Noam Chomsky and Students at Loyola University, 19-Oct-1994 - Part 1

yeah I feel like I'm gonna be crowned queen of England or something I hope nobody's taking photographs of my activities in my spirit though okay let's just go yep hmm unless spring yeah which one oh yeah my question concerns your vision the way that we and what do you see as institutions in our society Society of justice in solid well the last two words define the vision I think justice solidarity freedom equal rights these are all ideas that come straight out of the Enlightenment that in fact out of classical liberalism which is classical liberalism is very anti-capitalist contrary to what everybody says and classical liberal and enlightenment ideals lead in a very direct path I think to what was called libertarian socialism anarchism or something like that the idea that people have a fundamental core right and need to be free creative not under external constraints that any form of authority requires legitimation the burden of proof is always on an authoritarian structure whatever it may be whether it's you know owning people or sex lengths or whatever a child parent any form of authority has to be challenged sometimes they can be justified maybe in that case okay you live with them the but for the most part not and the that would then lead quite directly to what we're kind of truisms about a century ago I mean now they sound really crazy because there's been such a deterioration of values but if you look at the thinking of just ordinary people like say the working-class press in the mid 19th century it which grew where the ideas just grew out of the same soil enlightenment classical liberal soil the idea is look obviously people should not be machines they shouldn't be tools of production they shouldn't be ordered around we don't we don't want chattel slavery you know like black slaves in the south but we also don't want what was called since the 18th century wage slavery which is not very different namely where you have to rent yourself to survive and in a way it was argued with some plausibility that you're worse off than a slave that way actually slave owners argued that when slave owners were defending slavery there was a kind of a moral debate that went on and it had shared moral turf as a lot of tomorrow debate did and the slave owners made a plausible point they said look we own our workers you just rent your workers when you own something you take much better care of it than when you rent it like to do it a little anachronistically if you've rent a car you're not gonna pay as much attention to taking care of it as if you own the car for obvious reasons similarly if you own people you're gonna take more care of them than if you rent people you rent people you don't want anywhere you throw them out you own people well you got a sort of an investment in them so you make them healthier and so on so the slaves slave owners in fact argue and that look we're a lot more moral than you guys with your capitalists wage slave system and ordinary working people understood that so you know people would like after the civil war you find in the American working class press bitter complaints over the fact that look we fought the end chattel slavery and now you're driving us into wage slavery which is the same sort of thing well okay this this is one core institution the society where people are forced to become tools of others machines tools of others to be cast out if they're not necessary I mean that's just a grotesque relation arrangement totally contrary to the ideals of classical liberalism or enlightenment values or anything else all right and it's now become a sort of standard doctrine but that's just a victory of absolutism and we should dismantle all that stuff culturally it starts with cultural changes you got change your minds you know in your spirit and recover what was common understanding in a more civilized period let's say a century ago and the shop floors of Lowell Massachusetts and so on I recover those that understanding and then we work to simply democratize and all institutions free them up eliminate authoritarian structures as I say you find them everywhere I mean you find them from families of the Corporations all kind of authoritarian structures in the world they all ought to be challenged very few of them can resist that challenge they survive mainly because they not challenged they're not really very strong they look strong but there's a point that was made by David Hume a couple hundred years ago with it's worth bearing in mind Hume was very conservative as you know it was so much so that Thomas Jefferson the great believer in free speech when he established the University of Virginia to be a counter to Harvard you know so they wouldn't send Southern gentlemen up to be distorted by the northern you know Federalists he was the founder of the University of Virginia and he had to read the history of England than those I mean universities mainly law schools in those days like you're training lawyers and people and naturally had to read this tree of England and unfortunately the main history of England was by David Hume who had Tory ideas it's very conservative and Jefferson didn't want the students to be allowed to read it so what he there there was a bowdlerized version somebody had written a version of Hume in which he kept the same style but eliminated all the offending passages you know so Jefferson insisted that that be the only version that students be allowed to read they would be told that's human so on but that's you know anyway even though you know much too conservative to be allowed to be read by Thomas Jefferson's College still he recognized he look at his fundamental principles of government he recognized something which is very much worth area in mind he raised the kind of power docks of power is that how - how does power sustain itself he said if you think about it power is always in the hands of the people who are oppressed it's in the hands of the governor they really have power and it says this true of the most oppressive society what we would call totalitarian society is of the most free power is in the hands of the governed so how come they submit themselves to the authority of others is it well forces an element but he