“没有机会的自由是魔鬼的礼物”

处于世界最顶端的是当地的地主，最底层的是农民，地主家的狗和农民之间，差了可不止一个等级。伊尼亚齐奥在小说《方特马拉》（fontamara）中说。

Real world is spinning around this old gravity. 

一代代诚实勤恳的的劳动人民忘我的兢兢业业地工作着，背负着每一个时代沉重而坚实的地基，和站在地基上跳梁的小丑和咬人的狗。

当马戏团的驯兽师挥动鞭子时，狗就会跳起来。可是真正训练有素的狗，不需要鞭子就会翻筋斗。乔治·奥维尔说。

共识被制造出来、被贩卖、通过日益兼并集中的几个大财团控制的世界（美国）媒体，批量生产出电影、音乐、新闻（比如迪士尼的电影、times等主流媒体），送达千家万户。看似五花八门，其实并没有选择。

新自由主义，怕不是《美丽新世界》里描述的，快乐的毒剂。在看似自由的选择里，喜好早就被严格控制，阿尔法和贝塔阶层以下，愚民政策、暴力洗脑、催眠疗法、确保个体只是完成出生之前就已经被决定的社会阶层、消费模式和岗位职责。《美丽新世界》作为一部反乌托邦作品，却在资本横行的、新自由主义支配的世界里，掷地有声。

政治的核心，以我愚见，就是人与人之间该如何相处，扩大到权力结构、利益分配、国家社会组织形式等方面的复杂和微妙。个体的自由和选择，都离不开政治、经济的大背景。

新自由主义，大概是这个时代政治经济模型，以及给个体的自由幻象。

Robert W. McChesney 给 Noam Chomsky 1999年 profit over people, neoliberalism and global order 写的introduction，对新自由主义的批判，是我近来读到的最佳。

Neoliberalism is the defining political economic paradigm of our time—it refers to the policies and processes whereby a relative handful of private interests are permitted to control as much as possible of social life in order to maximize their personal profit. Associated initially with Reagan and Thatcher, for the past two decades neoliberalism has been the dominant global political economic trend adopted by political parties of the center and much of the traditional left as well as the right. These parties and the policies they enact represent the immediate interests of extremely wealthy investors and less than one thousand large corporations.

Aside from some academics and members of the business community, the term neoliberalism is largely unknown and unused by the public-at-large, especially in the United States. There, to the contrary, neoliberal initiatives are characterized as free market policies that encourage private enterprise and consumer choice, reward personal responsibility and entrepreneurial initiative, and undermine the dead hand of the incompetent, bureaucratic and parasitic government, that can never do good even if well intended, which it rarely is. A generation of corporate-financed public relations efforts has given these terms and ideas a near sacred aura. 

As a result, the claims they make rarely require defense, and are invoked to rationalize anything from lowering taxes on the wealthy and scrapping environmental regulations to dismantling public education and social welfare programs. Indeed, any activity that might interfere with corporate domination of society is automatically suspect because it would interfere with the workings of the free market, which is advanced as the only rational, fair, and democratic allocator of goods and services. At their most eloquent, proponents of neoliberalism sound as if they are doing poor people, the environment, and everybody else a tremendous service as they enact policies on behalf of the wealthy few.

The economic consequences of these policies have been the same just about everywhere, and exactly what one would expect: a massive increase in social and economic inequality, a marked increase in severe deprivation for the poorest nations and peoples of the world, a disastrous global environment, an unstable global economy and an unprecedented bonanza for the wealthy. Confronted with these facts, defenders of the neoliberal order claim that the spoils of the good life will invariably spread to the broad mass of the population—as long as the neoliberal policies that exacerbated these problems are not interfered with!

In the end, neoliberals cannot and do not offer an empirical defense for the world they are making. To the contrary, they offer—no, demand—a religious faith in the infallibility of the unregulated market, that draws upon nineteenth century theories that have little connection to the actual world. The ultimate trump card for the defenders of neoliberalism, however, is that there is no alternative. Communist societies, social democracies, and even modest social welfare states like the United States have all failed, the neoliberals proclaim, and their citizens have accepted neoliberalism as the only feasible course. It may well be imperfect, but it is the only economic system possible.

