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Noam Chomsky on Jordan Peterson, Post-Modernism, Foucault and Ali G
July 2, 2020
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The establishment left has just dropped entirely. So the Democratic Party, whatever that is, abandoned the working class generation ago. Okay, let's get straight into the questions. Is that all right?
Oh, yeah. Okay, so Peter, you can mute your mic if you don't mind. Got it. Okay. Okay. So what I wanted to know is the first I wanted to define the left and essentially the way that I'm going to do that is by asking you what are the traits in the left, the left political left in the past century that have changed and what's remained the same as far as you can tell? Well, of course, the left has moved consistently to new issues that weren't
even noticed before. So if you go back a century, well, there were elements of the left that you could call, say, feminist. It's nothing like the dominant element in left politics that exists today. You go back 20 years ago, there was very little concern about the environment.
Now the left recognizes that it's an existential problem. On the other hand, and so there are many cases in which there's been progress in understanding and dedicated work. There are other cases in which there's regression. So go back not very far, a couple of decades of labor organizing.
was a major issue for the left. It was recognized and understood that the driving force in any social and political economic change is going to be an organized working class. That's been, well, it depends what you call the left, but the establishment left has just dropped entirely. So the Democratic Party, whatever that is,
abandoned the working class a generation ago, handed over their class enemy. Activists on the left have become engaged justifiably with issues that are sometimes called identity politics. Those are real issues, have to be dealt with. But class issues have been subordinated, marginalized, and they're very real.
What is your opinion on identity politics? The issues are significant. They have to
Each type of identity politics cannot dominate a commitment of an organized left that hopes to achieve things. They have to interact, be mutually supportive, and they have to crucially bring in the class issues that have been subordinated. Actually, the most active, extreme form of identity politics is white nationalism.
Something I'm trying to determine with my research is when does the left go too far and when does the right go too far politically speaking? And I wanted to know what your opinion is on that. Just to pick the issues. I mean, the right at this point is simply suicidal. It's not a question of going too far. The right is committed to destruction of organized human society.
Is that an extreme statement? Maybe, but it's correct. Just take a look at the Republican Party. What is the Republican Party committed to? It's committed to destroying human life, not in the long term. The Paris agreements a couple of years ago, they weren't fabulous, but they were something at least. Their original
create a treaty in which there would be verifiable commitments to some measures to avert the huge threat of global warming. Couldn't get a treaty. It had to be a voluntary agreement. Why? Republican senators wouldn't accept it. They take the Republican primary in 2016. Every single candidate, without exception,
either denied that global warming is taking place or else said, maybe it is, but we don't care. John Kasich, who was governor of Ohio, who is considered the real moderate of the group, said, yeah, we recognize that global warming is taking place and it's serious, but we in Ohio are going to use our coal and we're not going to apologize for it. That's the moderate Republican.
Then you go over to the White House, you have total maniacs. People that say, we don't care. I said, we'll destroy the world, but we'll have profit tomorrow. And are leading the way towards destruction, consciously aware of what they're doing. No secret about it. Easy to demonstrate. How far ahead is this? I mean, there are no words for it. One question. What about the left? When does the left go too far?
It's not a matter of going too far. It's a matter of making tactical decisions that are incorrect. It may be that some of the goals are debatable. We can talk about that. But insofar as they're the kinds of goals that we think we can support, you have to ask whether the tactics that are used are well-designed to meet those goals or else undermine the goals.
So let's take concrete cases. As you know, I was very active in the anti-war movement, resistance movement, during the 1960s. I had contact with Vietnamese. The Vietnamese were appalled by some of the tactics that were being used. I remember meetings where the Vietnamese would plead with American activists not to do things like what the weathermen are doing.
A lot of young people, many of them I knew, were perfectly sincere. They thought that the way to end the war is to smash up windows on Main Street. It's not the way to end the war. That was the way to enrage construction workers and others so they'd be more pro-war than they were before. The Vietnamese didn't care whether Americans felt good. They cared whether they could survive. So what they advocated were
measures so mild that a lot of the war movement would just laugh at them. But that's the kind of choice that has to be made all the time. I can give you many examples today. So going too far, I think the way we should rephrase that is picking tactics that are going to undermine the perhaps legitimate and just goals that you say you're advocating.
On the discussion of the left and the right, in terms of their differences and their similarities, oftentimes the left are characterized as being pro-government and the right is characterized as being pro-corporation. And you have written about the revolving door between the two, between regulators and the regulator, in your book like Manufacturing Consent. Now, does this blur the line of what it means
Did they ever exist? I mean, let's take being pro or anti-government. That's not a general position of the left. That's a tactical choice in particular circumstances. So when you have a state like the United States that's largely dominated by private tyrannies with very little of
public voice. In that particular circumstance, the option available to you to overcome this is governmental action, which at least to some extent is responsive to public opinion. In other circumstances, when you're trying to construct a really libertarian left participatory society, you might want to dissolve governmental structures as illegitimate
The United States is unusual. It's just different from other developed societies in many respects. One respect is it barely has public media. Media are privatized, overwhelming.
So nothing like the BBC or anything like that. We can look at why this happened. Certainly not implicit in US history. Like the founders of the country, the framers, I believe they interpreted the First Amendment very differently than the way we do. They thought it meant that the government ought to take an active role in sponsoring a free and independent press. That's why we have the post office, for example.
