Marie Snyder writes in 3 Quarks about
Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, a collection of talks given between 1989 and 1999. Below, I’ve summarized the ideas down to ten common threads often seen elsewhere in his work....
1. He openly disparages the use of unnecessarily complex words and ideas (like “praxis”), and explains how and why the university system (tied to corporations and governments) breeds elitist intellectualism:
Doctors should not use complex words like 'hemoglobin'. Universities should not pretend that they take only the smartest students. We want our scientists and lawyers to have the vocabulary of a retarded five year old.
“I think the idea that you’re supposed to have special qualifications to talk about world affairs is just another scam…
Nobody thinks you need special qualifications. What helps is having been a diplomat who negotiated an important multilateral treaty or else having made billions on the currency market by correctly predicting wars and revolutions and so forth.
.it’s just another technique for making the population feel that they don’t know anything, and they’d better just stay out of it and let us smart guys run it.
The population genuinely doesn't want to make decisions regarding countries they have never heard off. Also they want their Doctors to be hella smart.
In order to do that, what you pretend is that there’s some esoteric discipline, and you’ve got to have some letters after your name before you can say anything about it. The fact is, that’s a joke” (137).
What Chomsky studied was indeed a joke. As for his comments on politics, they were jejune. Did you know politicians pretend to be nice even if they aren't nice? That's totes bonkers!
“Don’t forget, part of the whole intellectual vocation is creating a niche for yourself, and if everybody can understand what you’re talking about, you’ve sort of lost, because then what makes you special?
What made Chomsky special was that his shite was a total waste of time. Linguists should be compiling dictionaries or grammar books. They shouldn't pretend they are doing some higher type of math.
I think people should be extremely skeptical when intellectual life constructs structures which aren’t transparent….most of the time it’s just fakery” (229).
Generative grammar was fakery- that's true enough.
“Universities…in many respects are not very different from the media in the way they function….they’re parasitic institutions that need to be supported from the outside” (233).
Some media outlets are useful- e.g. one's devoted to providing economic or scientific information. The same is true of Universities which focus on STEM subjects or Sports or useful stuff of that sort. What is utterly useless is stupid Professors who pretend they are actually Leon fucking Trotsky.
Typically you’re going to find major efforts made to marginalize the honest and serious intellectuals,
Paranoid much? What marginalized Chomsky was the fact that his work was utterly useless.
the people who are committed to what I would call Enlightenment values – values of truth, and freedom, and liberty, and justice.
The fundamental Enlightenment value had to do with fucking over darkies.
And those efforts will to a large extent succeed” (261).
Nope. Darkies will kick Whiteys ass- if darkies are more numerous.
2. He has a plethora of evidence of shocking atrocities committed by the U.S. including using mercenary states which allow them to overtly support one side while covertly supporting the other.
Chomsky did not notice that the US was founded on atrocities committed against indigenous people. As for 'covert' support- the US didn't need to bother with any such thing unless Congress had ruled otherwise.
This in-depth information ensure that the public can see the severity of the current problem with our system:
Paranoid ravings don't enable us to see shite.
“There’s a whole network of U.S. mercenary states….a massive international terrorist network run by the United States…military groups that unite the Western Hemisphere….Other countries hire terrorists, we hire terrorist states” (4-5).
I suppose Chomsky meant the Contras in Nicaragua. Still, what's so strange about a terrorist state doing deals with other terrorist states? Anyway, many people in America have dicks. Dicks cause RAPE! Ban them immediately.
“In the 1960s, Israel started to be used as a conduit for intervening in the affairs of black African countries…
Israel sold military training to anyone who could afford to pay. But it was the PLO which trained crazy terrorists.
the United States increasingly turned to Israel as a kind of a weapon against other parts of the Third World –
No. The US itself provided training to some groups- e.g. Tibetan Khampas. Israel was welcome to do non mission critical stuff like training ex-Mau Mau fighters from Kenya.
