No-one controlled the market. In 1973 the Arab vs Israeli war broke out. One of the consequences was that the Arabs put up the price of oil by 400%: the effect on the western economies was disastrous. In Britain the stock market was pushed over the edge to a catastrophic crash. It finally made the politicians realise they had no control over the economy. ibid.
[Friedrich] Von Hayek had fled the Nazis and now taught at the University of Chicago: Hayek was convinced that the use of politics to plan society was far more dangerous than any problems produced by companies. Because it inevitably led to tyranny and the end of freedom. 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 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.
Recorded crime: again, inventive strategies were found. ibid.
But report after report came out which revealed that this inventive gaming of the system was now endemic throughout the public services. What was supposed to be a rational system was instead creating a strange world in which no-one knew whether to believe the numbers or not. ibid.
A powerful system of control: but the numbers were also having a strange and perverse effect on New Labour’s vision of a freer and more open Britain. They were in fact creating a more rigid and stratified society. At the heart of this was education and league tables for schools. The tables showed parents which were the best performing schools and which were the worst ones. ibid.
Rich parents moved into the areas of the best schools which then caused house prices to spiral keeping the poor out. ibid.
Under New Labour the country is even more unequal than it was under Mrs Thatcher with an ever increasing share of the wealth going to a tiny 1% of the top of society … The social divisions in Britain are hardening and deepening. ibid.
Financial and political corruption on a huge scale … Those who ran many of America’s corporations were faking profits on an enormous scale … Despite the growing evidence of corruption, the Clinton administration portrayed the boom as something revolutionary. It was a genuine democracy of the market place in which everyone at all levels of society was benefiting. But this was completely untrue. ibid.
In economics the whole idea of the free market as an efficient system is coming under serious attack. ibid.
We too came to think of ourselves as simplified beings, whose behaviour and even feelings could be analysed objectively by scientific systems which told us what was the normal way to feel. And both we and our leaders have come to believe that this is the true definition of freedom, there is no other. But there is. There is an alternative idea of freedom but we have hidden and forgotten about it … The dream of not only changing the world but also transforming people. And then by changing them you can transform them from themselves …The architects of our present world set us a terrible trap: in seeking to protect us from the dangers of the other kind of freedom [hope] they led us into a world without meaning. Adam Curtis: The Trap III: We Will Force You to be Free
At the heart of [Isaiah] Berlin’s thought was the question of individual freedom and how to protect it. For Berlin the greatest threat to individual freedom in the world was the Soviet Union. In October 1956 the Hungarian people had risen up and toppled their Communist government. In response Soviet forces invaded and brutally suppressed the rebellion massacring thousands. The Soviet action shocked the world. ibid.
Berlin: All attempts at revolution however seductive and romantic would always lead to disaster, and that power always had to be restrained. ibid.