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Extract :
Extract :
AN INTERVIEW WITH NOAM CHOMSKY
Q: Professor Chomsky,let’s start with a basic question. Are people in control of their own destiny? More specifically, are American people fully aware that they themselves are the creators of their own laws, and how does that dispose them towards their institutions?
NC: First of all, the majority of American people today don’t accept the assumption that it is they who create their institutions and who run their country. The last time I looked at the polls, about 80% of the population felt that the government is made up of a few big interests looking out for themselves and not for the people. You could see this at the elections. Although I don’t have the exact figures at hand, there’s a very striking fact: opinions of Congress are extremely low—in the teens. Nevertheless, probably 98% of incumbents get reelected. What this tells you is that, essentially, people are aware that they don’t have a choice and that they’re not taking part in running the country. In fact, you can see this in many other ways: take April 15, the day when taxes are paid. In a democratic society, where people would feel that they are shaping their own lives, this would be a day of celebration. The spirit would be “We’re getting together as a community to put our resources into implementing policies that we have chosen. What could be better than that?” Well, that’s not the way it is here. Instead, it’s a day of mourning when some alien force that has nothing to do with us comes to steal our hard-earned money.
Q: Would you say that we have become so apathetic and conformist that we even lack the desire to resist?
NC: I don’t think “apathetic” is the right word, I’m also not sure “conformist” is the right word. People feel hopeless. Take the Obama campaign in 2008. Campaigns in the US are run by the public relations industry and elections are, basically, bought. The Obama campaign was a case in point. In fact, as you may know, the advertising industry gives an award each year for the best marketing effort of the year. In 2008 they gave it to Obama, whose campaign beat Apple in “Best Marketing of the Year.” There was really very little talk about issues. Real political issues were off in the side somewhere and, to start with, most people didn’t even know what they were. The words that were being repeated over and over again, in typical advertising campaign style, were “hope” and “change.” Well, that’s meaningless. But it does work: advertisers understand popular moods. The people wanted “hope” and
“change” which means that they didn’t have hope and they didn’t like what existed. Now, that’s not apathy, it’s a mark of a kind of disintegration of society. I’m old enough to have lived through a real depression, the Great Depression. My family were mostly working people, not well-off by any means. But, in a way, it was a less psychologically depressed time. There was a sense of hopefulness; the sense that there is a way out of this, that there are possibilities, things that can be done, like organize the CIO (Committee for Industrial Organization), get involved in programs of reform—there were opportunities to be grasped. There is no such general feeling in the country now—but it’s not apathy. I think what it is is the success of
an incredible propaganda campaign, the scale of which is very little understood, although there’s good scholarship on it: after the Second World War, there was an enormous campaign by the business classes to drive out of people’s heads any conception of democracy, concern for one another, feeling able to do anything, and so on. And it had its successes.
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