Noam Chomsky has discussed the concept of manufacturing consent, which refers to the ways in which leaders and institutions shape public opinion. Chomsky argues that the media, along with other mechanisms, can often be used to manipulate public perception and to control the flow of information . Chomsky emphasizes the importance of critical thinking and independent analysis of information as a means to counteract these manipulations . He also highlights the power of grassroots activism and popular struggle in bringing about societal change . If you are interested in learning more about Chomsky's views, there are several resources available, including his writings, interviews, and lectures, which can provide further insight into manufacturing consent and related topics .
(someone): And of course, wealth in the United States for most people is property owning. So the black population was cut out from this opportunity in the 50s and 60s to enter into, at some level at least, into mainstream American society by segregated federal laws, which mandated segregation less in the late 60s. Women's rights. Women were still in the 1960s under federal law, not regarded as peers, basically regarded as kind of property. It wasn't until 1975 that The Supreme Court finally ruled that women have the right to serve on a federal jury, for example. All sorts of changes have taken place. The country's much more civilized than it was just 50 or 60 years ago. Well, it didn't happen by magic. It happened by lots of popular struggle. You go back in history, there's more and more examples of that, and you can see it right now. I mean, I mentioned that the leadership class is racing to disaster, but there's a lot of activism among the public, mainly young people, saying, we insist on a better future. You see it at the COP meetings, you know, the regular meetings COP26, COP27. There's actually two meetings going on. Like in Glasgow, last time it was Sharm el-Sheikh, so it's so far away, nobody could come. But in Glasgow, there was a meeting going on inside the halls where the elegant ladies and gentlemen were doing nothing, and outside in the streets there were tens of thousands of young people demonstrating, saying, we have to take steps to prevent the disaster that you all know is coming.
(someone): I try to maintain and do maintain a lively commitment to intellectual work, a lot of new work there, but the issues of human concern are just overwhelming. I mean, we have to face the fact that we are in a unique moment of human history. Nothing like this has ever happened in the couple hundred thousand years that humans have been on Earth. We now have to decide, within a couple of decades, whether the human experiment is going to continue or whether it'll go down in glorious disaster. That's what we're facing. We know answers, at least possible answers, to all of the problems that face us. We're not pursuing them. The leadership is going in the opposite direction. How can anybody relax under these circumstances?
Tyler Cowen: Do you think it's genetic that you're still going, or just essentially voluntarist?
(someone): Nobody knows a thing about it.
Tyler Cowen: But it's you and Henry Kissinger, right? Who would have thought they would be the two of you?
(someone): Human genetics are a mystery.
Tyler Cowen: Why do you answer every email?
(someone): Because I take people seriously. I think people deserve respect.
Tyler Cowen: Two final questions. First, what's the biggest misperception people have about you?
(someone): Depends what they read. People read Newsweek, for example. have the assumption that I think we should hand Ukraine over to the Russians. Sure, that's the way manufacturers' consent works in the ideological journals. If people read what I say, they'll have a different opinion.
