An interview with
Noam Chomsky
Interviewer: Your famous “Filters of Propaganda Model” is very famous, and has put a new spin on the way one may view the way that we receive information and essentially, truth, from the media and other sources. What is the potential for truth given these ideas that you have put forth? Is the truth accessible to the masses or do you think that such propaganda is hiding it?
Chomsky: “All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.” Because of this, I feel that people are not being given the truth, all they are being given is the information needed to fill these roles of consumption and to believe that they are the one’s making the decisions. This is ever present in government, as party managers familiarize themselves with what it is that the masses are looking to hold onto, whether it is religion, or hope of resolution to a present issue, they make sure that their leader appears as a solution or ideal figure. Essentially, the political party will manipulate the masses into believing that they are what the public needs and that they are making the best decision, when in reality they may have a different agenda. The same goes for advertisements and other companies that have something to gain from the public.
Interviewer: So then do you feel we are being lied to?
Chomsky: In a way, yes. Many institutions that are present in our society are geared in one way, and that is to be submissive to the norm. “The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.” It follows the propaganda model very closely, especially in the notion of “flak”. If one does not learn to be submissive and follow the norm, that is if one becomes too independent in thinking from what the systems want from you, then you may experience what is called flak, and though one may deal with such fine on their own, someone else down the line of persons they are involved with may not, and may attempt to stop them. This is how our society’s biggest institutions such as the education and government systems, or religion, stay prominent.