means of life people who give orders and orders to take lies all that yeah if you have private ownership of the means of production it means that first of all the people it's not just one person it's a institution so you get like maybe it's a corporation or private business or something first of all internally it's essentially a totalitarian institution almost necessarily there's a group at the top maybe a person or a group they make the decisions they give orders people down hierarchy get the orders transmit them at the very bottom you get people who are permitted to rent themselves to survive that's called a job wage labor and you get the outside community who's allowed to purchase what you produce and of course they're very heavily propaganda is to make them want to consume it even if they don't so that's nature the system it's kind of a that was close to totalitarianism as you can imagine private enterprise works just the way Milton Friedman says you give the worst possible service at the highest possible profit that's what it means to be in the business if you try to be benevolent you're out of the business because somebody undercuts you so the nature of the system is good in sight there's a way back to Adam Smith is to be as mean and rotten as you can to try to maximize profit and market fear and give the worst possible service name with HMOs and everything else the system is is has unacceptable risk built into it it's well known among economists that markets are inefficient from the narrowest perspective so to make it simple suppose you and I you suppose you sell me a car okay we may make a good deal for ourselves we're not taking into count the effect on him that's what's called an externality and there's an effect if you sell me in a car a car it increases gas prices increases pollution increases congestion and that extends very broadly these so called externalities could be very large now in financial institutions it's far worse they are in the business of taking risks if they're well managed they they calculate the potential cost to themselves if there's a loss but the important words are to themselves they don't calculate in what's called systemic risk the effect on the whole system if I make if I go bust you know and as a huge effect the result is that risk-taking is underpriced meaning there's a lot more of it than there would be in a reasonable system in your role a CEO of a corporation you are compelled to maximize profit and to ignore what economists call externalities that is the impact of your transactions on others well that's why we have repeated financial crises ever since Reagan and Thatcher the deregulation of the financial institutions means that the people who run them have to ignore what's called systemic risk the risk that a transaction is going to bring down the system and since you ignore it you're increasing the probability of it and therefore it repeatedly happens so we repeatedly have financial crises each one worse than the last markets are supposed to be magnificent because they increase your choices actually they restrict your choices you think about it for a minute suppose I want to get home from work at night okay the market offers me a choice I can have a four-door Toyota it does not offer me the choice of the subway what I want what's good for me what's good for the environment what's good for my children but that's not offer to the market markets offer individual consumption and the enormous stress on the importance of markets is part of the way to drive people towards looking for yourself I'm a Singh there's many commodities you can forget everything else in fact if you think about it for every one of you is taking an economics course or read about it then you know what markets are supposed to be markets are supposed to be systems in which informed consumers make rational choices right I'm sure every one of you is turned on a television set what do you see when you turn around a television set you see that there's a huge industry public relations industry which began in the United States and Britain incidentally huge industry which is designed undermine part of the business world the undermine markets but to keep the aspect that's usable for profit and power namely separating people from one another focusing on individual choices not working with your neighbor what's called neoliberalism it is an attack on democracy and is an open attack of democracy it's not secret the goal is to minimize the state and if you minimize the state you're maximizing something else what is the thing that you're maximizing well private tyranny the state is the arena within which the public has some role at least in principle in determining policy in the private sector has no role so the more that the public arena is minimized and private power is maximized the less you have democracy now personally in my view the state is an illegitimate Institute should be dismantled but not as long as private power is there because that's much worse that's a system which is unaccountable to the public and the main thrust of neoliberalism is precisely that it's to restrict the arena within which the public can make some difference my suggestion is to extend the public arena and in in the classic fashion namely as I said before working people should have control of the places in which they work not private tyrants the people of the community should have control of their community and they should interact with one another that increases the public sphere if the heavy concentration of private power is eliminated then I think moves towards dismantling the entire state system are entirely legit proper but you face what the world that you're in right now incidentally these neoliberal moves are not moves towards establishing a market system a private corporation is outside the market system if you look at world trade you know about take say the United States about half of US trade is not trade at all it's just transactions internal to a corporation run by a very visible hand and which just happened to cross borders so half of US exports to Mexico don't even enter the Mexican economy there just think parts are being assembled in the United States transferred to Mexico through another branch of say the same Ford Motor Company it's called exports they come back to the United States called imports that's not trade that's mercantilism and that's huge part of world trade it's kind of corporate mercantilism in which that the market is functioning only at the margins and functioning mostly to control people the the the ones who are running the world economy have protected themselves very strongly from market discipline fact if you look at the top there are some good studies by good economists of transnational corporations and there's one major study by two British economist of the top 100 transnational corporations every one of them has benefited from the interventionist policies of its own of its home government and 20 of the hundred have been saved from complete collapse by state takeover and bailout and over and above that the corporation itself is out of the market system its internal transactions are central centrally directed these are command economies so you have a the neoliberal system is an attack in my view both on the market and on democracy consequences of the austerity agenda pretty obvious there in Europe or there being imposed more strictly there devastating the societies one is a rich Society they're increasing debt as anticipated they're creating a huge number of unemployed and the United States switches in this in this case more progressive than Europe there's there being applied but less rigorously and they're having a milder version of the same effects it's not because people want it so like in the United States for example there's plenty of polls the general population considers the main problem to be unemployment not deficit and they're right in fact the deficit is probably a good idea right now it's a stimulus to the economy and it's a way to create more jobs even the IMF this coming around to accept this so who wants to austerity well bankers rich people the people have run the world they want austerity this recent studies came out by good political scientist Ben page Larry Bartels in which they just studied attitudes towards deficit and austerity and the jobs ranked by income level and it's exactly as you'd predict the very top of the income scale the problem is deficits so we have to have austerity the rest of the population we don't have a functioning democracy roughly seventy percent of the population lower seventy percent their views have no influence on policy they're disenfranchised and you get more influences you go up the scale at the very top that means tenth of one percent well what they want is they don't care what's happened in the past ten or twenty years is just astonishing I mean even the Wall Street Journal is astonished though they pointed out recently in an article that which is correct but in Europe no matter what government is elected you know far left or right anything else they follow exactly the same policies because they have no role in setting policy the policies are set in the and by the bureaucrats and Brussels under the shadow of the Bundys funk so it doesn't matter what people think in fact there are some dramatic illustrations of that couple years ago the Greek Prime Minister Papandreou meekly suggested that maybe there should be a referendum in Greece so that people could say whether they wanted to accept the policies that were being dictated to them he was denounced across the spectrum everybody denounced him is totally crazy how can you dare ask the population what policies ought to be in Europe we know that policies have to be set by the bankers most you have save iPhones or something like that in your pocket for example they have in the GPS where the GPS come from it's created by the US Navy the Navistar program that has micro electronics software hardware created almost all created for decades mostly in the state sector under often and the u.s. Pentagon funding here the counterpart taxpayers pay for this because they think they're protecting their security that's what they're told but in fact the government doesn't care about your security what it cares of is about its own power and security for corporate power and the way the system works is the taxpayer takes the risks carries out the investment for decades literally decades finally something may come out which is profitable and then the profit goes to the private sector if if we had anything remotely like capitalist systems we don't they would they would adhere to the capitalist principle that if an investor takes risks and you know invests and Waits and takes risky steps and if something comes out of it the profit goes back to the investor that's not the way it works here the profit goes to people who had nothing to do with it the risks are taken by you often through the Pentagon and comparable systems and if anything comes out the profits go to Microsoft and Apple they didn't create it they bar they take it it's given to them and it literally is days so computers were the first in a computer market personal computer market became viable in 1977 I think it was Apple was the first that was about thirty years after the development of computers almost all in the state sector like in the building where I work and it's the said if you buy pharmaceuticals let's say the research the basic research and development is pretty much done in the state sector places like probably the biology lab right here probably gets government funding grants and that's all across the board when you look back at these I mentioned the trans-pacific partnership one part of that was leaked by WikiLeaks it's secret except for the corporate lawyers and lobbyists but one part was leaked it was the part on intellectual property intellectual property is a polite term a kind of a euphemism for government instituted monopoly pricing rights that's what it really means it means extraordinarily hide patent rights which have never existed in history for the pharmaceutical corporations and some other corporations that's to keep the price of drugs up and make profits astronomical now there's a pretext and the pharmaceutical corporations say look we need that for research and development that's been investigated turns out but it's probably at least half of the RMD is not done by the pharmaceutical corporations at all stunned by the state sector and so on and that's an under estimate because if you take a closer look the part that's funded by the pharmaceutical corporations is towards the marketing end like you know with around the molecule to get a new drug with the basic research the hard costly risky research that's done by people like you you pay for it through your taxes the pharmaceutical corporations ripoff the profit in the period when the press was most free was about the mid 19th century I mean at that time just keeping to say England in the United States the two cases that have been studied I imagined the same elsewhere in the mid nineteenth century there was a very lively popular press very widely read by you know working people by everyone but no much reached far beyond the commercial media at the time it was very diverse it represented you know reflected public interest and public concerns and was very popular in Britain they tried to close it down by censorship of various kinds but that didn't work there were too many ways to avoid it and it was finally understood that the way to eliminate it was by advertising while reliance on advertising and by concentration of capital so