Power Systems by Noam Chomsky Read Free Book Online

intellectuals in El Salvador had their heads blown off. 4 Worse. In fact, nobody even knows their names. Everyone knows the names of the Eastern European dissidents. Try to find somebody who knows the names of the dissidents in, say, El Salvador or Colombia, anywhere in U.S. domains.
    Â 
    A lot of what is called the new media, Facebook and Twitter, plus what are called handheld devices, iPads and tablets and the like, are creating greater social atomization and isolation. I’ve had the experience of being in a restaurant and everyone is looking down at their iPhone, sending messages and checking e-mail. What impact might this have on society?
    Â 
    I’m really not part of this culture at all, so I’m just observing it from outside, and not with very much intensity or understanding. But my impression is that the people participating in it, the young people participating in it have a feeling of intimacy and interaction. But I have to say, it reminds me of a close friend of mine as a kid who had a little booklet in which he wrote the names of all his friends. He used to boast that he had two hundred friends, which meant he had no friends, because you don’t have two hundred friends. And I suspect that it’s similar to that. If you have a whole bunch of friends on Facebook or whatever, it almost has to be pretty superficial. If that’s your outlet to the world, there’s something really missing in your life.
    In fact, one of the significant aspects of the Occupy movements, maybe their most significant aspect, is the way they’re overcoming that by creating real communities of people who interact, who have associations and bonds and help each other, support each other, really talk to each other freely, something which is very much missing in the whole society. You have it in bits and pieces, of course. But there has been, I think, a conscious effort to atomize the society for a long time, to break people up, to break down what are called secondary associations in the sociological literature: groups that interact and construct spaces in which people can formulate ideas, test them, begin to understand human relations and learn what it means to cooperate with each other. Unions were one of the major examples of this, and that’s part of the reason for their generally very progressive impact on society. And, of course, they’ve been a major target of attack, I think partially for that reason.
    The whole concept of social solidarity is considered very threatening by concentrated power. That’s true in any system, and is very striking in ours.
    Although the social media are undoubtedly invaluable for organizing and keeping some connections alive, I think they contribute to atomization. That’s my superficial impression from outside.
    Â 
    Let’s talk about education in a capitalist society. You’ve taught for many years. One of your strongest influences was the educator John Dewey, whom you’ve described as “one of the relics of the Enlightenment classical liberal tradition.” 5
    Â 
    One of the real achievements of the United States is that it pioneered mass public education, not just elite education for the few and maybe some vocational training, if anything, for the many. The opening of land-grant colleges and general schools in the nineteenth century was a very significant development. But if you look back, the reasons for this were complex. Actually, one of them was discussed by Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was struck by the fact that business elites—he didn’t use that term—were interested in public education. He speculated that the reason was that “you must educate them to keep them from our throats.” 6 In other words, the mass of the population is getting more rights, and unless they’re properly educated, they may come after us.
    There’s a corollary to this. If you have a free education that engenders creativity and