John le Carre: In a country whose power had collapsed, leaving only a drab decaying reality all around, the spies had managed to recreate a magical world where they could go anywhere they wanted, bug, burgle and even assassinate without any fear of judgment or control, just like in the empire. ibid.
Ever since the Second World War the American Government had been using the CIA to manipulate and overthrow the governments of many other countries … The dual state … had to be kept secret from the people … From the 1950s onwards the CIA rigged elections, destabilised governments through fake information, and organised violence coups in Italy, Greece, Syria, Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, Indonesia and Chile. In all, the United States ran covert operations to overthrow 66 foreign governments. In 26 cases they succeeded. ibid.
In 1961 the CIA decided to overthrow a government in the heart of Africa: in the Congo. 200 years before, the Congo had been at the centre of the slave trade. Millions of Africans had been forcibly taken down the river and shipped to America where their forced labour fuelled America’s rise to economic power. Now, the country had been given independence by its old colonial rulers, the Belgiums. But it was completely unprepared and had collapsed into violence. The CIA were frightened that the new prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was about to turn for help to the Soviet Union … and they helped install a dictator in his place: he was called Colonel Mobutu whose brutal regime the Americans would support for the next 30 years. ibid.
Hong Kong: The BBC continued the fantasy of the special virtues of the Britain’s empire … ‘There’s a genuine fondness for Britain’s decent contribution here.’ ibid. BBC commentary handover ceremony
What the Chinese were doing was using their money to create a safe bubble wrapped around the United States that would stabilise the system and so keep China safe. But in the process the Chinese money would create the biggest consumer and property boom ever in history. And lead America into a protected dream world that was increasingly detached from the reality outside. ibid.
By 2007 the war in Iraq had become a nightmare. The Americans were pouring nearly a billion dollars in every day to keep a conflict going that no-one knew how to win. ibid.
But what the Americans had found themselves doing was exactly the same as the British had done 80 years before: faced by a complex society they did not understand, they were turning to the tribes outside the cities and giving them power. They called the militias the Sons of Iraq and it seemed to work, but in reality it was going to lead to something even worse … They turned and allied instead with the very people they had been fighting. ibid.
Isis was far more than just another version of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Its public face were the jihadists, but it was organised and guided by men from the Sunni tribes, many of whom had been experienced soldiers in Saddam Hussein’s army. As a result, they swept through Iraq and on into Syria. ibid.
The confusion over the Spaghetti House siege proved to be a turned point exposing the messy realities of revolutionary politics. ibid.
On the surface Tupac Shakur was part of the age of the individual. He believed deeply in the idea of self-expression. But he was also one of the few in the 1980s who still believed in the power of grand stories to move people and to inspire them to change the world. His mother Afeni had been a Black Panther and she still believed in the idea of revolution in America. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head VI Are We a Pigeon? Or Are We Dancer? *****
‘She always raised me to think I was the black prince of the revolution.’ ibid. Tupac
‘We’re not being taught to deal with the world as it is. We’re being taught to deal with this fairyland which we’re not even living in any more.’ ibid. Tupac’s school interview 1988
‘More kids are being handed Crack than are handed diplomas.’ ibid.
By the 1980s it was clear that the promises of the civil rights’ movement had not been kept in America. And the idealism of black politics fell away. And the communities divided into gangs then turned on each other. Then Crack swept through the black communities in America. And a fading Shakur finally gave up: she became addicted to Crack, and Tupac found himself alone. ibid.
Tupac Shakur set out to awaken the radicalism of the Panthers. And to do it he was going to use himself as the central character. ibid.
But there was another country that was like a fairytale land: Saudi Arabia. Ever since the 1970s billions of dollars had flooded in from the West. This vast wave of money created a dream-like society run by an elite where no-one paid any tax. But there were those in Saudi Arabia who saw another much more sinister reality underneath this facade. ibid.
Money has created a society where nobody believes in anything, and nothing can be trusted. ibid.
