Nikolay's Reviews > Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

Not assembled by Chomsky, but by some genius editors who organized and very precisely cut pieces of many interviews with him. I loved the format. The covered a much broader range of topics than I expected and the more conversational style made it a lot easier to swallow.

Now, to the more complicated part of the review – the content itself. Based on knowing a little bit about Chomsky, my approach to listening the book was to pay closer attention to the facts and explanations how and why the works and tactfully let his ideas about how the world should go in one ear and out the other. This strategy worked marvelously.

Some of the topics covered are: US foreign policy and its brutal aggression, capitalism and how capital effectively governs the country, media/education/intellectualism and how they are mostly used as propaganda tools, dissent and how they had an actual effect on US government actions.

My two main takeaways:
- After learning more about how the world works, the only way to deal with the imminent depression and being overwhelmed is to stick to the things we can change and enjoy and work on changing them day after day, putting one foot in front of the other, until we see an improvement.
- While flawed, the current system works reasonably well – we live longer, violence is minimal compared to the past, with a little bit of luck one can lead a decent life. Not to say we should accept the status quo, but amount our regular rage about how fucked up the world is, let's at least for a second acknowledge the current complex (and surprising, to me) balance.