Noam Chomsky - The God That Failed Transition and Controlling the Public Mind

one of the most prominent modern American political scientists Harold Lasswell who was a leading figure in communications and such things he wrote the article on propaganda in the International encyclopedia of social sciences which was published in 1933 and in it he says that we should not succumb to democratic dogmatism about men being the best judges of their own interests they are not the best judges are the elites us smart guys the cool observers and we must therefore be ensured the means to impose our will for the common good of course this he said will require a whole tech new technique of control largely through propaganda because of the ignorance and superstition of the masses same theme all the way through the basic problem is this the idea is that if you have a society in which the voice of the people is heard you got to make sure that that voice says the right thing in totalitarian societies it's not a big problem you got a club in your hand and if people don't behave the right way you hit them with a club or threaten them with it so it doesn't really matter much what they think what matters is what they do and that you control by force but as the capacity of the state to control by force erodes it's necessary to control what people think and in fact I think you find much more sophisticated concern for thought control precisely as the society becomes more free I don't think it's surprising that the sophisticated discussion things like the public relations industry and the academic side of it and you know the journalistic side and all this kinds of things I've been sampling I suspect if one did a comparative study you'd find that they developed primarily in relatively free societies ours is a very free society in the sense that the state has by comparative standards very limited resources to control by force and I think it's undoubtedly in fact the most sophisticated in the terms of in the reliance on techniques of indoctrination and control public relations industry in particular as American creation you'll notice of course the close similarity to Leninist ideology the Bolshevism which also assumes that the radical intellectuals are the specialized class the land guard may have got to lead the stupid and ignorant masses to a better society in fact the two conceptions are very much alike I think that's probably one of the reasons why there's been historically such an easy transition from one to another the move from being Leninist enthusiasts to a you know a passionate supporter of state capitalism and you know working for American aims that takes place overnight it's been going on for years it's called the God that failed transition and it happens very simply I mean in the early stages it had some authenticity to it when people like Ignacio Selena and others were making this transition but in recent years has become just a farce I mean technique of opportunism and the transition is very easy I think because there isn't much of a difference in ideological change it's just a matter of where you think power lies if you think there's going to be a popular revolution and you can ride that revolution to state power and then wield the whip over the masses you're a Leninist enthusiast if you see that that's not going to happen and power lies in the state capitalist institutions which you have to serve as a manager an ideological manager you do that but it's basically a very similar position and in fact in the last century or so since there's been a more or less identifiable secular Intelligencia I think you find typically that they fall into one or the other of these two categories they associate themselves with one or the other system of power and hierarchy and subordination in fact what I just said is almost a tautology it's only if you submit to those systems that you're counted as a respectable intellectual for obvious reasons well coming up to more modern times and the post Second World War period Carey find again deep concern over the need to control and deceive the public the public mind presidential historian Thomas Bailey wrote in 1948 at the time when we were sort of setting off on a new war the Cold War he wrote because the masses are notoriously short-sighted and generally cannot see danger until it's at their throats our statesmen are forced to deceive them into an awareness of their own long-run interests deception of the people may in fact become increasingly necessary unless we're willing to give our leaders in Washington a freer hand and in 1981 as the United States was launching a new crusade for freedom Samuel Huntington the professor of government at Harvard said in a private but published discussion and interchange you may have to sell intervention or other military action in such a way as to create the misimpression but it is the Soviet Union that you're fighting that's what the United States has been doing ever since the Truman Doctrine which is quite accurate and gives a certain insight into the nature of the Cold War in particular into the nature of the war against Nicaragua which is what he specifically had in mind well these concerns over controlling the public mind tend to rise to the surface particularly after periods of wars and turmoil like the 17th century Revolution the Civil War or like the First World War when Woodrow Wilson launched the major Red Scare which is the major example in modern American history of all of American history of state repression that was really large-scale and effective in destroying unions and destroying independent politics and eliminating independent thought and so on and the same thing happened after World War two with the phenomenon that's mislabeled McCarthyism it's mislabeled because it was actually initiated by the Liberal