In its early years, the post office was almost totally devoted to providing the cheap, free subsidies to a wide variety of journals and newspapers to encourage a varied, free, independent press. Over the years, the
power, private power in the United States, which is quite unusual, managed to privatize radio, television, and more recently the internet. Yes, in those circumstances, it would make sense to call for a public voice. Under other circumstances, you might want to have local-based, worker-based, community-based media.
and there's many other such questions. You're a self-described anarchist and I'd like to know what is the difference between your beliefs and contemporary libertarianism? Well, first of all, what's called libertarian in the United States is some ultra-right advocacy of private tyrannies. It's nothing like anything that was libertarian traditionally. But if you're talking about left libertarian,
It covers quite a range, but just as the term anarchism does. But there is a kind of a core at the center of it, I think. The core running through the whole tradition, with many variations, is the recognition that there are certain structures in social, political life, economic life, that
have to justify their own legitimacy. They are coercive, authoritarian. There's hierarchy, domination. Somebody gives the order, somebody takes them. None of those structures are self-justifying. They have a burden of justification. If they can't meet it, which is almost always the case, they should be dismantled. I think that's the core principle.
And my own view is that once you get to the basics, almost every normal person is an anarchist in this sense. But then you have to ask how it applies. So do you have a job somewhere? Well, if you have a job in a business corporation, let's say, you're living in a tyranny so extreme that no totalitarian dictator ever dreamed of it.
So for example, Stalin didn't tell people that you have 10 minutes to go to the bathroom every couple hours. You have to wear these clothes, not some other clothes. You're not allowed to stop to talk to a friend for a minute. Your monitor, say at an Amazon warehouse, so that if you don't pick up enough things fast enough, you
like maybe you stop to breathe or something, you get a demerit. There was no totalitarian dictatorship like that. That's most of people's lives. Well, is that a legitimate structure? Is the labor contract legitimate? Actually, traditional classical liberals didn't think so. Abraham Lincoln didn't think so. The Republican Party didn't think so.
The Republican Party's slogan in the mid-19th century, early Industrial Revolution, was that wage labor is indistinguishable from slavery, except that it's supposed to be temporary until you become a free person again. Well, okay, those ideas have been driven out of people's heads, but I don't think they're very far below the surface. They can emerge, and that would be authentic left libertarianism in just one aspect.
So it seems like you overlap with regards to free exchange of speech and ideas, and I remember a while ago you defended a Holocaust denier, and I wanted to know if you still stand by that? Defending a Holocaust denier? Defending his freedom of speech? Sure. I mean, this is just standard classical liberalism. There's two choices.
some form of power and authority, typically the state or other, determines what's true and punishes any deviation from what it claims is true, or else you allow views to be expressed that you don't like. In fact, if you really believe in freedom of speech, the only issues are, do I allow speech that I don't like? Hitler and Stalin had nothing against speech that they liked.
Nowadays, there's this trans rights versus free speech debate. I want to know what you think about that. Where do you lie on that? Let's talk about Holocaust denial for another minute. Holocaust denial is the norm in Western society. So, just to take an example, a couple of years ago, an article appeared in the New York Review
major journal of left liberalism, in which the author, a good, decent left liberal, was reviewing a book by a major American historian. He said in his review, he was interested to learn that when the early explorers came to the Western Hemisphere, there were only about a million people from the tropical forests to the frozen north.
He was off by about 60 or 70 million who were wiped out, said Holocaust denial. Did anybody say he should be imprisoned? Did anybody even notice? I mean, these things happen all the time. It's a particular form that we don't like, that somebody doesn't like, that's considered, that has to be suppressed. And that's worth keeping in mind when you talk about Holocaust denial.
Hmm. So it seems like you have some similarities with Jordan Peterson on this issue, and I know that you haven't talked much about Jordan Peterson, and I wanted to know if you had any disagreements with what he says. Frankly, I pay very little attention, but if you want to know about Jordan Peterson, I think the best thing I can refer you to is an article by Nathan
There are some issues on which I probably agree with Hitler. No, it doesn't mean much.
On that subject, I think it's Aristotle who says that people get the governments they deserve. Aristotle said that people get the governments they deserve. Is this what you're implying, but for intellectuals? No, I don't think people get the government they deserve. They get the government that power systems impose. That's quite different. On the systems of power, you had mentioned in
The idea that large-scale bureaucracies will ally with other large-scale bureaucracies to sort of maintain a status quo and to aid each other and that when a company like when a media company for example tries true journalism these large bureaucracies be either the government or corporations will give the media company flak and sort of cease to work with them. My question for you is
My question for you is, does the principle of bureaucratic affinity apply to educational institutions like large universities? To a varying extent. It depends on the university, it depends on the time and the era. In our current situation, current circumstances, with all their flaws, the universities are one of the
blessed bastions of relative freedom of expression and research, even of worker self-government to a certain extent. The faculty at a university has a degree of control over their working lives, which is very rare in the existing socio-political system. So I don't think you can answer a simple yes or no. By comparative standards, there
Relatively, they have flaws. So, for example, if you take a look at the American university system, well, about just a few years ago, you couldn't find a Marxist professor anywhere. Any other country in the world, they'd be all over the place, not here.
