Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (45 page)

M
AN
: 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.

Look, there isn’t any true capitalist society in the world, it couldn’t survive for ten minutes, but there are variations on capitalism, and the U.S. is towards the capitalist end of the world spectrum—not very far towards it, I should say, but towards it at least in values. And if you had a truly capitalist society, everything would be a commodity, including freedom: there would be as much of it as you can buy. Well, since the U.S. is towards that end of the spectrum, it means there’s an awful lot of freedom around if you can afford it. So if you’re a black organizer in the ghetto, you don’t have much of it, and you’re in trouble—they can send the Chicago police in to murder you, like they did with Fred Hampton [a Black Panther assassinated by the F.B.I, in 1969]. But if you’re a white professional like me, you can buy a lot of freedom.

And beyond that, I also happen to belong to a sector of the society where those who have real power are going to want to protect me—I mean, they may hate everything about me and want to see me disappear, but they don’t want the state to be powerful enough to go after people
like
me, because then it could go after people like
them
. So the fact of the matter is that in societies like ours, privileged people like me are pretty well protected. It’s not a hundred percent, but there’s a lot of leeway around.

Teaching About Resistance

W
OMAN
: Do you have any thoughts about how best to begin helping people understand some of these ideas—like about the media institutions and how they prevent people from thinking freely for themselves?

Well, I don’t think any of it’s very hard, to tell you the honest truth—I mean, intellectuals make a career of trying to make simple things look hard, because that’s part of the way you get your salary paid and so on. But the fact of the matter is, the social world—to the extent that we understand it at all—is more or less right there in front of you after you sort of peel away the blinders a little. It’s an extremely hard thing to understand if you’re all alone trying to do it, but through the kinds of interactions and groups we’ve been talking about, you can do it pretty easily.

So when you have a chance to meet with people or talk with them, I think the thing to do is to try to get them to learn how to explore things for themselves—for example, to help them learn for
themselves
the way that the media shape and frame issues for the purpose of manipulation and control. Now, there’s not much point in doing it abstractly—you know, like some theory of how it works. What you have to do is look at cases. So take cases that people are interested in, and just teach them how to do research projects—research projects are very easy to do, you don’t need a Ph.D.; maybe in physics you do, but not in these topics. You just have to have common sense. You have to have common sense, you have to look carefully at the facts; it may be a little bit of work to
find
the facts—like usually you’re not just going to find them right there in the headlines or something. But if you do a little work, you can find out what the facts are, you can find out the way they’re being distorted and modified by the institutions. And then the purposes of those distortions quickly become clear.

M
AN
: It’s hard to know the best way to stimulate people’s interest as a teacher or an organizer, but certainly there are ways of
not
doing it, even while
appearing
to do it. Earlier, in response to the question about civil disobedience, you mentioned people lecturing on resistance—that would seem to me to be an example of not doing it, while pretending to do it
.

Well, I’m not so convinced that that’s
not
a way to do it, actually. Like, I think there are things to teach people about resistance—I’ve personally liked to listen to people who have had experiences with it, and who may have ideas about it that I don’t have. If you want to call that “lecturing,” okay—but it’s not necessarily wrong: there are lots of things you can learn from other people who have thought about subjects and had experiences.

M
AN
: But what I’m wondering is, what else do you think would go into teaching people about resistance, and activism in general?

First of all I don’t think you should mislead people: you should get them to understand that if they’re going to be independent thinkers, they are probably going to pay a cost, I mean, one has to begin with an understanding of the way the world works: the world does not reward honesty and independence, it rewards obedience and service. It’s a world of concentrated power, and those who have power are not going to reward people who question that power. So to begin with, I don’t think anybody should be misled about that.

After you understand that, okay, then you make your own choices. If your choice is that you want to be independent anyhow, even though you recognize what’s involved, then you should just go ahead and try to do it—but those can be extremely hard choices sometimes. For instance, I know that as an older person who often gets approached by younger people for advice, I’m always very hesitant to give it on these sorts of decisions (even though sometimes the circumstances are such that I have to)—because I’m in no position to tell anybody else what to decide. But what I think one can do is to help people understand what the objective realities are.

Look, you can gain a lot by activism, like all of you were saying earlier—but there are also many things that you can lose. And some of those things are not unimportant, like security for example—that’s not unimportant. And people just have to make their own choices about that when they decide what they’re going to do.

Isolation

W
OMAN
: To stay on a personal level for a moment, Noam, I’ve always been kind of fascinated by how you find the time to write books and articles, and teach, give talks all over the country, have a family life, be the leading figure in linguistics, you document your work very thoroughly—are you in some kind of a time warp, where you experience something other than a 24-hour day like the rest of us?

No, it’s just pure, ordinary fanaticism—and in fact, a lot of things go. Anybody who’s pretty seriously involved in political activity or organizing knows that a lot of other things just go, like personal lives sometimes. I mean, yeah, I try to keep my personal life going—so my grandkids and children were over a few nights ago, and I played with them, that sort of thing. But personal relationships do suffer. For instance, if I see my closest personal friends, whom I’ve known for fifty years, we’re extremely close and so on, once or twice a year, it’s a good year. But that’s the way it goes: you can’t do everything, so you just have to make choices.

