JERRY: Noam, I just read a transcript of one of your recent speeches, where you describe how throughout history honor has been given to those who speak on behalf of the powerful. You conclude with the observation, "Rending these chains is a first step toward freedom and justice." Maybe we could start there.
NOAM: Well, we can go back to the earliest recorded texts in our canon -- take the Bible, for example -- and we'll find that those who have served power have always been rewarded with respectability. It's as close to a historical truism as you can find. There were a lot of intellectuals in the Bible. They didn't use the term, "intellectual"; they were called prophets. But they played the role that intellectuals play in the modern period. They gave geopolitical analysis, social critique; they expressed moral judgments and so on.
The prophets of the Bible came in two types, types that in the Soviet Union used to be called commissars, and those that were called dissidents. The commissars, the people who served power, were the ones who were later considered false prophets. They were the people, however, who, in their own time, were respected, honored and protected. They served power. There was another group of people, seemingly off in a corner somewhere, who exposed the corruptions of power. They're the ones who were reviled, imprisoned, driven into the desert, and so on. It was only much later that the evaluation was reversed and they were recognized as the true prophets.
That pattern just perpetuates throughout history, and for perfectly good reasons. If you serve power, authority and privilege, you'll end up, by and large, with respectability. And if you undermine them, whether it's by political analysis, moral critique, or anything else, they're not going to applaud you for it.
JERRY: They're not going to applaud you for it, because you're not validating the power structure.
NOAM: No. What you're doing is, in fact, speaking up for the interests of the general population and for what the people themselves see as right and wrong. That's not what privilege and power want. History isn't physics, but this pattern is about as close to a true historical generalization as you can find.
BLOOMSDAY: Fuck that, guys. I'm going for applause.
[excerpted from Dialogues, Jerry Brown, Berkeley Hills Books (1998)]
