Avram Noam Chomsky, an American professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and institute professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, is one of the most cited scientists in the world. This is partly due to his rich work (he has written over 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, and politics) but also to many, often moving, quotes. He is called the father of modern linguistics, and his no. one contribution to the achievements of Mankind is the theory of linguistics. He is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of cognitive science.
But he is not only a respected and highly valued scientist. He is known for his political activism and social criticism. He became famous for his bold, often ruthless views on geopolitics and manipulation, which we are increasingly subject to in the modern world. He is loved and despised equally. He does not shy away from being heard in good and bad times. He gained notoriety for his often radical political views, which he describes as a libertarian socialist, which in American conditions requires tremendous courage.
Today, I would like to share a THEORY OF MANIPULATION that Chomsky developed while observing the modern world. I am curious about which points will appeal to you the most or cause you to associate them with something you know from your experience.
American socialist Noam Chomsky: a short biography.
Avram Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928, in Philadelphia. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father was William Chomsky, originally from what is now Ukraine, and his mother was Elsie Simonofsky, originally from what is now Belarus. Their first language was Yiddish. Noam later described his family life as a kind of Jewish ghetto and recalled the personal harassment he experienced as a child at the hands of Irish and German Catholics in the mid-1930s. His parents were educated men. His father held a Ph.D. in Hebrew studies and was the principal of Gratz College for many years.
From a young age, Chomsky had a wide and varied interest, and his greatest passion was linguistics. He admitted that his father's doctoral dissertation on David Kimhi’s medieval Hebrew grammar influenced his later thinking about language skills. As a young man, he frequented alternative bookstores in New York. That might have influenced his ability to think independently and shaped his sensitivity to disinformation.
In 1945, at age 16, he began studying at the University of Pennsylvania, a prestigious and yet open university to Jews, something that was not yet a given in the United States at that time. There, in 1955, he earned a Ph.D. in linguistic structuralism.
In 1961, he became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT. He worked there until 2002 when he formally retired and became institute professor emeritus but continued to conduct research and seminars. Moreover, in 2017, at 89, he was hired as a part-time professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he still lectures. This is a rare exception.
In 1949, he married Carol Doris Schatz, a linguist as well. Their marriage lasted 59 years until his wife died of cancer in December 2008. Interestingly, in 2014, 6 years after the death of his first wife, at the age of 86, he remarried and married Valeria Wasserman.
From his first marriage, he has two daughters, Aviva and Diana, and a son, Harry. Aviva is a professor of history and coordinator of Latin American and Caribbean studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts. She previously taught at Bates College in Maine and was a research fellow at Harvard University, where she specialized in the history of the Caribbean and Latin America.
He gained international recognition mainly thanks to his revolutionary linguistic concepts published in the second half of the 1950s. His work in the field of linguistics changed the way people perceive and understand language and its structure. The theory of Transformational-Generative Grammar, co-created with Morris Halle, stands out.
His 1957 publication Syntactic Structures was a breakthrough and challenged the then-prevailing statistical linguistics. He introduced the concepts of generative grammar and universal grammar. He stated that the human brain is designed to understand linguistic structures. A universal set of rules exists and governs all human languages. Therefore, according to him, our ability to use language is an innate human trait.
He also created the concept of a biological tool responsible for language acquisition in children (LAD, the language acquisition device), which he often refers to as the Chomsky gene. This had a strong influence on psychologists and linguists dealing with the process of language acquisition in children.
He also opposed the then-prevailing behaviorism and its prominent representative B. F. Skinner. The behaviorist movement treated the brain as a black box. Stimuli enter, and reactions emerge, but we do not know what is happening inside.
The strongest criticism of this concept is Chomsky's review of Skinner's publication titled Verbal Behavior. He strongly opposed the statement that language is a set of learned habits. He also introduced an important distinction between internal and external language. In his opinion, human language is used internally, not for external communication. In external communication, the so-called e-language (English external) is used, which consists of many forms that do not constitute a coherent whole. Almost everything we do consciously or unconsciously can be used to communicate, for example, clothing, non-verbal messages, pheromones, etc. - but this is not language. For example, there is no grammatical syntax. Communication can be characterized by great creativity, but communication is not language. The two concepts must be correctly distinguished.
Chomsky is widely considered one of the most prominent linguists in the field of cognitive science, a public intellectual, and one of the most influential intellectuals of the 21st century.
He has contributed to the study of language and philosophy, and to psychology, computer science, and programming languages.
He has already been given a place in the history of science similar to Copernicus, Darwin, and Einstein and he made a scientific revolution in his field.
However, he is not only a respected and highly valued scientist and professor in the field of cognitive science. He has become famous for his bold, often ruthless views on regimes, geopolitics, and the perspective of the individual, who in the modern world is increasingly controlled and steered by the system.
He is loved and despised in equal measure. He does not shy away from being heard, both in good times and bad. He gained fame, among other things, for his often radical political views, which he describes as a libertarian socialist. Which in American conditions requires great courage. This may be because Noam Chomsky is of Belarusian-Ukrainian origin.