(someone): There's a reason why the doomsday clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists was recently moved to 90 seconds to midnight. One is the growing threat of nuclear war, which will be terminal war. Another is the failure to take the necessary and feasible steps to deal with the existential crisis of environmental destruction. We're moving in the opposite direction on both, and there's not a lot of time. the leadership elements across the board and around the world, very few exceptions, are dedicated to racing to the precipice as quickly as possible. That's not much grounds for optimism. Nevertheless, there are grounds. If you look over history, people have organized, resisted, stood up, overthrown repressive autocratic structures created a broader reign of freedom and justice. Plenty of awful things remain, but if you look back at what used to be perfectly acceptable, you can see we've come a long way, even just in the last couple of decades. So, go back to the 1960s, for example. In the 1960s, the United States had anti-miscegenation laws, which were so extreme that the Nazis refused to accept them. We had federally mandated housing segregation. That meant that Afro-American, Black Americans, maybe in the growth period of the 1950s and 60s, black man could get a decent job at an auto plant, but he couldn't buy one of the homes in Levittown. And of course, wealth in the United States for most people is property owning. So the black population was cut out from this opportunity in the 50s and 60s to enter into, at some level at least, into
(someone): It civilized the society in many ways. Things were just taken for granted in the 60s. You couldn't possibly even say now, well, that's the effect of the activism of mostly young people, what was called the New Left. So it's not a movement, but it's all over the place. It's changed the way we see and think of things, almost everybody. It's libertarian socialism, anarchism. Of course, they're not going to be popular. We have a class-based society, a rigid class-based society. The business classes, the ultra-rich, are dedicated to class war. They're basically vulgar Marxists, values inverted. constantly fighting a harsh class war. They control the resources, control the institutions, control the economy. So, yes, ideas that they don't like, you don't hear nothing novel about that. And go back to George Orwell. One of his essays he wrote about how in England, he said in Free England, unpopular ideas can be suppressed without the use of force, just because of the class nature of the society and the subordination of intellectuals to power. Incidentally, his essay was suppressed, just to make it a little more dramatic, found later in his unpublished essays.
Tyler Cowen: If I think of some of the new left critics of, say, the Cold War, the revisionists, you have Seymour Mellman, Pentagon Capitalism, Sidney Lenz, D.F. Fleming. I'm sure you knew many or all of these people.
(someone): Terrified once because we're racing towards disaster day by day, doubly terrified because there's no attention being given to it. Sometimes it's just astonishing. So the Pew polling agency a couple of weeks ago came out with, they give regular studies of public attitudes on all sorts of things, very valuable. The latest one, they gave people a couple of dozen choices of issues and asked them to rank them in terms of urgency. Nuclear war was not even on the list. Climate change was on the list. It was ranked at the bottom of the 21 choices. That's manufacture of consent in a form which is going to destroy us all.
Tyler Cowen: Why does the whole left libertarian tradition, at least to me, seem to be so weak today? So if I mention Rudolph Rocker to someone, the chance they have heard of him is extremely small. I'm sure you experience the same. Maybe they've heard of him because they've read your writings, but to have heard of him separately, that hardly ever happens. The new left of the 1960s mostly has vanished. How and why did that happen?
(someone): I don't think it's true. I think the new left of the 1960s which incidentally was a very brief period. It scattered, splintered, but it left a major imprint. What I've just described was largely an effect of the new lift of the 60s. It civilized the society in many ways. Things were just taken for granted in the 60s.
(someone): Sure, that's the way manufacturers' consent works in the ideological journals. If people read what I say, they'll have a different opinion.
Tyler Cowen: Final question. What is it that you will do next?
(someone): Well, the thing I'll do next in 10 minutes is have a long discussion at a major conference in, happens to be in Texas, on social and political issues, annual conference that takes place there. After that, go back to the regular work of the two sides of my brain. social and political issues, intellectual contributions.
Tyler Cowen: In your career, where do you feel it is that you've been most wrong?
(someone): There are a lot of things that have been wrong. So, for example, take the Vietnam War. I was very much involved in it. In fact, it was my whole life for a couple of years. But I got involved much too late. I got seriously involved in the early 60s. when Kennedy sharply escalated the war. There was almost nobody concerned with it at that time, but the time to have gotten involved was 10 years earlier. I didn't know it at the time, you know now, when the government made the basic decisions in the early 50s that set the stage for what became the most hideous crime of the 20th century. That was the time to get involved, not when I did many other things like that. There's so much that should be done that I haven't managed to do. Right now, you can say the same thing.
Tyler Cowen: The Holocaust isn't the most tedious crime of the 20th century?
(someone): 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 the both Lippmann and Bernays, and adopted the standard liberal position that the population is stupid. The terms were stupid and ignorant. They don't know what's good for them. We, the responsible men, have to do the planning for their benefit, of course. And meanwhile, we have to, as Lippmann put it, protect ourselves from the roar and the trampling of the bewildered herd." The 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. 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, Manufacturer of Consent was, just to quote some more Lippmann, they said, the public can be spectators, but not participants in action. They are not supposed to take part in any of public affairs. We do that.
