In America in the 1960s was a man who was convinced that there was something frightening hidden under the surface of the new modern suburbs. Behind what looked like a confident individualism was rising up throughout America there were really hidden fears eating away at people from inside. There were feelings of anxiety, loneliness and emptiness, and he was convinced he could make a lot of money out of these feelings: he was called Arthur Sackler … Valium: he offered it to the doctors as an extraordinary new way to treat these inner anxieties, and he said it wasn’t dangerous or addictive. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head III: Money Changes Everything
They had discovered before anyone else the underlying weakness with the new individualism: that you were free but you were alone. ibid.
In the past there had been repeated sudden changes both heating and cooling of the world’s climate at speeds that no-one thought possible. ibid.
Richard Nixon came to power because he had harnessed a new force: he called it the silent majority … It was a fragile power-base … Nixon promised to represent the silent majority … his feelings of dread … suspicious and paranoid … He told his aides to start the enemies’ list. ibid.
Suddenly there was no fixed value for any currency anywhere in the world. There was immediate confusion … He [Nixon] went to China … a giant mysterious country that had been cut off from the world for decades. But he was going to bring it into the modern global system. ibid.
He [Nixon] had set up a conspiracy based in the White House. It was run by a group of ex-intelligence agents, and they already planned to bug, burgle, and blackmail Nixon’s opponents. ibid.
Solzhenitsyn: he was secretly writing a novel … faced by the failure of the revolutionary dream, it was now difficult to believe in anything. That maybe ideology itself was the problem … But in every case, he said, thousands and often millions were killed. Solzhenitsyn’s book contained a damning conclusion … The only way to escape from that horror was to stop trying to change the world. Instead the safest thing to believe in the future was to believe in nothing. ibid.
For 20 years the CIA had been planning assassinations and overthrowing leaders of foreign governments all around the world using poisons and specially made secret weapons. ibid.
Kerry Thornley had begun Operation Mindfuck: he and his friend Greg Hill had planted fake conspiracy theories in the press and in underground magazines alleging that the Illumanati was a secret organisation behind all the assassinations in America. Their aim was to make people see how absurd all such theories were … Stories about the Illuminati and a plot to create a New World Order began to get mixed up with revelations about brain-washing and secret mind control programs run by the CIA. ibid.
‘The plague of money. The disease of money. The plague of buying and selling that’s their handiwork. I hate this system … It’s Me, Eddie … People think they are free. But really they are becoming like simplified robots following the rules of money.’ ibid.
Betty Ford’s admission had a dramatic effect. In its wake stories began to pour out of people all across America who were also addicted to Valium. It seemed that there was a private hidden world of anxiety behind the public faces that affected millions of people. But Arthur Sackler who in the 1960s had promoted Valium as beneficial and non-addictive was unrepentant. And a company that he and his two brothers had started was about to develop a new drug: a synthetic form of opium called Oxycontin, and that was going to deal with the next wave of anxiety that would hit America. ibid.
South China Seas: In 1979 a Frenchman called Bernard Kouchner who had founded Medicines sans Frontiers chartered an old cargo ship. And he went to rescue thousands of starving refugees trapped on a tiny island – refugees that no-one else seemed to care about. They were fleeing from the new communist government that had taken over Vietnam. To many liberals in the West the communists had been heroes in their fight against America. Which meant that the refugees did not deserve to be helped. To Kouchner this was outrageous. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head IV: But What if the People are Stupid?
Possibly, being good was not as easy as it seemed. ibid.
Liveaid: To change the world you had to bypass all politics, because politicians both left and right had become corrupted by power and petty nationalism. Instead, you connected directly with others suffering around the planet and rescue them … The food being bought in by Liveaid was being used as a weapon in a civil war … It showed a weakness at the heart of the growing humanitarian movement … They couldn’t challenge power. ibid.
Boris Yeltsin was the president of the new Russia. He had promised to turn the country into a mass democracy. Yeltsin appointed a group of young technocrats and they set out to do this through what they called shock therapy. Advised by Western bankers and economists. They believed that they had to move fast because the communists might try to take power again. 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. ibid.
Bill Clinton: He came to power promising to represent what he called the forgotten middle class. And very quickly, within weeks of entering the White House, Clinton agreed to give up on many of his promised reforms and to give power over to the financial world. He did this not through any cynical motive but because he knew that the old power base of mass politics had gone. No-one joined political parties any more. Organised labour was a vanishing force. Clinton might be in office but he no longer had the collective power of the people behind him. The power that in the past had allowed politicians to challenge the elites in society. And in the face of that, Clinton decided to give power instead to the new force that promised that it could create a wealthier and happier society – the bankers and the economists and the management experts who were now spreading and multiplying through the corridors of Washington. ibid.
In Russia the democracy experiment had gone out of control. The president Boris Yeltsin had lost all power. It had been seized by a small group called the oligarchs who were using it to loot Russia. There was massive inflation. Millions of people were reduced to selling what they owned on the street. ibid.
Yeltsin responding by dissolving parliament; he cut the phone lines and sealed the building off. But a group of protesters broke through and fighting began around the parliament and then spread to the television station. ibid.
The geopolitics of money, a force that had already enslaved the American people and now wanted to bend the Russia people to its will. ibid.
The Balkans: President Clinton’s representative, Richard Holbrooke, brought the question out into the open. Suppose elections are free and fair, he said, and those elected are racists, fascists, separatists. That is the dilemma. ibid.
In Russia President Yeltsin had lost all control. He was drunk most of the time. He had become the puppet of the oligarchs. ibid.
Ghosts of the past were returning at the margins in England too. In August 1999 a farmer in Norfolk called Tony Martin shot two burglars who were travellers; he killed one of them called Fred Barras. Tony Martin was a recluse … Martin was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison. His conviction touched off a wave of protest. On the surface it was about Martin’s right to defend himself. But it also expressed a much wider feeling that was simmering under the surface. That the very institutions that were supposed to protect the people – the law, the police and the politicians – were now being turned against them. A growing sense that you couldn’t trust those in power any longer. What began to be called elites. ibid.
Politicians in the West had given large parts of their power away. What had begun with Bill Clinton in the early 1990s had spread. When Tony Blair came to power he had immediately given control over much of the economy to the Bank of the England. But in 1998 the global financial system showed how unstable it could be. An economic crisis that begun in Russia and then spread to Asia had consequences throughout the world. ibid.
In the north of England factories began to close. Tony Blair insisted that it was a price the country had to pay if it wanted to be a part of what he called the world economy. ibid.
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.
The people driven by the new individualism had retreated into their own private worlds. So 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. But now the people had gone, beneath them was a void. ibid.
Blair came to Kosovo 1999 and was welcomed as a hero. At the refugee camp Blair presented what they had done as an expression of that epic vision … We are all one world simply linked together as individuals … and we the good politicians of the west have a duty to intervene to help the victims of all evil dictators wherever they may be in the world … ‘This is a battle for humanity. It is a just cause.’ 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.