Abroad in Iraq and Afghanistan, Britain and America had set out to liberate individuals from tyranny. Adam Curtis, The Trap II: The Lonely Robot
A scientific model of ourselves as simplified robots, rational calculated beings whose behaviour and even feelings could be analysed and managed by numbers. But what resulted was the very opposite of freedom: the numbers took on a power of their own which began to create new forms of control, greater inequalities and a return to a rigid class structure based on the power of money. ibid.
Once public servants were set performance targets they could achieve them in any way they wanted; the old bureaucratic rules could be thrown away and they would become heroic entrepreneurs. ibid.
James Buchanan, economist: He argued that politicians just like civil servants were hypocrites; the idea they promoted that they were serving the public was a fiction. In reality they too followed their self-interests. ibid.
Faced with the bankers’ argument Clinton agreed, and on taking office began to cut back on his reforms. During his first term, he dismantled much of the welfare structure that had been put in place in the 1930s; he abandoned all his healthcare reforms and cut government regulation of business. It was what the markets wanted. ibid.
It was the triumph of market democracy. The belief that anyone who gave the public what they wanted was democratic and thus good. ibid.
The promoters of this idea of market democracy portrayed it as a glorious return to a golden age … but this was a myth. ibid.
Freedom was redefined to mean nothing more than the ability of individuals to get anything they wanted. ibid.
In the early ’90s an epidemic of mental disorder was sweeping America and Britain … uncovered by a new system for identifying disorders. Psychiatry had been attacked for relying on the personal and fallible judgement of psychiatrists and instead a new objective methods based on checklists had been invented. ibid.
The drug companies announced they had created a new type of drug called an SSRI which they claimed targeted circuits inside the brain that were causing these misfunctions … like Prozac … The result was liberation from anxiety on a wide scale. But in the process the checklists became a powerful and seemingly objective guide for people as to what should be their normal feelings and what was abnormal. ibid.
Large parts of normal human experience, grief, disappointment, loneliness, were all being reclassified as medical disorders. In the process a new system of management was emerging: the drugs took away those complex and difficult feelings and made the individuals happier. But they also made them simpler beings, more easy to predict and manage. 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.
[Isaiah] Berlin’s warning would become a prophecy. Ironically, this corruption of negative liberty would begin with the resurgence of positive liberty. In the wake of the Soviet disaster, a new and even more extreme version of positive liberty was about to rise up in the Third World. It would be a revolutionary vision of transforming individuals through violence. It would spread and begin to destabilise the balance of power in the world. In response, the followers of negative liberty in the West would decide that they had to confront and roll back this tide. Out of this would emerge a strange mutant idea. You would use violent revolutionary techniques to create a world of negative freedom. ibid.
[Jean-Paul] Sartre believed … only through revolutionary violence that individuals in the west could free themselves from the controls of bourgeois society. ibid.
The chaos caused by these revolutions also began to destabilise the balance of power in the world. And this would inexorably bring them face to face with America and its global battle against communism. But what this clash was going to lead to was the rise in America of a new militant idea of freedom, and the belief that it was the United States’ duty to spread this freedom around the world by force if necessary. ibid.
And then in 1979 the Iranian revolution showed dramatically America’s policy of backing dictators did not work. The Iranian people rose up and toppled the Shah of Iran. The Shah had one of the largest military forces in the world given to him by the Americans. But it proved helpless in the face of the new Islamist ideology of Ayatollah Khomeini. Many in the West saw Khomeini as the resurgence of a dark almost medieval force. But this was wrong. The Iranian revolution was yet again driven by Western ideas of political freedom. ibid.
The other part of Project Democracy was to use military force in secret operations to overthrow foreign regimes that stood in the way of freedom. The main target was the government of Nicaragua, the Sandinistas. The Sandinistas were Marxist revolutionaries who had seized power in 1979; but since then they had held elections and had been democratically elected. The Reagan administration dismissed this though as a sham. And an operation was set up to enforce the right kind of democracy by overthrowing the Sandinistas if necessary. ibid.
The Americans started funding and training a counter-revolutionary army called the Contras. But there was enormous political opposition in the United States. And to get round it the leaders of Project Democracy set out to frighten the American public. An agency called The Office of Public Diplomacy was set up that disseminated what was called White Propaganda. It produced dossiers and fed stories to journalists that proved that Soviet fighter planes had arrived in Nicaragua to attack America. Another story from ‘intelligence sources’ said that the Soviets had given stockpiles of chemical weapons to the Sandinistas. President Reagan appeared on television with maps to show how quickly such a chemical attack could be launched on America itself. It was only a matter of time. ibid.
The Neo-Conservatives were beginning to believe that their ideal of freedom was an absolute. And that this then justified lying and exaggerating in order to enforce that vision. The end justified the means. Although they portrayed the Contras as freedom fighters, it was well known that they used murder, assassination and torture. And also were allegedly using CIA-supplied planes to smuggle cocaine back into the United States. And to finance the Contras, the Neo-Conservatives were even prepared to deal with America’s enemy – the leaders of the Iranian revolution. In 1985 those running the Nicaragua operation held a series of secret meetings with Iranian leaders in Europe. They arranged to sell the Iranians American weapons; in return the Iranians would release American hostages held in Lebanon. Then the money from these sales would be used by those running Project Democracy to fund the Contras. The only problem was that this was completely illegal. And the President knew it. ibid.
What was beginning to emerge was the problem of spreading freedom around the world. To do it those leading Project Democracy had turned not just to manipulation and violence but were beginning to undermine the ideals of democracy in America. The very thing they were trying to create abroad. It was the corruption of freedom that Isaiah Berlin had warned of. ibid.