The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.

The quotation warns against a strongly “blank-slate” or radical social-constructivist view of human psychology—one that treats human nature as wholly produced by historical circumstance and social relations. Chomsky’s point is that if people are assumed to have no relatively stable, innate constraints (moral, cognitive, emotional), then there is no principled limit on what institutions may attempt to make of them. In that framework, coercive “re-education,” propaganda, and technocratic social engineering can be justified as merely reshaping a malleable product. The line thus links a philosophical claim about human nature to political consequences: theories that deny inherent human capacities and needs can become enabling ideologies for domination.