The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom is a BBC documentary
series by English filmmaker Adam Curtis, well known for other
documentaries including The Century of the Self and The Power of
Nightmares. It began airing on BBC Two on 11 March 2007.
The series consists of three one-hour programmes which explore the
concept and definition of freedom, specifically, “how a simplistic model
of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to
today’s idea of freedom.”
Part 1: “Fuck You Buddy”
In this episode, Curtis examines the rise of game theory during the
Cold War and the way in which its mathematical models of human behaviour
filtered into economic thought. The programme traces the development of
game theory with particular reference to the work of John Nash, who
believed that all humans were inherently suspicious and selfish
creatures that strategised constantly. Using this as his first premise,
Nash constructed logically consistent and mathematically verifiable
models, for which he won the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences,
commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics. He invented system
games reflecting his beliefs about human behaviour, including one he
called “Fuck Your Buddy” (later published as “So Long Sucker”), in which
the only way to win was to betray your playing partner, and it is from
this game that the episode’s title is taken. These games were internally
coherent and worked correctly as long as the players obeyed the ground
rules that they should behave selfishly and try to outwit their
opponents, but when RAND’s analysts tried the games on their own
secretaries, they instead chose not to betray each other, but to
cooperate every time. This did not, in the eyes of the analysts,
discredit the models, but instead proved that the secretaries were unfit
subjects.
What was not known at the time was that Nash was suffering from
paranoid schizophrenia, and, as a result, was deeply suspicious of
everyone around him—including his colleagues—and was convinced that many
were involved in conspiracies against him. It was this mistaken belief
that led to his view of people as a whole that formed the basis for his
theories. Footage of an older and wiser Nash was shown in which he
acknowledges that his paranoid views of other people at the time were
false.
Curtis examines how game theory was used to create the USA’s nuclear
strategy during the Cold War. Because no nuclear war occurred, it was
believed that game theory had been correct in dictating the creation and
maintenance of a massive American nuclear arsenal—because the Soviet
Union had not attacked America with its nuclear weapons, the supposed
deterrent must have worked. Game theory during the Cold War is a subject
Curtis examined in more detail in the To The Brink of Eternity part of
his first series, Pandora’s Box, and he reuses much of the same archive
material in doing so.
A separate strand in the documentary is the work of R.D. Laing, whose
work in psychiatry led him to model familial interactions using game
theory. His conclusion was that humans are inherently selfish, shrewd,
and spontaneously generate strategems during everyday interactions.
Laing’s theories became more developed when he concluded that some forms
of mental illness were merely artificial labels, used by the state to
suppress individual suffering. This belief became a staple tenet of
counterculture during the 1960s. Reference is made to the Rosenhan
experiment, in which bogus patients, surreptitiously self-presenting at a
number of American psychiatric institutions, were falsely diagnosed as
having mental disorders, while institutions, informed that they were to
receive bogus patients, “identified” numerous supposed imposters who
were actually genuine patients. The results of the experiment were a
disaster for American psychiatry, because they destroyed the idea that
psychiatrists were a privileged elite able to genuinely diagnose, and
therefore treat, mental illness.
All these theories tended to support the beliefs of what were then
fringe economists such as Friedrich von Hayek, whose economic models
left no room for altruism, but depended purely on self-interest, leading
to the formation of public choice theory. In an interview, the
economist James M. Buchanan decries the notion of the “public interest”,
asking what it is and suggesting that it consists purely of the
self-interest of the governing bureaucrats. Buchanan also proposes that
organisations should employ managers who are motivated only by money. He
describes those who are motivated by other factors—such as job
satisfaction or a sense of public duty—as “zealots”.
As the 1960s became the 1970s, the theories of Laing and the models
of Nash began to converge, producing a widespread popular belief that
the state (a surrogate family) was purely and simply a mechanism of
social control which calculatedly kept power out of the hands of the
public. Curtis shows that it was this belief that allowed the theories
of Hayek to look credible, and underpinned the free-market beliefs of
Margaret Thatcher, who sincerely believed that by dismantling as much of
the British state as possible—and placing former national institutions
into the hands of public shareholders—a form of social equilibrium would
be reached. This was a return to Nash’s work, in which he proved
mathematically that if everyone was pursuing their own interests, a
stable, yet perpetually dynamic, society could result.
The episode ends with the suggestion that this mathematically
modelled society is run on data—performance targets, quotas,
statistics—and that it is these figures combined with the exaggerated
belief in human selfishness that has created “a cage” for Western
humans. The precise nature of the “cage” is to be discussed in the next
episode.
Part 2: “The Lonely Robot”
The second episode reiterated many of the ideas of the first, but
developed the theme that drugs such as Prozac and lists of psychological
symptoms which might indicate anxiety or depression were being used to
normalise behaviour and make humans behave more predictably, like
machines.
