August 1998: Russia’s economy is out of control tonight and it’s causing an international financial crisis. Huge queues in Moscow. There’s a run on the banks. The Rouble’s lost nearly half its value. And prices are soaring. ibid. BBC News
Overnight, the Americans destroyed the civil structure of Iraqi society. But instead of trying to create new institutions ... the country would then be thrown open to international corporations who in return for investing, would take 100% of their profits out of the country untaxed. Only one of Saddam Hussein’s laws remained: the one that restricted trade unions. Out of this was supposed to come spontaneous order. What resulted was chaos. ibid.
What also resulted was corruption on a huge scale: more than $350 billion has been sent to Iraq for reconstruction. ibid.
The Americans began to turn to violence and torture to enforce their kind of freedom. ibid.
Positive liberty is driven by a vision that freedom is for something. The freedom to do or become something new. Out of which a better world would come. Negative liberty has no such vision. It isn’t for anything. At its heart it has no purpose other than to keep us free from unnecessary constraint or harm. And in using force to create a world based on negative liberty, the democratic revolutionaries have actually led millions of people abroad into a world without purpose or meaning. This idea of freedom is still portrayed by many politicians and influential commentators as a universal absolute. They assume it is only a matter of time before it spreads throughout the world. But this may not be true. ibid.
The idea of freedom that we live with today is a narrow and limiting one; it was born out of a specific and dangerous time, the Cold War. It may have had meaning and purpose then as an alternative to communist tyranny but now has become a dangerous trap. Our government relies on a simplistic economic model of human beings that allows inequality to grow and offers nothing positive in the face of reactionary forces they have helped awake around the world. ibid.
Isaiah Berlin was wrong: not all attempts to change the world for the better lead to tyranny. ibid.
The whole idea of mass democracy began to be questioned and undermined from inside the political establishment itself. It began almost unnoticed, hidden behind the wave of enthusiasm after the fall of communism. But a political scientist called Peter Mair has argued that what happened in the 1990s was that the old idea of democracy started to disappear in the West. And it was replaced by something else which we haven’t fully comprehended yet or even seen because it is outside the old categories of politics. Western politicians, Meyer said, literally changed their roles: they gave up being representatives of the people and instead they became the agents of a new bureaucracy which was rising up and promising that it could manage the dangerous and unpredictable force of individualism better than the politicians could ... Individualism and its drive to self-actualisation can corrode and eat away at the collective power of mass democracy. Peter Mair said the same was now happening in the West. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head IV: But What if the People are Stupid? BBC 2021
The politicians switched sides and became instead the representatives of the new powerful technocratic class. It still looked like they were powerful and had control over events. ibid.
Liberal politicians in the West had willingly given up much of their power in the interests of the greater good – a global stability. Power had gone first to the global financial institutions and now it was being given to the American military as well. ibid.
In the West the corruptions and the inequalities also continued to grow. And the politicians seemed unable to do anything about it. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head VI Are We a Pigeon? Or Are We Dancer? *****
The reality is that all these societies, not just America and Britain but China and Russia too, are exhausted, empty of any new ideas. All of them have corruption that has burrowed deep into their institutions. ibid.
What was going to emerge instead was a new system that had nothing to do with politics. A system whose aim was not to try and change things but rather to manage a post-political world. Adam Curtis, Hypernormalisation, BBC 2016
The version of reality that politics presented was no longer believable. That the stories politicians told their people about the world had stopped making sense. And in the face of that, you could play with reality. ibid.
The whole idea of mass democracy began to be questioned and undermined from inside the political establishment itself. It began almost unnoticed, hidden behind the wave of enthusiasm after the fall of communism. But a political scientist called Peter Mair has argued that what happened in the 1990s was that the old idea of democracy started to disappear in the West. And it was replaced by something else which we haven’t fully comprehended yet or even seen because it is outside the old categories of politics. Western politicians, Meyer said, literally changed their roles: they gave up being representatives of the people and instead they became the agents of a new bureaucracy which was rising up and promising that it could manage the dangerous and unpredictable force of individualism better than the politicians could ... Individualism and its drive to self-actualisation can corrode and eat away at the collective power of mass democracy. Peter Mair said the same was now happening in the West. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head IV: But What if the People are Stupid?
The politicians increasingly found there was little they could do to respond to this anger. Because over the past ten years all sorts of new organisations had grown up that were deliberately designed to limit the politician’s power. Because national politics was dangerous to the stability of the global system. ibid.
This growing idea that the government is too big and too restrictive. And there’s no clearer example of this than Elon Musk’s Doge Department, leading to a revolution of sorts with dudes with bad haircuts holding chainsaws coming to free the handcuffs of government bureaucracy from the people. However, is this concept really new? JimmytheGiant podcast: How the Elite Engineered Britain’s Collapse (And Blamed You), Youtube 2025
Oh yeah, loads of cuts to social welfare spending … This ideology is known as neoliberalism. ibid.
Government debt continued to rise because they needed to borrow in order to allow for major tax cuts for the rich. ibid.
Neoliberalism – this ideology which was ignited by Nixon, exploded under Thatcher and Reagan, and then accelerated under Blair and Bush – had led to this zombified mantra of deregulation, selling off of state assets to private individuals, and massively cutting welfare spending. ibid.
The UK and the United States bailed out the banks to the tune of £500 billion, with a guarantee of £1 trillion. That is taxpayer money, our money, paying to keep banks alive. Also known as Socialism for the Rich. ibid.
We launched our very own DOGE department, or as well call it, Austerity. Austerity was being euphemistically sold to as as, Fixing the Roof While the Sun is Shining. ibid.
The entire Theory of Austerity was built on incorrect maths. ibid.
Even our refugee system is privatized. ibid.
This wasn’t like sustainable real economic growth, this was wealth extraction from the ordinary people and the state into the hands of the ultra-wealthy. And so our whole economy, everything, our public services, everything, got shitter and shitter but more expensive. ibid.
This is the Big Scam. ibid.