Subtexts A graphic novel based on chats with Noam Chomsky

The world according to Noam Chomsky “Whenever you have a glimpse of freedom, people start acting like free, sensible human beings,” Noam Chomsky said. “They break out of these chains of indoctrination and privatization.” Author and Santa Fe resident Jeffrey Wilson brings his conversation with the legendary social and political theorist to life in the new book The Instinct for Cooperation: A Graphic Novel Conversation with

Noam Chomsky and Jeffery Wilson (Seven Stories Press), illustrated by Eliseu Gouveia.

Throughout history, people have been inspired to involve themselves in what began as spontaneous moments — a couple of black teenagers walking into a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina; social justice sympathizers setting up shop in Zuccotti Park in New York to target Wall Street — that found people working together to eradicate a common social contagion: the subduing of the masses for the purpose of social control. But the instinct to organize, something Chomsky notes the elites are well aware of and try desperately to dissuade, is natural to the human experience, and those impulses must be acted upon to effect change. Sadly, today’s social media culture may be bringing us together, but there is a permeating sense of detachment from one another. We can flip through a news feed on Facebook, witness something atrocious, post an emoji, and then move on.

What can be done? How do we begin to understand how to organize our thoughts — and our communities — to right inherent wrongs? One place to start might be The Instinct

for Cooperation. Wilson, a doctoral candidate in geography at the University of Arizona, has distilled some of Chomsky’s ideas about threats to social and economic justice into a series of conversations with Chomsky and others. These chats highlight moments in history that could very well be seen as tipping points, where decisive action spawned by malaise replaced complacency. This book may serve as a primer for those who are interested in learning how to better organize themselves to confront issues that plague our communities.