‘No one can be blamed for doing the best he can for himself under existing circumstances,’ said Owen in reply to Slyme’s questioning look. ‘This is the principle of the present system – every man for himself and the devil take the rest. For my own part I don’t pretend to practise unselfishness. I don’t pretend to guide my actions by the rules laid down in the Sermon the Mount. But it’s certainly surprising to hear you who profess to be a follower of Christ – advocating selfishness. Or, rather, it would be surprising if it were not that the name of ‘Christians’ has ceased to signify one who follows Christ, and has come to mean only liar and hypocrite.’ ibid.
‘It hasn’t always been like it, and it won’t always be like it,’ said Owen. ‘The time will come, and it’s not very far distant, when the necessaries of life will be produced for use and not for profit. The time is coming when it will no longer be possible for a few selfish people to condemn thousands of men and women and little children to live in misery and die of want.’ ibid.
Isn’t that what marriage is about? Accepting your partner’s selfishness. House of Cards s3e6: Chapter 32, US gay rights’ prisoner in Russia, Netflix 2015
It is a strange story and it begins with a strange woman in the 1950s of New York. Ayn Rand had left Russia in the 1920s and gone to live in California … Human beings, Rand said, were alone in the universe. They must free themselves from all forms of political and religious control, and live their lives guided only by their selfish desires. If they did this, they would become heroic figures. Adam Curtis, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace I: Love and Power, BBC 2011
Rand’s ideas were seen as mad and dangerous … but Rand continued to write. ibid.
‘We are heroic. We can know the world. We contain nature. We can achieve our goals. We can do what we want. What does it matter that we are alone? Who do we need? Why do we need anyone? We have ourselves.’ ibid. Barbara Branden, 1950s Randian
The group most inspired by her were the new entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley … They saw themselves as Randian heroes. ibid.
The new computer technology could turn everyone into Randian heroes. It was a vision of a society where the old forms of political control would be unnecessary. ibid.
Together they could create their own kind of order. It was a cybernetic dream which said that the feedback of information between all the individuals connected as nodes in the network would work to create a self-stabilising system. The world would be stable if everyone would be heroic Randian beings completely free to follow their desires. ibid.
‘I’m challenging the moral code of altruism.’ ibid. Rand
The computers allowed the banks to create complex mathematical models that could predict the risk of making any loan or investment. ibid.
The computer networks and the global systems they had created hadn’t distributed power; they had just shifted it and if anything had concentrated it in new forms … Power was exercised over the individual in new and surprising ways. 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. Because it inevitably led to tyranny and the end of freedom. 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 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 a 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.
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. Adam Curtis, The Trap II: The Lonely Robot, BBC 2007
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.
Why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, from Birth must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
To be successful you have to be selfish, or else you never achieve. And once you get to your highest level, then you have to be unselfish. Stay reachable. Stay in touch. Don’t isolate. Michael Jordan
We are veraciously destructive like locusts … Society will collapse into a Mad Max world … Selfishness with an urgency. Paul Klee, Are We Living in a Simulation? Youtube 3.24.35