How the World Works

How the World Works is the title of a 2011 book by American professor, linguist, political analyst, and philosopher Noam Chomsky. It consists of four books by Noam Chomsky: What Uncle Sam Really Wants, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many, Secrets, Lies and Democracy, and The Common Good. The speeches and interviews collected in How the World Works were given in the 1990s and some in the late 1980s. The book was edited by Arthur Naiman.^[1]

In his book How the World Works, Noam Chomsky exposes the destructive foreign policy of the United States in other countries, mainly in Third World countries, with the support of dictatorships and other unethical methods with the ultimate goal of the financial profit of the corporations that govern the United States. Another issue that the author touches on in his book is the exploitation and oppression of the poor by the rich both within the United States and in general around the world. At the same time, the media is criticized, which are used as a tool to manipulate people's thinking and never allow them to know the truth. Thus, the great ones can work peacefully for their own profits.^[2] Noam Chomsky does not have a magic answer for the enormous problems that he analyzes. As he writes at the end of the book, "I don’t think it’s my job to tell people what they should do – they should think for themselves. I don’t know what I should do here either. So I’m just trying to describe what’s going on as best I can.", while elsewhere in the book he states that the answer to how people can change the world is organization: "Organize. Just organize." As he writes: "There’s only one way to deal with these issues. If everyone is alone, they can’t do anything. All they can do is lament the situation. But if they unite with others, they can make a difference. We can do a million things, depending on where we direct our efforts."^[1]