Noam Chomsky and Robert Trivers: On Deceit

Noam Chomsky and Robert Trivers
The anti-war activist and MIT linguist meets the Rutgers evolutionary biologist in the Seed Salon to discuss deceit.
Seed (September 2006)

In the 1970s, a Harvard class taught by evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers ignited a controversy that would escalate into the "sociobiology wars." His papers provided a Darwinian basis for understanding complex human activities and relationships. Across town at MIT, revolutionary linguist Noam Chomsky had earned a reputation as a leading opponent of the Vietnam War. Throughout those pivotal years, and in the following decades, the two explored similar ideas from different perspectives. Long aware of each other's work, they had never met until a couple of months ago, when they sat down to compare notes on some common interests: deceit and self-deception.

Noam Chomsky: One of the most important comments on deceit, I think, was made by Adam Smith. He pointed out that a major goal of business is to deceive and oppress the public.

And one of the striking features of the modern period is the institutionalization of that process, so that we now have huge industries deceiving the public—and they're very conscious about it, the public relations industry. Interestingly, this developed in the freest countries—in Britain and the US—roughly around time of WWI, when it was recognized that enough freedom had been won that people could no longer be controlled by force. So modes of deception and manipulation had to be developed in order to keep them under control.

And by now these are huge industries. They not only dominate marketing of commodities, but they also control the political system. As anyone who watches a US election knows, it's marketing. It's the same techniques that are used to market toothpaste.

And, of course, there are power systems in place to facilitate this. Throughout history it's been mostly the property holders or the educated classes who've tended to support power systems. And that's a large part of what I think education is—it's a form of indoctrination. You have to reconstruct a picture of the world in order to be conducive to the interests and concerns of the educated classes, and this involves a lot of self-deceit.

Robert Trivers: So you're talking about self-deception in at least two contexts. One is intellectuals who, in a sense, go through a process of education which results in a self-deceived organism who is really working to serve the interests of the privileged few without necessarily being conscious of it at all.
The other thing is these massive industries of persuasion and deception, which, one can conceptualize, are also inducing a form of either ignorance or self-deception in listeners, where they come to believe that they know the truth when in fact they're just being manipulated.

To read the rest of the dialogue and access video of their discussion

Noam Chomsky: “This is the Most Remarkable Regional Uprising that I Can Remember”

Noam Chomsky: “This is the Most Remarkable Regional Uprising that I Can Remember”
Democracy Now

In recent weeks, popular uprisings in the Arab world have led to the ouster of Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the imminent end of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s regime, a new Jordanian government, and a pledge by Yemen’s longtime dictator to leave office at the end of his term. We speak to MIT Professor Noam Chomsky about what this means for the future of the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy in the region. When asked about President Obama’s remarks last night on Mubarak, Chomsky said: "Obama very carefully didn’t say anything... He’s doing what U.S. leaders regularly do. As I said, there is a playbook: whenever a favored dictator is in trouble, try to sustain him, hold on; if at some point it becomes impossible, switch sides."

To Watch/Listen/Read

Noam Chomsky: Activism, Anarchism and Power

Noam Chomsky -- Activism, Anarchism, and Power
Conversations with History

On this edition of Conversations with History, UC Berkeley's Harry Kreisler is joined by linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky to discuss activism, anarchism and the role the United States plays in the world today.

To Watch the Conversation

Conversations With History: Noam Chomsky

[Expanded discussion on concision and framing, and essential context for thinking about the current Wikileaks whistleblower releases and the American government's/media's repressive attacks]

Noam Chomsky on Concision in the Media

Robert Barsky: Acting in Your Own Self-Interest

... any dissident or dissenter comes up against power, and interests, and, accordingly, considerable resources dedicated to the maintanence of status quo power relations, so it is incumbent upon him to offer up credible sources, "indisputable" facts and convincing rhetoric to guide people along the path to understanding not only the world but even their own self-interest. We ought to be concerned about how the government is spending our money, that is, the rational for spending a huge percentage of the federal budget on military and Pentagon expenses rather than upon the kind of social projects and programs that promote a higher standard of living for the majority of the population. This is self-interest, and informed involvement in political discussions by that measure is the exercise of our individual interest, in the same way as figuring out how our monthly income is being spent is in our own interest. But given that such self-interest conflicts with a power elite interest, because government officials like corporate managers would generally prefer to act with impunity (the cloaks of secrecy that surround our own government's actions on a range of fronts is testament to this), it's likely that attempts to become engaged in our own affairs will be met with resistance or scorn.

