Taken from "The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many (Interviews with Noam Chomsky)".
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You've said the real drama since 1776 has been the "relentless attack of the prosperous few upon the rights of the restless many." I want to ask you about the "restless many." Do they hold any cards?
Sure. They've won a lot of victories. The country is a lot more free than it was two hundred years ago. For one thing, we don't have slaves. That's a big change. Thomas Jefferson's goal, at the very left-liberal end of the spectrum, was to create a country "free of blot or mixture" -- meaning no red Indians, no black people, just good white Anglo-Saxons. That's what the liberals wanted.
They didn't succeed. They did pretty much get rid of the native population -- they almost succeeded in "exterminating" them (as they put it in those days) -- but they couldn't get rid of the black population, and over time they've had to incorporate them in some fashion into society.
Freedom of speech has been vastly extended. Women finally received the franchise 150 years after the revolution. After a very bloody struggle, workers finally won some rights in the 1930s -- about fifty years after they did in Europe. (They've been losing them ever since, but they won them to some extent.)
In many ways large parts of the general population have been integrated into the system of relative prosperity and relative freedom -- almost always as a result of popular struggle. So the general population has lots of cards.
That's something that [English philosopher] David Hume pointed out a couple of centuries ago. In his work on political theory, he describes the paradox that, in any society, the population submits to the rulers, even though force is always in the hands of the governed.
Ultimately the governors, the rulers, can only rule if they control opinion -- no matter how many guns they have. This is true of the most despotic societies and the most free, he wrote. If the general population won't accept things, the rulers are finished.
That underestimates the resources of violence, but expresses important truths nonetheless. There's a constant battle between people who refuse to accept domination and injustice and those who are trying to force people to accept them.
How to break from the system of indoctrination and propaganda? You've said that it's nearly impossible for individuals to do anything, that it's much easier and better to act collectively. What prevents people from getting associated?
There's a big investment involved. Everybody lives within a cultural and social framework which has certain values and certain opportunities. It assigns cost to various kinds of action and benefits to others. You just live in that -- you can't help it.
We live in a society that assigns benefits to efforts to achieve individual gain. Let's say I'm the father or mother of a family. What do I do with my time? I've got 24 hours a day. If I've got children to take care of, a future to worry about, what do I do?
One thing I can do is try to play up to the boss and see if I can get a dollar more an hour. Or maybe I can kick somebody in the face when I walk past them (if not directly then indirectly, by the mechanisms that are set up within a capitalist society). That's one way.
The other way is to spend my evenings trying to organize other people, who will then spend their evenings at meetings, go out on a picket line and carry out a long struggle in which they'll be beaten up by the police and lose their jobs. Maybe they'll finally get enough people together so they'll ultimately achieve a gain, which may or may not be greater than the gain that they tried to achieve by following the individualist course.
In game theory, this kind of situation is called "prisoner's dilemma." You can set up things called "games" -- interactions -- in which each participant will gain more if they work together, but you only gain if the other person works with you. If the other person is trying to maximize his or her own gain, you lose.
Let me take a simple case -- driving to work. It would take me longer to take the subway than to drive to work. If we all took the subway and put the money into that instead of into roads, we'd all get there faster by the subway. But we all have to do it. If other people are going to be driving and I'm taking the subway, then private transportation is going to be better for the people who are doing it.
It's only if we all do something a different way that we'll all benefit a lot more. The costs to you -- an individual -- to work to create the possibilities to do things together can be severe. It's only if lots of people begin to do it, and do it seriously, that you get real benefits.
The same has been true of every popular movement that ever existed. Suppose you were a twenty-year-old black kid at Spelman College in Atlanta in 1960. You had two choices. One was: "I'll try to get a job in a business somewhere. Maybe somebody will be willing to pick a black manager. I'll be properly humble and bow and scrape. Maybe I'll live in a middle class home."
The other was to join SNCC [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a black civil rights group of the 1960s], in which case you might get killed. You were certainly going to get beaten and defamed. It would be a very tough life for a long time. Maybe you'd finally be able to create enough popular support so that people like you and your family could live better.
It would be hard to make that second choice, given the alternatives available. Society is very much structured to try to drive you toward the individualist alternative. It's a remarkable fact that many young people took that second choice, suffered for it and helped create a much better world.
You've noted polls that indicate that 83% of the population regard the entire economic system as "inherently unfair." But it doesn't translate into anything.
It can only translate into anything if people do something about it. That's true whether you're talking about general things -- like the inherent unfairness of the economic system, which requires revolutionary change -- or about small things.
Take, say, health insurance. In public, almost nobody calls for a "Canadian-style" system. (That's the kind of system they have everywhere in the world -- an efficient, nationally organized public health system that guarantees health services for everyone and -- if it's more serious than Canada's system -- also provides preventive care.)
And yet according to some polls, a majority of the population is in favor of it anyway, even though they've scarcely heard anybody advocate it. Does it matter? No. There'll be some kind of insurance company-based, "managed" health care system -- designed to ensure that insurance companies and the health corporations they run will make plenty of money.
There are only two ways we could get the health care that most of the population wants. There either needs to be a large-scale popular movement -- which would mean moving towards democracy, and nobody in power wants that -- or the business community must decide that it would be good for them. They might do that.
This highly bureaucratized, extremely inefficient system designed for the benefit of one sector of the private enterprise system happens to harm other sectors. Auto companies pay more in health benefits here than they would across the border. They notice that. They may press for a more efficient system that breaks away from the extreme inefficiencies and irrationalities of the capitalist-based system.
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