The Common Good

[Lodestar]

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 - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate. -- Noam Chomsky

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/Common_Good_Chomsky.html

p17

The big transnationals want to reduce freedom by undermining the democratic functioning of the states in which they're based, while at the same time ensuring the government will be powerful enough to protect and support them.


p19
... it's ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They're totalitarian institutions - you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There's about as much freedom as under Stalinism.


p29
The goal is a society in which the basic social unit is you and your television set. If the kid next door is hungry, it's not your problem. If the retired couple next door invested their assets badly and are now starving, that's not your problem either.


p29
Boards of directors are allowed to work together, so are banks and investors and corporations in alliances with one another and with powerful states. That's just fine. It's just the poor who aren't supposed to cooperate.


p34
Business wants the popular aspects of government, the ones that actually serve the population, beaten down, but it also wants a very powerful state, one that works for it and is removed from public control.


p35
There's a very committed effort to convert the US into something resembling a Third World society, where a few people have enormous wealth and a lot of others have no security ...


p35
Now that ... workers are superfluous, what do you do with them? First of all, you have to make sure they don't notice that society is unfair and try to change that, and the best way to distract them is to get them to hate and fear one another.


p37
Both prisons and inner-city schools target a kind of superfluous population that there's no point educating because there's nothing for them to do. Because we're a civilized people, we put them in prison, rather than sending death squads out to murder them.


p41
You need something to frighten people with, to prevent them from paying attention to what's really happening to them.



p48
Vietnam wasn't a "disastrous mistake" - it was murderous aggression.


p53
... the best defense against democracy is to distract people.


p57
A corporate executive's responsibility is to his stockholders - to maximize profit, market share and power. If he can do that by paying starvation wages to women who'll die in a couple of years because their working conditions are so horrible, he's just doing his job. It's the job that should be questioned.


p64
... corporations are fundamentally illegitimate, ... they don't have to exist at all in their modern form. Just as other oppressive institutions - slavery, say, or royalty - have been changed or eliminated, so corporate power can be changed of eliminated. What are the limits? There aren't any. Everything is ultimately under public control.

[bbgrunt]

1. I really like this one: .. the best defense against democracy is to distract people.

It is very disappointing how easily this is done.

[Igel]

2. Have you had your daily outrage yet?

Probably not. But outrage over minutiae lets us miss bigger-picture things.

At the same time, the extent of discourse on the left is tightly constrained. It's also tightly constrained on the right. Some things you can't say. Assume intentions matter.

I've watched people use a set of facts in one kind of post to argue for their point of view. In a different set of posts, just mentioning the same facts is prima facie evidence of racism and I've seen posts deleted because of it. Same facts. Same sources--census, bureau of labor, research institutions.

As for corporations, in Chomsky's post, try working for government. Try being a grad student under most professors. Heck, try being a teenager in your peer group. What he says is true of "corporations" is true of corporations, but it's true of any group of people or organization not ruled by just the right philosopher king who insists on "every voice being heard". In a psychologically safe space (because if you don't feel psychologically safe, you're going to self censor.)

[bbgrunt]

4. very true. There are gate keepers on the left as

well as the right. Witness the pariahs that 911 truthers have become. Not even Amy Goodman or Bill Maher would touch them or give them quarter....and we have yet to see the 28 redacted pages.

As to our esteemed educational institutions, being a student or grad student is definitely confining as well as being a professor--even with tenure. So yes. There is a lot of self censoring going on as well as institutional censoring.

[bemildred]

3. People who try to scare you or make you angry are not your friends.

They are trying to manipulate you.