(xiii)

Paul Steet & Anthony Dimaggio: What "Populist Uprising?": Part 1 -- Facts and Reflections on Race, Class, and the Tea Party "Movement"

What "Populist Uprising?": Part 1 -- Facts and Reflections on Race, Class, and the Tea Party "Movement"
by Paul Street and Anthony DiMaggio
Monthly Review Press

...

Who Are the Tea Partyers?

There is much to appreciate in Chomsky and Rovics' reflections. Reflecting shared subordination to the same "unelected dictatorship of money" that controls the Republicans and much else in U.S. political culture, the corporate-neoliberal Democrats (whose current standard bearer Barack Obama was rightly anointed as "the King of Corporate subsidies" by the liberal political scientist Thomas B. Edsall last year) are deeply complicit in the state-capitalist "shafting" of the American working class. Reflexively blaming the nation's economic problems and related social disparities on the "failed policies of the Republicans," top Democrats refuse to tell the truth about the richly bipartisan nature of the policies and practices -- corporate globalization, "free trade," financial de-regulation, overwork, de-pensioning and other forms of benefits roll back, the attack on public family cash assistance, and a relentless employer assault on unions and more -- through which the economic elite has waged top-down class warfare on American workers in recent decades. The Democratic Party most certainly is, as Rovics writes, "a hopelessly corrupt institution led by people who constantly say one thing and do another."

There is a chilling and dangerous anger and activism gap on what passes for a Left in the U.S. today. There is indeed widespread legitimate popular and populist anger (what the dominant corporate media likes to disparage as backward and dysfunctional "populist rage") across the nation -- anger that needs to be understood, harnessed, and channeled in egalitarian and anti-imperial ways by genuinely progressive and democratic activists. On the right, of course, there is no shortage of high-wattage demagogues (Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sarah Palin, Bill O'Reilly, and the rest of the nation's still powerful right-wing noise machine) ready to appeal with crazy but forthright and angry answers for anxious and oppressed people with, yes, real grievances.

If the United States' "so-called progressives" (yes) can't arise from their significantly Obama-induced lethargy to build substantive anti-elitist and genuinely grassroots alternatives to the current reigning corporate managed fake democracy, then the prospects for desperately needed progressive change in the world's most powerful nation are going to be dim indeed. In a nation where the top percent owns more than a third of the nation's wealth, the bottom 50 percent owns 2.5 percent and the bipartisan power elite distributes ever more wealth and power upward while waging vastly expensive and criminal wars abroad and wrecking livable ecology the world over, the old bumper sticker adage is most certainly correct: "If You're Not Outraged, You're Not Paying Attention."

"The Left" should naturally try to influence and organize everyone it can. Converts from the right and from all classes are welcome (we could certainly use some of the super-rich's surplus capital to help build our currently weak movements). There's always a few (or more) potential allies stuck on the wrong side of the political divide.

The CBS-New York Times Findings: Privileged White Hypocrites

Still, what about the "Tea Party" people? Do they really come from particularly aggrieved and working-class backgrounds? Are we really seeing legitimately angry working-class Americans being steered into the right by clever right manipulators in accord with at least one key aspect of the famous "Tom Frank Kansas thesis"? Is the "Tea Party thing" really rooted in "the people who ought to" -- or even could -- "be organized by the Left"? Are these "Tea Party" people really motivated primarily by economic issues and problems and just slightly by concerns and sentiments of race, gender, and religion? Are their grievances really all that legitimate and potentially progressive? Last but not least, are they really coalesced into anything that deserves to be considered a "movement," much less a "populist uprising" (of any sort)?

