The market... and the trap

[imomus]

I'm writing a Wired column this morning, so I'm just going to give you a picture of me and Hisae at the local market yesterday, enjoying what really felt like the first day of spring.



Actually, if I were BAFTA award-winning television essayist Adam Curtis, I'd tell you that it only felt like the first day of spring so early in March because of global warming, and that global warming is the direct result of the belief in mobile individualism fostered by Henry Ford. And, do you know, in a slightly paranoid way I actually think I am Adam Curtis. My Wired piece, for instance, will be about how market research software recursively influences the things it purports to study -- how junk mail produces junk space (insert Henri Lefebvre and Rem Koolhaas references) and (through focus groups and super-precise geodemographic software tools) junk politics.

Overdetermined as ideas like these may be, I love people who raise big questions and make semi-convincing, if polemical, accounts of how we've reached the state we're currently in. I love people who point out the inherent absurdity of ideologies we don't even notice we have. (See yesterday's Derrida line about how modern democracy is based on a phallocentric and other-hating idea of brotherhood and needs to relearn hospitality and openness.)

So I'm looking forward immensely to Adam Curtis' new BBC 2 series The Trap: What happened to our dream of freedom?, which starts on Sunday March 11th at 9pm. I don't get BBC 2 here in Berlin, but I'm hoping some kind soul will burn me a DVD, as they did with Curtis's excellent docs Century of the Self (follow that link, all four parts are up on archive.org for you to watch) and The Power of Nightmares.

So what's The Trap about?

"The Trap," says the BBC press release, "explains the origins of our contemporary, narrow idea of freedom. It shows how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today's idea of freedom. This model was derived from ideas and techniques developed by nuclear strategists during the Cold War to control the behaviour of the Soviet enemy... Governments committed to freedom of choice have presided over a rise in inequality and a dramatic collapse in social mobility. And abroad, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the attempt to enforce freedom has led to bloody mayhem and the rise of an authoritarian anti-democratic Islamism. This, in turn, has helped inspire terrorist attacks in Britain. In response, the Government has dismantled long-standing laws designed to protect our freedom."

Rather wonderfully, Curtis links this to the antipsychiatry of R.D. Laing, a personal hero of mine (one of the greatest dead Scotsmen, and the subject of an excellent art film / documentary by Luke Fowler).

I'll let The Guardian tell you more about The Trap:

"The new series, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom, argues that we have unwittingly subscribed to a bleak ideal of liberty that has, ironically, "become our cage", reducing our true freedom and fuelling a dramatic rise in inequality.

"The cold war way of thinking about human nature, mirrored by the work of the economist Friedrich von Hayek, inspired the nascent Thatcherites. They were convinced that civil servants and public-sector workers, while claiming to serve the greater good, were really just self-centred and out for their own gain. As in the nuclear standoff, it was best to be honest about the fact that everyone involved was cold and calculating; the dangerous people were the ones who claimed to serve some higher ideal... Hence the culture of public-sector targets, pioneered by Margaret Thatcher and massively expanded by Tony Blair: give people the right incentives, the theory went, and in pursuit of their own interests they'll end up helping everyone.

"In a typical bit of conceptual long-jumping, The Trap leaps from politics to the radical Scottish psychiatrist RD Laing, who saw normal families as hotbeds of strategy and scheming, with husbands and wives manipulating each other as if they, too, were just like the White House and the Kremlin. Psychiatry abetted this nightmare, defining people as mad if they rebelled against the system.

"...If you keep treating people as if they were selfish and calculating, that's how they'll eventually become. "We ... come to believe," as Curtis puts it, "that we really are the strange, isolated beings that the cold war scientists had invented to make their models work."

Comments

Aha!

[(Anonymous)]

Happily wearing your butcher-shop apron again, I see....

Honestly, I do admire your fashion-sense. I have recently been looking for a wig to complement my alter-ego.

[desant012.livejournal.com]

I completely agree, ole Momus. The ideology of "personal freedom" we have in the US (and I assume the UK) negates the reality of society, and so personal freedom actually infringes on the freedom of others. Yes, the classic argument.

It's just amazing how people are so dogmatically passionate about individual, personal indulgence regardless of how much it may harm others or society at large, thus hurting everyone in the end. There must be a balance between that and full-fledged dependence on bureaucracy. There's no way the US, the #1 producer of CO2 emissions, will ever change - if we ever mention the argument, we're "city-dwelling lefty fags". Pretty sad.

