The Cold War – it is about a group of scientists who believe that they had found for the first time ever a way of controlling the human mind. They were convinced they had discovered how to change human memory. Adam Curtis, The Living Dead II: You Have Used Me As A Fish Long Enough
Their certainty and optimism turned to paranoia. They found themselves in a strange world in which nothing could be trusted, not even their own memories. ibid.
Penfield invited a psychiatrist called Ewen Cameron to come and join him in Montreal. Cameron was fascinated by Penfield’s work. He believed that if it was possible to change memories, one could produce better, more rational human beings. ibid.
In a Gothic mansion overlooking Montreal – it was both a psychiatric clinic and a centre for research. His [Cameron’s] aim was to find ways of changing the memories in the minds of his mentally ill patients. ibid.
Memory became a weapon in a confrontation between Russia and America. ibid.
Cameron had begun a series of experiments to try and brainwash the memories in his patients. He called it psychic driving. ibid.
He [Cameron] had published a paper about his work called Brainwashing Canadian Style. ibid.
The CIA decided to fund Cameron’s experiments. They wanted to find a way of controlling human beings by reprogramming their memories. ibid.
Cameron’s experiments weren’t working out quite as he expected … He couldn’t find a way of replacing them with new memories. His patients were completely free of their past and of all the emotions that went with it. ibid.
The CIA were terrified that the Russians might also be working to produce a programmed assassin. They decided to continue funding Dr Cameron; whether he was creating healthy human beings or not was now irrelevant. The prefect assassin would be programmed for one simple task, and the fewer memories and emotions involved the better. ibid.
Britain is a country haunted by its past. It is possessed by the memory of a golden age, a time long ago when this country was the most powerful on Earth. This is a film about what happens when politicians summon up that romantic vision; for a moment it gives them immense power but then they discover they have evoked forces they cannot control. The price they pay is to become imprisoned by their vision. Adam Curtis, The Living Dead III: The Attic
Some of the Colditz generation even set up private militias; a network of retired military officers who would take over the running of the country if law and order collapsed. ibid.
Mrs Thatcher took over a demoralised Tory party. The modern Britain the Conservatives had tried to build in the ’50s and ’60s had collapsed. In its place she offered a new vision: she too would modernise the economy and make it grow, but the wealth produced would recreate an older form of Britain. ibid.
He [Churchill] led the British people into a world of his own imagining. They were drawn by the power of his imagination into an idealised vision of Britain’s past. A dream from a world that was long gone. ibid.
One of Mrs Thatcher’s aims was to generate a new sense of pride in Britain’s past. ibid.
Mrs Thatcher soon established herself as a new kind of leader driven by a messianic vision. But her party didn’t realise the price the country would have to pay to be reborn in her terms. ibid.
The powerful historical forces she [Thatcher] had summoned up in Ireland were not under her control. ibid.
A group of right-wing economists in America now put forward a theory why this was happening. At the heart of their idea was Game Theory. They said that the fundamental reality of life in society was one of millions of people continually watching and strategising against each other, all seeking only their own advantage. An assumption had become a truth. The self-interested model of human behaviour that had been developed in the Cold War to make the mathematical equations work had now been adopted by these economists as a fundamental truth about the reality of all human social interaction. Adam Curtis, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom: Fuck You Buddy, BBC 2007
They [strategists] turned to a new idea called Game Theory. Game Theory had been developed as a way of mathematically analysing poker games. ibid.
A military think-tank called the Rand Corporation: and the strategists at Rand used Game Theory to create mathematical models that predicted how the Soviets would behave in response to what they saw the Americans doing. ibid.
Underlying Game Theory was a dark vision of human beings who were driven only by self-interest constantly distrusting of those around them. ibid.
The mathematical genius John Nash … In reality Nash was difficult and spiky; he was notorious at Rand for inventing a series of cruel games. The most famous he called Fuck You, Buddy. ibid.
A system driven by selfishness did not have to lead have to chaos. He proved that there could always be a point of equilibrium in which everyone’s self-interest was perfectly balanced against each other … Selfishness always led to a safer outcome: it was called the Prisoners’ dilemma. ibid.