Democrats in the late 1940s McCarthy just came along at the tail end of it and vulgarized little the reason for this is and is that periods of wars and turmoil have a tendency to arouse people from apathy and to make them think and to make them organize often so that's why you get things like the Red Scare and McCarthyism right after periods of war and turmoil and the same thing happened after the Vietnam War which had the same effect after the Vietnam War elites were concerned about what they called a crisis of democracy in fact one of the most interesting books on this topic or one of the most interesting books on most of the insightful books I think on modern on the modern democratic system is called the crisis of democracy it's a study the only book-length study published by the trilateral commission it's important group put together by David Rockefeller in 1973 and it represents the more or less liberal internationalists from the three major centers of modern capitalism the United States Western Europe and Japan and its trilateral and remember this is the Liberals this is the group out of which Jimmy Carter and most of his administration came the quite what's the crisis of democracy that they're concerned with in all of the democratic societies well the crisis is that during the 1960's large groups of people who are normally passive and apathetic began to try to enter the political arena to press their demands and that's a crisis which has to be overcome the naive might call that democracy but that's because they don't understand the sophisticated understand that that's a crisis of democracy the American spokesmen again Samuel Huntington wrote in his report that Harry Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers in those days there was no crisis of democracy things were working just right but in the 1960s he got all this turmoil I mean young people and women you know labor I mean all kinds of weird people who were supposed to be sitting quietly and the corners began to get involved and caused this crisis I mean the same crisis that arose in the 17th century and there repeatedly arises when people begin to try to take advantage of the formal opportunities that exist among the terrible things that were happening during the 60s causing this crisis they said was that you had this group of people who they called value-oriented intellectuals people who are concerned with things like truth and justice and all that sort of nonsense and they're opposed to the good guys the technocratic and policy oriented intellectuals they called the common source that ones who just do the job which had these value-oriented intellectuals and they were doing all sorts of horrible things like under my D legitimizing the institutions that are responsible for the indoctrination of the young like schools and universities remember this is an internal discussion so they kind of let their hair down there are general proposal at the end of all of this these lengthy and thoughtful discussions was that what we need is more moderation and democracy to mitigate the excess of democracy and overcome the crisis in plain terms what that means is that the public has to be reduced to their proper state of apathy and obedience and driven from the public arena if democracy is to survive and the appropriate sense with the specialized class you know the cool observers smart guys the technocratic and policy or an intellectuals doing our job in the interests of the people who have real power that's the liberal side I won't go into what the reactionary side says about the matter well to summarize there is a standard view of democracy and it's the view of Justice Powell the public should assert or the review that he expressed at least the the view that the public ought to assert meaningful control over the political process and there's a contrary view the contrary view is the public's a dangerous enemy and has to be controlled for its own good of course the way you control children like you don't let a three-year-old run across the street the first view is the rhetorical view the second view is the view that's actually held and you can see that it's actually held when a crisis of democracy erupts and the unwashed masses begin to try to enter into the political arena and have to be somehow repressed either by force as in the Red Scare or by other means in order to overcome the crisis of democracy well with regard to the media play a big role in this and with regard to the media too there is a standard view the standard view for example is expressed again by justice Powell and the same discussion when he claims that it's the crucial role of the media to affect the societal purpose of the First Amendment that is to it allow the public to assert control of the political process standard view was also expressed by Judge Gurfein in an important decision the Pentagon Papers decision when he permitted the New York Times to publish the Pentagon Papers and he said we have a cantankerous press an obstinate press that ubiquitous press and it must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know that's one view that's the standard view and given that view we then have a debate the debate is over whether the Kover whether the media have gone too far in their defiance of Authority and their adversarial stance the right-wing claims they've gone too far they're overcome by a liberal bias we've got to do something about it the Liberals as in the trilateral commission all in fact agree they in the same study they say that the media threaten government authority by their adversarial stance and they've got to be curved if they can't curb themselves the government is going to move in the curve curb them the executive director of Freedom House Leonard Sussman asked whether free institutions must be a must free institutions