Talking with Chomsky
World-renowned scholar and activist on self-hatred, Canada, the media, and industrial democracy
Andrew Lodge
Author of dozens of books and countless articles, Noam Chomsky walks in the worlds of both academia and activism. He is arguably the 20th century’s most important linguist, yet it is his political work that has launched him to almost mythical status in recent decades. Now almost 80 years old, he maintains a torrid and relentless pace of speaking engagements, interviews and publishing. Love him or hate him (and few people fall in between), when Chomsky talks, people listen. Recently, he took some time to speak with me.
Andrew Lodge: I want to start by asking you about some of the more personal critique that have been levelled at you. You grew up Jewish in America with all the problems of racism that must have entailed, but now how do you deal with it when you are called a self-hating Jew or accused of anti-Semitism?
Noam Chomsky: I was lucky to have had a good Jewish education, so I know exactly where it comes from — it comes from the bible. The epitome of evil in the bible was King Ahab, and he called the prophet Elijah and demanded that Elijah tell him why [Elijah] was a hater of Israel. Elijah was a hater of Israel because he criticized the acts of the evil king. The king — what we would call nowadays a totalitarian — identified himself with the country, the culture and the people, so if you criticize the king you’re a hater of Israel. That concept continues, so in modern days in totalitarian states like the Soviet Union, dissidents were called anti-Soviet or, you know, haters of Russia, and in the totalitarian mentality, that makes sense. If you said anything like that in a country that has democratic values, it would simply be ridiculed. For example, if you were to criticize the Canadian government and someone were to call you a Canada-hater, people would probably fall on the streets in laughter, but where there is a totalitarian mentality, that’s common.
The notion of self-hating Jew — that’s another one. That comes from the Israeli statesman Abba Eban in the late ’70s, who said that the task of our — I can’t remember the word he used; not propaganda, but what amounts to propaganda — is to demonstrate that what he called critics of Zionism are either anti-Semite or neurotic, self-hating Jews. That will cover the entire territory.
He picked two people. One of them was I.F. Stone, who was an avid Zionist all his life, but who was also a critic of [Israeli] state policies. The other person was me. I’ve also been a Zionist all my life, still am, but that doesn’t matter. If you criticize policies of the state, it must be that you’re a self-hating Jew, and if you’re not Jewish then you must be anti-Semite. Okay. That takes care of pretty much any possible criticism.
In recent years, the population in Canada and the United States seems to be polarizing to quite a degree on issues of gay rights, abortion, euthanasia and the whole Terri Schiavo affair; and things like social spending and so on. Why is this polarization taking place?
What do people think about social spending in the United States? I can tell you. There are very extensive, detailed polls about it. People think it’s much too low. There was a major poll taken right after the federal budget came out indicating that a large majority wants sharp cuts in military spending. [Also,] sharp increases in social spending — health, education, welfare, and so on — increases in funding for the United Nations, increases in foreign aid, much more spending for things like renewable energy, as well as a reversal of Bush’s tax cuts for the rich. That’s the overwhelming majority of the public.
This was not published in any major newspaper that I know of, and that’s consistent — results like that simply aren’t published. What the propaganda system wants us to focus on are issues that don’t affect power and wealth. So if you’re a CEO of a major corporation, you want to get people to focus their attention on other issues and keep away from the arena of public policy, and then you’ve done your job; you’ve won. So that’s why the propaganda system makes huge efforts to divert people from issues that matter; issues of policy that affect state planning and action and so on. And if you look at people’s attitudes on those issues, you’ll find that both of the political parties in the U.S. are far, far to the right of the general population on almost every major issue. That includes national health care. That includes the use of force in international affairs. It includes reliance on the United Nations, Iraq — right across the board — the International Criminal Court, Kyoto Protocol; you name it. But, those results aren’t published, because it would be wrong to allow the public to be aware of what people think that might help make it a democratic society, which is pretty dangerous.
You know, it’s not a democracy when you show up every four years and push a button. Democracy requires ongoing, active political organizations and other popular organizations that are working all the time, and that’s what you have in democratic countries.
