"The Internet is an élite organization; most of the population of the world has never even made a phone call."

Noam Chomsky (via noam-chomsky)

"to take apart the system of illusions and deception which functions to prevent understanding of contemporary reality, that’s not a task that requires extraordinary skill or understanding. It requires the kind of normal skepticism and willingness to apply one’s analytical skills that almost all people have and that they can exercise. It just happens that they exercise them in analyzing what the New England Patriots ought to do next Sunday instead of questions that really matter for human life, their own included."

The Chomsky Reader - Noam Chomsky (via noam-chomsky)

(Source: chomsky.info, via noam-chomsky)

"In any case, 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. Whatever rights workers have are guaranteed by the limited public authority that still exists.
When enormous, private, tyrannical institutions are granted the same rights as—or more rights than—human beings, freedom becomes something of a joke. The solution isn’t to undermine freedom—it’s to undermine the private tyrannies."

How the World Works - Noam Chomsky (via noam-chomsky)

"Whether they’re called “liberal” or “conservative,” the major media are large corporations, owned by and interlinked with even larger conglomerates. Like other corporations, they sell a product to a market. The market is advertisers—that is, other businesses. The product is audiences. For the elite media that set the basic agenda to which others adapt, the product is, furthermore, relatively privileged audiences.
So we have major corporations selling fairly wealthy and privileged audiences to other businesses. Not surprisingly, the picture of the world presented reflects the narrow and biased interests and values of the sellers, the buyers and the product"

How the World Works - Noam Chomsky (via noam-chomsky)

"The public relations industry, which essentially runs the elections, is applying certain principles to undermine democracy which are the same as the principles that applies to undermine markets. The last thing that business wants is markets in the sense of economic theory. Take a course in economics, they tell you a market is based on informed consumers making rational choices. Anyone who’s ever looked at a TV ad knows that’s not true. In fact if we had a market system an ad say for General Motors would be a brief statement of the characteristics of the products for next year. That’s not what you see. You see some movie actress or a football hero or somebody driving a car up a mountain or something like that. And that’s true of all advertising. The goal is to undermine markets by creating uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices and the business world spends huge efforts on that."

Noam Chomsky (via noam-chomsky)

(Source: chomsky-must-read.blogspot.com, via noam-chomsky)

"

Now, there are also people who don’t go along-and they’re called “be-havior problems,” or “unmotivated,” or things like that.
Well, you don’t want to be too glib about it-there are children with behavior problems but a lot of them are just independent-minded, or don’t like to conform, or just want to go their own way.

And they get into trouble right from the very beginning, and are typically weeded out. I mean, I’ve taught young kids too, and the fact is there are always some who just don’t take your word for it.
And the very unfortunate tendency is to try to beat them down, because they’re a pain in the neck. But what they ought to be is encouraged. Yeah: why take my word for it? Who the heck am I? Figure it out for yourself.
That’s what real education would be about, in fact.

"

Understanding Power - Noam Chomsky (via noam-chomsky)

"One of the major properties of markets – if you take a good economics course you learn this in the first term – is that they under price social effects. So if you sell me a car, we can make a good deal for ourselves. We both gain from it, but [buyer] is paying a cost. So there’s more pollution, more congestion, the price of oil goes up, and these effects are spread through the population, the count of all can be quite large. It’s called externalities. Economists put them in a footnote, but they’re not so small."

Noam Chomsky (via noam-chomsky)

(Source: allisonkilkenny.wordpress.com, via noam-chomsky)

"From a comparative perspective, the United States is unusual if not unique in its lack of restraints on freedom of expression. It is also unusual in the range and effectiveness of the methods employed to restrain freedom of thought. The two phenomena are related. Liberal democratic theorists have long observed that in a society where the voice of the people is heard, elite groups must ensure that that voice says the right things. The less the state is able to employ violence in defense of the interests of elite groups that effectively dominate it, the
more it becomes necessary to devise techniques of “manufacture of consent,” in the words of Walter Lippmann over 60 years ago, or “engineering of consent,” the phrase preferred by Edward Bernays, one of the founding fathers of the American Public Relations industry."

Noam Chomsky (via noam-chomsky)

"No less insidious is the cry for ‘revolution,’ at a time when not even the germs of new institutions exist, let alone the moral and political consciousness that could lead to a basic modification of social life. If there will be a ‘revolution’ in America today, it will no doubt be a move towards some variety of fascism. We must guard against the kind of revolutionary rhetoric that would have had Karl Marx burn down the British Museum because it was merely part of a repressive society. It would be criminal to overlook the serious flaws and inadequacies in our institutions, or to fail to utilize the substantial degree of freedom that most of us enjoy, within the framework of these flawed institutions, to modify them or even replace them by a better social order. One who pays some attention to history will not be surprised if those who cry most loudly that we must smash and destroy are later found among the administrators of some new system of repression."

Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins, 1969 (via doctorofnothing)

(Source: en.wikiquote.org, via noam-chomsky)

"Today’s gap between North and South—the rich developed societies and the rest of the world—was largely created by the global conquest.
Scholarship and science are beginning to recognize a record that had been concealed by imperial arrogance. They are discovering that at the time of the arrival of the Europeans, and long before, the Western hemisphere was home to some of the world’s most advanced civilizations. In the poorest country of South America, archaeologists are coming to believe that eastern Bolivia was the site of a wealthy, sophisticated, and complex society of perhaps a million people. In their words, it was the site of “one of the largest, strangest, and most ecologically rich artificial environments on the face of the planet, with causeways and canals, spacious and formal towns and considerable wealth,” creating a landscape that was “one of humankind’s greatest works of art, a masterpiece.” In the Peruvian Andes, by 1491 the Inka had created the greatest empire in the world, greater in scale than the Chinese, Russian, Ottoman, or other empires, far greater than any European state, and with remarkable artistic, agricultural, and other achievements."

Hopes and Prospects - Noam Chomsky (via noam-chomsky)