The Responsibility of Intellectuals
Improving society is an individual effort
Only those who are willing to resist authority themselves when it conflicts too intolerably with their personal moral code, only they have the right to condemn the death-camp paymaster.
— Dwight McDonald
In his 1967 speech, The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Noam Chomsky says scholars have the time, means, and resources to lift the veil of lies and deception the government disseminates throughout its population. Chomsky identifies three points that intellectuals are responsible for sharing with the public through their findings.
- To speak the truth and expose lies
- To provide historical context
- To lift the veil of ideology
Chomsky’s speech answered Dwight McDonald’s essay The Responsibilities of Peoples where McDonald wrote it is the duty of the general population to understand their government and discover where they are being lied to so they can make changes to policy as needed.
Chomsky points out that most people are committed to their families and occupations and do not have the time and maybe not the resources or ability to investigate the misdeeds of their government and uncover the truth. It can be observed that propaganda floods into the mind of the masses through media so that instead of responding to the government, the general population responds to the passions of ideological thinking issued from misleading statements.
There are two roles for the intelligentsia to play in response to government policy. The good guys who are ironically on the side of the government and for upholding policy and the bad guys who want to see policy smashed and changed so that what’s created in its place works for the benefit of the masses.
The work of Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels on voting habits uncovered that voters’ beliefs often don’t match those for whom they voted. People will vote for candidates whose social identities they’re drawn to rather than their political platform. Voting is often powerfully affected by natural events which a candidate has no power to predict or control. Theoretical behavior does not correlate with the intentions of the masses. Nobody wants to get stuck in a low-paying job doing grunt labor. They want social security, high wages, and a healthy working environment.
Our desires for these things are stonewalled by the word wars of politicians, each vying to be portrayed as supporting the working class and partly to demonize their political opponent. From Achen and Bartels’ position, we can see that politicians speak to voters’ sense of passion and ideology rather than to their reason.
So why don’t people see through politicians’ sleight of hand and fight to get what they want instead of being exploited? It’s not just lies that build up over time to miseducate people but a concerted effort to cultivate ideology.
Throughout the 20th century, the governing forces of Russia was big news in the United States, from Marxist powers headed by revolutionary communists in the first quarter to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), lasting from December 1922 through December 1991.
Using the Soviet Union as its model the United States branded Stalin’s dictatorship as socialism through media channels, so it’s no wonder in the United States socialism is regarded as evil. Linking socialism with Joseph Stalin was a tactical maneuver to sell the virtues of capitalism, and to fuel the repulsion and fear of American people for a century.
It’s not surprising to see Trump’s followers as violent opponents of socialism, much like Joseph McCarthy’s followers opposed communism. This manner of brainwashing has been so effective that even centrists and liberals in the United States view socialism as being too far left and unsuitable for observance in the US.
The thing is, Stalin wasn’t a socialist. He wasn’t a communist. He broke away from Marxist-Leninism in the early ‘20s. He was a tyrant who manipulated the state through fear and force and murdered 40 to 50,000,000 people during his twenty-nine years in power. So the idea of socialism as a horror system that leads to the enslavement of entire nations and the rampant murder of four dozen million people is a fallacy concocted by the West conveniently built out of the murderous actions of a mad scapegoat.
But it wasn’t a fallacy that was due strictly to the misunderstanding of those who erroneously identified socialism as tyranny but was legitimized as a fact for its role of reinforcing the value of capitalism.
In the United States we’re free to set up a shop and earn as much money as possible from our customers. So there’s the notion of free enterprise as making people free, which is hazardous because those who can take advantage of it perpetuate the myth that socialism is evil — thereby safeguarding the wealth they create for themselves at the expense of laborers.
Over the last 60 years, we’ve seen improvements in policy; from this, the world is more sophisticated and civil in everyday life. The horrors of sexism, racism, terrorism, warmongering, and capitalism rampantly ruin people’s lives — but society has become more urbane— we are integrated and generally tolerant.
Who we are changes from decade to decade as people come and go, but the movement continues. We want to see the policy change from us — it happens in grassroots action. The NAACP through which in 1955 Rosa Parks spearheaded a successful campaign to boycott Montgomery public transportation for over a year; the four college freshmen from the student nonviolent coordinating committee (SNCC) who in 1960 protested segregation laws outlawing Black people from being served at a Woolworths in Greensboro, North Carolina, sparked sit-ins across the country; the protests by the SCLC in Albany, Georgia, and Birmingham, Alabama, all helped advance civil rights and created a platform for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr to communicate their message as powerfully and effectively as he did.
The responsibility of intellectuals is in the action of what you can do to improve your community. It’s not in the word policing or arguing over which movement is the most effective way to achieve transparent democracy in the United States that works for its people.
Chomsky talks about a select few — not an elite but those whose circumstances led them into a position of being able to perform — being the intelligentsia who see through the veil of government lies — is something all of us can do in various capacities.
If you want to have universal healthcare or abolish prisons and instill a human approach to detention, equal rights for everyone — this shouldn’t be a topic of discussion; it should be universally observed — or see massive radical tweaks to education; thinking about it is the first step. Discussing the problem comes next, decision-making and planning come after that. Most people don’t get past discussion. Aside from writing, neither do I. It doesn’t take intellectuals to organize protests or encourage people to vote.
Those teaching in universities may be able to see through the government’s lies and disseminate the truth behind those lies in essays and class discussions, which can, in turn, be spread by their students and readers. But academics are not the only ones capable of making change, nor are they the only ones capable of seeing through misinformation and lies which prevail. It takes the communication of like-minded people, a willingness to be wrong, tenacity, and determination to get to the truth.
