We should remember there's an analog here. I mean, it's not the same, of course, but the population in the United States is angry, frustrated, full of fear and irrational hatreds. And the folks not far from you on Wall Street are just doing fine. They're the ones who created the current crisis. They're the ones who were called upon to deal with it. They're coming out stronger and richer than ever. But everything's fine, as long as the population is passive. If one-tenth of one percent of the population is gaining a preponderant amount of the wealth that's produced, while for the rest there 30 years of stagnation, just fine, as long as everyone's quiet. That's the scenario that has been unfolding in the Middle East, as well, just as it did in Central America and other domains.
...
Furthermore, Egypt cooperates in the crushing of Gaza. That terrible free election in January 2006 not only frightened the U.S. and Israel -- they didn't like the outcome, so turned instantly to punishing the Palestinians -- but the same in Egypt. The victor in the election was Hamas, which is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. That was very much feared by the Egyptian dictatorship, because if they ever allowed anything like a free election, the Muslim Brotherhood would no doubt make out quite well, maybe not a majority, but it would be a substantial political force. And they don't want that, so therefore they cooperate. Egypt, under Mubarak, cooperates with Israel in crushing [Gaza], built a huge fence on the Egyptian border, with U.S. engineering help, and it sort of monitors the flow of goods in and out of Gaza on the Egyptian side. It essentially completes the siege that the U.S. and Israel have imposed. Well, all of that could erode if there was a democratic movement that gained influence in Egypt, just as it did in Palestine.
Rolling along with the idea, popular in my head, that statism is a religion, here's the good professor (emphasis mine):
These conventions are so widely observed that further citation is unnecessary. A notable feature throughout is the lack of any felt need to justify the flattering doctrine that in the Third World, the U.S. has sought only to thwart the Russians and their totalitarian goals while upholding its lofty principles as best it can in these grim and trying circumstances. The reasoning is that of NSC 68: these are necessary truths, established by conceptual analysis alone. Scholars who profess a tough-minded "realistic" outlook, scorning sentimentality and emotion, are willing to concede that the facts of history hardly illustrate the commitment of the United States to, as Hans Morgenthau puts it, its "transcendent purpose" -- "the establishment of equality in freedom in America," and indeed throughout the world, since "the arena within which the United States must defend and promote its purpose has become world-wide." But the facts are irrelevant, because, as Morgenthau hastens to explain, to adduce them is "to confound the abuse of reality with reality itself." Reality is the unachieved "national purpose" revealed by "the evidence of history as our minds reflect it," while the actual historical record is merely the abuse of reality, an insignificant artifact. The conventional understanding is therefore self-justifying, immune to external critique.
Though the sophistication of traditional theology is lacking, the similarity of themes and style is striking. It reveals the extent to which worship of the state has become a secular religion for which the intellectuals serve as priesthood. The more primitive sectors of Western culture go further, fostering forms of idolatry in which such sacred symbols as the flag become an object of forced veneration, and the state is called upon to punish any insult to them and to compel children to pledge their devotion daily, while God and State are almost indissolubly linked in public ceremony and discourse, as in James Reston's musings on our devotion to the will of the Creator. It is perhaps not surprising that such crude fanaticism rises to such an extreme in the United States, as an antidote for the unique freedom from state coercion that has been achieved by popular struggle.
So I've been trying to cut down on how much attention I pay to sports. Its been gradually dropping over the last few years, and is probably down to "not very much" from a high of "a whole fucking lot." But I still check in at ESPN.com every once in a while, more out of inertia and temporary boredom than actual interest. Today I stopped by and this was the front page:
Breaking news! His Majesty hath spoken! Jesus fucking Christ. Needless to say I closed the page and resolved not to go back for a long time.
Glenn Greenwald is under contract to write a book (he appears in the comments) that will be "a comprehensive examination of Chomsky’s life as a public intellectual as a means of understanding how America’s dominant media controls and narrows political debates." I look forward to that.