Actually, it was kind of striking to watch it during the Sixties—all of a sudden a lot of people really threw themselves into activism, and when I think about it, very few of the couples made it through. Very few. Not because they hated each other or anything—it was just that it was too much of an emotional burden, even if both of them were involved, and something snaps. In fact, it was like a tidal wave right through that period, particularly after some of the big political trials. So couples would stick together for as long as the trial was going on, and immediately afterwards get divorced—it was just too much. And that’s a reflection of what tends to happen in general when you get really seriously involved.

I mean, it’s extremely hard to lead a deeply committed life in several different areas and have them all work. Some of them give, and one of the ones that gives often is personal life—and that’s hard to deal with, because you just can’t go on that way. I don’t really know what the answer is to that, actually; people have found different answers.

M
AN
: It’s comforting for me that you experience the same thing
.

Oh, everybody does.

M
AN
: I feel very isolated when I get so involved in activism that my personal life becomes nonexistent—I really feel a void, not connecting with people
.

Oh yeah, it’s a terrible void—and it then makes it impossible for you to work. After all, we’re not automata: we function as part of a matrix of human relations, and need to connect with other people.

M
AN
: And the personal isolation then reinforces the political isolation
.

It’s tough, yeah. I mean, partly the problem is a result of the fact that we’re all so isolated: if we had live, ongoing popular organizations, this wouldn’t be so true. The history of the labor movement in the United States is interesting in this respect, actually: when people were really working together organizing, that overcame the isolation. In fact, it even overcame things like racism and sexism to a great extent. And this goes way back.

I mean, about a century ago in the United States, the labor movement was getting smashed all over the place: they were only defeated, there were no victories. But in the course of those defeats—things like, say, the Homestead strike [an 1892 strike at a Carnegie Steel plant in Pennsylvania]—it’s amazing what happened. Homestead’s an interesting case, actually, because it was a working-class town, and the strikers simply took the place over: they took over the town and ran everything. And this was during a very racist period, remember—there weren’t a lot of blacks around right there, but there was real racism directed at Eastern Europeans. So, what were called “Huns” (which could be Slovaks or anybody, it didn’t have to be Hungarians) were treated sort of the way blacks are treated—and the racism was very vicious. But it all collapsed in the middle of the Homestead strike. And also, women were running all sorts of things too, a lot of the sexism was broken down as well. And that’s what tends to happen when people join together in common struggles.
  ³²

It also happened in the formation of the C.I.O. [a union for mass-production industries formed in 1935]—black and white workers worked together to create the C.I.O. And it happened in the Civil Rights Movement—S.N.C.C., for example, was very open, it was white, black, anything. A lot of the unpleasant aspects of life disappear, and you can compensate for them, in the course of some kind of common struggle. In fact, an old friend of mine who was in the Polish resistance in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation—and lived through that time and survived—always used to say that it was the best period of his life. I mean, it was extremely dangerous—you could end up in a gas chamber and everybody knew it—but there was a sense of community that he’d never felt before, and never had after.

So the best answer, I suspect, is just the same as for everything else—we have to develop stable popular organizations, and a culture of concern, and commitment, and activism, and solidarity, which can help to sustain us in these struggles, and which can help break down some of the barriers that have been set up to divide and distract us.

Science and Human Nature

M
AN
: Noam, could you elaborate a little more on what your own opinions are about human nature—for instance, do you see humans as more destructive than constructive, or is it maybe the other way around?

Well, first of all, my opinion about it is no better than yours: it’s just pure intuition, nobody really understands anything about human nature. Look, people don’t understand much about big molecules—when you get beyond that to things like human nature, anybody’s guess is as good as anyone else’s.

M
AN
: But you’ve studied a lot of the results of human nature
.

Yeah, but if you look at the results of human nature, you see everything: you see enormous self-sacrifice, you see tremendous courage, you see integrity, you see destructiveness, you see anything you want. That doesn’t tell you much.

M
AN
: It seems like a great deal of your research documents the destructive nature of humans, though
.

Well, but a lot of it documents other things too. I mean, my general feeling is that over time, there’s measurable progress: it’s not huge, but it’s significant. And sometimes it’s been pretty dramatic. For instance, take the sort of “original sin” of American history—what happened to the native population here. It’s a remarkable fact that until the 1960s, the culture simply could not come to terms with that at all. Until the 1960s, with very rare exceptions, academic scholarship was grossly falsifying the history, and suppressing the reality of what happened—even the number of people killed was radically falsified. I mean, as late as 1969, in one of the leading diplomatic histories of the United States, the author Thomas Bailey could write that after the American Revolution, the former colonists turned to the task of “felling trees and Indians.”
  ³³
Nobody
could say that now—you couldn’t even say that in a
Wall Street journal
editorial now. Well, those are important changes, and it’s part of a lot of other significant progress too. Slavery was considered a fine thing not long ago.