just through the effect of reliance on advertising which was then just a you know kind of beginning like around a century ago and concentration of capital they've realized that over time they could marginalize the independent popular press which couldn't get the advertising of course because advertisers know like what they were saying and didn't have the capital and it took a long time so in England that was actually up until that about 40 years ago still the case forty years ago that the main newspaper in England The Daily Herald was a kind of labor oriented social democratic newspaper very popular you know if everybody had outsold all the others the the mirror which was the main tabloid was the same kind of leftist paper popular paper but they kind of come to advertising pressure and capital control the United States happened a bit earlier but it was the same same process and advertising is - I mean it's part of much bigger industries as advertising is part of the public relations industry there's a huge industry and it developed very consciously around the first war in the two most democratic countries the United and the United States and there's a good reason for it they were coming down to as the countries were becoming more free that just through popular struggle and people were winning the franchise and you couldn't shut him up anymore by force it became it was understood that you're gonna have to control people by controlling opinion and attitudes because we can't rely on force anymore and the control of opinion and attitudes means well you know there was actually a phrase for it this this was the time when what was called scientific management of work was becoming a big issue Taylor right management you know Ford know that stuff but it was also understood you want to not only control very closely the lives of people in their work time but also you have to control them in their off work time and what you have to do is turn them into passive obedient consumers who don't pay you know don't try to get out of our hair basically pay attention to the what we're called the superficial things of life like fashionable consumption you get them trapped into consumerism isolated from one another atomized control their beliefs that's where notions like manufacture of consent come from right after this first world war and out of this came huge industries the advertising is a large part of it but and it of course affects the media and I mean if any of you ER if you watch television for example takes a television when you turn on the television set the corporation doesn't make any money right like they you don't pay them when you turn it on less it's cable but they do so why do they do it well they do it because of the advertising so the the resources and the creativity and the effort and so on in the whole television industry goes in advertisement in fact within the television industry they there are there are words called content and fill like a program has content and a program has fill the content is the Verizon the fill is the car chase that's in there to keep you watching until the next dad comes along and all the effort of course goes into the advertiser and the the country phil has to you know first let's keep your interest enough so you watch the advertising but the advertising is there for a purpose I mean it's to make you it's to turn people into creatures whose only concern in life is to max out their five credit cards and not to pay attention to what's going on in the world and let the rich powerful guys do what they want without interference essentially the same message because why well we have to look what the message is first of all the message is one of remarkable subordination to power now power in the United States doesn't happen to be in state it's not the it's not a centralized military bureaucratic state like in the Soviet Union power in the United States primarily lies in corporations in the corporate world the there's very narrow concentration of control over resources over investment decisions and so on and so forth and that affects everything can't help affecting everything it effects the government because this means that there's a very close link between governmental power and corporate power furthermore just the ability to make investment decisions and financial decisions places bounds on what any government could do yeah furthermore it now let's go to the major media for what are the major media well they're huge corporations ok the New York Times Washington Post NBC they FERC law are large corporations they're quite profitable ones in fact secondly there are parts of even bigger conglomerates like you know Westinghouse and GE and so on now like any corporation they sell a product on a market this is a market roughly a mark that kind of a fate guided market society what's the product and what's the market well the markets advertisers that is other businesses so they're selling a product to other businesses corporations are selling a product other businesses what's the product well the product is audiences now for the major media the ones that kind of set the agenda they're selling a lead audiences privileged audiences New York Times say is targeting privileged elite sectors of the population that's their audience and they're trying to sell that audience to other businesses not so we have to begin with just on you know the most elementary grounds we have it we look at a system suppose we're Martians you know we're looking at this system we say okay here are huge corporations selling privileged audiences to other businesses well what picture of the world do you expect to come out of that then we begin that other factors if you're let's say you're the chief diplomatic correspondent of the New York Times or you know fund it on the op-ed page and you want to really have important you know insights into the government well we all know how that's done you have lunch with the Secretary of State he tells you the lies that he wants to appear tomorrow you write them and you say a high source in Washington my intrepid reporting has discovered that a high source in Washington said so and so in fact if you compare the internal declassified record you know say people like Dean Acheson these decisions and you look at say James Reston columns we're pretty close and the same will be true about the James Baker and Thomas Friedman furthermore this is an open secret we know that this is the way it's it's not a big secret in the journalism profession that this is now in order to maintain those contacts you better present the world a certain way or those contexts are going to be cut off you'll you'll lose your opportunity to have to appear to have special insight to have leaks you know to be able to come across with a story you know cull hours before the next person and so on plus you know now in order there's there's an interplay here which requires power in order to maintain your own power that's another factor over and above the just structural institutional are just this so-called Patriot movement is just one ask notice first of all that their slogans are very much like what the whole propaganda system has been trying to ram it your heads for 50 years the government is the enemy and private power doesn't exist okay now it's obvious why big corporations who are fighting the everlasting battle for the minds of men would want that to be the picture you have if the government is your enemy and you can let's say when people when 83% of the population think the economic systems inherently unfair that's supposed to mean they're angry at the government if you can take that view then those who run the private institutions are quite well-off there's no threat of democracy they can run things peacefully the people are demoralized and the normal weapon the normal methods of democratic participation to gain social ends are excluded so it makes good sense for corporate propaganda which means most of what we see in here makes a good sense for it to be trying to stress the message that the government is the enemy and that and destress in fact eliminate from sight the fact that private power exists government is the enemy everybody is in harmony that's been the message well the militias just take that a step further you know they kind of take it through its logical extension yeah okay government's the enemy let's blow up the federal bill okay so in a sense they're kind of hearing the indoctrination and taking it literally well it also has deeper roots in American history but apart from that remember that it's just this is a very cult ridden society the the militias are cold and they're only one and by no means the major one um people are isolated they're atomized they they don't believe in the political system and they don't take part in it they don't organize in other ways the unions are very weak which have been the leading democratizing force in most of modern history this kind of constructive civil society has been very much demolished kind of striking to compare the richest country in the world the United States with the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere namely Haiti which had you know peasants and people in the slums and so on did construct and have sustained amazingly a very lively vibrant civil society with grassroots organizations and unions and all sorts of things and had an effect I mean they got their own president into office well that conception of democracy has been knocked out of people's heads here we could do well to go to the Haitian slums and try to learn something about what democracy is but here it's kind of it has been very much dissolved people feel lonely isolated atomized you know me and the tube they don't do anything with anyone else the normal methods of interchange and constructive action like for example unions or political organizations barely are very weak by comparative standards well how do people react to them well one of the reasons ways they react is people just don't give up you know they form other ways of associating and the other ways of associating are often extremely irrational I think that's a reflection of the dissolution of functioning civil society and constructive ways of responding the militias are just one piece of it and they happen to be picking out the major theme of the propaganda system you can't say they invented it that's exactly what people are told all the time yeah government's the enemy you can't do anything through the political system because it's your enemy so therefore let us we and run the private system let us run everything and don't bother us okay essentially what they're doing they're not inventing it they're just exaggerating something that has been the primary theme of propaganda for 50 years and doing it in a way which you can kind of understand in a dissolving society where there's plenty of other and in fact much bigger and more I think more dangerous cults development well you know all of that can be reversed it's happened in the past and it's been reversed unions were much worse off in the 1920s and they'd barely existed and then in the 1890s I mean I didn't they exist they were being you know people trying to organize they're simply being murdered by security forces fact that went on into the 1930s here okay things are better than they were you know but it can be recovered the way it's been recovered in the past that's why we live in a better country then than it was 60 years ago much better than it was a hundred years ago professor Chomsky I think one of the reasons that you see crowds like this is people are interested in hearing these things that don't get said very often and generally agree that gee these are bad things how could the US government be involved in them why do you think it is that most people feel one way and yet our leaders invariably and you cited Democratic and Republican leaders all of them going across the board you said Carter Clinton both wishes Reagan why do you think it is that our leaders don't feel the same way that we do I don't want to over generalize there a lot of different people in Congress and the White House and so on but by and large overwhelmingly they simply respond to different interests that 75 percent of the population who was skeptical of the election we're basically correct policy is determined by power by concentration of domestic power and it's not a big secret how power is concentrated domestically there it's concentrated in huge conglomerates which are internally tyrannies in effect they're mostly unaccountable to the public there they're given an enormous rights far beyond the rights of persons they're linked to one another and all kind of alliances they have an overwhelming effect on state policy which largely keeps to what they want so on and if they happen to differ you know if there's splits among them you get things coming up in elections where they agree it doesn't come up like some of the major issues for the US population are things like the international economic agreements what are called trade agreements so they don't have much to do with trade or say the free trade area of the Americas or the trade deficit and so on these are really top issues they don't come up in the elections and they don't come up in the elections for a very simple reason the business world is on one side and the population is on the other side very largely and they know it so like in the Wall Street Journal they say you know the problem is if these things come up opponents of these agreements have what they call an ultimate weapon namely the general population so therefore we have to keep them from coming up and they don't come up