Deconstructing Consent

Noam Chomsky, the MIT linguist and social critic, is justly renowned as a relentless left critic of empire. For decades he has systematically unmasked the hypocrisy of the worldview disseminated by the establishment media. Terrorism? The U.S. is the most terrorist of them all. Democracy? Only when the outcome is the one we want, only within narrow limits.

In a 1997 talk, "What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream", Chomsky lays out his method. "You look at the media, or at any institution you want to understand. You ask questions about its internal institutional structure....You want to study them the way, say, a scientist would study some complex molecule or something." Chomsky's focus is always on the self-serving contradictions and illogic, the deceptions perpetrated by the ruling elites. "By manufacturing consent, you can overcome the fact that formally a lot of people have the right to vote. We can make it irrelevant because we can manufacture consent and make sure that their choices and attitudes will be structured in such a way that they will always do what we tell them, even if they have a formal way to participate. So we’ll have a real democracy. It will work properly."

Can the people escape the indoctrination and reduced democracy that have been constructed for them by the elite? In his most recent comprehensive statement, Hegemony or Survival (2003), Chomsky frames the problem: "Recognition that control of opinion is the foundation of government... is far more important in the more free societies, where obedience cannot be maintained by the lash... Problems of domestic control become particularly severe when the governing authorities carry out policies that are opposed by the general population."

Hope remains. "It would be a great error to conclude that the prospects are uniformly bleak. Far from it. One very promising development is the slow evolution of a human rights culture among the general population, a tendency that accelerated in the 1960s, when popular activism had a notable civilizing effect in many domains, extending significantly in the years that followed.... Over the course of modern history, there have beren significant gains in human rights and democratic control of some sectors of life. These... have typically been imposed on states and other power centers by popular struggle.... There has been at least a restraining influence on state violence."

Chomsky accurately locates popular progressive struggles as the path to survival in the future. But he does not explain how those movements overcome the ideological blinders so relentlessly disseminated by the ruling elite. He does not reveal their social base, look into which sectors are most or least subject to deception, or show why movements succeed or fail. In fact, these movements appear like a bolt from the blue after hundreds of pages of uninterrupted domination of lies and irrationality. While Chomsky identifies with them, he does not explain them, he does not show how to build them. Ultimately, they are an afterthought to a pessimistic analysis in which ideological manipulation reigns supreme in a closed system.