Professor Naom Chomsky speaks to FORSEA. He offers views on democracy, which was recorded for the delegates at the official launch of FORSEA, and the inaugural conference, which took place in Kuala Lumpur, February 16, 2019.
Considering how much he has spoken out, his contribution to linguistics, and how many books he's written, he'll continue to do so as long western civilization exists.
@@fabiengerard8142 agreed.. that's essentially what I had in mind by saying 'so long as western society exists', and we certainly appear to be losing any measure of rational, or sane discourse. Although it's not like his level of thought plays any meaningful role in any modern discourse anyhow, so here's to hoping it helps us transcend the current regression in some way and move toward a better future. His argument for a regionalization of power - anarcho-syndicalism - certainly seems like a prerequisite for dealing with the current shift toward more concentrated power and the division and insanity that prevails today imo.
we're fortunate to still have this guy around. despite being ignored by the MSM for most of his life, he'll no doubt be remembered with the greatest minds of modern history (Bertrand Russell, David Hume, etc.)
@Steffen Zander Some need help... Some perpetrate evil on the masses. We can do everything together with truth and love. If you don't like society, why do you stay?
A nice gesture, but Chomsky would refuse: Immanuel Kant's theory of morality, the categorical imperative, states that it is immoral to use another person merely as a means to an end and that people must-under all circumstances-be treated as ends in themselves. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_and_intrinsic_value
I could listen to him talk for days. The truth sounds so good. It's reliving to hear it even though it is bad news. I wish everyone would listen to him and all the lies could just stop. It's just so disheartening but I have hope that many people who watch this will know this is the truth. Everything he has to say is the raw truth and the world needs this more than anything.
thank you this world needs your voice and knowledge more than ever. whenever I'm researching and need some honest truth I look to your voice along with but 2 others and I personally do thank you
Such an amazing mind and brilliant explanation of current events plus factual political history. Only has 4.300 views. Bobby Kennedy said " if you are not involve in politics, you are an idiot". Because politics dictate where the future of our planet is going.
WORST ADVICE EVER GIVEN, NEVER EAT ANY ANIMAL THAT HAS RECEIVED HORMONE INJECTIONS, VIRUS INJECTIONS ETC. - EXAMPLES OF CHICKEN, BUFFALOS, COWS, BULLS, GOATS, SHEEPS, DUCKS, HORSES, DOGS, RATS, RABBITS ETC.
Dear Professor N A Chomsky My votes for Being blessed MANY YEARS tomorrow like all 🔭⚱️⚰️🗿📽️📕 Yesterday's you've been Careing of us With your sensational Accurate Knowledge UNIQUE PPOWERFUL RU-vid GOLDEN VIDEOS DANKESHÖN !🔭⚱️⚰️🗿📽️📕
For all the homework, observation and insight, NC always shapes his works toward what is empowering, toward what will liberate action for the great mass of human beings. He doesn't proscribe, he knows that people in action will find the solutions.