in elections and they're not discussed and the population more or less knows that even if they don't know all the details about you know GATS and so on yeah except you know anyone who tries to break out of that know that rather rigid framework is going to be marginalized because they don't have the resources and they don't control them they don't have the media and they don't have the organization and so on it's going to take large popular movements to change this and that can happen what's happened in the past I mean that's why the freedom and justice have expanded over the centuries it's never been gifts yeah one gifts from the rich and powerful these are things that were one you know they were won by the labor movement and by the women's movement about the civil rights movement by other by human rights movements they're won by popular struggle then you get a so you move forward but they're never given us gifts and they won't be in the future that leads that critical question professor Chomsky how do we fight back how do we win we write back the way they did in the 1930s the way the populist movement did in the 1890s and the labor movement then finally defeated but not without a lot of victories the way the civil rights movement worked again with significant victories so certainly not what Martin Luther King was trying to achieve you organize you try first you have to educate like what you're doing on you know on your activities then you have to which includes educating yourself and then you have to try to organize get people mobilized to do something as the Occupy movement did and has done inmate might continue to do and then carry out actions of the kind that threaten power and require a response like say see is it down strikes and there plenty of other things you can do so for example some things are going on kind of quietly in the country which have potentially a kind of you know even revolutionary implications the growth and development of cooperatives and workaround enterprises for example it's not on a huge scale what it's on a significant scale and spreading and those are what could be the germs of a new society in very different society undermining capitalist social and economic relations well all of us on all sorts of fronts there are things that can be done and sometimes they're successful I mean for example but you know the 1960s 60s activism I had quite a civilizing effect on the country it did evoke tremendous backlash from the nineteen seventies and we're living in the midst of that backlash but there are plenty of achievements many of them were carried forward some are being carried forward right now I say the advance of gay rights or much too limited but at least some concern about the environment all of those things are developing they can go further so there's no shortage of things to do the kinds of tasks that have always been in front of people who wanted to make a better world not easy ones but but not impossible either there's successes in the past that we can build on the political system increasingly increasingly functions without public input it means to an increasing extent not only do people not ratify decisions presented to them but they don't even practice it but they don't even take the trouble of ratifying them they assume that the decisions are going on independently of what they may do in the polling booth and they feed us that even ratification of decisions made elsewhere is a very weak form of democracy ratification would it would be what well ratification would mean a system in which there are two positions presented to me the voter I go into the polling booth and I push one or another button depending on which of those positions I want that's a very limited form of democracy a real really meaningful democracy it would mean that I play a role in forming those decisions making creating those positions that those positions reflect my active creative participation at it not just me but of course everyone that would be real democracy that's not very far from that in a capitalist democracy you have the problem and it is always perceived as a problem that the popular general population has a method of participating in a decision-making they can participate in politics the state is not capable of stopping them you can't shut them up you can't put them in jail you can't keep them away from the polls and so on and it's striking but that has always been perceived as a problem to be overcome it's what's called the crisis of democracy too many people organizing themselves to become to practice it to enter the public arena that's a crisis so therefore what we have to have what walter Lippmann back in 1920 or so called manufacture of consent we have to ensure that actual decision-making actual power is in the hands of what he called a specialized class a smart guys you know we're gonna make the right decisions and we've got to keep the general population marginalized because they're always going to make mistakes marginalizing meaning reduce them to a path Ian obedience allow them to participate in the political system but as consumers not as true participants that has allowed them a method for ratifying decisions that are made by others but eliminate the methods by which they might first inform themselves second organize and third act in such a way as to really control decision-making that is the ideas our leaders control us not we control them the doctrines of the Enlightenment held that individuals should be free from the coercion of concentrated power well the kind of concentrated power that they were thinking about was the church and the state and the feudal system and so on and that you could sort of imagine a collect a population of relatively equal people at least equal weight now property owners who would be not controlled by those private powers but in the subsequent period a new form of power developed namely corporations with highly concentrated power over decision-making in the economic life that is they can control over what's produced what's distributed what's invested and so on and so forth it's very narrowly concentrated this is why the vice president of the Lord's corporation doesn't say the public mind is totally mine might have funny ideas about democracy which say that we should not be forced simply to rent ourselves to the people who own the country rather and own its institutions rather we should play a role in determining what those institutions do that's democracy if if we were to move towards democracy and I think democracy even in the 18th century sense we would say that there should be no mail distribution of power in determining what's produced what's distributed what's invested and so on rather that should be that's a that's a problem for the entire community in fact there are in my own personal view unless we move in that direction the human society probably isn't going to survive why well we now face the most awesome problems of human history about problems such as the likelihood of nuclear conflict either among the superpowers or through proliferation the destruction of a fragile environment which finally we're beginning to recognize those obvious decades ago that we're heading for disaster other problems of this nature they're they're of a level of seriousness that they never were in the past why do you think more participation by a public by the public more democracy is the answer because well more democracy is a value in itself so part because democracy is a value doesn't have to be defended any more than freedom has to be defended that's just it's it's a part of it's an essential feature of human nature that people should be free that should be able to participate they should be uncoerced and so on these all values in themselves why do you think if we go that route I think that that's the only hope that I can see that other values will come to the fore I mean if the society is based on control by private wealth it will reflect the values that in fact does reflect the value that the highest the only real human property is the desire for its green and the desire to maximize personal gain at the expense of others now any society made that small society based on that principle is ugly but it can survive a global society based on that principle is headed for massive destruction and that's what we are we have to have a mode of social organization that reflects other values that I think are inherent in human nature that people recognize and that would be able to see exactly I mean what are human beings I mean in your family for example it's not the case that in the family every person tries to maximize personal gain at the expense of others or if they do it's kind of pathological it's not the case that if if you and I are say walking down the street and we see a child eating a piece of candy and we see the nobody's around we don't spend we happen to be hungry we don't steal it if we did that would be would be pathological I mean the idea of care for others and concern for other people's needs and concern for a fragile environment that must sustain future generations all of these things are part of human nature these are elements of human nature that are suppressed in a social and cultural system which is designed to maximize personal gain well I think we must try to overcome that suppression and that's in fact what democracy could bringing out it could lead to the expression of other human needs and values which tend to be suppressed under the institutional structure of a system of private power and private profit if a real democracy is going to thrive if the real values that are deeply embedded in human nature are going to be able to flourish and I think that's necessary to save us if nothing else it will be it's an absolute necessity that that groups form in which people can join together can share their concerns can articulate their ideas can gain a response can discover what they think can discover what they believe what their values are this can't be imposed on you from above you have to discover it by experiment by by by effort by trial by application and so on and this has to be done with others furthermore surely central to human nature is a need to be engaged with others in cooperative efforts of solidarity and concern that can only happen almost by definition through group structures and unless such a floor Galatian political and other civic or there's all sorts of trade association which people can associate with one another and I think what I would like to see is a move towards a society which is really based on for Lacan proliferating voluntary organization with eliminating as much as possible as the structures of hierarchy and domination and the basis for them and ownership and control and [Music] becoming the means by which we govern ourselves by which we control our lives may begin by saying something about liberalism which is a very complicated concept I think it's correct surely that liberalism grew up in the intellectual environment of the empiricism and the rejection of authority and Trust in the evidence of the senses and so on however liberalism has undergone a very complex evolution it has a social philosophy over the years if we go back to the classic service what i regard classics say for example Humboldt limits of state action which inspired Mill and is a true libertarian liberal classic affect the world that Humboldt was considering which was partially an imaginary world but the world for which he was developing this political philosophy was a post futile but pre capitalist world that it was a it was a world in which there is no great divergence among the individuals in the kind of power that they have and what they command let's say but there was a tremendous disparity between individuals on one hand in the state on the other consequently it was the task of a liberalism that was concerned with human rights and equality of individuals and so on it was the task of that liberalism to dissolve the enormous power of the state which was such a an authoritarian threat to individual liberties and from that you develop a classical liberal theory and say Humboldt Urmila sense well of course that is pre-capitalist he couldn't conceive of an era in which a corporation would be regarded as an individual that's it or in which such an enormous in which enormous disparities and control over resources and production would distinguish between individuals in a massive fashion now in that kind of society to take the Humboldt in view is a very superficial liberalism because while opposition to state power in an era of such divergence conforms to Humboldt conclusions it doesn't do so for his reasons that is his reasons we the very different conclusions in that case namely I think his reasons lead to the conclusion that we must dissolve the authoritarian control over production and resources which leads to such divergences among individuals in fact I think one might draw a direct line between classical liberalism and the kind of libertarian socialism which I think can be regarded as the as a kind of an adapting of the basic reasoning of classical liberalism to a very different social Europe now if we come to the modern period here at liberalism has taken on a very strange sense if you think of its history now now liberalism is essentially the theory of state capitalism of state intervention in a capitalist economy well that is very little relation to classical liberalism in fact classical liberalism is what's now called conservatism I suppose but this new view I think really is it a my my my view at least the highly authoritarian position that is it's one which accepts a number of centers of