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Noam Chomsky on Religion, Consciousness, Black Lives Matter #BLM, and Education
September 5, 2020
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Professor Chomsky, you're a serious person. Most people know you as a serious man who has serious views on US foreign policy and so on. I'm curious, what do you do to unwind? What makes you laugh? Do you watch The Simpsons? Rick and Morty? I can't say it or my animals will race to the exterior exit.
I'm curious about your views on consciousness. If you've ever had any experiences, whether it's with psychedelics or marijuana or an unconscionable amount of alcohol or meditation that has changed your views on consciousness. Not part of my universe. I'm probably the only person you've ever spoken to who never used marijuana. So what do you think the function of consciousness is?
Do you take a materialist standpoint that is that the world is made up of atoms and from that consciousness is a epiphenomenon or do you see consciousness as foundational at some level ontologically?
I'm curious to know what your views are on free will. Free will? Like a hundred percent of other people, even those who deny it, I think I can decide right now whether to lift my finger up or down.
Science tells us essentially nothing about this. It only tells us we can't incorporate it within our current understanding of science. So there's a certain sense that material reality from some of the people that we've been speaking to is secondary to that of consciousness. They think that it's the material that's more epiphenomenal, that's more of an epiphenomena as opposed to consciousness being something that sparked from
Well that discussion can only be pursued if you have some notion of what the material world is. So what is it
Actually, if you look at the history, there was a quite interesting debate about this several centuries ago. So the foundations of modern science, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Huygens, Leibniz, the great scientists of the 17th century, developed a concept of material world. The concept was called
The mechanical philosophy, philosophy meant science. So it's philosophy, mechanical science. The idea was that the world is a machine. It's like the complex artifacts that skilled artisans were producing and spreading all around Europe. Mechanical clocks, performances that looked like real actors.
digestion of a duck, the fountains at Versailles, all over the place, incredible machines, and the assumption was, well, the world is just a bigger machine. Machine meant what it means to you and me, levers, gears, and things pushing and pulling each other, and so on. And that was the reigning doctrine, the idea that Galileo and others considered
a theoretical account not acceptable if it wasn't if you couldn't construct a machine to duplicate it well zubin came along and showed that there are no machines none he thought that was a total absurdity spent the rest of his life trying to overcome it his associate
The other great scientists of the day, Leibniz and Huygens, others, accused him of reinstituting occult ideas, interaction without contact. He agreed. Problem was never resolved. Science just abandoned the quest. They basically said, well, we'll just construct intelligible theories. Newton's theories were intelligible.
The world he described wasn't intelligible. But they said, we'll forget it. Science lowered its goals. Now we just try to construct intelligible theories. Whatever the theories tell us, that's the material world. So there's nothing to discuss. The material world keeps changing as we understand more. So the question whether something transcends the material world
It's just a way of saying we don't know how we incorporate it within our intelligible theories. Maybe we never will, maybe someday we will. Does this mean that you also take an agnostic view when it comes to God? That is, who knows? When it comes to God. God? I don't even know what I'm at being asked about. What is it that I'm supposed to believe in or not believe in?
possible then just to give you a certain dimension, something to question, because we understand that the word like a coin that's lost its face and become nothing but sheer metal loses its value and sort of put aside ambiguities. There's a certain move now towards understanding or maybe even rediscovering the idea of God not so much as a man in the sky, but
You could argue it's the highest value as to how things should be and the principles that we should abide by. I certainly think we can talk about the principles we should abide by. What do you find your most driving principle, just even if it's something personal in your own life experience? We all have principles.
We don't want to torture children. We don't want to slaughter people. We want to bring justice and mercy to people who need it. There's all kinds of values that we share. Nothing is added when we give them the name God or give them the name anything else. Sure, we have values. We can look into where these values originate, how they've developed over time. We can discuss them.
I recall you said that there are no moral relativists, that is people who can theorize about morals are relative, change from culture to culture and therefore there is no overarching morality.
They're just theorizing. They don't act like that in practice. Does this mean that you hold the view that there are objective morals? We are organic systems. We're not angels. We have internal cognitive, emotional, moral other structure. We can investigate what it is.
You can't really go beyond it. You can say, here's our moral nature. We can try to refine it. We can sharpen it. We can carry out informed, intelligent discussions to see if we can determine whether certain things conform to our concept of what is good or bad. But if you ask, how do I show that it's really
Good or bad? It's a question that you can't formulate it. You can formulate the words, but you have nothing to say about it. It's like asking, we have certain modes of trying to understand the world. We have certain ways of investigating, analyzing results, making conjectures, confirming, disconfirming them. If somebody comes along and says, how do you know those are the right ways?
It's not a meaningful question. By what standard do we discover whether the right way is? Since there are no standards proposed, the question is just empty words. So there's many different ways that we arrive to an understanding of truth. There are different epistemologies that we use. Some are respected as much more than others.
Amongst these tools, some cling towards tradition either in the form of respected mythologies which they believe either fundamentally or allegorically or somewhere in between. And my question for you is just in your own development, in your own education as you advance, what was your view towards these mythologies, these sort of founding
either religious myths or mythologies in other cultures. Did you ever have a fascination with mythology? Was it just regarded as superstition? My own history, which is of no interest to anybody but me, up until the time I was about maybe 11 or 12 years old, I accepted the religious beliefs of the culture that I grew up in
intensive Hebrew education and culture. I didn't seriously question it. By the time I was a young teenager, I realized that none of this makes any sense. So I just abandoned it. I'm not telling other people to give up their beliefs. It means a lot to them, improves their life. It's fine. None of my business. As long as they don't interfere with others,
Sure. Many find that this transition from the superstitious beliefs of their
of their upbringing to something either more allegorical, maybe possibly still religious, or something more atheistic, and in this sense we mean material, devoid of any superstition. That transition often occurs in adolescence, I would say, and it impacts people when they're growing up. Did this transition for you impact you? Did you find that it changed the way you viewed the world?
I was brought up in an intensive Jewish culture, but Judaism is more of a culture of practice than belief.
Like my grandfather was extremely orthodox Jew, super orthodox. Grew up and lived in Eastern European Jewish communities, practically medieval in character. If I had asked him, do you believe in God? He probably wouldn't have known what I was talking about.
The religion is doing all these things. Get up in the morning, perform the rituals, go to the shul, pray with your friend, come back. He was what's called a mashkiyach.
person who supervises butcher shops to make sure that they're kosher. So go around to the butcher shops, do all the job, then go to the afternoon prayers and do the other things. That's religion. Amen. Okay for him, not for me. If you want a personal experience, there was one that
gave me an insight into the nature of religion. If you don't mind, a personal story. Please, share. We'd love that, yeah. We'd absolutely love that. Well, my family lived in Philadelphia. My father's family, which was extremely Orthodox, lived in Baltimore. And we would go to Baltimore for the holidays, just to visit. And I remember when I was maybe
10 or 11 years old. We were visiting on Pesach Passover and I noticed that my grandfather was smoking. So I asked my father, how can he be smoking? I knew the Talmudic law which says there's no difference between the holidays and the Sabbath except with regard to eating.
So on the holidays, you're allowed to cook a dinner. You can't do that on Sabbath. So my father said, well, he just decided that smoking is a kind of eating. And then I did get an insight. Religion is based on the assumption that God is an idiot, that you can fool God very easily.
And if you think about it, it's true. Nobody can live up to the prescriptions that are told, so everybody finds ways around them. Actually, Pascal later learned had a wonderful passage about that in the City of God on the Jesuits and how they find ways to give interpretations that are the opposite of what the text says, and they live by the interpretations.
And that's correct. I mean, if you think about it, it's completely impossible to live up to the prescriptions. Well, the Catholics have a way out of this. You go to confession every whenever periodically and you tell the priest all the terrible things he did and he says, fine, you're okay.
If Jews is a little harder, you have to wait once a year, the young kipper, they have atonement, then you say all the things you did, make them up if there weren't any. I have Catholic friends who tell me that when they were kids and went to confession, they couldn't think of anything to say, so they had to make something up.
took a toy from my little sister or something like that. But every religious faith has some means to avoid keeping to the letter of the prescriptions. So, okay, essentially it means they're based on the assumption that you can get around God's prescriptions by one or another device. That was an insight, I have to say.
She mentioned the Talmud, and there's a scene where the spirit of Moses comes back and sees a bunch of rabbinical scholars, and they're analyzing a text, and God brings Moses there. Moses looks at the scholars and goes, what's happening? I didn't tell them any of this. And God kind of gives a bit of a shrug, like, well, now you know how it feels.
So that idea that there's this movement away from either the foundational belief or that things become a farce, right, is a theme I think even within those religious traditions. What fascinates me and what I'm curious of in yourself is what you see reflected in those traditions either in terms of their utility or the potentials in human beings that they
Well, if you take the religious faiths that exist, they're all interpreted. Nothing takes literally the words of the holy text. So for example, in the Jewish tradition,
the huge rabbinic Talmudic later rabbinic tradition, which I did study when I was growing up, is just ways of interpreting the texts so that they become feasible for ordinary life. And the same is true in the Christian tradition. The interpretive tradition modifies
reshapes the words to fit a possible existence in the culture in which it was done. And it can be done in various ways. So you can have one of the most dramatic examples in recent years is what happened with Pope John XXIII calling Vatican II, Second Vatican Council, 1962.
which tried to revise the Catholic tradition that went back to the fourth century. In the fourth century, the Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. The cross, which had been a symbol of human suffering, was put on the shields of the Roman legions.
