He is one of the foremost social and political critics, not only of American politics but also globally, known also for his work as a philosopher and founder of modern linguistics.

 

I leave the floor to you, Noam, it's up to you.

 

I can start ?

 

I had the great pleasure and privilege of participating in the first editions of the World Social Forum 20 years ago in Porto Alegre: memorable and exciting times, and the same goes for my presence among you today, whether it be virtually, to my great regret.

 Noam Chomsky giving his Speech to the 2022 World Social Forum

 

 

As YD did not have the time to transcribe the speech from the video, our friend Jules Letambour did a reverse transcription from a translation from Les Crises. Thank you Jules….

 

Well, the years pass and the questions remain, they simply become more urgent, more unavoidable. For twenty years, the motto of the World Social Forum has been that another world is possible. This remains true, we cannot forget it, but as we gather today, this question is overshadowed by another: is this world possible? And the answer is no. This world is not possible. This world is rushing towards its own annihilation and only the creation of another world can reverse this course. Fortunately, another world is still possible, even if the chances of realizing it are diminishing at an alarming rate.

 

This world has long been on a slow path of self-annihilation, but there have been inflection points where the process of destruction has accelerated. One of them is a day that remains indelibly engraved in my memory, as well as in that of other people of my generation: August 6, 1945. That day, I was in a camp of summer when I was a monitor. In the morning, the loudspeaker announced that the United States had destroyed Hiroshima with an atomic bomb. There were a few cheers and everyone carelessly left for their next activity, swimming, baseball, whatever.

 

A little later, I was able to get some newspapers and found that the general reaction was much the same: people were happy about the end of the war. And then we moved on to the next activity. This taught us a double lesson. The first is that human intelligence and its power have devised the means of its own destruction. The second lesson is that human intelligence has not developed the moral capacity to understand what it is doing and to control its death wish. To be precise, it is not just about the annihilation of our own species. We also cause at the same time as ours, the annihilation of a large part of life, when insects and bacteria, they should get away with it.

 

And there is an additional reservation: human intelligence had not yet gone that far, but it was obvious that it would do so without delay, and it was in 1953 that it did so, when the States United States, then the Soviet Union, detonated thermonuclear weapons. The ability to destroy everything, what a great feat! These reservations aside, let us return to the essential lesson. Human technical and scientific intelligence has far exceeded human moral intelligence. The capacity to destroy cannot be compared to the capacity to understand what we are doing and to change course.

 

Those who see a striking resemblance to today are not mistaken. Some understood perfectly what we were doing and the need to change course. Among these were the scientists who created the Atomic Scientists Bulletin and the famous Doomsday Clock whose hand showed the time left before midnight. Midnight signifies the end of the human experiment on earth. The clock provides a kind of measure of the gap between technical intelligence and moral intelligence. The clock was first set in 1947, seven minutes before midnight. In 1953, with the explosion of the hydrogen bombs, the minute hand was advanced to two minutes to midnight.

 

Since then, it has oscillated, reflecting the fluctuations of the world situation. It didn't hit two minutes to midnight again until the Trump years. In his final year in office, analysts dropped minutes and moved to seconds. One hundred seconds to midnight is where the clock is today. Next January it will be adjusted again and I wouldn't be surprised if it gets closer to the end.

 

In 1945, little was known that another inflection point was coming, the pollution of the atmosphere, and a new geological era, which geologists call the Anthropocene. An epic that sees human activity radically influencing the global climate, and not in its favour.

 

Well, add another personal position to it. I learned how serious this was 50 years ago, when in a single week I received phone calls from two of my friends. One was the holder of the chair of earth sciences at Harvard. The other was the chief of meteorology at the Michigan Institute of Technology. Both were informing me of new data proving that CO2 levels in the atmosphere appeared to be rising sharply and that we were headed for disaster.

 

As we all know by now, fossil fuel company executives were also well aware of this terrible information. Their scientists were in fact at the forefront in terms of research on these questions and denounced the grim consequences. The response of the rulers has been to hasten the destruction and neutralize any threat that might make the people aware of their grim fate. Some of these steps to annihilation are not as well known as they should be. They are, however, instructive.

 

A prime example is what happened to the Republican Party which will soon take power in the United States. So it looks like his power is virtually permanent if his very public efforts to undermine democracy are successful. The party is 100% climate-skeptical, which is of considerable importance. This has not always been the case, and mutation tells us something about the institutions humans have built and the challenges they pose to our survival.

 

Let's go back to 2008, the year of the elections. The Republican presidential candidate was John McCain. He has a climate component in his program, not very developed, but there is something. Republican lawmakers were also beginning to consider similar efforts. Well, as soon as the huge energy conglomerate of the Koch brothers caught wind of it, they charged into action. For years, they had worked hard to ensure that Republicans fully supported the free use of fossil fuels, and they were not going to tolerate this departure from the principle of subordination to their interests.

