“Citizens of the democratic societies should undertake a course of intellectual self defense to protect themselves from manipulation and control, and to lay the basis for meaningful democracy.”
Noam Chomsky
“Governments should not have this capacity. But governments will use whatever technology is available to them to combat their primary enemy – which is their own population”
Noam Chomsky
“Most schooling is training for stupidity and conformity, and that’s institutional, but occasionally you get a spark, somebody’ll challenge your mind, make you think and so on, and that has a tremendous effect you just reach all sorts of people. Of course if you do it you may very have problems, you have to tread the narrow line. There are plenty of people who don’t want students to think, they’re afraid of the crisis of democracy. If people start thinking you get all these problems that I quoted before. They won’t have enough humility to submit to a civil rule or they’ll start trying to press their demands in the political arena and have ideas of their own, instead of beleiving what they’re told. And privelage and power typically doesn’t want that and so they react and the high school teacher that tries to get students to think may find oppression, firing and so on.”
Noam Chomsky
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow a very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people a sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of debate.”
Noam Chomsky