This was not presented as a conspiracy theory, but as a logical
(although unpredicted) outcome of market-driven self-diagnosis by
checklist based on symptoms, but not actual causes, discussed in the
previous programme.
People with standard mood fluctuations diagnosed themselves as
abnormal. They then presented themselves at psychiatrist’s offices,
fulfilled the diagnostic criteria without offering personal histories,
and were medicated. The alleged result was that vast numbers of Western
people have had their behaviour and mentation modified by SSRI drugs
without any strict medical necessity.
The Ax Fight—a famous anthropological study of the Yanomamo people of
Venezuela by Tim Asch and Napoleon Chagnon—was re-examined and its
strictly genetic-determinist interpretation called into question. Other
researchers were called upon to verify Chagnon’s conclusions and arrived
at totally opposed opinions. The suggestion was raised that the
presence of a film crew and the handing out of machetes to some, but not
all, tribesmen might have caused them to ‘perform’ as they did. While
being questioned by Curtis, Chagnon was so annoyed by this suggestion
that he terminated the interview and walked out of shot, protesting
under his breath.
Film of Richard Dawkins propounding his ultra-strict “selfish gene”
analogy of life was shown, with the archive clips spanning two decades
to emphasise how the severely reductionist ideas of programmed behaviour
have been absorbed by mainstream culture. (Later, however, the
documentary gives evidence that cells are able to selectively replicate
parts of DNA dependent on current needs. According to Curtis such
evidence detracts from the simplified economic models of human beings.).
This brought Curtis back to the economic models of Hayek and the game
theories of Cold War. Curtis explains how, with the “robotic”
description of humankind apparently validated by geneticists, the game
theory systems gained even more hold over society’s engineers.
The programme describes how the Clinton administration gave in to
market theorists in the US and how New Labour in the UK decided to
measure everything it could, the better to improve it, introducing such
artificial and unmeasurable targets as:
* Reduction of hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa by 48%
* Reduction of global conflict by 6%
It also introduced a rural community vibrancy index in order to gauge
the quality of life in British villages and a birdsong index to check
the apparent decline of wildlife.
In industry and the public services, this way of thinking led to a
plethora of targets, quotas, and plans. It was meant to set workers free
to achieve these targets in any way they chose. What these game-theory
schemes did not predict was that the players, faced with impossible
demands, would cheat.
Curtis describes how, in order to meet artificially inflated targets:
* Lothian and Borders Police reclassified dozens of criminal offences
as “suspicious occurrences”, in order to keep them out of crime
figures;
* Some NHS hospital trusts created an unofficial post of “The Hello
Nurse,” whose sole task it was to greet new arrivals in order to claim
for statistical purposes that the patient had been “seen,” even though
no treatment or even examination had occurred during the encounter;
* NHS managers took the wheels off trolleys and reclassified them as
beds, while simultaneously reclassifying corridors as wards, in order to
falsify Accident & Emergency waiting times statistics.
In a section called “The Death of Social Mobility”, Curtis also
describes how the theory of the free market was applied to education.
With league tables of school performance published, the richest parents
moved house to get their children into better schools. This caused house
prices in the appropriate catchment areas to rise dramatically—thus
excluding poorer parents who were left with the worst-performing
schools. This is just one aspect of a more rigidly stratified society,
which Curtis identifies in the way in which the incomes of the poorest
(working class) Americans have actually fallen in real terms since the
1970s, while the incomes of the average (middle class) have increased
slightly and those of the highest earners (upper class) have quadrupled.
Similarly, babies in poorer areas in the UK are twice as likely to die
in their first year as children from prosperous areas.
Curtis’s narration concludes with the observation that the game
theory/free market model is now undergoing interrogation by economists
who suspect a more irrational model of behaviour is appropriate and
useful. In fact, in formal experiments the only people who behaved
exactly according to the mathematical models created by game theory are
economists themselves, and psychopaths.
Part 3: “We Will Force You To Be Free”
The final programme focussed on the concepts of positive and negative
liberty introduced in the 1950s by Isaiah Berlin. Curtis briefly
explained how negative liberty could be defined as freedom from coercion
and positive liberty as the opportunity to strive to fulfill one’s
potential. Tony Blair had read Berlin’s essays on the topic and wrote to
him in the late 1990s, arguing that positive and negative liberty could
be mutually compatible. He never received a reply, as Berlin was on his
death bed.
The programme began with a description of the Two Concepts of
Liberty, reviewing Berlin’s opinion that, since it lacked coercion,
negative liberty was the ’safer’ of the two. Curtis then explained how
many political groups who sought their vision of freedom ended up using
violence to achieve it.