(someone): And of course, wealth in the United States for most people is property owning. So the black population was cut out from this opportunity in the 50s and 60s to enter into, at some level at least, into mainstream American society by segregated federal laws, which mandated segregation less in the late 60s. Women's rights. Women were still in the 1960s under federal law, not regarded as peers, basically regarded as kind of property. It wasn't until 1975 that The Supreme Court finally ruled that women have the right to serve on a federal jury, for example. All sorts of changes have taken place. The country's much more civilized than it was just 50 or 60 years ago. Well, it didn't happen by magic. It happened by lots of popular struggle. You go back in history, there's more and more examples of that, and you can see it right now. I mean, I mentioned that the leadership class is racing to disaster, but there's a lot of activism among the public, mainly young people, saying, we insist on a better future. You see it at the COP meetings, you know, the regular meetings COP26, COP27. There's actually two meetings going on. Like in Glasgow, last time it was Sharm el-Sheikh, so it's so far away, nobody could come. But in Glasgow, there was a meeting going on inside the halls where the elegant ladies and gentlemen were doing nothing, and outside in the streets there were tens of thousands of young people demonstrating, saying, we have to take steps to prevent the disaster that you all know is coming.
(someone): There is some, like all organisms, we have innate capacities. There's something about a genetic endowment that determines that the embryo grows arms, not wings. And there's something about the genetic endowment that says that an infant, a newborn infant, can instantly pick out parts of the noise that surrounds it and say to itself, those parts are language. And I'm going to, not consciously of course, it's all totally reflexive, these parts are language. I'm going to pursue a course of maturation, will determine course of maturation, which means that by about two or three years old, I've basically absorbed the fundamentals of language. You can take the smartest chimpanzee or the dogs under my desk, they can listen to this noise forever. They have no idea there's anything there but noise. Well, that's a fundamental property of humans built in. It's the reason why you and I can be having this discussion now, but a troop of chimpanzees can't be.
Tyler Cowen: Do you think your critiques of media and the idea of manufacturing consent in any way spring from your underlying views on language?
(someone): More from my views on social and political structure. In fact, the phrase manufacturing consent was not mine. I borrowed it from Walter Lippmann, who was, as you know, the leading public intellectual of the 20th century. good liberal, a Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy liberal. He was a member of Woodrow Wilson's propaganda machine. Wilson, I don't want to tell you this, you know it better as well as I do, but for the record, Wilson was elected
(someone): are not supposed to take part in any of public affairs. We do that. As Reinhold Niebuhr put it, they have to be fed unnecessary 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 world combined to yield a very effective propaganda system.
Tyler Cowen: You seem to be relatively optimistic about the future, but 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?
(someone): Well, first of all, I mean, I wish I could say that I were relatively optimistic. If you look at the way the world is going today, it's extremely hard to be optimistic. I mean, we are facing two enormous crises. There's a reason why the doomsday clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists was recently moved to 90 seconds to midnight. One is the growing threat of nuclear war, which will be terminal war.
(someone): I try to maintain and do maintain a lively commitment to intellectual work, a lot of new work there, but the issues of human concern are just overwhelming. I mean, we have to face the fact that we are in a unique moment of human history. Nothing like this has ever happened in the couple hundred thousand years that humans have been on Earth. We now have to decide, within a couple of decades, whether the human experiment is going to continue or whether it'll go down in glorious disaster. That's what we're facing. We know answers, at least possible answers, to all of the problems that face us. We're not pursuing them. The leadership is going in the opposite direction. How can anybody relax under these circumstances?
Tyler Cowen: Do you think it's genetic that you're still going, or just essentially voluntarist?
(someone): Nobody knows a thing about it.