Israel would provide armaments and training and computers and all sorts of other things to Third World dictatorships at times when it was hard for the U.S. government to give that support directly” (126).
Because of Congress.
“The United States is permitted to carry out war crimes, it’s permitted to attack other countries, it’s permitted to ignore international law. On those things there’s a complete consensus”
No. That's why it has to be done surreptitiously. Oliver North got limited immunity for testifying. Otherwise he'd have done jail time. Chomsky didn't understand that doing evil shit costs money. Voters are also tax payers. They elect people to cut off funding for evil shit.
3. He acknowledges and details the illegitimate use of power in western governments today as they work towards improving their own lot at the expense of their citizens’. We could have a society in which every mouth is fed, but that would be bad for the government:
Chomsky noticed that most Americans were as thin as shit because those in power kept stealing their tacos.
“Under the Sandinista government Nicaragua was in fact beginning economic development: it was establishing health programs and social programs, and things were starting to improve for the general population there.
Unless they objected to Dictatorship or wanted stuff like habeas corpus and freedom of expression.
Well, that set off the alarm bells in New York and Washington, like it always does, and we had to stop it – because it was issuing an appeal to the ‘illiterate and mentally deficient’ in other desperate countries, like Honduras and Guatemala, to do the same thing. That’s what U.S. planners call the ‘domino theory,’ or the ‘threat of a good example,’ and pretty soon the whole U.S.-dominated system starts to fall apart” (40-41).
Congress felt that Nicaragua was a money-pit and, under the Boland amendment, banned funding for the Contras.
“Germany has a kind of social contract we don’t have –
Chomsky lurves Germany.
one of the biggest unions there just won a 35-hour work-week….
Interestingly, the average number of hours worked is lower in the US than in Germany.
In the Netherlands, poverty among the elderly has gone down to flat zero,
but American seniors are richer.
and among children it’s 4%….So even within the range of existing societies set up almost exactly like ours,
The US is a lot bigger than Germany. For structural reasons
there are plenty of other social policies you could have – and I think our system could tolerate those things too, it really just depends if there’s enough pressure to achieve them” (363).
It really depends on whether Americans want to pay higher taxes.
[The U.S. intentionally] “put the country so deeply in debt that there would be virtually no way for the government to pursue programs of social spending anymore”
To be fair, Chomsky knows shit about econ.
4. He clarifies that we’ve become accustomed to a corporate-dictated governmental system that has to be overthrown.
“Our economic system “works,” it just works in the interests of the masters,
Chomsky's master should take him walkies more often.
and I’d like to see one that works in the interests of the general population. And that will only happen when they are the ‘principal architects’ of policy, to borrow Adam Smith’s phrase.
The problem is that people run away from places where they are 'principal architects'.
I mean, as long as power is narrowly concentrated…you know who’s going to benefit from the policies….
No. What matters is what people with power do with that power.
That’s why democracy would be a good thing for the general public.
Democracies can do stupid shit.
But of course, achieving real democracy will require that the whole system of corporate capitalism be completely dismantled
Also we will have to exterminate the bourgeoisie and the kulaks and the lumpen elements and, obviously, the Jews and the Freemasons and the Catholics and the sodomites and people who like Taylor Swift.
– because it’s radically anti-democratic….You have to build up alternative popular institutions,
this cunt can't build shit.
which could allow control over society’s investment decisions to be moved into the hands of working people and communities…a ‘participatory economy’” (140).
Chomsky was a big fan of Chavez. He simply felt he didn't go far enough.
“If capital is privately controlled, then people are going to have to rent themselves
Chomsky started off as a rent-boy.
in order to survive. Now, you can say, ‘they rent themselves freely, it’s a free contract’ – but that’s a joke.
Venezuela is no joke. Twenty percent of the population has fled.
If your choice is, ‘do what I tell you or starve,’
7 million Venezuelans fled because they weren't getting enough to eat. Stalin and Mao presided over massive famines.
that’s not a choice – it’s in fact what was commonly referred to as wage slavery in more civilized times, like the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example”.
