Koestler & Chomsky vs Skinner

 Behaviourism- as pioneered by Pavlov, Thorndike & Watson- was the dominant 'scientific' school of psychology in post War America. B.F Skinner, tenured Professor at Harvard from 1948-1973 was its high priest. Chomsky first gained fame, in 1959, by attacking Skinner's 1957 book 'Verbal behaviour'. Chomsky's 'nativism' (the idea that language is 'innate') was seen as championing freedom & creativity & the qualitative difference between human behaviour and that of 'meat-machines' (animals). However, the great utility & increasing sophistication of large language models- based on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)- seems to support Skinner, not Chomsky. 

On the other hand, Chomsky's first mentor, Zellig Harris- who was critical of Skinner's book- did foundational work on distributional structures in the 1950s thus providing the theoretical underpinning for modern LLMs and vector-space models of meaning. His "distributional hypothesis"—the idea that the meaning of a word is defined by its environment and the company it keeps—is the core principle behind how LLMs learn to process and generate language. By contrast, Chomsky produced exactly zero 'Generative Grammars' of any language. This was a linguist who started to forget languages he had learnt and whose naive 'computational' metaphor was repudiated by neuroscience. In other words, he specialism was in ultracrepidarianism- i.e. pontificating about things of which he had very little knowledge and doing it in a paranoid style. 

To be fair, there was an aspect of 'moral panic' & 'straw-manning' to the polemics associated with the anti-Skinnerian crusades. Everybody could claim that they had been misrepresented. This only left the question as to which approach would yield more useful results. Suppose there was an 'i-language' based machine translator rendering English into Russian with high fidelity, then Chomsky would be on the winning side. If the translator is statistical and 'e-language' based, then Harris & Skinner had been on the right track all along. We might say Skinner should have sugar-coated things but, au fond, the guy was doing good science'. 

Chris Knight has suggested that Chomsky- afraid his work might have military value- deliberately made it so abstract as to be useless. The problem here is that abstraction would be a good thing if the program itself was viable. It wasn't. It was nonsense. 

I think, Chomsky's value to his colleagues at MIT is that he made it appear as though his profession was 'self-regulating'- i.e. had its own internal watchdogs equipped with a liberal sensibility and a moral conscience. Indeed, Chomsky was a member of the Pound Panel in 1969 which sought to defuse anti-War protesters from attacking Pentagon funded laboratories. 

It did not harm that Chomsky's political tirades were naive and counter-productive. All that was required of him was the appearance, not the reality, of liberal or humanistic values and deep sympathy for Left wing socio-economic policies. 

  I suppose even Chomsky must have finally come to understood that everything he believed or advocated for was nonsense. Perhaps he hoped Nowak- whose Evolutionary dynamics research Epstein was financing- or some other such math maven could find a way to vindicate him. What is certain is that the Epstein scandal had destroyed Chomsky's legacy. It seems his son, who was in charge of his deceased mother's trust, unwittingly contributed to the destruction of his own most valuable inheritance- viz. the moral halo associated with the Chomsky brand-name. This was because the father was left short of money and thus had to turn to Epstein for help. Interestingly, Ehud Barak- a Mathsy Israeli general and senior politician- was another interlocutor Chomsky gained through Epstein. But this undermines his anti-establishment, anti-Zionist, image. The one good thing is that, because of his age, Chomsky can't be accused of sexual impropriety. 

The most influential opponent of Skinner back in the Sixties and Seventies was Arthur Koestler who advocated a holistic philosophy. Like Chomsky, Koestler was anti-Stalinist and a great believer in human freedom & creativity. Koestler's reputation declined as genuine biologists, like Medawar, criticized his Lamarckian evolutionary theory. But that wasn't what was utterly fatal to his reputation. After his death, it was revealed that he had a predatory attitude towards women- he raped Michael Foot's wife!- and thus he was dismissed as a sociopathic charlatan who must be  'cancelled' . 

Interestingly, Skinner, in his 1948 Utopian novel, Walden 2, had supported many 'progressive policies' under the rubric of what we might term 'mechanism design' or even 'nudge' theory. The problem is that this compromises human freedom & dignity. It may be that we can be indeed manipulated into being good but is would that actually be a good outcome? This does not mean that we shouldn't try to make social mechanisms 'incentive compatible'- i.e. ensuring there are penalties for doing harmful things and rewards for doing helpful things. It just means we should not consider the outcome Utopian or universalizable. 

Had Chomsky done something useful with his life- rather than frittered away his energies writing stupid ultracrepdiarian shite, he wouldn't, in old age, have had to turn to Epstein for help. Money matters. In the short run, you can make enough of it by bullshitting. Long term, utility is what gives you liquidity. Lack of liquidity drove Chomsky into the sticky hands of Epstein. The Pavlovian reflex of the brain-dead Left is to eviscerate an old man who was never guilty of any type of sexual misconduct or financial irregularity in his whole life. 

Thus Skinner's victory has been total. 

Chomsky vs Pater

Theories- like everything else- are either useful or useless. If they are useful, they are likely to be part of a system which yields more and more functional information. But if a thing is useful in improving predictions or performance or can otherwise 'pay its way', it stops being 'theory' or the province of pedants. It is just part and parcel of a profession or an industry which is subject to competitive pressure.

The law of increasing functional information, in any useful field- or, indeed, one under selection pressure- does not militate for a unique structural causal model or one and only one way to 'carve reality up along its joints' at least when it comes to co-evolved systems where there is likely to be 'plasticity' or 'robustness' such that correlation rather than causation is what is observed or what gives rise to 'surprisal'- i.e. is taken greater notice of. 

Chomsky is not interested in utility. He wants magic. For him, a theory is 'adequate' only if it can distinguish between what is possible and impossible in advance. Ptolemaic Astronomical theory is adequate because it could say in advance that it was impossible for man to land on the moon. NASA's astronomy is inadequate because it can't assure us even that faster than light is impossible. 

To be fair, Chomsky wasn't speaking of Astronomical theories. His field is linguistics or cognitive science. He insists that a minimal condition of adequacy for a theory of human language is that it distinguish possible from impossible languages. Sadly this involves having an a priori method of discriminating what is possible and impossible for human beings since, so far as we know, anything possible for us can be communicated by us in some sort of language. If that were not the case thought would not have a representation as 'internal language'. 

Thus, what Chomsky thinks 'adequate' for his theory is nothing less than magic! But with magic, anything is possible. 

It is reasonable is to say a theory of human language must also be a theory of language for non-humans. Otherwise, the theory is empty. It just returns 'because humans are super-special' to any and every question. This isn't compatible with the theory of Evolution. Humans simply aren't super-special. 

At one time there was a shibboleth that a proper Science could solve its own demarcation problem- i.e. say what was or wasn't a scientific statement. But this was foolish. A guy might be as crazy as a bed-bug but might still be doing good science. Another guy might gas on endlessly about Scientific Method but produce nothing useful. 

Turning aside from theories of language- which we can all come up with if we need to- what about 'a theory of Universal Grammar?' If what it amounts to is 'humans have it innately. Non-humans don't.' then it isn't a theory. It is merely bigotry. It doesn't explain anything. It doesn't predict anything. It doesn't improve the performance of anything. It is a useless piece of shit. 

Consider the demand for 

Cognitive Plausibility: A theory of language should reflect constraints imposed by the human mind.

In which case, human theories are constrained. Try to do without them. Just look for statistical regularities. Since language and thought and theories are constrained in various ways, give priority to facts or techniques of a useful kind. In other words, ignore what people say. Just look at what they do and decide if it is worthwhile to imitate them.  But this means ignoring people like Chomsky. 

If it predicts that wildly unnatural or unlearnable systems are possible languages, it fails to model human linguistic capacity.

Human beings have a capacity to suffer cancer though  the thing is highly undesirable. This does not mean modelling human biology has failed if it predicts a very bad outcome- e.g. getting cancer. One may say 'if we didn't predict cancer, there would be no cancer. People would enjoy better health.' But this is magical thinking.

Typological Insight: Linguists observe recurring patterns across languages. A theory should explain why certain structures are universal or common, and why others never occur.