 

They have launched a gigantic movement of corruption by threatening Congress, by exercising massive lobbying, by creating false groups of citizens, by neglecting no lead. In no time, all the Republican leaders capitulated. In the last Republican primary, in 2016, all the candidates either denied the existence of global warming or said that it might exist, but that we were not going to do anything about it.

 

The winner, Donald Trump, did everything to maximize the use of fossil fuels, including the most destructive of them, and to dismantle the norms that could protect the environment. Of course, he also turned his back on the international effort to deal with the crisis.

 

Donald Trump owns the party which is most likely currently on its way back to full government control. We are not talking about Andorra here, it is the government of the most powerful country in human history, and this is no joke for our sad world. One of the effects of the leaders' betrayal is that among Republicans and their supporters, only 20% consider global warming a top priority. After all, it is only the most critical problem that man has ever faced, along with nuclear war. So why pay attention to what our leaders and their media echo chamber tell us? In fact, global warming has been factored into the setting of the doomsday clock in recent years, along with a third factor, the degradation of rational discourse which yet offers our only hope. to escape disaster.

 

The example set by fossil fuel companies can be misleading. They just follow the usual capitalist principles, principles that Adam Smith described 250 years ago. What he pointed out was that the masters of humanity, that is to say the merchants and industrialists of England, the masters of humanity, have always followed the vile maxim: everything for us and nothing for others.

 

Adam Smith: “It is not because they are particularly bad that the masters implement this maxim, it is an institutional imperative. Those who do not adopt this maxim are supplanted by those who do. This is the essence of the unregulated market and it is a death warrant for the human species and also collateral damage for the rest of life on earth. Unchecked markets are a death warrant for other reasons. They were evoked more than a century ago by the great political economist Thurstein Viblin. He pointed out that in terms of the market, success requires manufacturing needs, stimulating consumerism that destroys the planet and, in fact, destroys all acceptable life.

 

So we can imagine better ways to pass our time than fuming because we get irritated when we are stuck in an endless traffic jam. Enormous industries are devoted to inducing us to adopt such a way of life, not that better world which is possible when institutions are devoted to satisfying human needs rather than to private profit and destruction. of the environment which nevertheless allows life.

 

So here we are contemplating a human intelligence that has invented effective means of self-annihilation and is having fun using them right now. In fact, it has also designed social institutions that are death warrants and so far it has failed to bridge the yawning gap between the ability to destroy and the ability to create that other world that is possible. And this is where the World Social Forum comes into play.

 

His job is to bridge that gap. We know what to do. We know how to rid the world of nuclear weapons, at the very least rebuild the arms control regime that the Republican Party has been dismantling for twenty years. And to make this system evolve towards the eradication of this scourge. We know how.

 

There are also some totally doable detailed proposals on how to overcome the climate crisis and move on to a much better life. There is even a resolution in the United States Congress, carried by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a young representative who was propelled to power by the Bernie Sanders wave, joined by Ed Markey, a veteran senator who has long worried about the destruction of the environment. The resolution is worth reading, it presents a detailed, reasonable and achievable approach to ending the crisis and paving the way to a much more livable world.

 

It is not the only program of this type: you can read them on the site of the international energy agency which depends on the companies of the energy sector; it so happens that several economists, including my colleague Robert Holland, have developed detailed proposals, all of which are quite similar. They can be implemented now in Congress. It is simply a resolution that, with a strong enough grassroots movement, could become law and pass. The same is true in other countries. The window of possibilities is very limited and is closing, but it is still there.

 

Changing murderous social institutions is a greater challenge, but it is also a challenge that can be overcome if you put your mind to it. So we know how to do it. But is it feasible? The answer is in your hands and those of others like you. We could put this question in a broader context. You are all familiar, I suppose, with the famous paradox of physicist Aaron and Enrico Fermi. In short, what is it? This renowned astrophysicist knew that there were a considerable number of planets capable of presenting conditions favorable to forms of life and intelligence. But despite the most relentless searches, we find no trace of their existence. So where are they?

 

Well, one of the answers that has been very seriously put forward and cannot be dismissed is that certain forms of intelligence may have developed at various times, but this one was deadly. She has discovered the means to annihilate herself but has not developed the moral capacity to stop herself. This is a possibility that certainly cannot be ignored. For now, it may even be an inherent characteristic of what we call “intelligence.” We are currently conducting an experiment to determine if this sinister principle also applies to modern humans. We are a species that recently arrived on Earth, two or three hundred thousand years ago. It’s a blink of an eye on the scale of evolutionary time.

 

There is not much time left to find the answer, more precisely to define the answer. This is something we will do one way or another, there is no other alternative. The challenge is unique in the history of mankind. It must be faced now because we are not all doomed to die at the same time, but we are doomed to a world in which those who die will be the luckiest. The solutions exist, they expect us to bridge the gap between our ability to destroy and our desire to create this better world that is before us. This is the challenge, we cannot escape it.

 

 

 

 

https://www.les-crises.fr/noam-chomsky-un-autre-monde-est-encore-possible/

 

Original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV3n66qnwB4

 

 

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