Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (74 page)

And if you look at the place where investigation of “conspiracies” has absolutely flourished, modern American history, I think what’s notable is the
absence
of such cases—at least as I read the record, they almost never happen. I mean, occasionally you’ll find something like the Reaganites, with their off-the-shelf subversive and terrorist activities, but that was sort of a fringe operation—and in fact, part of the reason why a lot of it got exposed so quickly is because the institutions are simply too powerful to tolerate very much of that stuff. As far as the Pentagon goes, sure, the Services will push their own interests—but typically they do it in pretty transparent ways.

Or take the C.I.A., which is considered the source of a lot of these conspiracies: we have a ton of information about it, and as I read the information, the C.I.A. is basically just an obedient branch of the White House. I mean, sure, the C.I.A. has done things around the world—but as far as we know, it hasn’t done anything on its own. There’s very little evidence—in fact, I don’t know of any—that the C.I.A. is some kind of rogue elephant, you know, off on its own doing things. What the record shows is that the C.I.A. is just an agency of the White House, which sometimes carries out operations for which the Executive branch wants what’s called “plausible deniability”: in other words, if something goes wrong, we don’t want it to look like we did it, those guys in the C.I.A. did it, and we can throw some of them to the wolves if we need to.
  ³⁷
That’s basically the role of the C.I.A., along with mostly just collection of information.

It’s the same with the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, all these other things that people are racing around searching for conspiracy theories about—they’re “nothing” organizations. Of course they’re
there
, obviously rich people get together and talk to each other, and play golf with one another, and plan together—that’s not a big surprise. But these conspiracy theories people are putting their energies into have virtually nothing to do with the way the institutions actually
function
.

The Kennedy-assassination cult is probably the most striking case. I mean, you have all these people doing super-scholarly intensive research, and trying to find out just who talked to whom, and what the exact contours were of this supposed high-level conspiracy—it’s all complete nonsense. As soon as you look into the various theories, they always collapse, there’s just nothing there.
  ³⁸
But in many places, the left has just fallen apart on the basis of these sheer cults.

M
AN
: There’s perhaps one exception, though—what about Martin Luther King’s assassination?

That’s interesting—see, that’s the one case where you can imagine pretty plausible reasons why people would have wanted to kill him, and I would not be in the least surprised if there in fact
was
a real conspiracy behind that one, probably a high-level conspiracy. I mean, the mechanisms were there, maybe they would have hired somebody from the Mafia or something to do it—but that conspiracy theory is perfectly plausible, I think. And interestingly, I’m not aware that there’s been very much inquiry into it—or if there has been, I haven’t heard about it.
  ³⁹
But in the case of the one that everybody’s excited about—Kennedy—I mean, nobody’s even come up with a plausible
reason
.

In fact, that’s a pretty dramatic contrast, isn’t it: the case of the King assassination is on its face very plausible, and the case of the Kennedy assassination is on its face extremely implausible—yet look at the difference in treatment.

W
OMAN
: Do you have any ideas why that might be?

Well, there are a lot of things in a way “conspiring” to make the Kennedy assassination an attractive topic these days. I mean, the Kennedy administration was in many ways very similar to the Reagan administration—in policy and programs—but they did do one smart thing that was different: they sort of buttered up the intellectual class, as compared with the Reaganites, who just treated them with contempt. So they gave sort of an
appearance
of sharing power (it was never real) to the kinds of people who write books and articles, and make movies, and all of those things—and the result is, Camelot has always had a very beautiful image. And somehow it’s all succeeded in getting most of the population to believe the lies about Kennedy. I mean, even today you can go down to poor rural black areas in the South and find pictures of him on the walls. Kennedy’s role in the Civil Rights Movement was not pretty. But somehow the imagery has succeeded, even if the reality was never there.
  ⁴⁰

And certainly a lot of things have gone wrong in the last thirty years, for all sorts of independent reasons. I mean, the Civil Rights Movement made great achievements, but it never lived up to the hopes that many people invested in it. The anti-war movement made achievements, but it didn’t end war. Real wages have been declining for twenty years.
  ⁴¹
People are working harder, they have to work longer hours, they have less security—things are just looking bad for a lot of people, especially young people. I mean, very few people expect the future for their children to be anything like what they had, and entry-level wages in the United States have just declined radically in the last fifteen years—for instance, wages you get for your first job after high school are now down 30 percent for males and 18 percent for females over 1980, and that just kind of changes your picture of life.
  ⁴²
And one could easily go on. But the fact is, a lot of things have happened that aren’t very pretty. And in this kind of situation, it’s very easy to fall into the belief that we had a hero, and we had a wonderful country, and we had this guy who was going to lead us, we had the messiah—then they shot him down and ever since then everything’s been illegitimate. So really there have to be serious efforts to get past this, I think.

The Decision to Get Involved

M
AN
: Noam, we’ve been discussing a number of activist strategies and problems—I’d like to talk for a moment about some of the reasons why people
don’t
get involved in activism. Suppose somebody convinced you, at the level of your belief in most things, that it was impossible to change the country, that the basic institutional structures we have now are going to remain in place for the next 200 years—you know, more or less adapted, but the same basic structures. I’m wondering, would you behave any differently?

Zero.

M
AN
: You would behave exactly the same way?

