He is so smart. We all know that. The thing is he is a free thinker. By this I men that he is not connected to any 'ism'. As long as I've known of him, ever since I audited his courses at MIT, ever since I met him and went to his talks, people have been trying to pigeon hole him into being what their passion is. Be a Socialist. Be a Marxist. Be pro Israel. Endorse our cause.
Brilliantly, he has refrained from doing so. My Buddhist teacher says that as soon as you put yourself into any box or label, you are no longer free. It makes perfect sense that a box contains you. My guess is that most thinking people wish to be free and at the same time, many wish to belong to something. I am not saying that one should not be passionate about things or not be an activist, I am trying to take the example from Chomsky and be free.
He also teaches that everyone should evaluate information themselves. He finishes off the notion of pundits giving their slant on what is happening. It turns events into black and white polarities, stopping action and stopping common sense. Before all the access to news that we have today, he was putting down the complaint that we had no access to info. He mentioned in particular that observations abut the placement of an article in a paper such as the New York Times could tell a reader as much as the article itself. If a military take over in Honduras was a little article on page three, well someone big was happening that important people didn't want us to notice.
At one talk of his I heard at Hampshire College, the students were frustrated by the fact that he wouldn't tell them what to think. He was teaching us how to think better, how to go from the particular to the big picture.
Here is a leap of the sort my mind loves to make: In many of the historic religions (not the fundamentalist factions) people are seeking out something that might be called "The Direct Approach". We don't want the priest or the minister or the rabbi to tell us what to think. As Waldo Emerson described in the 1800s in The Divinity School Address, we want our own experience. We want to be free to know and relate to our own spirituality.
Letting others tell us how to fell or what to think is highly dangerous and really limiting. I drew a lot of wrath when I voted for Obama in his first election but voiced big hesitations. He was clear in his campaign that he liked the war in Afghanistan. I did not. Then various liberal friends didn't like the fact that I was not all in for everything he did. I was not. It became obvious right away that he was under the sway of big banks, big pharma, big agriculture, big military. I was signaled out as a malcontent and it was true. I am anti war. After Obama became the drone president, I was fully disenchanted. I voted for Jill Stein in the second election.
Trying to be a free thinker has its own traps. But this is where good old fashioned intuition helps a lot. It is the best tool in our toolbox. Think about it. Does something feel right? Are your personal alarm bells going off? If so, it is time to be more awake and pay attention. When I listen to Chomsky talk, I think of his brilliance but I also think of him as having an intuition which leads him to the truth. Why else would we have that capacity?
Go to Chomsky's website and watch a random video and see what you think.
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