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#1. Conversación con Noam Chomsky - La responsabilidad de los intelectuales. — Transcript

by Mateus Bolson Ruzzarin - Mindshop · 5,449 words · 643 segments · language en · Watch on YouTube

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0:05Okay, great.
0:08Well, Professor, thanks for your time.
0:09First of all, thanks for seeing me.
0:11I'm really excited and nervous for this, but I'm glad- That's
0:17the end of the conversation.
0:18Yeah. I'm glad we finally made it happen.
0:23So I would like to ask a few questions.
0:29Are you Are you listening all right here? Yes.
0:32Okay, great.
0:34So the idea was for us to meet with the whole society,
0:39but because of the schedule and other matters, we can just chat here.
0:43So I'll send them the video later and I'll send them your regards.
0:48Okay?
0:50Right.
0:51So I wrote down some questions so we can have the conversation, all right?
0:56So my first question for you is about your academic trajectory.
1:01So I would like to hear a little bit about what key attitudes and strategies
1:07do you think an intellectual has to develop across the years
1:12to make good progress, to make substantial progress on his field.
1:16And personally speaking, how have you managed to stay motivated and focused
1:22on your work across these years?
1:25The only strategy I know is to find what you're interested in,
1:31what you find challenging and exciting, pursue it as best you can.
1:38My own personal trajectory is pretty chaotic.
1:44I never really had.
1:47I mean, I have formal degrees, but I never met the qualifications for any of them.
1:53When I was an undergraduate, I took almost no courses.
1:57I took a couple of graduate courses for I wasn't prepared, but the instructor
2:02was willing to let me in.
2:04At graduate school, I was essentially off on my own.
2:08Got a PhD by accident, but never did it.
2:16I just handed in some work I was doing, essentially.
2:19But I was very lucky.
2:21I had very outstanding people in the field who were willing
2:26to just let me go on my own way.
2:29So it worked fine. Amazing.
2:32You make it sound very easy.
2:37I suppose you found a deep love
2:42for the work, and you followed
2:45your intuition, your curiosities.
2:48Basically, in the early, when I was an undergraduate for the first couple
2:54of years, I assumed I was working with Zellik Harris leading professor
3:00and leading figure in theoretical linguistics, very impressive person.
3:06I was also taking courses with Nelson Goodman, an outstanding philosopher.
3:10We stayed and worked together.
3:14I stayed working with him for many years.
3:16The first couple of years, I more or less took for granted what seemed to be
3:22the right way to do things, was being in the new work that was coming out.
3:28Faculty members who I greatly respected, I assumed they
3:31must know what they're doing.
3:33On the side, I was working with my own hobbies, which just
3:40seemed to be something interesting to do, so I pursued them.
3:43And gradually, over the years, the balance shifted.
3:46The hobbies got more interesting.
3:49I saw more problems with the way work was being done
3:54and just moved over to the hobbies.
3:57Amazing.
3:58I have written about it if you're interested Definitely.
4:02So on this note, on the matter
4:07of intellectual research and inquiry,
4:11I read a letter you wrote on an Intellectuals in 1967.
4:17As news about human rights abuse came back to America about the Vietnam
4:22War, you wrote an essay called The Responsibility of Intellectuals.
4:28And in this essay, you mentioned that intellectuals were, in a way,
4:31largely subvenient to power.
4:34I was very interested on this idea, and I was wondering if you could
4:39elaborate a little bit on this and comment on it in this day and age.
4:45Well, if you look over the history of intellectuals,
4:49that's pretty much the story.
4:51We can go back to classical Greece and ask yourself, who drinks a hemlock?
4:59It was the man who was corrupting the youth of Athens by asking
5:05too many questions, not the ones who were following acceptable procedure.
5:12Has that ever changed?
5:14The term intellectual came into its modern
5:18use, time of the Dreyfus trial.
5:23The Dreyfusards were called intellectuals in the in a modern
5:30sense, dissident intellectuals.
5:33How are they treated?
5:36Bitterly, harshly, harshly condemned
5:39the immortals of the Académie Française,
5:44you know, How can you, writers and
5:48artists dare to criticize our magnificent
5:52institutions, the government, the state, the army, and so on?
5:57In fact, Anel Zola was forced to flee France, in fact.
6:02I mean, later, it's the Dreyfusards who were honored, not at the time.