Hans Kuhn, the great historian of Christianity, describes this as a change from the church becoming the church of the persecuted to the church of the persecutors. And it pretty much remained like that, if you look at the history, until Vatican II, when Pope John urged that the church return to the Gospels.
That's pretty radical. The Gospels have a radical pacifist message, and it was taken seriously, especially in Latin America. Bishops, priests, nuns, sisters, lay people went out to peasant communities, tried to organize them, get them to read the Gospels to understand the preferential option for the poor, which
take it into their own hands, try to reconstruct their own lives and communities to overcome the terrible repression in which most of them suffered. That was liberation theology. The United States went to war to destroy it and did. That's why there were so many religious martyrs in the following decades. Furthermore, interestingly, the US government takes pride in that. If you look at the
School of the Americas has since been renamed because it's got a bad reputation. But the School of Americas which trains Latin American officers, mainly the killers in the national security states, violent states that the U.S. imposed and supported through the region, they have advertising points, talking points. One of them is the U.S. Army helped defeat liberation theology.
So we beat back this effort to reconstitute the Gospels successfully, and we take pride in it. But that's one of the things that could come out of religion, going back to the original texts and seeing what they meant. And it can be a very radical message. That's frightening. You may recall there's even literary exemplifications of this.
Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school? I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand. It was just the five of us.
We know the fellow, Alexander Christianopoulos, who is going back to the Gospels and looking at them through what he considers to be a Christian anarchist lens.
And the conclusion kind of comes to is this pacifism that he would find that would resonate with fellows like Tolstoy. And you look at these Christian anarchists, Tolstoy, Ivan Illich, and they tend to come up with these rather interesting responses to our contemporary problems, particularly to neoliberalism is something that interests us. Do you think that
My own feeling is that the most important messages are those taken up by the activists in Latin America who took seriously
the injunction to return to the preferential option for the poor and try to apply it in practice. So people like, most of them martyred, Ratilio Grande, Archbishop Romero,
Father Ea Korea and all of these people were trying to do it in a concrete way. I don't care much what people were saying. They were doing it. That's why they got killed. Given the various perspectives on neoliberalism and its origins, where would you locate the institutions, the institutional centers of neoliberalism?
The corporate sector and the business world in general worked very hard in the 1970s to reverse the civilizing effects of the 1960s, the democratizing effects. They're very explicit about it. If you look at the Howell Memorandum,
on the liberal side, the Trilateral Commission's crisis of democracy. They were deeply concerned about the entry into the political arena of sectors of the population that are supposed to be passive and obedient, not interfering with the rights of the powerful to run the world.
was showing up in things like even militant strike actions like Lordstown where young workers were not just asking for better wages but asking for some control of the workplace, reduction of the rate of profit. The liberal side, the
Trilateral report warned against the failures of what they called the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young. Schools, colleges, churches are not indoctrinating the young properly. That's why you have these
demonstrations in the streets. That's why you have people protesting against the war. Sorry to interrupt. You said they're not indoctrinating the young properly. That to me sounds like there's a proper way of indoctrinating the young, which sounds like you don't hold a negative view towards indoctrination per se. I'm speaking about the liberal side of the spectrum. There is a spectrum of opinion. At the right you have things like the Powell memorandum.
We have the money, we have the force, we have to fight back, to beat back all these threats to the business world.
First, the major publication of the Trilateral Commission, liberal internationalists from the United States, Europe and Japan, basically the Carter administration. They were drawn from its ranks. I'm quoting from them, they were condemning the universities and the schools for their failure, the failures of indoctrination of the young.
Proper indoctrination means return the general population to passivity, obedience, what they call more moderation in democracy. So don't press for your demands. Just take it easy. Go back and stay where you belong. We'll take care of things. Okay, that's the liberal side.
The harsher side is expressed, for example, in the Powell Memorandum. These are just exemplifications of developments that were taking place in documents. But the idea was to reverse the basically New Deal programs that persisted through the 50s and the 60s, or even extended, reverse them, return to where things ought to be,
With power in the hands of private power. That's where decisions ought to be. Private, unaccountable power. That's neoliberalism. It was made explicit by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who sort of escalated it all almost as soon as they took office. So Reagan's inaugural speech said, the government is the problem, not the solution, which means
take decisions away from government you didn't say this but government has a flaw it's partially influenced by people so take decisions away from government take initiatives away from government put them in the hands of private power which is totally unaccountable to the population totally and to drive it home they had an economics guru Milton Friedman who came out with the
since reigning doctrine that the sole responsibility of corporate leaders is to maximize profit for shareholders and themselves, of course.
the sole and only goal okay and then laws were changed the regulations were changed to implement this you go on into the neoliberal world with perfectly predictable consequences sharply concentrated wealth so right now for example about 20 percent of the country's wealth is in the hands of
0.1 percent, one-tenth of one percent of the population, twice what it was when Reagan came in. For most of the population, it's basically stagnation. People try to get by from paycheck to paycheck. It's claimed that unemployment was low, but that's highly misleading. And for one thing, it doesn't take into account people who just dropped out of the workforce in desperation.
count them in labor participation measures turns out that unemployment is more like seven percent and even that's misleading because it doesn't deal with the fact that the new employment that's come under Obama continued more or less under Trump not quite as well but more or less is mostly precarious work solid jobs it's
There's a sense that one of the crises of neoliberal ideology is the fact that it restricts this human potential. I'd imagine there'd be more who have a job but do not feel that they would be living up their true potential, working sort of mindlessly or numbingly at an occupation that
they would rather avoid but feel more or less cornered into. Another thing is, is you talk about the private sector's role, but how deeply do you feel that government has been integrated with this private sector? Who's running the government here? And if it's not the people, if it's these corporations, how do we fight back? How do we circumnavigate this system?
Well, first of all, I don't know if you want to go into it, but having a job is not an ideal. In fact, having a job is a severe attack on human rights and human dignity. We can go into that if we want. But it's now what's called conventional common sense these days.
When you say having a job is deleterious, you mean to say that needing to have a job is not ideal or even having a job at all? Having a job. Having a job means placing yourself under the control of an autocratic ruler for most of your waking life. An autocratic ruler has the kind of control over you
that Stalin never dreamt of, like Stalin never thought he could tell people you're allowed to go to the bathroom for five minutes at three o'clock, you know, or you have to wear these clothes and not some other clothes, or you have to race from this spot in the warehouse to the other spot in the warehouse by a path that I laid out for you. And if you go a little bit to the side, you get a noticing, you get an American. Stalin didn't do that. But that's having a job.
19th century workers regarded that as a fundamental assault on human rights and human dignity. The Republican Party agreed. One of the platforms of the Republican Party is that wage labor is no different from slavery except that it's temporary until you have a chance to become a free person again.
That's the 19th century, goes back millennia. The idea of being dependent on another person is a fundamental attack on dignity. And having a job means that's most of your waking hours. It took a long time to beat this into people's heads and make them think that that's the goal in life. There's a lot to unravel about that.
And I think it can be done. But if you go back to the narrow question, how do we get government to be more responsive? We know the means for that. You can do that through the political system. It's often been done. Activism has done it all the time. Take the New Deal, which I'm old enough to remember, from the Depression hit in 1929,
much worse than today. Most of my family was involved, unemployed, first-generation working class. It took a couple of years before things began to pick up. By about 1934, 1935, the labor movement was picking up
had been almost completely crushed in the 1920s. You had started getting CIO organizing militant strikes, leftist political parties, a lot of activism. Fairly sympathetic administration moved on to give you the New Deal measures that have greatly improved life for
The same is true now. Take a look at what's going on in the Democratic Party. They have been forced to the left by the Sanders movement, by continuing popular activism. There's a battle going on.
The DNC, the Clintonite donor-oriented, basically conservative part of the party, which manages the party. They're trying to prevent the programs that would move to the left, and there's a struggle going on.
If the activists continue at it, they can continue to shift the party's programs. They can develop new parties, other forms of activism. All of these options are open. We don't live in a brutal dictatorship where the dissidence means you're sent to the gulag.
There's plenty of repression, I wouldn't deny that, but it's nothing at all like really repressive states. We have a very great range of freedom, opportunity. We can do things through the political system or through modifications of the political system or alternatives to the political system to change the nature of the society.
Speaking of freedom, democracy, John Dewey, the pragmatist was like, education, what's important for it is democracy. I'm curious, what do you see that we can do to democratize education or to make education more democratic? In addition, we know you went to what you described as a Deweyite school. If you mind explaining that experience. I think we can do is to reverse.
through the neoliberal years. One part of the neoliberal programs has been to undermine and destroy the public sector. That includes public schools, includes state colleges. So state funding for the schools has declined. Funding for state colleges has sharply declined.