said the real el-amin's opinion you have to control their opinion of course he was in favor of it you know he's a Tory so he says well the what you have to do is make sure you control the opinion of the people meaning make them believe you know make them saturate their minds with ideology carry out what we call propaganda didn't have the term in those days and control their opinion and you got them that means you you change their aspirations you restrict their aspirations to personal things to commodities to break down the natural bonds among people force them to forget what they understand you know that they basically want freedom and independence and justice and so on everybody interest every child understands that so you have to work really hard to drive it out of their heads and if you can drive it out of their heads and you control their opinion then they'll submit you know and they'll submit whether you're a brutal state or a more free society in fact it's more important in the free societies in the 20th century when it be you know in humans day there wasn't much difference every society was absolute is but as the society is differentiated over the years with popular struggles and you know winning the franchise and so on and so forth the difference between the freer societies and the more you know totalitarian or command societies became clearer and a point was began to be understood that Hume didn't talk about and that is that control of opinion is much more important in the free societies so if I can say Soviet Russia they really care much what people thought a Franco's Spain let's a fascist state people read much more broadly and widely than they do the United States I would like say that's a true birthday you know you could you go to a Marxist bookstore you know I mean if he got outta line too much okay they send you to the torture chamber in downtown madrid but the since there were techniques of control just by force there was not much you know wasn't much concern about what people thought it sort of believe what you like will beat you over the head with a bludgeon you know when you get to the freer societies there's a lot more concerned with what people think and that has been understood that's part of the reason for the rise of the public relations industry in the United States public relations industries propaganda agency of business which was it's an American creation you know it's created in the early part of the century to try to as they put it in to control people's minds become and that's you know I don't know if they read him but you know it's not a deep point anybody can understand it without reading you know they understood that unless you control people's minds we're going to be in trouble people's mind you know that the what school was called in the business press the greatest hazard facing industrialists is the rising political power of the masses I'm quoting I mean recognize that the business press is very Marxist super Marxist I mean all the values are inverted you know but they believe in class struggle they talk about the masses you know and beating down the masses and all that sort of thing in fact business press reads kind of like malice attract a little red books and things just with all the values reverse and they understood that you've got to control people's opinion because as human power is in the hands of the governed if they ever realize it and if they realize it and they try to recognize what their own values are and pursue them we're really going to be in trouble because it's not coming any way to control people well okay you ask what institutions can change things I think if you think it through its kind of obvious you have to start by changing people's minds I mean take say something pretty close to your takes a liberation theology and in the seventies and sixties and seventies how did it work well you know people in priests and nuns when and started based communities where people read the Gospels and they thought about it not peasants maybe on maybe illiterate people who knows you know but they you know they thought about what I meant they gave their own egan interpret in a lot of ways they gave an interpretation which was oriented toward the preferential option for the poor people began to do things like I mean I saw some of this happening you know you go to a very concerned I remember once going to a village in Nicaragua which was run by an extremely conservative order of nuns I forget which one but the one that runs all the schools for girls in Latin America somebody's I forget who they are you probably know but you know there's real ultra right-wing you know but they were but they were running they were working in a court in a village where the peasants were so isolated from one another that they couldn't even work together to the point of trying to get water and one of their biggest and that they were good people and then the Mother Superior was walking around you know trying to convince people to get injections and things like that and they their big achievement when I was there was that they had gotten the peasants to cooperate enough to work on a common well they had a you wouldn't believe the way it worked there was a they had you know this is real poor country so they had a they had an ox and they tied the I had a rope tied to the neck of the ox and it was pulling the antibiotics climbed up a hill and as it climbed up the hill it pulled water out of the well and then people would come and you know take the water his first water they were head and then the ox would be led down to the bottom the hill again and would walk up ok that was a real achievement and it was helping bring people to understand look you work together we're all better off the kind of you know authoritarian regime that you lived under which kept you separated and kept you isolated it's just destroying you to try to get those thoughts into people's heads his heart and once it gets started it goes on you know and then they develop cooperatives and associations and then of course the death squads come and the us trainers come and people like you and me pay taxes to killers we'll put an end to all of this well okay you think this through it's not very hard to figure out what what have you done whether it's