Based on recently released national data generated by CBS and the New York Times and our own regionally specific (Midwestern) research and observation of the "Tea Party" people, our answers to each of these questions is a resounding NO. In saying this we wish to add that Chomsky (by far and away the leading thinker among all the authorities quoted above) was speaking informally and hedged his observations with two important qualifications: (i) "they [the tea-party people] are a mixed crowd" and (ii): "I haven't seen a study" of the social composition and world view(s) of the tea-party people. We note also that Chomsky suggested a far better perspective on the Tea Party crowd and its political implications in his reflections on the right-wing Republican Scott Brown"s victory over the establishment Democrat Marcia Coakley in the open seat election for the critical U.S. Senate post formerly held by Teddy Kennedy in "liberal" Massachusetts. As Chomsky observed, citing the findings of Boston Globe reporter Brian Mooney, Brown won mainly in the more affluent Massachusetts suburbs where voter turnout was quite high. In the more strongly Democratic urban areas, the turnout was much lower, reflecting Obama and the corporate Democrats success in disillusioning and therefore demobilizing the party's historical working-class and minority constituents, thereby dooming the candidacy of Democrat Martha Coakley.

That insight goes much closer to what we consider the real heart of the problem. The angry Tea Party right is actually quite affluent, suburban, white, male, older, and religious. Despite vociferous denials from its members, racism remains endemic within the group. It is not particularly working-class and does not generally represent people who have been seduced over from the Democrats' corporatism. "The Left's" slumber and quiescence is not so much causing an angry working-class exodus to FOX News, the Republican Party, and the Tea Party "movement" as it is simply depressing, discouraging, demobilizing, standing down, and wasting popular and working-class energy and thereby leaving the authoritarian sentiments of the in fact ugly and plutocratic, arch-nationalist and racist and patriarchal right dangerously unchallenged.

Who are the Tea Party people? Angry though they may be, these right-wing "populists" hardly come from disadvantaged and working-class sections of the U.S. populace. According to a recent (April 5-April 12, 2010) CBS and New York Times poll of 1,580 persons among the 18 percent of Americans who call themselves Tea Party supporters, they are "wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, and are no more or less afraid of falling into a lower socioeconomic class." The survey finds that 75 percent of them have college educations; 76 percent enjoy household incomes above $50,000 (including a fifth of them making more than $100,000); 78 percent describe their financial situations as "good" or "fairly good;" 65 percent of them identify as either middle or middle upper class; 59 percent are men; 75 percent are 45 or older; and 89 percent are white. Consistent with these relatively privileged demographics, 54 percent are open supporters of the Republican Party; 66 percent of them (compared to just 28 percent of Americans) either usually or always vote Republican; and 72 percent describe themselves as "conservative." Fully 57 percent of them (compared to just 27 percent of the U.S. populace as a whole) report having a "favorable" view of George W. Bush); 66 percent (compared to just 30 of the populace) hold a favorable view of Sarah Palin; and just 6 percent of them (compared to 39 percent of Americans) think that the Bush administration is the primary cause of the current federal budget deficit.

To Read the Entire Essay

Seed Salon: Robert Trivers and Noam Chomsky

Seed Salon discussion between Robert Trivers and Noam Chomsky on deception. Very interesting examples and theories.

Noam Chomsky: Globalization Marches On -- Growing popular outrage has not challenged corporate power.

Globalization Marches On: Growing popular outrage has not challenged corporate power.
by Noam Chomsky
Commond Dreams

...

Bringing Obama to Heel

Popular anger finally evoked a rhetorical shift from the administration, which responded with charges about greedy bankers. "I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat-cat bankers on Wall Street," Obama told 60 Minutes in December. This kind of rhetoric was accompanied with some policy suggestions that the financial industry doesn't like (e.g., the Volcker Rule, which would bar banks receiving government support from engaging in speculative activity unrelated to basic bank activities) and proposals to set up an independent regulatory agency to protect consumers.