May I ask what do you attribute that to? In your in past comments you had mentioned how academics maintain a sort of status quo as opposed to being the sort of radicals that they display themselves as. Do you find that still true or do you find that academics are changing? Well,
And there's a kind of an ebb and flow. I think it's less true than it was 50 or 60 years ago, but it's more true than it ought to be. And it's not just academics, it's intellectuals generally. You look over the whole history of intellectuals for a couple of thousand years, in fact, and you find that overwhelmingly, they tended to support power systems.
There are a few who don't, and they're usually treated pretty harshly. In fact, just take the term intellectual in its modern sense was first used at the time of the Dreyfus trial in France, late 19th century. Most of the intellectuals, the prestigious intellectuals, the ones of the French Academy and so on, bitterly condemned the Dreyfus Arts. How dare these writers and artists
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Question the majesty of our army states and so on. There were a few like Emile Zola, a couple of others who stood up against it. They were persecuted.
And we may honor them today, but not at the time. Emile Zola had to flee France. That's the record in one form or another, all through history. So in fact, shortly after this First World War came along, it was very dramatic to see what happened to the intellectual classes during this, including the left during the First World War. In every single country, Germany,
France, England, the United States. The intellectuals lined up almost 100% in passionate support of their own country. The ones who didn't, many of them ended up in jail, like Bertrand Russell, Rosa Luxemburg, Gene Debs. That's the pattern.
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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. We're back, we're back. Peter, do you want to repeat the question super quick? Just my wife.
Hi, thank you. Thank you. Hello, Professor Noam Chomsky's wife. Okay. The question in summary was, in manufacturing consent, you teach us that big media is allied with the government and corporate elites. And as a result, the framework of big media's discussion fits comfortably in a propaganda model, an acceptable framework on how to analyze problems and talk about issues.
Well, if academia itself is allied with government and corporate elites, then wouldn't they also fit a propaganda model? And if not, what makes them so unique? Well, for one thing, there's several things that are, to some extent it's true, but notice that the relation of media to say corporate elites is very different from the relation of universities to corporate elites.
In the case of media, it's just that's what they are. The media are major corporations, parts of bigger corporations, flow in and out of government, very heavily subject to government edicts and so on. The universities have the same influences, but much less so.
of a university to corporations is, can I get a grant? Will there be a donor who will be willing to build a building or something? That's very different from being a part of the corporate system, which already allows a little flexibility. Also, we should not underestimate the fact that there is a
a sense of professionalism and intellectual responsibility. That's true in the media too. There are serious journalists, many of them who understand the system very well, they didn't have to hear it from us, and who try to find ways to combat it. And it happens. Now in the media they tend to be marginalized and eliminated, you know, sent to the
Some people have suggested that we should remove universities.
Listen to what Jordan Peterson is saying. He's saying universities are dominated by the left. For him, the left is anybody to the left of Attila the Hun. In fact, universities are dominated by the right. He's so
But does it make sense to tell students not to go to universities? It's crazy. It's one of the places where you can, there's lots of things wrong, but there are resources and opportunities that simply don't exist anywhere else. There are opportunities to become a free, independent, creative individual working with others that you just don't have elsewhere.
Sorry, I misspoke. I didn't mean to suggest that he suggested to eliminate the universities. I'm more trying to convey the decentralizing of universities. So for example, an online school. There's a lot you miss in an online school, your peers. One of the big parts of education is the students you're with, that those kinds of interactions
It's very important for educating oneself. Anybody who's been through a school or university situation knows how you can learn more from interaction with your peers than from sitting in on a lecture. Even interaction with the faculty. So it's one thing to sit in a lecture class or watch a television screen, and it's another thing to be in an actual class where you're interacting with other students and with the faculty.
What are your thoughts on the Christian anarchist Ivan Illich and his rise in popularity
I sort of understand some of the motivation for it, but the de-schooling society is taking away from people some of their major opportunities for individual growth and social interaction and even general activism. I mean it's not
of many of the most important social movements. Partly it's just because young people are a period of their life when they're relatively free, but it's also the fact that they're together. They can talk with one another. They can interact. That's something that's pretty much missing and atomized in capitalist society. Then I'm running into a little bit of a confusion here.
On the one hand, the history of intellectuals and academia sort of lines up with the status quo, in the sense that we were talking about Nazism and things before. But on the other hand, they're on the forefront of social change. How are these views compatible? Their participants are in the forefront of social change. The mainstream may be
status quo and conservative, which it is, is take a look at student activism. It's usually opposed by the administration and most of the faculty, but nevertheless it takes place because this is a relatively free institution, which means that there are opportunities to break out of the doctrinaire system of attempted writ orientation. You know, we're not living in
totalitarian dictatorships where if you say the wrong thing you get sent to the concentration camp. We're living in societies with a relative degree of freedom, often infringed by authoritarian structures, but they don't have the kind of force they do if the SS troops are standing behind you. We shouldn't compare ourselves with that.
