Review of Chomsky's Necessary Illusions, Indroduction

(For Chomsky's full text: http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/ni/ni-contents.html.)

Summary of Chomsky’s contributions as a setting for readings from “Necessary Illusions, Thought Control in Democratic Societies.”

Among Noam Chomsky’s contributions to rebel culture count first a theory of communication (a science of linguistics) that challenged nearly every other researcher in the world and then became the standard against which the vast majority of their work was judged. The theory requires freedom and creative intelligence to explain meaning. Language is a discreet type of culture. Our ability to respond, adapt, create and express all depend on free choice. Chomsky proceeded to elucidate his creative theory’s epistemological parity with the theories used by the "hard sciences,” an elucidation that has helped to expose how much of the edifice of Western knowledge is a system reinforcing greed and power thoroughly confusing knowledge with control and driven by an effort to suppress and deny our freedom.
A second contribution Chomsky has made to rebel culture comes from his focus on state sponsored terror, atrocities, torture and related means for controlling far too many people in the empire. Chomsky makes a further point that the fear of torture and its selective practice are the core of every nation’s government to a greater or lessor degree.
This leads to Chomsky’s third contribution to rebel culture, his explanation of the social processes of thought control in democratic societies that require educated people to participate in acts of terror, torture, and war while believing that they promoting justice.
It’s this third contribution, his elucidation of thought control in democratic societies, that is the subject of this review.

Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman composed Manufacturing Consent to bring forth a theory of institutional constraints that filter news and ultimately public thought and which, because they are institutional, are beyond the control of individual people. Chomsky and Herman describe five institutional filters through which news must pass:
1. The first filter is that media are themselves corporations, operating under the same laws, with the same goals and striving for the same “investment climate” as all other corporations. The few exceptions, publicly owned media, community media, independent media and insurgent media (as exemplified in Fanon’s Voice of Algeria,) prove the rule by their entirely different narratives of reality and by exposing the disparity between reality and the corporate media’s narrative.
2. The second filter is the source of the money on which media depend. Advertisers have dominated content since the rise of the corporation in the early 1920s. (* Chomsky frequently sites the British labor journal which was Britain’s most popular press in the 1920s but was undermined by a corporate paper, not because it had more subscribers, but because of its ability to distribute and to sell beneath costs by subsidizing its revenues with advertisements, which in turn led to its market dominance.) Chomsky further clarifies that advertiser driven media place the advertisers in the role of buying the attention of the media’s audience. This reverses common expectations that the audience pays for the information the media distributes. Since advertisers pay nearly all the costs of media it is not the advertisers who are selling goods to us through the media, nor the papers who are selling us news. The driving financial transaction is the advertisers purchase from the media monopolies of our attention. Our attention and the public space of the airwaves are raw materials the media monopolies pirate and sell for a handsome profit.
3. The third filter is using corporate and government leaders who share media owner’s assumptions and values as the sources of analysis, reporting, opinion and information.
4. The forth filter is flak, in which Chomsky and Herman include harassment, shunning, lawsuits and blacklisting of reporters who stray outside the dominant narrative. Flack is an extension of deadly force relised in the assassination of reporters and dissidents which happens infrequently inside the US but freqently in its many clients ruled by military or royal families, and in war zones.
5. The fifth and final filter discussed in Manufacturing Consent is the ideological belief in the free market. This filter is the most complicated and the least concrete. Chomsky and Herman develop a comparative method. They contrast essentially identical atrocities occuring in friendly vs enemy countries. The same events, for example massacres of innocent people, are banner headlines if perpetrated by our enemies and unnoticed or excused if their perpetraters are clients. Chomsky and Herman also find that leaders, for example Saddam Hussein, can be a people's hero or a terrorist enemy in our papers depending on his compliance with US corporate interests. This media and intellectual compliance to US corporate objectives goes unnoticed in our democratic culture. At least in the Soviet Union they knew they were being lied to.

Many thousands of people have read Manufacturing Consent. Like Chomsky’s other seminal works, it defines a type of research that has led to an entire field of knowledge and to communities who rely on Chomsky and those he influences to re-interpret daily events in a coherent context.

But Chomsky follows Manufacturing Consent with a deeper but little read analysis: Necessary Illusions, Thought Control in Democratic Societies. In a second part, I will summarize the main argument of this book.