[fishwithissues.livejournal.com]

if we ever mention the argument, we're "city-dwelling lefty fags".

straw man alert!

i'm tired of this anti-anti-intellectual crap. it just fosters tensions between folks. people in rural areas care about sustainable agriculture and climate change as much as people in the cities. if they drive pickup trucks it's very often that they actually have use for them, and/or, if they like them, that's fine. let's scream about making ones that pollute less, instead of screaming at people who "choose" to drive. if we're really going to abandon the idea of personal freedom, then obviously let's save our anger for the auto and oil firms, and leave the beautiful people of the fields (the straw men) alone.

[intergalactim.livejournal.com]

thanks for the Century of the Self link, I will have to check that out. I'm too many steps behind to comment just now.

isn't 4.5 euros quite expensive for a quarter of a pumpkin?

[akabe.livejournal.com]

what looks like a 4 is how most eurpeans write 1

[(Anonymous)]

I like your apron as well, but I have a question: on the fifth picture, were you trying to take a photo of the couple(?) behind you, and if so, why?

[colinmarshall.livejournal.com]

There appears to be a certain conflation of "self-interest" and "selfishness" here. Selfish people are disliked, and rightly so, but it's no delusion to want to harness the desires of the self-interested, a group that includes even the kindest, most giving souls around.

When all is said and done, I'd probably prefer a Thatcher/Hayek trying to make use of human nature than someone more overbearing trying to force people to adopt "higher" values.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

It doesn't really help Mr Curtis' case that it's based on an essentially flawed interpretation of one of von Hayek's basic messages, which ran along the lines of "the road to hell is paved with good intentions."

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

...make use of human nature than someone more overbearing trying to force people to adopt "higher" values.

If only people came to this conclusion before the twentieth century socio-mechanistic meat-wheel really started building a head of steam.

This utopianism yielded interesting results on a smaller scale during the nineteenth century with the shakers and other such social experiments, but at our current stage of development and brutal scale of living it is a deadly thing to toy with.

And yet, here we are again. Must be human nature.

[(Anonymous)]

i think scientology might just be your bag. you should check it out.

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

Scientology do bags???

someone tell Victoria Beckham

Unblocked

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

<< The Trap," says the BBC press release, "explains the origins of our contemporary, narrow idea of freedom. It shows how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today's idea of freedom. >>

Sartrean, no? I tried to read Being and Nothingness and mostly remember the teacher saying "Sartre wants you to reinvent yerself at each corner, he blieves humans get stale by relying to heavily on what they've seen in the past."

I read Nausea and got the same from that, the inpenetrable doorknob. What does the knob mean to a man who can't eat without getting sick?

In other news, had my chakra read today. Introduced myself as Skeptic Number 1. He's like "I like skeptics I am not going to make you vomit." vomited. he said you have much in your past that you cannot access because it's blocked by your body and the selfish spirits that inhabit it. They love your bod because you don't care if you die so they party there. I vomited again. He's like you have so much knowledge, you will be able to access it by this time next week. I'm like you mean every face I see looks like soomeone I've seen before? I can only cookie-cut faces? He's like sorta. Come back with more questions, we'll get you unblocked, we'll get you access to the colleective unconcsious.

Re: Unblocked

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

He said, when you get on Click Opera and tell people what to do, you are teaching them. They may not hear the lesson, but that's what's happening. No matter if you are under the influence. Drunk people teach. No matter if you are on the upswing of a bipolar episode. Ever post on momus when you're depressed. No, you have nothing to teach when depressed, the spirits have left the shell of your body.

When you burp and post fifteen times in a row, they are right when they say in vino verirats and they are right that yo umight, for your own health and mental well being, have a breathalyser installed on your keyboard, but there's no need. Just keep posting, whoever needs to hear will hear, whoever doesn't need to hear may complain your monopoloziing the conversations, and they may be right, but you are still a teacher.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

I strongly think that's a bit of a straw man on Mr Curtis' part. What von Hayek is saying is not primarily that bureaucrats are evil, but that bureaucracies tend to have as one of their main priorities their own perpetuation and expansion and that very large bureaucracies tend to come with problems attached.