Since Obama was supposed to be their man in Washington, the principal architects of government policy wasted little time delivering their instructions: Unless Obama fell back into line, they would shift funds to the political opposition. "If the president doesn't become a little more balanced and centrist in his approach, then he will likely lose" the support of Wall Street, Kelly S. King, a board member of the lobbying group Financial Services Roundtable, told the New York Times in early February. Securities and investment businesses gave the Democratic Party a record $89 million during the 2008 campaign.

Three days later, Obama informed the press that bankers are fine "guys," singling out the chairmen of the two biggest players, JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs: "I, like most of the American people, don't begrudge people success or wealth. That's part of the free-market system," the president said. (Or at least "free markets" as interpreted by state capitalist doctrine.)

That turnabout is a revealing snapshot of Smith's maxim in action.

The architects of policy are also at work on a real shift of power: from the global work force to transnational capital.

Economist and China specialist Martin Hart-Landsberg explores the dynamic in a recent Monthly Review article. China has become an assembly plant for a regional production system. Japan, Taiwan and other advanced Asian economies export high-tech parts and components to China, which assembles and exports the finished products.

The Spoils of Power
The growing U.S. trade deficit with China has aroused concern. Less noticed is that the U.S. trade deficit with Japan and the rest of Asia has sharply declined as this new regional production system takes shape. U.S. manufacturers are following the same course, providing parts and components for China to assemble and export, mostly back to the United States. For the financial institutions, retail giants, and the owners and managers of manufacturing industries closely related to this nexus of power, these developments are heaven sent.

And well understood. In 2007, Ralph Gomory, head of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, testified before Congress, "In this new era of globalization, the interests of companies and countries have diverged. In contrast with the past, what is good for America's global corporations is no longer necessarily good for the American people."

Consider IBM. According to Business Week, by the end of 2008, more than 70 percent of IBM's work force of 400,000 was abroad. In 2009 IBM reduced its U.S. employment by another 8 percent.

For the work force, the outcome may be "grievous," in accordance with Smith's maxim, but it is fine for the principal architects of policy. Current research indicates that about one-fourth of U.S. jobs will be "offshorable" within two decades, and for those jobs that remain, security and decent pay will decline because of the increased competition from replaced workers.

This pattern follows 30 years of stagnation or decline for the majority as wealth poured into few pockets, leading to what has probably become the greatest inequality between the haves and the have-nots since the end of American slavery.

While China is becoming the world's assembly plant and export platform, Chinese workers are suffering along with the rest of the global work force. This is an unsurprising outcome of a system designed to concentrate wealth and power and to set working people in competition with one another worldwide.

Globally, workers' share in national income has declined in many countries-dramatically so in China, leading to growing unrest in that highly inegalitarian society.

So we have another significant shift in global power: from the general population to the principal architects of the global system, a process aided by the undermining of functioning democracy in the United States and other of the Earth's most powerful states.

The future depends on how much the great majority is willing to endure, and whether that great majority will collectively offer a constructive response to confront the problems at the core of the state capitalist system of domination and control.

If not, the results might be grim, as history more than amply reveals.

To Read the Entire Essay

Seeing Red Radio: Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, Malcolm X, Billy Bragg, Utah Philips, Saul Williams, Masada, DJ Spooky, Fela Kuti

October’s Release from the Archive
Seeing Red Radio

A show slightly dated by the Bush references, but the new regime that pilots America’s Imperial Juggernaut has barely altered course. It includes sections of a Noam Chomsky talk ..., as well as Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, Malcolm X and music by the likes of Billy Bragg, Utah Philips, Saul Williams, Masada, DJ Spooky, Fela Kuti and others.

Music:
Marching Song of the Covert Battalions – Billy Bragg
Pledge of Resistance – Saul Williams
World Turned Upside Down – Billy Bragg
VIP – Fela Kuti
to name a few…

To Listen to the Episode

Noam Chomsky: Philosophies of Language & Politics

Noam Chomsky: Philosophies of Language & Politics
Interviewed by Larry Bensky
FORA TV

Noam Chomsky has been pushing change in language, politics and culture for decades. The controversial expert on modern language explains why "the smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum."