The effectiveness of the state-corporate propaganda system is illustrated by the fate of May Day, a workers' holiday throughout the world that originated in response to the judicial murder of several anarchists after the Haymarket affair of May 1886, in a campaign of international solidarity with U.S. workers struggling for an eight-hour day. In the United States, all has been forgotten. May Day has become "Law Day," a jingoist celebration of our "200-year-old partnership between law and liberty" as Ronald Reagan declared while designating May 1 as Law Day 1984, adding that without law there can be only "chaos and disorder." The day before, he had announced that the United States would disregard the proceedings of the International Court of Justice that later condemned the U.S. government for its "unlawful use of force" and violation of treaties in its attack against Nicaragua. "Law Day" also served as the occasion for Reagan's declaration of May 1, 1985, announcing an embargo against Nicaragua "in response to the emergency situation created by the Nicaraguan Government's aggressive activities in Central America," actually declaring a "national emergency," since renewed annually, because "the policies and actions of the Government of Nicaragua constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States" -- all with the approbation of Congress, the media, and the intellectual community generally; or, in some circles, embarrassed silence. "
I think this is the first time I have read the changes you want to see enacted. Some of your points I agree with and some I do not. But I have wondered from time to time what you are actually looking for in a government/society so I was very pleased to read your post. Just wanted to say that.
It was a well-intentioned message, and I appreciated the thought, but I thought he was wrong. I thought I'd been making it pretty clear what I'd like to see.
For example, in the same month as that dreams post I published this lament of the destruction of the Bush years, and I don't think my disgust with basically everything that man did has been any secret. Was it not clear that I'd like to live in a country that doesn't invade other nations based on outrageous lies, destroy millions of lives, torture its captives, and whatever else you want to include as part of the rotten corpse of the Bush legacy?
Also in the same month as the first post, just a few days before it in fact, I wrote that the departing Bush gang were all criminals but will be protected by the rest of the US political class, including Obama. In case it wasn't obvious, if I'm going to live under the rule of a government, I'd like that government to hold its leaders to higher standards of conduct than anyone, rather than the current arrangement of a two-tiered justice system where the full force of the law is brought down on common people while political elites break the law with impunity. I'd like my government to prosecute war criminals for war crimes and to honor the treaties they've signed that obligate them to investigate and prosecute such crimes. Was that not clear before?
And in case it wasn't clear from this post, also in the same month as the others, I'd like my government to display the opposite priorities from the ones criticized. I'd like government to place higher priority on meaningful help for needy people than on endless expansion of the war machine or corporate welfare. Did I not get that message across?
Again, I thought my friend's message was a nice-hearted gesture, especially from someone who has often disagreed with me. But I just find the idea that I've never said want I wanted bizarre.
Maybe I'm sensitive to this issue because I've seen the same idea applied to critics far more eloquent than I am, and I suspect it is yet another way that people have found to dismiss challenges to their perspectives without actually engaging them. "Oh sure, Chomsky is a smart guy, but he's so negative. He never offers constructive solutions, he just criticizes everyone." They can just tune out criticism based on the nonsensical idea that it isn't productive. It seems to me that criticizing terrible actions is highly constructive, and that the solution is obvious: stop doing the terrible stuff. But Chomsky's oh-so-wearisome negativity becomes the first talking point brought up in response to anything he says, drowning out his important message with this distracting bullshit. And by the way, while in some cases people do that as a conscious strategy, I'm sure that many people do it automatically and without realizing it, like a built-in ideological defense mechanism. (It is kind of a version of "poor form." I don't like that guy, so I won't listen to him.)
But instead of speculating about that kind of cognitive dissonance management strategy applying to my friend, I'll gladly adopt a more generous interpretation of his message: that he read my list of dreams as specific policy positions I'd like to see, and that seemed fundamentally different (and more interesting) to him than the criticism of past government actions that he's mostly seen me write. And I guess that's fair enough, at least for the first sentence of his message.
But as for the rest of what he wrote, his confusion about what I'm "looking for in a government/society" confuses me. Maybe I don't really have a good sense of how closely what I've written here keeps up with what is going on in my head. But as I've already mentioned, several of the items on that list had been mentioned in weeks before it, and most of the others in the months before (I assume, but I don't feel like looking it up right now). And all of them seem very straightforward extensions of the general philosophies I routinely express. So maybe he just doesn't pay close attention to my writing, and/or maybe he just didn't pick his words very carefully.
I'll emphasize that I don't mean to give any impression that I'm personally bent out of shape about his comment. I'm not. I read a post at another blog recently about a private email exchange that made me think of several of my own that I've considered writing about, including this one. I chose to go ahead with this one because of its similarity to the broader pattern I've observed where critics of power are dismissed for not providing "constructive solutions" or whatever, and I think that pattern is worthy of comment. So I used this personal example as a launching point for the discussion.
