Noam Chomsky: Good and Evil in Human Nature

00:00:00.000 | - You've said that evil in society arises from institutions,

00:00:05.000 | not inherently from our nature.

00:00:09.120 | Do you think most human beings are good,

00:00:11.360 | they have good intent, or do most have the capacity

00:00:14.760 | for intentional evil that depends on their upbringing,

00:00:18.160 | depends on their environment, on context?

00:00:20.760 | - I wouldn't say that they don't arise from our nature.

00:00:24.520 | Anything we do arises from our nature.

00:00:27.600 | And the fact that we have certain institutions,

00:00:30.280 | not others, is one mode in which human nature

00:00:35.280 | has expressed itself.

00:00:37.280 | But as far as we know, human nature could yield

00:00:40.800 | many different kinds of institutions.

00:00:43.800 | The particular ones that have developed

00:00:46.720 | have to do with historical contingency,

00:00:50.480 | the who conquered whom, and that sort of thing.

00:00:53.800 | They're not rooted in our nature in the sense

00:00:57.920 | that they're essential to our nature.

00:01:00.320 | So it's commonly argued that these days

00:01:03.720 | that something like market systems

00:01:06.480 | is just part of our nature.

00:01:09.120 | But we know from a huge amount of evidence

00:01:12.200 | that that's not true.

00:01:13.080 | There's all kinds of other structures.

00:01:15.280 | It's a particular fact about a moment of modern history.

00:01:19.800 | Others have argued that the roots of classical liberalism

00:01:24.320 | actually argue that what's called sometimes

00:01:28.000 | an instinct for freedom, an instinct to be free

00:01:31.760 | of domination by illegitimate authority

00:01:35.720 | is the core of our nature.

00:01:37.240 | That would be the opposite of this.

00:01:39.200 | And we don't know.

00:01:41.080 | We just know that human nature can accommodate both kinds.

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