Noam Chomsky Robert Trivers Interview psychology propaganda and self-deception

psychologists have shown that people make these verbal switches it becomes like a real fundamentalist religion organisms when they realize they're being deceived sounds like normal propaganda one of the most important comments on deceit for the modern theories I think was made by Adam Smith who is greatly revered but their little read he pointed out the major goal of business is to deceive and oppress the public for good reasons and one of the striking features of the modern period is the institutionalization of that process so that we now have huge industries devoted to deceiving the public I very conscious about public relations industry which strikingly developed in the freest countries and for good reasons welcome Britain in the United States at the time roughly to the First World War when it was recognized that enough freedom had been won so you really can't control people by force and you have to carry out modes of deception and manipulation in order to keep them under control and by now these are huge industries and they not only dominate too Marketing of commodities which is maybe the sixth of GDP or something just marketing but now they also control the political system so as anyone knows and watches the US election its marketing commodities by same techniques that are used for marketing toothpaste so our self-deceit is concerned it seems to me that's throughout history been mostly the property the location of the educated classes who were 10 100 % of course but tend to be supportive of power systems and that involves a lot of self to see you have to reconstruct the picture of the world and in order to be conducive to the interests and concerns of the educated classes I just went through an hour of that with the videoconference overseas with students in the university imagine where they want to talk about globalization I started by saying there's two senses of globalization I said every every term of political discourse virtually has two senses there's a literal sense and since this used for doctrinal warfare propaganda so through of terrorism aggression take a choice this happens to be globalization so that well there's two senses of globalization there's the doctrinal sense which refers to the specific form of economic international integration that's organized by major corporations few powerful states within the framework of the so-called Washington Consensus World Trade Organization and so on and that's one form there's another in the literal sense of doctor but globalization just needs international integration and there there's a huge number of people dedicated to globalization they're called anti-globalization so if you take a look symbolically at the World Economic Forum in the world Social Forum to be almost simultaneously World Economic Forum represents a any sector of highly privileged people and their form of international integration is called globalization world Social Forum draws from about as wide a range of people in the world as any organization ever has I mean all over the world different walks of life anything from peasants to professionals and so on and their form of globalization is called anti globalization because it's it's working on plans directed to the interests of people so I started off by that but then every question used globalization in the technical sense the propagandistic sense that's self-deceit and that's a large part of what I think education zuv it so yeah deceit is a technique of control on the part of the powerful when forces unavailable and of course even when force is available but and self-deceit is it is a substantial part of the history of the educated classes for back ziggo let me as you personally just out of curiosity you've devoted most of your intellectual life to on the one hand the deep structure of language and on the other hand is something that I just classify under deceit and self-deception all of your analyses of like the the absurd double standard in which the word terrorism is used it's not terrorism to arm the Contras to attack women's collectives and Nicaragua but it's terrorism to strap a bomb on yourself and blow up some people in a pizzeria etc etc is there any relationship in your own life reduce any connection between your linguistic work and your and your continued analysis of deceit and self-deception in society there's a kind of a loose connection and I've occasionally spoken and written about it but anyone I'm asked to because I'm the honest truth is that if I was an algebraic apologist I could do the same work indeed wouldn't have any connection to it so don't draw anything from what I know about language right people are constantly saying well you know linguists must be analyzing the language of deception but no I mean analysis of the language of propaganda and so on is just common sense you don't have to have any special knowledge about it but there is connection and in fact the connection was brought out in the enduring the Enlightenment in the early Romantic period thee so takes it's a figures like we're so for example or villain phone Humboldt is the most extreme the he was one of the founders of classical liberalism but he was also a leading linguist and he drew some of the potential connections all coming from a kind of Cartesian source namely the idea that the core element of human beings with in the Cartesian picture distinguishes humans from beasts machines you know animals and machines the core property is a kind of creative capacity that humans have and the Beast or machine has which