He has been involved in numerous political movements, mainly in the fields of civil rights, human values, democracy, and global issues. He was critical of US foreign policy, mainly in the context of what he considered senseless military interventions and the violation of human rights. He clearly expressed his controversial and critical opinions on this subject.
He gained particular attention in 1967 with his anti-war essay The Responsibility of Intellectuals, criticizing the involvement of the USA in the Vietnam War. His political activism also included criticism of the media, which can be read in the book Consent to Domination, where he discusses the model of propaganda used by the media. This model has been empirically tested and confirmed.
In addition to linguistics, his works cover such topics as globalization, capitalism, the free market, media theory, psychological abuse, and the role of intellectuals in society.
His influence on many scientific areas, culture, and politics is difficult to overestimate. Chomsky is still active as a publicist, teacher, and lecturer, inspiring successive generations of researchers and thinkers. He has given many interviews and answered countless questions. Among the open conversations, it is worth watching, for example, the discussion from 2004 posted below, showing how Chomsky perceived the policies of US President George Bush.
Noam Chomsky's theory of reality manipulation
Here are 10 points that make up Prof. Chomsky's theory of social manipulation.
1. Distract attention
A key element of social control is distracting attention from important issues and changes made by political and economic elites through constant distraction and a flood of public opinion with irrelevant information. A distraction strategy is the key to preventing the public from becoming interested in basic knowledge of science, economics, psychology, neurobiology, and cybernetics.
Keep public opinion away from real social problems by enslaving them with unimportant matters. Society must be busy all the time, with no time to think.
2. Generate a problem and propose a solution
This approach is also referred to as problem-response-solution. Create a situation (problem) that prompts recipients to take immediate steps to correct or prevent the problem in the future. For example, allow violence to spread out and the public to agree to tighten the legal norms to protect their security at the cost of their freedom. Or create an economic crisis to justify radical cuts in welfare benefits.
3. Introduce changes gradually
Do not make radical changes drastically, but gradually. Push the boundaries of endurance and acceptance step by step to the limit of endurance, breaking down changes over the years. Thus, radical socio-economic changes in the 1980s and 1990s were successfully pushed through and led to the formation of the neoliberal economy: minimum benefits, privatization, the uncertainty of tomorrow, employment flexibility, mass unemployment, low wages, and no guarantee of a decent income. Introducing such changes would simultaneously trigger a revolution.
4. Postpone changes
Another way to introduce an unwelcome change is to present it as a painful necessity we have to make.
It is easier for people to accept the specter of future sacrifice than to make a change immediately. Moreover, societies tend to naively believe that everything will be fine and that sacrifice may be avoided. This strategy gives you more time to get used to the awareness of the change. When the time comes, you put it into practice and embrace it with an attitude of resignation.
5. Talk to the public as you would talk to a child
Most advertising and communications to the general public use language and argumentation to address children or the mentally ill. So simplified and downright infantile. The more you want to blur the image of reality for your interlocutor, the more you try to infantilize the message. Why?
If you talk to a person as if they were 12, they are likely to respond or react uncritically as if they were 12 or under on the suggestion.
6. Focus on emotions, not rationality
Using emotions is a classic technique designed to eliminate rational analysis and common sense. Emotionally marked language makes it possible to subconsciously instill ideas, desires, fears, anxieties, and impulses and thus, induce specific behaviors.
7. Keep people ignorant
Make society unable to understand methods of exercising control.
Education offered to the lower classes must be poor and average enough that the gap of ignorance between the lower and upper classes persists, and control techniques remain incomprehensible to the lower classes.
8. Promote mediocrity (!)
Make the public believe it is okay to be stupid, vulgar, and uneducated.
9. Make people feel guilty
Let individuals believe they are the only ones to blame for their failures through a lack of intelligence, abilities, or effort. In this way, instead of rebelling against the economic system that puts the individual at a disadvantage, the person will live in guilt and devaluation of self-worth. In this state, the person will become passive and unable to take action to change the system. And passivity means no revolution.
10. Get to know people better than they can themselves
Over the past 50 years, rapid scientific advances have created a widening gap between the resources of knowledge generated and what is available (and translated) to the masses. Thanks to biology, neurobiology, and psychology the power elite can acquire advanced knowledge about individuals and society. This allows the elite to know a man better than he can know himself. That means the elite can have more control over individuals than themselves.
According to Chomsky, propaganda has always been creating lies and half-truths.
However, it is a great tool for spreading false information so that as many people as possible believe it and lose their sense of reality. Be vigilant and notice how frequently repeated lies bombard us from all sides.
“Everywhere from popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel helpless. And the only role they can play is to accept all decisions and blindly pursue constant consumerism.”
See also other biographies:
David Clutterbuck - the father of modern mentoring in Europe
Sir John Whitmore - the father of business coaching
Marilyn vos Savant - a person with the highest IQ in the world
Byron Katie – who would you be without your story?
Maurice Ravel – Engineer or Composer?
Fritz Perls – short biography, quotes
The Beatles as a role model for a perfectly functioning team?
Check the term gaslighting, different forms of gaslighting (incl. verbal abuse), and their influence on mental health
Comments