The market... and the trap
Mar. 7th, 2007 01:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusI'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."
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."
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-07 01:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-07 01:49 pm (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-07 03:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-07 03:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-08 03:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-07 04:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-07 04:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-07 09:53 pm (UTC)Gandhi
That poverty is no disaster is understood by everyone who has not yet succumbed to the madness of greed and luxury that turns everything topsy-turvy.
Seneca
Avarice is always poor.
Samuel Johnson
Madness is badness of spirit, when one seeks profit from all sources.
Aristotle
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-07 09:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-07 11:35 pm (UTC)yes philosophy in a bottle!
Date: 2007-03-07 10:24 pm (UTC)and
badness is madness of spirit, when one seeks sources from all profit
rinus
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-08 07:44 am (UTC)I do, actually, think individualism is a good thing, but then I seem to have a different idea of what individualism means than some. To me, it certainly doesn't mean greed. It means valuing all individuals, whether first, second or third person.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-08 08:02 am (UTC)Isn't that valuing a collectivity, though? I, you, he, she or it -- that's a crowd! But do you mean to value that crowd as individuals rather than a group?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-08 04:49 pm (UTC)I would say that I value the idea of community very much. It would be great if we could have schools, for instance, in which childrens individual talents are actually nurtured, rather than schools where one of the main lessons is, "You're no different to anyone else." That's something that's very hard, or impossible, to legislate for, though. There has to be a large-scale shift in attitudes.
Conflict resolution is certainly the great human problem, though. societies that proclaim freedom breed conflict within, and those that proclaim conformity (if we can suppose abstract, pure examples of such opposites) set up conflicts on a group scale.
My own policy has been as much as possible to interact with people as individuals and downplay any group identities to which I might belong. It's not perfect, but it seems to be the best I can do at the moment.
Sorry if this is a bit woolly - I've just come back from a training day.