Noam Chomsky: Neoliberalism Is Destroying Our Democracy
"What
it’s called is “freedom,” but “freedom” means a subordination to the decisions
of concentrated, unaccountable, private power. That’s what it means. The
institutions of governance—or other kinds of association that could allow
people to participate in decision making—those are systematically weakened.
Margaret Thatcher said it rather nicely in her aphorism about "there is no
society, only individuals".. She was
actually, unconsciously no doubt, paraphrasing Marx, who in his
condemnation of the repression in France said, “The repression is turning
society into a sack of potatoes, just individuals, an amorphous mass can’t act
together.” That was a condemnation. For Thatcher, it’s an ideal—and that’s
neoliberalism. We destroy or at least undermine the governing mechanisms by
which people at least in principle can participate to the extent that society’s
democratic. So weaken them, undermine unions, other forms of association, leave
a sack of potatoes and meanwhile transfer decisions to unaccountable private
power all in the rhetoric of freedom."
For 50 years, Noam
Chomsky, has been America’s Socrates, our public pest with questions that
sting. He speaks not to the city square of Athens but a vast global village in
pain and now, it seems, in danger. This interview comes
from Open Source
with Christopher Lydon, a weekly program about arts, ideas and
politics. Listen to rest of the conversation with Chomsky here. The world in
trouble today still beats a path to Noam Chomsky’s door, if only because he’s
been forthright for so long about a whirlwind coming. Not that the world quite
knows what do with Noam Chomsky’s warnings of disaster in the making. Remember
the famous faltering of the patrician TV host William F. Buckley Jr., meeting
Chomsky’s icy anger about the war in Vietnam, in 1969.
It’s a strange
thing about Noam Chomsky: The
New York Times calls him “arguably” the most important public thinker
alive, though the paper seldom quotes him, or argues with him, and giant
pop-media stars on network television almost never do. And yet the man is
universally famous and revered in his 89th year: He’s the scientist who taught
us to think of human language as something embedded in our biology, not a
social acquisition; he’s the humanist who railed against the Vietnam War and
other projections of American power, on moral grounds first, ahead of practical
considerations. He remains a rock star on college campuses, here and abroad,
and he’s become a sort of North Star for the post-Occupy generation that today
refuses to feel the Bern-out.
He remains,
unfortunately, a figure alien in the places where policy gets made. But on his
home ground at MIT, he is a notably accessible old professor who answers his
e-mail and receives visitors like us with a twinkle. Last week, we
visited Chomsky with an open-ended mission in mind: We were looking for a
nonstandard account of our recent history from a man known for telling the
truth. We’d written him that we wanted to hear not what he thinks but how. He’d
written back that hard work and an open mind have a lot to do with it, also, in
his words, a “Socratic-style willingness to ask whether conventional doctrines
are justified.”
Christopher Lydon: All
we want you to do is to explain where in the world we are at a time -
Noam Chomsky: That’s easy.
CL: [Laughs]: When
so many people were on the edge of something, something historic. Is there a
Chomsky summary?
NC: Brief summary?
CL: Yeah.
NC: Well, a brief summary I think is if you
take a look at recent history since the Second World War, something really
remarkable has happened. First, human intelligence created two huge
sledge-hammers capable of terminating our existence - or at least organized
existence - both from the Second World War. One of them is familiar. In fact,
both are by now familiar. The Second World War ended with the use of nuclear
weapons. It was immediately obvious on August 6, 1945, a day that I remember
very well. It was obvious that soon technology would develop to the point where
it would lead to terminal disaster. Scientists certainly understood this... read on:
https://www.thenation.com/article/noam-chomsky-neoliberalism-destroying-democracy/see also