I've been meaning to go back and address a point raised by Brice Lord in the comments to this post. I said that the government steals your money, calling it "taxation," to pay for its crimes, to which he replies:
First, who says it's my money anyway? Most of the money I make wouldn't be available to be made were it not for the facilitation of the government by redistribution of resources.
Perhaps this is a defensible reply to a narrow understanding of the specific comment that preceded his remark, but it doesn't meaningfully address the challenge I posed, though it may seem that way if you've deeply embraced the state structure, as most people have. To note that redistribution of resources is only necessary because of the state's essential role in maintaining massive inequality of resource distribution is to note that Brice Lord's answer begs the question: the state controls everyone's lives so of course the state should control our money!
To (hopefully) make this a little easier...
An easy way to dismiss Brice Lord's complaint is to imagine a farmer who earns a living by selling food that he grows to his neighbors, making little or no use of government infrastructure. He just works the land that his family has worked for generations, and sells his harvests to people nearby. He is taxed by the government, and if he refuses to pay, men with guns will throw him in a cage and/or take his property. I think this scenario goes most of the way to addressing Brice Lord's point.
As for the rest of us, how many people actually even have the option of making a living in a way that can't be seen as directly or indirectly reliant on government? Whether your career aspirations are about pure altruism, pure self-advancement, or anything in between, it is almost impossible to find a path that isn't state-managed. (If the privileged people that come from where Brice Lord and I come from have that option, they don't seem to exercise it very often. Our former classmates and mutual friends are lawyers, doctors, academics, federal law enforcement officers, Wall Street financiers, teachers, government policy advisors.) So pretty much the only way to make money, by which I mean the only way to gain access to general resources by the means of our personal specialized productivity, is by aligning yourself with the state. And it is this all-encompassing strangehold that the state has on our lives that Brice Lord offers as a defense of the state's all-encompassing stranglehold on the gains from our personal productivity. Obviously I find his argument unpersuasive.
As for Brice Lord's arguments in his other comments, I think he's committed several other errors. First he seems to think that because two-thirds of the annual federal budget (I'll just take his figure for granted here) goes to what are called "social programs," that means most of your tax money supports the "social safety net." He then acknowledges that such programs might be poorly managed, which immediately undermines his argument because poor management means that a significant percentage of that goes to waste. While some are content to politely call this inefficiency, there are thriving industries getting rich off this waste and investing a portion of their proceeds in lobbying to make sure the "poor management" continues. This is corporate welfare, redistributing resources in the opposite direction from what Brice Lord thinks the government is doing.
But you can even put that aside, because even if 100% of this money was devoted to the stated goals of these "social programs," many of them actually make things worse, not better. In order to adequately support this argument, I think we'd have to go through these programs on a case-by-case basis and examine their net effects, which is beyond the scope of this post. (As for the debate at hand, if Brice Lord can simply assert that these programs do good, I can refute him by simply asserting they don't, so at worst I've forced a draw on this specific point.)
Second, he seems to think that a meaningful version of democracy obtains in the US. It doesn't, and never has.
Third, he has only acknowledged negative actions funded by our tax dollars that take place in foreign countries. This might be because he thinks (perhaps fairly) that I've mostly focussed on those (though I did note a domestic issue in the original post). Following from the first point, I'd argue that the vast majority of all government action has negative consequences. An example that I must have mentioned before and that should be uncontroversial is the "war on drugs," which has devastating domestic effects and costs untold billions of tax dollars. Same with our agriculture policies and subsidies. Same with most federal "education" programs.
Fourth, to put all of it together, he seems to be saying that if a government elected by a plurality of a population engages in aggressive foreign wars resulting in millions of ruined lives, that it is defensible for everyone living in the area controlled by that government to be coerced into supporting the atrocities, as long as that government confiscates additional and more numerous funds that are used for good causes. Aside from the already mentioned cheapening-to-the-point-of-meaninglessness of "democracy," this makes a mockery of any notion of government by consent of the governed.
And that the defense of this is that there is no "practical" alternative is shockingly cynical, which is ironic in that Brice Lord's view here is quite common, and my political thoughts are often dismissed as too cynical. But I've never argued that the only way that 300 million people in a given geographic region could possibly live together in relative safety and do a fairly decent job of taking care of each other is by surrendering control of their lives to an institution that sociopathically will do whatever it can get away with to gain the slightest advantage for those who control it, up to and including the mass slaughter of millions of human beings. I might be insane or naive, but I do still believe that there are practical alternatives to such an arrangement.
update: slight edit to the wording of the 2nd to last paragraph.
