Kind: captions
Language: en
- [Interviewer] You've
said that evil in society
arises from institutions, not
inherently from our nature.
Do you think most human beings are good,
they have good intent, or
do most have the capacity
for intentional evil that
depends on their upbringing,
depends on their environment, on context?
- [Noam Chomsky] I wouldn't say
that they don't arise from our nature.
Anything we do arises from our nature,
and the fact that we
have certain institutions
and not others is one mode in which
human nature has expressed itself,
but as far as we know,
human nature could yield
many different kinds of institutions.
The particular ones that have developed
have to do with historical contingency,
who conquered whom and that sort of thing.
They're not rooted in
our nature in the sense
that they're essential to our nature,
so it's commonly argued these days
that something like market systems
is just part of our nature, but we know
from a huge amount of
evidence that that's not true.
There's all kinds of other structures.
It's a particular fact about
a moment of modern history.
Others have argued that the
roots of classical liberalism,
actually argue that
what's called sometimes
an instinct for freedom,
the instinct to be free
of domination by illegitimate authorities
is the core of our nature.
That would be the opposite
of this, and we don't know.
We just know that human nature
can accommodate both kinds.