Earlier in the twentieth century some critics called fascism “capitalism with the gloves off,” meaning that fascism was pure capitalism without democratic rights and organizations. In fact, we know that fascism is vastly more complex than that. Neoliberalism, on the other hand, is indeed “capitalism with the gloves off.” It represents an era in which business forces are stronger and more aggressive, and face less organized opposition than ever before. In this political climate they attempt to codify their political power on every possible front, and as a result, make it increasingly difficult to challenge businesses—and next to impossible—for nonmarket, noncommercial, and democratic forces to exist at all.

It is precisely in its oppression of nonmarket forces that we see how neoliberalism operates not only as an economic system, but as a political and cultural system as well. Here the differences with fascism, with its contempt for formal democracy and highly mobilized social movements based upon racism and nationalism, are striking. Neoliberalism works best when there is formal electoral democracy, but when the population is diverted from the information, access, and public forums necessary for meaningful participation in decision making. As neoliberal guru Milton Friedman put it in his Capitalism and Freedom, because profit-making is the essence of democracy, any government that pursues antimarket policies is being antidemocratic, no matter how much informed popular support they might enjoy. Therefore it is best to restrict governments to the job of protecting private property and enforcing contracts, and to limit political debate to minor issues. (The real matters of resource production and distribution and social organization should be determined by market forces.

Equipped with this perverse understanding of democracy, neoliberals like Friedman had no qualms over the military overthrow of Chile’s democratically elected Allende government in 1973, because Allende was interfering with business control of Chilean society. After fifteen years of often brutal and savage dictatorship—all in the name of the democratic free market—formal democracy was restored in 1989 with a constitution that made it vastly more difficult, if not impossible, for the citizenry to challenge the business-military domination of Chilean society. That is neoliberal democracy in a nutshell: trivial debate over minor issues by parties that basically pursue the same pro-business policies regardless of formal differences and campaign debate. Democracy is permissible as long as the control of business is off-limits to popular deliberation or change; i.e. so long as it isn’t democracy. 

The neoliberal system therefore has an important and necessary byproduct—a depoliticized citizenry marked by apathy and cynicism. If electoral democracy affects little of social life, it is irrational to devote much attention to it; in the United States, the spawning ground of neoliberal democracy, voter turnout in the 1998 congressional elections arguably was a record low, with just over one-third of eligible voters going to the polls. Although occasionally generating concern from those established parties like the US Democratic Party that tend to attract the votes of the dispossessed, low voter turnout tends to be accepted and encouraged by the powers-that-be as a very good thing since nonvoters are, not surprisingly, disproportionately found among the poor and working class. Policies that could quickly increase voter interest and participation rates are stymied before ever getting into the public arena. In the United States, for example, the two main business-dominated parties, with the support of the corporate community, have refused to reform laws that make it virtually impossible to create new political parties (that might appeal to non-business interests) and let them be effective. Although there is marked and frequently observed dissatisfaction with the Republicans and Democrats, electoral politics is one area where notions of competition and free choice have little meaning. In some respects the caliber of debate and choice in neoliberal elections tends to be closer to that of the one-party communist state than that of a genuine democracy.

But this barely indicates neoliberalism’s pernicious implications for a civic-centered political culture. On the one hand, the social inequality generated by neoliberal policies undermines any effort to realize the legal equality necessary to make democracy credible. Large corporations have resources to influence media and overwhelm the political process, and do so accordingly. In US electoral politics, for just one example, the richest one-quarter of one percent of Americans make 80 percent of all individual political contributions and corporations outspend labor by a margin of 10-1. Under neoliberalism this all makes sense, as elections then reflect market principles, with contributions being equated with investments. As a result, it reinforces of the irrelevance of electoral politics to most people and assures the maintenance of unquestioned corporate rule.

On the other hand, to be effective, democracy requires that people feel a connection to their fellow citizens, and that this connection manifests itself through a variety of nonmarket organizations and institutions. A vibrant political culture needs community groups, libraries, public schools, neighborhood organizations, cooperatives, public meeting places, voluntary associations, and trade unions to provide ways for citizens to meet, communicate, and interact with their fellow citizens.Neoliberal democracy, with its notion of the market über alles, takes dead aim at this sector. Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless.

In sum, neoliberalism is the immediate and foremost enemy of genuine participatory democracy, not just in the United States but across the planet, and will be for the foreseeable future.

It is fitting that Noam Chomsky is the leading intellectual figure in the world today in the battle for democracy and against neoliberalism. In the 1960s, Chomsky was a prominent US critic of the Vietnam War, and, more broadly, he became perhaps the most trenchant analyst of the ways US foreign policy undermines democracy, quashes human rights, and promotes the interest of the wealthy few. In the 1970s, Chomsky, along with his co-author Edward S. Herman, began their research on how the US news media serve elite interests and undermine the capacity of the citizenry to actually rule their lives in a democratic fashion. Their 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent, remains the starting point for any serious inquiry into news media performance.