In that case, what is an anarcho-syndicalist's take on education, on what it should look like and what needs to change from how it is now to how it should be? Actually, the anarchist movement, not just the anarcho-syndicalists, were in the forefront of developing progressive education systems. So, for example, in Spain, where the 1936 revolution was
of the most successful, so for example, of the anarchist revolution. I was preceded by decades of educational efforts in villages and towns everywhere, trying to create a free, liberatory environment in which students could find their own ways, their creativity would be sponsored, they would work jointly with one another, very similar to progressive education tendencies of John Dewey's and others.
which I happened to benefit from as a child. In fact, whether you were taught that way or as well. So yes, anarchist education has been very progressive. There's also people like Paulo Freire who argued
I think that's the kind of direction that education should take, the course that should follow and does in the better places.
Do you feel that if education is too centralized, these alternative platforms will be sidelined, neglected in the public sphere? Or for example, in universities that student participation would get minimalized? I don't think there's a simple answer. You could have a public education system which fosters individual creativity,
You could have a scattered system of charter schools which are business run and which impose discipline. It depends on the educational program, not whether it's central or not. It depends. Okay, I have a question that either you would think is completely polar opposite or that they completely overlap. What were you thinking during your interview, your conversation with Foucault? And what were you thinking during your conversation with Ali G?
I didn't hear the first one. With Foucault and with Ali G. Well, it was quite different. In the case of Ali G, I was not particularly interested in the interview, but I think it was the BBC, whoever was behind it, gave me a big song and dance about it. It was going to be a very serious interview, and so I finally agreed. As soon as he walked in, I realized this is a joke. I cried to be polite.
had a hard time with it and take it seriously. You mean to say you realized that it was a joke or you felt like the whole interview was a joke and you thought he was for real? The whole thing was obviously some kind of an effort at comedy, which I didn't want to be part of. And I perfectly, I mean, it was on the tip of my tongue saying, look, this is enough. Let's terminate it.
a large part
I know you're a busy person. I only have two more questions and they're super quick. One is, what are your thoughts on postmodernism? What do you agree with and what do you disagree with? For about a couple of decades,
I've had a very simple question that I've been posing to my postmodern friends. Can you find something in postmodernism which is not either a triviality cloaked in polysyllables or is false? And nobody's answered it yet. So that's about all I can say.
Okay, and then my last question was, you're extremely prolific. You've written, I think, over a hundred books, at least on politics, and then many more on other subjects. How do you structure your day? What's your productivity look like? Your routine? Right now, since my wife Valeria and I moved to Arizona, I'm not living in Cambridge anymore. My routine is to get up early in the morning, take our dogs out,
start looking at the huge quantity of email that would pile up if I can get rid of that, get to work on serious things. Ah, but did you clean your room? I'm just kidding. I said, ah, but did you clean your room? Clean my room? Jordan Peterson reference. There's very little oxygen in the room. It's mostly books and papers. It's not much clean.
Thank you so much, Professor, and thank you. What's your wife's name? Valeria? Valeria. Valeria. Hi. Hi. Thank you so much. Thank you. I'll send you a link to this interview as well. I'll give you a copy of the interview. Sure. Okay. Thank you. I appreciate it. Have a great day. Go back to playing with your dogs and make sure you clean up your room because I think that's the most important. I think that's more important than writing books.
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"text": " What is your opinion on identity politics? The issues are significant. They have to"
},
{
"end_time": 344.684,
"index": 13,
"start_time": 316.493,
"text": " Each type of identity politics cannot dominate a commitment of an organized left that hopes to achieve things. They have to interact, be mutually supportive, and they have to crucially bring in the class issues that have been subordinated. Actually, the most active, extreme form of identity politics is white nationalism."
},
{
"end_time": 373.217,
"index": 14,
"start_time": 346.92,
"text": " Something I'm trying to determine with my research is when does the left go too far and when does the right go too far politically speaking? And I wanted to know what your opinion is on that. Just to pick the issues. I mean, the right at this point is simply suicidal. It's not a question of going too far. The right is committed to destruction of organized human society."
},
{
"end_time": 399.77,
"index": 15,
"start_time": 374.019,
"text": " Is that an extreme statement? Maybe, but it's correct. Just take a look at the Republican Party. What is the Republican Party committed to? It's committed to destroying human life, not in the long term. The Paris agreements a couple of years ago, they weren't fabulous, but they were something at least. Their original"
},
{
"end_time": 431.817,
"index": 16,
"start_time": 402.739,
"text": " create a treaty in which there would be verifiable commitments to some measures to avert the huge threat of global warming. Couldn't get a treaty. It had to be a voluntary agreement. Why? Republican senators wouldn't accept it. They take the Republican primary in 2016. Every single candidate, without exception,"
},
{
"end_time": 459.838,
"index": 17,
"start_time": 432.381,
"text": " either denied that global warming is taking place or else said, maybe it is, but we don't care. John Kasich, who was governor of Ohio, who is considered the real moderate of the group, said, yeah, we recognize that global warming is taking place and it's serious, but we in Ohio are going to use our coal and we're not going to apologize for it. That's the moderate Republican."
},
{
"end_time": 487.346,
"index": 18,
"start_time": 460.179,
"text": " Then you go over to the White House, you have total maniacs. People that say, we don't care. I said, we'll destroy the world, but we'll have profit tomorrow. And are leading the way towards destruction, consciously aware of what they're doing. No secret about it. Easy to demonstrate. How far ahead is this? I mean, there are no words for it. One question. What about the left? When does the left go too far?"
