Noam Chomsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…More from my views on social and political structure. In fact, the phrase manufacturing consent was not mine. I borrowed it from Walter Lippmann, as you know, the leading public intellectual of the 20th century. Good liberal, the Wilson-Roosevelt-Kennedy liberal. He was a member of Woodrow Wilson’s propaganda machine. I don’t want to tell you this — you know it as well as I do — but for the record, Wilson was elected in 1916 on a pacifist program. “I’m going to keep you out of war.” The US population didn’t want to get into the European war. Very quickly, he decided that the United States should enter the war on the Allied side, and he had a problem. How do you turn a pacifist population into raving anti-German maniacs? He succeeded brilliantly. Part of the device was a commission that Wilson set up called the Committee on Public Information, which, of course, means disinformation. Creel commissioners, it was called. Walter Lippmann was a member of it. Another member of it was Edward Bernays, who went on to be one of the main founders of the public relations industry. Both Wilson and Bernays were very impressed with what Lippmann called “manufacture of consent” and Bernays called “engineering of consent” — how these techniques could control the public, shape opinion, completely turn them into, in this case, fanatic anti-German people who wanted to kill everything German. Can’t say frankfurter; you have to say hotdog. You have to change your name if you’re German to something else. Also, a huge attack on labor came out of it. It was very effective for the corporate sector. They meant to smash the labor unions with all kinds of claims of anti-patriotism and so on. Well, Lippmann, in particular, was very persuaded by this, as Bernays was. Lippmann called it a new art in the practice of democracy. It’s important to understand that both Lippmann and Bernays adopted the standard liberal position, that the population is, as the terms were, stupid and ignorant. They don’t know what’s good for them. We, the responsible men, have to do their planning for their benefit, of course. Meanwhile, we have to, as Lippmann put it, protect ourselves from the roar and the trampling of the bewildered herd. A very Leninist doctrine, if you think of it. Very similar rhetoric. That goes right up to the present distinction that was made in the Kennedy years between what were called the technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals, the good guys who worked on policy and so on, and the value-oriented intellectuals, the bad guys — what McGeorge Bundy called “the wild men in the wings” — who talk about ridiculous things like justice and rights and so on. This is a very consistent property of the intellectual classes from way back, pretty much independent of political commitment. In any event, manufacture of consent was, just to quote some more Lippmann — he said the public can be spectators but not participants in action. back, pretty much independent of political commitment. In any event, manufacture of consent was, just to quote some more Lippmann — he said the public can be spectators but not participants in action. They are not supposed to take part in any public affairs. We do that. As Reinhold Niebuhr put it, they have to be fed necessary illusions and emotionally potent oversimplifications while we take care of things for the common good. One aspect of this was separating the economy from public affairs. Economists played a major role in this, including liberal economists. Mainly liberal economists separate the economy, which is just pure science. We take care of the science. The public should have nothing to do with it. All of these are major strains in modern thought. They have much earlier origins. In the book that Edward Herman and I wrote about manufacturing consent, we selected these conceptions, looked at the structure of the media, and tried to show that, in fact, the institutional structure of the media — these conceptions of the nature of the intellectual were combined to yield a very effective propaganda system. You seem to be relatively optimistic about the future. If human beings are so susceptible to propaganda, why be so optimistic? Shouldn’t you just think we’re stuck in a continual illusory equilibrium where people feed us BS and we just keep on believing it?…

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