Noam Chomsky: “Worship of Markets” Is Threatening Human Civilization

These are excerpts from this excellent and incredibly important interview. 

As I once again read what Noam Chomsky has to say, I have become mindful of how deeply saddened and incredibly angry I feel about the fact that the American corporate media has completely robbed us of the voices we most need to hear — especially those such as Noam Chomsky, who is a true national and international treasure. Tears... I am just so angry!  

We've been warned for years, for decades about how we humans — either through power and greed or through brainwashing and ignorance — are destroying ourselves and our Earth Mother. But the corporate media has systematically deprived us of the information that we need most to know, understand, and act upon. Our mainstream media has completely failed us because they have put profits and loyalty to their corporate donors above the welfare of the American people and all of Earth's inhabitants. Their failure to divest and do their journalistic job is criminal! It is criminal!
 

This epidemic of disempowerment, propaganda, and sociopathic greed and heartlessness has now brought us to the precipice where we are facing our own extinction. I'm just so filled with grief and anger and outrage at all the forces that are now threatening the very lives of my children and grandchildren and all life everywhere. Damn it! We need to listen to Noam Chomsky! NOW! And the truth is that I don't know if another world is possible. I don't. But regardless of how bleak things look, we all must fight for a just and caring world. We must. — Molly

Noam Chomsky: The question of how we got to this state of affairs is truly vast in scope, requiring not just inquiry into the origin and nature of social and cultural institutions but also into depths of human psychology that are barely understood. We can, however, take a much more modest stab at the questions, asking about certain highly consequential decisions that could have been made differently, and about specific cases where we can identify some of the roots of looking away...

That raises your question of why we look away. I do not understand it, and never have. The question has been on my mind almost constantly since that grim day in August 1945 when we heard the news that an atom bomb had wiped out Hiroshima, with hideous casualties. Apart from the terrible tragedy itself, it was at once clear that human intelligence had devised the means to destroy us all — not quite yet, but there could be little doubt that once the genie was out of the bottle, technological developments would carry the threat to the end. I was then a junior counselor in a summer camp. The news was broadcast in the morning. Everyone listened — and then went off to the planned activity — a baseball game, swimming, whatever was scheduled. I couldn’t believe it. I was so shocked I just took off into the woods and sat by myself for several hours. I still can’t believe it, or understand how that has persisted even as more has been learned about the threats. The same sentiments have been voiced by others, recently by William Perry [former defense secretary], who has ample experience on the inside. He reports that he is doubly terrified: by the growing risk of terrible catastrophe, and the failure to be terrified by it.

It was not known in 1945, but the world was then entering into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, in which human activity is having a severe impact on the environment that sustains life. Warnings about the potential threat of global warming date back to a 1958 paper by Hans Suess and Roger Revelle, and by the 1970s, concerns were deeply troubling to climate scientists. ExxonMobil scientists were in the forefront of spelling out the severe dangers. That is the background for a crucial decision by ExxonMobil management in 1989, after (and perhaps because) James Hansen had brought the grave threat to public attention. In 1989, management decided to lead the denialist campaign.

That continues to the present. ExxonMobil now proudly declares that it intends to extract and sell all of the 25 billion barrels in its current reserves, while continuing to seek new sources.

Executives are surely aware that this is virtually a death-knell for organized human society in any form that we know, but evidently it doesn’t matter. Looking away with a vengeance.

The suicidal impulses of the fossil fuel industry have been strongly supported by Republican administrations, by now, under Trump, leaving the U.S. in splendid isolation internationally in not only refusing to participate in international efforts to address this existential threat but in devoting major efforts to accelerate the race to disaster.

It is hard to find proper words to describe what is happening — and the limited attention it receives.

This again raises your question of how we can look away. For ExxonMobil, the explanation is simple enough: The logic of the capitalist market rules — what Joseph Stiglitz 25 years ago called the “religion” that markets know best. The same reasoning extends beyond, for example to the major banks that are pouring funds into fossil fuel extraction, including the most dangerous, like Canadian tar sands, surely in full awareness of the consequences.

CEOs face a choice: They can seek to maximize profit and market share, and (consciously) labor to undermine the prospects for life on earth; or they can refuse to do so, and be removed and replaced by someone who will. The problems are not just individual; they are institutional, hence much deeper and harder to overcome.

Something similar holds for media. In the best newspapers there are regular articles by the finest journalists applauding the fracking revolution and the opening of new areas for exploitation, driving the U.S. well ahead of Saudi Arabia in the race to destroy human civilization. Sometimes there are a few words about environmental effects: fracking in Wyoming may harm the water supplies for ranchers. But scarcely if ever is there a word on the effect on the planet — which is, surely, well understood by authors and editors.

Please continue this interview here: https://truthout.org/articles/noam-chomsky-worship-of-markets-is-threatening-human-civilization/