For example the French revolutionaries wished to overthrow a
monarchical system which they viewed as antithetical to freedom, but in
so doing ended up with the Reign of Terror. Similarly, the Bolshevik
revolutionaries in Russia, who sought to overthrow the old order and
replace it with a society in which everyone was equal, ended up creating
a totalitarian regime which used violence to achieve its ends.
Using violence, not simply as a means to achieve one’s goals, but
also as an expression of freedom from Western bourgeois norms, was an
idea developed by African revolutionary Frantz Fanon. He developed it
from the Existentialist ideology of Jean-Paul Sartre, who argued that
terrorism was a “terrible weapon but the oppressed poor have no others.”
These views were expressed, for example, in the revolutionary film The
Battle of Algiers.
This programme also explored how economic freedom had been used in
Russia and the problems this had introduced. A set of policies known as
“shock therapy” were brought in mainly by outsiders, which had the
effect of destroying the social safety net that existed in most other
western nations and Russia. In the latter, the sudden removal of e.g.
the subsidies for basic goods caused their prices to rise enormously,
making them hardly affordable for ordinary people. An economic crisis
escalated during the 1990s and some people were paid in goods rather
than money. Yeltsin was accused by his parliamentary deputies of
“economic genocide”, due to the large numbers of people now too poor to
eat. Yeltsin responded to this by removing parliament’s power and
becoming increasingly autocratic. At the same time, many formerly
state-owned industries were sold to private businesses, often at a
fraction of their real value. Ordinary people, often in financial
difficulties, would sell shares, which to them were worthless, for cash,
without appreciating their true value. This ended up with the rise of
the Oligarchs—super-rich businessmen who attributed their rise to the
sell offs of the ’90s. It resulted in a polarisation of society into the
poor and ultra-rich, and indirectly led to a more autocratic style of
government under Vladimir Putin, which, while less free, promised to
provide people with dignity and basic living requirements.
There was a similar review of post-war Iraq, in which an even more
extreme “shock therapy” was employed—the removal from government of all
Ba’ath party employees and the introduction of economic models which
followed the simplified economic model of human beings outlined in the
first two programmes—this had the result of immediately disintegrating
Iraqi society and the rise of two strongly autocratic insurgencies, one
based on Sunni-Ba’athist ideals and another based on revolutionary Shi’a
philosophies.
Curtis also looked at the neo-conservative agenda of the 1980s. Like
Sartre, they argued that violence would sometimes be necessary to
achieve their goals, except they wished to spread what they described as
democracy. Curtis quoted General Alexander Haig then US Secretary of
State, as saying that “some things were worth fighting for”. However,
Curtis argued, although the version of society espoused by the
neo-conservatives made some concessions towards freedom, it did not
offer true freedom. The neo-conservatives were ardent supporters of the
Augusto Pinochet regime in Chile which used violence to crush opponents
in a virtual police state.
The neo-conservatives also took a strong line against the
Sandinistas—a political group in Nicaragua—who Reagan argued were
accepting help from the Soviets and posed a real threat to American
security. The truth was that the Sandinistas posed no real military
threat to the US, and a disinformation campaign was started against them
painting them as accessories of the Soviets. The Contras, who were a
proxy army fighting against the Sandinistas, were—according to US
propaganda—valiantly fighting against the evil of Communism. In reality,
argued Curtis, they were using all manner of techniques, including the
torture, rape and murder of civilians. The CIA funded the Contras by
allegedly flying in cocaine into the United States, as financing the
Contras directly would have been illegal.
However such policies did not always result in the achievement of
neo-conservative aims and occasionally threw up genuine surprises.
Curtis examined the Western-backed government of the Shah in Iran, and
how the mixing of Sartre’s positive libertarian ideals with Shia
religious philosophy led to the revolution which overthrew it. Having
previously been a meek philosophy of acceptance of the social order, in
the minds of revolutionaries such as Ali Shariati and Ayatollah
Khomeini, Revolutionary Shia Islam became a meaningful force to
overthrow tyranny.
The programme reviewed the Blair government and its role in achieving
its vision of a stable society. In fact, argued Curtis, the Blair
government had created the opposite of freedom, in that the type of
liberty it had engendered wholly lacked any kind of meaning. Its
military intervention in Iraq had provoked terrorist actions in the UK
and these terrorist actions were in turn used to justify restrictions of
liberty.
In essence, the programme suggested that following the path of
negative liberty to its logical conclusions, as governments have done in
the West for the past 50 years, resulted in a society without meaning
populated only by selfish automatons, and that there was some value in
positive liberty in that it allowed people to strive to better
themselves.
The closing minutes directly state that if western humans were ever
to find their way out of the “trap” described in the series, they would
have to realise that Isaiah Berlin was wrong and that not all attempts
at creating positive liberty necessarily ended in coercion and tyranny.
More information about this documentary series on wikipedia.