Throughout these years Chomsky, who could be characterized as an anarchist or, perhaps more accurately, a libertarian socialist, was a vocal, principled, and consistent democratic opponent and critic of Communist and Leninist political states and parties. He educated countless people, including myself, that democracy is a non-negotiable cornerstone of any post-capitalist society worth living in or fighting for. At the same time, he has demonstrated the absurdity of equating capitalism with democracy, or of thinking that capitalist societies, even under the best of circumstances, will ever open access to information or decision making beyond the most narrow and controlled possibilities. I doubt any author, aside from perhaps George Orwell, has approached Chomsky in systematically skewering the hypocrisy of rulers and ideologues in both Communist and capitalist societies as they claim that theirs is the only form of true democracy available to humanity.

In the 1990s, all of these strands of Chomsky’s political work—from anti-imperialism and critical media analysis to writings on democracy and the labor movement—have come together, culminating in work like this book on democracy and the neoliberal threat.

Chomsky has done much to reinvigorate an understanding of the social requirements for democracy, drawing upon the ancient Greeks as well as the leading thinkers of democratic revolutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As he makes clear, it is impossible to be a proponent for participatory democracy and at the same time champion capitalism, or any other class-divided society. In assessing the real historical struggles for democracy, Chomsky also reveals how neoliberalism is hardly a new thing, but merely the current version of the battle for the wealthy few to circumscribe the political rights and civic powers of the many.

Chomsky may also be the leading critic of the mythology of the natural “free” market, that cheery hymn that is pounded into our heads about how the economy is competitive, rational, efficient, and fair. As Chomsky points out, markets are almost never competitive. Most of the economy is dominated by massive corporations with tremendous control over their markets and that therefore face precious little competition of the sort described in economic textbooks and politicians’ speeches. Moreover, corporations themselves are effectively totalitarian organizations, operating along nondemocratic lines. That our economy is centered around such institutions severely compromises our ability to have a democratic society.

The mythology of the free markets also submits that governments are inefficient institutions that should be limited so as not to hurt the magic of the natural “laissez-faire” market. In fact, as Chomsky emphasizes, governments are central to the modern capitalist system. They lavishly subsidize corporations and work to advance corporate interests on numerous fronts. The same corporations that exult in neoliberal ideology are in fact often hypocritical: they want and expect governments to funnel tax dollars to them, and to protect their markets for them from competition, but they want to assure that governments will not tax them or work supportively on behalf of non-business interests, especially on behalf of the poor and working class. Governments are bigger than ever, but under neoliberalism they have far less pretense to being concerned with addressing non-corporate interests.

And nowhere is the centrality of governments and policymaking more apparent than in the emergence of the global market economy. What is presented by pro-business ideologues as the natural expansion of free markets across borders is, in fact, quite the opposite. Globalization is the result of powerful governments, especially that of the United States, pushing trade deals and other accords down the throats of the world’s people to make it easier for corporations and the wealthy to dominate the economies of nations around the world without having obligations to the peoples of those nations. Nowhere is the process more apparent than in the creation of the World Trade Organization in the early 1990s, and, now, in the secret deliberations on behalf of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI).

Indeed, it is the inability to have honest and candid discussions and debates about neoliberalism that is one of its most striking features. Chomsky’s critique of the neoliberal order is effectively off-limits to mainstream analysis despite its empirical strength and because of its commitment to democratic values. Here, Chomsky’s analysis of the doctrinal system in capitalist democracies is useful. The corporate news media, the PR industry, the academic ideologues, and the intellectual culture writ large play the central role of providing the “necessary illusions” to make this unpalatable situation appear rational, benevolent, and necessary if not necessarily desirable. As Chomsky hastens to point out, this is no formal conspiracy by powerful interests: it doesn’t have to be. Through a variety of institutional mechanisms, signals are sent to intellectuals, pundits, and journalists pushing them to see the status quo as the best of all possible worlds, and away from challenging those who benefit from the status quo. Chomsky’s work is a direct call for democratic activists to remake our media system so it can be opened up to anticorporate, anti-neoliberal perspectives and inquiry. It is also a challenge to all intellectuals, or at least those who express a commitment to democracy, to take a long, hard look in the mirror and to ask themselves in whose interests, and for what values, do they do their work.

Chomsky’s description of the neoliberal/corporate hold over our economy, polity, journalism, and culture is so powerful and overwhelming that for some readers it can produce a sense of resignation. In our demoralized political times, a few may go a step further and conclude that we are enmeshed in this regressive system because, alas, humanity is simply incapable of creating a more humane, egalitarian, and democratic social order.

In fact, Chomsky’s greatest contribution may well be his insistence upon the fundamental democratic inclinations of the world’s peoples, and the revolutionary potential implicit in those impulses. The best evidence of this possibility is the extent to which corporate forces go to prevent there being genuine political democracy. The world’s rulers understand implicitly that theirs is a system established to suit the needs of the few, not the many, and that the many cannot therefore ever be permitted to question and alter corporate rule. Even in the hobbled democracies that do exist, the corporate community works incessantly to see that important issues like the MAI are never publicly debated. And the business community spends a fortune bankrolling a PR apparatus to convince Americans that this is the best of all possible worlds. The time to worry about the possibility of social change for the better, by this logic, will be when the corporate community abandons PR and buying elections, permits a representative media, and is comfortable establishing a genuinely egalitarian participatory democracy because it no longer fears the power of the many. But there is no reason to think that day will ever come.

Neoliberalism’s loudest message is that there is no alternative to the status quo, and that humanity has reached its highest level. Chomsky points out that there have been several other periods designated as the “end of history” in the past. In the 1920s and 1950s, for example, U.S. elites claimed that the system was working and that mass quiescence reflected widespread satisfaction with the status quo. Events shortly thereafter highlighted the silliness of those beliefs. I suspect that as soon as democratic forces record a few tangible victories the blood will return to their veins, and talk of there being no possible hope for change will go the same route as all previous elite fantasies about their glorious rule being enshrined for a millennium.

The notion that there can be no superior alternative to the status quo is more farfetched today than ever, in this era when there are mind-boggling technologies for bettering the human condition. It is true that it remains unclear how to establish a viable, free, and humane post-capitalist order, and the very notion has a utopian air about it. But every advance in history, from ending slavery and establishing democracy to ending formal colonialism, has had to conquer the notion at some point that it was impossible to do because it had never been done before. And as Chomsky hastens to point out, organized political activism is responsible for the degree of democracy we have today, for universal adult suffrage, for women’s rights, for trade unions, for civil rights, for the freedoms we do enjoy. Even if the notion of a post-capitalist society seems unattainable, we do know that human political activity can make the world we live in vastly more humane. And as we get to that point, perhaps we will again be able to think in terms of building a political economy based on principles of cooperation, equality, self-government, and individual freedom.

Until then, the struggle for social change is not a hypothetical issue. The current neoliberal order has generated massive political and economic crises from east Asia to eastern Europe and Latin America. The quality of life in the developed nations of Europe, Japan, and North America is fragile and the societies are in considerable turmoil. Tremendous upheaval is in the cards for the coming years and decades. There is considerable doubt about the outcome of that upheaval, however, and little reason to think it will automatically lead to a democratic and humane resolution. That will be determined by how we, the people, organize, respond, and act. As Chomsky says, if you act like there is no possibility of change for the better, you guarantee that there will be no change for the better. The choice is ours, the choice is yours.

作为掀起人文社科领域不亚于“哥白尼革命”的近代语言学的创始人，乔姆斯基从语言使用的角度，对美国霸权的虚伪、传统知识分子不自觉的沦为权力的走狗、国家宣传和公共意识、权力和财富、共识的生产和制造等方面，政治评论犀利辛辣彻底深刻。对美国在中东、世界范围内的为非作歹，一针见血。

太多学科，用术语和行话把自己包装的云里雾里，其实真正的知识可以深入浅出的解释清楚。对于中东晕头晕脑很多年的我，在看乔深入浅出的对历史事实的引经据典中，也渐渐清晰了起来。于是最近总是抱着我的小电脑在深夜里痛哭。

关于共识的生产和制造，乔用语料库的方式，用大数据去看主流媒体的政治立场。对于意识形态的警惕，和对一个政治学论证到底是何居心的不确定，让以前的我很难相信孰真孰假。但乔用科学的方法去讲事实，摆证据。知道真相的我（或者说获得了这个新视角以后）只有痛哭流涕的份。

我常说，不仅要看说了什么，是谁，在什么时间，以怎样的方式和目的说，也要看什么没有说。

乔把这个道理用在政治和媒体上。比如，对难民的报道，美国所谓的左翼主流媒体，大篇幅报道的永远是美国敌对政权制造的难民，却对美国扶持的政权制造的难民和屠杀只字不提。

并不是把民主、自由批判的一无是处。只不过，太多看起来中立的东西，实际上是一个虚伪的包装。揭开这层层虚伪，才能看清前进的方向。

我站在空无一物的房间中央，问题突然爬上我的心头：所以你是说要打破阶层的桎梏？于是底层劳动人民可以翻身做主？

no，absolutely not。是不要有阶层这个东西。

你知道的，权力、财富、地位是会异化人的。人人见到你都点头哈腰、对你趋之若鹜、溜须拍马，能不膨胀的怕是要有神仙般的定力吧。人于你，如果如蝼蚁，那么很难在蚂蚁爬上你家厨房台面的时候，不伸手碾死吧。

权贵是一种社会角色，无论是谁来扮演，太子还是昔日造反农民，都是一样的剧情。

暴力的受害者，一回头就是施暴者。因为暴力和压迫对人最大的毒害，不在于直接的身体创伤，而在于对人想象力的毒杀。

乔姆斯基老先生，作为犹太人，对以色列建国后，曾经被压迫的少数族裔，犹太人翻身做主以后变身压迫阿拉伯人的种族主义者，痛心疾首。

于是人的解放，最重要的是思想上的解放。要让人在除了压迫和被压迫之外，看到、相信团结友爱的可能。

我不够聪明也没有读足够多的书的小脑瓜，并不能认同任何一场政治革命的方式，在思想没有解放之前，我以为血往往是白流的。我认为要瓦解这压迫的吃人的话语，但不是现在那种“富人要有社会责任感，因为维持你资本主义统治的前提是穷人不起来暴动”。我会觉得这基于恐惧的话语，短期内可能有见效，但不是基于理解与共情，长期上只怕会加剧对立与分隔。

我觉得重要的，是解释世界和改造思想。在权贵的剧本里加上共情的美德，拆解人与人之间的对立，去除掉把每个人困在自己的小剧本里的小我概念。大概真的还蛮社会主义+社群主义的一个理想。despite how hard，我想现阶段上决定要向这个方向去努力。

下面是一段我很想删掉的话，留下做个错误示范吧。

在学校学古典经济学的时候，总是觉得这个“资源是有限的，经济学是研究如何最有效的配置资源”的framing怪怪的。就好像自己是，被蒙上了眼睛的狗，被训练洗脑每顿饭的肉是有限的，所以要和其他狗去撕咬和抢夺。看不见市场的手，其实是满脸横肉的地主的手。

有朋友说，要想有钱不难，如果你能够降低一点自己的底线。

这两年，我大概也懵懂明白了那么一点，兢兢业业的工作，为的是温饱和内心一点坚守。游手好闲而财富自由的生活，其实很容易实现，只要开动脑筋，想办法和地主家的狗成为朋友，进而成为地主家的狗。

我的成年，大概是从不想做champion wife, 花瓶妻子，到不想拿着精英学校毕业的车票，挤入通往阿尔法贝塔阶层的弱肉强食号列车，再到从小地主家温暖的坑头出走。

看似躺平，其实准备好开始真正艰苦卓绝的努力。

“努力”意味着什么？

在每个人的语境里，都有着截然不同的内涵和象征意义。

所以前几天复旦毕业典礼上那个教大家“拒绝躺平，继续努力”的教授，怕是给了一个过于generalized的缺乏对每个语境的具体考量的建议。take it to best case 是君子自强不息厚德载物，但缺乏对躺平和努力在不同语境中的定义，容易被误解成替地主挥鞭子的人。

：可我不喜欢我上面这整段话，和这整篇文章，充满了戾气和讽刺，是我被对立的话语给捕获了。

权贵也好、地主也罢，其实每个角色都有每个角色的艰难困苦，​施暴者同时也是受害者。困于狭小自我的孤岛，困于敌对的想象，然后把这种想象活成现实，才是集体和个体的悲剧，无论拿的是什么角色和剧本​。

但可能我自己说的这一切，也没有逃脱魔鬼的窠臼吧​。

继续吐槽下自己没头没脑、整天胡说八道​。写出来笑话一下自己也好，让我看看你的小脑瓜里都是些什么不清不楚的浆糊，确认完毕，请继续努力。滴- ​