6:08And I think that's the general pattern.
6:10It's hard to find an exception.
6:12So let's come up to this time that this article was written, 1967.
6:18Yeah, on the Vietnam War.
6:20The Vietnam War.
6:21It was very hard to organize, even protest at that time
6:26was just begarly beginning to that point.
6:29There were Critics of the war.
6:32George Bundy, who was the National Security Advisor for
6:38Kennedy and Johnson, former dean at Harvard,
6:40then head of the Ford Foundation, wrote an article in Foreign Affairs, where
6:47he talked about the war, and he said, there's a lot of problems with it.
6:50There's a lot of legitimate criticisms.
6:53We got the tactics wrong.
6:55We didn't understand this and that, and so on.
6:58All of that's legitimate.
6:59We to pay attention to it.
7:01And then he said, there are the wild men in the wings who not only
7:07question our tactics, but actually question our motives and look into
7:13planning and things like that.
7:15They're, of course, crazy lunatics.
7:18We're a free society, so we don't put them in the gulag, but we can dismiss them.
7:24They're the critical intellectuals, the ones that follow the rules.
7:29And And it goes right to the present.
7:32Yeah, definitely.
7:34I completely agree with you.
7:35And thinking about this, I remember as I was a graduate student
7:41in studying philosophy, I read well, not graduate, undergraduate student
7:46studying philosophy.
7:47I read a famous essay by Cant, by Manuel Cant on the Enlight.
7:52And on the first few paragraphs, he defines enlightenment as being
7:58the self-release the release of our self-imposed shackles in a way.
8:03And he was meaning, of course, of shackles of religion, of dog mind in some ways.
8:10Do you think, on this note, how Could
8:15intellectuals, widespread intellectuals,
8:18not only a select few, could be released from these shackles in a way?
8:23Because in the end, intellectuals, in one way or the other, they belong to
8:28an academic department or a university?
8:31And how could this work?
8:34How could this freedom of...
8:38I don't know how to put it. You know what I mean?
8:40The only way is to do it.
8:43It's a question everywhere.
8:45I'm not much in the sciences, but even there.
8:48So for example, there are famous cases, even in recent times when
8:56leading physicists were almost shut out of the mission
9:00because of their unorthodox views.
9:02David Bohm is a famous case.
9:04Later, later years, his views became more acceptable.
9:09Some just dropped out of the field.
9:11They forgot his name.
9:12But the physicists to first propose the concept of multiverses,
9:19which is now not uncommon.
9:22He actually just left the field because of the way he was treated, and protests,
9:28and crazy man, and so So it does exist in the sciences, but it's marginal.
9:33And the sciences are mostly the, at least in the advanced sciences, there's a
9:39fairly solid basis of understanding that people assume you just have to have
9:44and you're not participating in the field, and that's accepted.
9:49You go to a quantum theory conference, which I've done, and there's debates
9:54and discussions, but fundamentally, agreement over a very wide range
10:00because it's solidly established.
10:02It wouldn't make sense to question it.
10:05Somebody might come along and say, look, let's look at things
10:08in a totally different way, but they wouldn't be ordinary.
10:11They just laughed at.
10:13But as you move to the fields
10:14with both less solid substance and
10:21more pertinence to human affairs, the two
10:25tend to go together, then it changes.
10:28The closer you are to dealing with human affairs, the harder it is to break ranks,
10:35because there's so many pressures forcing things in one direction.
10:39It's not impossible.
10:40There are people who do it.
10:42You can survive many don't, and you can be subjected to unpleasant treatment
10:49in many ways, vilification, denunciation,
10:54sometimes worse, loss of career.
10:57There are such people, but It's the academic field remains
11:04reasonably open by comparative standards.
11:08You have a fair degree of freedom as compared with other institutional
11:13settings in this or other societies.
11:16Not perfect by any means, but there are possibilities.
11:21And in fact, in recent years, it's improved, I think.
11:27So a lot of things were very difficult
11:29in the '60s, '70s have now
11:34become much freer and more open.
11:36A lot of battles were won by activism and including dissenting intellectuals.
11:42Okay.
11:44Thank you very much.
11:45So changing subjects a little bit.
11:48Going on your latest book, the Climate Crisis and the Global Great New Deal.
11:54So you explore and shed light on probably the greatest catastrophe of our times,
12:00one of the greatest dangers.
