The attack on Social Security is similarly motivated. Social Security is based on the conception is that we should have sympathy for others, not function merely as isolated "rational wealth maximizers."

Take something you really don't think about: Plastics in the ocean. I mean plastics in the ocean have an enormous ecological effect.

One of the questions asked in that study was, How many Vietnamese casualties would you estimate that there were during the Vietnam war? The average response on the part of Americans today is about 100,000. The official figure is about two million. The actual figure is probably three to four million. The people who conducted the study raised an appropriate question: What would we think about German political culture if, when you asked people today how many Jews died in the Holocaust, they estimated about 300,000? What would that tell us about German political culture?

Suppose I try to say the US carries out terror, in fact it's one of the leading terrorist states in the world. You can't say that between commercials. People rightly want to know what do you mean. They've never heard that before. Then you have to explain. You have to give background. That's exactly what's cut out.

There are historical analogs, which are not exact, of course, but are close enough to be worrisome. This is a whiff of early Nazi Germany. [Adolf] Hitler was appealing to groups with similar grievances, and giving them crazy answers, but at least they were answers; these groups weren't getting them anywhere else. It was the Jews and the Bolsheviks [that were the problem].

The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.

What Wikileaks exposed is kind of superficial in a way.