I don't know if I have special access to Science articles because I'm on campus, so I'll just copy the whole thing below. The basic story is that some academics have developed mathematical techniques to analyze the shape of Congressional districts and provide some measure of how goofy the shapes are, which you could infer is a measure of how gerrymandered they are.
The last paragraph amused me. The discussion is entirely about whether these sophisticated mathematical tools will lead to people feeling like the process is fair. Note that the discussion is not about whether these tools will lead to a process that is fair. Apparently the latter issue cannot be addressed because of "contradictions out the wazoo" since "one person's equality is another person's gerrymander." Clearly it is beyond the capacity of academia's preeminent publications to attempt to referee such muddled debates! I'm sure they couldn't possibly find any patterns as to which kinds of people think shapes like Maryland's 3rd district represent equality, or do any kind of analysis as to who benefits from those kinds of shapes. Far too many contradictions indeed. More than can be contained in a single wazoo.
Instead what is important is that the outcome be "respected." Smoke and mirrors. As Chomsky has said many times, the role of intellectuals is to support power systems and justify their atrocities. At least they sometimes acknowledge it.
JOINT MATHEMATICS MEETINGS, 5-8 JANUARY 2009, WASHINGTON, D.C. With the 2010 census looming, U.S. politicians and their legal teams are gearing up for another round of wrangling over the spoils of redistricting: the process of deciding which voters get to reelect which members of the House of Representatives and other legislative bodies. Parties in power like to carve up voters to their own advantage, a practice known as gerrymandering. Some reformers, however, hope to limit the mischief--and are turning to mathematics for tools to do so. In a marathon 6-hour session at the Joint Meetings, speakers discussed ideas ranging from pie-in-the-sky theoretical to crust-on-the-ground practical.
The term "gerrymandering" dates back to 1812, when Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry signed into law a tortuous districting map that favored his Democratic- Republican Party over the rival Federalists. But given the fine-grain demographic detail of modern political databases, "the problem is much worse than it used to be," says Richard Pildes, an expert on election law at the New York University School of Law in New York City. Gerrymandering "gives people the sense that they're not really in control of their democracy," Pildes says. "It's part of what contributes to an alienation and cynicism about democracy."
The mathematics of redistricting starts with arithmetic and geometry. Ideally, every district in a state would have an equal population and would be, in some sense, both "contiguous" and "compact." Socioeconomic, political, and racial demographics also come into play. "You can have equipopulous districts and still have whoppingly biased gerrymanders," notes Sam Hirsch, a lawyer at Jenner & Block in Washington, D.C., who specializes in election law and voting rights.
To a mathematician, contiguous means connected--i.e., you can travel from any point in it to any other without leaving the region. Compactness is trickier. Various definitions have been proposed, including one presented at the session by Alan Miller, a graduate student in social science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California.
Miller's method, developed with Caltech economist Christopher Chambers, quantifies the "bizarreness" of geometric shapes. (The word "bizarre" traces to a 1993 ruling in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down several oddly shaped congressional districts. Politicians' attempts to handpick their constituents invariably create convolutions in district lines.) In essence, bizarreness is the probability that the most direct path between two randomly chosen voters within a district crosses district lines. The higher the probability, the more bizarre the district is. (The path is required to stay within the state, to avoid penalizing districts that sit on ragged state boundaries.)
Using block data from the 2000 census, Miller and Chambers have computed bizarreness for the congressional districts of Connecticut, Maryland, and New Hampshire. Most compact was Connecticut's 4th District, with bizarreness 0.023; most oddly shaped: Maryland's 3rd district, at 0.860 (see figure).
Bizarreness could be used as a threshold criterion in producing redistricting maps or comparing alternatives, Miller says. "You can use it to reject districts that are badly shaped."
In his own proposal, Hirsch took the idea of thresholds and added a dose of high-octane competition. Rival factions--or anyone else interested in entering the fray--would be able to counter one another's maps, as long as each new submission improved on at least one of three criteria and matched the other two. The goals of the three criteria are to minimize the number of counties cut up by district lines, equalize as much as possible the number of districts leaning toward each of the two major parties, and maximize the number of "competitive" districts, in which neither major-party candidate in a recent statewide contest would have won by more than 7% of the vote.