There was actual slavery in the eighteenth century and for a good part of the nineteenth century. It took the genius of the Bolsheviks to invent Gulags which were worse than any Caribbean barracoon.
“There’s an experiment going on. The experiment is: can you marginalize a large part of the population, regard them as superfluous because they’re not helping you make those dazzling profits – and can you set up a world in which production is carried out by the most oppressed people, with the fewest rights, in the most flexible labor markets, for the happiness of the rich people of the world?“
That experiment succeeded in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Chomsky is simply ignorant.
5. He insists we must have a government that is transparent and fair
we must find our own Chavez to wreck our country.
with a populous that keeps it on its toes through constant scrutiny and limited government control:
which is what constitutional law is about- another subject Chomsky is wholly ignorant of.
“If you want to traumatize people, treason trials are an extreme way – if there are spies running around in our midst, then we’re really in trouble, we’d better just listen to the government and stop thinking” .
Chomsky doesn't bother with thinking. He just tells the stupidest most mischievous possible lie.
“Look, every government has a need to frighten its population, and one way of doing that is to shroud its working in mystery” (11).
The late Queen, Gor bless 'er, often hid behind a chair and shouted' Boo!' at the Prime Minister.
“Giving the state the power to determine what people can say does not improve the position of people who are now powerless.…It’s dangerous to impose such constraints on what people are allowed to say. There are other ways of dealing with it”
Biden is a Nazi. He often hides behind a chair and shouts 'Boo!' at members of the general public.
6. He favours anarchy over our current form of pseudo-democracy:
We would favor some nice anarchist kicking his fucking head in.
“If a decision is made by some centralized authority, it is going to represent the interests of the particular group which is in power.
No. It is more likely to represent the interest of the group which can deprive that authority of power.
But if power is actually rooted in large parts of the population –
then there won't be any fucking power. Collective action problems won't be solved.
if people can actually participate in social planning – then they will presumably do so in terms of their own interests, and you can expect the decisions to reflect those interests.
Plans cost money to implement. Where will the money come from? The rich will run away.
Well, the interest of the general population is to preserve human life; the interest of corporations is to make profits – those are fundamentally different interest” .
Very true. That why most CEOs refuse to breathe and thus die quickly of suffocation.
“Anarchists have typically believed in a highly organized society, just one that’s organized democratically from below, [but the] “idea that people could be free is extremely frightening to anybody with power”.
Nothing wrong with being a Libertarian. Anarchists shat the bed long ago.
“The person who claims the legitimacy of the authority always bears the burden of justifying it.
Not if that authority actually exists and people consider it legitimate.
And if they can’t justify it, it’s illegitimate and should be dismantled. To tell you the truth, I don’t really understand anarchism as being much more than that”
Anything at all can be justified by telling stupid lies.
7. He explains how the media (owned by corporations in cahoots with governments) keep us from dissenting.
Media controls us through evil mind-rays. My tin-foil hat keeps me safe.
Media should be a counterweight to the government, but that’s impossible when it’s corporate owned.
The Venezuelan media turned against Chavez whose supporters promptly beat it into submission.
They don’t care about attracting readers in order to sell papers, but in attracting advertisers.
But advertisers are only interested in newspapers which lots and lots of people enjoy reading.
“So what the media do, in effect, is to take the set of assumptions which express the basic ideas of the propaganda system…and then present a range of debate within that framework – so the debate only enhances the strength of the assumptions, ingraining them in people’s minds as the entire possible spectrum of opinion that there is….Under what’s sometimes been called “brainwashing under freedom,” the critics….make a major contribution to the cause by bounding the debate within certain acceptable limits – that’s why they’re tolerated, and in fact even honored” (13). The media, “have a commitment to indoctrination in the interests of power, and that imposes pretty strict limits on what they can do” (179).
Chomsky is describing his own modus operandi. It is based on what Michael Polanyi called 'moral inversion'. You show your superior virtue by condemning anything your own side does while praising whatever evil shit those who want to kill you are doing.