},
{
"end_time": 518.166,
"index": 19,
"start_time": 489.053,
"text": " It's not a matter of going too far. It's a matter of making tactical decisions that are incorrect. It may be that some of the goals are debatable. We can talk about that. But insofar as they're the kinds of goals that we think we can support, you have to ask whether the tactics that are used are well-designed to meet those goals or else undermine the goals."
},
{
"end_time": 548.456,
"index": 20,
"start_time": 518.592,
"text": " So let's take concrete cases. As you know, I was very active in the anti-war movement, resistance movement, during the 1960s. I had contact with Vietnamese. The Vietnamese were appalled by some of the tactics that were being used. I remember meetings where the Vietnamese would plead with American activists not to do things like what the weathermen are doing."
},
{
"end_time": 577.193,
"index": 21,
"start_time": 548.933,
"text": " A lot of young people, many of them I knew, were perfectly sincere. They thought that the way to end the war is to smash up windows on Main Street. It's not the way to end the war. That was the way to enrage construction workers and others so they'd be more pro-war than they were before. The Vietnamese didn't care whether Americans felt good. They cared whether they could survive. So what they advocated were"
},
{
"end_time": 602.483,
"index": 22,
"start_time": 577.619,
"text": " measures so mild that a lot of the war movement would just laugh at them. But that's the kind of choice that has to be made all the time. I can give you many examples today. So going too far, I think the way we should rephrase that is picking tactics that are going to undermine the perhaps legitimate and just goals that you say you're advocating."
},
{
"end_time": 632.517,
"index": 23,
"start_time": 604.906,
"text": " On the discussion of the left and the right, in terms of their differences and their similarities, oftentimes the left are characterized as being pro-government and the right is characterized as being pro-corporation. And you have written about the revolving door between the two, between regulators and the regulator, in your book like Manufacturing Consent. Now, does this blur the line of what it means"
},
{
"end_time": 664.292,
"index": 24,
"start_time": 634.753,
"text": " Did they ever exist? I mean, let's take being pro or anti-government. That's not a general position of the left. That's a tactical choice in particular circumstances. So when you have a state like the United States that's largely dominated by private tyrannies with very little of"
},
{
"end_time": 694.65,
"index": 25,
"start_time": 664.787,
"text": " public voice. In that particular circumstance, the option available to you to overcome this is governmental action, which at least to some extent is responsive to public opinion. In other circumstances, when you're trying to construct a really libertarian left participatory society, you might want to dissolve governmental structures as illegitimate"
},
{
"end_time": 719.07,
"index": 26,
"start_time": 697.022,
"text": " The United States is unusual. It's just different from other developed societies in many respects. One respect is it barely has public media. Media are privatized, overwhelming."
},
{
"end_time": 752.944,
"index": 27,
"start_time": 724.309,
"text": " So nothing like the BBC or anything like that. We can look at why this happened. Certainly not implicit in US history. Like the founders of the country, the framers, I believe they interpreted the First Amendment very differently than the way we do. They thought it meant that the government ought to take an active role in sponsoring a free and independent press. That's why we have the post office, for example."
},
{
"end_time": 773.763,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 753.677,
"text": " In its early years, the post office was almost totally devoted to providing the cheap, free subsidies to a wide variety of journals and newspapers to encourage a varied, free, independent press. Over the years, the"
},
{
"end_time": 801.937,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 774.548,
"text": " power, private power in the United States, which is quite unusual, managed to privatize radio, television, and more recently the internet. Yes, in those circumstances, it would make sense to call for a public voice. Under other circumstances, you might want to have local-based, worker-based, community-based media."
},
{
"end_time": 832.551,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 802.739,
"text": " and there's many other such questions. You're a self-described anarchist and I'd like to know what is the difference between your beliefs and contemporary libertarianism? Well, first of all, what's called libertarian in the United States is some ultra-right advocacy of private tyrannies. It's nothing like anything that was libertarian traditionally. But if you're talking about left libertarian,"
},
{
"end_time": 862.261,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 832.995,
"text": " It covers quite a range, but just as the term anarchism does. But there is a kind of a core at the center of it, I think. The core running through the whole tradition, with many variations, is the recognition that there are certain structures in social, political life, economic life, that"
},
{
"end_time": 892.671,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 862.773,
"text": " have to justify their own legitimacy. They are coercive, authoritarian. There's hierarchy, domination. Somebody gives the order, somebody takes them. None of those structures are self-justifying. They have a burden of justification. If they can't meet it, which is almost always the case, they should be dismantled. I think that's the core principle."
},
{
"end_time": 917.722,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 892.961,
"text": " And my own view is that once you get to the basics, almost every normal person is an anarchist in this sense. But then you have to ask how it applies. So do you have a job somewhere? Well, if you have a job in a business corporation, let's say, you're living in a tyranny so extreme that no totalitarian dictator ever dreamed of it."