Hirsch's proposal "is a great idea," says Charles Hampton, a mathematician at the College of Wooster in Ohio, who has been involved in redistricting since the early 1980s. (He drew maps in 1991 for the governor of California's Independent Redistricting Panel.) "We quibble on some of the details," Hampton says, but "I think [it] has some real prospect of producing a much better situation."
No one expects mathematics to solve the problem to everyone's satisfaction. "It's ultimately a political problem," Hirsch says. Kimball Brace, head of Election Data Services in Manassas, Virginia, and a member of the 2010 Census Advisory Committee, agrees. "Redistricting is contradictions out the wazoo," Brace says. "One person's equality is another person's gerrymander." Nonetheless, a growing group of practitioners believe mathematics can play a key role. Says Pildes, "Math can give you tools for creating processes that are likely to lead people to feel that the process is fair and that the outcome is therefore something to be respected."
I mentioned a few weeks ago that Noam Chomsky's wife died in December and that I hoped he'd be ok and be able to get back to work. I noticed last night that indeed he has been working. As always, it is worth reading and listening to what he has to say, so check out his latest.
Why shouldn't I support Obama? He's way better than McCain or Hillary!
Well I think it is more complicated than just comparing the few viable candidates. The first thing you need to do is let go of your idea that the United States of America is a democracy. It isn't. Look, Dr. Chomsky says so:
He's really fucking smart, so you ought to really give this notion some consideration. America isn't a democracy.
Yeah, but, like, we have elections. We get to vote, right? That makes it a democracy!
Not really. All elections mean is that the public has a choice between various candidates. It doesn't mean that those candidates represent the interests of the people, or that the people have any say in the decisions that are important to them. All elections mean is that people can choose between candidates. The real power is in who chooses the candidates.
Uh, so... who chooses the candidates?
Well, first look at a what all the candidates have in common. You might notice that they're all politicians. They all have lots of money behind them. They're all Democrats or Republicans.
Yeah but wait, if they're all the same, how come there are Democrats and Republicans?
They aren't all exactly the same. There are some minor differences between them, perhaps even some major ones. But even major differences are dwarfed by their profound similarities. And the reason they have so many similarities is because the big money that backs them generally comes from people with very similar interests.
So now to answer the question, there are Democrats and Republicans for a few reasons, but two main reasons stand out. First, while the people who make the decisions have vast areas of common interests, they do have some differences. And so factions form that compete with each other over those minor areas of disagreement.
But far more importantly to you and me, there are Democrats and Republicans because it creates the illusion of choice for the public. The interests of the people in power, the people who control both the Democrat and the Republican parties, are very different than the interests of the public. So it is important that they make it seem as if the public has meaningful choices. Parties are kind of like marketing gimmicks. They create appealing slogans that generates enthusiasm, and use various methods of deception to get the public to overlook the fact that their actions and their rhetoric don't match. The vast majority of their actions favor the interests of those elite few, at the expense of the general public and the rest of the world.
Ok, well that all makes sense, and I kind of agree. But still, Obama is way better than McCain.
He certainly wants you to think that. It is possible that it is true, though I think it is much harder to predict than most people seem to think. Like Chomsky says, the campaigns are designed to highlight character qualities, rather than positions on meaningful issues. It seems to me that Obama has been highly evasive on issues, and quite willing to outright lie.
Regardless, putting your efforts, your time, your money, your hope, into Obama is putting your efforts, your time, your money, your hope into the Democratic party. And that Democratic party is a crucial part of that whole corrupt and disorienting system that gives the illusion of choice without actually providing one. Its primary function is to attract the votes of progressive/liberal-minded people. It does this by saying things that progressives like to hear, and very rarely by passing measures that progressives like (so long as they don't conflict with the interests of the elites), but then primarily using their electoral success to serve the interests of the elites and maintain their own personal and party power.
Yeah, I kind of felt that way after the last election...
Exactly! In 2006 you supported Democrats because you wanted them to end the Iraq war. The war escalated. You wanted Democrats to stop the US from torturing people and holding them without charges. They not only stopped it, they legalized it. You wanted them to impeach Bush and Cheney for their obvious crimes, but they said impeachment was off the table.
So just because Democrats have always claimed to offer a better alternative to Republicans, just because they've said they stand for the things that are important to me, and just because they've never actually done a single thing to back up those claims, and just because there's an extremely painful recent example for me to dwell on... wait but Obama is changing everything. He's different!
