How should we understand the forces that shape public opinion and politics, and what do they reveal about human nature, language, and power?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science.
2. Interview Summary
In the interview, Chomsky reflects on Manufacturing Consent (co-written with Edward S. Herman), saying the “basic analysis” still holds even though the media landscape has been transformed by the explosion of digital platforms: the first edition didn’t consider digital media at all, and even the 2002 update treated the early internet as not yet changing the core picture. He argues that elites still work to “manufacture consent” by redirecting attention and “demonizing enemies,” and he uses China as a case study: in his view, the “threat” is framed as aggression, but the real concern is China’s development and expanding economic influence, met by military posturing and encirclement narratives.
A big portion turns to language and human nature. Chomsky says the distinctive human capacity for language appears extremely recent in evolutionary time—likely emerging with Homo sapiens—and he emphasizes the narrow window suggested by archaeology and genomics: humans separated into groups not long after our emergence, yet those groups shared language, implying a rapid, near-“instantaneous” development. He resists the idea that language is primarily an adaptation for communication, instead treating it as an instrument of thought whose core design often prioritizes computational elegance over communicative efficiency, and he links this to a broader picture of evolution as “disruption → simplest solution → selection,” not teleology. When asked about Ludwig Wittgenstein’s rule-following worries, he pushes back that many “rules” are not sustained by social convention but by built-in biases and internal cognitive structure—pointing to how even young children acquire and use grammar without treating it like a publicly negotiated norm.
On politics and public life, Chomsky repeatedly shifts questions from surface fixes to underlying “pathologies.” On mass shootings (raised via Uvalde), he argues the central issue isn’t tactical response but preventing such events from being normal features of social life. On polarization and “patient” civic culture, he falls back on education, organization, and sustained activism as the mechanism by which norms actually improve over decades. He warns that Supreme Court of the United States’s post–Roe trajectory (as signposted by Clarence Thomas) could target contraception and same-sex relationships, and he describes a long-term legal/political project associated with Mitch McConnell and the Federalist Society. He insists U.S. elections are extremely secure and treats fraud panic as a pretext for voter suppression and institutional capture—highlighting an Axios-reported civil-service reclassification push tied to Donald Trump as part of a broader authoritarian drift. He also returns to what still “surprises” him: public complacency since Hiroshima about existential risks (nuclear escalation and climate tipping points), and he condemns U.S. authorization and support for Israel’s settlement/annexation policies as unusually extreme in modern geopolitics.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:57 - Manufacturing consent
02:49 - Manufacturing consent still necessary?
08:06 - Development of language
10:54 - Capacities relevant to language
16:49 - Mentors
19:08 - A priori propositions and Quine
21:34 - Police response to Uvalde shooting
24:05 - Rule-following argument
27:30 - Social justice
29:36 - Roe v. Wade and what’s next
32:26 - Voting process
36:54 - Surprises
43:30 - Biden’s approval rating
45:17 - Israel
47:27 - Conclusion