according from the Kirke for the Cartesians and their followers was manifested most clearly in language that is the capacity to do what you and I are not doing just to you know produce new thoughts new ideas for the Cartesians the core element of the human essence and for the following generation and see through so some of versus more egalitarian essays von Humboldt and others it was also became with Bakunin called an instinct for freedom you know just some core element in humans that seeks freedom and any institutional structure that limits that freedom has to be challenged that's actually a core principle of classical liberalism and it found its way right into anarchism which my view at least is the inheritor of classical liberalism classical liberalism is sort of break against the shoals of capitalism basically disappeared but I think it's fair to regard the anarchist tradition as a descendant based on the principle that you have to challenge any form of authority and make it justify its legitimacy because it is interfering with a core component of human nature which manifests itself most explicitly in the use of language but many other things so in that sense there's a kind of a loose connection but it's not a deductive connection I mean you can draw some conclusion from linguistics of a political life or conversely right not of do you see any other connection well one of the great benefits of language is the fact that we can make statements about events that are far in space and time of course the problem is that we can make false statements about the events distant space and time they're even harder to verify or check on than statements about events that are nearby so language to me greatly increases the opportunity for deception in our lineage this information and it prop and and greatly increases the opportunities for self-deception as well do you think it matters much when you think about the leaders like let us say the present set of organisms that launched this dreadful LaRocca misadventure did when you're thinking about things like that how important to you is it their level of self-deception we know they launched the whole thing in a swarm of lies the evidence for that's too overwhelming to even need to be referred to now my view is that is that the deception and trained self-deception very easily I agree I'm not sure they launched it with lies but and it's perfectly possible they believed it yes that's I mean in fact if you look we don't have a detailed record but from the record we have it looks as if they were kind of cherry-picking they had a goal yeah and then they sort of cherry-picked intelligence and coerced intelligence yes to yield evidence that would contribute to that tool yes and anything that under conflicted with it just was tossed out or in fact the people were tossed up like the joint debtors joint you said right they eat the envy but but that doesn't necessarily mean it's self-deception I mean it's very easy to I think we all know it from personal life you see with young children you see two kids fighting about a toy let's say and the older one takes the toy from the younger one and his mother comes in and starts berating him they give you an answer saying look it was really mine and yeah you know he took it for me and you didn't want it anyway yeah you build up a whole story which kid probably believes they're not and it's I suspect it's pretty similar when the Cheney and Rumsfeld pick the evidence they want to invade another country yeah suspect more or less the same mechanisms so you're sure it is self-deception but it just dump it's it's it's so automatic they effort and you know energy to try to see yourself from a distance yes it's hard to do no it is I think in everyday life we're aware of the fact that when we're watching something on stage so to speak we have a better view overall view than the actors on the stage have you know if you can see events lateral and sideways you can say my god they're doing this and they're doing that but if you're embedded in that network at the time very hard much harder I think you can you can see it very clearly but it's comparing historical events which are similar you know they're never identical but similar so they take the Russian invasion of Afghanistan of the Saddam's invasion of Kuwait the US invasion of Iraq just take those three well you know from the point of view of the of the people perpetrated it it was a noble effort and done for the benefit of everyone no reason to think they were lying they had arguments in fact the self justifications are kind of similar I chose an interview with a Polish reporter a couple of weeks ago and we're talking about this and I asked him whether he'd been reading Pravda during the bestia you know during the Afghan war we didn't have to go on with the conversation he just laughed because he saw the point right away I mean yeah it was about the same as the US British press in regard to the Iraq war the there was criticism of the war in the Russian Soviet press same kind that there is here well it's costing too many lives you know poor brave soldiers dying in vain we can't bring the gifts we want to bring to the Afghan people we can't bring because of terrorists who were stopped at jihadi Islamic crazy terrorists who were trying to disrupt people's lives and we're improving things in Kabul you know women go to the university but how can we would do this with the terrorists around Iran that's it almost translates but we can't see it for ourselves we can see it for them you know like nobody doubts that the Russians committed aggression but some saying