This can be done very quickly. It isn't rocket science. After that you can have a theory of why there is a lot of commonality in the way people walk or cough. But who will listen to you gas on about it?

Learnability & Acquisition: Children acquire language rapidly and robustly.

Machine learning may do so too after the preliminary spadework is done. Indeed that is what seems to have happened over the last five years.  

A theory must account for this by ruling out systems that are too complex or unstructured to be learned.

Again, this can be very quickly done. We don't need to devote resources to a theory of human language which explains that humans have the sort of language humans have because they are human. Also, they walk like humans because they are humans.  

Chomsky wasn't stupid. He did know one or two languages quite well. But he didn't know how language works or that it could say things which were suggestive rather dogmatic. This is because he wrote dreary shite. Walter Pater, too, was a pedagogue. But, in his essay on style he wrote this-

SINCE all progress of mind consists for the most part in differentiation, in the resolution of an obscure and complex object into its component aspects, it is surely the stupidest of losses to confuse things which right reason has put asunder, to lose the sense of achieved distinctions, the distinction between poetry and prose, for instance, or, to speak more exactly, between the laws and characteristic excellences of verse and prose composition.

This is like Chomsky clinging to stupid shite he came up with sixty years ago. After all, once a particular position is seen as 'progressive' it must remain so for all time, right? It isn't fair that other people do amazing things which were previously thought impossible thus making you look like a stick in the mud. 

On the other hand, those who have dwelt most emphatically on the distinction between prose and verse, prose and poetry, may sometimes have been tempted to limit the proper functions of prose too narrowly; and this again is at least false economy, as being, in effect, the renunciation of a certain means or faculty, in a world where after all we must needs make the most of things.

In other words, utility is all that matters in a world of scarce resources and an unforgiving fitness landscape.  

Critical efforts to limit art a priori, by anticipations regarding the natural incapacity of the material with which this or that artist works, as the sculptor with solid form, or the prose-writer with the ordinary  language of men, are always liable to be discredited by the facts of artistic production;

Chomskian shite has been discredited by the facts regarding A.I.  

and while prose is actually found to be a coloured thing with Bacon, picturesque with Livy and Carlyle, musical with Cicero and Newman, mystical and intimate with Plato and Michelet and Sir Thomas Browne, exalted or florid, it may be, with Milton and Taylor, it will be useless to protest that it can be nothing at all, except something very tamely and narrowly confined to mainly practical ends—a kind of "good round-hand;" as useless as the protest that poetry might not touch prosaic subjects as with Wordsworth, or an abstruse matter as with Browning, or treat contemporary life nobly as with Tennyson.

In other words, language will never be reducible to a theory about it.  

In subordination to one essential beauty in all good literary style, in all literature as a fine art, as there are many beauties of poetry so the beauties of prose are many, and it is the business of criticism to estimate them as such; as it is good in the criticism of verse to look for those hard, logical, and quasi-prosaic excellences which that too has, or needs. To find in the poem, amid the flowers, the allusions, the mixed perspectives, of Lycidas for instance, the thought, the logical structure:—how wholesome! how delightful! as to identify in prose what we call the poetry, the imaginative power, not treating it as out of place and a kind of vagrant intruder, but by way of an estimate of its rights, that is, of its achieved powers, there.

There was a time when Linguistics was about learning different languages so as to be more cultured, creative and open minded, or- at the very least- more useful or productive in some quotidian occupation. Chomsky, foolishly, decided to turn his subject to shit for some paranoid reason to do with defeating the machinations of those evil bastards who ensured his life was prosperous and secure. 

Chomsky on Language & Freedom

 If a linguist is invited to speak on the topic 'Language & Freedom' we expect

1) him to begin with the etymology of word constellations linked to Freedom in various ancient languages and their modern successors. In particular, he would explain how the term for not being a slave come to mean having various sorts of political, economic and legal rights or entitlements. The puzzle was why particular cultures or civilizations had interpreted Freedom and Liberation in different ways with the result that the 'Yogi' considered it to be release from transmigration, while the 'Commissar' thought it had to do with the overthrow of Capitalism, while, in America, it was seen in juristic terms as an expanding set of justiciable Hohfeldian immunities. 

2) him to consider pragmatics- i.e. how such word constellations are actually used. In particular one might look at Orwellian uses of language or the 'semiotics' of Madison Avenue and so forth.

3) make policy recommendations with a view to enabling Language use to contribute to greater freedom. For example, the 'Plain English Campaign' encouraged  Law Courts and Bureaucratic Institutions to get rid of obsolete jargon so as to promote access and inclusivity thus increasing effective Freedom. Furthermore, ensuring that speakers of minority languages have equal access to relevant information or tribunals increases effective freedom for them.

4) At the beginning of the 1930's, something new had appeared- viz. computer and other artificial languages. Godel, Turing & Tarski had shown that Freedom, for any given language, might not be definable within it. In other words, it would remain a 'primitive' within any juristic or deontic language which could have a mathematical representation.  A separate development was that mechanical translation or even computers, or artificial intelligences, able to pass the Turing Test (i.e. appear indistinguishable from human interlocutors) were on the horizon. How might this impact Freedom? 

Noam Chomsky, at the height of his intellectual powers in 1973, gave a talk on 'Language and Freedom' which signally failed to do what was required of him. This was because he wasn't really a linguist. He was a shithead. Also, he wouldn't have recognized Freedom if it came and bit him in the leg.

To be fair, in 1966. the influential Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee put a dampener on thirty years of enthusiasm for machine translation.  They reported “We do not have useful machine translation and there is no immediate or predictable prospect of useful machine translation.” The committee effectively recommended a halt to the various research programmes and a return to human translators. Though there were big theoretical advances in computer science and statistics, it was not until the 1980s, when cheap computing power became available, that commercial research began again in earnest. Thus, Chomsky might be forgiven for ignoring the one development in his field which we consider the most important to our lives as we live them today.

A separate point has to do with 'Project Camelot'- the 'Manhattan Project for the Social Choices'- which increased funding for the teaching of stupid shite at the Post-Grad level in America. Though it started off as an anti-Communist strategy, it was soon captured by the Pinkos whose 'long march through the institutions' ended in senile impotence and 'woke' incontinence. My point is that there's an economic reason why Chomsky, despite being useless and mad, gained salience while guys doing useful stuff were unhonoured and unsung. On the other hand, some of those who did useful work- like Robert Mercer who had contributed to 'Brown Clustering'- became billionaires capable of changing the political landscape by funding particular causes- e.g. Brexit which was all about gaining freedom from Brussels. 

When I was invited to speak on the topic “Language and freedom”, I was puzzled and intrigued. Most of my professional life has been devoted to the study of language. There would be no great difficulty in finding a topic to discuss in that domain. And there is much to say about the problems of freedom and liberation as they pose themselves to us and to others in the mid-twentieth century. What is troublesome in the title of this lecture is the conjunction. In what way are language and freedom to be interconnected?

The answer is that Courts and Legislatures use language. Both may be concerned with Freedom. At least, such was the case in Chomsky's country- much though he may have hated it. 

As a preliminary, let me say just a word about the contemporary study of language, as I see it. There are many aspects of language and language use that raise intriguing questions, but – in my judgement – only a few have so far led to productive theoretical work.

Chomsky's theoretical work wasn't productive. Why? It was predicated on magic. The boring, statistical, 'E-language' approach did yield results which we all now greatly profit by. But it was essentially 'Skinnerian' and statistical. 

In particular, our deepest insights are in the area of formal grammatical structure.

Which don't exist.  

A person who knows a language

or a generative AI 

has acquired a system of rules and principles – a “generative grammar,” in technical terms – that associates sound and meaning in some specific fashion.

on the basis of Skinnerian 'reinforcement'- albeit of a stochastic kind. It is purely a matter of chance that I have acquired an English idiolect whose peculiar grammar and syntax shows the deep influence of Tamil, Hindi, and even Arabic and Swahili. Nevertheless, my aim is always to sound like a teenaged Californian cheerleader who is also a Vampire Slayer. 

