Noam Chomsky’s Split Personality

This article is published in partnership with Yasha Levine’s Substack.

The latest release of Jeffrey Epstein documents has everyone on the left once again struggling to understand Noam Chomsky’s relationship with the Pedophilic Pimp to America’s Elite. How is it possible that Chomsky — with his sharp, computerlike mind and his profound sense of morality — was palling around with such a shady, nefarious character? Many who’ve known Chomsky well — including Glenn Greenwald and Chris Hedges — have been wrestling with this question and what Hedges calls the larger “politics of betrayal.”

I was less surprised at the news than some people who know Chomsky. This is because I have long been struck by how strange and compartmentalized his thought process has always been. Years ago, while working on my book “Surveillance Valley,” I was baffled that, even as Chomsky developed his comprehensive critique of U.S. empire, he was in his own small way helping to create the militarized surveillance state I call “Vampire Valley.” His work, after all, was directly and famously funded by the same imperial security apparatus that he was critiquing — an apparatus that wanted to put a digital layer over the entire world. Specifically, Chomsky was pursuing a very particular kind of theoretical linguistics — a linguistics that treated the mind as a computer and language as an algorithm. He was at MIT, which is basically an extension of the Pentagon. And his work, not surprisingly, was funded by the Pentagon — by the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force and other related arms of the imperial state.

The reason these entities funded his linguistics? As I write in my book:

He rose to fame by redefining the study of linguistics, and helped spark the “cognitive revolution” by positing that human language was produced by what was essentially a specialized language computer module in the human brain — like a sound card plugged into a mother board. He theorized that language could be boiled down to logical expressions, which was the foundation of computer language. His linguistic work at MIT in the 1950s was funded by the army, navy, and air force in large part because the military wanted to develop computer technology that could process human language on the fly in order to analyze intelligence intercepts, to process press reports, and to understand human commands.

This was no minor thing. At the time, the military was plowing many Manhattan Projects’ worth of resources into developing and weaponizing all sorts of computer systems — for missiles and radars and intelligence gathering and psychological and cultural warfare. The internet and personal computers and all the artificial intelligence stuff we’re seeing now were part of this larger project. And to paranoid security state bureaucrats calling the R&D shots back then, Chomsky’s linguistic work would help move the needle and bring this reality into being. Or to put it another way: They thought it would help them create the ultimate early AI weapon against the commies!

In college, I took a linguistics class that basically taught Chomsky’s theories as gospel. I remember sitting in a café doing these algorithmic-type universal grammar sentence analyses for my homework and being very confused by the nonsensical uselessness of it. You deconstruct a sentence to the point that it has no meaning. And? Only later did I realize that there was a reason why it felt like this approach to studying human language was made for computers: It was. Chomsky helped trigger the cognitive revolution in psychology — a “revolution” that posited the best way to understand the human mind is to think of it as a digital computer … a development that was essentially funded by the Pentagon because it aligned with its larger drive to turn the world into a giant surveillance machine. I only realized this later, when I was writing my book.

This split in Chomsky’s brain — the radical and the early AI weapons guy — was best explored by Chris Knight in his wonderful and unexpected book “Decoding Chomsky.” Knight uses Chomsky as a kind of foil to look at the world of post-World War II American security state academia and its obsession with integrating everything into computer systems. The book ranges across all sorts of seemingly unrelated regions, too: Cold War fantasies of global control, Russian Revolutionary poets, the origins of linguistics, the dream of discovering a universal human language. About Chomsky, the book is pretty clear: He was distraught at being part of the Pentagon machine and so he simply denied that his work had any politics to it. His linguistics was pure; it hovered in the clouds, untainted by this world. In a word: He compartmentalized the two sides of his life’s work.

Consider how he described his Pentagon funding. In “Understanding Power,” a book that reprinted some of Chomsky’s speeches and public appearances, Chomsky describes the military guys who funded him as idiots who had no idea what they were doing. In fact, he claimed that the more military money a university got, the more radical it was.

This is a clear obfuscation — he’s lying to himself and others. It is no surprise that being awash in military money gave you the most freedom. You are the most elite worker in American society, directly contributing to weapons system development … helping protect the American Way of Life from Godless Communism. You were doing technology in a society that held technology above God — you were part of an anointed priestly class, working in the holiest of holies, given wide latitude to do things as long as the higher-ups thought it could be put to use.

But linguistic theories are not disconnected from political considerations. Even outside their potential usefulness to the military in computerizing warfare and intelligence gathering, studying human language as if it can be reduced to code running on a digital computer is a political idea at the highest level of politics: It promotes a certain view of humanity … namely, that we are machines … that we can be reduced to ones and zeroes … that our bodies and minds can be integrated seamlessly with a weapons system or an oil refinery or a vacuum cleaner. That kind of view of society promotes the creation of a certain kind of society … with certain values and technologies and social structures.

Another part of Chomsky’s personality that went against the moral and down-to-earth and egalitarian image he took pains to craft for himself in the political part of his life was this: He was vicious with any linguist who dared question or critique the validity of his linguistic theories. There’s a whole other book written about it — “The Linguistic Wars” — that describes in great detail how Chomsky used his godlike stature in the world of linguistics to destroy the careers of any dissenters — fellow academics, former students and friends who critiqued his pure logic approach to language and offered their own counter-theories.

So here was Chomsky, this egalitarian anarchist acting like a total tyrant when the correctness of his theories and his life’s work were called into question. To me, it is another example of split-brain behavior: The political guy who wants socialism and peace on Earth and the Pentagon-funded academic obsessed with his prestige who tolerates no dissent.

It’s funny, too, because Chomsky’s detractors were proven largely right; his search for Universal Grammar has been discredited. The way large language models handle language is through pure statistics and brute-forcing massive amounts of data. So the paranoid Pentagon bureaucrats had backed the wrong horse with Chomsky. But it didn’t matter. Chomsky was still very useful. He helped push the larger field of psychology in the right direction: toward studying minds as computers. So he paid for himself many times over.

As far as Chomsky and Epstein. Well, who knows what that’s about. Maybe Chomsky was flattered by the attention? Maybe he liked to hang out with weird and interesting characters? Maybe it’s just an elite and celebrity thing — it’s a tiny class and the people at the top are more comfortable hanging with each other than the peasants? Maybe he was starting to get senile? It does appear that Chomsky seemed to not believe or care about the media hype around Epstein, chalking it up to smear campaigns and #MeToo hysteria. It wouldn’t be surprising given how much Chomsky himself was smeared and attacked in the press — and he basically wrote as much to Epstein at some point.

Whatever the cause, Epstein was probably not the best guy to pal around with if you’re trying to maintain a position of morality from which to lash and whip America’s unaccountable elites. Epstein was a creature of those elites — he is just one tiny example of what happens in a society where power is concentrated in the hands of a super-minority. The fact that an Epstein existed in America is not surprising. He is gone, but no doubt another thousand Epsteins will take his place.

All of which illustrates how people are not logical. Chomsky’s theories posited that something as core to life as language can be boiled down at a deep level to pure logic — a set of rules that can modeled on computers. But here, with Epstein, Chomsky clearly breaks his own moral logic, depressing all his fans and exciting his critics. It just goes to disprove the whole rationalist-computer approach to understanding reality. We are not machines. Our minds are geared for fuzzy thinking, compartmentalization, denial, illogical rationalizations. Everything depends on social context. Everything is relative to something else. No one lives in absolutes. That’s why politics is so hard and messy. We are not machines and never will be — no matter how hard they train us in an attempt to make it so.