A business model has been imposed in the colleges in which you try to maximize profit and reduce what's called waste. So instead of having senior faculty teaching courses, which is expensive, I hand them over to adjuncts who you don't have to pay anything, pay practically nothing. They have no means of protecting themselves. They're
Basically gig economy, graduate students, and so on. But simply defund. The public schools are vastly defunded. Purpose is clear. When you defund the public institution, it means it doesn't work properly. Parents get upset. They don't like it. They want something else. You can drive them into the private sector. We have to reverse that. And then after you reverse that,
and develop decent schooling, then we should move on to what you just described using the methods that are understood to and sometimes applied to enhance and develop the creativity and dependence of mind, mutual participation, all the things that happened in a well-run Deweyite school, as I happen to personally know happened
from nursery school up to high school, that's where it was, can be done very effectively. So what you've described seems to be the crisis of neoliberalism and education. Would you agree with that in part? I would call it a, I think it's one of the crises that follows from the neoliberal program of undermining the public sector
and which people participate and which is responsive to them. So undermine that and turn everything over to private power which is unaccountable to the public. In the curious rhetoric of today that's called libertarian. It's a remarkable turn of phrase. Libertarian means put your lives
in the hands of complete totalitarians. That's libertarian. It's an interesting usage. Of course, you can understand the rationale. So Thatcher, Reagan, throw people into the market, destroy unions, destroy means of association. You're alone in the market.
If you can survive, okay. If you can kick the guy next to you in the face and get ahead, fine. Do what you can to maximize your own power and rule. Now that's the principle. And it's understood. Like if you read the big thinkers, the leading thinkers of the so-called libertarian movement in the United States, people like James Buchanan, Nobel Laureate. Hear that sound?
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Economics, one of the major thinkers of the movement.
work in economics. His position explicit is the economy should be designed so as to accord with human nature, which makes good sense. Then what is human nature? He tells us human nature is such that each person's highest ideal
is to live ruling a world of slaves. In case you didn't notice, that's your highest ideal. To live ruling a world of slaves. That's the highest doctrine of libertarian theory. And so when you're in the market, you try to do whatever you can to approximate that position. If you happen to lose out, it's your problem.
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There's an evolutionary biologist by the name of Peter Gray, who argues a very different understanding of human nature. He works with the Evolution Institute, which has espoused the philosophy of Christian anarchists like Piotr Krapotkin, and their mutualistic understandings of human nature. But in evolution, there's a force that shapes our humanity, our evolution of bonding with others, helping others out. Anyway,
Peter Gray has looked at our evolutionary history when it comes to learning, you could argue sort of learning instinct and seeing how that is unleashed in schools versus how that's unleashed in more democratic, more sort of unstructured play-based schools like Sudbury Valley School. Do you believe that the schools that we have now unleash that learning instinct or run counter to it?
and what would be the best way to sort of unleash this learning instinct in our schools? Just to fix up the history a little bit, this goes back to Kropotkin.
his mutual aid a factor in evolution shortly he was a naturalist soon as Darwin's work came out Kropotkin pretty soon published this book arguing that a major factor in evolution was simply mutual aid he gave many examples in the animal world and in the human world and that's opposite to the
reigning interpretation. Herbert Spencer made famous about it's just survival of the fittest. You get as much as you can. Now the fact of the matter is we know virtually nothing about human nature from a scientific point of view. So these proposals are saying here are the... human nature includes both whatever humans do that's part of human nature. So there are various tendencies in human nature.
There are probably some people who aren't totally appalled by James Buchanan's conception that what we want is to rule over a world of slaves. Somebody like Adam Smith would have regarded that as pathological.
But there are people who accept it and believe it. There are people who prefer the picture that Kropotkin and others developed, that the parts of human nature we should foster and develop are those that turn towards mutual aid and support. You can see it constantly, right in front of us every minute. So for example, right now there's a
an effort to deal with the raging pandemic. One way, the James Buchanan way, is illustrated primarily by the Trump administration. They're not alone, but they're extreme. If we can get a vaccine, let's get it for ourselves. Screw the rest of the world, okay, because we want it. In fact, Trump just, there is an international consortium
working on developing a vaccine which will be a cooperative effort to develop, which of course is more efficient than local efforts, some measures to try to distribute it to the poor. Trump just pulled out of it. We don't want anything to do with these mutual aid, mutual support things. We're out for ourselves, okay, and that means the rich and the powerful, not the poor among us. So that's one extreme.
The other extreme you see on the streets all over the place. Mutual support groups are spontaneously developing in poor neighborhoods and crime-ridden neighborhoods, all sorts of places all around the world to help out people who are in trouble and to try to see if you can do something to bring the possibility of surviving the pandemic in places where people only have water, let alone the possibility of isolation.
So those are two aspects of human nature. The question is, which ones do we want to work and foster? That's the choice. It's not a matter of science telling us what human nature is. It doesn't. It just says, these are various manifestations of human nature. From there on, we go to decide what we want to do. What the schools are doing in recent years is training for obedience and passivity.
That's called teaching to test the worst possible mode of education. We all know it from our own experience. I'm sure you've had the same experience I've had many times. You take a course because you're forced to take it. You're not interested in it. You want to do well so you study for the final exam. You get an A. Two weeks later you forgot what the course is about.
How many times does that happen? We all know that. That's teaching to test. It turns you into a passive automaton, follows orders. I talk a fair amount to teachers. I hear things from teachers, like a sixth grade teacher told me in one meeting that
Massachusetts, a liberal state, that she was giving a section on something in class and a little girl came up to her after class and said she was interested in pursuing one of the things that the teacher had brought up so she could suggest something she could look at. She had to tell the kid
You can't do it. You have to study for the MCAS test because your future will depend on it. Though the teacher didn't say it, my future will depend on it because if you don't get a high grade, I get a demerit.
So you can't pursue what you're interested in and try to develop your creativity, your inventiveness, work with other students in the class to develop. You can't do that. You've got to memorize what comes up in the test, pass the test, two weeks later forget what it was about. But now you're a passive, obedient individual. That's called teaching to test.
Right, I heard you say that one of your favorite courses was real variables where the teacher just wrote a theorem or a possible theorem on the board and said you figure out whether or not this is a mathematical theorem. Have you heard of the concept of unschooling or de-schooling and if so what are your thoughts on it? That's illage. I mean I can understand this motivation but I don't think it's the right solution. The right solution is not de-schooling.
but rather turning schooling into a creative experience which develops the child's abilities, capacities, abilities to work with others and so on. I mean, as I said, I went to a Dewey 8 school till high school. All I wanted to do in the morning is get to school. It was the greatest experience. When I got to high school, an academic high school,
for kids who are college oriented and cities top high school. It's the opposite. It was a burden. I had to go there and get all A's and hated it and couldn't stand it. Tried to do my own things on the side. Okay. But I was able to get a scholarship to college. Okay. In fact, until I got to high school, I literally didn't know I was a good student. It never came up. The
Years I was in school prior to high school, everybody was encouraged to do their best. Actually, I realized later, hadn't thought about it at the time, that I'd been skeptic here. So one year I was in a different class, older class. Nobody paid any attention. I didn't notice it. Nobody else noticed it. The only thing it was, it was new classmates and I'm the smallest kid in the class. That's about the only thing I noticed.
But it was just nothing. As soon as you get to high school, you're ranked. Are you first? Are you second? Did you get an A plus? In fact, I saw with my own children in a liberal, professional, Boston suburb community, by the time they were in third grade, they were talking about the smart kids and the stupid kids.
Okay, because of the tracking that was done. It's outrageous. And that's the liberal side. Okay, I'm not talking about, you know, underfunded inner city schools. These are the best schools. Okay, that's a way to destroy children, to turn them into passive automata, by no means has to be done. And it's not always done. I mean, there are
This seems to be something more in the structure of our schools as opposed to the funding, this desire to assess rank
have a certificate. If there were different institutions that gave certificates, wouldn't we see like a diversification of these assessment structures have more room for creativity? They have ways to do it. I mean, they're very good teachers who do it and do very well, but the system is stacked against them.
It's just as the college system is stacked against constructive work. When the state defunds state colleges, which it's doing under the neoliberal period drastically, okay, I'm now teaching in the state college for the first time, sharply defunded. What can you do? You don't have a lot of choices. You have to raise tuition. You have to attract
Foreign students will pay full tuition. You have to transfer classes to adjuncts. You don't have a lot of choices. You can fight against it and do the best you can, but the policies from the federal government on down, and this was true right through the Obama period as well,
are designed to undercut the kind of educational programs which would be very successful. Now I don't want to exaggerate, there are very good programs being developed, particularly in science education.
A lot of very good scientists, in fact the scientific institutions, the main ones are American Association for Advancement of Science and others, are developing very good curricula on science education. We had time, I could talk about them, but there isn't time. Which do, from the kindergarten level up through high schools, do a really good job on developing creativity, ingenuity,
learning how to solve problems, learning how to work with others, very well done. So it can be done, but you're fighting against strong institutional pressures. And we can overcome that by changing the institutional pressures. My question for you, and it relates to this, what I would call the crisis of neoliberalism in education, is Betsy Davos, who's favored charter schools,
These charter schools are something that have taken off in the United States, while here in Canada there's only 13 in Alberta or something near there. What are your thoughts on charter schools voucher systems? Is this something that Canadians should adopt as an alternative to have more of a diversity of education or more of a diversity of educational instructions? Or is this something that should be warded away like a blade? What's your stance on this?
