Noam Chomsky: The Immediate and Foremost Enemy of Genuine Participatory Democracy

 This post is Noam Chomsky at a glance...

I listened yesterday morning to the second half of an interview by David Barsamian with Noam Chomsky on Alternative Radio (https://www.alternativeradio.org/). I was reminded once again of how Noam Chomsky is the world's greatest living intellectual. And again, fully and painfully, I was reminded of how we Americans are systematically deprived of this wisdom and truth and instead massively propagandized. As my eldest son, Brian, related to me many years ago, "What better way to control a people than to convince them that they are not being controlled?" So true of our country. And I recognized how radically different our nation and the world would be if we humans were consistently exposed to the powerful voices of wisdom, integrity, courage, and truth found in voices like that of Noam Chomsky and from independent resources which receive no funding from the corporate elite.
 

In listening to the interview on Tuesday, I was also reminded that Noam Chomsky turns 91 on December 7th. This post — which embodies the profound gifts of truth and wisdom of this great Elder and international treasure — is dedicated to Noam Chomsky. I also share this as a dedication to all those who have devoted their lives to healing our broken world and offering us instead a courageous vision of what is possible. May we be informed and inspired and courageous. May we allow the truth to set us free. — Molly
 

 It is the responsibility of intellectuals to 

speak the truth and expose lies.

— Noam Chomsky

Neoliberal democracy. Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless. In sum, neoliberalism is the immediate and foremost enemy of genuine participatory democracy, not just in the United States but across the planet, and will be for the foreseeable future.

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
 

Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media. 
 

The general population doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know.

There's a good reason why nobody studies history, it just teaches you too much.

Education is a system of imposed ignorance. 

The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on — because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.
 

He who controls the media controls the minds of the public.
 

The point of public relations slogans like "Support Our Troops" is that they don't mean anything ... that's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody is going to be against and I suppose everybody will be for, because nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. But its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something, do you support our policy? And that's the one you're not allowed to talk about. 
 

As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome. 
 

It’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions — you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism.
 

The indoctrination is so deep that educated people think they’re being objective.
 

***** 

The best defense against democracy
is to distract people. 

Nobody should have any illusions. The United States has essentially a one-party system and the ruling party is the business party.

The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.

Governments will use whatever technology is available to combat their primary enemy — their own population.

In the US, there is basically one party — the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies. By and large, I am opposed to those policies. As is most of the population.

Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are, in principle, under autocratic control. Thus, a corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist, that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level. [...] Just as I'm opposed to political fascism, I am opposed to economic fascism. I think that until the major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it's pointless to talk about democracy. 

Globalization is the result of powerful governments, especially that of the United States, pushing trade deals and other accords down the throats of the world’s people to make it easier for corporations and the wealthy to dominate the economies of nations around the world without having obligations to the peoples of those nations.

All public resources go to the rich. The poor, if they can survive in the labor market, fine. Otherwise, they die. That's economics in a nutshell. 
  
The media want to maintain their intimate relation to state power. They want to get leaks, they want to get invited to the press conferences. They want to rub shoulders with the Secretary of State, all that kind of business. To do that, you've got to play the game, and playing the game means telling their lies, serving as their disinformation apparatus. 

Jingoism, racism, fear, religious fundamentalism: these are the ways of appealing to people if you're trying to organize a mass base of support for policies that are really intended to crush them.

Hypocrites are those who apply to others the standards that they refuse to accept for themselves. 
 

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle.
 

That's the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don't work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.

It’s pretty ironic that the so-called ‘least advanced’ people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction. 

If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged. 
 

*****

Moral cowardice and intellectual corruption are 

the natural concomitants of unchallenged privilege.

Democratic societies can't force people. Therefore they have to control what they think.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune. 

Nobody is going to pour truth into your brain. It's something you have to find out for yourself. 

You are responsible for the predictable consequences of your actions.

If you care about other people, you might try to organize to undermine power and authority. That's not going to happen if you care only about yourself. 
 

I try to encourage people to think for themselves, to question standard assumptions... Don't take assumptions for granted. Begin by taking a skeptical attitude toward anything that is conventional wisdom. Make it justify itself. It usually can't. Be willing to ask questions about what is taken for granted. Try to think things through for yourself.
 

The world is a very puzzling place. If you're not willing to be puzzled, you just become a replica of someone else's mind.
 

If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that's something, but the people in power can live with that. What they can't live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organisations that keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better the next time. 

If you want to make changes in the world, you're going to have to be there day after day doing the boring, straightforward work of getting a couple of people interested and building a slightly bigger organization and carrying out the next move and suffering frustration and finally getting somewhere. That's how the world changes. 

The search for truth is a cooperative, unending endeavor. We can, and should, engage in it to the extent we can and encourage others to do so as well, seeking to free ourselves from constraints imposed by coercive institutions, dogma, irrationality, excessive conformity and lack of initiative and imagination, and numerous other obstacles.

To live a life of honesty and integrity is a responsibility of every decent person. 

Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, it’s unlikely you will step up and take responsibility for making it so. If you assume that there’s no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, there’s a chance you may contribute to making a better world. The choice is yours.  

Let us free ourselves from propaganda and ignorance by

courageously embracing a profound commitment to truth!

— Molly