authority and control the state on the one hand agglomerations of private power on the other hand all interacting with individuals as malleable cogs in this highly constrained machine which may be called democratic but given the the the actual distribution of power is very far from being meaningfully democratic and cannot be so so my own feeling has always been that to achieve the classical liberal ideals for the reasons that led to them being put forth in a society so different we must be led in a very different direction it's superficial and erroneous to accept the conclusions which were reached for a different society and not to consider the reasoning that led to those conclusions the reasoning I think is very substantially I'm a classical liberal in the sense but I think it leads me to be a kind of an anarchist anarchism is a point of view which at first once covers a lot of things political rhetoric is not the clearest it's not a model of clarity an anarchism has covered quite a lot of ground but the mainstream of it has just been the basic principle which I think comes straight out of classical liberalism and the Enlightenment that any form of authority and domination hasn't as a burden of proof to bear it has to demonstrate that it's legitimate no matter what it is whether it's inside a family or global economy if it's if it is a form of authority and domination and coercion that's to show that it's legitimate it can demonstrate its that's a heavy burden to bear if it shows that it's legitimate okay if not it ought to be dismantled that's anarchy that's the that's the task of those who have the authority to demonstrate that suppose I'm taking a walk with my granddaughter and she runs runs out into the street okay and I grab her and pull her back well that's authority and it's my task to demonstrate that it's legitimate and I think in this case if anybody challenged me I could make an argument thing that's legitimate Authority but the burden of proof is always on those who exercise you that's true if it's men and women parents and children owners and people they ran the state and people who serve it the IMF and people who follow its orders wherever it is so there's no general definition of what legitimate Authority is it's the task of those who exercise authority to demonstrate their legitimacy they're the ones have the burden of proof and if they can't meet that burden by explaining why what they do is legitimate then they have no right to exercise the authority and whatever institution any institution within which they exercise it is illegitimate unless they show otherwise and the anarchists are just people who believe that and try to do something about it well I don't I don't mean that every minute of the day everybody has to be saying look this is my legitimate Authority but they have to be prepared to make the challenge so if it's like a Dem expose it's a formally democratic state well in principle that challenge is met by interchange among the population which recognizes the authority of the of actions in the public arena through constant interaction debate struggle and so on in theory that's what happens if it is a democratic state to the extent that that doesn't happen it's not a democratic state and it is a legitimate when you move to other systems of authority like say private corporations or fascist states or other forms of totalitarianism there's no question of legitimacy because they have none no it's not their responsibility it's their responsibility to meet the challenge it's the responsibility of people to make the challenge so it's the responsibility of say women to challenge a framework in which they are supposed to wash the dishes and put the children to sleep and that sort of thing and it's the responsibility of men and a patriot traditional patriarchy family to answer that challenge I mean it would be nice if you could if the challenge could be raised by those in positions of authority that's pretty rare I mean usually when you're in a position of authority you kind of internalize the values that say it's right and just and the reason is because I think because most people are sort of decent human beings and it's very hard to tell yours to look in the mirror and say I'm a bastard so usually what you do is look in the mirror and say I'm a nice guy and I do these things because it's right and just and that's pretty standard you know I mean everybody knows that from their own experience we don't have to go into it that's what people are like and therefore the responsibility of raising the challenge is typically in the hands of those who recognize that they have a subordinate status it's very hard to recognize that people live you know first millennia you know without recognizing that they are being subordinated in the systems of power I'm gonna true of the women for example it's it's in - per slave you know I mean most slave societies we're accepted by the slaves as legitimate and in fact necessary and a large part and and the same is true of for example people have jobs today in our society almost without exception they consider it legitimate for them to be in a position where they have to rent themselves in order to survive it's not certainly not obvious you know and in fact if you go back a century ago it was not any considered not obvious it was considered outlandish but we're marrying working people and I'm not talking about Marxist or socialist or anybody like that that's a mill hands and Lowell Massachusetts who never heard of socialism who regarded it as a form of slavery and we're complaining that they had not fought the civil war to replace chattel slavery by wage slavery and that therefore those who work in the mills are owned because that's the Republican rights that we want in the American Revolution and so on and so forth so you know it's not obvious but by now I think enough indoctrination and propaganda and so on has taken place so people do regard that form of subordination through external Authority as legitimate whether they should is another question but the fact is they do just as for most of history women have accepted a subordinate role as correct and proper and so on and slaves did and people living in a feudal societies and a feudal society people had a place you know some kind of rule and quite typically the societies were stable because people regarded those structures as legitimate the same is true of religious structures and I mean throughout human life there's a whole variety of systems of authority and oppression and domination and so on which are usually accepted as legitimate by the people subordinated to when they don't you have struggles and revolutions and sometimes changes some nice brutality and so on that's as far as I understand that anarchists are just people to take this seriously here the term libertarian means the opposite of what it always meant in history libertarian throughout modern European history meant socialist anarchist they're not the antes under the socialist movement the workers movement in the Socialist Movement I sort of broke into two branches roughly one statist one a D status the statist branch led to Bolshevism and Lenin and Trotsky and so on the a D status branch which included Marxists left Marxists was looking for others to kind of merge more or less into an amalgam with a big strain of anarchism into what was called libertarian socialism so an a libertarian and Europe always meant socialist here it means ultra you know anger and or Cato Institute or something like that but that's a special US usage having to do with the or a lot of things quite special about the way the United States developed them this is part of it there it meant and always meant to me a socialist and socialist anti-state the anti state branch of social socialism which meant a highly organized society completely organized a night with KF but based on a democracy all the way through that means democratic control of communities of what places of federal structures built on systems of voluntary association and spreading the internationally though that's traditional anarchism at least you know anybody can have the word if they like but it's a mainstream really the mainstream of traditional anarchism and it has roots coming back to the United States it has very strong roots in the American working class movement so if you go back to say the 1850s the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution I was right around the area where I live eastern Massachusetts textile plants and so on I have the people working in those plants were in part the young women coming off the farms they were called factory girls so the women from the farms and work in the textile plant but some of them were Irish immigrants embossed and that group of people they had had an extremely rich and interesting culture we're kind of like my uncle never went past forty great very educated reading modern literature they didn't bother with european radicalism that had no effect on them but the general literary culture they were very much played out and they developed their own conceptions of how the world ought to be organized labor in newspapers in fact the period of the freest press in the United States was probably around the 1850s in the 1850s the scale of the popular press meaning run by factory girls in Lowell and so on was scale of the commercial press or even greater these were independent newspapers a lot of interesting scholarship on them he could read them though they were called not note that just spontaneously without any background of narrative marks or or anyone else they develop the same ideas they thought that they're they from their point of view were what they called wage slavery renting yourself to an owner was not very different from chattel slavery you know what they were fighting to the war about and you have to recall that by the in the mid 19th century that was a common view in the United States for example the position of the Republican Party was Abraham Lincoln's position was not an odd view that there isn't much a difference because it's selling yourself and renting yourself that's how the idea of renting yourself meaning working for wages was degrading you couldn't it was just an attack on your personal integrity the and they despised the industrial system that was developing that was destroying their culture destroying their independence their individuality constraining them to be subordinate to masters losing there was a tradition of those called republicanism in the United States we're free people first free people in the world this was destroying and undermining that freedom and this was the core of the labor movement all over and included in it was the assumption just taken for granted that those quoting those who work in the mills should run in fact one of their main slogans of this court it was they condemned what they called the new spirit of the age a gain wealth for getting all but self that idea that you should the new spirit they don't even interested in gaining wealth and forgetting about your relations other people they regard it as just a violation of fundamental human nature and a degrading idea like take for example one of the most successful industrial commercial installations and for in Spain quite big in fact Mondragon it's a big collection of industrial works schools you know social systems health systems and so on very substantial very successful it's one of the few parts of the Spanish economy that's competitive internationally even after joining European Union it's worker owned and it's partially socialist anarchist its worker owned but manager controlled workers pick the managers but they theoretically at least control the managers how much they control them you can debate and it but in but there's no outside investors telling what to do that their own banks their own Development Bank's they have their own social services and so on and it's been dramatically successful well okay that's pieces of a more free and democratic society pieces only because workers are not really participating directly it's they're still picking somebody to tell them what to do at least they're picking them and they have the authority ultimately which in principle they could use well okay that's a piece of democratic to say and you find pieces of democratic societies all over the place very often in periods of revolution very democratic societies emerge fast and spontaneously and similarly like workers council to control industries they come up all the time I mean they come up after the Bolshevik Revolution they were immediately crushed by the reacted before the Bolshevik Revolution they developed and they were immediately crushed by Lenin and Trotsky and Italy at the same time they developed after the Hungarian Revolution they developed in Spain they don't even thought that flourish in fact these things have happened over and over again spontaneously the reason is this unnatural you don't have to read big books to think that the workers in the plant or to get together and run it thank you back to 19th century America you know the mill towns around here the workers were saying factory girls as they call them young women from the farms or you know local craftsmen the mills ought to be run by the workers who are owned and run by the workers in them that's just natural that's like saying that people should vote their own representatives in Congress well ok those natural ideas are crushed but there's no reason why they can't be realized and implement ok I mean the principle as far as I can see goes right back to the Enlightenment you know like if you go back to classical and lighten my thought I'm