There are many reasonably well-founded and, I think, rather enlightening hypotheses as to the character of such grammars, for quite a number of languages. Furthermore, there has been a renewal of interest in “universal grammar”,

which arose out of the notion of a universal Turing machine though, no doubt, you could see it as related to a Liebnizian or Lullian universal mathesis. Incidentally, this was originally an Islamic notion. 

interpreted now as the theory that tries to specify the general properties of those languages that can be learned in the normal way by humans.

A wrong interpretation. Normal humans can learn no such theory. Perhaps computers can. In other words, this project may be useful for machines communicating with each other who may, where there is category theoretical 'naturality', actually converge upon a universal grammar but only for specific purposes where, for some reason, concurrency problems don't arise and there is no profit in strategic behaviour. 

Sadly, Chomsky's project has no utility for humans who, for whatever reason, may need to gain competence in different languages. 

Here, too, significant progress has been achieved.

No. Only bollocks was talked. It turns out Skinner, not Chomsky, was right. Reinforcement is what matters.  

The subject is of particular importance. It is appropriate to regard universal grammar as the study of one of the essential faculties of mind.

Nope. Minds can exist without language and language of a useful enough sort can be generated by computers which have no minds.  

It is, therefore, extremely interesting to discover, as I believe we do, that the principles of universal grammar are rich, abstract, and restrictive, and can be used to construct principled explanations for a variety of phenomena.

False explanations. But Astrology can do so just as well. 

At the present stage of our understanding, if language is to provide a springboard for the investigation of other problems of human nature, it is these aspects of language to which we will have to turn our attention, for the simple reason that it is only these aspects that are reasonably well understood.

Skinnerian reinforcement was well understood. What was new was things like 'Brown clustering'. But Chomsky wasn't smart enough to understand the Math.  

In another sense, the study of formal properties of language

which are irrelevant because most communication is as informal as fuck 

reveals something of the nature of humans in a negative way: it underscores, with great clarity, the limits of our understanding of those qualities of mind that are apparently unique to humans and that must enter into their cultural achievements in an intimate, if still quite obscure, manner.

But if humans have this limitation then they can't say what the significance of that limitation might be.  

In searching for a point of departure, one turns naturally to a period in the history of Western thought when it was

pretty fucking backward. Why not take as your point of departure, current cutting edge work which is already proving useful and thus 'paying its way'?'

possible to believe that “the thought of making freedom the sum and substance of philosophy has emancipated the human spirit in all its relationships,

e.g. fucking your friend, Schlegel's, wife 

and . . . has given to science in all its parts a more powerful reorientation than any earlier revolution.”  The word “revolution” bears multiple association in this passage, for Schelling also proclaims that “man is born to act and not to speculate”;

he speculated. Napoleon acted. But so did Wellington and Blucher.  

and when he writes that “the time has come to

talk high falutin' bollocks because, unlike Napoleon or Wellington we are talkers, not doers.  

proclaim to a nobler humanity the freedom of the spirit,

free alcoholic spirits might interest humanity- noble or otherwise. Vacuous proclamations are just wasted words.  

and no longer to have patience with men’s tearful regrets for their lost chains”

There were no such men requiring patience or verbose perorations.  

we hear the echoes of the libertarian thought and revolutionary acts of the late eighteenth century.

No. We hear hysterical nonsense.  

Schelling writes that “the beginning and end of all philosophy is – Freedom.”

We know better. It begins with an open problem in a STEM subject. When that subject closes the problem, it ceases to be 'philosophical'.  

These words are invested with meaning and urgency at a time when people are struggling to cast off their chains, to resist authority that has lost its claim to legitimacy, to construct more humane and more democratic social institutions.

There has never been such a time save where actual galley slaves or chain gangs existed. As for 'social institutions' we don't want nutters to construct them or interfere with them in any way even if they are weeping because they lost their chains or manacles or other S&M paraphernalia.  

It is at such a time that the philosopher may be driven to inquire into the nature of human freedom and its limits, and perhaps to conclude, with Schelling, that with respect to the human ego, “its essence is freedom”; and with respect to philosophy, “the highest dignity of Philosophy consists precisely therein, that it stakes all on human freedom.”

It has nothing to stake. Sad.  

We are living, once again, at such a time.

1973? There may have been revolutions around that time but they tended to make everything worse. There were some exceptions. Portugal rose and rose after it got rid of Salazar's stupid regime. Spain and Greece, too, prospered as never before. But these were 'carnation' or 'velvet' revolutions. A moribund authoritarianism collapsed and there was a return to freer conditions which had previously prevailed.  

A revolutionary ferment is sweeping the so called Third World, awakening enormous masses from torpor and acquiescence in traditional authority.

Thankfully, in India, Mrs. Gandhi put an end to that stripe of nonsense. Even China got rid of the Gang of Four and decided to embrace the Market.  

There are those who feel that the industrial societies as well are ripe for revolutionary change – and I do not refer only to representatives of the New Left.

Drug addled nutters or sociopaths of various descriptions.  

The threat of revolutionary change brings forth repression and reaction.

Ford set up concentration camps for dissidents but it was Jimmy Carter who physically exterminated the American proletariat 

Its signs are evident in varying forms, in France,

Pompidou ordered the killing of the French kulaks.  

in the Soviet Union,

Brezhnev was overthrown by his cat which had formed a strategic alliance with Soviet mice- many of whom were of a Trotskyite predisposition.  

in the United States—not least, in the city where we are meeting. It is natural, then, that we should consider, abstractly, the problems of human freedom, and turn with interest and serious attention to the thinking of an earlier period when archaic social institutions were subjected to critical analysis and sustained attack.

Where? France had an Emperor and then the Bourbons returned after which the House of Orleans took over. Then there was a Second Republic till another Emperor turned up after which there was a third Republic. In Germany, by contrast, Kings and their Generals decided the pace and scope of political change. 'Critical analysis' was shit and achieved nothing.  

It is natural and appropriate, so long as we bear in mind Schellings’s admonition that man is born not merely to speculate but also to act.

But stupid cunts can only speculate in a stupid fashion. Their actions, however, may be hilarious. Chomsky posing as a persecuted dissident is almost as funny as Woody Allen.  

One of the earliest and most remarkable of the eighteenth-century investigations of freedom and servitude is Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (1755), in many ways a revolutionary tract.

But a deeply stupid and mischievous in ways some of his readers would discover to their own great personal cost.  

In it, he seeks to “set forth the origin and progress of inequality, the establishment and abuse of political societies, insofar as these things can be deduced from the nature of man by the light of reason alone.” His conclusions were sufficiently shocking that the judges of the prize competition of the Academy of Dijon, to whom the work was originally submitted, refused to hear the manuscript through. 

Rousseau was the scribe of the fabulously wealthy Louise Dupin who was fascinated by a Cartesian priest who, a century previously, had written tracts on the the Equality of the Two Sexes. If there is mind body dualism, it follows that females are not naturally inferior, at least mentally, to men. But the same must be true of those who labour in the fields. Their minds are not essentially inferior to those with the leisure to cultivate the arts and sciences. Rousseau's foolishness was to think private property was to blame for inequality. He wasn't a Cartesian- indeed, he had no knowledge of philosophy, just like Chomsky. 

In it, Rousseau challenges the legitimacy of virtually every social institution, as well as individual control of property and wealth. These are “usurpations . . . established only on a precarious and abusive right . . . having been acquired only by force, force could take them away without (the rich) having grounds for complaint.” Not even property acquired by personal industry is held “upon better titles”. Against such a claim, one might object: “Do you not know that a multitude of your brethren die or suffer from need of what you have in excess, and that you needed express and unanimous consent of the human race to appropriate for yourself anything from common subsistence that exceeded your own?” It is contrary to the law of nature that “a handful of men be glutted with superfluities while the starving multitude lacks necessities.”

If the 'multitude' really was starving then they could do no work and thus nobody at all would be 'glutted with superfluities'. Rousseau was talking bollocks. However, everybody knew there could be a Jacquerie as happened in 1358. There was a good reason the propertied had a vested interest in getting behind the Sun King.  

