Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

People have to be driven to have certain wants in our system—why? Why not leave them alone so they can just be happy, do other things?

People want to explore, we want to press our capacities to their limits, we want to appreciate what we can.

Noam, aren’t you at all afraid of being silenced by the establishment for being so prominent and vocal in speaking out against U.S. power and its abuses? No, not really—and for a very simple reason, actually: if you look at me, you’ll see what it is. I’m white, I’m privileged, and that means I’m basically immune from punishment by power. I mean, I don’t want to say that it’s a hundred percent immunity—but the fact of the matter is that these two things mean that you can buy a lot of freedom.

people aren’t gods: they just discover things,

Real education is about getting people involved in thinking for themselves—and that’s a tricky business to know how to do well, but clearly it requires that whatever it is you’re looking at has to somehow catch people’s interest and make them want to think, and make them want to pursue and explore. And just regurgitating “Good Books” is absolutely the worst way to do it—that’s just a way of turning people into automata. You may call that an education if you want, but it’s really the opposite of an education, which is why people like William Bennett [Reagan’s Secretary of Education] and Allan Bloom and these others are all so much in favor of it.

But the basic institutional role and function of the schools, and why they’re supported, is to provide an ideological service: there’s a real selection for obedience and conformity. And I think that process starts in kindergarten, actually.

When you’re sitting in front of your tube, you’re alone. I mean, there’s something about human beings that just makes face-to-face contact very different from banging around on a computer terminal and getting some noise coming back—that’s very impersonal, and it breaks down human relations.

Another thing I’ve found is that there’s a kind of degraded character to e-mail messages. People are just too casual about them—they send you any half-baked idea they haven’t even thought through yet, whenever the impulse hits them. And the result is, it ends up being a tremendous burden even to read everything that comes across, let alone to answer it—so that can easily end up being all you do with your time. And people do put huge numbers of hours into it. In fact, there are friends of mine whose quality of work I think is seriously declining, because of their overwhelming involvement in e-mail interactions. It’s extremely seductive just to sit at the computer screen and bang at it all day.

So for example, it was a very easy thing in the 1980s for people in the United States to denounce the atrocities of the Soviet Union in its occupation of Afghanistan—but those denunciations had no effects which could have helped people. In terms of their ethical value, they were about the same as denouncing Napoleon’s atrocities, or things that happened in the Middle Ages. Useful and significant actions are ones which have consequences for human beings, and usually those will concern things that you can influence and control—which means for people in the United States, American actions primarily, not those of some other state.

Canada’s very nice as long as you’re criticizing the United States—try going after Canada and see what happens to you.

Well, in my view what would ultimately be necessary would be a breakdown of the nation-state system—because I think that’s not a viable system. It’s not necessarily the natural form of human organization; in fact, it’s a European invention pretty much. The modern nation-state system basically developed in Europe since the medieval period, and it was extremely difficult for it to develop: Europe has a very bloody history, an extremely savage and bloody history, with constant massive wars and so on, and that was all part of an effort to establish the nation-state system. It has virtually no relation to the way people live, or to their associations, or anything else particularly, so it had to be established by force. And it was established by centuries of bloody warfare. That warfare ended in 1945—and the only reason it ended is because the next war was going to destroy everything. So it ended in 1945—we hope; if it didn’t, it will destroy everything.

The principles of the Founding Fathers were rather nicely expressed by John Jay, the head of the Constitutional Convention and the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. His favorite maxim was, “The people who own the country ought to govern it”—that’s the principle on which the United States was founded.95 The major framer of the Constitution, James Madison, emphasized very clearly in the debates at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 that the whole system must be designed, as he put it, “to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority”—that’s the primary purpose of the government, he said.

I mean, you can pretend up to a certain point that the world has infinite resources and that it’s an infinite wastebasket—but at some point you’re going to run into the reality, which is that that isn’t true.

What I usually say is that they’re not phrasing the question the right way. I mean, people should not be asking me or anyone else where to turn for an accurate picture of things: they should be asking themselves that. So someone can ask me what reflects my interpretation of the way things are, and I can tell them where they can get material that looks at the world the way I think it ought to be looked at—but then they have to decide whether or not that’s accurate. Ultimately it’s your own mind that has to be the arbiter: you’ve got to rely on your own common sense and intelligence, you can’t rely on anyone else for the truth.