8. He cautions us about getting sucked into the trivia created to distract us from reacting to real problems in the world,
like the fact that Biden is totes Fascist
what he calls ‘de-politicizing’ intelligent people by getting them to track sports statistics and the complex relationships on HBO series.
So, Chomsky is basically your Mum who thinks TV is rotting your brain and preventing you getting into Med school.
“It’s as though people want to work out mathematical problems, and if they don’t have calculus and arithmetic, they work them out with other structures…
Or they just ask somebody smart.
people just want to use their intelligence somehow….
people want to use their dicks. If intelligence helps your dick find a nice home, well and good.
Spectator sports also have other useful functions too. For one thing they’re a great way to build up chauvinism – you start by developing these totally irrational loyalties early in life,
e.g. being loyal to Mummy. That's totes evil.
and they translate very nicely to other areas….
Did you know Biden had a Mummy? No wonder he is a Nazi!
This sense of irrational loyalty to some sort of meaningless community
like your family.
is training for subordination to power….
Chomsky wanted to be subordinated to some power far more evil than anything that obtained in his own country.
All of this stuff builds up extremely anti-social aspects of human psychology…irrational competition,
we should be competing with Chavez to turn our own country into an even worse shithole.
irrational loyalty to power systems,
like being loyal to Mummy even though she used her power to potty train you
passive acquiescence to quite awful values, really.
Why won't people eat their own shit? Don't they realize Big Food is brainwashing them?
In fact, it’s hard to imagine anything that contributes more fundamentally to authoritarian attitudes than this does, in addition to the fact that it just engages a lot of intelligence and keeps people away from other things….Soap operas…teach people other kinds of passivity and absurdity….These are the types of things which occupy most of the media….This stuff is a major part of the whole indoctrination and propaganda system”
Stalin forced prisoners in the Gulags to watch 'Peyton Place'.
9. He’s clear that things are very bad – worse than in the depression, and not much different from feudal society:
Things were very bad for his students. Their brains turned to shit. By contrast the 'e-language' approach taken by Peter Brown (Brown clustering) was useful for speech recognition. Brown became CEO of Renaissance Technologies. He must be a billionaire.
“There was a lot of union organizing [in the 30s],
in seven states where workers were afraid of losing jobs to migrants from the Dust Bowl.
and the struggles were very brutal….So it was not pretty by any means. But it was also not hopeless. Somehow that’s a tremendous difference: the slums are now hopeless, there’s nothing to do except prey on one another…
Darkies are super-predators- right?
.For the first time in I think human history, middle-class kids now assume they are not going to live as well as their parents – that’s really something new; that’s never happened before” (45).
Unchecked migration will do that particularly if Newsom become President and gives free health care to undocumented people.
“You can see it very clearly when you drive through New York now: the differences in wealth are like San Salvador…
No. They are much greater because New York is much more economically developed.
.But it’s like living in a feudal system, with a lot of wild barbarians outside – except if you’re rich, you don’t ever see them, you just move between your castle and your limousine. And if you’re poor, you’ve got no castle to protect you”.
The advantage of being rich is you can relocate if the shit hits the fan.
“The idea is, ‘We smashed up the world and stole everything from it – now we’re not going to let anyone come and take any piece of it back.’
Its easier just to relocate.
That’s an attitude I see right on the surface all over the place in the West these days” (176). “If we wait for an ecological disaster, it’ll be too late – in fact, we might not even have such a long wait”
Which is why the rich invest in New Zealand real estate.
10. Yet, he’s hopeful. He shares myriad examples of how far we’ve come, and how possible it all is. We just need to avoid the red herrings – activities that get us spinning our wheels unproductively – and keep organizing, keep being noisy about it all, and, like every other movement for change, eventually it will come together into something that can’t be ignored.
Chomsky was considered smart back in the mid Sixties. The hope was that he'd take on Robert McNamara. But Chomsky was shit at math. Come to think of it, it was Irma Adelman- who actually went to Vietnam- who gave the best policy recommendation.
