Noam Chomsky’s Theory of the Good Life

<p>How do you introduce Noam Chomsky? Perhaps you start here: In 1979, The New York Times<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1979/02/25/archives/the-chomsky-problem-chomsky.html"> called</a> him “arguably the most important intellectual alive today.” More than 40 years later, Chomsky, at 92, is still putting his dent in the world — writing books, giving interviews, changing minds.</p><p>There are different sides to Chomsky. He’s a world-renowned linguist who revolutionized his field. He’s a political theorist who’s been a sharp critic of American foreign policy for decades. He’s an anarchist who believes in a radically different way of ordering society. He’s a pragmatist who pushed leftists to vote for Joe Biden in 2020 and has described himself as having a “rather conservative attitude towards social change.” He is, very much, himself.</p><p>The problem in planning a conversation with Chomsky is how to get at all these different sides. So this one covers a lot of ground. We discuss:</p><ul><li>Why Chomsky is an anarchist, and how he defines anarchism</li><li>How his work on language informs his idea of what human beings want</li><li>The role of advertising in capitalism</li><li>Whether we should understand job contracts as the free market at work or a form of constant coercion</li><li>How Chomsky’s ideal vision of society differs from Nordic social democracy</li><li>How Chomsky’s class-based theory of politics holds up in an era where college-educated suburbanites are moving left on economics</li><li>Chomsky’s view of the climate crisis and why he thinks the “degrowth” movement is misguided</li><li>Whether job automation could actually be a good thing for human flourishing</li><li>Chomsky’s views on US-China policy, and why he doesn’t think China is a major geopolitical threat</li><li>The likelihood of nuclear war in the next decade</li></ul><p>And much more.</p><p>References: </p><p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Anarchism-Noam-Chomsky/dp/1595589104/ref=pd_lpo_14_t_0/143-6270908-2694057?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=159