Tyler Cowen: But it's you and Henry Kissinger, right? Who would have thought they would be the two of you?
(someone): Human genetics are a mystery.
Tyler Cowen: Why do you answer every email?
(someone): Because I take people seriously. I think people deserve respect.
Tyler Cowen: Two final questions. First, what's the biggest misperception people have about you?
(someone): Depends what they read. People read Newsweek, for example. have the assumption that I think we should hand Ukraine over to the Russians. Sure, that's the way manufacturers' consent works in the ideological journals. If people read what I say, they'll have a different opinion.
(someone): Terrified once because we're racing towards disaster day by day, doubly terrified because there's no attention being given to it. Sometimes it's just astonishing. So the Pew polling agency a couple of weeks ago came out with, they give regular studies of public attitudes on all sorts of things, very valuable. The latest one, they gave people a couple of dozen choices of issues and asked them to rank them in terms of urgency. Nuclear war was not even on the list. Climate change was on the list. It was ranked at the bottom of the 21 choices. That's manufacture of consent in a form which is going to destroy us all.
Tyler Cowen: Why does the whole left libertarian tradition, at least to me, seem to be so weak today? So if I mention Rudolph Rocker to someone, the chance they have heard of him is extremely small. I'm sure you experience the same. Maybe they've heard of him because they've read your writings, but to have heard of him separately, that hardly ever happens. The new left of the 1960s mostly has vanished. How and why did that happen?
(someone): I don't think it's true. I think the new left of the 1960s which incidentally was a very brief period. It scattered, splintered, but it left a major imprint. What I've just described was largely an effect of the new lift of the 60s. It civilized the society in many ways. Things were just taken for granted in the 60s.
(someone): It civilized the society in many ways. Things were just taken for granted in the 60s. You couldn't possibly even say now, well, that's the effect of the activism of mostly young people, what was called the New Left. So it's not a movement, but it's all over the place. It's changed the way we see and think of things, almost everybody. It's libertarian socialism, anarchism. Of course, they're not going to be popular. We have a class-based society, a rigid class-based society. The business classes, the ultra-rich, are dedicated to class war. They're basically vulgar Marxists, values inverted. constantly fighting a harsh class war. They control the resources, control the institutions, control the economy. So, yes, ideas that they don't like, you don't hear nothing novel about that. And go back to George Orwell. One of his essays he wrote about how in England, he said in Free England, unpopular ideas can be suppressed without the use of force, just because of the class nature of the society and the subordination of intellectuals to power. Incidentally, his essay was suppressed, just to make it a little more dramatic, found later in his unpublished essays.
Tyler Cowen: If I think of some of the new left critics of, say, the Cold War, the revisionists, you have Seymour Mellman, Pentagon Capitalism, Sidney Lenz, D.F. Fleming. I'm sure you knew many or all of these people.
(someone): They had no idea what it was. It was a very mixed story. I mean, it had very brutal, harsh elements, destructive elements. There are also aspects of Maoism which aren't discussed much here. the scholarship is aware of them. One of the things that the Maoist policies did was save a hundred million people. A hundred million people were saved from death and starvation, as compared with democratic capitalist India in the same years. You look from 1979, 1949 liberation to 1979, compare the demographics of the two countries, there's a gap of a hundred million people killed in India as compared with China, simply because of the lack of carrying out rural development and healthcare programs. There's no big secret about this. It's discussed by some of the leading scholars, like Amartya Sen, for example, Nobel laureate in Indian economics. This is one of his main specialties, hardly obscure, but you don't hear about it. That's manufacture of consent again. But this is not why people on the left flirted with Maoism. They had all sorts of confused ideas about Maoism. In fact, if you want the most enthusiastic Maoist in the country, his name happens to be Henry Kissinger. He adored Mao. He worshipped him. If you want to picture of this, I urge that you take a look at a very important scholarly work that just appeared, Carolyn Eisenberg's extensive detailed study of the Nixon-Kissinger years, using extensive archival material.