12:01And one of the premises is that all the countries have to be in this
12:06together, everyone together, of course.
12:09But the problem that you actually state about underdeveloped countries
12:14is that we do not have the means to make the proper investments to make this work.
12:20And one of your proposals, together with your co-author, is that
12:25the high income countries should be the ones to pay for these investments
12:29on the low income countries.
12:31Could you elaborate on this idea and perhaps say a bit about how we
12:37could make something like this happen?
12:39Because after all, Mindshop, our knowledge society is from Latin America.
12:43So as people from this side of the world, we would like
12:46to understand how we can support this.
12:50Well, there are several kinds of answers.
12:53One is survival.
12:56If the less developed world does not
13:02participate, we're all dead.
13:05That's where maybe up to half the emissions are going to come from.
13:10So they have to participate.
13:12Second is moral.
13:15We're rich, they're less rich.
13:19We have a common task, therefore we should participate.
13:23The third is history.
13:25Why are we rich and they're poor?
13:29Well, There's a history.
13:31I don't know if I run through it.
13:33You mentioned Kant and the Enlightenment.
13:35It's a great essay.
13:37There's other sides to the Enlight.
13:40The Enlight was the period of conquest.
13:43It's the period in which Europe conquered the world by violence, mostly
13:49by violence, and carried out horrendous atrocities, shocking atrocities.
13:56By now, Europe includes its offshoots, the United States which leads
14:01the former Europe, the Western world.
14:03So take the United States and Latin America.
14:07Why is Latin America less developed than the United States?
14:12Well, partly because of the heavy hand of the United States.
14:16That's very explicit.
14:18It's not just, I mean, sometimes it's extreme violence,
14:22like simply violently overthrowing the government, Guatemala, Chile, supporting
14:29military coups, a plague of repression in Latin America since
14:34from the '60s through the '80s, mainly US, but sometimes it's direct policy.
14:40So for example, in 1945, when the US was essentially poised to
14:47replace Britain's role as leading international force take over the world.
14:54Us planners were quite sophisticated, careful.
14:57They planned different regions of the of what their function was and so on.
15:02When it got to Latin America, it was simply taken for granted
15:06that we don't have to...
15:09This is what Henry Stimson, Secretary of War, called Our Little Region over
15:14here, which has never bothered anyone.
15:17So there can't be any other regional alliances because we want a world
15:21that's open to our penetration.
15:23But our little region over here will set aside.
15:25We'll just take care of it.
15:27And in fact, if you look back February 1945, the United States
15:34called a meeting of Latin American leaders, all the countries in Mexico,
15:42Chultepec, Mexico, and The purpose of the meeting was
15:46to establish what was called an Economic Charter for the Americas,
15:51which the US was laying down.
15:54The Economic Charter is worth reading, and even the State Department
15:59explanations in the background.
16:03The goal, as the State Department put it, was to end economic nationalism
16:09in all its forms.
16:12They said there's a disease spreading through Latin America.
16:17They called it the philosophy of the new nationalism.
16:21The philosophy of the new nationalism is the idea, I'm quoting now, that the first
16:27beneficiaries of a country's resources should be the people of that country.
16:33That's heresy.
16:36Sound economics, so-called, tells us that the first beneficiaries
16:41should be those who can use it most efficiently, which is, of course, us.
16:47Our big multinationals can use it much more efficiently
16:50than those stupid, ignorant, backward peasants down in the South.
16:55So just for reasons of pure efficiency, benign, love for mankind,
17:02we have to be the first beneficiaries.
17:06And they also said that there's this
17:08equally heredical idea in Latin America,
17:14that policies should be oriented towards
17:17leading to equality and the distribution
17:22of resources to people who need them.
17:25That's not sound economics.
17:28Sound economics means maximize efficiency, make sure the markets work properly,
17:34which means we are to take everything because we can use it more efficiently.
17:38They didn't put it quite in those words before I was quoting.
17:42So in particular cases, they It's a Brazil,
17:45the most powerful country in the South.
17:48They can produce steel.
17:51That's okay.
17:52But they shouldn't have excessive production.
17:56In other words, they shouldn't produce high quality steel,
17:59which we can produce better.
18:01They should produce low quality.
18:03They steal the kind we're not that much interested in.
18:06Well, these were the general attitudes, and they're implemented.