Part of something that had started 200 years before with the French Revolution: it was the idea that through revolution you could break through to a new kind of world. Something beyond the corrupt reality of this one. ibid.
But when the scientists did this, the computers began to reveal something they hadn’t expected. One tiny change in their equations could have massive catastrophic consequences which they could never have predicted: it was called Chaos Theory. Chaos Theory had a very powerful influence in the West because it rose up at the very moment the Soviet Union was collapsing. And it seemed to explain why all attempts at revolution had led to disaster: the world was just too complex for human beings to change in a predictable way. ibid.
Complexity Theory: Murray Gell-Mann: he believed that there were underlying patterns at every level of the universe, not just in the particles but in the way people think, and the structure in human societies … ‘And it’s fascinating to try and figure out what these laws are.’ ibid.
Maybe many people didn’t want to change. They were happy living in their own fairytale world of gangs and violence. ibid.
President Clinton had brought in tough new crime laws. Even though in reality crime was falling. Hundreds of thousands of young black men were now imprisoned with no hope of parole, even for minor offences. It seemed to show that President Clinton cared more about the fears of the white middle-class voters than he did about the lives of young black men. ibid.
But in the West scientists were beginning to ask whether the very idea of an integrated self was actually a fiction for everyone. ibid.
Inside their brains, human beings have all kinds of different selves. The conscious mind had no awareness of it at all. ibid.
The one self that is conscious constantly makes up stories to explain what all the other selves are doing. But when the connection between the two halves of the brain is cut, it can’t do it … All human beings live in a dream world of stories. ibid.
The 1990s was the high point of the idea of individualism. ibid.
In Russia that same dream seemed to have led to disaster … Russia had been taken over by a small group called the oligarchs who had looted the country of much of its wealth … No-one believed in communism or democracy any longer … They had been promised a democracy but what they got was chaos and corruption on a vast scale. ibid.
What Google was doing was gathering vast amounts of data on millions of people without them being fully aware of it … Google was now making billions, and at the heart of it was data. It had become a new gold rush. 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. ibid.
They [US] called it enhanced interrogation, and they did it by waterboarding Zubaydah 83 times, by repeated smashing him against the wall, and locking him naked in a freezing box for weeks at a time. The CIA videotaped the interrogations but later destroyed the tapes. ibid.
Out in the margins of western societies there was a growing anger and a total disillusion with the system because it offered hundreds of thousands of people nothing and gave their lives no purpose or meaning. ibid.
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 were supposed 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.
Since Putin had come to power the global price of oil had increased drastically. And money had poured into Russia … ibid.
One of the most pervasive mythologies … The world is too complicated for us as human beings to understand but nothing is too complicated for the machines and the data, for they can see the hidden reality under the surface. ibid.
Millions of people became convinced that all the major stars, from Britney Spears to Beyoncé were being manipulated and controlled by the Illuminati. ibid.
His [Tupac’s] message was simple: that suspicion was just another form of control. ibid.
Governments in Britain and America rescued the banks, but they then decided to transfer the debt that incurred away from the private sector to the public sector. And what was called austerity began. ibid.
All the major banks had been rigging interest rates, and many of them had been laundering money for organised crime, including the drug cartels of Mexico. ibid.
Suspicions grew that there was a dark frightening world of dictators, drug lords, Russian gangsters, arms dealers and international bankers all thriving together in the shadows of the City of London. ibid.
In the West the corruptions and the inequalities also continued to grow. And the politicians seemed unable to do anything about it. ibid.
Much of the evidence for priming wasn’t there … You might be able to keep millions of people in a state of constant anxiety online by bombarding them with memes, but you couldn’t alter underneath what they thought and what they believed. ibid.
Once you believe you are being manipulated there is no way back. ibid.
Vladimir Putin, whose power in reality was becoming increasingly fragile at home in Russia, became in the eyes of the West a dark malevolent force, which made him seem far stronger than he really was. ibid.