Bauen

Saturday, September 10, 2005

Know More

"My own feeling is that the right approach is to build on the strengths: to recognize what's healthy and solid about having not hundreds, but thousands of flowers blooming all over the place--people with parallel concerns, maybe differently focused, but at the core ... similiar values and a similiar interest in empowerment, in learning, in helping people understand how to defend themselves against external power and take control of their own lives, in reaching out your hand to people who need it. All the things that you people have talked about--that's a common array of concerns. And the fact that there's a tremendous diversity can be a real advantage--it can be a real way of learning, of learning about yourself, and what you care about, and what you want to do, and so on. But of course, if it's going to bring about real change, that broad array of concerns is going to require some form of integration and inter-communication and collaboration among its various sub-parts...

...in the end, there really are only small changes that can be made within the existing institutions--because they've got their own commitments, which are basically to private power. In the case of the media, they have a committment to indoctrination in the interests of power, and that imposes pretty strict lmits on what they can do.

So the answer is, we've got to create alternatives, and the alternatives have got to integrate these lots and lots of different interests and concerns into a movement--or maybe not one necessarily, which somebody could then cut the head off of, but a series of interconnected ones: lots of associations of people with similiar concerns, who've got in mind the other people next door who have related concerns, and who can get together with them to work for changes. Maybe then we can ultimately construct serious alternative media... serious in scale, at the point where they can consistently present people with a different picture of the world, a picture different than the one you get from an indoctrination system based on private control over resources."

-Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power

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