18:12They're implemented step after step in That, by the way.
18:16That's why Latin America is one of the reasons why Latin America is poor.
18:21There's Indigenous internal reasons as well, which are worth
18:25looking at, very important.
18:27But there's also external reasons.
18:30And we have a lot to do with it.
18:32Even the internal reasons, we have a lot to do with.
18:36So one of the deep problems of Latin America, pretty general across the
18:41continent, is that Latin American elites have no responsibility for their country.
18:48They don't have to pay taxes.
18:50They can send their capital abroad, buy a home in the Riviera,
18:56send their kids to Harvard and Oxford.
18:59They They're not concerned with the country.
19:01It's very different from East Asian elites.
19:05They are responsible for the country.
19:08No capital export during the period of development.
19:12Have to target it investment domestically, policies of development, and so on.
19:19That's why East Asia developed, Latin America didn't.
19:22Latin America is much better poised for development than East Asia.
19:27There's much more resources, no external enemies, but the culture was wrong.
19:33Now, why are elites allowed to be responsible in Latin America?
19:38Because every time there's an attempt to create a more democratic society,
19:44the US came in and crushed it.
19:47Case after case.
19:49Don't have to run through the history for you.
19:52So the final answer to that is, it's our responsibility.
19:57Take a look at Europe and Africa.
20:00Same story.
20:02Middle East, mostly Europe in that case.
20:04Yes, France and England carved up
20:08the Middle East for their interests, not
20:11for the interests of the people there.
20:13Well, Now Europe wines when refugees flee from the countries that they've
20:19destroyed, and we wine when people flee from the countries we've destroyed.
20:25It's a very ugly picture.
20:28I have to agree with Pope Francis that the so-called Refugee Crisis
20:34is a moral crisis for the West.
20:37And getting back to your question, a lot of reasons why the West should be funding
20:43the best developed world in dealing with the problems
20:48of polluting and heating the atmosphere.
20:52Very powerful reasons, and it's not being done.
20:55In fact, it's worse than that.
20:57Let's take the immediate crisis.
21:00Yes.
21:00Not as serious as global warming, but the immediate one, the pandemic.
21:05There's vaccines.
21:07No vaccines have been distributed in places like Africa.
21:13Why?
21:13Because the West has the money, so they're purchasing the vaccines.
21:19Canada, which is supposed to be a more or less humane country by comparative
21:25standards, reportedly now has vaccines that about five times as much
21:31as they need for their own population.
21:34Meanwhile, in Africa, they don't have any.
21:36There is a international organization,
21:40COFAX, which is supposed to deal with
21:44distribution functional problems.
21:46Trump pulled out of it.
21:48I imagine Biden will probably go back into it.
21:51But even at COFAX, where they're trying to deal with them, they just can't
21:55get the rich countries to agree.
21:58They buy up vaccines to themselves.
22:02Well, that's a large part of history, one part of the enlightenment.
22:08Yeah, definitely.
22:09Like the legacy in some way, what was happening during that time.
22:15Yes, these are very complex problems to get away from very pretty ugly pictures.
22:22I actually don't think they're very complex.
22:25I think they're very simple.
22:27What's complex is trying to get people of privilege to do what they ought to do.
22:34Yeah.
22:35I mean, to get out of them, that's what I meant.
22:38The problems are straightforward.
22:40The solutions are in a way to getting people to do what they ought to do,
22:45the moral capacity on that side.
22:49So changing a little bit on a different subject that we also
22:55spoke briefly on emails.
22:59So Perhaps this is not...
23:01Well, it is an existential threat in some way, but definitely it's a new one.
23:07I'm talking about the concept of surveillance capitalism,
23:11of the threat of big data AI.
23:14And I would like to ask you about the role of technology in shaping the world,
23:20and how could we instead make an effort
23:23to shape better technology that doesn't
23:28invade so much human rights.
23:31So the obvious way would be to stop using some of these systems,
23:35but that's not really an option.
23:37What can people do against such powerful corporations in the sense of technology?
23:44Machine learning, artificial intelligence, and the next technologies to come?
23:51I think it's not so much a matter of technology as the matter
23:57of who uses it and how they use it.
24:00So technology, by and large, tends to be fairly neutral.
24:07You can use it for harm, you can use it for benefit.
24:10The question is, who has their hands on the lever?