there or whether it's here and the aim ought to be to dismantle authoritarian institutions and like I say they're all over the place you find them in the family but the core ones the ones that simply have to be radically changed if you're ever going to have a free society are the institutions of that are the the institutions that involve production and distribution and decision about what life is going to be like and that happens to be in executive boardrooms like the hotel where I was staying last night you know you walk around then you see who's making the decisions not very hard to find them and those sectors of society with their extraordinary power it's now you know even international and huge collaboration of power they have plenty of violence behind them much of it is provided by the United States there's a reason why we have more than half of the total military expenditures of the whole world the reason is because we're the big killers and we have to be around to make sure that nobody gets out of hand you know hasn't start building a well we've got to be in there to have a death squad that'll take care of them and that's what a lot that's a lot of what we're involved in and you and I are involved in it because this is a pretty free country like we're involved in a we decided to be involved in it or we decided to look the other way or something like that okay those are things that can be done and on and on up till the point where you just dismount but and I don't think these institutions are very strong I agree with you if people change their conceptions and decide look I'm not going to be kicked around and you get together there's nothing to stop you from taking over a factory let's say I mean the police will stop you've got police or just other people and if understanding and solidarity has spread enough they won't stop you incidentally that's why when countries are ruled by either colonial rulers or every country's kind of colonized you know even if it's just in itself I mean there's some sector that and colonize it everyone else and seemed more dramatically obvious when it's a foreign ruler what they typically do is use military forces that are not local so like when in China when they put down the Tiananmen Square demonstrations you take a look at what they did they did not use the local PLA you know Army forces they took them in from the provinces when the British ran India they forego hundred years they ran it with Indian soldiers but from other places in like the Gurkhas for example in a famous Turkish there Nepalese you know Hill tribesmen and you can sort of bring them down to smash up local people we do the same thing we bring in you know sort of forces from the outside actually it's going on right now in the occupied territories and the Israeli occupied territories the Israel are a fought agreement one crucial part of it is to make sure that those territories are controlled by foreigners they're called Palestinians but in fact they are foreign Palestinians ones were trained were brigades of Jordanian or army or something like that they're the ones are being brought in that's the standard technique of colonial control and so you know when you bring in when they wanted to put down the Homestead Strike in 1892 they get the pencil the National Guard from somewhere else you know not the local cops in Homestead so yeah there are police and there are armies and their security forces but you know and their techniques which are well understood for using them and the answer to that is just more solidarity you know broader solidarity so you don't get soldiers from somewhere else will come and smash up people and that's hard no I mean it's the the fact that societies are colonized and so stratified offers all cannot to go very far away like when the Chicago Police were trying to destroy political organizing in the black ghetto back in the 60s they were able to work together with other criminal organizations like them the FBI and simply set up assassinations and other criminal activities to get rid of leaders in the ghetto which they did and you know they happen to come from Chicago but they came from a different stratum of Chicago which was so separated it might as well have been from you know Alaska and it's because of the stratifications and so on that these things work actually kind of interest if you look at the details it's very illuminating so take Chicago when the FBI was trying to the Panthers in Chicago back in the 60s were a pretty constructive group they were doing real things a lot of community organizing and so on and the main Panther leader was a guy named Fred Hampton maybe some of you know this stuff this is your own history you really ought to know a recent history but the at first the FBI tried to use the colonization that is internal to the black ghetto that is they tried to get a criminal gang to assassinate Hampton now typically the police and the FBI liked the criminals they work with them they're more or less the same class and the same interests and they're all involved in the same control systems there's a lot of interaction like Columbia or anywhere else you know the security forces and the criminals are all in the same bag you know they have the same interest so the FBI in fact had pretty good relations with the main criminal gang in the ghetto which was the Blackstone Rangers and they tried to get the Rangers to kill Fred Hampton the way they did it was buy a lot of this stuff came out in court cases right here in Chicago later they sent fake letters to the head of

Channel: Digital Chomsky

Views: 7,540

Rating: 4.9083967 out of 5

Keywords: Noam Chomsky, politics, history, Loyola University Chicago (College/University)

Id: 6YxPOGC2K8A

Length: 20min 9sec (1209 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 13 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/suekichi]

Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vpOmbGsLng

Part 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-yeVDKkRsM

Part 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIrIBP-BalQ

Part 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8Wrwo2a1dg

[u/Dymdez]

Just finished this -- it's excellent! Great upload.

[u/big_al11]

This is such a glut of new NC stuff. I need to ration it out.