Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

As a more general matter, though, if you really want to educate yourself politically, what you have to do is become part of a group—because unless you’re a real fanatic about it, you’re just not going to be able to do it all by yourself. I mean, I do it, but I know I’ve got a screw loose, and I don’t expect anybody else to be that crazy. On the other hand, a group working together can do it very well. Take a look at the Central America solidarity movements in the 1980s, for example—they were usually church-based groups around the country, and they just kept working at it together. They had people going down there, they had their own literature, they circulated information around, and the result was, there were people I met in those groups who knew more about Central America than I do—and I work on it hard. They certainly knew more about it than the C.I.A., which is no big thing actually, or than people in a lot of the academic departments.