Well, it's a mixed story. Suppose you're a black mother in a poor community where the schools have been defunded so they don't work. Teachers has 50 students in the class and half of them didn't have breakfast. The main goal in the class is to keep the kids quiet. And you don't want your child to be in that class.
And there's a rich charter school down the street, privately funded, nice facilities and so on. So you want your kid to go to the charter school. That's very understandable. But at the next lower level, right in the background is the fact that this is a way to destroy the public school system. The right response to that defunded school in your neighborhood is to fund it
to reduce the classes to a reasonable size, to make it possible to have free breakfast for the kids. That's the way to deal with it. Not to say, let's throw out the public system and have a privatized system, which of course draws from public funding. So it reduces the funding for public schools. So from the point of view of that mother, I can understand her decisions. If it was my kid, I'd probably do the same thing.
But we should recognize that it's part of a system designed to destroy us, to destroy the public institutions in which the society can thrive and turn them over to private hands where you'll be under control. So yes, that's the decision as an individual you may make. Understandably, as I say, I'd probably do the same thing, but recognizing
that it's part of a very destructive development.
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To close, there's obviously
deleterious aspects to being too close minded as well as being homogeneous that is uniform. Do you happen to see any flaws to being on the flip side? Is there such a thing as too much openness or too much diversity or even too much equality? And if so, what's an example of that? Yeah, things can go overboard, but that's not the problem. And it's like, say, take the Black Lives Matters protests.
which is a huge, incredible development, the biggest social movement in American history. Huge number of people involved, spontaneously, solidarity, black and white working together, constructive goals, developed good programs, really great things happening, enormous support from the population, about two-thirds support, there's never been anything like that. At the fringes,
There are people who are breaking windows, intimidating somebody in a restaurant. That's what the focus is on. Let's take a look at the fringe and talk about how bad it is. Okay, yeah, it is bad. Things like that shouldn't be happening. But that's not what's going on. What's going on is a massive, nonviolent, constructive social movement. Same is true of what you're talking about.
You can find people who push diversity beyond reasonable limits at the fringe. But the call for concern for people's various ways of choosing a lifestyle, that makes sense. And that's the main thrust. So take any movement you want, you can find the same thing. And you can understand very well why the major institutions want to focus on the fringe.
In fact, President Trump is building his entire campaign on it. That's all he has left. No positive proposal that he can offer the population. He can't come to the population and say, I'm responsible for killing 150,000 of you, so vote for me. He can't say that or any of the other things. So what you say is radical anarchists are taking over the society and going to destroy your life.
I'm curious, you know you said in the 70s and the 80s that you were afraid of possibly getting killed from the government or being imprisoned.
Why do you think that didn't happen? Because of something called the Tet Offensive. The Tet Offensive in South Vietnam brought about a major change in government policy. It made the government realize they're not going to be able to win this war by force. They've got to move towards some sort of
diplomatic settlement took years, millions of people were killed, but they began to move towards some way to get out. One of the things they did was try to make basically conciliate the growing anti-war movement to try to dampen it down, saying we're your friends, you know, we're all on the same side. A lot of efforts to do that. One of the ways was to cancel the trials.
I mean, I was coming up for trial, but the trials were canceled. I appreciate that. There's only one audience question and then you can answer it super quick. Hardly asks, in the past, you said that US administrations for a long period were guilty of war crimes. Would you lay such claims against the current administration? Sure.
Just I think today or yesterday, figures came out about the bombing in Afghanistan and the assessment of civilian casualties. Take a look at the figures. They're on the papers yesterday or today. The bombings under Trump have gone way up. Assessment of casualties has gone way down.
They don't look for them anymore, civilian casualties. Okay, that's a war crime. It's the least of it, by far the least of it. The worst crime that Trump has committed and is committing day after day is working with dedication and fervor to destroy the prospects for organized human life on earth.
That's what it means to press harder, to maximize the use of fossil fuels, open up new reserves for drilling, cut back on the regulations that somewhat mitigate the coming catastrophe. Alone in the world, Trump is racing towards environmental catastrophe, which will come if we continue on this course, and not in the distant future.
Now, maybe that's not called a crime in the criminal system, but in any moral system that we can even talk about with a straight face, that's an incomparable crime. There is no criminal in human history who's been doing that. Not Hitler, not Genghis Khan, not anyone.
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"text": " Professor Chomsky, you're a serious person. Most people know you as a serious man who has serious views on US foreign policy and so on. I'm curious, what do you do to unwind? What makes you laugh? Do you watch The Simpsons? Rick and Morty? I can't say it or my animals will race to the exterior exit."
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"text": " I'm curious about your views on consciousness. If you've ever had any experiences, whether it's with psychedelics or marijuana or an unconscionable amount of alcohol or meditation that has changed your views on consciousness. Not part of my universe. I'm probably the only person you've ever spoken to who never used marijuana. So what do you think the function of consciousness is?"
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"text": " Do you take a materialist standpoint that is that the world is made up of atoms and from that consciousness is a epiphenomenon or do you see consciousness as foundational at some level ontologically?"
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"text": " I'm curious to know what your views are on free will. Free will? Like a hundred percent of other people, even those who deny it, I think I can decide right now whether to lift my finger up or down."
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"text": " Science tells us essentially nothing about this. It only tells us we can't incorporate it within our current understanding of science. So there's a certain sense that material reality from some of the people that we've been speaking to is secondary to that of consciousness. They think that it's the material that's more epiphenomenal, that's more of an epiphenomena as opposed to consciousness being something that sparked from"
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"text": " Well that discussion can only be pursued if you have some notion of what the material world is. So what is it"
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"text": " Actually, if you look at the history, there was a quite interesting debate about this several centuries ago. So the foundations of modern science, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Huygens, Leibniz, the great scientists of the 17th century, developed a concept of material world. The concept was called"
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"text": " The mechanical philosophy, philosophy meant science. So it's philosophy, mechanical science. The idea was that the world is a machine. It's like the complex artifacts that skilled artisans were producing and spreading all around Europe. Mechanical clocks, performances that looked like real actors."
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"text": " digestion of a duck, the fountains at Versailles, all over the place, incredible machines, and the assumption was, well, the world is just a bigger machine. Machine meant what it means to you and me, levers, gears, and things pushing and pulling each other, and so on. And that was the reigning doctrine, the idea that Galileo and others considered"
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"text": " a theoretical account not acceptable if it wasn't if you couldn't construct a machine to duplicate it well zubin came along and showed that there are no machines none he thought that was a total absurdity spent the rest of his life trying to overcome it his associate"
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"text": " The other great scientists of the day, Leibniz and Huygens, others, accused him of reinstituting occult ideas, interaction without contact. He agreed. Problem was never resolved. Science just abandoned the quest. They basically said, well, we'll just construct intelligible theories. Newton's theories were intelligible."
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"text": " The world he described wasn't intelligible. But they said, we'll forget it. Science lowered its goals. Now we just try to construct intelligible theories. Whatever the theories tell us, that's the material world. So there's nothing to discuss. The material world keeps changing as we understand more. So the question whether something transcends the material world"
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"text": " It's just a way of saying we don't know how we incorporate it within our intelligible theories. Maybe we never will, maybe someday we will. Does this mean that you also take an agnostic view when it comes to God? That is, who knows? When it comes to God. God? I don't even know what I'm at being asked about. What is it that I'm supposed to believe in or not believe in?"
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"text": " possible then just to give you a certain dimension, something to question, because we understand that the word like a coin that's lost its face and become nothing but sheer metal loses its value and sort of put aside ambiguities. There's a certain move now towards understanding or maybe even rediscovering the idea of God not so much as a man in the sky, but"
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"text": " You could argue it's the highest value as to how things should be and the principles that we should abide by. I certainly think we can talk about the principles we should abide by. What do you find your most driving principle, just even if it's something personal in your own life experience? We all have principles."
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"text": " We don't want to torture children. We don't want to slaughter people. We want to bring justice and mercy to people who need it. There's all kinds of values that we share. Nothing is added when we give them the name God or give them the name anything else. Sure, we have values. We can look into where these values originate, how they've developed over time. We can discuss them."
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"text": " I recall you said that there are no moral relativists, that is people who can theorize about morals are relative, change from culture to culture and therefore there is no overarching morality."
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"text": " They're just theorizing. They don't act like that in practice. Does this mean that you hold the view that there are objective morals? We are organic systems. We're not angels. We have internal cognitive, emotional, moral other structure. We can investigate what it is."
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"text": " You can't really go beyond it. You can say, here's our moral nature. We can try to refine it. We can sharpen it. We can carry out informed, intelligent discussions to see if we can determine whether certain things conform to our concept of what is good or bad. But if you ask, how do I show that it's really"
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"text": " Good or bad? It's a question that you can't formulate it. You can formulate the words, but you have nothing to say about it. It's like asking, we have certain modes of trying to understand the world. We have certain ways of investigating, analyzing results, making conjectures, confirming, disconfirming them. If somebody comes along and says, how do you know those are the right ways?"
