Following the logic of Marcuse’s argument, the new student left set out to attack this system of social control. It was summed in by the slogan, ‘There is a policeman inside all our heads. He must be destroyed’. And that policeman was going to be destroyed by overthrowing the state and the corporations that put it there. Adam Curtis, Century of the Self, BBC 2002
A system driven by and 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. Adam Curtis, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom: Fuck You Buddy, BBC 2007
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.
It is a strange story and it begins with a strange woman in the 1950s of New York. Ayn Rand had left Russia in the 1920s and gone to live in California … Human beings, Rand said, were alone in the universe. They must free themselves from all forms of political and religious control, and live their lives guided only by their selfish desires. If they did this, they would become heroic figures. Adam Curtis, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace I: Love and Power, BBC 2011
Rand’s ideas were seen as mad and dangerous … but Rand continued to write. ibid.
‘We are heroic. We can know the world. We contain nature. We can achieve our goals. We can do what we want. What does it matter that we are alone? Who do we need? Why do we need anyone? We have ourselves.’ ibid. Barbara Branden, 1950s Randian
The group most inspired by her were the new entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley … They saw themselves as Randian heroes. ibid.
The new computer technology could turn everyone into Randian heroes. It was a vision of a society where the old forms of political control would be unnecessary. ibid.
Together they could create their own kind of order. It was a cybernetic dream which said that the feedback of information between all the individuals connected as nodes in the network would work to create a self-stabalising system. The world would be stable if everyone would be heroic Randian beings completely free to follow their desires. ibid.
‘I’m challenging the moral code of altruism.’ ibid. Rand
The computers allowed the banks to create complex mathematical models that could predict the risk of making any loan or investment. ibid.
The computer networks and the global systems they had created hadn’t distributed power; they had just shifted it and if anything had concentrated it in new forms … Power was exercised over the individual in new and surprising ways. ibid.
The [US] Government passed the Patriot Act: it said that everyone’s personal data must be open to examination to stop further attacks. Privacy of the individual now became irrelevant in the face of a much higher need: security. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head VI Are We a Pigeon? Or Are We Dancer? ***** BBC 2021
Dominic Cummings worked as a political adviser for the Conservative Party, and he believed that all politicians, left and right, had completely lost touch with the people they claimed to represent … Cummings was fascinated by the founder of Complexity Theory … Cummings wanted to use data and computers to see the underlying patterns in modern society, and then use that knowledge to take power back from the unelected elites who had seized control. ibid.
His [Tupac’s] message was simple: that suspicion was just another form of control. ibid.
Social engineering (the analysis and automation of a society) requires the correlation of great amounts of constantly changing economic information (data), so a high-speed computerized data-processing system was necessary which could race ahead of the society and predict when society would arrive for capitulation.
Relay computers were too slow, but the electronic computer, invented in 1946 by J Presper Eckert and John W Mauchly, filled the bill.
The next breakthrough was the development of the simplex method of linear programming in 1947 by the mathematician George B Dantzig.
Then in 1948, the transistor, invented by J Bardeen, W H Brattain, and W Shockley, promised great expansion of the computer field by reducing space and power requirements.
With these three inventions under their direction, those in positions of power strongly suspected that it was possible for them to control the whole world with the push of a button.
Immediately, the Rockefeller Foundation got in on the ground floor by making a four-year grant to Harvard College, funding the Harvard Economic Research Project for the study of the structure of the American Economy. One year later, in 1949, The United States Air Force joined in.
In 1952 the grant period terminated, and a high-level meeting of the Elite was held to determine the next phase of social operations research. The Harvard project had been very fruitful, as is borne out by the publication of some of its results in 1953 suggesting the feasibility of economic (social) engineering. (Studies in the Structure of the American Economy – copyright 1953 by Wassily Leontief, International Science Press Inc White Plains New York).
Engineered in the last half of the decade of the 1940s, the new Quiet War machine stood, so to speak, in sparkling gold-plated hardware on the showroom floor by 1954.
With the creation of the maser in 1954, the promise of unlocking unlimited sources of fusion atomic energy from the heavy hydrogen in seawater and the consequent availability of unlimited social power was a possibility only decades away. The combination was irresistible.
The Quiet War was quietly declared by the International Elite at a meeting held in 1954.
Although the silent weapons system was nearly exposed 13 years later, the evolution of the new weapon-system has never suffered any major setbacks.
This volume marks the 25th anniversary of the beginning of the Quiet War. Already this domestic war has had many victories on many fronts throughout the world. Bill Cooper, Top Secret: Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, Operations Research Technical Manual TM-SW7905.1
These programs were never about terrorism: they’re about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They’re about power. Edward Snowden