Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

So to go back to the original question, I don’t think we can reasonably doubt that moral values are indeed rooted in our nature. MAN: Then if people do have this shared set of moral values, you still have to explain why everything is as corrupt and hierarchical and war-laden as it is. But why not ask another question? Why not ask how come there’s so much sympathy, and care, and love, and solidarity? I mean, that’s also true. MAN: That’s the way I always answer the objection—there should be none of those things, because the institutions don’t breed them. Well, there’s no such thing as, “why is there so much of this and so much of that?”—there is what there is. But what there is doubtless is conditioned by the opportunities and choices that are imposed and available to people under particular social, cultural, economic, and even physical settings. So the point is to try to get to a situation where the society and all its institutions and arrangements are set up so as to maximize the options for people to pursue the healthier alternatives. And I really don’t think there’s been a better period in modern history for organizing towards that than there is right now, actually. I mean, there’s tremendous disillusionment all across the country—and it’s world-wide incidentally: there have been cross-national studies of this, and the level of pessimism across the entire industrial world is just extraordinary. In the United States, for example, about three-quarters of the population th...