zmag.org
Bill Moyers
Good evening, I'm Bill Moyers. What's more dangerous, the big stick or the big lie? Governments have used both against their own people. Tonight I'll be talking with a man who has been thinking about how we can see the developing lie. He says that propaganda is to democracy what violence is to a dictatorship. But he hasn't lost faith in the power of common people to speak up for the truth.
You have said that we live entangled in webs of endless deceit, that we live in a highly indoctrinated society where elementary truths are easily buried. Elementary truths such as...?
Chomsky
Such as the fact that we invaded South Vietnam. Or the fact that we're standing in the way of significant -- and have for years -- of significant moves towards arms negotiations -- or the fact that the military system is to a substantial extent -- not totally -- but to a substantial extent, a mechanism by which the general population is compelled to provide a subsidy to high-technology industry. Since they're not going to do it if you ask them to, you have to deceive them into doing it.
There are many truths like that, and we don't face them.
Bill Moyers
Do you believe in common sense? I mean you're a --
Chomsky
Absolutely, I believe in Cartesian common sense. I think people have the capacities to see through the deceit in which they are ensnared, but they've got to make the effort.
Bill Moyers
Seems a little incongruous to hear a man from the ivory tower of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a scholar, a distinguished linguistics scholar, talk about common people with such appreciation.
Chomsky
I think that scholarship, at least the field that I work in, has the opposite consequences. My own studies in language and human cognition demonstrate to me at least what remarkable creativity ordinary people have. The very fact that people talk to one another is a reflection -- just in a normal way, I don't mean anything particularly fancy -- reflects deep-seated features of human creativity which in fact separate human beings from any other biological system we know. |