(someone): Sure, that's the way manufacturers' consent works in the ideological journals. If people read what I say, they'll have a different opinion.
Tyler Cowen: Final question. What is it that you will do next?
(someone): Well, the thing I'll do next in 10 minutes is have a long discussion at a major conference in, happens to be in Texas, on social and political issues, annual conference that takes place there. After that, go back to the regular work of the two sides of my brain. social and political issues, intellectual contributions.
Tyler Cowen: In your career, where do you feel it is that you've been most wrong?
(someone): There are a lot of things that have been wrong. So, for example, take the Vietnam War. I was very much involved in it. In fact, it was my whole life for a couple of years. But I got involved much too late. I got seriously involved in the early 60s. when Kennedy sharply escalated the war. There was almost nobody concerned with it at that time, but the time to have gotten involved was 10 years earlier. I didn't know it at the time, you know now, when the government made the basic decisions in the early 50s that set the stage for what became the most hideous crime of the 20th century. That was the time to get involved, not when I did many other things like that. There's so much that should be done that I haven't managed to do. Right now, you can say the same thing.
Tyler Cowen: The Holocaust isn't the most tedious crime of the 20th century?
(someone): There is some, like all organisms, we have innate capacities. There's something about a genetic endowment that determines that the embryo grows arms, not wings. And there's something about the genetic endowment that says that an infant, a newborn infant, can instantly pick out parts of the noise that surrounds it and say to itself, those parts are language. And I'm going to, not consciously of course, it's all totally reflexive, these parts are language. I'm going to pursue a course of maturation, will determine course of maturation, which means that by about two or three years old, I've basically absorbed the fundamentals of language. You can take the smartest chimpanzee or the dogs under my desk, they can listen to this noise forever. They have no idea there's anything there but noise. Well, that's a fundamental property of humans built in. It's the reason why you and I can be having this discussion now, but a troop of chimpanzees can't be.
Tyler Cowen: Do you think your critiques of media and the idea of manufacturing consent in any way spring from your underlying views on language?
(someone): More from my views on social and political structure. In fact, the phrase manufacturing consent was not mine. I borrowed it from Walter Lippmann, who was, as you know, the leading public intellectual of the 20th century. good liberal, a Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy liberal. He was a member of Woodrow Wilson's propaganda machine. Wilson, I don't want to tell you this, you know it better as well as I do, but for the record, Wilson was elected
(someone): 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 the both Lippmann and Bernays, and adopted the standard liberal position that the population is stupid. The terms were stupid and ignorant. They don't know what's good for them. We, the responsible men, have to do the planning for their benefit, of course. And meanwhile, we have to, as Lippmann put it, protect ourselves from the roar and the trampling of the bewildered herd." The 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. 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, Manufacturer of Consent was, just to quote some more Lippmann, they said, the public can be spectators, but not participants in action. They are not supposed to take part in any of public affairs. We do that.
(someone): He was a member of Woodrow Wilson's propaganda machine. Wilson, I don't want to tell you this, you know it better 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 had a problem. How do you turn a pacifist population into raving anti-German maniacs? succeeded brilliantly. Part of the device was a commission that Wilson set up called the Committee on Public Information, which of course means disinformation. Creole Commission, as 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 how what Lippmann called manufacture of consent, 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 want to kill everything German. You can't say Frankfurt, or you have to say hot dog. 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.
(someone): are not supposed to take part in any of public affairs. We do that. As Reinhold Niebuhr put it, they have to be fed unnecessary 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 world combined to yield a very effective propaganda system.
Tyler Cowen: You seem to be relatively optimistic about the future, but 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?
(someone): Well, first of all, I mean, I wish I could say that I were relatively optimistic. If you look at the way the world is going today, it's extremely hard to be optimistic. I mean, we are facing two enormous crises. There's a reason why the doomsday clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists was recently moved to 90 seconds to midnight. One is the growing threat of nuclear war, which will be terminal war.