},
{
"end_time": 938.507,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 918.148,
"text": " So for example, Stalin didn't tell people that you have 10 minutes to go to the bathroom every couple hours. You have to wear these clothes, not some other clothes. You're not allowed to stop to talk to a friend for a minute. Your monitor, say at an Amazon warehouse, so that if you don't pick up enough things fast enough, you"
},
{
"end_time": 963.2,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 938.831,
"text": " like maybe you stop to breathe or something, you get a demerit. There was no totalitarian dictatorship like that. That's most of people's lives. Well, is that a legitimate structure? Is the labor contract legitimate? Actually, traditional classical liberals didn't think so. Abraham Lincoln didn't think so. The Republican Party didn't think so."
},
{
"end_time": 993.131,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 963.695,
"text": " The Republican Party's slogan in the mid-19th century, early Industrial Revolution, was that wage labor is indistinguishable from slavery, except that it's supposed to be temporary until you become a free person again. Well, okay, those ideas have been driven out of people's heads, but I don't think they're very far below the surface. They can emerge, and that would be authentic left libertarianism in just one aspect."
},
{
"end_time": 1020.776,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 993.797,
"text": " So it seems like you overlap with regards to free exchange of speech and ideas, and I remember a while ago you defended a Holocaust denier, and I wanted to know if you still stand by that? Defending a Holocaust denier? Defending his freedom of speech? Sure. I mean, this is just standard classical liberalism. There's two choices."
},
{
"end_time": 1050.998,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 1021.561,
"text": " some form of power and authority, typically the state or other, determines what's true and punishes any deviation from what it claims is true, or else you allow views to be expressed that you don't like. In fact, if you really believe in freedom of speech, the only issues are, do I allow speech that I don't like? Hitler and Stalin had nothing against speech that they liked."
},
{
"end_time": 1083.831,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 1054.428,
"text": " Nowadays, there's this trans rights versus free speech debate. I want to know what you think about that. Where do you lie on that? Let's talk about Holocaust denial for another minute. Holocaust denial is the norm in Western society. So, just to take an example, a couple of years ago, an article appeared in the New York Review"
},
{
"end_time": 1113.046,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 1083.985,
"text": " major journal of left liberalism, in which the author, a good, decent left liberal, was reviewing a book by a major American historian. He said in his review, he was interested to learn that when the early explorers came to the Western Hemisphere, there were only about a million people from the tropical forests to the frozen north."
},
{
"end_time": 1142.312,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1113.575,
"text": " He was off by about 60 or 70 million who were wiped out, said Holocaust denial. Did anybody say he should be imprisoned? Did anybody even notice? I mean, these things happen all the time. It's a particular form that we don't like, that somebody doesn't like, that's considered, that has to be suppressed. And that's worth keeping in mind when you talk about Holocaust denial."
},
{
"end_time": 1169.394,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1143.456,
"text": " Hmm. So it seems like you have some similarities with Jordan Peterson on this issue, and I know that you haven't talked much about Jordan Peterson, and I wanted to know if you had any disagreements with what he says. Frankly, I pay very little attention, but if you want to know about Jordan Peterson, I think the best thing I can refer you to is an article by Nathan"
},
{
"end_time": 1192.142,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1171.135,
"text": " There are some issues on which I probably agree with Hitler. No, it doesn't mean much."
},
{
"end_time": 1224.104,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1194.258,
"text": " On that subject, I think it's Aristotle who says that people get the governments they deserve. Aristotle said that people get the governments they deserve. Is this what you're implying, but for intellectuals? No, I don't think people get the government they deserve. They get the government that power systems impose. That's quite different. On the systems of power, you had mentioned in"
},
{
"end_time": 1259.087,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1229.889,
"text": " The idea that large-scale bureaucracies will ally with other large-scale bureaucracies to sort of maintain a status quo and to aid each other and that when a company like when a media company for example tries true journalism these large bureaucracies be either the government or corporations will give the media company flak and sort of cease to work with them. My question for you is"
},
{
"end_time": 1290.196,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1260.657,
"text": " My question for you is, does the principle of bureaucratic affinity apply to educational institutions like large universities? To a varying extent. It depends on the university, it depends on the time and the era. In our current situation, current circumstances, with all their flaws, the universities are one of the"
},
{
"end_time": 1319.667,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1290.708,
"text": " blessed bastions of relative freedom of expression and research, even of worker self-government to a certain extent. The faculty at a university has a degree of control over their working lives, which is very rare in the existing socio-political system. So I don't think you can answer a simple yes or no. By comparative standards, there"
},
{
"end_time": 1341.169,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1320.435,
"text": " Relatively, they have flaws. So, for example, if you take a look at the American university system, well, about just a few years ago, you couldn't find a Marxist professor anywhere. Any other country in the world, they'd be all over the place, not here."
},
{
"end_time": 1370.026,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1344.189,
"text": " May I ask what do you attribute that to? In your in past comments you had mentioned how academics maintain a sort of status quo as opposed to being the sort of radicals that they display themselves as. Do you find that still true or do you find that academics are changing? Well,"
},
{
"end_time": 1395.179,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1370.469,
"text": " And there's a kind of an ebb and flow. I think it's less true than it was 50 or 60 years ago, but it's more true than it ought to be. And it's not just academics, it's intellectuals generally. You look over the whole history of intellectuals for a couple of thousand years, in fact, and you find that overwhelmingly, they tended to support power systems."