},
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"text": " It's not a meaningful question. By what standard do we discover whether the right way is? Since there are no standards proposed, the question is just empty words. So there's many different ways that we arrive to an understanding of truth. There are different epistemologies that we use. Some are respected as much more than others."
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"text": " Amongst these tools, some cling towards tradition either in the form of respected mythologies which they believe either fundamentally or allegorically or somewhere in between. And my question for you is just in your own development, in your own education as you advance, what was your view towards these mythologies, these sort of founding"
},
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"text": " either religious myths or mythologies in other cultures. Did you ever have a fascination with mythology? Was it just regarded as superstition? My own history, which is of no interest to anybody but me, up until the time I was about maybe 11 or 12 years old, I accepted the religious beliefs of the culture that I grew up in"
},
{
"end_time": 852.329,
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"start_time": 823.592,
"text": " intensive Hebrew education and culture. I didn't seriously question it. By the time I was a young teenager, I realized that none of this makes any sense. So I just abandoned it. I'm not telling other people to give up their beliefs. It means a lot to them, improves their life. It's fine. None of my business. As long as they don't interfere with others,"
},
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"text": " Sure. Many find that this transition from the superstitious beliefs of their"
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"text": " of their upbringing to something either more allegorical, maybe possibly still religious, or something more atheistic, and in this sense we mean material, devoid of any superstition. That transition often occurs in adolescence, I would say, and it impacts people when they're growing up. Did this transition for you impact you? Did you find that it changed the way you viewed the world?"
},
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"text": " I was brought up in an intensive Jewish culture, but Judaism is more of a culture of practice than belief."
},
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"text": " Like my grandfather was extremely orthodox Jew, super orthodox. Grew up and lived in Eastern European Jewish communities, practically medieval in character. If I had asked him, do you believe in God? He probably wouldn't have known what I was talking about."
},
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"text": " The religion is doing all these things. Get up in the morning, perform the rituals, go to the shul, pray with your friend, come back. He was what's called a mashkiyach."
},
{
"end_time": 974.94,
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"start_time": 952.056,
"text": " person who supervises butcher shops to make sure that they're kosher. So go around to the butcher shops, do all the job, then go to the afternoon prayers and do the other things. That's religion. Amen. Okay for him, not for me. If you want a personal experience, there was one that"
},
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"start_time": 976.186,
"text": " gave me an insight into the nature of religion. If you don't mind, a personal story. Please, share. We'd love that, yeah. We'd absolutely love that. Well, my family lived in Philadelphia. My father's family, which was extremely Orthodox, lived in Baltimore. And we would go to Baltimore for the holidays, just to visit. And I remember when I was maybe"
},
{
"end_time": 1035.162,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 1006.527,
"text": " 10 or 11 years old. We were visiting on Pesach Passover and I noticed that my grandfather was smoking. So I asked my father, how can he be smoking? I knew the Talmudic law which says there's no difference between the holidays and the Sabbath except with regard to eating."
},
{
"end_time": 1058.575,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 1035.725,
"text": " So on the holidays, you're allowed to cook a dinner. You can't do that on Sabbath. So my father said, well, he just decided that smoking is a kind of eating. And then I did get an insight. Religion is based on the assumption that God is an idiot, that you can fool God very easily."
},
{
"end_time": 1086.8,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 1059.087,
"text": " And if you think about it, it's true. Nobody can live up to the prescriptions that are told, so everybody finds ways around them. Actually, Pascal later learned had a wonderful passage about that in the City of God on the Jesuits and how they find ways to give interpretations that are the opposite of what the text says, and they live by the interpretations."
},
{
"end_time": 1110.674,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1087.278,
"text": " And that's correct. I mean, if you think about it, it's completely impossible to live up to the prescriptions. Well, the Catholics have a way out of this. You go to confession every whenever periodically and you tell the priest all the terrible things he did and he says, fine, you're okay."
},
{
"end_time": 1133.285,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1111.152,
"text": " If Jews is a little harder, you have to wait once a year, the young kipper, they have atonement, then you say all the things you did, make them up if there weren't any. I have Catholic friends who tell me that when they were kids and went to confession, they couldn't think of anything to say, so they had to make something up."
},
{
"end_time": 1161.613,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1133.78,
"text": " took a toy from my little sister or something like that. But every religious faith has some means to avoid keeping to the letter of the prescriptions. So, okay, essentially it means they're based on the assumption that you can get around God's prescriptions by one or another device. That was an insight, I have to say."
},
{
"end_time": 1192.841,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1162.892,
"text": " She mentioned the Talmud, and there's a scene where the spirit of Moses comes back and sees a bunch of rabbinical scholars, and they're analyzing a text, and God brings Moses there. Moses looks at the scholars and goes, what's happening? I didn't tell them any of this. And God kind of gives a bit of a shrug, like, well, now you know how it feels."
},
{
"end_time": 1221.971,
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"start_time": 1193.336,
"text": " So that idea that there's this movement away from either the foundational belief or that things become a farce, right, is a theme I think even within those religious traditions. What fascinates me and what I'm curious of in yourself is what you see reflected in those traditions either in terms of their utility or the potentials in human beings that they"
},
{
"end_time": 1251.049,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1222.278,
"text": " Well, if you take the religious faiths that exist, they're all interpreted. Nothing takes literally the words of the holy text. So for example, in the Jewish tradition,"
},
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"index": 47,
"start_time": 1251.613,
"text": " the huge rabbinic Talmudic later rabbinic tradition, which I did study when I was growing up, is just ways of interpreting the texts so that they become feasible for ordinary life. And the same is true in the Christian tradition. The interpretive tradition modifies"
},
{
"end_time": 1309.633,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1280.35,
"text": " reshapes the words to fit a possible existence in the culture in which it was done. And it can be done in various ways. So you can have one of the most dramatic examples in recent years is what happened with Pope John XXIII calling Vatican II, Second Vatican Council, 1962."
},
{
"end_time": 1339.77,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1310.265,
"text": " which tried to revise the Catholic tradition that went back to the fourth century. In the fourth century, the Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. The cross, which had been a symbol of human suffering, was put on the shields of the Roman legions."
},
{
"end_time": 1368.592,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1340.418,
"text": " Hans Kuhn, the great historian of Christianity, describes this as a change from the church becoming the church of the persecuted to the church of the persecutors. And it pretty much remained like that, if you look at the history, until Vatican II, when Pope John urged that the church return to the Gospels."
},
{
"end_time": 1397.892,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1369.309,
"text": " That's pretty radical. The Gospels have a radical pacifist message, and it was taken seriously, especially in Latin America. Bishops, priests, nuns, sisters, lay people went out to peasant communities, tried to organize them, get them to read the Gospels to understand the preferential option for the poor, which"
},
{
"end_time": 1430.009,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1400.145,
"text": " take it into their own hands, try to reconstruct their own lives and communities to overcome the terrible repression in which most of them suffered. That was liberation theology. The United States went to war to destroy it and did. That's why there were so many religious martyrs in the following decades. Furthermore, interestingly, the US government takes pride in that. If you look at the"
},
{
"end_time": 1458.985,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1430.879,
"text": " School of the Americas has since been renamed because it's got a bad reputation. But the School of Americas which trains Latin American officers, mainly the killers in the national security states, violent states that the U.S. imposed and supported through the region, they have advertising points, talking points. One of them is the U.S. Army helped defeat liberation theology."
},
{
"end_time": 1486.715,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1459.667,
"text": " So we beat back this effort to reconstitute the Gospels successfully, and we take pride in it. But that's one of the things that could come out of religion, going back to the original texts and seeing what they meant. And it can be a very radical message. That's frightening. You may recall there's even literary exemplifications of this."
},
{
"end_time": 1509.206,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1487.705,
"text": " Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school? I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand. It was just the five of us."
},
{
"end_time": 1539.514,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1509.753,
"text": " We know the fellow, Alexander Christianopoulos, who is going back to the Gospels and looking at them through what he considers to be a Christian anarchist lens."
},
{
"end_time": 1568.063,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1539.821,
"text": " And the conclusion kind of comes to is this pacifism that he would find that would resonate with fellows like Tolstoy. And you look at these Christian anarchists, Tolstoy, Ivan Illich, and they tend to come up with these rather interesting responses to our contemporary problems, particularly to neoliberalism is something that interests us. Do you think that"
},
{
"end_time": 1598.353,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1568.558,
"text": " My own feeling is that the most important messages are those taken up by the activists in Latin America who took seriously"
},
{
"end_time": 1620.896,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1599.002,
"text": " the injunction to return to the preferential option for the poor and try to apply it in practice. So people like, most of them martyred, Ratilio Grande, Archbishop Romero,"
},
{
"end_time": 1646.34,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1621.118,
"text": " Father Ea Korea and all of these people were trying to do it in a concrete way. I don't care much what people were saying. They were doing it. That's why they got killed. Given the various perspectives on neoliberalism and its origins, where would you locate the institutions, the institutional centers of neoliberalism?"