Argh! Nobody gets to the position he's in without being completely a creature of the system. Big business is pouring money into his campaign; he's selling out his friends because they say true things that are politically inconvenient; he wants to increase the size of the military; he refuses to acknowledge the turmoil wrought by Israeli action in the Middle East; the list goes on forever. He's not different.
But he's better than McCain!!
Again, he very much wants you to think that, but I'm not sure I see how. You could certainly look at one very narrow issue and conclude that Obama would handle things better in than McCain in that domain. A popular example of that is military belligerence. It might well be the case that Obama is less likely to bomb Iran, for example, although Obama seems quite unwilling to advocate non-aggression. Even if Obama is less likely to launch another war of aggression, he could be more likely to inflict massive harm on people through economic sanctions, as Bill Clinton did in Iraq. Or he might be more inclined to use his beefed up military for "humanitarian" interventions, which never seem to have humanitarian outcomes. Or Obama might have the acquiescence of a Democratic Congress that allows him to pass various measures that cause long-term harm, whereas a McCain presiding with a Democratic Congress wouldn't allow much of anything to pass, preventing harmful measures from proceeding. Or....
The point of that isn't to argue that Obama will be worse or as bad as McCain, but to illustrate the difficulty in figuring it out. Which is once again why I say supporting Democrats is a huge fucking waste of any good intentions you have, because you're supporting the system that allows a decision that is seemingly so important to be contested by people who offer you no meaningful commentary on the important issues.
So you're just saying I shouldn't support anyone? I shouldn't vote? Well then what should I do? You aren't offering any alternatives.
Why does pointing out the massive flaws of the system have to be accompanied by a specific plan of alternative action? Whatever causes you support, whatever ideals you hold that you think Obama might be slightly more likely to represent than the other idiot, you'd be better served pursuing them in other ways. Presidential elections don't change that shit. They're a huge brick wall between you and your vision, and you're just slamming your head into that wall by supporting candidates. If I come along and point out that slamming your head against the wall isn't going to knock it down, isn't that pretty fucking useful information right there? But I guess some people have hit their head so many times that they can't even recognize the futility.
I'm still going to vote for Obama.
I know you are. That's the fucking diabolical beauty of the system.
Perhaps the most important factor in my decision not to vote is that democracy is a sham in the United States. Business interests, not popular opinion, control the machinery of government, regardless of which button we push every four years (I'll leave a discussion of how votes literally don't even count for another entry). Elections are an elaborate charade providing the illusion of choice, but issues of public concern are carefully avoided. The policies enacted by our federal government are widely opposed by the public, and yet incumbents rarely lose congressional elections. As a result of the way campaigns are conducted, with the mind-melting techniques of the public relations industry, public awareness of the positions of candidates on issues is abysmally low, while voters increasingly cite "character" or "values" as the reason for their selections. (Here's what I think about the character and values of politicians.)
To quote Noam Chomsky's discussion of public opinion and public policy in his 2006 book Failed States:
A large majority of the public believe that the United States should accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the World Court, sign the Kyoto protocols, allow the United Nations to take the lead in international crisis, and rely on diplomatic and economic measures more than military ones in the "war on terror." Similar majorities believe the United States should resort to force only if there is "strong evidence that the country is in imminent danger of being attacked," thus rejecting the bipartisan consensus on "preemptive war" and adopting the rather conventional interpretation of the UN Charter reiterated by the UN's High-level Panel of December 2004 and the UN World Summit a year later. A small majority of the population even favors giving up Security Council vetoes, so that the United States would follow the UN's lead even if it is not the preference of the US state managers. On domestic issues, overwhelming majorities favor expansion of government programs: primarily health care (80 percent), but also funding for education and Social Security. Similar results on domestic issues have long been found in these studies conducted by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations (CCFR). As noted, other mainstream polls report that large majorities support guaranteed health care, even if it would raise taxes. Not only does the US government stand apart from the rest of the world on many crucial issues, but even from its own population.
I refuse to support this system and add to the illusion of its legitimacy. I won't vote.
Noam Chomsky had this dialog in a 1976 interview with the BBC's Peter Jay. (You can listen to the entire interview on YouTube. The question begins around 7:38 of the clip below, which is part 5 of the 5 part series.)