Take Brazil, for example, another major country in the hemisphere. They had an election, and it wasn’t the choice between two rich men who went to Yale and joined secret societies that train you in the manners of the upper class and are funded by the same corporate interests. They chose someone from their ranks. [Brazil’s leader, Lula] was a peasant steelworker. I don’t know if he had any higher education, and the reason the Brazilians could do it is because they have mass popular organizations like the Landless Workers’ Movement and the Workers’ Party. I’m not suggesting that Brazil is any sort of great ideal, but it’s far more democratic than the United States.
In the United States, there aren’t elections — there are public relations shows in which people mostly don’t have any idea where the candidates stand. Just take one case: you read in the newspapers that the United States opposed the Kyoto Protocol. Well, that’s true from a totalitarian point of view if you identify the United States with its government. But, if the people are part of the United States, it’s not true at all. The population was strongly in favour of the Kyoto Protocol; in fact, so strongly in favour that a majority of Bush voters thought he was in favour of it, because it was so obvious. But, in a well-managed society where you keep the public out of the public arena and you concentrate them on things that don’t matter to power interests, like gay rights or Terri Schiavo, then you can get away with it, until people become organized.
But things like abortion, gay rights and the right to die — they’re important too.
Yeah, sure they’re important. But, they’re not issues that matter to power and wealth. In fact, if you took a poll among CEOs of major corporations, you’d find that their attitudes are quite liberal — in favour of gay rights, in favour of abortion, and so on. But they don’t care enough about it. What matters is running the world and making a profit.
Canadians like to pride themselves on the fact that we’re different than Americans. How different do you think Canadian society is? Is there a difference at all?
There are some differences: take, say, health care. Canada is like the rest of the industrial world; it has some form of national health care. The United States is unique in the industrial world in that it has a largely privatized health care system, and the consequences are very clear. The U.S. has the most inefficient health care system in the industrial world and probably anywhere. Per capita costs are much higher than other comparable societies, including Canada, and health outcomes are at the lowest end of the industrial societies. The reason is primarily privatization, which introduces a lot of administrative overhead, bureaucratic supervision, immense paperwork, and so on.
The drug companies are given enormous privileges in the United States. I think the U.S. is the only industrial country where the government is barred by law from negotiating prices with pharmaceutical corporations. They can do it for paper clips, but government purchasing power can’t be used for negotiating drug prices. The corporations claim they need these immense profits and the huge protectionism of the World Trade Organization because of their research and development (R & D) costs — but that’s just a scam. A large part of the [R & D] costs are paid for by the public anyway. In fact, the economists who have looked into it point out that if the [R & D] costs were raised to 100 per cent public and the drug companies were compelled to go on the market without protectionism, there would be a colossal saving to the consumer. But, that can’t be considered any more than a national health care system can be considered.
Now, that’s kind of interesting because the considerable majority of the population regard it as a moral issue for the government to provide health care to everyone. A moral issue. You’ll notice that in the fuss about the last election, there was a lot of talk about the importance of moral issues, but if you look carefully you’ll notice they never tell you what the moral issues were. Well, it turns out one of the highest ranking moral issues was that the government should provide health care to everyone. And that’s been true for a long time. When this is ever mentioned in the press, which is rare, it’s said: “Yeah OK, that’s what people want, but it’s politically impossible.” That’s the term that’s used. “Politically impossible” means that the drug corporations are against it — it doesn’t matter if 80 per cent of the population wants it.
So if you ask about the differences between Canada and the U.S., there are differences in policies, such as health care. There are differences in attitudes as well. Take, say, the role of religious extremism in our societies. I haven’t seen recent cross-cultural studies, but there were some done 20 years ago, which showed that there’s a close correlation between religious extremism — like belief in miracles, the world was created 6,000 years ago, and so on — there’s a close correlation between that and industrialization. The more a society becomes industrialized, the less the population is committed to such beliefs. One country that was completely off the spectrum — remember that this was 25 years ago — was the United States, which is at the level of a pre-technological, peasant society. And the other that was pretty far off the spectrum was Canada. Not as far as the U.S., but still off the spectrum.
On that topic of morals, we do hear a lot about moral values, but we very rarely hear any discussion of what the moral values are. During the last American election, the polls indicated that a majority of Americans considered Bush to be the “moral guy.” What does that mean?
