Dear Noam Chomsky, Early Context Theory, the Trick and Simolution

Geoffrey Hamilton
Sent March 8, 1993
Response dated March 29, 1993 (not included)

Dear Mr. Chomsky, My name is Geoff Hamilton, I'm a new writer and photographer. This letter contains a thesis that you may find interesting. I hope you'll hear me out.

I think I exist, therefore I'm a thought. You have claimed an affinity to Cartesian common sense (an oxymoron) so I allude to it with the opening line. But most Cartesian ideas died out long ago because they didn't go as far towards the truth as this twist on Descartes does. The originators of these ideas were anchored down by the parochial attitudes of their time, (the Church, etc.) Your humanism isn't any less parochial and it's destroying your other cause, the search for truth.

Like you, I'm in the habit of using shocking statements to attract some attention to what I'm going to say. And to playoff your refusal to act with false modesty in Manufacturing Consent I'll call it false arrogance. There is much to follow that will shock you (with low voltage). Perhaps if I say it cunningly enough you'll see why it is you're so afraid to believe my ideas.

I've run across your name several times during my personal studies regarding Central America and the media, but was never interested in compounding my own conclusions with yours. Now that I have crossed paths with your thinking again, via the movie Manufacturing Consent, I realize you're like a twin to me. We both love anarchist concepts, solving common concerns and getting at the truth (even a few intellectual mannerisms as well). Whether it was from osmosis - from you to me - or as I prefer to believe simply a consequence of being on the right road together, we believe the same things.. .except for this one aspect: you believe humanism and the search for truth are complementary pursuits while I believe they are mortal enemies.

As long as you discriminate between humanity and the rest of life you will be trapped in the institutional deceptions and indoctrinations from which you tell others to escape. This conclusion of mine has nothing to do with my natural inclinations. Every cause you've espoused I have fought for in my "ordinary person's" way. For example, I have read up to seven newspapers a day, then clipped, xeroxed, and filed, (and was in the process of indexing the whole thing until I threw it in the garbage - I will explain later,) four years worth of articles on Nicaragua and related subjects. I debated the cause of the Nicaraguan people with anyone that would listen and even with those people that would rather die than see a leftist cause as just. I did all I could do, even going as far as screaming at Reagan, as he passed me in his limo, that he was a drug lord. But what I began to see during my investigations was not so much an institutional marginalization of ideas but, more essentially an individual marginalization process rooted in life's survival prerequisites. First some clarifications.

If a judge came upon a case that demanded that she rule on a company that she herself owned, you would expect her to step aside on that case because it would be an obvious conflict of interest. Well, the same should be done by humanity in the case I'm setting forth. Values, other than what humanity bestows, especially upon itself, in my not very humble opinion, do not exist. Therefore, whether I talk about people or fungus, after this point, is barely relevant. I morally equate them, and incidentally, them to the truly humble rock. Next, I noticed you had some Cartesian doubt pop into your mind during the filming of Manufacturing Consent when you stated you could be deceiving yourself about everything you say. That you could be wrong! (Shocking!) I'm guessing that moment of doubt was caused by the knowledge of the inescapable context of your mind. Even one's existence might at times seem quite refutable when you're looking for absolutes. If what I said on the very first line is agreed to, and we are only thoughts of ourselves, what then is truth except that which has satisfied us for a time? So for the remainder of this letter let's pretend that truth exists outside ourselves and that it is a place we arrive at like the end of a road.

What is true then? (Here I ll state the obvious because sometimes it just needs to be done.) We will all die. We think things. We feel things. We kill life in order to live. All these are true. But what is equally true and is too often overlooked is that we did not exist before our conception. We had nothing. We were nothing. We needed nothing. Did we need to live? I repeat, (quite pedantically,) we had no needs. Our parents' needs or those of the rest of the world are not our needs. We had no needs. When someone is crashing in an airplane for lack of gas and I don't know about it, does it make me need gasoline? No. The need for my existence, in particular, was not an issue - it never could be. Billions of other potential beings could have taken my place. Other peoples. (things') perceived needs (like sex), by chance, caused my existence. Now that I do have needs, perceived as they are, I cannot escape them without penalties, severe penalties at times. If as individuals we had no reason to live in the first instance, it means there is no reason, ultimately, that we do.

How is this lack of need for our own existence any different for the whole universe, God included? If it, meaning everything, never existed in the first place it would not have needed to have been invented. (This implies that space time is infinite.) You might think this is a problem to its continued survival, but existence's lack of an ultimate necessity was never a problem as long as relative necessity (like physical relativity) was, and is, functioning. It sounds glib at times to use the word relative in terms of human needs but the ultimate lack of need for anything makes it the most fruitful and true concept there is. Despite Einstein's attempts to limit relativity's meaning, not only is God playing craps with the universe, it's playing craps with God. (After all, what gives God any more purpose to exist in the first place than we have?)

