I couldn’t get pass first 30ish pages in the main book (after reading trough the prefaces and skipping here and there reading some other stuff that piqued my interest also). It got me heavily depressed and left me feeling completely powerless and hopeless and it only reinforced the things I noticed and tought about USA myself.
And I just quit…prefering the sanity of ignorance to the madness of reality.
How can anyone hope to have a normal world with THAT…and I live in Eastern Europe…one would say far away from thr main American Influence. Not so far as it felt before. If we tought that the Nazis or the Communists were evil…ohoho boy…this book makes one feel like there is nothing more vile in the world than the United States of America government.
Did you read it? How did it make you feel?
There are many leftists, American and otherwise, who write very much in the same tradition as Chomsky, but with far more of a focus on hopeful alternatives to the present order. Graeber, Solnit, and Bergman are the first that come to mind. Maybe they’d be a better fit for your current mental state!
Yea he puts the bad out there…but…no proposition to what a layman can do.
And I don’t mean about america specifically…I mean about their local problems of the sort.
How does one idiot battle the corrupts? Voting has no power…I don’t think it ever did actually…or if it did…certainly now the game is rigged from the start.
I’m looking at my country now: there’s the Socialists which are just former comunists and communist inteligence generals and higher ups…corrupt to the bone (with very minor but extremely shiny exceptions here and there).
There’s the Liberals which themselves made it clear they are just the same when they were in power.
And there’s 2 more parties…one is straight up Russian agents…and the other is filled with young people with good ideals …but after they got together they showed they’re all talk…all bark no bite…completely impotent outside of shiny slogans and ideals, so they’re out of the picture anyway.
Lately the Liberals and the Socialists have made a coalition (It’s like a coalition between USA and the USSR during the cold war if you ask me) only to not allow the Russian party to gain power…so…who the hell do you vote for? Is there even a choise anymore?
I like Chomsky a lot, but I don’t think he’s who you should turn to if you’re feeling so dispirited and hopeless. As I mentioned in my other comment, there are tons of other contemporary thinkers who are adept at pointing out the problems in our current social systems, but then also giving recommendations for how we can combat it. A lot of the time, it deals with focusing on things we do have control over, whether they’re community building organizations or simply reaching out to like-minded individuals.
I know everything looks really bleak, but there is still hope! I hope you feel better, friend!