Main stream media in America cannot promote truth against contemporary corporate monopoly and the elite wealthy powerful because they are owned by same…..thank you for this lecture and analysis Mr. Chomsky in Arizona
The fact that you would platform Chomsky & come to him for his insights on democracy tells me that you are the real deal, & want genuine democracy (rather than the kind of plutocratic “inverted totalitarian” “capitalist republic” system we have in America, & I absolutely wish that for Southeast Asian, the rest of Asia, & the entire world (including us). Solidarity from America! I hope you all are able to organize enough from the bottom up to actually have the kind of mass, participatory social revolutionary influence necessary to actually achieve authentic democracy, rather than having the local economic ruling class & foreign imperialist forces collaborate to buy out any emergent non-participatory “democratic” systems, &/or finance fascist authoritarians to implement some kind of autocratic dictatorship instead. That’s what usually tends to happen, & certainly has in various forms throughout the history of Southeast Asia. Concentrated power & wealth are always going to be directed against efforts to build democracy, because in a democracy the poor/working class would have political power (by virtue of being the vast majority in any unequal, class-divided society). That means it’s always an uphill battle, & the one advantage the people have which can rival those is our numbers- we are the overwhelming majority, & capitalism cannot produce profits without us as workers. This is pretty much the theoretical basis behind the ideology Chomsky has historically identified with- anarchosyndicalism (& radical syndicalism in general). The fact that, despite all of their advantages, they ultimately need a complacent working class more than we need a ruling class- if we organize on a mass scale into class conscious, self-consciously revolutionary labor unions & democratic worker’s councils & other participatory organizations run by the rank-&-file & the people ourselves, we could hypothetically all systematically agree to withhold labor & completely shut down any capitalistic system the ruling class imposes on us, & thereby, we could take back power over our own institutions- over our economy & our government(s). Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean the ruling class will just give up their domination without a fight. There’s every likelihood of them increasing their funding of far-right paramilitary forces, fascist political parties, etc., in order to try to re-assert control over our society. This is what they usually have done throughout history any time the people got too “uppity-“ any time the working class has gotten to class conscious & organized for their liking, & began to threaten their profit margins, or when capitalism collapses & cannot pick itself back up… So any social revolution that’s going to have a hope of succeeding needs to be prepared to defend itself, even if it’s ideal would be non-violence. But we have a right to democracy, to not be exploited, to a say in the workplaces where we contribute to creating the revenue that owners take as profits, & where we are made to spend most of our waking hours… It’s a just cause, & in fact I’d argue is absolutely necessary if we’re going to survive the 21st century. But the forces that must be confronted to achieve it are horrifyingly misanthropic & sociopathically unsympathetic, as they’ve proven time & time again- for them, the profit motive & pursuit of power over others takes priority over any higher value, any human cost… But I’m sure you’re among the last people I’d ever have to tell that to. Southeast Asia has seen it firsthand, time after time, as so much of the world has. However, that only makes it more respectable that you continue to struggle for what you know is right. I encourage you to learn what you can from the revolution in Rojava as well, if you haven’t already studied it, as they created one of the most vibrant participatory democracies in the world despite some of the worst conditions anywhere, embattled by enemies on all sides & economic blockade in a harsh desert environment. But surely Chomsky is one of the best sources you could’ve sought out. Anyway, solidarity from America. ✊✌️Respect for the good work you are doing.
Mad Turns out that money is not the root of all problems. The problem is that people don't understand quantum physics. E=mc2 ----- this means energy and mass or matter are interchangable. So how could they be interchangable if they are not ONE already? At the subatomic level the speed of quarks and electrons is so fast that the quark is said to spin billions of times a second and the electron is vibrating in place as a point of light so fast that it is called a cloud by some. Quarks are spinning into protons and neutrons as 3 points of light. The hydrogen atom is spinning super fast as 7 points of light. It is all energy and light. People consist of 7 billion billion billion atoms, all spinning super fast as points of light. This is what we are. Plus the oxygen atom spins super fast as 56 points of light and the carbon atom spins super fast as 42 points of light. All this constant spinning and pulsating of conscious light makes creation constant. We are our souls right now. We are personalities of our souls that are creating us because ALL of the soul's consciousness would not fit into one of these bodies. Not knowing this is why there are problems in the world. People, especially those that "kill" others, think that death is a real thing, so this agitates them so much that they are deranged in the head. Like one of Chomsky's DVDs called "Distorted Morality" they are super distorted with their thinking. But many people are really scared of dying, so scared that they live their whole lives thinking about it. In fact, I don't think it outrageous to say that 99.9% of the world's population is scared of dying. The other .1% read books like the "Hands of Light" book and have NDEs where they leave their bodies to realized that other dimensions really DO exist.