24:14So you take a look at the Snowdon Revolutions, which are quite interesting.
24:19The ones that received most attention were
24:24that the NSA was spying on Americans.
24:30Picking up our communications, shouldn't be doing that.
24:34And laws were passed, which presumably constrained that.
24:38So it's claimed, probably not much.
24:41It was doing other things, too.
24:43The NSA was picking up private email conversations of foreign leaders.
24:51That actually led to a couple of international crises with Angela Merkel
24:56in Germany and Dilma Rousseff in Brazil.
24:59It was doing more than that.
25:03So there's now a big campaign in the United States to try to prevent Chinese
25:10economic and technological development.
25:14A lot to say about that.
25:16But one of the aspects of it is to try to destroy Huawei,
25:20the main-The main player on tech.
25:24Information systems.
25:27Corporation.
25:28In operation.
25:30In China.
25:31And the claim is it's dangerous to use them because they might
25:36have hidden devices which will pick up secrets in the countries where
25:41they're used, which is possible
25:43in Intelligence has worked very hard on that in many countries and can't find
25:48anything, but maybe they missed something.
25:51What about American technology?
25:53Should anybody use Microsoft or Apple?
25:57Are they doing anything like that?
26:00It'd be pretty surprising if they're not.
26:03One of the Snowdon revelations was that the CIA had managed
26:08to penetrate Huawei and was using
26:13the was using Huawei technology by
26:17their penetration to try to learn about the countries which were using Huawei.
26:24Huawei wasn't doing the surveillance.
26:28The CIA was through Huawei equipment in Iran, Venezuela, and other countries.
26:35That was part of the Snowdon revelations, too.
26:39Yes, all of this stuff is going on, should be curtailed, but it's a matter
26:44of controlling those with power.
26:47And it's not just the government.
26:50The major tech corporations are collecting tons of information
26:55about you every minute. Yes.
26:57If you have a cell phone, they're tracing you wherever you are.
27:02They're driving a car.
27:04The car manufacturers are picking up a ton of information.
27:08If we ever move to the so-called Internet of Things, your refrigerator
27:13will be picking up information about you, going straight to the big tech companies
27:18to use as they want for commercial purposes and also for control.
27:23So is that the world we want to live in?
27:27You want to see what it's like?
27:28Take a look at China, which has moved to the extreme.
27:32They have very...
27:34There are not everywhere, but there are cities in China which are most advanced
27:40or backward in these respects, depending on the way you look at it
27:46where surveillance is very tight.
27:48People have what are called credits.
27:52And if you do something wrong, your credit rating goes down.
27:55If you do something right, it goes up.
27:57You're under constant surveillance and control That's the world
28:02you can imagine we might be moving there, but it's our choice.
28:07Yes.
28:08This is actually my main interest in philosophy, more precisely
28:12in the ethics of technology.
28:14I of science and technology.
28:17And I'm afraid we're already moving in that direction in so many ways.
28:22And what worries me the most is that the machine learning
28:28and big data are technologies that are precursors to what's coming
28:32next, which is artificial intelligence.
28:34I'm not talking about specifically general artificial intelligence.
28:38I'm talking about a weak or soft artificial intelligence.
28:42But they will be very powerful tools.
28:46I think there's going to be a level of power that we haven't seen before.
28:50And just last week, well, a few days ago, The Guardian published
28:55an article about the US Congress about talking about developing artificial
29:02intelligence weapons, and that they actually have a moral
29:05imperative to develop these weapons.
29:08And they claim that this is because they would be more precise and
29:13heard less civilians But there's people that are skeptics on this.
29:17And because of the, again, the word efficiency, because they have
29:20to take decisions quickly, people might be in danger.
29:25What do you think about...
29:27Have you read about this?
29:29Have Have you thought about this? Very dangerous.
29:32The most dangerous at all, which might be totally species suicide,
29:37is automating the systems for detecting potential missile attacks.
29:45We know from the record that the automated systems that we have,
29:51have failed over and over.
29:54By failed, it means giving false positive.
29:57That is, detected missile that weren't taking place.
30:02And human intervention, sometimes at the last minute,
30:05virtually managed to save us.
30:10There's striking cases of this.
30:13And if it all gets automated, the more it gets automated, the more dangerous it is.
30:18There's no way to automate sensible decisions.