This basic phenomenon does not require Yes, Minister cynicism, although that does float around the corridors of power a lot. It is actually very easy to bring about with very non-cynical bureaucrats, too - as long as they feel that the thing they are currently doing always and perpetually deserves more funding and resources and importance (because it's clearly socially important, whatever it is).

Brazil - Terry Gillian - Tom Stoppard -1985

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

this is a great flic to check out about bureaucracies and personal freedoms. Enjoy the samurai collossus!

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

Nothing is so individual as the populist solution!

time for some adorno!

[poncif.livejournal.com]

minima moralia, 99, "gold assay."

Re: time for some adorno!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

My copy is in New York. But a gloss (http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/theory-frankfurt-school/2007m01/msg00010.htm) says:

"Authenticity becomes "authentic" only against the background of reproducibility. That means, however, that authenticity is compromised from the beginning, inauthentic from the start, for its origin lies not in itself, but rather in its opposite, reproduction.

Adorno expands on this position in aphorism 99, "Gold Assay", of Minima Moralia. He sees "genuineness" as filling the vacuum of traditional religious and ethical standards. But while authenticity was the watchword of 19th century bourgeois intellectuals like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and
Ibsen, in the 20th century it has found a home in fascism.

Adorno also draws on Benjamin"s view of mimesis and denies the existence of "a pure subject prior to mimetic behavior." (21) Adorno also has some harsh words for Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. As Jay puts it:Because the self is always imbricated in the social, any attempt, like Kierkegaard"s, to retreat into naked existential interiority is
complicitous with the isolation caused by society, not a protest against it. Nietzsche, despite all his insights into the workings of ideology, failed to see through the fallacy of authenticity, which betrayed his Lutheran roots and smacked of the very anti-Semitism he decried in Wagner.

Adorno traces the contemporaneous jargon of authenticity to religious revivalists, dubbed sarcastically as "The Authentic Ones", who pushed Kierkegaard in the 1920s. While the jargon, which Adorno characterizes as "the unending mumble of the liturgy of inwardness", speaks of higher things
but lacks the substance, it reeks of what Benjamin wrote about the "aura". To sum up, then, Adorno's multifarious charges against authenticity and the jargon around it are as follows: it provides a hollow substitute for lost religious belief in ultimate values; it is based on a mistaken search for
proprietary origins that establish rights of the earliest settlers; it rests on a dubious ideal of self-possession and integrity, which fails to credit the mimetic moment in the creation of selfhood; it entails an ontological fiction of absoluteness that falsely sees itself as the antidote to the leveling equivalence of the exchange principle; it serves
as an anti-intellectual evocation of concreteness and immediacy against the alleged depredations of abstract, intellectual thought; it can be understood as a variant of the cultish notion of aura, which itself is only a function of the reproductive technologies that it pretends to antedate;
and, finally, it paradoxically gives too much power to the subject able to designate something as authentic and to the object after that designation has been made. All attempts to derive authentic meaning from etymological priority thus share with foundational philosophy a vain search for an
Urgeschichte, which is little more than a nostalgic fantasy of primal wholeness before the Fall.

mayfair set

[bongo-kong.livejournal.com]

Adam Curtis also made a documentary series called The Mayfair Set. It reveals the influence a group of wealthy, right-wing gamblers (John Aspinall, James Goldsmith, David Sterling etc) had on successive UK governments, leading to private equity boom and busts, the end of British industry, and disastrous mercenary adventures in Africa and the middle east. James Goldsmith, in particular, was completely barking.

The most frightening part of Adam Curtis's output is that he portrays the political elite as being hopelessly-out-of-their-depth fools, readily manipulated by special interest groups with often rather bizarre ideas. The present PM certainly springs to mind.

Re: mayfair set

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about The Mayfair Set when I overheard a BBC radio 4 profile on Saturday 3 March about Gordon Brown's pal, Ronald Cohen

From this article (http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/pages/live/articles/columnists/columnists.html?in_article_id=439808&in_page_id=1772&in_author_id=382):

ABOVE all, Gordon Brown opened the way for private equity entrepreneurs to make massive fortunes when he slashed the rate of capital gains tax soon after becoming Chancellor.

Throughout its time in government, New Labour has given its unreserved public help to the private equity 'industry'. It should be noted that this support has come at the expense of Labour's traditional backers in the trade union movement and among ordinary Labour activists.