Rousseau argues that civil society is hardly more than a conspiracy by the rich to guarantee their plunder. Hypocritically, the rich call upon their neighbors to “institute regulations of justice and peace to which all are obliged to conform, which make an exception of no one, and which compensate in some way for the caprices of fortune by equally subjecting the powerful and the weak to mutual duties”– those laws which, as Anatole France was to say, in their majesty deny to the rich and the poor equally the right to sleep under the bridge at night. By such arguments, the poor and weak were seduced: “All ran to meet their chains thinking they secured their freedom. . . .” Thus society and laws “gave new fetters to the weak and new forces to the rich, destroyed natural freedom for all time, established forever the law of property and inequality, changed a clever usurpation into an irrevocable right, and for the profit of a few ambitious men henceforth subjected the whole human race to work, servitude and misery”. Governments inevitably tend toward arbitrary power, as “their corruption and extreme limit”. This power is “by its nature illegitimate,” and new revolutions must dissolve the government altogether or bring it closer to its legitimate institutions … . The uprising that ends by strangling or dethroning a sultan is as lawful an act as those by which he disposed, the day before, of the lives and goods of his subjects. Force alone maintained him, force alone overthrows him.'

This was all very well but the French knew how the Jacquerie ended. The fact is, if the propertied could not put down the rabble, then there would be a foreign invasion which would reduce the entire nation to serfhood. That's why the French Revolution ended when a little Corsican artillery officer crowned himself Emperor and offered to guarantee title in land acquired by peasants during the Revolution in return for loyalty and military service. Chomsky knew as little about French history as he did about anything else he gassed on about. 

What is interesting, in the present connection, is the path that Rousseau follows to reach these conclusions “by the light of reason alone,” beginning with his ideas about human nature. He wants to see man “as nature formed him”.

In other words, seeing our species as one which evolved by natural selection. In this respect the work of John Maynard Smith on evolutionarily stable strategies (which appeared in 1973) and on 'uncorrelated asymmetries' (e.g. unicity is encoded by who owns what) as dictating eusocial 'bourgeois strategies' is of great interest.  Like his mentor, Haldane, Smith had been a card carrying Communist. Sadly, Marxism turned out to be stupid shit. 

It is from human nature that the principles of natural right and the foundations of social existence must be deduced.

Around this time, category theorists were discovering that 'naturality' (non-arbitrariness) is far to seek. Even where there is an objective function to be maximized or minimized, that objective is itself arbitrary. Had Chomsky understood math- as opposed to an indulgence in pseudo-mathsy mental masturbation- he would have understood that his own research program was nonsense because of complexity, computability and concurrency problems as well as lack of naturality and unicity. You may say, 'Chomsky's ignorance and stupidity allowed him to survive as a 'public intellectual'.' But, the rejoinder is 'public intellectual' means the same thing as 'public toilet' except the intellectual spews out shit whereas a toilet sends it down the sewer. 

This same study of original man,

Rousseau made no such study. He just dashed off some hysterical shite.  

of his true needs, and of the principles underlying his duties,

e.g. his duty to hand over his kids to the Foundling's hospital so that he won't be put to the trouble and expense of raising them 

is also the only good means one could use to remove those crowds of difficulties which present themselves concerning the origin of moral inequality,

 why do we consider homicidal rapists to be morally inferior to Mother Theresa? Is it because of Neo-Liberalism? 

the true foundation of the body politic, the reciprocal rights of its members, and a thousand similar questions as important as they are ill explained.

In other words, they aren't important at all.  

To determine the nature of man, Rousseau proceeds to compare man and animal. Man is “intelligent, free . . . the sole animal endowed with reason.” Animals are “devoid of intellect and freedom.”

Like women? Louise Dupin didn't think so. Since she was as wealthy as fuck, Rousseau didn't dare disagree with her.  

In every animal I see only an ingenious machine to which nature has given senses in order to revitalize itself and guarantee itself, to a certain point, from all that tends to destroy or upset it.

This is the Cartesian element Rousseau absorbed through Madam Dupin. But Descartes was a mathematician. There were subtleties to his system which neither Rousseau nor Chomsky could appreciate.  

I perceive precisely the same things in the human machine, with the difference that nature alone does everything in the operations of a beast, whereas man contributes to his operations by being a free agent.

This is the scholastic 'conatus'. But for Cartesians it is linked to mathematical phenomena like tautochrones (solved by the end of the seventeenth century but given an analytic treatment somewhat later by Euler and Lagrange) and, in a sense, to problems in Physics which remain open and thus are 'philosophical'.  

The former chooses or rejects by instinct and the latter by an act of freedom, so that a beast cannot deviate from the rule that is prescribed to it even when it would be advantageous for it do so, and a man deviates from it often to his detriment . . . .

Rousseau clearly knew nothing about animals. They aren't Cartesian 'meat-machines'. But the reason for this was only captured by mathematical ideas of 'regret-minimization' and information theoretic notions of 'surprisal' both of which have turned out to be very useful for machine learning, generative AI, LLMs etc, etc. Chomsky steered clear of anything useful or insightful. Skinner didn't. He has prevailed.  

it is not so much understanding which constitutes the distinction of man among the animals as it is his being a free agent.

There is a story that monkeys refuse to learn how to speak so as to remain free. Through the ages, humans have envied wild animals their freedom and abundance of leisure.  

Nature commands every animal, and the beast obeys. Man feels the same impetus, but he realizes that he is free to acquiesce or resist; and it is above all in the consciousness of this freedom that the spirituality of his soul is shown. For physics explains in some way the mechanism of the senses and the formation of ideas; but in the power of willing, or rather of choosing, and in the sentiment of this power are found only purely spiritual acts about which the laws of mechanics explain nothing.

This looks like Cartesian dualism- Mind stuff is different from Matter stuff- but, save in an Occasionalist universe (where God is the only efficient cause), something like Darwinian Evolution must be true. Thus, if you want to stick with the hysterical bollocks of Rousseau or Chomsky, you end up having to stipulate for some magical gene which appears and spreads instantaneously at some point in our evolutionary history. How is this different from saying God created the world on a Thursday afternoon in 4004 BC? 

Thus the essence of human nature is human freedom

in which case it exists in all possible worlds including ones where the Big Bang never occurred. The essence of bullshit is that it makes claims of this type.  

and the consciousness of this freedom. So Rousseau can say that “the jurists, who have gravely pronounced that the child of a slave would be born a slave, have decided in other terms that a man would not be born a man.”

No. They have decided that the guy who owns the slave also owns the child of the slave. He may also own a cow and have title over the calf it gives birth to. This does not mean the calf belongs to the human species or that the human child is actually a calf.  

Sophistic politicians and intellectuals search for ways to obscure the fact that the essential and defining property of man is his freedom:

Though it is no such thing. That's why there are plenty of people in jail. Few cows or pigeons are incarcerated even if, as I have frequently asserted, they are responsible for hideous financial crimes which have left me impoverished.  

“They attribute to men a natural inclination to servitude,

other men, not themselves 

without thinking that it is the same for freedom as for innocence and virtue – their value is felt only as long as one enjoys them oneself and the taste for them is lost as soon as one has lost them.

Chomsky valued his virginity. Then, on his honeymoon night, his wife raped him. This was undoubtedly the fault of Neo-Liberalism. Still, it is a fact that Chomsky retained his taste for and enjoyment of his own anal cherry. That's why Foucault didn't like him. 

” In contrast, Rousseau asks rhetorically “whether, freedom being the most noble of man’s faculties, it is not degrading one’s nature, putting oneself on the level of beasts enslaved by instinct, even offending the author of one’s being, to renounce without reservation the most precious of all his gifts and subject ourselves to committing all the crimes he forbids us in order to please a ferocious or insane master” – a question that has been asked, in similar terms, by many an American draft resister in the last few years,

It is very degrading to get shot by gooks. Please Mummy, don't let them send me to Vietnam! 

and by many others who are beginning to recover from the catastrophe of twentieth-century Western civilization, which has so tragically confirmed Rousseau’s judgement:

but only to a cretin teaching useless shit 

Hence arose the national wars, battles, murders, and reprisals which make nature tremble and shock reason, and all those horrible prejudices which rank the honour of shedding human blood among the virtues. The most decent men learned to consider it one of their duties to murder their fellowmen; at length men were seen to massacre each other by the thousands without knowing why; more murders were committed on a single day of fighting and more horrors in the capture of a single city than were committed in the state of nature during whole centuries over the entire face of the earth.