Same way. In fact, you don’t even have to make it hypothetical—when I first got seriously involved in anti-Vietnam War activity, I was a hundred percent convinced that absolutely nothing could be done. I mean, into 1965 and ’66, if we wanted to have an anti-war meeting in Boston, we’d have to find six topics—you know, “Let’s talk about Venezuela, Iran, Vietnam, and the price of bread, and maybe we can get an audience that’ll outnumber the organizers.” And that went on for a long time. It looked impossible.

M
AN
: So if you thought that the current situation was going to continue, just persist forever, you would still do it?

Yes.

M
AN
: Why, exactly?

Well, for a number of quite simple reasons. For one thing, if somebody convinced me of that, it would be because I’m totally irrational—there’s no
way
to convince anybody of such things rationally. Look, we cannot predict the weather two weeks ahead, and that’s something relatively simple, it’s not like human society.

M
AN
: It’s a hypothetical question, it gets to motivations—I’m sure none of us believe it, none of us believe you could prove it
…

Not only could you not prove it, you couldn’t even say anything convincing about it.

M
AN
: But, nevertheless, because in fact a great many people not understanding that point
do
feel this way, or tend to feel this way sometimes, and get depressed at those moments—what I’m wondering is, anyway, in any event, what gets you up each morning to do the things you do? Is it that you think in terms of winning a little way down the road, or is it something else?

Well, it’s hard to introspect, but to the extent that I introspect about it, it’s because you basically have two choices. One choice is to assume the worst, and then you can be guaranteed that it’ll happen. The other is to assume that there’s some hope for change, in which case it’s possible that you can help to effect change. So you’ve got two choices, one guarantees the worst will happen, the other leaves open the possibility that things might get better. Given those choices, a decent person doesn’t hesitate.

M
AN
: But is it really true that a decent person will only go that one way? I’m remembering a friend of mine who was an activist in the Sixties and intended to move into a working-class neighborhood to do organizing, and finally he decided not to. Somewhat later he went back to graduate school and became a psychiatrist, and now I’m sure he has progressive values, but he’s certainly not involved in any significant way in political activity. But the choice he made back then was a very conscious one: he looked around and said, “The impact that I personally am going to have is so small, because I’m not So-and-so and So-and-so, that I feel it’s just not worth giving up what I think I’ll be giving up.”

I know plenty of people like that too. But see, that person now, let’s say he’s a rich psychiatrist somewhere—okay, he’s got a lot of options, he’s simply deciding at some point not to face them. They’re always there. For example, he’s got money: if he doesn’t want to do things himself, he can give money to people who do. In fact, movement groups have existed because people who were doing other things were willing to fund them—something as trivial as that. And you can go way beyond that, of course, and still live your elegant lifestyle and do the work you want to do. I know plenty of people who have in fact divided their lives that way.

Now, of course, it’s extremely easy to say, “The heck with it—I’m just going to adapt myself to the structures of power and authority, and do the best I can within them.” Sure, you can do that. But that’s not acting like a decent person. Look, if you’re walking down the street and you see a kid eating an ice-cream cone, and you notice there’s no cop around and you’re hungry, you can take the ice-cream cone because you’re bigger and just walk away. You can do that—probably there are people who do. But we call them pathological. On the other hand, if they do it within existing social structures, we call them normal—but it’s just as pathological, it’s just the pathology of the general society.

Again, people always have choices, so you can decide to accept the pathology—but then do it honestly at least. If you have that grain of honesty in you, say: “Okay, I’m going to honestly be pathological.” Or else just try to break out of it somehow.

M
AN
: For a lot of people, though, it appears that there’s an all-or-nothing choice—it appears that there’s the choice between being “normal,” pathological as you describe, but a normal member of society with its normal benefits and costs, having a reasonably average or perhaps elite existence, one that’s accepted. And then there seems to be the “all” choice. I think the reason why it’s so hard for people even just to take a leaflet, or to give a donation at a relatively low level which means nothing to them financially—which is less money than they’re going to spend on dinner Friday night when they go out—seems to me to be because there is this psychologically very powerful effect. At some level people know that it’s right, but they also know that to do it somewhat leads to doing it more—so they just close the door right at the very beginning. I’m not sure how as organizers we can manage to overcome that situation
.

I think you’re right that just giving your contribution of a hundred dollars to the Central America Support Center or whatever is a statement that you know that that’s the right thing to do—and then once you’ve stated that it’s the right thing to do, the question arises, “How come I’m only doing this when I could be doing a million times more?” And it’s very easy just to say, “Look, I’m not going to face that problem, I’m just going to forget it all.” But that’s like stealing the ice-cream cone from the kid.

The reality is that there’s a whole range of choices in the middle, and all of us have made them—none of us are saints, at least I’m not. I haven’t given up my house, I haven’t given up my car, I don’t live in a hovel, I don’t spend 24 hours a day working for the benefit of the human race, or anything like that. In fact, I don’t even come close: I spend an awful lot of my time and energy just doing scientific work.

M
AN
: And you don’t feel guilty about that
.

Well, that’s not so clear. But I certainly do devote an awful lot of my energy and activity to things that I just enjoy, like scientific work. I just like it, I do it out of pleasure. And everybody else I know does the same thing.

M
AN
: Do you fool yourself into believing that it increases your effectiveness as a political person somehow?

No, that’s ridiculous—it has no effect on that, And I certainly don’t do it for that reason. I do it because I like it, and I think it’s getting somewhere.