not talking about Adam Smith's and you know Jefferson and those guys the sort of core idea is people have a right to control their own work you know ok that the that if a person here I'll quote some standard formula back in an 18th century you know leading heroes of the Enlightenment is if a person works on it if a person does beautiful work under external command meaning for wages we may admire what he does but we despise what he is because not for human being ok that goes all the way through classical liberal thought and lighten man thought I mean you know Alexis de Tocqueville says under wage labor the art advances the art ISM declines now you find this going right into the working class movements and Lowell and Lawrence I think that's just natural I wouldn't try to convince anybody oh but it seems to me if you think about it yeah why should you work on command I mean if you work on command you're some kind of slave now why not work because it's coming out of your needs and interests I mean like cheap for me to say I'm gonna fence the University and our science department and I can do that one of the nice things about being in the Sun in science is a defense of fencing universities you really do have workers control I'm to a very large extent we control what we do you know want to work on this topic I work on that topic I mean you gotta sell it to funders and this and that but the degree of workers control at the elite level is quite substantial I mean that's why it's such a privilege to be in a science department you know enormous ly privileged existence forget the money if they pay you one-tenth the amount of money it would still be a much better existence than working on command now I think people do know that you know I don't think that these Enlightenment ideas are hard to grasp I think people know that if you work on under external control you may despise admire what the person does but despise what he is because his labor you know the sort of central part of your life is being done at somebody else's orders and you are not controlling the way it's done or why it's done or how it's used or anything else well you can't have every individual controlling every single thing but that's why you have a democratic structures best people control things together you know okay I I I don't know how to I wouldn't try to convince anybody of this I because I frankly just don't believe that everyone doesn't know it I think maybe I'm sentimental but it seems to me if he's sort of cut away waves of you know layers of distortion and delusion these things that we're considered pretty obvious 200 years ago still people are interested in linguistics for all sorts of reasons but my own interest for since the beginning for 50 years has been as a way of exploring some aspects of human higher mental faculties and ultimately of human nature which should show up in every domain not just in I mean language happens to be one of the few areas where you can study very core human capacities unique gun core human capacities in a very intense way and achieve some results that go beyond superficial understanding in most areas it's very hard to do it but this is one area in which you can't and at the core of this capacity for language it's been recognized for centuries is a kind of was sometimes called a creative aspect the free ability to do it you and I are doing to express their thoughts without limit within constraints but without limit in novel ways and so on that's somehow a fundamental part of human nature the core of Cartesian philosophy was disability for example well similar questions arise in every aspect of human capacity and again it's traditional so David Hume 250 years ago pointed out that the foundation of morals must be what we nowadays call generative grammar he didn't call it that but it must be some set of principles that we're capable of applying in novel situations again without limit and he pointed out these principles have to be part of our nature because there's no way to acquire them from experience in theory you can learn something about these aspects of human nature and that moving over to the domain of human affairs including politics but personal life or anything else anyone who make takes any stand on anything I say if you're in favor of keeping things the way they are or some minor reform or revolution or whatever it may be I mean if you're serious about it if you're acting as a kind of a moral agent you think what you do should meet certain minimal moral standards you're taking that position because you think it's it's good for people it's gonna somehow conform it's going to bring out and amplify and offer possibilities for their fundamental nature to express it so well at that point there's a theoretical connection but it's pretty abstract because when you deal with anything as complex as human beings you're always on the surface the fact we can't answer questions like this about in six a long time if ever before one can have a anything like scientific understanding of any questions like these my own studies in language and human cognition demonstrate to me at least what remarkable creativity ordinary people have the very fact that people talk to one another is a reflection just in the normal way I don't mean anything particularly fancy reflects deep-seated features of human creativity which in fact separate human beings from any other biological system we know if in fact our minds were a blank slate on the experience wrote on them we would be very impoverished creatures indeed so the obvious hypothesis is that our language is the result of the unfolding of a genetically determined program well plainly there are different languages in fact the apparent variation of languages is quite superficial it's circum as certain of anything it is that humans are not genetically programmed to learn one or another language so you bring up a Japanese baby and Boston they'll all speak Boston English it when you bring up my child in Japan it'll speak Japanese and that means that the base that from that it fought from from that it simply follows by logic that the basic structure of the languages must be essentially the same our task as scientists is to try to determine exactly what those fundamental principles are that cause the knowledge to unfold in the manner in which it does under particular circumstances and incidentally I think there's no doubt the same must be true other aspects of human intelligence and systems of understanding and interpretation and moral and aesthetic judgment and so on one consequence of your theories is that we are as human beings very very rigidly pre-programmed there are certain things we can understand certain things we can communicate and anything that falls outside that we simply can't is that so that's certainly correct so I mean in a way this is a rather alarming doctrine I mean it it certainly contravenes the way we want to feel about ourselves that may be an immediate reaction but I think it's it's not the correct reaction in fact well it's true that our genetic program rigidly constrains us I think the more important point is that the existence of that rich of that rigid constraint is what provides the basis for our freedom and creativity and the reason I mean it's only because we have pre-programmed but we can do all things and exactly the point is that if we really were plastic organisms without an extensive pre-programming then the state that our mind achieves would in fact be a reflection of the environment which means it would be extraordinarily impoverished fortunately for us we are rigidly pre-programmed with extremely rich systems that are part of our biological endowment correspondingly a small amount of relative rather degenerate experience allows a kind of a great leap into a rich cognitive system essentially uniform in a community and in fact for roughly uniform ilysm which would have developed over campus evolutionary ages through the basic system itself developed over long periods of evolutionary development we don't know how really but for the individual its present as a result the individual is capable of with a very small amount of evidence of constructing an extremely rich system which allows him to act in the free and creative fashion which in fact is normal for humans we can say anything that we want over an infinite range other people will understand us that I've heard nothing like that before we're able to do that precisely because of that rigid programming but short of that we would not be able to at all what account are you able to give of creativity if we are pre-programmed in the way you see then how is creativity and possibility for us well here I think one has to be fairly careful I think we can say a good deal about about the nature of the system that is acquired the state of knowledge that is attained we can say a fair amount about the biological that the basis the the basis in the initial state of the mind for the acquisition of the system but when we turn to a third question namely how is this system used how are we able to act creatively how can how do we decide - how can we decide to say things that are new but not random that are appropriate to occasions but not under the control of stimuli when we ask these questions we really enter into a realm of mystery where human science at least so far and maybe in principle does not reach we can say a fair amount about the principles that make it possible for us to behave in our normal creative fashion but as soon as questions of will or decision or reason or a choice of action when those questions arise human science is at a loss it has nothing to say about them as far as I can see these questions remain in the obscurity that in which they were in classical antiquity would you also accept this or not but that having arrived at our present situation across millions of years of evolution we must have been going through a continual process of innovation and new adaption and development of new abilities dispositions organs etc might we not still be as it were plastic at the edges might least not still be developing and evolving genuinely evolving if only on the margin well I think one has to be again very cautious here because well it's true at a very independent very vague sense to say it's correct to say that the systems that we now have have developed through evolution and through natural selection it's important to recognize how little we are saying when we say that for example it is certainly not necessarily the case but every particular trait that we have is the result of specific selection that is that we were selected for having that in fact there are striking examples for the contrary which the parent examples to the contrary say take for example our capacity to deal with abstract properties of the number system and that's a distinctive human capacity as distinctive as the capacity for language any normal human fact found of pathological levels can comprehend the properties of the number system and can move very far and understanding their deep properties but it's extremely difficult to believe that this capacity was the result of specific selection that is it's hard to believe that people who were a little better at proving theorems of number theory had more children would say that didn't happen in fact through most of human evolution in fact essentially all of human evolution this capacity wasn't it would have been impossible to know that this capacity even existed lis contingencies that allowed of the exercise never arose nevertheless the trait is there the capacity is there the mental organ if you like has developed presumably it has developed as a concomitant of some other properties of the brain which may have been selected for example we can speculate say that you know the the increase in brain size was a factor in differential reproduction it's an evolution and it may be that for physical law because of physical laws that we presently don't know that an increase in brain size under the specific conditions of human evolution simply leads necessarily through a system which has the capacity to deal with properties the number system well then as a matter of physics ultimately and then the mind that evolves the brain that evolves will have this capacity but not because it was achieved for selection not I think it's at least likely that something of the sort is true language I mean surely if it were dysfunctional it wouldn't have been maintained it's obviously functional but it's a long leap to claim that that the specific structures of language are themselves the result of specific selection and it's elite that I don't think is particularly possible the language and communication are about the same thing but if you think about it it's extremely implausible for one thing you know almost any behavior you carry out communicate something a gesture the hairstyle you know almost anything so sure language behavior also communicates even the first of all beyond that almost all language is not involved in communication and we all know that I mean you can't go one minute without talking to yourself I mean it's it's it takes a tremendous effort of will not to be doing whatever you're doing when what's going on in your head well that's plainly not communication you're doing it yourself that's about 99.9% of the use of language now in fact when you really think that's never been investigated but if you introspect about it as it could be investigated seriously you know from kind of third person point of view but it hasn't been so you can only sort of think about it yourself but I can I tell you my introspections you can figure out yours but my introspections