I have no proof that there is the slightest connection between the large donations to the Labour Party (mainly from people who, like Sir Ronald, showed no interest in Labour until it was on the verge of power) and the generous tax treatments offered to the private equity industry. For all I know, everything is completely above board.

[(Anonymous)]

It's interesting that we'll so readily embrace the cynical psychology of a Nietzsche of La Rochefoucauld, but reject the (some would say cynical) ideas about the benefits of self-interested forces acting in markets.

[desant012.livejournal.com]

When it comes down to practicality, society is an institution which puts boundries on the worst human impulses - rape, murder, etc. It's not perfect, but it works for the most part. So, why can't it be used curb the human impulse to be obsessively selfish?

Other societies manage to be perfectly fine and society-oriented, which is evidence that it's perfectly possible to do. It's the typical right wing extreme-capitalist argument to say that "since humans are selfish, there's nothing society can do!" Yet, the whole point of society is redirecting the dark parts of our nature to at least keep us from destroying ourselves, which is exactly what we're doing now.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, the kind soul who's sending me a DVD turns out to be the film-maker himself!

By the way, two BBC plugs for the series contain clips and discussion of The Trap:

This is Paul Morley liking The Trap (http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_4680000/newsid_4686600/4686677.stm?bw=nb&mp=rm) on Newsnight Review.

This is Isobel Hilton giving Curtis a hard time (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/mainframe.shtml?http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio3_aod.shtml?radio3/nightwaves) on Night Waves, Radio 3.

[fishwithissues.livejournal.com]

somebody had the power of nightmares dvd in his pocket and gave it to me, so i'll probably watch that tonight.

[afoxdrinksblood.livejournal.com]

I am truely impressed by the frequency and thoroughness of your posts.
I wouldn't be suprised if one day someone told me you were actually an amalgam of german hikikomori who'd hired someone to be their liason to the world.

How much time DO you devote to posting? How much to other things?
In fact, I am somehow becomming interesting in a breakdown of the way you spend your time, since you seem to get so much done.

lol.

Hmmm, well keep it up anyway.
Good work.

Industrial Society Destroys Mind and Environment

[sushil-yadav.livejournal.com]

In response to your post about "the Trap", culture, freedom and mental illness I want to post a part from my article which examines the impact of consumerism/ industrialization on our minds and environment.

The link between Mind and Social / Environmental-Issues.

The fast-paced, consumerist lifestyle of Industrial Society is causing exponential rise in psychological problems besides destroying the environment. All issues are interlinked. Our Minds cannot be peaceful when attention-spans are down to nanoseconds, microseconds and milliseconds. Our Minds cannot be peaceful if we destroy Nature.

Industrial Society Destroys Mind and Environment.

Subject : In a fast society slow emotions become extinct.
Subject : A thinking mind cannot feel.
Subject : Scientific/ Industrial/ Financial thinking destroys the planet.

Emotion is what we experience during gaps in our thinking.

If there are no gaps there is no emotion.

Today people are thinking all the time and are mistaking thought (words/ language) for emotion.

When society switches-over from physical work (agriculture) to mental work (scientific/ industrial/ financial/ fast visuals/ fast words ) the speed of thinking keeps on accelerating and the gaps between thinking go on decreasing.

There comes a time when there are almost no gaps.

People become incapable of experiencing/ tolerating gaps.

Emotion ends.

Man becomes machine.


A society that speeds up mentally experiences every mental slowing-down as Depression / Anxiety.

A ( travelling )society that speeds up physically experiences every physical slowing-down as Depression / Anxiety.

A society that entertains itself daily experiences every non-entertaining moment as Depression / Anxiety.


Fast visuals/ words make slow emotions extinct.

Scientific/ Industrial/ Financial thinking destroys emotional circuits.

A fast (large) society cannot feel pain / remorse / empathy.

A fast (large) society will always be cruel to Animals/ Trees/ Air/ Water/ Land and to Itself.


To read the complete article please follow either of these links :

PlanetSave (http://www.planetsave.com/ps_mambo/index.php?option=com_simpleboard&Itemid=75&func=view&id=68&catid=6)

TheHolisticWheel (http://www.theholisticwheel.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=324)

sushil_yadav