This is true. And many variants in between. After all, democracy is a mere word, and words are not concrete things with fixed, permanent meanings, but vessels for first one thing, then another, to fill. Of course, there do tend to be dichotomies formed, like authoritarian vs libertarian, tyrannical vs free, or the dichotomy of whether the democracy in question means rule by the many or rule by the few, but things are always more complicated than these simplified and classified dichotomies our minds create out of limitation rather than as a reflection of the whole, absolute nature or essence of the thing-in-itself, which can only be imagined theoretically. What we can be sure of, however, is that things are not equal; there are many degrees of innumerable qualia in reality. There is no such thing as a pure democracy or democracy-in-itself in reality (and even if there was, we could never know it). Our words for our concepts taken from our images are always grossly approximate, as language itself twists, corrupts, and forces unequal things to be seen as equal. And as Chomsky pointed out, the former Soviet Union considered itself to be _both_ "socialist" and a "democracy for the people", while others considered it _neither_ democracy nor socialism, instead calling it authoritarian state capitalism or some other thing. And while the terms "socialist" and "democratic" are considered by many to be quite similar (eg., Marx considered democracy a stepping stone to socialism), many others regard the two terms as utterly distinct or even(albeit superficially) diametrically opposed.
Dionysus Having said these, I think we must underline that, in any case, receiving mandate from skies / heavens / God is over since the 7th century. Societies elect governments and societies and governments should audit each other. If necessary, societies should take back the mandate they’ve given, and give it to another government instance.
@@nadirkemal "Receiving mandate from the skies/heaven/God is over..." Tell that to the people living in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea! But that's an unfortunate thing to joke about. Now, I think I see your point: That there is no God or ultimate authority which dictates what should happen in a democracy (it's not an autocracy), and that it's not fixed and stagnant but subject to changes and reforms based on the will of the majority (or on the will of the minority in the case of a democracy that works for the minority), and that those changes can be any combination of good and bad depending on what the majority (or minority) mandates. In this way, if I understand you correctly, democracy itself is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. I agree with that, if that's what you mean. I thought at first you meant something different, that you were merely referring to the word "democracy" as a frame, rather than referring to a concept or particular structure of democracy you already had in mind as the frame.
A man with deep deep knowledge of the society, capitalist order and symbol of progressive approach to liberate the commoners from the oppression of few on the top.
One difference between humans and animals it that we constantly seek more for ourselves, while animals only seek enough. It's probably a twisted iteration of a basic survival instinct, but when weaponized through the discovery of tools that can create advantages over others, it becomes a destructive force for anyone and everything that is not on the receiving side. We've known of this self-destructive tendency since Aristotle at least, and supposedly attempt to develop societies to deal with it. Democracy and socialism (by any definition) aren't natural allies of the instinct to survive and take care of one's own needs Capitalism is. It satisfies our urge to conquest, and eliminate weakness. Jumping ahead, if extinction were to take place, then the sum of mankind's knowledge would be lost forever. Circumstantial evidence may remain in the strata of Earth, something for archaeologists of another civilization. Does this mean we're doomed to repeat this Billion year cycle? Or are we repeating it already? The fact that the next 'go-around' won't be able to read our history and avoid the same mistakes is amusing. If someone had told Henry Ford in 1908 or so, that all he had accomplished and everything he was doing was going to be regulated into uselessness, there would have been a calamitous social reaction. You could not sell that concept, even though it would have been the right thing to do. What does that say about our choices, critical thinking and ability to adapt? Without knowledge of the future, you can't plan for it. But we still have common sense, empathy and a conscience. Evil in today's world is obvious and they have names. This is going to get messy.
My sacrifice, 🙏🏼it’s something meaningful here, to live with no doubt and daffy always inside. To think differently coming to the ways going out as the brain-damaged, not the way of same nature and cultural differences. 😕
I feel the same way, but can't write the man off either, as his analyses of most things are dead-on and helpful to working people. I guess everybody's entitled to a blunder.
