Noam Chomsky was once defined as the
"most important intellectual of the 20th century" by the New York Times which is actually quite weird since he has spent most of his life trying to convince people in America that "the free press" is merely an illusion, carefully constructed to
manufacture consent among the American people for USA's extremely violant forreign policy.
Noam Chomsky started out as a linguistic and became later one of the most important linguistics in modern history. He defined what was later to be known as
Universal Grammar which is "the bible" for linguistics today. Though he is probably way more important in regards to the work he has done in regards to Free Thought, Free Press and Americas extremely violent US forreign policy. In my world he is one of those shiny beacons of light which unfortunately we as a specy is not able to digest just yet.
I watched the movie
V for Vendetta yesterday for the third time I think, and I think you have to be pretty stupid to not realize that this move all though the plot is in "future London" really is about
War on Terror which America currently is "fighting", all though to call
Guantanamo Bay and killing children and women in Iraq for a "war" in the name of "freedom and democracy" is probably equal to call the slaughtering of of the Jews during World War II in Nazi Germany a "fight".
For the ones among us which is awake, there exists lots of really bright and clearminded people like Noam in this world which are trying to "wake up" the rest of the population. The first time I saw
Dr. Strangelove by Stanley Kubrick I instantly put Kubrick on my "list of prophets". The same with Michael Moore the first time I saw
Fahrenheit 9/11. So my question has always been this; "why cannot the average Amercian understand this"?
Manufacturing Consent to the rescue
Noam goes a little bit into the problem in the video below here in regards to explaining it;
The short version for those not wanting to see a 55 minutes long lecture with Noam is basically that we all have a "framework of understanding". This is something which is being installed in our minds already while we're still children in Kindergarten. And later the "public school system" takes over the task of installation and before we're grown up we're so colored by the installed "framework of understanding" that we wouldn't see trees even if we were sitting on a branch in the forrest!
This is what the movie Manufacturing Consent...
...is all about...
This movie is probably one of the most important movies you can ever watch (or if you read the book - even better) since it explains why we all think as we think!
The Internet CAN save us from this
The thing about the internet which I have written about several times before is that it is the first time we have had the opportunity to choose what we see for ourselves and not have "the truth" being placed inside of us by big corporate media as if we were some kind of "mind slaves" with the single purpose of being in consent with the guys with the power. But...
Even though the internet gives us the freedom to seek out our OWN information, we still need to un-install this
Framework of Understanding which Noam talks about. And that's a much harder job unfortunately...
The recipe
There are however a lot of things you can do to minimize the impact of this "framework of understanding", I'll list some of the things I know about beneath.
- Throw your TeleVision - TV is largely responsible for doping down your mind, unless you take away the noise from your TV set your mind will never be able to truly see the really important things going on around you...
- Ask critical questions to your children - You may be "permanently destroyed", but there is still hope for your children...
- If there's a tabu in your life, then check it out for yourself - Tabus are constructed to make ourselves not be able to ask ourselves what is right and what is wrong...
- And NEVER, EVER, EVER use violence! - Violence is an act you cannot take back an regret later, if you kill a man (or woman) then the act of killing that person can NEVER be undone. There's no CTRL+Z for taking a life. And later down the road you may discover that this man (or woman) was right with her ideas, but then it's too late! Talk is the only acceptable weapon of the 21st Century!
If you haven't watched Manufacturing Consent before I would definitely encourage you to do so - TODAY!