},
{
"end_time": 1672.312,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1647.79,
"text": " The corporate sector and the business world in general worked very hard in the 1970s to reverse the civilizing effects of the 1960s, the democratizing effects. They're very explicit about it. If you look at the Howell Memorandum,"
},
{
"end_time": 1700.742,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1672.961,
"text": " on the liberal side, the Trilateral Commission's crisis of democracy. They were deeply concerned about the entry into the political arena of sectors of the population that are supposed to be passive and obedient, not interfering with the rights of the powerful to run the world."
},
{
"end_time": 1721.408,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1701.374,
"text": " was showing up in things like even militant strike actions like Lordstown where young workers were not just asking for better wages but asking for some control of the workplace, reduction of the rate of profit. The liberal side, the"
},
{
"end_time": 1741.305,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1722.329,
"text": " Trilateral report warned against the failures of what they called the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young. Schools, colleges, churches are not indoctrinating the young properly. That's why you have these"
},
{
"end_time": 1769.48,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1741.834,
"text": " demonstrations in the streets. That's why you have people protesting against the war. Sorry to interrupt. You said they're not indoctrinating the young properly. That to me sounds like there's a proper way of indoctrinating the young, which sounds like you don't hold a negative view towards indoctrination per se. I'm speaking about the liberal side of the spectrum. There is a spectrum of opinion. At the right you have things like the Powell memorandum."
},
{
"end_time": 1790.128,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1770.145,
"text": " We have the money, we have the force, we have to fight back, to beat back all these threats to the business world."
},
{
"end_time": 1817.756,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1790.52,
"text": " First, the major publication of the Trilateral Commission, liberal internationalists from the United States, Europe and Japan, basically the Carter administration. They were drawn from its ranks. I'm quoting from them, they were condemning the universities and the schools for their failure, the failures of indoctrination of the young."
},
{
"end_time": 1842.705,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1818.422,
"text": " Proper indoctrination means return the general population to passivity, obedience, what they call more moderation in democracy. So don't press for your demands. Just take it easy. Go back and stay where you belong. We'll take care of things. Okay, that's the liberal side."
},
{
"end_time": 1870.043,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1843.131,
"text": " The harsher side is expressed, for example, in the Powell Memorandum. These are just exemplifications of developments that were taking place in documents. But the idea was to reverse the basically New Deal programs that persisted through the 50s and the 60s, or even extended, reverse them, return to where things ought to be,"
},
{
"end_time": 1899.906,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1870.674,
"text": " With power in the hands of private power. That's where decisions ought to be. Private, unaccountable power. That's neoliberalism. It was made explicit by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who sort of escalated it all almost as soon as they took office. So Reagan's inaugural speech said, the government is the problem, not the solution, which means"
},
{
"end_time": 1929.753,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1900.725,
"text": " take decisions away from government you didn't say this but government has a flaw it's partially influenced by people so take decisions away from government take initiatives away from government put them in the hands of private power which is totally unaccountable to the population totally and to drive it home they had an economics guru Milton Friedman who came out with the"
},
{
"end_time": 1941.852,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1930.282,
"text": " since reigning doctrine that the sole responsibility of corporate leaders is to maximize profit for shareholders and themselves, of course."
},
{
"end_time": 1968.285,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1942.176,
"text": " the sole and only goal okay and then laws were changed the regulations were changed to implement this you go on into the neoliberal world with perfectly predictable consequences sharply concentrated wealth so right now for example about 20 percent of the country's wealth is in the hands of"
},
{
"end_time": 1998.695,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1968.746,
"text": " 0.1 percent, one-tenth of one percent of the population, twice what it was when Reagan came in. For most of the population, it's basically stagnation. People try to get by from paycheck to paycheck. It's claimed that unemployment was low, but that's highly misleading. And for one thing, it doesn't take into account people who just dropped out of the workforce in desperation."
},
{
"end_time": 2027.278,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1999.462,
"text": " count them in labor participation measures turns out that unemployment is more like seven percent and even that's misleading because it doesn't deal with the fact that the new employment that's come under Obama continued more or less under Trump not quite as well but more or less is mostly precarious work solid jobs it's"
},
{
"end_time": 2056.51,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 2027.841,
"text": " There's a sense that one of the crises of neoliberal ideology is the fact that it restricts this human potential. I'd imagine there'd be more who have a job but do not feel that they would be living up their true potential, working sort of mindlessly or numbingly at an occupation that"
},
{
"end_time": 2085.401,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 2057.381,
"text": " they would rather avoid but feel more or less cornered into. Another thing is, is you talk about the private sector's role, but how deeply do you feel that government has been integrated with this private sector? Who's running the government here? And if it's not the people, if it's these corporations, how do we fight back? How do we circumnavigate this system?"
},
{
"end_time": 2111.049,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 2086.544,
"text": " Well, first of all, I don't know if you want to go into it, but having a job is not an ideal. In fact, having a job is a severe attack on human rights and human dignity. We can go into that if we want. But it's now what's called conventional common sense these days."
},
{
"end_time": 2140.111,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 2111.459,
"text": " When you say having a job is deleterious, you mean to say that needing to have a job is not ideal or even having a job at all? Having a job. Having a job means placing yourself under the control of an autocratic ruler for most of your waking life. An autocratic ruler has the kind of control over you"
},
{
"end_time": 2170.435,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2140.503,
"text": " that Stalin never dreamt of, like Stalin never thought he could tell people you're allowed to go to the bathroom for five minutes at three o'clock, you know, or you have to wear these clothes and not some other clothes, or you have to race from this spot in the warehouse to the other spot in the warehouse by a path that I laid out for you. And if you go a little bit to the side, you get a noticing, you get an American. Stalin didn't do that. But that's having a job."
},
{
"end_time": 2198.66,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2171.203,
"text": " 19th century workers regarded that as a fundamental assault on human rights and human dignity. The Republican Party agreed. One of the platforms of the Republican Party is that wage labor is no different from slavery except that it's temporary until you have a chance to become a free person again."
},
{
"end_time": 2225.555,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2199.206,
"text": " That's the 19th century, goes back millennia. The idea of being dependent on another person is a fundamental attack on dignity. And having a job means that's most of your waking hours. It took a long time to beat this into people's heads and make them think that that's the goal in life. There's a lot to unravel about that."
},
{
"end_time": 2252.568,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2226.084,
"text": " And I think it can be done. But if you go back to the narrow question, how do we get government to be more responsive? We know the means for that. You can do that through the political system. It's often been done. Activism has done it all the time. Take the New Deal, which I'm old enough to remember, from the Depression hit in 1929,"
},
{
"end_time": 2273.814,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2253.404,
"text": " much worse than today. Most of my family was involved, unemployed, first-generation working class. It took a couple of years before things began to pick up. By about 1934, 1935, the labor movement was picking up"
},
{
"end_time": 2297.517,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2274.206,
"text": " had been almost completely crushed in the 1920s. You had started getting CIO organizing militant strikes, leftist political parties, a lot of activism. Fairly sympathetic administration moved on to give you the New Deal measures that have greatly improved life for"
},
{
"end_time": 2334.462,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2304.582,
"text": " The same is true now. Take a look at what's going on in the Democratic Party. They have been forced to the left by the Sanders movement, by continuing popular activism. There's a battle going on."
},
{
"end_time": 2354.224,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2334.872,
"text": " The DNC, the Clintonite donor-oriented, basically conservative part of the party, which manages the party. They're trying to prevent the programs that would move to the left, and there's a struggle going on."
},
{
"end_time": 2374.804,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2354.718,
"text": " If the activists continue at it, they can continue to shift the party's programs. They can develop new parties, other forms of activism. All of these options are open. We don't live in a brutal dictatorship where the dissidence means you're sent to the gulag."
},
{
"end_time": 2399.855,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2375.077,
"text": " There's plenty of repression, I wouldn't deny that, but it's nothing at all like really repressive states. We have a very great range of freedom, opportunity. We can do things through the political system or through modifications of the political system or alternatives to the political system to change the nature of the society."
},
{
"end_time": 2429.974,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2400.879,
"text": " Speaking of freedom, democracy, John Dewey, the pragmatist was like, education, what's important for it is democracy. I'm curious, what do you see that we can do to democratize education or to make education more democratic? In addition, we know you went to what you described as a Deweyite school. If you mind explaining that experience. I think we can do is to reverse."
},
{
"end_time": 2459.189,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2432.073,
"text": " through the neoliberal years. One part of the neoliberal programs has been to undermine and destroy the public sector. That includes public schools, includes state colleges. So state funding for the schools has declined. Funding for state colleges has sharply declined."
