Wallace Shawn

Privileged people assume that the less-privileged are less privileged precisely because they were born with a lower degree of intelligence. That’s their unconscious sociological analysis. Even those privileged people who have thought about it and who know that that isn’t true are unable to retain that awareness on a daily basis. It’s not something they have time to think about. Privileged people think, “I was born intelligent. That’s why I’m a lawyer or a playwright. The guy making my sandwich was born less intelligent. That’s why he’s making sandwiches or dealing drugs and being thrown in prison.”

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We need emotional depth and sensitivity. Particularly if you’re imagining, as I do in the book, “What if the Left succeeds?” Let’s be frank. Sometimes people with wonderful motivations have disappointed everyone when they came into power, because of a lack of emotional depth and sensitivity and compassion. Just to overcome global warming alone requires brains! To try to guide society, that requires emotional depth and sensitivity.

People need the wisdom, or the imagination, of others. Who do you learn from? You might have a wise and compassionate friend. But very few people, maybe no people, can invent their own menu of possibilities. Don’t great works of art have something to teach you? Maybe Tolstoy has something to teach you. Maybe Debussy. Maybe many others. No one would deny that Noam Chomsky has special intellectual capacities. Beethoven has special capacities, Ibsen had great insight into the psychology of human beings. If we’re imagining that a better world could be created, don’t we need their help?

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If I went into a restaurant and saw people of my own class, I would feel such hatred for those people I would feel ill. And every time I’d get sick I’d realize that I was just like them. I felt a loathing for myself as someone responsible for the suffering of humanity. I thought, “The United States is the enemy of humanity, and I’m one of the people they’re doing this for.”
JF

And then you traveled to Latin America in a volatile period — the late 1980s — to see the Sandanista revolution.
WS

I wanted to go to Nicaragua, to see if there could be a different way of organizing society that would be better. I had always been an incredible physical coward — and I would say I am one again now. But at the time I was in such a state, because I had come to hate myself. We were told, “You can’t just go to Nicaragua, you have to go to El Salvador and Honduras to see what Nicaragua used to be like, and what the differences are.” I was very motivated, and I rather aggressively collected phone numbers of people in Central America whom we could meet. We also went to Guatemala, three times. That all fed into my point of view becoming really different from the point of view of a lot of my friends.


https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/09/wallace-shawn-plays-socialist-night-thoughts-culture-hollywood