To Listen/Watch

Noam Chomsky: Propaganda in a Democracy; The Threat of the Public Beast; Welfare State for the Rich; National Interest vs Special Interests

It’s not the case, as the naïve might think, that indoctrination is inconsistent with democracy. … The point is that in a military State or a feudal State or what we would nowadays call a totalitarian State, it doesn’t much matter what people think because you’ve got a bludgeon over their head and you can control what they do. But when the state loses the bludgeon, when you can’t control people by force and when the voice of the people can be heard, you have this problem. It may make people so curious and so arrogant that they don’t have the humility to submit to a civil rule and therefore you have to control what people think. And the standard way to do this is to resort to what in more honest days used to be called propaganda. Manufacture of consent. Creation of necessary illusions. Various ways of either marginalizing the general public or reducing them to apathy in some fashion.

(Speech at American University quoted in) Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media. ed. Mark Achbar. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1994: 43.

In the presidential address to the American Political Science Association in 1934, William Shepard argued that government should be in the hands of "an aristocracy of intellect and power," while the "ignorant, the uninformed and the anti-social elements" must not be permitted to control elections, as he mistakenly believed they had done in the past. One of the founders of modern political science, Harold Lasswell, one of the founders of the field of communications, in fact, wrote in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences in 1933 or 1934 that modern techniques of propaganda, which had been impressively refined by Wilsonian liberals, provided the way to keep the public in line. Lasswell described Wilson as "the great generalissimo on the propaganda front." Wilson's World War I achievements in propaganda impressed others, including Adolph Hitler. You can read about it in Mein Kampf. But crucially they impressed the American business community. That led to a huge expansion of the public relations industry which was dedicated to controlling the public mind, as advocates used to put it in more honest days, just as writing in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences in 1934, Laswell described what he was talking about as propaganda. We don't use that term. We're more sophisticated. As a political scientist, Laswell advocated more sophisticated use of this new technique of control of the general public ... [to] enable the intelligent men of the community, the natural rulers, to overcome the threat of the great beast who may undermine order because of, in Laswell's terms, the ignorance and superstition of the masses. We should not submit to "democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests." The best judges are the elites, who must be ensured the means to impose their will for the common good.

---. "Democracy and Education." Mellon Lectures given at Loyola University, 1994.

So the Reaganite statist reactionaries thought that the public, the beast, shouldn't even have the spectator role. That explains their fascination with clandestine terror operations, which were not secret to anybody except the American public, certainly not to their victims. Clandestine terror operations were designed to leave the domestic population ignorant. They also advocated absolutely unprecedented measures of censorship and and agitprop and other measures to ensure that the powerful and interventionist state that they fostered would serve as a welfare state for the rich and not troubled by the rabble. The huge increase in business propaganda in recent years, the recent assault on the universities by right-wing foundations, and other tendencies of the current period are other manifestations of the same concerns. These concerns [of Reaganite statist reactionaries] were awakened by what liberal elites had called the "crisis of democracy," that developed in the 1960s, when previously marginalized and apathetic sectors of the population, like women and young people and old people and working people and so on, sought to enter the public arena, where they have no right to be, as all right-thinking aristocrats understand.

---. "Democracy and Education." Mellon Lectures given at Loyola University, 1994.

The term "national interest" is commonly used as if it's something good for us, and the people of the country are supposed to understand that. So if a political leader says that "I'm doing this in the national interest," you're supposed to feel good because that's for me. However, if you look closely, it turns out that the national interest is not defined as what's in the interests of small, dominant elites who happen to be able to command the resources that enable them to control the state--basically, corporate-based elites. That's what's called the "national interest." And, correspondingly, the term "special interests" is used in a very interesting related way to refer to the population. The population are called the "special interests" the corporation elite are called the "national interests"; so you're supposed to be in favour of the national interests and against the special interests.

---. Language and Politics. edited by C.P. Otero. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1988: 662.