},
{
"end_time": 2487.073,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2459.531,
"text": " A business model has been imposed in the colleges in which you try to maximize profit and reduce what's called waste. So instead of having senior faculty teaching courses, which is expensive, I hand them over to adjuncts who you don't have to pay anything, pay practically nothing. They have no means of protecting themselves. They're"
},
{
"end_time": 2518.353,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2488.37,
"text": " Basically gig economy, graduate students, and so on. But simply defund. The public schools are vastly defunded. Purpose is clear. When you defund the public institution, it means it doesn't work properly. Parents get upset. They don't like it. They want something else. You can drive them into the private sector. We have to reverse that. And then after you reverse that,"
},
{
"end_time": 2547.449,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2518.951,
"text": " and develop decent schooling, then we should move on to what you just described using the methods that are understood to and sometimes applied to enhance and develop the creativity and dependence of mind, mutual participation, all the things that happened in a well-run Deweyite school, as I happen to personally know happened"
},
{
"end_time": 2578.029,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2548.097,
"text": " from nursery school up to high school, that's where it was, can be done very effectively. So what you've described seems to be the crisis of neoliberalism and education. Would you agree with that in part? I would call it a, I think it's one of the crises that follows from the neoliberal program of undermining the public sector"
},
{
"end_time": 2605.572,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2578.968,
"text": " and which people participate and which is responsive to them. So undermine that and turn everything over to private power which is unaccountable to the public. In the curious rhetoric of today that's called libertarian. It's a remarkable turn of phrase. Libertarian means put your lives"
},
{
"end_time": 2630.162,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2605.811,
"text": " in the hands of complete totalitarians. That's libertarian. It's an interesting usage. Of course, you can understand the rationale. So Thatcher, Reagan, throw people into the market, destroy unions, destroy means of association. You're alone in the market."
},
{
"end_time": 2659.326,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2630.657,
"text": " If you can survive, okay. If you can kick the guy next to you in the face and get ahead, fine. Do what you can to maximize your own power and rule. Now that's the principle. And it's understood. Like if you read the big thinkers, the leading thinkers of the so-called libertarian movement in the United States, people like James Buchanan, Nobel Laureate. Hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 2686.391,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2660.282,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 2712.483,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2686.391,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone"
},
{
"end_time": 2735.845,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2712.483,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothies, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
},
{
"end_time": 2754.957,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2735.845,
"text": " Economics, one of the major thinkers of the movement."
},
{
"end_time": 2784.582,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2756.305,
"text": " work in economics. His position explicit is the economy should be designed so as to accord with human nature, which makes good sense. Then what is human nature? He tells us human nature is such that each person's highest ideal"
},
{
"end_time": 2812.108,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2785.043,
"text": " is to live ruling a world of slaves. In case you didn't notice, that's your highest ideal. To live ruling a world of slaves. That's the highest doctrine of libertarian theory. And so when you're in the market, you try to do whatever you can to approximate that position. If you happen to lose out, it's your problem."
},
{
"end_time": 2830.52,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2812.688,
"text": " Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover."
},
{
"end_time": 2858.985,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2830.52,
"text": " Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible. Henson Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business, so that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades, and no planned obsolescence."
},
{
"end_time": 2875.384,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2858.985,
"text": " It's also extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything."
},
{
"end_time": 2894.718,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2875.384,
"text": " If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart plus 100 free blades when you head to H E N S O N S H A V I N G dot com slash everything and use the code everything. So."
},
{
"end_time": 2924.172,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2895.196,
"text": " There's an evolutionary biologist by the name of Peter Gray, who argues a very different understanding of human nature. He works with the Evolution Institute, which has espoused the philosophy of Christian anarchists like Piotr Krapotkin, and their mutualistic understandings of human nature. But in evolution, there's a force that shapes our humanity, our evolution of bonding with others, helping others out. Anyway,"
},
{
"end_time": 2954.07,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2924.838,
"text": " Peter Gray has looked at our evolutionary history when it comes to learning, you could argue sort of learning instinct and seeing how that is unleashed in schools versus how that's unleashed in more democratic, more sort of unstructured play-based schools like Sudbury Valley School. Do you believe that the schools that we have now unleash that learning instinct or run counter to it?"
},
{
"end_time": 2970.691,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2954.991,
"text": " and what would be the best way to sort of unleash this learning instinct in our schools? Just to fix up the history a little bit, this goes back to Kropotkin."
},
{
"end_time": 2997.875,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2971.476,
"text": " his mutual aid a factor in evolution shortly he was a naturalist soon as Darwin's work came out Kropotkin pretty soon published this book arguing that a major factor in evolution was simply mutual aid he gave many examples in the animal world and in the human world and that's opposite to the"
},
{
"end_time": 3028.251,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2998.746,
"text": " reigning interpretation. Herbert Spencer made famous about it's just survival of the fittest. You get as much as you can. Now the fact of the matter is we know virtually nothing about human nature from a scientific point of view. So these proposals are saying here are the... human nature includes both whatever humans do that's part of human nature. So there are various tendencies in human nature."
},
{
"end_time": 3045.947,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 3028.951,
"text": " There are probably some people who aren't totally appalled by James Buchanan's conception that what we want is to rule over a world of slaves. Somebody like Adam Smith would have regarded that as pathological."
},
{
"end_time": 3074.343,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 3046.493,
"text": " But there are people who accept it and believe it. There are people who prefer the picture that Kropotkin and others developed, that the parts of human nature we should foster and develop are those that turn towards mutual aid and support. You can see it constantly, right in front of us every minute. So for example, right now there's a"
},
{
"end_time": 3102.176,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 3075.179,
"text": " an effort to deal with the raging pandemic. One way, the James Buchanan way, is illustrated primarily by the Trump administration. They're not alone, but they're extreme. If we can get a vaccine, let's get it for ourselves. Screw the rest of the world, okay, because we want it. In fact, Trump just, there is an international consortium"
},
{
"end_time": 3131.34,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 3102.705,
"text": " working on developing a vaccine which will be a cooperative effort to develop, which of course is more efficient than local efforts, some measures to try to distribute it to the poor. Trump just pulled out of it. We don't want anything to do with these mutual aid, mutual support things. We're out for ourselves, okay, and that means the rich and the powerful, not the poor among us. So that's one extreme."
},
{
"end_time": 3161.493,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 3131.971,
"text": " The other extreme you see on the streets all over the place. Mutual support groups are spontaneously developing in poor neighborhoods and crime-ridden neighborhoods, all sorts of places all around the world to help out people who are in trouble and to try to see if you can do something to bring the possibility of surviving the pandemic in places where people only have water, let alone the possibility of isolation."
},
{
"end_time": 3189.77,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 3161.834,
"text": " So those are two aspects of human nature. The question is, which ones do we want to work and foster? That's the choice. It's not a matter of science telling us what human nature is. It doesn't. It just says, these are various manifestations of human nature. From there on, we go to decide what we want to do. What the schools are doing in recent years is training for obedience and passivity."
},
{
"end_time": 3218.2,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 3190.367,
"text": " That's called teaching to test the worst possible mode of education. We all know it from our own experience. I'm sure you've had the same experience I've had many times. You take a course because you're forced to take it. You're not interested in it. You want to do well so you study for the final exam. You get an A. Two weeks later you forgot what the course is about."
},
{
"end_time": 3240.998,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3219.838,
"text": " How many times does that happen? We all know that. That's teaching to test. It turns you into a passive automaton, follows orders. I talk a fair amount to teachers. I hear things from teachers, like a sixth grade teacher told me in one meeting that"
},
{
"end_time": 3262.824,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3241.647,
"text": " Massachusetts, a liberal state, that she was giving a section on something in class and a little girl came up to her after class and said she was interested in pursuing one of the things that the teacher had brought up so she could suggest something she could look at. She had to tell the kid"
},
{
"end_time": 3278.251,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3263.217,
"text": " You can't do it. You have to study for the MCAS test because your future will depend on it. Though the teacher didn't say it, my future will depend on it because if you don't get a high grade, I get a demerit."
},
{
"end_time": 3305.964,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3278.933,
"text": " So you can't pursue what you're interested in and try to develop your creativity, your inventiveness, work with other students in the class to develop. You can't do that. You've got to memorize what comes up in the test, pass the test, two weeks later forget what it was about. But now you're a passive, obedient individual. That's called teaching to test."
},
{
"end_time": 3336.22,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3306.886,
"text": " Right, I heard you say that one of your favorite courses was real variables where the teacher just wrote a theorem or a possible theorem on the board and said you figure out whether or not this is a mathematical theorem. Have you heard of the concept of unschooling or de-schooling and if so what are your thoughts on it? That's illage. I mean I can understand this motivation but I don't think it's the right solution. The right solution is not de-schooling."
},
{
"end_time": 3364.548,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3336.937,
"text": " but rather turning schooling into a creative experience which develops the child's abilities, capacities, abilities to work with others and so on. I mean, as I said, I went to a Dewey 8 school till high school. All I wanted to do in the morning is get to school. It was the greatest experience. When I got to high school, an academic high school,"
},
{
"end_time": 3393.78,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3365.043,
"text": " for kids who are college oriented and cities top high school. It's the opposite. It was a burden. I had to go there and get all A's and hated it and couldn't stand it. Tried to do my own things on the side. Okay. But I was able to get a scholarship to college. Okay. In fact, until I got to high school, I literally didn't know I was a good student. It never came up. The"
},
{
"end_time": 3423.422,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3394.326,
"text": " Years I was in school prior to high school, everybody was encouraged to do their best. Actually, I realized later, hadn't thought about it at the time, that I'd been skeptic here. So one year I was in a different class, older class. Nobody paid any attention. I didn't notice it. Nobody else noticed it. The only thing it was, it was new classmates and I'm the smallest kid in the class. That's about the only thing I noticed."
