Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

And in fact, that’s the direction a lot of the disarmament movement took after that: the people went off and got themselves MacArthur Fellowships and so on, and then they went around “convincing” the strategic analysts.5 Well, that’s one of the ways in which you can kid yourself into believing that you’re still doing your work, when really you’re being bought off—because there’s nothing that elites like better than saying, “Oh, come convince me.” That stops you from organizing, and getting people involved, and causing disruption, because now you’re talking to some elite smart guy—and you can do that forever: any argument you can give in favor of it, he can give an argument against it, and it just keeps going. And also, you get respectable, and you’re invited to lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club, and everybody pays attention to you and loves you, and it’s all great. That’s in fact the direction in which the nuclear freeze movement went—and that’s a mistake. And we ought to be aware of those mistakes and learn from them: if you’re getting accepted in elite circles, chances are very strong that you’re doing something wrong—I mean, for very simple reasons. Why should they have any respect for people who are trying to undermine their power?