Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

MAN: Noam, given an intellectual culture like the one you’ve been describing—can you find any “honest” intellectuals in the U.S.? You can find them, but like I say, usually they’re not inside the institutions—and that’s for a very good reason: there is no reason why institutions of power and domination should tolerate or encourage people who try to undermine them. That would be completely dysfunctional. So typically you’re going to find major efforts made to marginalize the honest and serious intellectuals, the people who are committed to what I would call Enlightenment values—values of truth, and freedom, and liberty, and justice. And those efforts will to a large extent succeed. MAN: Who are those people? I mean, you make the whole situation look very bleak—who would you say are the intellectuals that are going about things in the right way? Well, very often they’re the people who have done things to make a real change in the world. Take the S.N.C.C. [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] activists, for example—they were serious intellectuals, and they made a big change. Or take the people in the 1960s who did the work that’s led to so many of the improvements we’ve seen in the country over the last twenty years—and “work” didn’t just mean running around the streets waving signs, you know, it also meant thinking about things, and figuring out what the problems were, and trying to teach people about them and convince them. Despite what you always hear, that was not e...