Dec 10 2000

 

 

Propaganda and Indoctrination

  

By Noam Chomsky 

 

This is the first of three Chomsky Commentaries I will send this month...each 
answers one or more queries from David Barsamian (DB) and all are excerpted from 

a still to be published interview...

 

DB: Lets talk about a theme that we return to periodically, and that is propaganda 
and indoctrination. As a teacher, how do you get people to think for themselves? Can 

you in fact impart tools that will enable that? 

 

I think you learn by doing. I'm a Deweyite from way back, from childhood experience 
and reading. You learn by doing, and you figure out how to do things by watching 

other people do them. Thats the way you learn to be a good carpenter, for example, 
and the way you learn to be a good physicist. Nobody can train you on how to do 

physics. You don't teach methodology courses in the natural sciences. You may in 
the social sciences. In any field that has significant intellectual content, you dont 

teach methodology. You just watch people doing it and participate with them in 
doing it. So a typical, say, graduate seminar in a science course would be just people 

working together, not all that different from an artisan picking up a craft and working 
with someone who's supposedly good at it. I think the same is true of these things. I 
don't try to persuade people, at least not consciously. Maybe I do. If so, its a 

mistake. The right way to do things is not to try to persuade people you're right but 
to challenge them to think it through for themselves. There's nothing in human 

affairs of which we can speak with very great confidence, even in the hard natural 
sciences that's largely true. In complicated areas, like human affairs, we don't have 

an extremely high level of confidence, and often a very low level. In the case of 
human affairs, international affairs, family relations, whatever it may be, you can 

compile evidence and you can put things together and look at them from a certain 
way. The right approach, putting aside what one or another person does, is simply to 
encourage people to do that. The way you do it is by trying to do it yourself, and in 

particular trying to show, although its not all that difficult, the chasm that separates 
standard versions of what goes on in the world from what the evidence of the senses 

and peoples inquiries will show them as soon as they start to look at it. A common 
response that I get, even on things like chat networks, is, I cant believe anything 

you're saying. Its totally in conflict with what I've learned and always believed, and I 
dont have time to look up all those footnotes. How do I know what you're saying is 

true? That's a plausible reaction. I tell people its the right reaction. You shouldn't 
believe what I say is true. The footnotes are there, so you can find out if you feel like 
it, but if you don't want to bother, nothing can be done. Nobody is going to pour 

truth into your brain. Its something you have to find out for yourself. 

 

DB: Another comment I hear in talking about this issue is that people say, Im no 
Noam Chomsky. I dont have his resources. I work at Logan Airport from 9 to 5. I've 

got a mortgage to pay. I don't have the access and the ability. Does it take special 
brains? 

 

It doesn't take special brains, but it takes special privilege. Those people are right. 
You have to have special privilege, which we have. Its unfair, but we've got it. To 

have the resources, training, time, the control over your own life. Maybe I work a 
hundred hours a week, but its a hundred I choose. Thats a rare luxury. Only a tiny 

sector of the population can enjoy that, let alone the resources and the training. Its 
extremely hard to do it by yourself. However, we shouldn't exaggerate. Many of the 

people who do this best are people who lack privilege, for one thing because they 
have several advantages. Not having undergone a good education, not being 

subjected to the huge flow of indoctrination, of which an education largely is, and 
also not having participated by taking part in the system of indoctrination and 
control, so that you internalize it. By indoctrination I mean from kindergarten up 

through professional life. Not being part of that, you're somewhat more free. So 
there are advantages also to being outside of the system of privilege and 

domination. But its true that the person who's working fifty hours a week to put food 
on the table does not have the luxury we do. That's why people get together. That's 

what unions were about, for workers education, which often came out of the unions 
in the workers movement. These were ways for people to get together to encourage 

one another, to learn from one another, to find out about the world. Over quite a 
range, in fact: literature, history, science, mathematics. Some of the great books on 
science and mathematics for the public (for the millions) were written by left-

oriented specialists, and such topics found their way into workers education, often 
union-based, sometimes offshoots. There's things you can do in groups you cant do 

by yourself. In fact, that's true of the most advanced sciences. Very little is done 
individually. Its usually done in groups by collective action and interchange and 

critique and challenge, with students typically playing an active and often critical 
role. The same is true here. Part of the genius of the system of domination and 

control is to separate people from one another so that doesn't happen. We cant 
consult our neighbors, as one of my favorite Wobbly singers once put it back in the 
1930s. As long as we cant consult our neighbors, well believe that there are good 

times. Its important to make sure that people don't consult their neighbors. 

 

DB: Who was that singer? 

 

T-Bone Slim. 

 

DB: You were listening to T-Bone Slim? 

 

I read these things. Im not attuned to the auditory world.