False Prophets & Intellectual Dissedents

Questioner:

"Politicians are rarely great minds or intellectuals, they are 'scoundrels' as Samuel Johnson said. So my question to Mr Chomsky is, what effect do intellectuals or great minds have in the politics of today, and has he ever been able to influence any major decision of the political leaders in the past few decades?"

Noam Chomsky:

First of all, we should have no illusions. History is written by intellectuals, almost by definition. So if you look at history intellectuals look pretty good. On the other hand, if you look at the actual history, the role of intellectuals has typically been awful. I mention the Bible as an example, but it's a good example that pattern replicates. There were people in the biblical period who we would call dissident intellectuals, they're called Prophets. It's a bad translation of an obscure Hebrew word. But if you look at what the Prophets were saying, it's what we would call dissident intellectuals. Geopolitical critique, a call for justice and freedom and so on. Yes, that's dissident intellectuals. How were they treated? Well? No, they were denounced as haters of Israel. They were driven into the desert, they were imprisoned, reviled. Now, there were intellectuals at that time who were very highly respected, namely the flatterers at the court. Hundreds of years later they were called false prophets. That's the way it works. It's the flatterers at the court who are typically the mainstream of the intellectuals. It runs all the way through history, very few exceptions. So, you don't look to intellectuals to influence policy. Dissident intellectuals often have many things to say, but they're usually pretty badly treated, varying in different societies.

What makes things better is popular movements. That is what effects policy, that's how we've gained the freedoms that we have and we have a lot of freedom, but it didn't come from above and it didn't come from intellectuals. It came from organised popular movements, which demanded more freedom, like the non-violent resistance in Iraq, which forced the US and Britain to permit elections. That's how we got the right to vote here. That's how we got women's rights, that's how we got freedom of speech and so on. Constant struggle, that's why there are such efforts to break up popular movements and to atomise people and separate them from one another and to create enormous gulfs between public opinion and public policy. It's a constant battle and, yes, that's the way to make things better as in the past, plenty of concrete ways to do it. We're much more able to than in the past because of the freedoms that have been won. We have a legacy of freedom, which has been won. We can use it, improve it, carry it forward or we can abandon it. But you're not going to look to intellectuals to save you.

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