are that when I am thinking in language it's not really language there's just like an occasional wordles little long and I know what I want to say and then I can express it somehow something sometimes either internally or externally but if it's the same for you then that suggests that there's some kind of language use going on in there that isn't even using the articulated language system and it's just kind of hovering in there somewhere occasionally bits and pieces come out and if you try you can say them to yourself or say him outside and you know when you get it right that which means that you must have meant something and the articulation that you produce can match what you meant but what you meant is in some internal language and furthermore even if you take a if you look at the part of language very small part that's external you know like what we're doing a very small part of that is communication in a serious sense I'm a lot of us just setting up social relations telling jokes to your friends you know passing time and it's not communication in a meaningful sense of the word communication so I think it's just a big mistake to identify communication with language language hasn't evolved at all for fifty thousand years since humans left Africa a small group left Africa spread over the world and we're all basically identical if you take an infant from an Amazonian tribe that hasn't had human other human contact for twenty thousand years and bring it up in Baltimore it'll speak straight Baltimore English end up here studying physics no and conversely so it doesn't seem to me there are individual differences among humans we don't see many significant - almost detectable group differences so nothing's happened for about fifty thousand years if you go back about fifty thousand years before that there isn't really any evidence that there was language I mean in that you know of course we're beyond as I said you know you don't have you know if comparative evidence you don't have fossil evidence but you do have artifacts and in fact there was a big kind of creative explosion that took place somewhere in that window and say maybe seventy five thousand years ago a sudden explosion of symbolic representation complex social structures observations parent observations of astronomical events all kinds of things just suddenly happened in general it's usually assumed you know we don't directive it is that this must have been connected with the sudden emergence of language and notice that it's very sudden in evolutionary times now you can double or triple the numbers it's still a flick of an eyelash in evolutionary time so somewhere in a very small window something happened and nothing happened afterwards that part were pretty pretty sure of well what would have happened whatever happened unless there's some mechanism that biology hasn't discovered yet whatever happened would be some rewiring of the brain some mutation that caused a rewiring of the brain and that rewiring of the brain would have given this mechanism this computational mechanism that allows these things to happen but a rewiring of the brain a mutation takes place in an individual not in a group ok that's obvious so this happened to somebody you know some person and some small hunter-gatherer group underwent this change that person had the capacity to do what we all do internally but without the externalization because there was nobody to talk to there's no reason to think it was externalized at all just that whatever is going on in our heads that is pre-linguistic that we get bits and pieces of it when we think about that would have been available for one person well you know if there's any selective advantage to that say ability to plan and so on it could have been it could proliferate in a small group there over generations it could be enough people who have had that so it would make some sense to interact with in at that point you get you would get externalization but externalize ation is a very tough process there's this internal thing in the head which developed without any external pressures okay because there were no selectional pressures on it almost by definition so it's kind of like a snowflake you know something that just develops because that's the way nature works you have this thing in the head you have a sensory motor system which has been around for hundreds of thousands of years and there's nothing to do with it you have to match them up that's a complicated process in fact that's where practically as far as we know that's where all the compromise all the complexity of languages when you learn a language that's what you learn a child is acquiring a language that's what they acquire nobody teaches you you don't learn the kinds of things I've mentioned at the beginning which are probably just part of the way the snowflake works so which and then of course once you have the externalization you could have some kind of communication depending what you mean by religion I mean if you believe if you mean the Abrahamic religions we're a week round here because of course I'm religiously illiterate but they Judaism Christianity I guess yeah and and the other religions what are those Buddhism is different spiritual beliefs and Native Americans was different we're talking about the Abrahamic quite different that Buddhism is quite different I mean if you really look at these systems of belief they differ a lot believe that there's something in the world which is beyond my grasp which is determining the way things happen and it's going to you know it'll be a consolation for me maybe you know if my child is dying I'll see him again in heaven somewhere I mean these kinds of beliefs and that there's a sort of a spiritual force somewhere beyond my grasp and that explains why things are happening that's probably a bit Buddhist that's perfectly understandable yeah I mean you know the weird things are happening like the Sun is going around the earth you can see it I'm done have that happening but you see it well something must be making it happen okay so it's Apollo on his chariot pulling the Sun and the same with everything else goes on you don't understand anything that's happening in the world in personal life and you know why are why is my child sweet little wonderful kid dying he didn't do anything so there's got to be some explanation somewhere so it's a stead of stories to make sense of reality except not science I mean Apollo pulling the Sun with a chair it's early science it's a kind of a scientific theory you know it worked out you know we're not truly old like you know for example the classical Greek so you discover a lot of things if you say it now when there's lots of evidence other than that and it's no longer science you know that just means that our understanding is deepened right but you know the transition from magic to science is a pretty smooth transition and it just I mean even the work the word science in English didn't even appear until the mid 19th 19th century I mean there was a word but it meant something else just meant knowledge in the 19th mid 19th century there was a divorce between science and philosophy before it was just philosophy in fact if you study if you go to Oxford let's say you can study natural philosophy and moral philosophy natural philosophy is what we here call the natural sciences moral philosophy is what we call the humanities but through it in German it's the same thing so the whole concept of science in our sense is a pretty recently and it's it began and there was a intellectual revolution you know so it begins with Galileo goes on and led to enormous insights and after a while science just kind of took off and he gave a special domain we've been in the early 19th century it was that takes I can't he couldn't have told you whether there was a philosopher or scientist he taught astronomy I mean he thought the moral philosophy yeah an intelligent educated gentleman did all those things well by the mid 19th century becoming very hard to do all those things the sciences were reaching a point where you really understand things and you couldn't be a gentleman who knows everything so okay things got professionalized and we get you know what we call science separate domain but recall how recent this is a prior to that people were trying to figure things out and we we might now call what they're trying to figure out the magic but these are pretty smart people what they say Isaac Newton you're not a fool exactly I mean he's now kind of people laugh about the fact that he would spend most of his life working on chemistry and church fathers that was alchemy in church fathers I was perfectly reasonable I mean in terms of the vertical corpuscular Aryan theories that everybody accepted you know the world was made up with little building blocks like bricks as if nephew yeah shift a few and you get gold from lead that makes perfect sense that's where the church fathers that made perfect sense to I mean he was coming right after the humanist period when they were having a sudden discovery of the wealth and richness of classical civilizations which hadn't been known so the belief expanded that these guys really understood something and they were kind of keeping it secret for us so they were doing it in esoteric way and if we in decode what they were doing we'll get all kind of wonderful discoveries wasn't an irrational pursuit would you or do you consider yourself a person of faith I try not to have faith I believe in a principle that was enunciated rather well by Bertrand Russell which is you should try to keep away from having irrational beliefs you should believe some things that for which you can find some evidence or some support apart from commitment to principles like equality and freedom and justice and so on those I wouldn't say that's faith those are things you're committed to but as far as beliefs about the world reality my feeling is one should try to as much as possible have substantiated beliefs or at least beliefs for which evidence could be appropriate well then would you consider yourself paradoxically a person who has faith in the scientific method I think it's the only method we have to try to get some approximate understanding of the world I don't have faith that it'll reach the truth or even that it's leading us in a truer direction in fact as someone committed to the scientific method I'm also committed to its consequences and among them are that you and I and the rest of these species or organic creatures who have our specific capacities and limitations and we simply don't know and have no reason to believe that these capacities are such that we can gain the truth about the world we do our best but that's the most we can do but if people would say that you cannot have moral principles unless you adhere to a faith if I attribute those principles to a divine creature who I define as ordering me to have those principles the principles don't become any more better established so that's a useless tip it's true that our moral principles are not firmly grounded in unshakeable evidence and argument but nothing is going to make them any more firmly grounded as for having a meaningful life that seems to me irrelevant no people who have meaningful I was with faith and without faith do you think holding a supernatural worldview is healthy and beneficial for Humanity it's not for me I don't see any point to it at all on the other hand I know that it means religious beliefs of other forms of supernatural and have to mean a lot to a lot of people if I find someone who's say mourning the loss of a dead child and is comforted by the idea that they'll be reunited with a child in heaven it's not my business to take to try to convince them that their belief is incorrect in fact in a way I think they're lucky to be able to have such a belief I don't have it I don't think in the long run it's healthy but you can't legislate to other people of what they should believe in order to say comfort themselves what in general do you feel then about religions role in human society both historically and here in the 21st century overall I think it's in terms of its effect on policy ranging from social policy to war I think it's been mostly negative I think often extremely negative with regard to individuals it varies for a lot of people it just means a lot and always what do you think behaviorally speaking humans primarily are that is do you think we have a sort of Hobbesian human nature or a plastic human nature or something else because this seems to when you hear either conservatives or liberals or people on the far right or far left discuss what kind of policies and what kind of economics and what we should have you know how we should deal with the rest of the world it usually always what often comes back Lisa to justify their opinions it always comes back to well this is what humans are and this is therefore more natural for us to do a you know have a capitalist society or B have a social society what do you think is the basic human nature that or do you think that we have a basic human nature I believe that we are part of the natural world okay hmm therefore we have a nature it's our genetic endowment determines substantially what our nature is in fact if you look at the growth of any organism us bees you know yeast would have a like there are actually three factors that enter into its growth of development one is its genetic Constitution another is environmental effects and a third is just the way laws of nature work which isn't turns out as a major effect and the inquiry into biological organisms takes all of those into account or should as for our human nature the