CHOMSKY: When Im driving, I sometimes turn on the radio and I find very often that what Im listening to is a discussion of sports. People call in and have long and intricate discussions, and its plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that. People know a tremendous amount. They know all sorts of complicated details and enter into far-reaching discussion about whether the coach made the right decision yesterday and so on. These are ordinary people, not professionals, who are applying their intelligence and analytic skills in these areas and accumulating quite a lot of knowledge and, for all I know, understanding. On the other hand, when I hear people talk about, say, international affairs or domestic problems, its at a level of superficiality thats beyond belief. In part, this reaction may be due to my own areas of interest, but I think its quite accurate, basically. And I think that this concentration on such topics as sports makes a certain degree of sense. The way the system is set up, there is virtually nothing people can do anyway, without a degree of organization thats far beyond anything that exists now, to influence the real world. They might as well live in a fantasy world, and thats in fact what they do. Im sure they are using their common sense and intellectual skills, but in an area which has no meaning and probably thrives because it has no meaning, as a displacement from the serious problems which one cannot influence and affect because the power happens to lie elsewhere. Now it seems to me that the same intellectual skill and capacity for understanding and for accumulating evidence and gaining information and thinking through problems could be used - would be used - under different systems of governance which involve popular participation in important decision-making, in areas that really matter to human life.
Posted on: Wed, 17 Sep 2014 02:20:18 +0000
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