committed aggression we attribute to them rational goals you know maybe they wanted to control the energy the Middle East or something with regard to ourselves it's impossible which I've reviewed a lot of the scholarly literature and journalistic literature on this and it's close to universal we just cannot adopt towards ourselves the same sane attitudes that we adopt easily in fact reflexively when others commit crimes it's like your terror as an example just can't and do it and if anyone says it no educated liberal intellectuals are infuriated because it suggests that we could do something that's not Noble we can make mistakes that's easy so you criticize mistakes you can criticize low-level crimes like Abu Ghraib you can criticize that and criticize me lie but not the educated civilised people the kind of people we have dinner with you know see it concerts sitting at air-conditioned offices planning mass murder so that's beyond criticism on the other hand if it's half-crazed the GIS in the field uneducated donor who's going to shootout up next you know you can blame them and you can say look how awful they are and it's the Abu Ghraib is his name universe ice lady England you know disadvantaged young women very different from us I bet how about the guys who organized and planned it yes here's somewhat different question which you've also written a lot about and thought a lot about the economic motive is often hidden from discussion and from view so in retrospect all of this hysteria about anti-communism what was it I mean whenever someone came up with a socialist system it was a system that was not going to be open to our exploitation likewise in the Iraq case there was an economic motive in terms of of seizing a major sectional world and implanting up of some military bases I feel that we plan to put those military bases in for good we've we've never left any place voluntarily except Renata alright after all that's the Nutmeg cap of that up and say quite a lot is quite a lot right and Vietnam they ushered us out the front door so that was the end of that but we haven't left the Philippines we haven't left q but we haven't left where you know so it's almost like we looked around the globe and saw this wait is this really important area what if with all this oil and when this issue comes up I will what about the oil the own scholarship discounted and they discounted for interesting reasons they discount it because doesn't make sense after all the US could get the hold of the oil anyway because it's just on the market and wants the ships on the Seas because anywhere you want so it doesn't increase access to oil which is perfectly correct it doesn't increase access to oil it increases control over oil and that distinction is critical and it just can't enter scholarship in fact Dick Cheney here's another case like Afghanistan and Kuwait Dick Cheney the other day it was somewhere in Central Asia as Aslan or something right he was trying to get them to make sure to direct their pipelines to the West so the US can control them and he said control over pipelines is a means is art these are tools for intimidation and coercion he was talking about if somebody else controls the pipelines okay so like if China controls the pipelines is a tool of intimidation and coercion but if we control the pipelines has just been Evelyn tanned free and wonderful well and I was interested to see if anybody's going to comment on that now here he is in whatever was because I've done to get them to ensure that we control the pipelines but as long as he's talking about somebody else's control then its intimidation coercion waste the very moment he's trying to get them to give us control that's liberation in freedom you know to be able to live with it as contradictions in your mind really does take a good education but let me give you an example the kind of stuff on the individual psychology studies that is reminded to me by points you're making this we've a distinction and problems we have coming up with a consistent one psychologists have shown that people make these verbal switches what you're in a we've a situation and sometimes quite arbitrarily formed groups but in any case your group versus another group so these that are simply set up for the experiment it can be or you can be talking about them and their group versus some someone that's not a member of their group but you can also do it experimentally and I don't know that I'm stayed at work yet carefully to see how long you have to set them up in these arbitrary groups to get this kind of thing going but you have the following kinds of verbal things that people do apparently quite unconsciously if you're a member of my group and you do something good I make a general statement about noam chomsky is an excellent person now if you do something bad I give a particular statement noam chomsky stepped on my toe but it's exactly reversed if you're not a member of my group if you're not a member of my group and you do something good I say Noam Chomsky gave me directions to MIT but if he steps on my toe I say he's a lousy organism or he's an inconsiderate person so we we generalize positively to ourselves particular eyes- and reverse it when we're talking about other people it sounds like normal propaganda yes Islamofascists or the Irish role crooks yes exactly exactly generalize the negative characteristic into the other so to speak so I'm trying to I'm trying to understand these from at the individual level and also put them together in groups there are some times in which institutions act like individuals in that they practice internal