In the United States, there are various geopolitical considerations, but there is still freedom of expression, freedom of growth, and economic freedom. People who started from nothing have become wealthy, which is not rare but possible. In contrast, in all Arab countries, there is a dictatorship, a dictatorship not only against freedom of expression and economic freedom, but also against minorities and women's rights, and anyone who opposes the regime can disappear in an instant.
'Take me to your Liter', eh, Dr Chomsky :D? Ijust widh,Dr Chomsky my career in Linguistics had not been sidelined by dekbilitating depressiojn. my Senior year at the UW -Madison. I eventully completed my BA, but…
IT'S UP TO YOUNG PEOPLE TO SAVE AMERICA FROM DESTRUCTION!!!! I'M ALMOST 70. WE HAD A CHANCE IN THE 60'S TO MOVE THE DIRECTION OF THIS COUNTRY BUT WE DIDN'T REALIZE THAT THE POWERS-THAT-BE WOULD RESORT TO MURDER IN ORDER TO KEEP THAT POWER. AND MOST OF OUR PARENTS WOULD TAKE SIDES AGAINST US!! AMERICA NEEDS YOU YOUNG ONES TO UNDERSTAND THE FIGHTS RULES. YOU HAVE TO BE WILLING TO PERHAPS DIE OR GET MAIMED FOR THIS CAUSE AND OBVIOUSLY, BACK THEN WE WEREN'T. WE DIDN'T KNOW THE EXTENT OF THE BATTLE. MOST PEOPLE ARE NOT WILLING TO DIE OR GET BADLY HURT IN ORDER TO SAVE THEIR FREEDOM!! THAT SEEMS LIKE AN OLD IDEA!! BUT THAT IS WHAT IT WILL TAKE!! ARE YOU UP FOR IT?? I CAN ALWAYS DREAM, CAN"T I??
Growing up, I was taught that the embrace of slavery in the original Constitution was an unfortunate compromise. An error, a deviation. In fact, now I understand painfully well that the fixation on 'property rights' nearly always holds this exact kind of ghoulish oppression as its point. Slave-holding was only one of manifold expressions of such. It was no bug, it was a feature, and our continued devotion to property over humanity is a direct result. The idea in America that it's acceptable to shoot another human being if he's going to steal your two hundred dollar stereo, that such an action is not just forgivable but justice itself, is insanity. That police officers, or really just anyone in the social majority, can kill you for FEELING threatened, regardless of the actual level of danger, is madness. Police officers have one of the highest levels of safety on the job because of the consequences for attacking them, and yet act like the population they're supposedly protecting is their permanent enemy to be suppressed if possible, and slaughtered if not. If carpenters went around shooting people with nail-guns for an errant twitch, they would rightfully be called blood-drunk lunatics. The Founding Fathers' fears of democracy weren't hidden, even in grade school. They were presented as completely rational dogma, that 'mob rule' had to be guarded against with just as much vigor as a king or whatever. I mean, that the original Constitution was undemocratic wasn't some thing a random person online is saying; it was their deliberate design goal, and they left plenty of writings behind to attest to that. That oh no, what if a minority was to be oppressed? Has anyone noticed our systems have basically never, until recently, stopped any fucking minority from being oppressed as much as physically possible? And the supposed safeguards against abuses written in or added over time, like impeachment, term limits, constitutional amendments and the long process for them, the courts... none of them have ever done as advertised? They certainly can't now that we live in an age of ideologically-coherent parties that view themselves not as members of a branch of government, but members of a faction working together across branches to exercise the most absolute control possible. Time for a big change.
The main solution is to introduce ZPG worldwide. Limit birth rates to one child and you reduce the world's problems by half in one generation. There are too many people on the planet now. By a significant cut in the birth rate our existing infrastructure could cope again with fewer people who would in turn have a better quality of life. Of course for some strange reason it is taboo to even have a sensible discussion about the issue. I suspect the reason is corporate greed. A big population = more customers for businesses = more profit. At what point does need become greed?
