Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance — Begun 2010.12.05

I stumbled across this in one of my local used book stores late this summer, and have now followed through on my resolution at the time to not just put this one in the book shelf.
 It has been a while — early this year — since I read Chomsky. (Except for the excellent The Noam Chomsky Lectures, which isn't by Chomsky.)

(Avram) Noam Chomsky.

Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance.

New York: Metropolitan Books — Henry Holt and Company, 2003. ISBN:0805074007.

Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr ... 

... made the rather somber observation that 'the average life expectancy of a species is about 100,000 years. ¶We are entering a period of human history that may provide an answer to the question of whether it is better to be smart than the stupid. The most hopeful prospect is that the question will not be answered: if it receives a definite answer, that answer can only be that humans were a king of 'biological error,' using their allotted 100,000 years to destroy themselves and, in the process, much else. ¶The species has surely developed the capacity to do just that, and a hypothetical extraterrestrial observer might well conclude that humans have demonstrated that capacity throughout their history, dramatically in the past few hundred years, with an assault on the environment that supports life, on the diversity of more complex organisms, and with cold and calculated savagery, on each other as well (1-2).

And:

Those who want to face their responsibilities with a genuine commitment to democracy and freedom — even to decent survival — should recognize the barriers that stand in the way. In violent states these are not concealed. In more democratic societies barriers are more subtle. While methods differ sharply from more brutal to more free societies, the goals are in many ways the similar: to ensure that the 'great beast,' as Alexander Hamilton called the people, does not stray from its proper confines. ¶Controlling the general population has always been a dominant concern of power and privilege, particularly since the first modern democratic revolution in seventeenth-century England. ... Almost three centuries later, Wilsonian idealism, as it is standardly termed, adopted a rather similar stance. Abroad, it is Washington's responsibility to ensure that government is in the hands of 'the good, though but the few.' At home, it is necessary to safeguard a system of elite decision-making and public ratification — 'polyarchy,' in the terminology of political science — not democracy (5). 

To see the debate Chomsky had, November 26, 2003, with Washington Post readers about Hegemony or Survival, click this debate transcript link.