genetic endowment that we essentially share the very little is known about it it's just a really hard question and as I mentioned in our earlier discussion a lot of the ways of studying it are excluded simply because we don't allow invasive experimentation hmm the and it you know it's hard enough to learn about insect nature where we allow ourselves anything they're much simpler organisms so what do we know about human nature we'll most of our knowledge comes from history experience literary exploration and so on that's what our knowledge comes from what does it tell us it tells us that of course humans are partially plastic like I don't speak Swahili for example so were partially plastic on the other hand there's there has to be an enormous uniformity at a level right below the surface and what we see on the surface is a wide range of possibilities I mean we see people who are acting in a beastly fashion we see others who are kind of sacrificing their lives to save dolphins one of the the sciences and I'm not sure it would be categorized the hard science or soft science or it's an emerging science evolutionary psychology people like yo Wilson and Steven Pinker have come around and and said they understand what human nature is and it's based on this new science are you saying then that they're either still just guessing or do they have some some scientific backing that from what you have if you have read any of their work yes another word I met a lot of them it was now called evolutionary psychology was in fact initiated about a century ago over a century ago by Peter Kropotkin the an ERISA thinker and naturalist wrote a book called the mutual aid a factor in evolution mmm-hmm and in it he investigated he was basically trying to counter social Darwinist he was Darwin a Darwinist himself and he argued by looking at a lot of naturalistic phenomena other animals human history and so on he argued that if you look at it you discover that mutual aid had a provided the selectional advantage and therefore organisms were had evolved through selection including humans to be deeply committed to one or another form of mutual aid well you know that's not what elite opinion wants to hear mm-hmm they want to hear some other story so therefore core potkins form of evolutionary psychology actually disappeared been revived to some extent the actual modern the modern state of evolutionary psychology as I mean it's not that there's no science there at all there's some you know like sake in selection is real reciprocal altruism is real a couple other things are real but very little is known its and this is not physics in a certain it's not molecular biology it's not chemistry it's largely gases not it's a worthwhile topic to pursue thank you my topic to pursue in fact that's where my own professional work is in particular areas but we should be scientists particularly should be very cautious about inducing the in diluting the public to think that they know more than they do mmm-hmm science has held an enormous respect for good reasons and therefore scientists have a responsibility to make very clear here's what we know only here's what we don't know and what we know in these areas happens to be extremely thin not because they're not good scientists because the questions are too hard there was a concept of materialism right through the early Scientific Revolution right through Newton Newton still accepted it in fact the great scientists of the next century except that it you know lagron and others kept trying to develop a material mechanistic concept of the universe that went right through the 19th century ether theories and so on it was finally given up in the 20th century you know finally recognized we're never gonna get it and totally different ways of looking at things were developed which have no relation to traditional materialism if readers longest correct so since and nobody's ever suggested another notion it materialism just is like anything we more or less understand it includes thinking it includes reasoning and so on and so forth Locke suggestion so we can't leave it behind unless someone tells it what it is but there's no reason why we kind of we can't study it and we can study what the human capacity of understanding is in fact we know some things about it we know some negative things for example we can't understand the way the world works because our concept of understanding is too limited to incorporate that what Newton described as an absurdity you know people like Newton and human Locke were not idiots we have to take them seriously for very good reasons and modern cognitive science which somehow tries to recapitulate some of this finds pretty much that so as I mentioned an infant presented with presentations which indicate that there's some kind of causality like you know when the ball rolls this way light turns red or something they will invent a mechanical cause and they don't care if it's not visible because infants understand that most of what goes on is invisible you know but there's got to be some mechanical cause otherwise the way for it to influence anything else so that does seem to be the way our minds work and that tells us something about the limits of our understanding in fact a classical social case and it can go on to other cases so and we can't study it directly in principle we can study it directly it's not simple I mean it's not easy to understand why a rat can't understand can't deal with a prime number maze even that's hard and we have good evidence that's true but why it's true is unclear nothing known about the brains of rats that explains why they can't do that in fact we can't explain why say the tiniest organism that seriously studied C elegans nematodes that eight hundred cells three hundred neurons entire wiring diagram known have any years of study trying to explain why this thing it goes left instead of right let's say it's just we don't know how to explain that it's it was an answer but these are hard scientific questions when you talk about how human intelligence works it's incomparably more difficult second you can ask the questions you can you know cut away at them but we shouldn't we shouldn't exaggerate it's kind of striking that going back to what philosophy ordered the world philosophers often appear to intend to want to get answers about humans that we can't get about insects and that's too much you know science sort of works at the edges of understanding and it faces hard questions all the way so we can sort of talk about it but if you want to seriously work on it you have to take a look at what he's understood and try see if you can formulate questions which will which are can be investigated and will tell us more about what's understood actually it's interesting work going on on this having to do with things like that mark the human moral instinct in the past twenty thirty years that's become an experimental subject with the interesting experimental work on universal probably universal moral principles a very important book just came out a couple of weeks ago by John McKay oh he's a philosophers now teaches law at Georgetown University yeah who gives a very acute he more or less initiated this modern study didn't publish much but other people have drawn off his work combination of reanalysis of traditional moral philosophy may lead roles and his antecedents and an analysis a lot of the critique of roles and and then on to developing experimental programs to investigate some of these questions and it's feasible maybe we can get some insight into in a human that moral if concepts that are that are cross-cultural like you're going to find them in every culture and that you can find with young children the free any serious cultural impact those are all things that can be studied and there's beginnings of studies centrally your whole approach represents a rejection of the empirical tradition in philosophy it doesn't it because I mean the very fact that you think that the empiricists are wrong about how we learn must mean that they're wrong about knowledge and the nature of knowledge and the nature of knowledge has been the central problem in the whole empirical tradition of philosophy well the classical empiricist tradition which i think was that the traditions represented let's say craft in its highest worn by him seems to me to be a up to that tradition of extreme importance in that a particular theory of the origins of knowledge of the science of human nature in humans phrase was put forth an empirical theory and I think Hume for example would regard it as an empirical theory did regard it so when we investigated I think we discover that it's just completely false that is that the mechanisms that he discussed are not the mechanisms by which the mind reaches states of knowledge that the states of knowledge attained are radically different than the kinds that he discussed for example for Hume the mind was his image a kind of a theater in which ideas paraded across the stage and we think therefore followed necessarily that we could introspect completely into the contents of our mind if an idea is not on the stage it's not in the mind and the ideas may be connected and associated in fact he went on to say there isn't even any theater there's just the ideas and that respect the image is misleading well that's a that's a theory and in fact it's a theory that has had a an enormous Grippit on the imagination throughout most of my knowledge most of the history of Western thought for example that that same image dominates the rationalist tradition as well where it was assumed that one could exhaust the contents of the mind by careful attention you know you could really develop those clear and distinct ideas and that consequences and so on and in fact even if you move to someone let's say but Freud with his a vocation of the unconscious still I think that a careful reading suggests that he regarded the unconscious as in principle act accessible that is we could really perceive that theater and the stage and the things on it carefully if only the barriers of repression and so on could be overcome well if what I've been suggesting is correct that's just that's radically wrong I mean even wrong as a point of departure there is no reason at all that I can see for believing that the principles of mental computation that enter so intimately into our action or our interaction or our speech to believe that those principles have are at all accessible introspection any more than the analyzing mechanisms of our visual system or for that matter the nature of our liver is accessible to introspect it seems to me that over and over again you come back to the same point that is to say that many of the particular problems discussed and theories put forward by philosophers in the main but also psychologists you just mentioned Freud and in your writings you mentioned many other our in fact theories about physical princesses they are therefore open to checking by investigation and when you check my investigation you'll find out that the theories are wrong and therefore you are as it were radically subversive of a lot of very well-established theories in our tradition it seems to me that once you put forward in their place over and over again in fact as paralleled the rationalist tradition I said in my introduction to this program that what I'm always is the theories of Comte you seem to me to be almost redoing in terms of modern linguistics what Kant was doing do you accept any well right not only accepted truth in it but I've tried to bring it out in a certain way however I haven't myself specifically referred to Kant but rather to the primarily to the 17th century tradition of the Continental Cartesians and the British neoplatonist who developed many of the ideas that are now much more familiar in the writings of Conte for example the idea of experience conforming to our mode of cognition or the well particularly in the British platon is Edward for example there are I believe is a rich line of insight into the organizing principles of the mind by which experience is structured in fact I think that some of the richest psychologically so source of psychological insights they don't know and that's the one it's this tradition that I think that can be fleshed out and made more explicit by the kinds of empirical inquiry that are now possible of course I think we also have to diverge from that tradition and a number of respects I've mentioned one namely the belief with the contents of the mind or open introspection similarly we there's certainly no reason to accept the metaphysics of that tradition to believe that there's a dualism of mind and body I mean you can see why the Cartesians were led to that it was a rational move on their part but it's not a movie we have to follow we take a look at some other organism I mentioned a rat you can teach a rat complicated mazes don't turn right and then turn left and right and left a lot of things that can do you cannot teach a rat to run a prime number maze a maze in which you supposed to turn right at every prime number you can teach a human that you know to figure out the prime numbers in their heads but then they can do it a rat can't do it with an infinite amount of training it simply does not have that concept so it's a total mystery for rats that's kind of analogous to the fact that a human embryo can't grow wings just beyond this capacity now there are some that I think the scientifically and philosophically interesting question is what things are beyond human scope of what things are mysteries to us in the same way that a prime number mage is a mystery to Brett and I think there's a very interesting