Remember that the elections in the United States are run by the public relations industry, the same people who sell you toothpaste on television, lifestyle drugs, cars, and so on. When you turn on a television advertisement, you don’t expect to be informed — you expect to be deluded. The idea is not to create informed consumers who make rational choices like the way they teach in economics departments. Business hates markets. What they want are deluded consumers who will be affected by imagery and will ignore facts. I mean, if we had a market society, then the automobile companies and the drug companies would put up little notices saying: “Here are my products, here are their characteristics.” That way you’d inform consumers. But, that’s not what business spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year for — they do it in order to delude you.
It’s the same when they sell presidents, presidential candidates. They want to keep very far away from the issues and create imagery that people will be deluded by. So Bush’s handlers and agents construct an image of a down-to-earth, simple guy who has real moral commitments and a straight line to heaven. Look at this morning’s newspaper, at least in the United States. You’ll find a lot of fuss over the fact that he’s taken a ride on a mountain bike. That’s Bush. Kind of an ordinary guy, just like you with your moral values, sleeves rolled up, going back to the ranch.
What are [Bush’s] moral values? I mean, his moral values are to kill people.
Okay, but that’s a pretty bleak view if you speak of people being deluded and what-not.
It’s not bleak, it’s optimistic. It’s optimistic because people’s attitudes happen to be, I think, pretty decent. What that means is that there are great opportunities for education, organizing, re-democratizing society, changing public policies so they reflect people’s concerns — that’s an optimistic view. In fact, the reason why business spends such enormous efforts to try to delude people is because they’re afraid of the public. I mean, if they weren’t afraid of the public, they’d tell you the truth. The drug companies, the car companies, the toothpaste companies, whatever, they’re afraid that if they told people the truth about their products, people wouldn’t buy them, so therefore they have to delude you with imagery. Just as they use delusion to undermine markets, they use it to undermine democracy, which they also fear. But, that’s optimistic, because it means that there are certainly opportunities for re-creating functioning democracy in countries like ours.
So, why does it seem like there’s so little positive change occurring?
Because people feel helpless. One of the great achievements of the propaganda system and of the economic system has been to make people isolated, helpless; working to the limit. Take only the economic system, forgetting for the moment the propaganda system: the last 25 years have been quite unusual — I think unique — in American economic history. This is the first time ever when there has been a period of that length with stagnation or decline of real wages, and the only way people keep family incomes up is by working harder. So, the U.S. has by now maybe the highest workload in the industrialized world and probably the lowest real wages. People are overwhelmed by work, they have very few benefits and limited support systems, and they just feel like they can’t do anything.
Their children are inundated with massive propaganda trying to turn them into what the industry calls ‘evolving consumers’ — they’re not children, they’re ‘evolving consumers.’ So they’re propagandized from age one into the demands of consumerism. There actually are academic studies on nagging that the industry uses to try to figure out how to induce children to nag their parents to buy them things. The parents are under tremendous pressure to buy, they don’t have any money, they go deeply into debt, then, you know, they can’t handle their medical bills because there’s no support for them. You get a very isolated and marginalized population.
It doesn’t mean it has to stay like that. I mean, there have been worse times in the past and people pulled out of it. Actually, it was kind of like this in the ’50s, but then the ’60s came along and changed everything radically. It was like this in the ’20s, and in the ’30s it all changed. This happens right through history as far back as you can go.
So what do you see as a positive way forward, or perhaps a positive direction to be taken in governance?
What should be done? The first thing we should do is very conservative, and that is re-creating a kind of society in which public opinion enters into public policy. That’s what people were talking about in the 18th century. To some extent it happened, but that’s been beaten back, and now public opinion is almost divorced from public policy.
Okay. So a conservative stand would be to create a political system in which the will of the public matters. That’s a big job, but it’s certainly not impossible.
A further step would be to do what working people wanted to do in the 19th century: eliminate tyrannical systems, like corporations, which are as close to totalitarian as anything humans have devised. Put them under popular control, worker control and industry-community control. Eliminate what John Dewey called industrial feudalism and turn it into industrial democracy. He pointed out — John Dewey did, the main American social philosopher, as American as apple pie — that unless you do that, politics will be the shadow cast by business over society.
So, yes, those things can be done and we can go on from there. None of this is out of reach. In fact, probably most of the public would support it.
They would support it, but as you pointed out earlier, there’s massive opposition from…
You didn’t get the end of slavery or women’s rights or labour rights or anything else by waiting for some benevolent dictator to give them to you. That’s not the way it works. Rights aren’t granted from above; they’re won from below, and it takes effort and time and engagement.