“You couldn’t have predicted in 1954 that there was going to be a Civil Rights Movement” (68).
The turning point was Truman's 1948 issued Executive Order 9981. Brown v Board of Education had triggered anti-Black violence. African Americans had no choice but to unite and seek allies.
“The trick is not to be isolated – if you’re isolated, like Winston Smith in 1984, then sooner or later you’re going to break…because if you can keep them isolated enough, you can get them to believe anything. But when people get together, all sorts of things are possible”
Winston Smith was fictional. Big Brother was in charge because he'd got a lot of people together to run the country for him.
( “Large-scale social changes in the past …have come about just because
of new technology or being invaded by guys with a different technology.
lots of people, working wherever they are, have worked hard, and have looked around to find other people who are working hard, and have tried to work together with them when they find them….It’s mostly just a question of scale and dedication”.
People coming together represent a 'social change'. However, they may realize that they'd have been better off not coming together though, it must be said, lynching people can be quite a fun way to pass the time.
“There isn’t ever one great person who leads a movement.
It makes sense to pretend your leader is great and that his farts don't stink.
It starts with tons of people, and maybe there’s one person who can give a good speech, but they’re not the one who leads – the people lead.
The leader may pretend that is the case. But, the truth is, leaders solve a coordination problem for collective action.
It’s necessary to distort history and make it look as if Great Men did everything – that’s part of how you teach people they can’t do anything, they’re helpless, they just have to wait for some Great Man to come along and do it for them”
People are taught not to eat their own poo. This is a conspiracy involving 'manufactured consent' orchestrated by Big Food.
“The real work is being done by people who are not known, that’s always been true in every popular movement in history. The people who are known are riding the crest of some wave….But the point is, it’s the wave that matters”.
Waves don't matter. The Law does. So does money and guys with big big guns.
Trying to convince the “elites” of your side: “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”.
But 'causing disruption' just means making a nuisance of yourself. Even if everybody takes to the streets and to shit on everything, nothing permanent will be achieved.
“I don’t feel like that in order to work hard for social change you need to be able to spell out a plan for a future society in any kind of detail.
Also you don't need to work hard. Just wave from time to time.
What I feel should drive a person to work for change are certain principles you’d like to see achieved….
any principle is compatible with any shite whatsoever.
I think what you have to be able to do is spell out the principles you want to see such a society realize –
that was done long ago for the America to which Chomsky's grand-parents emigrated.
and I think we can imagine many different ways in which a future society could realize them….The basic principle I would like to see communicated to people is the idea that every form of authority and domination and hierarchy, every authoritarian structure, has to prove that it’s justified”.
American politicians justify their actions to the voters. Noam doesn't seem to have noticed that he was already living in the sort of society he wanted. Sadly, it was one where smart peeps like Peter Brown could get very rich by doing useful stuff.
“If you’re maximizing short-term profits without concern for the long-term effects, you are going to destroy the environment, for one thing”.
Not if you are working on green energy or simply raising allocative efficiency and thus doing more with less resources.
“Labor movement just has to be international” (383).
It was. But it was useless.
This collection was written about over twenty years ago, and at the time, regarding what would happen if we knew we had 10 years to stop climate change instead of 100, Chomsky said,
“Given the state of the popular movements we have today, we’d probably have a fascist takeover – with everybody agreeing to it, because that would be the only method for survival that anyone could think of…
This proves Biden is a Fascist. Did you know he has a dick? Dicks cause rape- including the sodomization of the Environment.
.So, you don’t wait for the disasters to happen, first you have to create the groundwork.
Chomsky did no groundwork. He talked paranoid bollocks.
You need to plant the seeds of something right now, so that whatever opportunities happen to arise,…people are in a position that they can do something constructive about it”
What seeds did Chomsky plant? Chavez is great, Biden is a Fascist? Robert McNamara redeemed himself by becoming head of the World Bank and helping China to rise. Chomsky's work- academic or political- was an utter waste of time.
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