This point has been understood forever, actually. So if you go back to James Madison, who framed a lot of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and so on, he pointed out that, as he put it, a “parchment barrier” will never stand in the way of oppression—meaning, writing something down on paper is totally worthless by itself: if you fight for it, you can make it real, otherwise you’ll just have really nice things on paper.

If the choices are narrowed to your child being attacked in the halls and getting a rotten education, or having “private choices”—sure, people will pick the “private choices.” But the task of the left is to extend those options, to let people know that there is another option, the option of a decent life: which is neither schools as prisons, nor pull yourself out and let everybody else stay in the prison—which is what the whole “privatization of education” story is really about.

So take something that’s been happening in recent years: devolution—that is, removing authority from the federal government down to the state governments. Well, in some circumstances, that would be a democratizing move which I would be in favor of—it would be a move away from central authority down to local authority. But that’s in abstract circumstances that don’t exist. Right now it’ll happen because moving decision-making power down to the state level in fact means handing it over to private power. See, huge corporations can influence and dominate the federal government, but even middle-sized corporations can influence state governments and play one state’s workforce off against another’s by threatening to move production elsewhere unless they get better tax breaks and so on. So under the conditions of existing systems of power, devolution is very anti-democratic; under other systems of much greater equality, devolution could be highly democratic—but these are questions which really can’t be discussed in isolation from the society as it actually exists.

So if you look at the history of marijuana prohibitions in the United States, you’ll find that they began with legislation in the southwestern states which was aimed at Mexican immigrants who were coming in, who happened to use marijuana. Now, nobody had any reason to believe that marijuana was dangerous or anything like that—and obviously it doesn’t even come close to alcohol, let alone tobacco, in its negative consequences. But these laws were set up to try to control a population they were worried about.

a large portion of the country’s population is being dismissed as superfluous because they do not play a role in profit-making

But by the 1970s, the “Bretton Woods” system had become unsustainable: the U.S. no longer was strong enough economically to remain the world’s banker, primarily because of the huge costs of financing the Vietnam War. So Richard Nixon at that point made a decision to just dismantle the whole arrangement: in the early 1970s he took the United States off the gold standard, he raised import duties, he just destroyed the whole system totally. Well, after this international regulatory apparatus had been destroyed, we started to get speculation against currencies on an unprecedented scale, and fluctuating financial exchanges, all these other things that have kept growing ever since.

And that’s a very dangerous phenomenon—because that kind of deep irrationality can readily be whipped up by demagogues, you know, Newt Gingriches. These guys can whip up fear, hatred, they can appeal to fundamentalist urges—and that’s been scaring most of the world for a while, I should say. For example, if you recall the Republican National Convention in 1992, it opened with a “God and Country” rally, which was televised and seen around the world. In Europe particularly it really sent chills up people’s spines—because they remember Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies, at least older people do, and it had something of that tone. Well, the Republicans were able to insulate the Convention from it that time around and keep most of that stuff confined to the first night, but in the future they might not be able to do that—in the future those people might take the Convention over, in which case we’d be very close to some American version of fascism; it may not be Hitler Germany, but it’ll be bad enough.

Actually, I think that the United States has been in kind of a pre-fascist mood for years—and we’ve been very lucky that every leader who’s come along has been a crook. See, people should always be very much in favor of corruption—I’m not kidding about that. Corruption’s a very good thing, because it undermines power. I mean, if we get some Jim Bakker coming along—you know, this preacher who was caught sleeping with everybody and defrauding his followers—those guys are fine: all they want is money and sex and ripping people off, so they’re never going to cause much trouble. Or take Nixon, say: an obvious crook, he’s ultimately not going to cause that much of a problem. But if somebody shows up who’s kind of a Hitler-type—just wants power, no corruption, straight, makes it all sound appealing, and says, “We want power”—well, then we’ll all be in very bad trouble. Now, we haven’t had the right person yet in the United States, but sooner or later somebody’s going to fill that position—and if so, it will be highly dangerous.