Jingoism, racism, fear, religious fundamentalism: these are the ways of appealing to people if you're trying to organize a mass base of support for policies that are really intended to crush them.

When I was growing up in the 1930s and '40s anti-Semitism was rampant. It wasn't like Nazi Germany but it was pretty serious - it was part of life.

Anarchists try to identify power structures. They urge those exercising power to justify themselves. This justification does not succeed most of the time.

If we understood, as we do not, the physical bases for intellectual structures, I have little doubt that we would find structures in the brain for social interactions, or language, or analysis of personality - a whole variety of systems developed on the basis of a specific biological endowment.

How it is we have so much information, but know so little?

In fact, for the majority of the population, wages and incomes have stagnated and conditions have gotten worse. So they are asking, "what did I do wrong?" And the answer that the talk show host is giving them is convincing, in it's internal logic. It's saying, "what's wrong is the rich liberals own everything, run everything, they don't care about you; therefore, distrust them" and so on.

There are plenty of things that are unknown, but are assumed reasonably to exist, even in the most basic sciences. Maybe 90 percent of the mass-energy in the universe is called "dark," because nobody knows what it is.