self-deception this was fineman's famous analysis of NASA and the Challenger disaster I don't know if you ever read the analysis well it was beautiful he said when we decided to go to the moon in the sixties there was no disagreement in the Society for better or worse everybody said let's beat the Soviets to the moon and the thing was built rationally from the ground up and by before the decade was out we were on the moon and back safely now then you had a five billion dollar bureaucracy with nothing to do so now you had to have to come up with rationales for what they did so they did two things they first of all decided on man flight because it's more expensive secondly they decided on the reusable whatever you call it a thing which turned out to be more expensive than if you had just had a new capsule every time but you always have to sell this thing as making sense then then you ended up with this absolutely hokey thing where where we're going to do experiments in space on whether plants grow up or down when there's no gravity nonsense like that stuff that you can recreate in the lab at a trivial cost as you know so he then argued that NASA the upper levels were busy selling this pile of you-know-what to the general public they didn't want to hear anything negative from the people down below this was his analysis for the the why how they came up with this o ring nonsense and they had a safety unit that was supposed to be involved in safety but ended up being subverted and functioned just to rationalize non safety and the classic example is there were 24 flights I think it was 24 prior to the disaster and of those seven of them there was owning damage in one of those flights detected detected yes and one of them the o-ring had been burned through a third of the way through then they came up with real absurdities they said we've built in a three-fold safety factor that's to say that you know it only burned a third of the way through but that as you know as a perversion of language by law you are required to build elevators with an 11 fold safety factor which means you pack it full of people running up and down there's no damage to your equipment now you make an 11 times as strong you know not as afraid 11th of the way through or whatnot and all of this data was available all of it was available and and it's like it has an analogy to individual self-deception informations often not is often somewhere in the organism it's just well hidden it's well down in the unconscious it's well inaccessible you've built up firewalls against it etcetera etcetera are there any animal analogues to anything well I don't know I believe that self-deception has evolved in spin-2 situations at least in and other creatures and I believe it could be studied and I've suggested a way to do it but nobody's done it when you are making an evaluation of another animal you know in a combat situation let's say male-male conflict the other organisms sense of self-confidence is a relevant factor in your evaluation and that's shown by its behavior yes exactly and so you're beating it up against just yes and suppressing signs of fear and not giving away so forth so you can't imagine selection for overconfidence selection for suppressing for showing overconfidence even if it's not real exactly likewise in situations of courtship where females are evaluating males and again the organism sense of self is a relevant parameter we all know that that people that have a low opinion them so that's a that's a sexual romantic turnoff right there so again you can have selection without language it seems to me for biased kinds of information flow within the organism to keep up a false front that's not necessarily it may be that the animal that putting up a false front knows it's false room indeed but it may benefit from not knowing it it may act more easier to do it easier to do it and perhaps more convincing because you're not giving away evidence secondary signs exactly secondary signs is there any evidence about this it's just speculation that what you heard is is rank speculation is it kind of investigative I do not know of anybody who's doing it on self-deception there's excellent work being done on deception and other creatures to give you just one line of work there that is is of some interest repeatedly what we find now in wasps in birds and in monkeys that organisms when they realize they're being deceived get pissed off forgive my English they often attack the deceiver but especially if the deceivers over representing him or herself if you're underrepresented and showing yourself as having less dominance than you really have or what not they don't know you're not and the ones that attacked you are precisely those whose who's whose dominant status you are attempting to expropriate or mimic it's very interesting and it suggests some of the dynamic in which you know in which fear of being detected wild while deceiving can be a secondary signal precisely because if you are detected you may get your butt kicked or you may get chased out the name for that then the international affairs literature it's called maintaining credibility see how to carry out violent acts to maintain credibility right the issues insignificant right right and that's a relic and a healthy for its kind of the Mathieu yeah yeah indeed indeed and then I know I've heard that rationale used for you know for obviously odious stuff while we're maintaining credibility otherwise we ain't got no street cred that's a common theme there was a brilliant study which is a very difficult one to do at the time you can do it much more easily now by