},
{
"end_time": 3450.947,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3423.865,
"text": " But it was just nothing. As soon as you get to high school, you're ranked. Are you first? Are you second? Did you get an A plus? In fact, I saw with my own children in a liberal, professional, Boston suburb community, by the time they were in third grade, they were talking about the smart kids and the stupid kids."
},
{
"end_time": 3479.923,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3451.527,
"text": " Okay, because of the tracking that was done. It's outrageous. And that's the liberal side. Okay, I'm not talking about, you know, underfunded inner city schools. These are the best schools. Okay, that's a way to destroy children, to turn them into passive automata, by no means has to be done. And it's not always done. I mean, there are"
},
{
"end_time": 3508.882,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3480.401,
"text": " This seems to be something more in the structure of our schools as opposed to the funding, this desire to assess rank"
},
{
"end_time": 3535.435,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3509.377,
"text": " have a certificate. If there were different institutions that gave certificates, wouldn't we see like a diversification of these assessment structures have more room for creativity? They have ways to do it. I mean, they're very good teachers who do it and do very well, but the system is stacked against them."
},
{
"end_time": 3565.811,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3536.425,
"text": " It's just as the college system is stacked against constructive work. When the state defunds state colleges, which it's doing under the neoliberal period drastically, okay, I'm now teaching in the state college for the first time, sharply defunded. What can you do? You don't have a lot of choices. You have to raise tuition. You have to attract"
},
{
"end_time": 3588.302,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3566.357,
"text": " Foreign students will pay full tuition. You have to transfer classes to adjuncts. You don't have a lot of choices. You can fight against it and do the best you can, but the policies from the federal government on down, and this was true right through the Obama period as well,"
},
{
"end_time": 3608.302,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3588.814,
"text": " are designed to undercut the kind of educational programs which would be very successful. Now I don't want to exaggerate, there are very good programs being developed, particularly in science education."
},
{
"end_time": 3638.814,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3609.053,
"text": " A lot of very good scientists, in fact the scientific institutions, the main ones are American Association for Advancement of Science and others, are developing very good curricula on science education. We had time, I could talk about them, but there isn't time. Which do, from the kindergarten level up through high schools, do a really good job on developing creativity, ingenuity,"
},
{
"end_time": 3668.609,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3639.258,
"text": " learning how to solve problems, learning how to work with others, very well done. So it can be done, but you're fighting against strong institutional pressures. And we can overcome that by changing the institutional pressures. My question for you, and it relates to this, what I would call the crisis of neoliberalism in education, is Betsy Davos, who's favored charter schools,"
},
{
"end_time": 3698.558,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3668.729,
"text": " These charter schools are something that have taken off in the United States, while here in Canada there's only 13 in Alberta or something near there. What are your thoughts on charter schools voucher systems? Is this something that Canadians should adopt as an alternative to have more of a diversity of education or more of a diversity of educational instructions? Or is this something that should be warded away like a blade? What's your stance on this?"
},
{
"end_time": 3727.466,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3699.104,
"text": " Well, it's a mixed story. Suppose you're a black mother in a poor community where the schools have been defunded so they don't work. Teachers has 50 students in the class and half of them didn't have breakfast. The main goal in the class is to keep the kids quiet. And you don't want your child to be in that class."
},
{
"end_time": 3758.2,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3728.268,
"text": " And there's a rich charter school down the street, privately funded, nice facilities and so on. So you want your kid to go to the charter school. That's very understandable. But at the next lower level, right in the background is the fact that this is a way to destroy the public school system. The right response to that defunded school in your neighborhood is to fund it"
},
{
"end_time": 3787.5,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3758.831,
"text": " to reduce the classes to a reasonable size, to make it possible to have free breakfast for the kids. That's the way to deal with it. Not to say, let's throw out the public system and have a privatized system, which of course draws from public funding. So it reduces the funding for public schools. So from the point of view of that mother, I can understand her decisions. If it was my kid, I'd probably do the same thing."
},
{
"end_time": 3816.203,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3788.268,
"text": " But we should recognize that it's part of a system designed to destroy us, to destroy the public institutions in which the society can thrive and turn them over to private hands where you'll be under control. So yes, that's the decision as an individual you may make. Understandably, as I say, I'd probably do the same thing, but recognizing"
},
{
"end_time": 3825.606,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3816.459,
"text": " that it's part of a very destructive development."
},
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"index": 144,
"start_time": 3825.964,
"text": " Football fan, a basketball fan, it always feels good to be ranked. Right now, new users get $50 instantly in lineups when you play your first $5. The app is simple to use. Pick two or more players. Pick more or less on their stat projections. Anything from touchdowns to threes and if you're right, you can win big. Mix and match players from"
},
{
"end_time": 3858.08,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3848.234,
"text": " any sport on ProgePix, America's number one daily fantasy sports app. ProgePix is available in 40 plus states including California, Texas,"
},
{
"end_time": 3884.923,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3858.319,
"text": " To close, there's obviously"
},
{
"end_time": 3912.978,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3885.23,
"text": " deleterious aspects to being too close minded as well as being homogeneous that is uniform. Do you happen to see any flaws to being on the flip side? Is there such a thing as too much openness or too much diversity or even too much equality? And if so, what's an example of that? Yeah, things can go overboard, but that's not the problem. And it's like, say, take the Black Lives Matters protests."
},
{
"end_time": 3942.978,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3913.729,
"text": " which is a huge, incredible development, the biggest social movement in American history. Huge number of people involved, spontaneously, solidarity, black and white working together, constructive goals, developed good programs, really great things happening, enormous support from the population, about two-thirds support, there's never been anything like that. At the fringes,"
},
{
"end_time": 3973.268,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3943.626,
"text": " There are people who are breaking windows, intimidating somebody in a restaurant. That's what the focus is on. Let's take a look at the fringe and talk about how bad it is. Okay, yeah, it is bad. Things like that shouldn't be happening. But that's not what's going on. What's going on is a massive, nonviolent, constructive social movement. Same is true of what you're talking about."
},
{
"end_time": 4003.234,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3973.729,
"text": " You can find people who push diversity beyond reasonable limits at the fringe. But the call for concern for people's various ways of choosing a lifestyle, that makes sense. And that's the main thrust. So take any movement you want, you can find the same thing. And you can understand very well why the major institutions want to focus on the fringe."
},
{
"end_time": 4032.875,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 4003.729,
"text": " In fact, President Trump is building his entire campaign on it. That's all he has left. No positive proposal that he can offer the population. He can't come to the population and say, I'm responsible for killing 150,000 of you, so vote for me. He can't say that or any of the other things. So what you say is radical anarchists are taking over the society and going to destroy your life."
},
{
"end_time": 4062.073,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 4033.08,
"text": " I'm curious, you know you said in the 70s and the 80s that you were afraid of possibly getting killed from the government or being imprisoned."
},
{
"end_time": 4090.435,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 4062.944,
"text": " Why do you think that didn't happen? Because of something called the Tet Offensive. The Tet Offensive in South Vietnam brought about a major change in government policy. It made the government realize they're not going to be able to win this war by force. They've got to move towards some sort of"
},
{
"end_time": 4120.503,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 4091.442,
"text": " diplomatic settlement took years, millions of people were killed, but they began to move towards some way to get out. One of the things they did was try to make basically conciliate the growing anti-war movement to try to dampen it down, saying we're your friends, you know, we're all on the same side. A lot of efforts to do that. One of the ways was to cancel the trials."
},
{
"end_time": 4142.978,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 4121.032,
"text": " I mean, I was coming up for trial, but the trials were canceled. I appreciate that. There's only one audience question and then you can answer it super quick. Hardly asks, in the past, you said that US administrations for a long period were guilty of war crimes. Would you lay such claims against the current administration? Sure."
},
{
"end_time": 4171.715,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 4144.087,
"text": " Just I think today or yesterday, figures came out about the bombing in Afghanistan and the assessment of civilian casualties. Take a look at the figures. They're on the papers yesterday or today. The bombings under Trump have gone way up. Assessment of casualties has gone way down."
},
{
"end_time": 4196.783,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 4172.398,
"text": " They don't look for them anymore, civilian casualties. Okay, that's a war crime. It's the least of it, by far the least of it. The worst crime that Trump has committed and is committing day after day is working with dedication and fervor to destroy the prospects for organized human life on earth."
},
{
"end_time": 4227.261,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 4197.654,
"text": " That's what it means to press harder, to maximize the use of fossil fuels, open up new reserves for drilling, cut back on the regulations that somewhat mitigate the coming catastrophe. Alone in the world, Trump is racing towards environmental catastrophe, which will come if we continue on this course, and not in the distant future."
},
{
"end_time": 4248.951,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 4228.046,
"text": " Now, maybe that's not called a crime in the criminal system, but in any moral system that we can even talk about with a straight face, that's an incomparable crime. There is no criminal in human history who's been doing that. Not Hitler, not Genghis Khan, not anyone."
}
]
}No transcript available.