In the early ’60s R D Laing set up a psychiatric practice in Harley Street in London. He offered radical new treatments for schizophrenia and quickly became a media celebrity. But his research into the causes of schizophrenia convinced him that a much wider range of human problems were caused by the pressure-cooker of family life. Laing decided to investigate how power and control were exercised within the world of normal families. And to do this he would use the techniques of Game Theory. ibid.
Laing produced matrices which showed how just as in the Cold War couples use their everyday actions as strategies to control and manipulate each other. His conclusion was stark. That what was normally seen as acts of kindness and love were in reality weapons used selfishly to exert power and control. From this research, Laing argued that the modern family, far from being a nurturing caring institution, was in reality a dark arena where people played continuous selfish games with each other. ibid.
Laing was radicalised by his findings. He believed that the struggle for power and control that he had uncovered in the family was inextricably linked to the struggle for power and control in the world. In a violent and corrupt society the family had become a machine for controlling people. Laing believed that this was an objective reality revealed by his scientific methods, above all by Game Theory. But these very methods contained within them bleak, paranoid assumptions about what human beings were really like, assumptions borne out of the hostilities of the Cold War. ibid.
The system that was trying to control your mind and destroy your freedom … What Laing and the counter-culture were doing was tearing down Britain’s institutions in the name of freedom. ibid.
A group of right-wing economists in America now put forward a theory why this was happening. At the heart of their idea was Game Theory. They said that the fundamental reality of life in society was one of millions of people continually watching and strategising against each other, all seeking only their own advantage. An assumption had become a truth. The self-interested model of human behaviour that had been developed in the Cold War to make the mathematical equations work had now been adopted by these economists as a fundamental truth about the reality of all human social interaction. ibid.
Public Choice theory … James Buchanan: ‘no meaningful concept that could be called the public interest.’ ibid.
Psychiatry, said Laing, was a fake science used as a system of political control to shore up a violent collapsing society. Its categories of madness and sanity had no reality. Madness was simply a convenient label used to lock away those who wanted to break free. ibid.
All human judgment would be removed and replaced instead by a system based on the power of numbers; they gave up on the idea they could understand the human mind and cure it; instead, American psychiatry created a new set of measurable categories that were only based on the surface behaviour of human beings. ibid.
More than 50% of Americans suffered from some type of mental disorder. ibid.
This new system of psychological disorders had been created by a an attack on the arrogance and power of the psychiatric elite in the name of freedom. But what was beginning to emerge from this was a new form of control: the disorders and checklists were becoming a powerful and objective guide to what were the correct and appropriate feelings in an age of individualism and emotion. ibid.
In November 1989 the Berlin Wall collapsed and the Cold War was finally over. A new era of freedom had begun. The shape that freedom was going to take would be defined by the victors – the West, and as this programme has shown, the idea of freedom that had now become dominant in the West was deeply rooted in the suspicion and paranoia of the Cold War. ibid.
The promoters of this idea of market democracy portrayed it as a glorious return to a golden age … but this was a myth. Adam Curtis, The Trap II: The Lonely Robot
Freedom was redefined to mean nothing more than the ability of individuals to get anything they wanted. ibid.
What the psychiatrists had discovered was that an objective system based on numbers had led them into a trap: the numbers had imposed their own narrow logic on how we thought and felt about ourselves. ibid.
New Labour: they gave power away to the banks and the markets. And in the management of society New Labour turned to the mathematical systems that John Major had brought in but on a scale never seen before. They believed that people actually behaved in the way described by the simplified economic model. Performance targets and incentives would be set for everything and everyone. Even cabinet ministers would have to perfect their performance targets or be punished. ibid.
‘We want a barometer of the indicators of the quality of life.’ ibid. Prescott
What New Labour began to discover was that people were more complex and devious than the simple model allowed. ibid.
Hospital managers proved to be particularly devious. When they were set targets to cut waiting lists, they ordered consultants to do the easiest operations first, like bunions and vasectomies. Complicated ones like cancers were no longer prioritised. And they found other clever ways of getting people off the lists. ibid.