QUESTION: How far does the success of libertarian socialism or anarchism really depend on a fundamental change in the nature of man, both in his motivation, his altruism, and also in his knowledge and sophistication?
CHOMSKY: I think it not only depends on it but in fact the whole purpose of libertarian socialism is that it will contribute to it. It will contribute to a spiritual transformation -- precisely that kind of great transformation in the way humans conceive of themselves and their ability to act, to decide, to create, to produce, to enquire -- precisely that spiritual transformation that social thinkers from the left-Marxist traditions, from Luxembourg, say, through anarcho-syndicalists, have always emphasized. So, on the one hand, it requires that spiritual transformation. On the other hand, its purpose is to create institutions which will contribute to that transformation in the nature of work, the nature of creative activity, simply in social bonds among people, and through this interaction of creating institutions which permit new aspects of human nature to flourish. And then the building of still more libertarian institutions to which these liberated human beings can contribute. This is the evolution of socialism as I understand it.
Jay asks about three characteristic of humanity: knowledge, sophistication, and "the nature of man." His interest in the latter is specific to the nature of man's motivation and altruism. The question is whether Chomsky's preferred social structure, anarcho-syndicalism, would require changes in those three characteristics to be successful.
I agree with Chomsky that a change in man's knowledge and sophistication would both be needed for and brought about by the success of such social system, but I disagree with his inclusion of human nature in this list. Now I can't object too strongly to his full response, because his elaboration is entirely about the social environment, and I certainly agree that humans will behave differently as social structures change. He glossed over the human nature part and talked about a "spiritual transformation" which would be a social/cultural characteristic.
I'd like to comment a bit more on my understanding of human nature, because I think it is a useful elaboration on Chomsky's point.
What motivates our behaviors is somewhat programmed by our genes, and somewhat influenced by our environment. Roughly speaking, our genes program us to seek out certain kinds of resources and avoid certain kinds of dangers, and our social environment provides information about those resources and dangers. The way we pursue and evade is also influenced by biology and environment. That is human nature: somewhat hard-wired and somewhat plastic.
Human nature won't and can't change over the course of a few decades or centuries; biology doesn't work that way. But social conditions can change that quickly, and the behavior of humans within the new systems can be different. Those humans will have the same underlying (not necessarily conscious - see next paragraph) motivations and the same nature, but might for example demonstrate more altruism or sophistication, both of which are just behavioral strategies for pursuing resources and avoiding dangers. Victorian England, for example, was a culture that rewarded refinement and sophistication, rewards that could lead to access to various resources. Football locker rooms reward a rather different set of behaviors, but the same human nature and the same motivation to pursue the resources would underlie the different behaviors.
As noted above, motivations don't have to be conscious, which I think is the key for understanding altruism. You need not stop and think "saving this drowning stranger could earn me rewards" in order to act altruistically; an immediate and deep feeling that it is right thing to do is enough to encourage you to act. That feeling is shaped by genes and by environment. Genes likely provide for some amount of plasticity, meaning that as you collect information about your environment and what kinds of behaviors are rewarded, your feeling about what kinds of behaviors are "right" could be variable.
If Chomsky is right that anarcho-syndicalism would provide a preferable life for the vast majority of people, why don't we already have it? Well, that's part of the reason that more knowledge and sophistication would be required for the success of that structure. The vast majority of people lack the knowledge of the flaws in the current social structure, partially because the powerful act to prevent this in selfish service of their own interests. People have been convinced that working within the existing system is in their best interests, and without knowledge to the contrary, change is unlikely. Presumably the same forces that have led to the current social structure would still be at work in the proposed structure (meaning the boundless greed of the powerful), and so continual refreshing of knowledge would indeed be necessary in order for anarcho-syndicalism to succeed. The knowledge to recognize the self-interest of behaving in a more altruistic fashion might be a specific kind of knowledge required to foster the spirit of altruism (which by the way is the sense in which Chomsky referred to a "spiritual transformation," as opposed to a religious sense of the term).
But that doesn't represent a change in human nature, just a change in social conditions that allow non-altruistic behaviors to thrive. Knowledge is a resource, environmental information on which people can base decisions. Sophistication is a behavioral strategy in regards to the application of knowledge, altruism a behavioral strategy in response to certain kinds of knowledge, or in response to a less conscious evaluation of the social environment. A system of anarcho-syndicalism would rely on a certain amount of knowledge, sophistication, and altruism, and also serve to encourage more of each. Human nature would not need to change for such a system to be successful; we're already well equipped with the right kind of motivation to respond with altruism and sophistication to an environment that rewards those behaviors.
