You know how most parents always raised you to believe that caring for others was imperative natural, and necessary? I wonder if rich and powerful families were raised to think otherwise?
Chomsky makes the claim that policy formation is based on the principle of solidarity (66). He goes on to define solidarity as “caring for others” (66). In addition he uses social security and public education as examples of policy formation. I believe him choosing these two examples is ethos because he’s using two major and well known programs to gain the reader's attention. Also, these programs are large and a majority of American citizens have a connection to these programs one way or another. For instance, millions of families are affected by the public education policy as long as their children are in school. Therefore by Chomsky mentioning them, it causes the readers to pay more attention to his claim because they will realize, “hey this may pertain to me at one point or another!”
Now that he has the reader’s attention, he goes on to discuss how solidarity does not pertain to the rich since they believe so much in the idea of individualism. The rich are angered by the fact that their taxes is going towards a program that is not benefiting them in any way but only feeding the mouths of another family. Unfortunately, they see it only as paying for another person’s means of living. Therefore they tear it down by defunding the program causing the people to find another means of living. I don't really understand how this idea seems plausible since most programs are funded by the rich, won’t Congress just create another policy similar to Social Security to fulfill the majorities needs?
It is ironic that Chomsky begins Principle #5 by saying how dangerous solidarity is because society has taught us that caring for others is beneficial and that you willl be rewarded for doing so. Yet, “from the view of the masters, you’re only supposed to care for yourself, not about other people.” He goes on to say that this is much easier for the rich and powerful to complete but hard for everyone else. The statement, “it’s taken a lot of effort to drive these basic human emotions out of people’s heads” suggests that the rich never had human emotions since it was so easy to let them go.
Overall Chomsky was arguing how our founding fathers built this country to stand on individualism and to not be dependent on others, that everyone should be in charge of how they construct their lives. However, this rule did not apply to every American, especially back then. This idea only pertains to the elite, rich and powerful: people who have status included with their name. Here Chomsky uses logos to relate to the readers. Our class, his current audience, is not apart of the rich and powerful so we find it logical to believe that it isn't possible for the rich to feel real human emotions, solidarity, towards people like us.
I thought Chomsky formed his argument well about how "policy formation is based on the principle of solidarity", however I disagree. I disagree because I think today, there are a lot of policymakers that don't have solidarity themselves, so they wouldn't incorporate it into policy. His two examples, public education and social security, are powerful tools that add ethos to his argument. I think this sort of shows how policymakers themselves can use rhetoric to persuade their constituents to support things they don't necessarily agree with.
ReplyDeleteI chose to read your blog post because I have been taking notes on the claims and support Chomsky uses throughout the article; one of which I have saved was when he said “Solidarity is quite dangerous” (page 65). I found this shocking. Like you said, our parents and teachers… everyone around us from a young age mention the importance of helping and caring for others. Why would Chomsky mention the opposite? His evidence of the Social Security being based on solidarity and the overpriced tuition of college in the United States proved his point. That people take these caring ideas and exploit them. So when Chomsky continued to mention that people now want to defund systems such as Social Security… makes sense. However I don’t know to what extent I agree to this. People’s view on what is deserved is so “me”-oriented. People want what is best for them, but when it comes to others, basically…. Who cares. Chomsky even mentioned this for tax money. The tax price used to be so high as it paid for college tuition but overtime people don’t want to pay for the tuition of someone across the street, and therefore us Americans need to pay for our own tuition, pay for the funding for our own university to run.
ReplyDeleteI think you're definitely right about the part where using education as an example caught the audience's attention. I know it definitely caught mine, and this was probably the easiest to understand from the reading. Chomsky keeps mentioning the vile maxim of"All for ourselves, nothing for anyone else." I agree that some rich people are extremely about themselves and their family and no one else. However, there are also wealthy people out there that give so much of their money to charitable causes or to poorer families. Everyone can be selfish and greedy in their own way, even poor people, so I don't really think its fair to portray the rich people as all for themselves. Most of the time, those rich people put in the hard work to get to the successful place they are in right now, so why shouldn't they enjoy the perks of being on top? After all, they earned it right?
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