Goran Sackheim about 20 years ago using the fact that that we respond to hearing our own voice with greater arousal than we hear then we show when we hear another human's voice in both cases we show physiological so galvanic skin response is one such measure about twice as big a jump if you hear your own voice now what you can do is have people match for agent sex read the same boring paragraph from Thomas Kuhns structure of Scientific Revolution chop it up into two four six 12 second segments create a master tape where some of the time you're hearing your own voice a lot of the time you're hearing not now then you've got to press a button which says if you think it's yours and they also have them press the second bus but now sure you are but meanwhile they got the galvanic skin response now they discovered two interesting things first of all some people denied their own voice some of the time but the skin always had it right some projected their own voice some of the time the skin always had it right the deniers denied the denial but the projectors half the time we're willing to admit afterwards that they think they made become that the mistaken projection a fellow yes in a follow-up interview right they're just just asking them okay now the second thing they get what do you think the reason for that is the difference between the projectors and the deniers got well I don't have a good way of putting it known but to me when you want to deny reality you got to act quickly and get it out of safety they also the deniers also showed the highest levels of G galvanic skin response to all stimuli it's like they were primed to do it inventing reality a little bit more a relaxed enterprise but I haven't it's not as threatening yes something like that I haven't thought out a good way to put it but something along that is the way I've been thinking the final thing they showed was that they could manipulate it so you know psychologists have lots of devices for making you feel bad about yourself and one of them to just give you an exam they're probably they're university students just a little pseudo exam give them their results and random so they tell half of me that lousy half of me did good and then what they found was that those that were made to feel bad by themselves started to deny voice more while those that are feeling good start hearing themselves talking when they're not so you know we didn't evolve to hear our voice on a tape recorder you have to use some kind of interpretation here but it's like self presentation is contracting under failure that it's expanding hunger you might be interested in a book that's coming out by very smart guy James Peck hose psychologist ha ha almost got a book coming out called Washington's China but in which he does a very in-depth analysis of the national security culture he went through the National Security Council literature you know the background literature and so on and he does a kind of a both an analysis of the content but also a psychological analysis but was reminding me of at all time you're talking from there when he shows there are elaborate techniques of self-deception to try to build up a framework in which we can justify things like say invading overthrowing the government of Guatemala yeah on the basis of some noble objective right and it's done by sharp making everything as dean acheson once said you have to make it clearer than truth that's right and as this picture gets internally created and built up on by each group of national security staffers it becomes like a real fundamentalist religion is showing extraordinary self-deceit yeah and then you end up with the changes in the room so well I'm looking forward to it I've been appalled when I pass a newsstand in there they you know there's some article there News and World Report China the next threat you know like now we got to mobilize our energy against China and their dark and military and that's interesting because the threat of China is not military exactly threat of China is they can't be intimidated it's very similar what you're describing Europe you can intimidate so for example when the u.s. tries to get people stopped investing anywhere and European companies pull out China disregards it for you look at the history understand why they've been around for 4,000 years they've contempt for the barbarians they just don't give it their right okay you scream we'll go ahead and take over big pieces out here well all right honey noil right your developer and that's the threat you can't intimidate well then it's driving people in Washington for cert but you know of all the major powers they're the one that has been least aggressive militarily having developed an offensive military capacity and probably got 20 missiles or something right nothing yet we're talking about it already we talking about but and you can see what the threat is they cannot be intended it's a very boys to go ahead and they look at you content it's a little bit like the gorilla pounding his chest some people ah there's that another how the people's lie about one another every time

Channel: TheEthanwashere

Views: 20,073

Rating: 4.9464288 out of 5

Keywords: Noam, Chomsky, Robert, Trivers, Interview, psychology, propaganda, and, self-deception, hegemony, or, survival, self, deception, right, wing, libertarian, socialism, noble, lie, neoconservatives, George, Bush

Id: 88xrbIHvNm4

Length: 33min 2sec (1982 seconds)

Published: Sat May 19 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/Daewwoo]

This is one of the most fascinating interviews I've ever heard. Thank you for posting this.