War is the mother of invention. Inventions raise the productivity of land thus making it a profitable proposition to expend the lives of a hundreds or thousands so as to gain territory capable of supporting thousands or millions. Chomsky's ancestors 'survived the catastrophes of Western civilization' in relative affluence and security by emigrating to 'Turtle Island' whose indigenous inhabitants had been exterminated or displaced.  

The proof of his doctrine that the struggle for freedom is an essential human attribute, that the value of freedom is felt only as long as one enjoys it, Rousseau sees in “the marvels done by all free peoples

like the aboriginal Australians? 

to guard themselves from oppression.”

 they needed advanced weapons..

True, those who have abandoned the life of a free man-

i.e. a starving vagabond 

do nothing but boast incessantly of the peace and repose they enjoy in their chains . . . . But when I see the others sacrifice pleasures, repose, wealth, power, and life itself for the preservation of this sole good which is so disdained by those who have lost it; when I see animals born free and despising captivity break their heads against the bars of their prison; when I see multitudes of entirely naked savages scorn European voluptousness and endure hunger, fire, the sword, and death to preserve only their independence, I feel that it does not behoove slaves to reason about freedom.

Nor did it behoove 'naked savages' who were exterminated or displaced from valuable real estate. Still, there was a time when 'Red Indians' riding horses and firing rifles might have created a powerful state of their own across a wide swathe of North America.  

Rather similar thoughts were expressed by Kant, forty years later. He cannot, he says, accept the proposition that certain people “are not ripe for freedom,”

unless they are Black.  

for example, the serfs of some landlord:

unless they speak Polish 

If one accepts this assumption, freedom will never be achieved; for one can not arrive at the maturity for freedom without having already acquired it; one must be free to learn how to make use of one’s powers freely and usefully.

This is silly. Serfdom or Slavery was ended gradually by 'enlightened despots' in Kant's Europe. There was quite a long transition period and considerable local variation.  

The first attempts will surely be brutal and will lead to a state of affairs more painful and dangerous than the former condition under the dominance but also the protection of an external authority. However, one can achieve reason only through one’s own experiences and one must be free to be able to undertake them. . . . To accept the principle that freedom is worthless for those under one’s control and that one has the right to refuse it to them forever, is an infringement on the rights of God himself, who has created man to be free.

In which case, God is more than a bit crap.  

The remark is particularly interesting because of its context. Kant was defending the French Revolution, during the Terror, against those who claimed that it showed the masses to be unready for the privilege of freedom.

The French decided Kant was wrong. Slavery was brought back- unless, as in Haiti, the slaves rebelled- and, soon enough, France had an Emperor.  

Kant’s remarks have contemporary relevance. No rational person will approve of violence

We approve of violence done to those who seek to harm us 

and terror.

We approve of those who strike terror into those who seek to harm us.  

In particular, the terror of the postrevolutionary state, fallen into the hands of a grim autocracy, has more than once reached indescribable levels of savagery. Yet no person of understanding or humanity will too quickly condemn the violence that often occurs when long-subdued masses rise against their oppressors, or take their first steps toward liberty and social reconstruction.

No person of sound understanding will not, as quickly as possible, run away from such a place. Once safe, he may waste his time praising or condemning anything or everything.  

Let me return now to Rousseau’s argument

why bother? The man was a lunatic.  

against the legitimacy of established authority, whether that of political power or of wealth. It is striking that his argument, up to this point, follows a familiar Cartesian model.

It reflects his period of service to Madam Dupin. But he hadn't understood Descartes.  

Man is uniquely beyond the bounds of physical explanation; the beast, on the other hand, is merely an ingenious machine, commanded by natural law. Man’s freedom and his consciousness of this freedom distinguish him from the beast-machine. The principles of mechanical explanation are incapable of accounting for these human properties, though they can account for sensation and even the combination of ideas, in which regard “man differs from a beast only in degree.”

To Descartes and his followers, such as Cordemoy,

an occasionalist, like Guelincx who thought that the 'rational soul can communicate with angels without language'. Why? Because God does everything. God alone knows why an atheist like Chomsky was so besotted with that nutter.  

the only sure sign that another organism has a mind, and hence also lies beyond the bounds of mechanical explanation, is its use of language in the normal, creative human fashion, free from control by identifiable stimuli, novel and innovative, appropriate to situations, coherent, and engendering in our minds new thoughts and ideas. 

Actually, a true Cartesian would be a mathematician and thus have some inkling that there are non-deterministic mechanical systems. This is like the currently open problem of whether it can be proved that P is not equal to NP. It turns out there can't be a 'natural proof' of this unless we have a way of discriminating random from pseudo-random. In other words, the question of determinism is open for math. What Chomksy and Rousseau were grasping at was vulgar nonsense which could only be 'Cartesian' if it was thoroughly 'occasionalist'- i.e. turned God into the sole efficient cause.  

To the Cartesians, it is obvious by introspection that each man possesses a mind, a substance whose essence is thought; his creative use of language reflects this freedom of thought and conception.

Nope. We still don't know if there can be a 'lawless' choice sequence. Also, there may be no genuine randomness in the Universe. Chance is itself a Deus Absonditus.  

When we have evidence that another organism, too, uses language in this free and creative fashion, we are led to attribute to it as well a mind like ours.

We do this anyway with certain animals- e.g. a shepherd and his dog. Skippy the kangaroo, if my memory serves, was equally communicative.  

From similar assumptions regarding the intrinsic limits of mechanical explanation, its inability to account for man’s freedom and consciousness of his freedom, Rousseau proceeds to develop his critique of authoritarian institutions,

like marriage or having to raise your kids yourself 

which deny to man his essential attribute of freedom, in varying degree.

Were we to combine these speculations, we might develop an interesting connection between language and freedom.

Stupid people can use language to talk nonsense about freedom. But they can also talk nonsense about linguistics.  

Language, in its essential properties and the manner of its use, provides the basic criterion for determining that another organism is a being with a human mind and the human capacity for free thought and self-expression,

Had Chomsky found an infallible 'Turing test'? No. He was just talking bollocks.  

and with the essential human need for freedom from the external constraints of repressive authority. Furthermore, we might try to proceed from the detailed investigation of language and its use to a deeper and more specific understanding of the human mind.

Has Chomsky achieved anything in this regard? No. He has become more and more paranoid and antagonomic.  

Proceeding on this model, we might further attempt to study other aspects of that human nature which, as Rousseau rightly observes, must be correctly conceived if we are to be able to develop, in theory, the foundations for a rational social order.

We aren't. There is no such thing. Why? Categoricity and naturality are lacking.  

I will return to this problem, but first I would like to trace further Rousseau’s thinking about the matter. Rousseau diverges from the Cartesian tradition in several respects.

Descartes was a Mathsy guy. Rousseau had great musical and literary talent. But do did Wagner. But we don't think of Wagner as a philosopher though he wrote well enough in that vein.  

He defines the “specific characteristic of the human species” as man’s “faculty of self-perfection,” which, “with the aid of circumstances, successively develops all the others, and resides among us as much in the species as in the individual.”

It didn't reside in Rousseau. His brain turned to shit soon enough.  

The faculty of selfperfection and of perfection of the human species through cultural transmission is not, to my knowledge, discussed in any similar terms by the Cartesians.

It was an Eighteenth Century development. One would have thought Chomsky would have preferred to dwell on Lord Monboddo in this connection. But that Scotsman had common sense and founded comparative linguistics and was an early contributor to the theory of evolution. In other words, he wasn't crazy and thus did not appeal to Chomsky. 

However, I think that Rousseau’s remarks might be interpreted as a development of the Cartesian tradition in an unexplored direction, rather than as a denial and rejection of it.

