Robert Kall on OpEd News has an interview with Noam Chomsky: America in Decline, US Operating Procedures for Blocking Democracy. I, for one find this a strange title. I thought that way back in the 1960s Chomsky and I were on the same wavelength about the failure of America with respect to the word "democracy". In spite of the fact that our scientific paths have diverged significantly, I have always shared a lot with him politically. I don't know this guy Robert Kall but I got on some e-mail list that has him. I find this on quite deceptive. If you go to the link you will read:
The transcript of this interview will be available in a day or two.
I am turned off big time by such tactics and I distrust Kall as a result. Read on below and you may join me.
Here is what Kall actually provides:
Interview rough notes-- mostly the questions asked.
Objectivity vs reality?
What's your take on the media today. What's your take on how it is now and how it could be?
"US deficit-- solved by health care reform-- is an international scandal."
in the face of looming collapse, how can we save our civilization?
do you see a model that works in the future-- be it capitalism or something else?
And you referred to the idea that intelligence can be lethal-- Ernst Mayr's theory-- in referring to global warming. Do you see a future that we survive in?
You've said you have to learn the fundamental science that's going to be applicable to whatever comes along next. And the same thing pretty much happened in medicine needing biology and engineering needing physics. How about with Economics? An you said, "Well, unification is kind of an intuitive ideal, part of the scientific mystique, if you like. It's that you're trying to find a unified theory of the world. Now maybe there isn't one, maybe different parts work in different ways, but your assumption is until I'm proven wrong definitively, I'll assume that there's a unified account of the world, and it's my task to try to find it." And you talk about the complexity of systems, how they are modular"
How do economics and marketing fit in?
In your Atlantic interview with Yarden Katz, you said,
"At some point in human evolution, and it's apparently pretty recent given the archeological record -- maybe last hundred thousand years, a computational system emerged with had new properties, that other organisms don't have, that has kind of arithmetical type properties... "
Leonard Shlain and Walter Ong-- talk about writing and the Gutenberg press.
and the internet and Occupy Wall street.
Can you talk about the Transition from hunter gather to agriculture, to city and civilization to corporatization". and the future of civilization"
In your Interview with Amy Goodman. titled Who Owns the World, You talk about America in Decline:
"The decline is real, but it's not new. It's been going on since 1945. In fact, it happened very quickly. In the late 1940s, there's an event that's known here as "the loss of China.""-- And you talk about how the "Vietnam War was fought primarily to ensure that an independent Vietnam would not develop successfully and become a model for other countries in the region. " And how, ""In the last 10 years the South American countries have begun to move towards independence and a degree of integration." And you say the Arab Spring is another such threat. It threatens to take that big region out of the grand arena. That's a lot more significant than Southeast Asia or South America. "So far, the threat of the Arab Spring has been pretty well contained. "We managed to ensure that the threat of democracy would be smashed in the most important places."
Finally, you spoke about, how, "in Egypt, the United States followed a standard operating procedure when one of your favorite dictators gets into trouble." Now that's very interesting. Can you describe that procedure?
How about Gaza? How is the balance changing with Qatar now providing funding as well as Iran? What do we do?
You're Jewish, I'm Jewish. Apologists for Israel say that Israel takes Gazans to Deborah Hospital and why should they put up with the rain of bombs?
I guess it takes a special kind of chutzpah to compare yourself with Chomsky, but these questions and more are answered in our new book:
GLOBAL INSANITY: HOW HOMO SAPIENS LOST TOUCH WITH REALITY WHILE TRANSFORMING THE WORLD. Here is the jacket summary:
The Global Economy that sustains the civilized world is destroying the biosphere. As a result, civilization, like the Titanic, it is on a collision course with disaster. But changing course via the body politic appears to be well nigh impossible, given that much of the populace lives in denial. Why is that? And how did we get into such a fix?
In this essay, biologists James Coffman and Donald Mikulecky argue that the reductionist model of the world developed by Western civilization misrepresents life, undermining our ability to regulate and adapt to the accelerating anthropogenic transformation of the world entrained by that very model. An alternative worldview is presented that better accounts for both the relational nature of living systems and the developmental phenomenology that constrains their evolution. Development of any complex system reinforces specific dependencies while eliminating alternatives, reducing the diversity that affords adaptive degrees of freedom: the more developed a system is, the less potential it has to change its way of being. Hence, in the evolution of life most species become extinct.
This perspective reveals the limits that complexity places on knowledge and technology, bringing to light our hubristically dysfunctional relationship with the world and increasingly tenuous connection to reality. The inescapable conclusion is that, barring a cultural metamorphosis that breaks free of deeply entrenched mental frames that made us what we are, continued development of the Global Economy will lead inexorably to the collapse of civilization.
I think our book answers these questions and more. Tell me what you think.