30:22What you can do is, I mean, what
30:26soft AI basically does is find patterns.
30:33You just use huge amounts of data, very rapid computing, see if you can find some
30:39patterns and just keep to the patterns.
30:42The patterns may be very misleading.
30:45It takes something like we can't count on human intelligence,
30:51but at least it's a possibility that it can abort decisions that are
30:56made just reflexively without thought.
31:00These systems have no thought, remember. They're just...
31:04And that's extremely dangerous.
31:06Same with the weapon systems.
31:08I mean, drone technology is supposed to be very precise
31:14until you look at the casualties.
31:17And in fact, there's a further question.
31:20But say, drone technology.
31:22It's reasonably effective at murdering people who you don't like.
31:28Should we be murdering people we don't like?
31:31What about that question?
31:35I mean, suppose, let's say, Iran was sending drones around the world
31:42to assassinate people who intend to murder run.
31:45Kill everybody in the American government, the Israeli government.
31:50Do we think that's okay?
31:52If it's not okay for them, why is it okay for us?
31:55Go back to Kant.
31:57Definitely, yeah.
32:00Definitely.
32:01And on a lighter note, I would
32:05like to ask you a question about Mind
32:09Shop, this knowledge society that are watching us right now.
32:13Well, that we'll watch us when they see this video.
32:17So I think many people today really don't take time to tend to those trees
32:23that take thousands of years to grow,
32:25those institutions and those those
32:32societies that will take a long time.
32:35So moreover, as you actually mentioned on the beginning of this interview,
32:41that many people have gotten in trouble by studying and teaching philosophy
32:44across the years.
32:45So my question is on this context, how can we, as a society,
32:49as a knowledge society, make a significant and permanent impact
32:53in the world without sharing the fate of Socrates and also without being
32:59intervened by private agendas and political agendas?
33:04Because I suppose that's how knowledge should be.
33:07It should be free.
33:08It should be without any other popeteers behind it.
33:13How could we do this across the years?
33:16A couple of levels on which we can do it.
33:19First of all, we should recognize that the struggles of people who have
33:25fought against power and domination, people like those we mentioned,
33:31Hamel Zola, for example, Martin Luther King, lots of others,
33:35lots of people whose names we don't know, people on the front line.
33:40When we think about the civil rights movement, just as I did a second ago,
33:45the name that pops in the mind is Martin Luther King.
33:48Yes.
33:49Very important individual, courageous, honorable individual.
33:54He wasn't on the front line.
33:55I don't know the names of the people who were.
33:58I don't know the names of the SNCC workers who were riding the freedom busses
34:03to try to encourage black farmers to face the threat of lynching
34:08in order to push a lever.
34:11I know some of their names, not most of them, and that's history.
34:14People are really doing things, mostly we don't know.
34:17But over the years, centuries,
34:22they have expanded the space
34:26of possible free action.
34:29We can do things that you couldn't do 50 years ago or 100 years ago.
34:37Not everybody, people like us who are fairly privileged, we have a fair scope.
34:44Not everybody.
34:45Not a black kid in the ghetto, but we have.
34:49Okay, that's one of the ways in which we can do things.
34:53It's a lot easier than it was because of the legacy we enjoy of people who
34:59fought He didn't give up and struggled.
35:02The other way, which is from another perspective, is to eliminate
35:09the concentrations of power.
35:11As long as they exist, they're going to work for their own benefit.
35:17Not a new insight.
35:18I can go back to Adam Smith, who we're supposed to worship, but not read.
35:24But if we bother to read him, what he said is, The masters of the universe
35:30The masters of mankind, his phrase, are in his day, the merchants
35:35and manufacturers of England.
35:37And they are the principal architects of policy, government policy.
35:43And they, manipulated to serve their own interests, no matter how grievous
35:50the impact on the people of England and the people abroad who suffer
35:56the savage injustice of the Europeans.
36:00That's a pretty good lesson.
36:02That's what's going to happen.
36:04It doesn't matter whether the concentration of power
36:07is public or private.
36:10There's a a myth that we live by that if concentrations of power
36:14are private, it's not a problem.
36:17It's the government that's the problem.
36:20It's, first of all, total nonsense.
36:22Secondly, Adam Smith is right.
36:26The private power is the force that controls the government.
36:30They are the principal architects of policy, overwhelmingly, not 100%,
36:35but to an extraordinary extent.
