Noam Chomsky, on the human drive to advance

MAN: But if we ever had a society with no wage incentive and no authority, where would the drive come to advance and grow?

Well, the drive to "advance"--I think you have to ask exactly what that means. If you mean a drive to produce more, well, who wants it? Is that necessarily the right thing to do? It's not obvious. In fact, in many areas it's probably the wrong thing to do--maybe it's a good thing that there wouldn't be the same drive to produce. People have to be driven to have certain wants in our system--why? Why not leave them alone so they can be happy, do other things?

Whatever "drive" there is ought to be internal. So take a look at kids: they're creative, they explore, they want to try new things. I mean, why does a kid start to walk? You take a one-year-old kid, he's crawling fine, he can get anywhere across the room he likes really fast, so fast his parents have to run after to keep him from knocking everything down--all of a sudden he gets up and starts walking. He's terrible at walking: he walks one step and he falls on his face, and if he wants to really get somewhere he's going to crawl. So why do kids start walking? Well, they just want to do new things, that's the way people are built. We're built to want to do new things, even if they're not efficient, even if they're harmful, even if you get hurt--and I don't think that ever stops.

People want to explore, we want to press our capacities to their limits, we want to appreciate what we can. But the joy of creation is something very few people get the opportunity to have in our society: artists get to have it, craftspeople have it, scientists. And if you've been lucky enough to have had that opportunity, you know it's quite an experience--and it doesn't have to be discovering Einstein's theory of relativity: anybody can have that pleasure, even by seeing what other people have done. For instance, if you read even a simple mathematical proof like Pythagorean Theorem, what you study in tenth grade, and you finally figure out what it's all about, that's exciting--"My God, I never understood that before." Okay, that's creativity, even though somebody else proved it two thousand years ago.

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Well, I think people should be able to live in a society where they can exercise these kinds of internal drives and develop their capacities freely--instead of being forced into the narrow range of options that are available to most people in the world now. And by that, I mean not only options that are objectively available, but also options that are subjectively available--like, how are people allowed to think how are they able to think? Remember, there are all kinds of ways of thinking that are cut off from us in our society--not because we're incapable of them, but because various blockages have been developed and imposed to prevent people from thinking in those ways. That's what indoctrination is about in the first place, in fact--and I don't mean somebody giving you lectures: sitcoms on television, sports that you watch, every aspect of the culture implicitly involves an expression of what a "proper" life and a "proper" set of values are, and that's all indoctrination.

So I think what has to happen is, other portions have to be opened up to people--both subjectively, and in fact concretely: meaning you can do something about them without great suffering. And that's one of the main purposes of socialism, I think: to reach a point where people have the opportunity to decide freely for themselves what their needs are, and not just have the "choices" forced on them by some arbitrary system of power.