},
{
"end_time": 1424.701,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1395.674,
"text": " There are a few who don't, and they're usually treated pretty harshly. In fact, just take the term intellectual in its modern sense was first used at the time of the Dreyfus trial in France, late 19th century. Most of the intellectuals, the prestigious intellectuals, the ones of the French Academy and so on, bitterly condemned the Dreyfus Arts. How dare these writers and artists"
},
{
"end_time": 1453.285,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1425.23,
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},
{
"end_time": 1479.343,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1453.285,
"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": 1502.739,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1479.343,
"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": 1527.585,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1502.739,
"text": " Question the majesty of our army states and so on. There were a few like Emile Zola, a couple of others who stood up against it. They were persecuted."
},
{
"end_time": 1556.527,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1528.166,
"text": " And we may honor them today, but not at the time. Emile Zola had to flee France. That's the record in one form or another, all through history. So in fact, shortly after this First World War came along, it was very dramatic to see what happened to the intellectual classes during this, including the left during the First World War. In every single country, Germany,"
},
{
"end_time": 1576.988,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1557.278,
"text": " France, England, the United States. The intellectuals lined up almost 100% in passionate support of their own country. The ones who didn't, many of them ended up in jail, like Bertrand Russell, Rosa Luxemburg, Gene Debs. That's the pattern."
},
{
"end_time": 1597.415,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1579.616,
"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": 1625.896,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1597.415,
"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."
},
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"end_time": 1642.261,
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"start_time": 1625.896,
"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": 1668.422,
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"start_time": 1642.261,
"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. We're back, we're back. Peter, do you want to repeat the question super quick? Just my wife."
},
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"end_time": 1697.978,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1670.145,
"text": " Hi, thank you. Thank you. Hello, Professor Noam Chomsky's wife. Okay. The question in summary was, in manufacturing consent, you teach us that big media is allied with the government and corporate elites. And as a result, the framework of big media's discussion fits comfortably in a propaganda model, an acceptable framework on how to analyze problems and talk about issues."
},
{
"end_time": 1727.671,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1698.404,
"text": " Well, if academia itself is allied with government and corporate elites, then wouldn't they also fit a propaganda model? And if not, what makes them so unique? Well, for one thing, there's several things that are, to some extent it's true, but notice that the relation of media to say corporate elites is very different from the relation of universities to corporate elites."
},
{
"end_time": 1750.043,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1728.166,
"text": " In the case of media, it's just that's what they are. The media are major corporations, parts of bigger corporations, flow in and out of government, very heavily subject to government edicts and so on. The universities have the same influences, but much less so."
},
{
"end_time": 1773.114,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1751.135,
"text": " of a university to corporations is, can I get a grant? Will there be a donor who will be willing to build a building or something? That's very different from being a part of the corporate system, which already allows a little flexibility. Also, we should not underestimate the fact that there is a"
},
{
"end_time": 1802.654,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1773.626,
"text": " a sense of professionalism and intellectual responsibility. That's true in the media too. There are serious journalists, many of them who understand the system very well, they didn't have to hear it from us, and who try to find ways to combat it. And it happens. Now in the media they tend to be marginalized and eliminated, you know, sent to the"
},
{
"end_time": 1830.913,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1812.346,
"text": " Some people have suggested that we should remove universities."
},
{
"end_time": 1859.514,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1831.271,
"text": " Listen to what Jordan Peterson is saying. He's saying universities are dominated by the left. For him, the left is anybody to the left of Attila the Hun. In fact, universities are dominated by the right. He's so"
},
{
"end_time": 1889.002,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1862.517,
"text": " But does it make sense to tell students not to go to universities? It's crazy. It's one of the places where you can, there's lots of things wrong, but there are resources and opportunities that simply don't exist anywhere else. There are opportunities to become a free, independent, creative individual working with others that you just don't have elsewhere."
},
{
"end_time": 1915.384,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1889.36,
"text": " Sorry, I misspoke. I didn't mean to suggest that he suggested to eliminate the universities. I'm more trying to convey the decentralizing of universities. So for example, an online school. There's a lot you miss in an online school, your peers. One of the big parts of education is the students you're with, that those kinds of interactions"
},
{
"end_time": 1947.193,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1918.029,
"text": " It's very important for educating oneself. Anybody who's been through a school or university situation knows how you can learn more from interaction with your peers than from sitting in on a lecture. Even interaction with the faculty. So it's one thing to sit in a lecture class or watch a television screen, and it's another thing to be in an actual class where you're interacting with other students and with the faculty."
},
{
"end_time": 1976.971,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1947.637,
"text": " What are your thoughts on the Christian anarchist Ivan Illich and his rise in popularity"
},
{
"end_time": 2006.015,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1982.807,
"text": " I sort of understand some of the motivation for it, but the de-schooling society is taking away from people some of their major opportunities for individual growth and social interaction and even general activism. I mean it's not"
},
{
"end_time": 2041.391,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 2015.725,
"text": " of many of the most important social movements. Partly it's just because young people are a period of their life when they're relatively free, but it's also the fact that they're together. They can talk with one another. They can interact. That's something that's pretty much missing and atomized in capitalist society. Then I'm running into a little bit of a confusion here."