36:39So as long as there are concentrations of power, you're going
36:42to have the problem you describe.
36:44They're going to use it, whatever excessive power they have,
36:48to try to protect themselves.
36:52If it happens to harm others, that's incidental.
36:55That's almost an automatic consequence It's a very close to automatic
37:01consequence of simply maldistribution of power, which can be of many kinds.
37:08The main goal is to try to overcome that.
37:13We'll go back to the philosophy of the new nationalism in Latin America that the US
37:18had to crush by force was committed
37:22to trying to obtain equality of rights
37:26and in distribution of resources.
37:29That's a heresy. Can't allow that.
37:33Have to maintain concentrations of power.
37:37And if you look for critiques of this, there are very few.
37:41Definitely.
37:42As I've put it when I talk with my brother on our critical thinking podcast,
37:49I mentioned that they're the ones that own the doors and they own the keys.
37:54So there's really not a lot to do in that sense.
37:59Well, anyways, As a final question, just one last one
38:03as we come towards the end of this talk.
38:07If you could give one message to people across time, because as I mentioned,
38:13my vision for or knowledge society is to outlive us all, to become truly a
38:21power across the ages, a society of knowledge across the ages
38:24that looks for constructive movements
38:30human rights movements, et cetera.
38:32What message would you give to people if they could do a few things in order
38:39to keep going on this direction?
38:42Just one last message for the society as people?
38:48Well, right now, there happens to be a very special, unique message.
38:54People of your age, your generation,
38:58have a challenge to face that has never
39:03arisen in human history.
39:05Never.
39:06Yesterday, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists released its latest,
39:13to have an annual analysis of the world security situation.
39:18It's encapsulated in the doomsday clock.
39:22It meant it had a certain distance from midnight, which is termination,
39:26extermination of the species.
39:29It's now set at 100 seconds to midnight.
39:33It's the closest it's ever been.
39:34They abandoned minutes.
39:36That was during the Trump administration.
39:39We were wondering, everyone was wondering to see if they would move it yesterday.
39:43They didn't. They kept it there.
39:45I said, one, malignancy is gone.
39:49Trump is out, at least temporarily, but other problems have worsened.
39:55Now, going back to your generation, you have to decide whether the human
40:01experiment will continue, and quickly.
40:05You mentioned environmental catastrophe.
40:08That's one deep problem.
40:10Cannot be delayed.
40:12The next couple of decades are going to decide whether we've overcome
40:17the problem or whether it's often running out of our control.
40:22Another is nuclear war.
40:25Threats are increasing severely, don't
40:29have a lot of We know there's some good
40:33moves, like last Friday,
40:37the International Treaty on Prohibition
40:42of Nuclear Weisons came into effect.
40:4750 nations ratified it.
40:49None of the 122 agree with it.
40:52None of the nuclear powers.
40:55That has to change.
40:57They have to be brought into compliance with the actually, with their own
41:01commitments under the Nonproliferation Treaty to put in good faith efforts
41:07to try to eliminate nuclear weapons.
41:09If we don't, we're in very serious trouble, in fact, probably finished.
41:16So these are all things that have to be done right now, not a lot of time,
41:22and the stakes cannot be higher.
41:26It's not just whether human society will survive, But other species
41:32on Earth, other species on Earth, which we're killing at an incredible
41:36rate, simply cannot go on.
41:40When Greta Thunberg steps up and talks to the older generation
41:46and say, You betrayed us.
41:48She's right.
41:49It's a shocking betrayal, but you're left with the ruins, and you have
41:54to see what you can do with them.
41:56So there's no message in human history that's more important than that.
42:03Well, Professor, I can't really put into words, but my feelings right
42:09now, I'm really, really glad we had this conversation.
42:12I feel extremely lucky to get a chance to talk to you in this way.
42:18And I agree with you.
42:19We are very privileged in many ways.
42:22And thanks for your time.
42:25I really, really respect your work, everything you have done,
42:28both in linguistics and, of course, in analytic philosophy,
42:32and, of course, in your activism as your hobbies, as you mentioned.
42:36Perhaps that's the most important of everything.
42:40It's great.
42:41Thank you very much.
42:42Very good to talk to you.
42:43Very good to talk to you, too. Great meeting you.
42:47Have a nice day.

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