Accidents, are what the universe is. (Chaos theory is just touching on this.) And accidents are played out with ultimate irrelevancies, (the space time equivalents of football games,) at stake. I call this process of creative accidents - within life forms - The Trick. (Here I wanted one more parenthesis - I can never have too many!)

Just as light can play tricks with us, so can sex trick us into procreation, pain trick us into avoiding death, the prison of our minds into suppressing intuitive decisions on ultimate truths. The Tricks are essentially genetic (structural) and conditioned as in all natural selection theories, by the necessities created by the immediate environment. But The Trick is the most flexible aspect in natural selection, it is the one that gives purpose to all events and decisions and is in no way dependent on ultimate meaning or purpose. It is fear, hunger, reflex, hate, rationalization, stubbornness, aesthetic judgement, hobbies, sports, politics, music, art, beauty. All the survival prerequisites. It leads us and pushes us to survive, it is anything that comes to mind, it is love. No amount of rational argument is going to stop it. And those beings that refuse to Trick the next generation into existence (myself being one of them - I made sure) will die off while the survival of 'fittest' will keep The Trick a going concern.

Another reason for The Trick's effectiveness is due to what I call The Big Truth. I'm sure you have observed people that won't listen to you because their frame of mind was so pat they couldn't see what was so obvious to you. What the Trick constructs is called the Context. And to leave this Context after all your relative meanings have been neatly set up opens you up to the .groundless universe.

It's a scary, purposeless universe out there when someone shakes your ideas to their foundation and causes a Zen moment of the Big Truth to be comprehended. Why would someone want to leave the Context prison/heaven for the Big Truth when it has literally nothing to offer. Where's the motivation (another Trick) to do it? After all, babies are cute, sex is fun, death is far away, right? Everybody constructs their Context, reconstructs it and has it reconfigured by others, but can't live without it.

And unless yours overlaps perfectly with the people you meet there is bound to be tension or even conflict. And caring enough to suffer to defend it is all just more of the Trick. It's also your value system.

I lay down a proposition at the start that values don't ultimately exist. Here are the reasons why they don't: Values are often defended by the argument that most people hold them to be true. What makes the majority hold one opinion at one time and hold the opposite another time? Both opinions can't ultimately be true. Therefore the majority doesn't necessarily know the truth simply because it is the majority. So can a generalized observation of any kind mean something is common to all? Most may believe that life is paramount but if one person does not, for example, a Kamikaze who believes honour is more important, the hypothesis therefore is wrong. Or if a hypothesis is tested on empirical lines - that self preservation is universal - any old suicide would immediately prove the negative. All values can be proven relative and parochial given the resources and motives to do so. (Why hasn't science attempted this route yet? Is it scared?)

Justice, politics, crime, good and evil, are values as unique and relative to the individual as a fingerprint. I hate Pol Pot but he had his own reasons. He is no more deserving of my intolerance for who he is then a person with Down's Syndrome. (The legal concept of responsibility is a pragmatic scapegoat; Does a lynx, or the hare it is eating, fret about the acts of a Pol Pot?) But if I was told to be Pol Pot's executioner I might listen to authority for a change. Though I wouldn't fool myself into thinking it was some mysterious justice being served. I would know that his survival or death by my hand was just a question of power.

When I was in the middle of indexing those articles I collected on Nicaragua this is what I realized. This is what made me throw it all out. Not only was there no justice being served against Reagan and Bush, but that there was no such thing as justice. Only power. Reagan and Bush were the prisoners of their own Tricks and Contexts. If I condemned them it would be similar to when Catholic priests told pagans that their children who had never even heard of Christ would burn in hell because they hadn't been baptized before they died of starvation. (I'm guessing this happened.) It is hardly a fair thing to do. (Fairness is one of the Tricks that keeps me going.) So I let your last two presidents get away with murder not because i agree with them but because their point of view, whatever it happens to be at any particular time, is their inescapable prison.

This is where I come to your institutional analysis. Yes it can be fruitful to do this in terms of practical opposition to the enemy propaganda. But all you will do in the end is fight it and fail with your own attempts at indoctrination, as you are doing now. If truth is paramount the struggle of the individual is the place to start. When two people meet and their Contexts do not immediately conflict then an institution is born and it is this simple way that they perpetuate their biases. They don't need to openly conspire because it is a natural survival Trick. It makes that Context more likely to survive if it pools its commonness into the herd. The more people that believe in a certain Context the more likely it will survive.

Not that it is intended that way, it just works out that way. (Incidentally, there are plenty of conscious attempts at conspiring to manipulate thought, some are run by the U.SUSor example the Commander Zero Bombing incident, The European based post-Soviet invasion resistance groups, the USIA, the infiltration by the CIA of the medias, etc. But in the main, they are insignificant compared to the natural process going on.)