},
{
"end_time": 2070.026,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 2042.125,
"text": " On the one hand, the history of intellectuals and academia sort of lines up with the status quo, in the sense that we were talking about Nazism and things before. But on the other hand, they're on the forefront of social change. How are these views compatible? Their participants are in the forefront of social change. The mainstream may be"
},
{
"end_time": 2097.602,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 2070.435,
"text": " status quo and conservative, which it is, is take a look at student activism. It's usually opposed by the administration and most of the faculty, but nevertheless it takes place because this is a relatively free institution, which means that there are opportunities to break out of the doctrinaire system of attempted writ orientation. You know, we're not living in"
},
{
"end_time": 2122.654,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 2098.422,
"text": " totalitarian dictatorships where if you say the wrong thing you get sent to the concentration camp. We're living in societies with a relative degree of freedom, often infringed by authoritarian structures, but they don't have the kind of force they do if the SS troops are standing behind you. We shouldn't compare ourselves with that."
},
{
"end_time": 2150.64,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 2124.121,
"text": " In that case, what is an anarcho-syndicalist's take on education, on what it should look like and what needs to change from how it is now to how it should be? Actually, the anarchist movement, not just the anarcho-syndicalists, were in the forefront of developing progressive education systems. So, for example, in Spain, where the 1936 revolution was"
},
{
"end_time": 2181.63,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 2152.125,
"text": " of the most successful, so for example, of the anarchist revolution. I was preceded by decades of educational efforts in villages and towns everywhere, trying to create a free, liberatory environment in which students could find their own ways, their creativity would be sponsored, they would work jointly with one another, very similar to progressive education tendencies of John Dewey's and others."
},
{
"end_time": 2194.906,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2182.125,
"text": " which I happened to benefit from as a child. In fact, whether you were taught that way or as well. So yes, anarchist education has been very progressive. There's also people like Paulo Freire who argued"
},
{
"end_time": 2217.346,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2197.5,
"text": " I think that's the kind of direction that education should take, the course that should follow and does in the better places."
},
{
"end_time": 2247.705,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2219.565,
"text": " Do you feel that if education is too centralized, these alternative platforms will be sidelined, neglected in the public sphere? Or for example, in universities that student participation would get minimalized? I don't think there's a simple answer. You could have a public education system which fosters individual creativity,"
},
{
"end_time": 2280.111,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2251.988,
"text": " You could have a scattered system of charter schools which are business run and which impose discipline. It depends on the educational program, not whether it's central or not. It depends. Okay, I have a question that either you would think is completely polar opposite or that they completely overlap. What were you thinking during your interview, your conversation with Foucault? And what were you thinking during your conversation with Ali G?"
},
{
"end_time": 2309.445,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2281.886,
"text": " I didn't hear the first one. With Foucault and with Ali G. Well, it was quite different. In the case of Ali G, I was not particularly interested in the interview, but I think it was the BBC, whoever was behind it, gave me a big song and dance about it. It was going to be a very serious interview, and so I finally agreed. As soon as he walked in, I realized this is a joke. I cried to be polite."
},
{
"end_time": 2333.763,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2310.384,
"text": " had a hard time with it and take it seriously. You mean to say you realized that it was a joke or you felt like the whole interview was a joke and you thought he was for real? The whole thing was obviously some kind of an effort at comedy, which I didn't want to be part of. And I perfectly, I mean, it was on the tip of my tongue saying, look, this is enough. Let's terminate it."
},
{
"end_time": 2356.34,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2341.459,
"text": " a large part"
},
{
"end_time": 2403.319,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2374.36,
"text": " I know you're a busy person. I only have two more questions and they're super quick. One is, what are your thoughts on postmodernism? What do you agree with and what do you disagree with? For about a couple of decades,"
},
{
"end_time": 2427.005,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2403.746,
"text": " I've had a very simple question that I've been posing to my postmodern friends. Can you find something in postmodernism which is not either a triviality cloaked in polysyllables or is false? And nobody's answered it yet. So that's about all I can say."
},
{
"end_time": 2455.009,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2428.285,
"text": " Okay, and then my last question was, you're extremely prolific. You've written, I think, over a hundred books, at least on politics, and then many more on other subjects. How do you structure your day? What's your productivity look like? Your routine? Right now, since my wife Valeria and I moved to Arizona, I'm not living in Cambridge anymore. My routine is to get up early in the morning, take our dogs out,"
},
{
"end_time": 2484.445,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2459.002,
"text": " start looking at the huge quantity of email that would pile up if I can get rid of that, get to work on serious things. Ah, but did you clean your room? I'm just kidding. I said, ah, but did you clean your room? Clean my room? Jordan Peterson reference. There's very little oxygen in the room. It's mostly books and papers. It's not much clean."
},
{
"end_time": 2515.794,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2486.152,
"text": " Thank you so much, Professor, and thank you. What's your wife's name? Valeria? Valeria. Valeria. Hi. Hi. Thank you so much. Thank you. I'll send you a link to this interview as well. I'll give you a copy of the interview. Sure. Okay. Thank you. I appreciate it. Have a great day. Go back to playing with your dogs and make sure you clean up your room because I think that's the most important. I think that's more important than writing books."
},
{
"end_time": 2529.957,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2518.046,
"text": " Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Now what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull?"
},
{
"end_time": 2548.08,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2530.435,
"text": " Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plans where you can get a single line with everything you need. So bring in your bill to your local Miami Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal."
}
]
}No transcript available.