I think what Chomsky discussed wasn't really human "nature," but how human nature would actually manifest itself under certain conditions. Many manifestations are compatible with human nature, at least in the short run, but the question is which manifestation is preferable and why. Chomsky prefers anarcho-syndicalism because he believes it will "provide the framework for intellectual development, the growth of moral consciousness, cultural achievement, and participation in a free community." I tend to agree with that assessment, as well the idea he has expressed elsewhere that the survival of humanity may well depend on this kind of change.
I've repeatedly heard from my family that part of what makes Hillary Clinton so terrifying is that she's a socialist.
A SOCIALIST!!
Now I agree that Hillary Clinton is terrifying, though really no more so than any of the other sociopaths contending for the most powerful job in the history of humanity, but I'd never identify a desire for wealth and production to be distributed more in line with popular interests as her most glaring flaw. In fact I have a hard time attributing that characteristic to her at all. I can't imagine that an objective assessment of her positions and voting history, compared to that of any of the other presidential contenders, or compared to just the Democratic field, or hell even just to Obama, would find her to be the most socialist. And I can't imagine any meaningful reason to label her candidacy as a socialist one, overall. She's conservative on economic issues, hawkish on foreign policy, and authoritarian on domestic policy, though slightly less so than the ultra-lunatic incumbents. In the parlance of our time...
SOCIALIST!!
So, evil she-devil aside, what is so overwhelmingly wrong with socialism anyway? They never have a good answer to that question though that doesn't slow them down. They end up muttering something about how all the people from socialist countries are trying to move here for our medicine. (Huh?) Or how socialism basically just makes the whole government a huge corporation that inevitably collapses. (Isn't that what is happening here?) Their heads are full of nonsensical cartoons of history and political theory, but they know that sure as the sweet baby Jesus was born of a virgin, socialism is really fucking bad.
How did this instantaneous and intense negative association come to be? Noam Chomsky explains:
One notable doctrine of Soviet propaganda is that the elimination by Lenin and Trotsky of any vestige of control over production by producers and of popular involvement in determining social policy constitutes a triumph of socialism. The purpose of this exercise in Newspeak is to exploit the moral appeal of the ideals that were being successfully demolished. Western propaganda leaped to the same opportunity, identifying the dismantling of socialist forms as the establishment of socialism, so as to undermine left-libertarian ideals by associating them with the practices of the grim Red bureaucracy. To this day, both systems of propaganda adopt the terminology, for their different purposes. When both major world systems of propaganda are in accord, it is unusually difficult for the individual to escape their tentacles. The blow to freedom and democracy throughout the world has been immense.
Just consider the consequences if the privileged and powerful were willing to entertain for a moment the principle of universality.
So begins what I think is the first Noam Chomsky passage I ever highlighted in one of his books, the first of many. Elsewhere he's called the principle of universality a "moral truism that should not provoke controversy," defining it as "We should apply to ourselves the same standards we apply to others - in fact, more stringent ones." In Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy, he continues [emphasis in original]:
If the United States has the right of "anticipatory self-defense" against terror, or against those it thinks might attack first, then, a fortiori, Cuba, Nicaragua, and a host of others have long been entitled to carry out terrorist acts within the United States because of its involvement in very serious attacks against them, often uncontroversial. Surely Iran would also be entitled to do so in the face of serious threats that are openly advertised. Such conclusions are, of course, utterly outrageous, and advocated by no one.
He goes on to highlight two other historical instances where by "US and UK standards," attacks commonly regarded as atrocities should be seen as "legitimate anticipatory self defense." The Taliban and Osama bin Laden had reason to believe the US was planning military action against them, making the 9/11/2001 attacks " a pre-emptive strike in response to what he saw as US threats."
An even stronger case is the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines in World War 2, preceded by well publicized US plans to (as expressed by an air force general) "burn out the industrial heart of the Empire with fire-bomb attacks on the teeming bamboo ant heaps of Honshu and Kyushu," and slaughter civilians.
All of this provides far more powerful justification for anticipatory self-defense than anything conjured up by Bush, Blair, and their associates. There is no need to spell out what would plainly be implied, if elementary moral principles could be entertained.
, he continues [emphasis in original]: