Year 501 Copyright © 1993 by Noam Chomsky. Published by South End Press.
Chapter 9: The Burden of Responsibility Segment 7/7
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4. "The American Psyche"

The state-corporate nexus has always devoted substantial efforts and resources to ensure that the rascal multitude recognize their wants and needs, never an easy task, from the days when independent farmers had to be turned into wage earners and consumers. Many of them remained mired in darkest ignorance and superstitious belief, sometimes even heeding the words of such scoundrels as Uriah Stephens, a founder and the first grandmaster workman of the Knights of Labor, who outlined labor's task in 1871 as "The complete emancipation of the wealth producers from the thralldom and loss of wage slavery," a conception that can be traced to the leading principles of classical liberalism. Many took the conditions of "free labor" to be "a system of slavery as absolute if not as degrading as that which lately prevailed in the South," as a New York Times reporter described the new era in which "manufacturing capitalists" are the masters.17

Even today, after a century of intense and dedicated efforts by cultural managers, the general population often fail to perceive their inner wants. The debate over health care provides some useful illustrations. A case in point is a major article in the Boston Globe by Thomas Palmer, well to the liberal side of the spectrum. Palmer opens by reporting that almost 70 percent of Americans prefer a Canadian-style health-care system -- a surprising figure, given that this retrograde socialism is regularly denounced as un-American. But the general public is just wrong, for two reasons, Palmer explains.

The first reason is technical: it was clarified by President Bush, who "emphasized the importance of avoiding the problems of bureaucratized, universal-care systems like Canada's." Mr. Bush, New York Times correspondent Robert Pear reports, "accuses the Democratic nominee of favoring a state-run system that would have Soviet-like elements," a "back door national health insurance" in the words of Presidential adviser Gail Wilensky. This is "a charge that Mr. Clinton and other Democrats deny," Pears adds with proper journalistic objectivity, keeping the balance between the charges of crypto-Communism and the angry denials. It is a matter of logic that Commie-style systems of the kind that exist throughout the industrial world apart from the United States (and South Africa) are inefficient. Accordingly, the fact that the highly bureaucratized private sector system in the US is vastly more inefficient is simply irrelevant. It is, for example, of no relevance that Blue Cross of Massachusetts employs 6680 people, more than are employed in all of Canada's health programs, which insure 10 times as many people; or that the share of the health dollar for administrative costs is over twice as high in the US as in Canada. Logic cannot be confuted by mere fact, by Hegel's "negative, worthless existence."

More interesting is the second reason, which is "spiritual," Palmer continues. There is a "difference in outlook" north and south of the border, "theoretical differences that students of the two nations see in the psyches of the average American and Canadian." The studies of these penetrating scholars show that the Canadian system would cause "the kind of rationing of health care that Americans would never accept... The US system rations by price; if you can afford it, it's there. Canadians ration their health care by providing the same care for everyone and simply making those seeking elective or less urgent procedures wait."

Plainly, that would not accord with "American-style impatience," one "student of the two nations" explains. Imagine, he says, that "no matter how poor you are, you will sit in a hospital bed and receive care as the richest in your community. No matter what contacts you have and no matter how rich you are, you can get no better than that." Americans would never accept that, we learn from this expert (incidentally, the president of a health-care consulting firm). Further insights into the American psyche are given by the deputy director of a trade group of commercial health insurers.18

The 70 percent of Americans who don't understand their own psyches are not sampled. That is not unreasonable, after all. They are not students of the American psyche, and it has long been common understanding that they need instruction in self-awareness.


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17 Krause, Battle, 82-3.

18 Palmer, BG, Feb. 9; Pear, NYT, Aug. 12, 1992. Data from Nancy Watzman, Multinational Monitor, May 1992.