What was that direction? With hindsight, it was the notion that there was a magical 'language gene' which appeared suddenly and spread instantly only to members of our species. This is isn't evolutionary theory. It is a belief in magic.  

There is no inconsistency in the notion that the restrictive attributes of mind underlie a historically evolving human nature that develops within the limits that they set; or that these attributes of mind provide the possibility of self-perfection; or that, by providing the consciousness of freedom, these essential attributes of human nature give man the opportunity to create social conditions and social forms to maximize the possibilities for freedom, diversity, and individual self-realization. To use an arithmetical analogy, the integers do not fail to be an infinite set merely because they do not exhaust the rational numbers. Analogously, it is no denial of man’s capacity for infinite “self-perfection” to hold that there are intrinsic properties of mind that constrain his development.

If 'self-perfection' is an optimization problem then it has a dual such that every constraint must be a variable in the primal problem. If 'constraints' are intrinsic to mind,  something outside mind may lift them- e.g. angels, oracles or just the invention of written language culminating in the creation of artificial languages and the use of computers. But, in that case, the primal problem is not wholly mental. Cartesianism is off the table. But so is Rousseau and Marx and other such nutters. 'Hardware' matters because it lifts binding constraints on very type of 'software' including brains or 'minds'. This is fine for Monboddo type evolutionary theory- suitably updated and mathematicized. But it spells curtains for Chomsky's hysterical shite. 

I would like to argue that in a sense the opposite is true, that without a system of formal constraints there are no creative acts; specifically, in the absence of intrinsic and restrictive properties of mind, there can be only “shaping of behaviour” but no creative acts of self-perfection.

we can shape our behaviour so it is less imperfect or inefficient in particular tasks. Doing so is plenty creative. Talking paranoid shite isn't creative. Any nutter can do it.  

Furthermore, Rousseau’s concern for the evolutionary character of self-perfection brings us back, from another point of view,

a stupid one which ignores the fact that the Neo-Darwinians, using mathematical game theory, were making great strides at around this time 

to a concern for human language, which would appear to be a prerequisite for such evolution of society and culture, for Rousseau’s perfection of the species, beyond the most rudimentary forms.

Nothing of the sort has yet occurred. We have better tools and hardware. We don't have bigger brains capable of telepathy or telekinesis than our eighteenth century ancestors. True, I can fly halfway across the world in ten hours but I can't do this by flapping my arms as if they were wings. I have to get on an aero-plane.  

Rousseau holds that “although the organ of speech is natural to man, speech itself is nonetheless not natural to him.”

Just as having an arsehole is natural to man, but shitting is unnatural.  

Again, I see no inconsistency between this observation and the typical Cartesian view that innate abilities are “dispositional,” faculties that lead us to produce ideas (specifically, innate ideas) in a particular manner under given conditions of external stimulation,

if those stimulations arise 'naturally', then there is an inconsistency.  

but that also provide us with the ability to proceed in our thinking without such external factors.

Stuff like being alive and breathing air as opposed to drowning at the bottom of a river 

Language too, then, is natural to man only in a specific way.

just as shitting is natural only in a specific way which involves shit being expelled from the anus rather than ingested by it. These are amazing discoveries for which Chomsky has received insufficient praise.  

This is an important and, I believe, quite fundamental insight of the rationalist linguists that was disregarded, very largely, under the impact of empiricist psychology in the eighteenth century and since.

Because that 'fundamental insight' was shit.  

Rousseau discusses the origin of language at some length, though he confesses himself to be unable to come to grips with the problem in a satisfactory way.

Because he didn't know about magical genes which suddenly appear and spread instantaneously.  

Thus if men needed speech in order to learn to think,

they don't though it does appear that not learning to speak causes some type of relative mental retardation 

they had even greater need of knowing how to think in order to discover the art of speech. . . .

just as babies must know how to shit before they can discover the art of shitting on you.  

So that one can hardly form tenable conjectures about this art of communicating thoughts and establishing intercourse between minds; a sublime art which is now very far from its origin. . . .

Yet common sense supplied tenable conjectures in this regard. Lots of people looked after babies as well as puppy dogs and other animals and came to see a continuum in signalling mechanisms across species. My wife even figured out a rudimentary way to communicate with me. If she wanted to get me out of bed and into my chair at my desk, which had a pile of work on it for me to do, she would open the curtains and say 'look! A miaow miaow pussy cat!'. I would lumber over to look at the miaow miaow pussy cat which, my wife would assure me would soon reappear, and then, out of force of habit, sit down and work through the pile of files on my desk. 

He holds that “general ideas can come into the mind only with the aid of words,

though mathsy guys had 'general ideas' for which words were only invented after the fact  

and the understanding grasps them only through propositions” –

Nope. A proposition is like a theorem or the judgment of the Court. The law of the excluded middle applies. But the thing may not be 'informative' and may not increase our understanding of anything. Also, plenty of 'general ideas' come into the mind without the aid of words.  

a fact which prevents animals, devoid of reason, from formulating such ideas or ever acquiring “the perfectibility which depends upon them.”

This was nonsense. Animals reason well enough for their own purposes. Some animals out-source their reasoning- e.g. the sheep to the shepherd or sheep-dog. But, as a self-domesticated species, we do the same. Some of us specialize in useful types of reason. Others, like Chomsky, or me, double down on talking hateful bollocks. 

Thus he cannot conceive of the means by which “our new grammarians began to extend their ideas and to generalize their words,” or to develop the means “to express all the thoughts of men”: “numbers, abstract words, aorists, and all the tenses of verbs, particles, syntax, the linking of propositions, reasoning, and the forming of all the logic of discourse.”

First there was language and only long afterwards was there grammar. But grammatical language is only a small subset of any particular person's idiolect. 

He does speculate about later stages of the perfection of the species, “when the ideas of men began to spread and multiply, and when closer communication was established among them, [and] they sought more numerous signs and a more extensive language.” But he must, unhappily, abandon “the following difficult problem: which was most necessary, previously formed society for the institution of languages, or previously invented languages for the establishment of society?”

Which came first? The chicken? The hen? Nope. It was the rooster. In other words, language evolved on the basis of sexual selection. This is a type of 'co-evolution' relatively independent of the fitness landscape.  

The Cartesians

because they lived long ago and were as ignorant as fuck 

cut the Gordian knot by postulating

some magical shite 

the existence of a species-specific characteristic, a second substance that serves as what we might call a “creative principle” alongside the “mechanical principle” that determines totally the behaviour of animals.

Guys who lived long ago when witches were still being burned at the stake may be excused for babbling about magical shite. But Chomsky has had every educational advantage and continual access to the smartest people working at the cutting edge of multiple disciplines. If his theory is more foolish than that of an eighteenth century lawyer, the reason may be that his political views are way crazier. 

There was, for them, no need to explain the origin of language in the course of historical evolution. Rather, man’s nature is qualitatively distinct: there is no passage from body to mind. We might reinterpret this idea in more current terms by speculating the rather sudden and dramatic mutations might have led to qualities of intelligence that are, so far as we know, unique to humans, possession of language in the human sense being the most distinctive index of these qualities. 

It is one thing to say God does everything. It is another to worship a magical mutation.  

If this is correct,

i.e. if pigs routinely fly to the moon 

as at least a first approximation to the facts, the study of

moon-pig 

language might be expected to offer an entering wedge, or perhaps a model, for an investigation of human nature that would provide the grounding for a much broader theory of human nature.

but that theory would be paranoid shite. Why are moon-pigs refusing to come to my birthday party? Is it because of Neo-Liberalism or some sinister skulduggery on the part of the P.T.A?  

To conclude these historical remarks, I would like to turn, as I have elsewhere, to Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the most stimulating and intriguing thinkers of the period

when peeps were as ignorant as shit 

. Humboldt was, on the one hand, one of the most profound theorists of general linguistics, and on the other, an early and forceful advocate of libertarian values.

Nonsense! He was a typical Teutonic 'beamten'- i.e. civil servant- who never got beyond 'beamtenliberalismus'- i.e. the top-down liberalism of the bureaucrats. 

