Well worth watching and pretty chilling.
After hearing about body count being used and an 'incentive' in the Vietnam War, I wanted to take John Nash's Nobel prize and shove it up his arse.
Sorry for the long quote - here's a good synopis of last nights' episode.
Adam Curtis' The Trap - A Synopsis - Part 1
Posted March 10th, 2007 by Davide Simonetti
in * uk politics * us politics
This is a follow-up of Quarsan's post about Adam Curtis' new documentary, "The Trap – What Happened To Our Dream Of Freedom?", the first part of which screens on BBC 2 this Sunday (March 11) at 21:00. I strongly urge readers of Blairwatch not to miss this series if possible as it is relevant to the topics we discuss. Adam Curtis has generously agreed to do an interview with us next week. In order to prepare for it, I managed to get the first two installments of this three part series and I was blown away by what I saw. I'm posting a synopsis of the first two episodes here for those who will be unable to catch the program. This is the first part.
So, what is it about? Well, I'd say it is about freedom and how the concept of freedom seems to have changed since the Cold War and how that change came about. As Britain and America go around the world 'liberating' oppressed people, and as they try to 'liberate' us from the old bureaucracies of the past, they replace what was there before with a strange kind of freedom which bears little resemblance to the freedom we knew before. This series examines how this came to happen and looks at the mechanisms behind this paradox which is, in effect, the losing of our freedom in the name of freedom, replacing it with a new form of social control which entraps us all.
The first part of the series goes back to the origins of this phenomenon and that is the paranoid environment of the Cold War. After World War II, the bureaucracies that existed to regulate unrestrained capitalism started to be challenged. The free-market economist Friedrich von Hayek (an inspiration for Thatcher) argued that the use of politics to plan society was more dangerous than capitalism and led to tyranny, using the Soviet Union as an example. He advocated a system where individuals followed their own self interest and government played little part. The Market was everything, what he called a "self-directing automatic system" where everyone persued their own gain and there was no room for altruism.
Hayek was largely ignored until scientists looking for ways to win the Cold War developed strategies based on "Game Theory", which was pioneered by the schizophrenic mathematician John Nash at the Rand corporation. Game Theory applied as military strategy kept a balance of power as the Soviet Union would not attack the USA out of fear and self-interest knowing that if they did, they too would be devastated. Game Theory, however, produced a dark vision of humanity where everyone was mistrustful of one another. John Nash demonstrated that it was possible to create stability through suspicion and self-interest in the whole of society rather than just Cold War strategy. Nash developed a game called "Fuck You Buddy" in which the only way to win was to betray your partners. By applying Game Theory to all forms of human interaction, he proved that a society based on mutual suspicion didn't necessarily lead to chaos, but he made the assumption that humans were naturally calculating and always seeking an advantage over their fellows and this led to an equilibrium. This system could only work if everyone behaved selfishly. As soon as people started co-operating together, instability ensued and this proved to be the case when the system was tested - participants co-operated with each other.
Nash's ideas were spread into the wider society when the psychiatrist R D Laing challenged conventional ideas of love and trust in his dealings with people suffering from schizophrenia. He observed that the medical staff in mental hospitals rarely spoke to the patients. As an experiment he selected twelve patients and spoke to them about their problems and encouraged them to speak also. They were soon well enough to leave the hospital but soon had to be re-admitted. This led Laing to think that their problems were caused by their environment, particularly in family life where power and control were exercised. He used Game Theory to examine this idea so the problems could be quantified using questionnaires, the answers to which were fed into a computer. He concluded that acts of love and kindness were actually weapons used to exert power and control - domination games as found in the outside world of international relations. he spread the idea that none of the state institutions of the post war world could be trusted and that public duty was an illusion which was, in fact, a means of mind control. The lack of trust spread as Britain's institutions were torn down in the name of freedom.
At this point some American right-wing economists inspired by Friedrich von Hayek, many of whom had also worked for the Rand Corporation, came onto scene. They set out to prove, using the science of Game Theory, that public duty which had under-pinned British public life for generations, was a sham and a corrupt hypocrisy, and their ideas were to start the process of the demolition of the old ideas of the British state. They also introduced to Britain the paranoid outlook of the Cold War strategies. The collapse of British government bureaucracies in the 1970s was blamed on the economy, but there was more to it than this. They seemed to have turned against the people they were supposed to serve. The group of American right-wing economists explained this by stating the philosophies based on the techniques of Game Theory - that everyone was strategising against each other in an effort to win some advantage. The idea of politicians working for the public good, they said, was a complete fantasy because it assumed that there were shared goals based on self-sacrifice and altruism when actually everyone was self-seeking. From this came the theory of "Public Choice" which was meant to destroy the idea of working for the public interest. They were led by Professor James Buchanan. Buchanan had a strong influence on Margaret Thatcher when she became leader of the Conservative party in 1975. When he came to London, he explained that the British institutions were full of self-serving bureaucrats rather than people working for the public good. Thatcher set out to attack these bureaucracies and at the same time the writer Sir Anthony Jay created a successful propaganda TV program to push the idea of public choice. It was called "Yes Minister".
Meanwhile, R D Laing went on to challenge the authority of the American psychiatric establishment with the aim of liberating people but instead what happened was a new form of control was developed using numbers. Laing said psychiatry was a fake science used to shore up a collapsing society and that madness was a label used to lock up those who wanted to break free. One of the psychologist who attended Laing's talks, David Rosenhan, devised an experiment that discredited the psychiatric establishment by showing that they locked up sane people and couldn't tell the difference between sane and insane. As a result of this a system was developed which just measured the surface behavior of people to remove human judgment. New categories were invented and new disorders like Attention Deficit Disorder or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. The diagnosis was done by computer. Studies were done on people and it was found with this system that more than 50 percent of Americans had some sort of mental disorder. An unforeseen consequence was that people started to self-diagnose themselves and ask their doctors for medication to make them 'normal'. This led to a new form of control done by people themselves in order to conform.
When Thatcher came to Power in 1979, she espoused this philosophy of 'freedom' but in order to exert some control she used similar systems based on numbers. She wanted to privatise as much of the state as possible, but realising that some institutions would have to remain in state control, she tried to change them by scrapping the idea of public duty and introducing a system of incentives based on self-interest - public choice. In 1986 she attacked the NHS. To do this she enlisted the help of Alain Enthoven, a nuclear strategist from the Rand Corporation who had devised mathematical models for nuclear war to incentivise the other side. He developed a technique called "Systems Analysis" which could be applied to any human organisation. Its aim was to remove any emotional and subjective baggage that could confuse the system and replace them with mathematically defined targets and incentives. He first used this idea in the 1960s to change the way the Pentagon was run under Robert McNamara. Patriotism was replaced by rational incentives and targets against the wishes of the military. However, when McNamara tried to run the Vietnam War this way, it was a disaster. Performance targets were met by killing civilians.
In the British NHS, Alain Enthoven employed the same system. He called it the "Internal Market". It mimicked the free market by introducing competition and incentives, opening the door for corruption. This created the self-interested kind of people John Nash envisaged in his Game Theory, only now in the NHS. As the Cold War ended, the paranoia that was prevalent in fighting it was now firmly rooted in our society.