Institutions only serve to magnify the individuals they represent and the 'problems' that they display. The individual that fears the onslaught of the Big Truth has the protection of the institution to coddle them. There they can hold the fort much longer. There they console each other, build each other up, and fight together for their common sense. Nazi Germany fought to it's doom to protect its Context and when the Big Truth finally flooded over them they ran for the Contexts of the Four Powers for safety.

You, Mr. Chomsky, have put a great part of your life into defending certain causes. My heart lauds your efforts. But my mind is indifferent. You see, you are acting out of the belief that there are principals to be defended, when there are none.

To illustrate the futility of thinking there are principles in politics as opposed to taking a pragmatic approach (which recognizes the power struggle going on), take free speech. You say in the movie, either you believe in free speech or you don't. Decide which it's going to be. You also say restricting it during World War Two was justified. I don't see anything in what you say but a pragmatic approach.

Here I'm going to layout some principles that are totally inane yet are constantly given lip service by you and others.

Free Speech,
All Types CNN broadcasts live pictures during the bombing of Baghdad and General Powell thanks CNN for helping to position Iraqi anti-aircraft installations.
A woman who constantly got death threats from a neighbour had to move to another part of Edmonton.
A lawyer in Toronto said after leaving court that the police and the judges were as thick as thieves and was disbarred.
A federal minister in Canada joked with a customs person that he had a bomb in his bag, he was arrested and convicted for mischief.

Joking in the wrong place, contempt of the courts, death threats, and military secrets together with several other free speech contradictions such as, libel, verbal contracts, inciting racial conflicts. They're just a few of the limits on free speech we face now. These limits are tolerated because they are not seen as free speech issues. Either you re for free speech or your not, yes or no. Ain't that right?
The Right to Vote.
Why eighteen? Why twenty-one? Why sixteen? The legal age chosen by governments to determine who is a person is no less arbitrary then the former standards of property, sex, race, education, or citizenship. People are people and the only barrier is the individual's will to vote. Maturity, physical I or mental handicaps, susceptibility to manipulation are all legally irrelevant qualities in a voter these days. Why should age still be a factor? And I am implying that even three year olds are people and can be allowed to vote
National Self-Determination.
At what point can self determination be considered final? For example, the USSR breaks up, Georgia is self determined. No wait, a first civil war divides the country on ideological lines, a second from South Ossetia, a third from Abkhazia. What if a region of Abkhazia wants self determination on religious lines from the centre, and then a town full of Turks wants to be a free town and looks to Turkey for aid. Then the local idiot of the town declares his house the Republic of Manitoba. (This last bit happened in Canada and ended in his assassination) There is no point of principal to tackle on this issue. It will always be arbitrarily decided.
Genocide, Cultural and Genealogical At what stage does a people stop living on conquered land? Take The Levant. The Canaanites threw out whatever was living there and made it their homeland. The Abrahamites Jews) claim a god gave it to them and proceed to practice genocide in order that it be won. Next the Egyptians and Mesopotamians and Greeks fail to usurp this state. Rome succeeds. The Arabs vanquish HeHellenicome, in their turn, then the Turks and British have a try. Lately a group of people making the same claim as the Abrahamites to this land, succeed by a half measure and it's called Israel. Name any people or country in the world and some form of genocide was the method by which it came into being.
War and Aggression
If war is 'bad' by definition and aggression cannot go unpunished, at what point should the status quo be maintained? What defines aggressive? If war was suddenly outlawed today, East Timour would remain forever a part of Indonesia. Dictatorships could never be overthrown. Nations would start to cross borders and establish coeconomicower bases in foreign lands. Or they would be able to pollute at will other peoples' national territory. Hatred would build between ethnic groups further then ever before. War would be outlawed but people would be killing each other hand to hand if necessary and calling each other the aggressor. This while a definition of aggressor would claim a standard that could not take into account all provocative steps or secret deals and would unfairly punish one nation on behalf of another. When, in all probability, by the spirit of the concept, the victim was in truth the aggressor. As an alternative to war there would need to be an international police force, but could they ever be anything but be another form of the armed forces?

I could go on with numerous other areas where power is the only arbiter. But to get back to the main point, what is true is that power, or I should say, forces in the universe are at play with no ultimate goal attainable, no ultimate reason for being in the first place and no possible way for it to stop happening. The Tricks build up our Contexts which in turn will, as a species, stop us from ever accepting the Big Truth.

I include myself among the deceived. My Context just happens to include such an irreverent and iconoclastic temperament that I can watch myself being scammed by the Universe and still enjoy all the sleight of hand.

If all the individuality within humanity is evolutionary mutation, variety for the survival of the species, maybe I'm a mutant that's going to be as helpful to humanity as the rifle was to the elephant. But I get the feeling that when you say, "If people try to enter the system who don't have that point of view (same as the system) they're likely to be excluded along the way. You're right......

(this correspondence goes nowhere from here)

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