An idea that both democrats and republicans might agree with : why can't we just keep printing whle needed enough money in fiat($) or crypto currencies to give every man, woman and child in the US, $1,000.00 each. Did we not just print over $15T adding to the debt? Expected runaway inflation did not happen. Economist might say this is naive thinking; hope seombody can tell me why. I heard where some economists have said debt does not matter anymore. If so print to give to those who need it. Forget for now about fighting over taxes.
All knowledge, and all history, belong to the whole of humanity. However, the West, to a great extent, has all but suffocated the voice of historical truths via obscurantism, false assignment of attributes belonging to previous cultures, and sometimes just outright lying. Democracy is another in a long line of institutions that has been misrepresented in terms of its origins in nature, and human practice, and the principles necessary to make it work which has always been woefully absent in Western Culture and at the heart of its ongoing demise. For one cannot intellectually chop off the root of a thing and expect it to live on. Because without important knowledge now kept hidden from the world we will never know our true present state nor can we ever be truly prepared for the future. Without this understanding a tragic joke of irony will be played upon those who wield illicit power for the sake of a delusion that one can be "first" among Cosmic Equals.
"This Constitution shall be the supreme law of the land" truncated, but the message. This is a Republic, not a democracy. Our election process is democracy, but we are not a Democratic Republic, we are a Republic. The term "Democracy" is too broad a term. There are many types of Democracy, but ours is not on equal footing or a supremacy above our Republic, it is meant to assist our Republic. Democracy... The will of the majority dictates over the will of the minority... That's not freedom, that's mob rules. Our Democracy is only a process, not our freedom. Our freedom comes from the Republic that was formed. Our Constitution doesn't grant us our freedom, it is the law that protects it. Thank you.
Just a though't! Isn't democracy by definition populism? Popular vote means populism, I would've thought. Democracy is a stupid system it lead to two party system. And, the herd (average man) can easily be lead over a cliff. Meritocracy should rule. The most accomplished and the most intelligent should be the rulers not some pretty face or a sweet talker.
Yes because who better to discuss such an important topic as, ' Democracy ', than a career Linguistics Professor, with ZERO Real World Experience in Government of ANY kind! This makes perfect sense-Right??? Yet some people still take this ridiculous old man seriously! smh
@@felixii4931, (SIGH) Please refrain from making WRONG assumptions about me: I NEVER said that I was a fan of Trump-NOR did I vote for him! That was NOT my point! My point is that the WORSE that Chomsky believes that our Policy-Makers have acted over the years, then the WORSE this makes Chomsky himself look, for NEVER having the guts to seek a Policy-Making Position himself, and-with his superior wisdom-Show that he can do a better job! NOT spend his Entire Career merely criticizing everyone ELSE from the sidelines! So if this was not clear to you, then you should have asked. smh
@@mck1972 Ok, so you don't want me to make assumptions about you, then stop making assumptions about him. Firstly, as citizens we elect reps to enforce the will of the ppl and who took oath to represent the interests of the ppl. It's not our job to seek a policy making position, this is why we have voting. 2) Chomsky is an anarchist and doesn't believe in the two party system rather in decentralized political processes. Your position is unrealistic, not everyone wants a policy making position, we want to see that our interests are protected by those we voted for.
@@felixii4931, Which is all the MORE reason for Chomsky to seek an actual Policy-Making Position himself, and show he can do a better job! NOT merely HIDE BEHIND the lame Sour Grapes Excuse: " I Noam Chomsky am an Anarchist, so therefore I have no responsibility to participate in Policy-Making myself- -BUT-I will STILL criticize everyone ELSE who DOES participate! " -Can't you see what an absurd cowardly cop-out that is??? smh
@@mck1972 No i don't see it, so if i go to a restaurant and the food is not nice, i shouldn't criticise the chef rather put an apron on and do the food myself? now apply that to every other area in life. Reps are voted for a purpose, or should 300 million ppl all stop working and living and all work as politicians or else should never criticise? cmon, besides there's a global mafia in control for centuries, one person can't do everything alone when billions are spent to control how ppl think etc
