For the Neo-Conservatives the collapse of the Soviet Union was a triumph. And out of that triumph was going to come a central myth that still inspires them today. That through the aggressive use of American power they could transform the world and spread democracy. But in reality their victory was an illusion. They had conquered a phantom enemy … It was a decrepit system decaying from within. ibid.
The Neo-Conservatives set out to reform America. And at the heart of their project was the political use of religion. Together with their long-term allies, the religious right, they began a campaign to bring moral and religious issues back into the centre of conservative politics. ibid.
For the Neo-Conservatives religion was a myth … Strauss had taught that these myths were necessary to give ordinary people meaning and purpose and to ensure a stable society. ibid.
Out of this [Neo-Conservative] campaign a new and powerful moral agenda began to take over the Republican Party. It reached a dramatic climax with the Republican Convention in 1992 when the religious right seized control of the Party’s policy making machinery. George Bush became committed to run for President with policies that would ban abortion, gay rights and multiculturalism. ibid.
By the mid-’90s politics in Washington was dominated by one issue: the moral character of the President of the United States. Behind this were an extraordinary barrage of allegations against Clinton that were obsessing the media. These included stories of sexual harassment, stories that Clinton and his wife were involved in Whitewater, a corrupt property deal, stories they had murdered their close friend, Vince Foster, and stories that Clinton was involved in smuggling drugs from a small airstrip in Arkansas. ibid.
Finally, his [Starr’s] committee stumbled upon Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky which Clinton denied. ibid.
By 1997 bin Laden & Zawahiri had returned to Afghanistan where they had first met ten years before … The new jihad would be against America itself. ibid.
By 1998 all their attempts to transform America by creating a moral revolution had failed. Faced with the indifference of the people, the Neo-Conservatives had become marginalized in both domestic and foreign policy. But with the attacks that were about to hit America the Neo-Conservatives would at last find the evil enemy they had been searching for ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union. And in their reaction to the attacks the Neo-Conservatives would transform the failing Islamist movement into what would appear to be the grand revolutionist cause that Zawahiri had always dreamed of. But much of it would exist only in people’s imaginations. It would be the next phantom enemy. ibid.
Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us from nightmares. They say that they will rescue us from terrible dangers that we cannot see and do not understand. And the greatest danger of all is international terrorism ... But much of this threat is a fantasy which has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It’s a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services and the international media. This is a series of films about how and why that fantasy was created and who it benefits. Adam Curtis, The Power of Nightmares III: The Shadows in the Cave
The Islamists after their moment of triumph were virtually destroyed within months. While the Neo-Conservatives took power in Washington. But then the Neo-Conservatives began to reconstruct the Islamists. They created a phantom enemy. And as this nightmare fantasy began to spread, politicians realised the new power it gave them in a deeply disillusioned age. ibid.
Now the Neo-Conservatives became all powerful … A small group began to shape America’s response to the attacks: at its heart were Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, along with the vice-president Dick Cheney, and Richard Perle was a senior adviser to the Pentagon. Last time these men had been in power before was twenty years before under President Reagan. ibid.
The Neo-Conservatives distorted and exaggerated the Soviet threat. They created the image of a hidden international web of evil run from Moscow that planned to dominate the world. When in reality the Soviet Union was on its last legs, collapsing from within. ibid.
What the British and American governments had done was to disturb and exaggerate the real nature of the threat … The way the American and other governments have transformed this complex and disparate threat into a simplistic fantasy. ibid.
Dirty Bomb: and the media took the bait. They portrayed the dirty bomb as an extraordinary weapon that could kill thousands of people. ibid.
The Neo-Conservatives: America had a special destiny to overcome evil in the world. ibid.
Such was the nature of that fantasy that it began to transform the very nature of politics. ibid.
The ultimate political goal at the heart of our age is the idea of individual freedom. In Britain our government has set out to create a revolution that will free individuals from old elites and bureaucracies. A new world where we are free to choose our lives not be trapped by class or income into predestined roles … ‘To liberate Britain from all the old class divisions, old structures, old prejudices [Blair] …’ Adam Curtis, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom: Fuck You Buddy, BBC 2007
It is a very strange kind of freedom. The attempt to liberate people from the dead hand of bureaucracy has led to the rise of a new and increasingly controlling system of management driven by targets and numbers. While governments committed to creating freedom of choice in all areas have actually presided over a rise in inequalities and a dramatic collapse in social mobility. The consequence has been a return of the power of class and privilege. And abroad the attempt to create democracy has led not just to bloody mayhem but a rejection of the American-led campaign to bring freedom. 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. ibid.
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.