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Daniel Wieser

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“The societal and political manifestation of disbelief (of belief that we make ourselves and are only what we make ourselves) is, of course, the world of liberal individualism - the world of isolated individuals asserting their freedom against each other. And, of course, if this is what society is like, you need a state whose job it is to control and limit the freedom of its citizens. The world that believes in the autonomous free individual also has to believe in the bureaucratic state. Society is seen as a perpetual struggle between these two - sometimes emphasizing the individual, sometimes the collective. But all this is the world of disbelief, the world without God.”

“QUESTION: Do you believe that by nature human beings yearn for freedom? Or in the interests of safety, security, and conformity, do we settle for order? CHOMSKY: These are really matters of faith rather than knowledge. On the one hand, you have the Grand Inquisitor who tells you that what humans crave is submission, and therefore Christ is a criminal and we have to vanquish freedom. That’s one view. The other view, held by Rousseau, for example, is that people are born to be free and that their basic instinct is the desire to free themselves from coercion, authority, and oppression. Where you stake your hopes depends on what you believe. I’d like to believe that people are born to be free, but if you ask for proof, I couldn’t give it to you.”

“One must hesitate when calling these protests pro-Palestinian because in that labelling, we lose their truth. They are protests against senseless killings, they are a rejection of regimes that support occupation and a cry for an end to war as a pathway to peace. These protests are pro-humanity in its true sense of the word, an all-encompassing humanity that is not cherry-picked by the powers that be. They are protests against hypocrisy and for a right to life.”