record of things in the world the most simple and striking and dramatic one is interaction of objects so you go back to the medieval period and they the Neo Scholastic period that was assumed that there are what we're called sympathies and antipathies so sympathy is brought two objects together and antipathies push them apart when you get to Galileo and modern science begins these notions were ridiculed what's a sympathy antipathy it's called not cult idea and Galileo introduced a conception that guided and modern science it's the one I quoted every the world is a machine it every everything that happens can be duplicated by a skilled artist in fact it was created by a skilled artist you know but and that that's what was called the mechanical philosophy everything works like a machine and that and the kane' modern science developed on the principle that unless you can show that something works like a machine you haven't explained it so Galileo at the end of his life was kind of in despair because he had not shown that the movement of the tides let's say or the heavenly bodies could be accounted for by mechanical principles Descartes the would later thought that he had shown that you could do it liveness his own version christiaan huygens another version but that was modern science until Newton demonstrated there are no machines nothing works by mechanical principles he just concluded that that is an absurdity that no person with any scientific understanding could possibly accept and he was right but it's true that scientists just had to kind of accept the fact that the world is not intelligible to us that's a major mystery and science changed totally at that point it happened slowly you know so it kind of became assimilated into common sense but so there's no longer tried to find and into a picture of the world that's intelligible to our intuitions what they try to do is construct theories that are intelligible but that's a totally different topic much lower goal and that's not that's post-newtonian science well that's one huge mystery but I think there plenty of others like Tex a freedom of will as big debates about freedom of will it's kind of striking that everyone who participates in these debates including the people who write learning tomes showing there's no freedom of will believe in freedom of will otherwise they wouldn't write to learning poems I'm gonna for all just thermostats of some complicated time then what you do is determined and how people react as determined so it's the point of the effort you know not so everyone kind of intuitively believes it I mean we all believe that I can either pick this offer for it across the room or not doing anything with it but what is it well it lies beyond I think you can speculate about what the core of the problem is they take a look at human science there are two concepts that are very well understood but one of them is determinacy something determined something else you know the other one is randomness things happen without anything determining them and that's about it I think those are the basic concepts that we comprehend and it freedom will just doesn't fit in that set of concepts well it could be that this is just another mystery for humans we don't have the right concept if some Martian might be looking at us and thinking how stupid we are why do we keep the determinacy in randomness when there's obviously that thing out there that I can't point to because I'm a human could be and many other things that seem impossible might turn out to be like this I mean once we recognize that we're not angels we are just biological organisms and as such we must have limits it's just point of logic you could not have any capacities at all if you didn't have limits because the capacities determine the limits and then the question comes well what's beyond the limits and we have some examples plausible examples there may be many others and I think that's a fertile direction to explore that once we abandon the kind of belief that we can do anything which is a very common belief in the modern sciences it's very common do you believe that the mind is in principle computable implying that it could be emulated on other substrates in the future another substrates like silicon I think he's talking about the mind is organized matter it's organized in a particular way which we don't understand but we don't understand much about and there's no reason we don't know of any physical reason to believe that the particular component of that organized matter are critical for its operation it appears to be something about the way it's organized yeah that's a fitness I mean it's it it we are a computing machine of some sort and it happens to be it has happen to use a certain system for storing and and and reproducing whether its genetic or or electrical it's hard to imagine any other system wouldn't that if we were able to reproduce all that information we wouldn't get the same the same person but it's one of those cases as you said before where you really have to be humble so little as understood about it and the major question what's what is the puppeteer doing yeah that one we don't even know how to address this this emerging notion that many of our conscious decisions are really not conscious maybe you want to elaborate on that well there's increasing experiment there's some experimental evidence by now that when you undertake a voluntary action let's say picking this up very briefly before you're conscious of making the decision the parts of your brain that are organizing the action are already active which means that the decision is made pre consciously and then reaches consciousness at some point most of our decisions never reach consciousness that we're doing all kinds of things all the time and totally unaware of them and parts of the way ever we have two brains remember there's this one there's this one sometimes the gut brain the enteric nervous system which is a real nervous system rich in neurons as it suffers Alzheimer's it's very similar to this one and we haven't the slightest consciousness about what it's doing its work unless you get a stomachache then you know it's not working but with regard the language unfortunately there has been no investigation serious investigation of the question though it could be investigated so we're left at the moment with introspection that's not a good state but try it when you introspect about your thinking and language I think what you'll find is that the expressions you articulate to yourself you know come almost instantaneously indicating that there was pre conscious organization of the thought that is sometimes reaching consciousness and often is not and I suspect that when these topics begin to be investigated which is not impossible that's what we're going to discover that most the this mystery of what the puppeteer is doing is probably preconscious we will not get access to it through conscious introspection but only in indirect ways the way we think we learn what the enteric nervous system is doing that's a guess about what will be discovered if these topics are ever investigated seriously one of the reasons they're not investigated is because of the assumption in modern philosophy psychology that consciousness is the hard problem I don't think that's true I suspect consciousness is a problem that we know how to address you know you can find the mechanisms involved in consciousness learn a lot about it preconscious decisioning choices I suspect is a much deeper problem okay well this is I mean both to speculate on things about the future virtual we really as we should emphasize about a system that we don't understand much of now but in that spirit and following up on this idea that maybe we could we could that the brain is a material entity and and therefore might be reproduced elsewhere Bishop is asked do you think that a and this is a real interesting question I think do you think that AI will have the same snowflake language apparatus or quick evolutionary moments in regards to creativity and language namely assuming AI becomes conscious well it it would you imagine it would have the same kind of language development it's a really speculative question but it's an interesting one it seems to me little cautious about AI what exactly is it there's two variants of AI one is roughly science and engineering it's rough distinction there's the kind of AI which is trying to construct devices that are useful you know self-driving cars robots that can clean your house things like that that's fine you know it's not really contributing except very indirectly to the understanding of how cognitive systems intelligent systems work it's doing things that are useful which is fine it's like building a big bigger bulldozer great there's another kind of AI which is which is pure science which is trying to discover the nature of what is going on when a nematode decides to turn to the left or when I decide to pick this up but that's the same as its cult map might be called AI if you like but it's the same as just cognitive science what will happen if thee I think the question is asking what if robots are designed which have the same properties that the mechanisms that we will come to understand are essential for come for consciousness will they be conscious that we can already asked that question about dogs I mean are they conscious in fact you can ask that question about me you know you're conscious do you know that I'm conscious no just because I tell you that doesn't mean it robot could - we there's the Turing test which it turns out to me not a very good test after all well the Turing test is kind of interesting Turing himself was a very brilliant mathematician and scientist he understood that the test didn't amount to much the history of the Turing test is kind of intriguing this is based on an eight-page paper around 1950 called the can machines think or something Turing and that paper says the question whether machines can think is too meaningless to deserve discussion and he's right asking whether machines can think is like asking whether submarines swim if you want to call that swimming it's swimming it's you know it takes a the airplanes fly in English they fly in Hebrew they glide two people fly in Japanese when they're jumping they fly in English they don't these are terminological questions what we can do and touring with touring he did suggest this imitation game but it is not as he pointed out an answer to the question where the machines think because it's not a serious question the notion thinking isn't well enough defined so you can ask whether it's being achieved by some device now it's kind of striking that if you go back to the 17th century the same questions were asked but are scientific questions so go back to Descartes who observed as far as we know correctly that this creative aspect of languages is a unique human capacity well that immediately led to experimental proposals the corps de moi won the minor Cartesians outlined tests that you could use a series of experiments that you could use if there was another creature who looked like you and you wanted to find out if he had this capacity and he pointed out like a scientist that if the creature passes all the tests you can think of then it would be reasonable to assume that he has the capacity it doesn't prove it but you don't prove things in science that was a serious version of the Turing test it was about something real alleged the namely a capacity that you're trying to test for it's kind of like a litmus test for acidity there's something real you're trying to find out whether some object has it that's very different from the Turing test in fact in many ways I think there's been a kind of intellectual regression from the 17th century to today replacing the serious tests for about reality litmus tests for a particular capacity by a test basically like answering the question whether submarines swim let's follow up in that little because you know you talked earlier this evening about the idea that maybe things the the the whatever was that initiated the possibility of language had to be in a sense because of the laws of nature the thing that I would be interesting to me is whether therefore there is a unique set of cognitive processes and so it would be interesting if one had machines that think to see if they think differently I think that would be a fascinating question certainly we know that there are some that are different so for example an automated procedure for say determining whether a paper in the American Mathematical Society gives a real proof if you look at things that are called proofs and there lots of intuition and you know appeal to what people know and so yeah you try to formalize it and fill them in the details it's pretty hard they have to be very hard but you can think of automated ways of doing that which are not the ways we do it and as I've said in the stage before we know the computers think at least right now think differently because they could lose energy in a very vastly different way they do all kind of things that we can do but and they also do it much in some sense more much more inefficiently in terms of energy consumption sort of sort of sort of cars yeah

Channel: Chomsky's Philosophy

Views: 64,088

Rating: 4.7640119 out of 5

Keywords: Chomsky, Anarchism, Capitalism, Language, Philosophy, Imperialism, Politics, Noam Chomsky, Science, Creativity, Libertarian socialism, Liberalism, Political philosophy, Religion, War, Activism, Propaganda, Media, Epistemology, Human nature

Id: 1umiaNjOinE

Length: 159min 44sec (9584 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 17 2018