If there are dollars to be made, you destroy the environment. The reason is elementary. The people who are going to be harmed by this are your grandchildren and they don't have any votes in the market. Their interests are worth zero. Anybody that pays attention to their grandchildren's interests is being irrational. Because what you're supposed to do is maximize your own interests, measured by wealth, right now. Nothing else matters. So destroying the environment and militarizing outer space are rational policies, but within a framework of institutional lunacy.
Noam ChomskyAs we [with Edward Herman] discuss there [in Manufacturing Consent] and elsewhere, recognition of the importance of "manufacturing consent" has become an ever more central theme in the more free societies.
Noam ChomskyKarl Marx said, โThe task is not just to understand the world but to change it.โ A variant to keep in mind is that if you want to change the world youโd better try to understand it. That doesnโt mean listening to a talk or reading a book, though thatโs helpful sometimes. You learn from participating. You learn from others. You learn from the people youโre trying to organize. We all have to gain the understanding and the experience to formulate and implement ideas.
Noam ChomskyIf we move toward the weaponisation of space, we can bid farewell to the planet. The chances of survival are very slight.
Noam ChomskyThe most extreme types, like Murray Rothbard, are at least honest. They'd like to eliminate highway taxes because they force you to pay for a road you may never drive on. As an alternative, they suggest that if you and I want to get somewhere, we should build a road there and charge people tolls on it. Just try generalizing that. Such a society couldn't survive, and even if it could, it would be so full of terror and hate that any human being would prefer to live in hell.
Noam Chomsky