be overthrown by the very freedom they sustain rhetorical question meaning we got do something about this excess freedom that the press is using to attack the government he was writing about the freedom house study of the coverage the Tet Offensive which became a sort of a classic allegedly showing that the press lost the war in Vietnam by unfair criticism of the government during the Tet Offensive it's an interesting if there's no time to talk about it I may try to get back to it if not maybe get through the discussion very interesting study it was total fraud falsified the data you know the whole thing was faked when you actually correct the errors it turns out that the press that the real charge of Freedom House was that the press although completely supportive of the government policy and working completely within the framework of government propaganda nevertheless was too pessimistic they said they didn't tell you by what standards it was too pessimistic the obvious standard is to compare it with say internal US intelligence assessments which we have thanks to the Pentagon Papers and it turns out the press was more optimistic than US intelligence because they were believing the public statement and they know about the private statements so Freedom House's complaint reduces to the fact that the press though those totally supportive of the propaganda didn't do it in an upbeat enough fashion I wouldn't have surprised George Orwell that that should be the criticism of the press produced by an organization called Freedom House but that's become the that's become the standard since everyone refers to that as the study that proves that the press was too adversarial well that's the debate then then the defenders of the press say no we're not to adversary or maybe we are too adversarial but you got to tolerate us even though we're cantankerous and so on that's essentially the issue well outside of that debate between those who say the press is too adversarial and must be curbed and those who say well yes the presses can't anchor isn't impossible but we just have to suffer that managers of freedom outside the spectrum of that debate which constitutes virtually the entire mainstream discussion virtually the entire discussion but outside the debate there is another position the other position challenges the factual consumption that's taken for granted in the debate according to this alternative view the media do indeed fulfill a societal purpose but a very differently their societal purpose is to inculcate and defend the economic and social and political agenda of the privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and they do this in all sorts of ways they do it by selection of topics by distribution of concern by the way they frame issues by filtering of information by emphasis and tone by simple fabrication sometimes but crucially by the bounding of debate to make sure that it doesn't go outside of certain limits the bounding both in the news columns and in the opinion columns because of course the news columns themselves embody all sorts of assumptions and ideological presuppositions and so on to the according to this alternative view to the extent that there is a liberal bias it serves primarily to bound thinkable thought that is to instill the unchallengeable assumptions which in fact reflect this rather narrow elite consensus so the liberal bias performs a real function it says thus far and no further as far as you can go and I go as far how far I go is still accepting the basic presuppositions as unchallengeable now within those bounds there's ample controversy and it reflects the tactical divisions among elites over how to achieve generally shared aims but these limits are very rarely transcendent so the media thus function in accordance with what my co-author Edward Herrmann and I have called a propaganda model in a recent book that's another view well the propaganda model has a lot of predictions as a lot of predictions about how the press is going to behave but it also has a further prediction the further prediction is that no matter how well confirmed the propaganda model is it cannot be taken seriously and therefore must be effectively excluded from mainstream discussion that actually follows from the model itself the reason is that the model if you think it through the model rejects certain principles that are serviceable to power that is it falls outside the spectrum defined by the presupposition that the media are adversarial and cantankerous perhaps excessively so now that presupposition is a useful one it's serviceable to the interests of established institutions to believe that what you're reading is actually criticism if it's in fact support that's a technique it's a sophisticated technique of indoctrination and of course it's very serviceable to the media themselves it's nice to think that you're you know pride yourself on being an independent that courageous adversary of power and since those assumptions are serviceable they're going to be upheld according to the propaganda model and no serious challenge will be permitted so that prediction indeed is very readily confirmed the propaganda model has never taken seriously it can't be considered notice that the propaganda model has a rather disconcerting feature to it plainly as a matter of logic it's either valid or invalid if it's invalid you can dismiss it if it's valid you must dismiss it

Channel: Chomsky's Philosophy

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Keywords: Noam Chomsky (Author), Leninism (Political Ideology), Propaganda (Quotation Subject), Politics (TV Genre), Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy Of The Mass Media (Book), the god that failed

Id: LYeaIJmduIU

Length: 18min 41sec (1121 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 04 2015