The basic concept of his philosophy is Bildung,

i.e. he was in the tradition of Moses Mendelssohn. But this is a slippery slope to Steinthal type 'Völkerpsychologie' (ethno-psychology) or Sapir-Whorf type relativism or the even more cretinous notion that 'language speaks us.' Still, Humboldt and Steinthal and so forth did genuine linguistic research. Chomsky didn't. 

by which, as J.W. Burrow expresses it, “he meant the fullest, richest, and most harmonious development of the potentialities of the individual, the community or the human race.” 

The more useless type of Bureaucrat or Diplomat still gasses on in that manner. 

His own thought might serve as an exemplary case. Though he does not, to my knowledge, explicitly relate his ideas about language to his libertarian social thought, there is quite clearly a common ground from which they develop, a concept of human nature that inspires each.

It is a racist concept. Another bureaucrat- but one who served the East India Company as opposed to the Prussian state- was J.S. Mill. 

Mill’s essay On Liberty

warned against the tyranny of the majority- stuff like the mutinous Hindoooos getting rid of the East India Company. Mill lost salience once Disraeli outflanked Gladstone and it became increasingly apparent that the upper working class would vote Tory or Unionist. Maybe women would vote the right way? Sadly, in America, they imposed Prohibition the moment they were enfranchised.  

takes as its epigraph Humboldt’s formulation of the “leading principle” of his thought: “the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.”

which would involve hobos shitting on Humboldt's head for the entertainment of the Tzar and the Holy Roman Emperor. Queen Victoria, however, was not amused.  

Humboldt concludes his critique of the authoritarian state by

serving it with vim and vigour. The fucker was a Prussian official. He wasn't a Lesbian Trotskyite demanding compulsory gender reassignment surgery for everybody who works at the Pentagon.  

saying: “I have felt myself animated throughout with a sense of the deepest respect for the inherent dignity of human nature, and for freedom, which alone befits that dignity.

Which, I suppose, is better than being animated by Walt Disney but not by much. Did you know, in the German version of Mickey Mouse, Goofy invades Poland?  

” Briefly put, his concept of human nature is this:

The true end of Man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal and immutable dictates of reason,

which Darwin showed didn't fucking exist 

and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole.

A complete and consistent asshole 

Freedom is the first and indispensable condition which the possibility of such a development presupposes;

Which is why Humboldt resigned. It wasn't the case that a salary from the Prussian Crown was the indispensable condition for Humboldt's dignity.  

but there is besides another essential – intimately connected with freedom, it is true – a variety of situations. 

Humboldt was both a diplomat and a guy who presided, from time to time, over the Education Department. 

Like Rousseau and Kant, he holds that

nothing promotes this ripeness for freedom so much as freedom itself.

because nothing promotes nonsense save that very nonsense 

This truth,

which ranks alongside 'it's nice to be nice' as an eternal verity 

perhaps, may not be acknowledged by those who have so often used this unripeness as an excuse for continuing repression.

Repression is either profitable or prudential. If it needs to excuse itself, it isn't repression. It is your Mummy suggesting maybe you should put your pants on before going to school- more particularly if you are the Principal.  

But it seems to me to follow unquestionably from the very nature of man.

or the very nature of God or the Magical Mutation or some such shite. 

The incapacity for freedom can only arise from

not being able to kill those who are trying to enslave you 

a want of moral and intellectual power;

as expressed by fucking over fuckers who try to fuck with you. 

to heighten this power is the only way to supply this want; but to do this presupposes the exercise of the power, and this exercise presupposes the freedom which awakens spontaneous activity.

Nonsense! Getting and loading a gun supplies the power to kill. Pulling the trigger exercises it. But if the other guy has surrendered or run the fuck away, there is no need to do so.  

Only it is clear we cannot call it giving freedom, when

what we are actually doing is pulling our own pudding 

bonds are relaxed which are not felt as such by him who wears them. But of no man on earth – however neglected by nature, and however degraded by circumstances – is this true of all the bonds which oppress him. Let us undo them one by one,

by pulling on our pudding with greater and greater vim and vigour.  

as the feeling of freedom awakens in men’s hearts, and we shall hasten progress at every step.

Unless, like Rousseau we give ourselves a hernia by our incessant jerking off.  

Those who do not comprehend this “may justly be suspected of misunderstanding human nature, and of wishing to make men into machines.”

Bosch made my washing machine. Hopefully, some particularly durable type of Ger-man was used because I neglected to pay for the extended warranty. 

Man is fundamentally a creative, searching, self-perfecting being:

Fundamentally, Man fucks himself.  

“To inquire

does this taste good? 

and to create

i.e. take a dump 

– these are the centres around which all human pursuits more or less directly revolve.” But freedom of thought and enlightenment are not only for the elite.

More particularly if they don't want that shite. In that case, maybe we can market it to the Proles or the Queers or the Gooks or whatever.  

Once again echoing Rousseau, Humboldt states, “There is something degrading to human nature in the idea of refusing to any man the right to be a man.”

But what is more degrading yet is being sodomized by the mailman who then proceeds to shit on your tits.  

Chomsky thinks Humboldt would have lurved the 'Liberation Theology' of

 radical Catholics of Latin America

which drove poor people into the arms of the Pentecostal Church 

who are concerned with the “awakening of consciousness,”

i.e. realizing it sucks to be poor and that listening to stupid Marxists- priests or otherwise- will make you poorer 

referring to “the transformation of the passive exploited lower classes into conscious and critical masters of their own destinies” 

Which is what happens when you embrace the 'Gospel of Prosperity'. 

much in the manner of Third World revolutionaries elsewhere.

all of whom shat the bed unless they created kleptocratic dynasties.  

He would, I am sure, have approved of their criticism of schools that are more preoccupied with the transmission of knowledge than with the creation, among other values, of a critical spirit.

Knifing teechur so as to relieve him of his wallet displays this very critical spirit towards 'the transmission of knowledge'.  

From the social point of view, the educational systems are oriented to maintaining the existing social and economic structures instead of transforming them

into shit.  Chomsky proceeds to gas on in Marxist vein about how Capitalism and Free Markets are very evil. The Chinese, who had experienced the alternative, did not agree. Embracing the market, they rose up rapidly. True, this did mean greatly limiting the freedom of nutters like Chomsky while investing heavily in STEM subject research. It now looks as though they may take the lead in generative AI because they do it very much more cheaply.

A vision of a future social order is in turn based on a concept of human nature. If in fact humans are indefinitely malleable, completely plastic beings, with no innate structures of mind and no intrinsic needs of a cultural or social character, then they are fit subjects for the “shaping of behavior” by the state authority,

Which is why China has risen so much above India.  

the corporate manager, the technocrat, or the central committee.

Without which you just have gangs knifing each other in between selling drugs.  

Those with some confidence in the human species will

wank whereas those with some confidence in the prevailing incentive system will do useful work or research. If such confidence is not justified, they will try to emigrate.  

hope this is not so and will try to determine

by wanking furiously 

the intrinsic human characteristics that provide the framework for intellectual development, the growth of moral consciousness, cultural achievement, and participation in a free community.

All of which has to do with 'mechanism design'.  But then Language itself is simply a Schelling focal solution to coordination and discoordination games. 

In a partly analogous way, a classical tradition spoke of artistic genius acting within and in some ways challenging a framework of rule.

A genius or daimon is a supernatural being animating a particular person, place or thing. One may as well speak of a magical gene.  

Here we touch on matters that are little understood. It seems to me that we must break away, sharply and radically, from much of modern social and behavioral science if we are to move toward a deeper understanding of these matters.

By embracing magic and 'tutelary geniuses'. Why not the alchemical properties of astrological signs?  

Here, too, I think that the tradition I have briefly reviewed has a contribution to offer.

That contribution is almost equal to that of toilet paper.  

As I have already observed, those who were concerned with human distinctiveness and potential repeatedly were led to a consideration of the properties of language.

Which are not the monopoly of what we call languages. Indeed, the intension 'language' has an unknown and unknowable 'extension'. We can't consider the properties of things which are beyond our ken. All we can do is make arbitrary stipulations about them which may serve us well enough for some pragmatic purpose. 

