Blog #5 Chomsky is making me rethink everything

This week we read Chomsky principles 4-7 and those principles include "Shift the Burden," "Attack Solidarity," "Run the Regulators," and "Engineer Elections." I want to focus on Attack Solidarity today though. 

A claim that he made in this section was that to masters, "solidarity is quite dangerous." That's because the people who want to control everything and have a concentration of wealth and power don't want to spend time thinking about the good of EVERYONE, but rather the good of themselves. And this idea can be seen in many ways. Chomsky writes that politicians have created the idea that "you've got to be for yourself and follow the vile maxim." This works for the really rich, and not for anyone else. He builds this claim by introducing social security and the affects it has had on the country.

Social security is always seen as a problem, but Chomsky argues that in fact, it's not even a problem. He introduces his claim about how the powerful and rich aim to reduce solidarity and then builds that claim by introducing his example on social security. He builds that by talking about how the only reason social security is seen as a problem is because it "benefits the general public," and the wealthy don't like that. 

He also discusses public education and how the general idea is that even after your kids are out of school, you pay taxes to benefit your community. He uses words like they "drive that out of people's heads," referring to the idea that corrupt politicians and wealthy people are aiming to take that idea away and have people think about the present generation and just themselves rather than people as a whole. 

The type of evidence he uses is just examples from history. At the end of the section, he has the green pages that show he cites the Social Security Act of 1935 and the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944. His evidence shows strength because he uses two examples that not only most Americans will know about, but are also relevant to those same Americans. Most people know about social security and/or have it, and most Americans have either been through the education system or have had their kids go through it (or both!). 

His strategies to make his claims more compelling are to appeal to people's natural sense of connectedness to their society. Most good people's natural response is to care about others. For example, when he talks about education and how people pay taxes for future generations to enjoy education, it makes sense. Very few people you talk to day to day will say they are against helping people get education. It just doesn't make sense. So he builds his claim in a way that everyone says, "yeah of course we would!" Then, he breaks it down and explains that the powerful and wealthy are trying to destroy this idea to get what they want. And that really affects people. He appeals a lot to pathos. Then, he makes his arguments sound logical by appealing of course to logos and citing at the end the two acts that I mentioned earlier. 

The way Chomsky writes is very passionate and subjective, and it's hard to decide whether or not I agree with everything (because it all makes sense so my immediate reaction is to doubt him). Regardless, it's a pretty interesting read.