I think that the study of language can provide some glimmerings of understanding of rule-governed behavior

He means the reverse. Protocols and paradigms can help in the study of a language but the reverse isn't the case. We can use mathematics to study economics but we can't use economics to study math- though we can explain why math develops rapidly in places where there is a strong economic motive to have better ways of calculating certain things. 

and the possibilities for free and creative action within the framework of a system of rules that in part, at least, reflect intrinsic properties of human mental organization.

Or cellular automaton or other such beasties which exist only 'in silico'. Consider Conway's Game of Life which came out in 1970. It is Turing complete and can simulate a 'universal constructor' or any other Turing machine including a universal grammar. 

It seems to me fair to regard the contemporary study of language

by useless shitheads like himself 

as in some ways a return to the Humboldtian concept of the form of language: a system of generative processes rooted in innate properties of mind but permitting, in Humboldt’s phrase, an infinite use of finite means.

Humboldt made some interesting discoveries about exotic languages. Chomsky didn't.  

Language cannot be described as a system of organization of behaviour.

Anything at all can be described as such.  

Rather, to understand how language is used,

by imbeciles or paranoid shitheads 

we must discover the abstract Humboldtian form of language – its generative grammar, in modern terms.

That's easily done. The generative grammar for talking bollocks involves ex falso quodlibet and cascading intensional fallacies. Throw in a bit of gesture politics and you can pose as a public intellectual decade after decade without ever saying anything true or interesting.  

To learn a language is to construct for oneself this abstract system, of course unconsciously.

No. It is merely to acquire proficiency in a particular type of communication. There is no 'unicity' when it comes to countable abstract systems with an infinite model (such being the case for Chomsky's universal grammar) because of the Lowenheim-Skolem theorem. Even if some such thing were imbibed unconsciously it is vanishingly improbable that anyone else imbibed the same thing.  

The linguist and pyschologist can proceed to study the use and acquistion of language only insofar as they have some grasp of the properties of the system that has been mastered by the person who knows the language.

This is a false claim. To get British citizenship, I had to show proficiency in English. I also had to see a Doctor after receiving an injury to my skull. In both cases, the people who tested me had no 'grasp of the properties of the system'. They applied a test in a mechanical manner to check I comprehended information presented in English and that I could respond correctly to questions like 'who is the Prime Minister of the UK'. One doesn't have to know everything about a Language or everything about Neurology in order to determine if a person speaks that language and is not concussed or suffering mental impairment. 

Furthermore, it seems to me that a good case can be made in support of the empirical claim that such a system can be acquired, under the given conditions of time and access, only by a mind that is endowed with certain specific properties that we can now tentatively describe in some detail.

Chomsky's mind's specific property is that it is shit. He has made a lot of noise but no useful contribution to anything.  

As long as we restrict ourselves, conceptually, to the investigation of behavior, its organization, its development through interaction with the environment, we are

doing something potentially useful for which the market might reward us or which will have some Social benefit for which a philanthropist or provider of Public Goods might pay and propagate.  

bound to miss these characteristics of language and mind.

which are unknowable or wholly imaginary. 

Other aspects of human psychology and culture might, in principle, be studied in a similar way.

One could study fartology to determine what type of fart would trigger a Revolution such that Social Justice is achieved within a framework of fiscal subsidiarity, environmental sustainability and free and compulsory gender reassignment surgery for all heterosexual males. 

Conceivably, we might in this way develop a social science based on

bullshit 

empirically wellfounded propositions concerning human nature.

e.g. human nature tends to turn into corpse nature after decapitation 

Just as we study the range of humanly attainable languages,

we can't because the range is unknown 

with some success, we might also try to study the forms of artistic expression or, for that matter, scientific knowledge that humans can conceive, and perhaps even the range of ethical systems and social structures in which humans can live and function, given their intrinsic capacities and needs.

In which case why not go one up on those who conduct such studies by studying that study? Why stop there? There is an infinite regress here. The meta-physicist claims to lay down the limits of physics but the meta-meta-physicist will then lay down the limits of metaphysics and so on. But those Societies which are becoming more productive and thus taking over territory and resources from stupid metaphysical or magical cunts, invest in first order studies of a utilitarian type. 

Perhaps one might go on to project a concept of social organization that would – under given conditions of material and spiritual culture – best encourage and accommodate the fundamental human need – if such it is – for spontaneous initiative, creative work, solidarity, pursuit of social justice.

Fartology postulates the existence of a sequence of farts which can achieve all this. Sadly, it is underfunded.  

I do not want to exaggerate, as I no doubt have, the role of investigation of language. Language is the product of human intelligence that is, for the moment, most accessible to study.

Nope. You have to go to the fucking Amazon forest to find out about exotic languages. Math is what is most accessible and cheapest to study.  

A rich tradition held language to be a mirror of mind.

No. The ancient saying was 'wine provides the mirror of the mind, just as bronze provides the mirror of the body'. We use language deceptively and strategically. In vino veritas- guys speak their mind when drunk. Sadly, beer swilling Teutonic pedagogues like Herder came to the startling conclusion, towards the end of the eighteenth century, that their own word salad represented 'reflection' (Besonnenheit) rather than vomit.

To some extent, there is surely truth and useful insight in this idea.

There is none.  

I am no less puzzled by the topic “language and freedom” than when I began – and no less intrigued. In these speculative and sketchy remarks there are gaps so vast that one might question what would remain, when metaphor and unsubstantiated guess are removed.

Shit. But that's all that Chomsky was capable of producing. Whatever he read or heard about, he failed to digest but did turn into a prodigious turd.  

It is sobering to realize – as I believe we must – how little we have progressed in our knowledge of human beings and society,

at this very time, the foundations were being laid for the type of machine translation, speech recognition and generative AI we all now find so useful. Some of those involved in this research are now very very fucking rich. They can change political- perhaps even geo-political- outcomes. Meanwhile everything Chomsky praised or spent time on turned out to be mischievous, mendacious, shite. 

or even in formulating clearly the problems that might be seriously studied. But there are, I think, a few footholds that seem fairly firm. I like to believe that the intensive study of one aspect of human psychology – human language – may contribute to a humanistic social science that will serve, as well, as an instrument for social action.

Circle jerks. Citation Cartels. Woke 'cancel culture'. But that triggered a massive backlash.  

It must, needless to say, be stressed that social action cannot await a firmly established theory of human nature and society,

self-interested actions in various markets were based on a 'firmly established theory' which, however, was capable of considerable fine-tuning to improve outcomes.  

nor can the validity of the latter be determined by our hopes and moral judgements.

Had Chomsky's hopes been fulfilled or had his moral judgments been enforced, his world would have turned to shit. Americans would now be speaking either Russian or Chinese.  

The two – speculation and action – must progress as best they can, looking forward to the day when theoretical inquiry will provide a firm guide to the unending, often grim, but never hopeless struggle for freedom and social justice.

A firm guide would have slapped Chomsky silly the moment he started indulging in ultracrepidarian bullshit. He was a linguist. He should have found ways to make foreign languages easier to learn or spent his time compiling dictionaries or doing other such donkey work. Instead, he babbled nonsense and acted as a Pied Piper to two generations of low IQ grad students who ended up wasting their lives. 

 When you go to a foreign country whose language you don't speak, you often feel that you are like a prisoner. There is so much you want to do but which you can't do because you don't know the language. Even for people living in their own countries who don't know English, there is this feeling of lack of enfranchisement. Automatic translators greatly help such people. There are villagers in China and India and Nigeria who are using these tools to export what they produce at a much higher price by being able to interact directly with potential customers on the other side of the globe. Thus, in practical terms, mathematical and highly theoretical work on both natural and artificial languages has contributed greatly to increased Freedom- economic, intellectual, artistic, cultural, etc.- all over the world. Chomsky's contribution to this was zero or negative. Let this be his epitaph. 

Chomsky's paranoid stupidity

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).

Universal 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 Whitey's 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.

If Chomsky had proof that any organ of government had acted ultra vires, he should have approached the courts . 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 is bound to be more child poverty in parts of it.

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 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 shit 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 problems.

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.