Documentary maker, Adam Curtis, includes R D Laing's anti-family arguments
as part of his latest BBCtv documentary series starting on Sunday 11 March,
about the erosion of our freedoms, whereas in his 2002 documentaries
charting the use of Freud's theories, Laing is noticeably absent, with the
narrative omitting any mention of sixties "anti-psychiatry" and going
straight to the seventies "Me" generation and Werner Erhard's est (Erhard
Seminar Training).

See the article from The Guardian, 3 March, below.

Full details of the two previous documentary series, broadcast 2002 and
2004, as well as information about Adam Curtis can be found on Wikipedia -
and the two previous series can be be viewed online -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curtis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_Of_The_Self
"This series is about how those in power have used Freud's theories to try
and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy." - Adam Curtis
broadcast 2002, available to view online - see links on the Wikipedia site.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Nightmares
subtitled The Rise of the Politics of Fear, broadcast 2004, available to
view online, see links on Wikipedia site.

Sun 11 Mar, 9:00 pm - 10:00 pm 60mins BBC2tv
THE TRAP: WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR DREAMS OF FREEDOM

F**k You Buddy: A series of films by BAFTA-winning producer Adam Curtis that
tells the story of the rise of today's narrow idea of freedom. It will show
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. It was
then taken up by genetic biologists, anthropologists, radical psychiatrists
and free market economists, until it became a new system of invisible
control. With some strong language. [S]
Subtitles Stereo Widescreen

http://www.guardian.co.uk/saturday/story/0,,2025578,00.html
CRY FREEDOM
In the cold war paranoia made sense, but a bold new documentary argues that
the west has become trapped in a false idea of what it means to be human. By
Oliver Burkeman

Saturday March 3, 2007
The Guardian

In the mid-1950s, with the cold war growing chillier, paranoia seeped
through the corridors of the Rand Corporation, the fabled military thinktank
in California. After all, to the hotshot young analysts paid to devise
America's strategy in the nuclear standoff with Moscow, paranoia seemed to
make perfect sense. If you assumed that you couldn't trust your enemy - and
you assumed that your enemy felt the same about you - then whatever noises
you made about disarmament, you'd always stockpile weapons, because you'd
assume your enemy was doing the same. Nobody would dare attack, and an edgy
stability would result. Act with trust and co-operation, on the other hand,
and you risked a situation where both sides would claim to be willing to
disarm, but then only you actually did so, spelling instability, then doom.

This was what the thinktank's logicians called the "prisoner's dilemma", and
the more ambitious among them - inspired by John Nash, the mathematical
genius and Rand Corporation scholar portrayed by Russell Crowe in the film A
Beautiful Mind - had high hopes for their newborn theory. Could it be, they
wondered, that stability in everyday human relations was achieved by the
same kind of self-centred suspicion and distrust? To test their ideas, they
recruited the nearest everyday humans they could find: the Rand
Corporation's secretaries. In experiments, they posed various dilemmas for
pairs of secretaries, in which they could co-operate or betray each other.
(A typical question involved the purchase of a Buick; one imagines women in
knee-length dresses, gamely tolerating questions from clipboard-wielding men
in horn-rimmed glasses and short-sleeved shirts.) The theory predicted
they'd choose betrayal, because they couldn't trust the other one not to.
Every single time, however, they chose to co-operate.

Perhaps if the analysts had paid more attention to their secretaries, the
history of the past half-century would have proved very different. Instead,
according to a new documentary series beginning on BBC2 next weekend, the
paranoid theories hatched during the cold war would come to inspire a
peculiar, cold-hearted idea of personal freedom - one that helps explain
everything from the rise of Prozac and Viagra to Labour's obsession with
healthcare targets, from the military crusades of George Bush and the rise
of the Iraqi insurgency to the rampant diagnosis of attention deficit
disorder in children.

This is an audacious hypothesis, even by the standards of the
documentary-maker involved, Adam Curtis, whose 2004 series The Power Of
Nightmares asserted that al-Qaida, as an organised entity, was essentially
an invention of the west. 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.
Critics will probably accuse Curtis, as they did after The Power of
Nightmares, of being paranoid himself - of seeing in government policies a
sinister plot to control the populace by tricking them. "But I've never
believed that anyone's bad," the 51-year-old Curtis insists, bouncing
restlessly around the Soho office where he's editing the series. "People do
bad things because they're forced into circumstances. Journalists always
want to find a smoking gun - people sitting in rooms saying 'let's bomb
Iraq'." As for what happened to the concept of freedom, he says: "I don't
think there are baddies in this. I think our leaders, and us, in the belief
that they were trying to find freedom, have gone down a road that's led us
into a trap, towards a world without meaning or purpose. We're complicit."

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. "We're safer if we have
politicians who are a bit self-interested and greedy," says James Buchanan,
the grandfather of this approach, "than if we have these zealots ... who
think they know best for the rest of us." 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.

In one famous proof that madness was defined by a patrician establishment,
an American follower of Laing, David Rosenhan, arranged for eight healthy
researchers, himself included, to check themselves in to mental hospitals.
They claimed they could hear a voice in their heads saying "thud". All were
diagnosed as ill; it took Rosenhan two months to get himself discharged. One
hospital chief, defending the profession, urged Rosenhan to send more
impostors and promised to detect them. He agreed, and soon the hospital was
boasting the discovery of 41 fake patients. Rosenhan hadn't sent any.

But in trying to overthrow the old definitions of madness, Curtis
demonstrates, many psychologists gave up looking inside people's brains at
all. Instead, they devised a system of checklists based entirely on
symptoms - the tome known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. If you
could tick enough boxes, you had the disorder: depression,
obsessive-compulsive disorder, ADD, or the rest. The new way of thinking
allowed people to diagnose themselves, and thus chastise themselves for
experiencing ordinary human emotions, just because they diverged from an
ideal of what was normal. They were free of a psychiatric establishment
telling them how they should be - but they weren't really free at all. They
had become enslaved by paranoid self-monitoring.

In earlier times, psychiatrist Paul McHugh tells Curtis, "people didn't want
to see themselves as in some way psychiatrically injured. But now, they tell
me that they have an ideal in their mind about what the normal person is.
[They say]: 'I don't fit that model. I want you to polish me down to
fit.'..."

Curtis argues that while the radical psychiatrists inadvertently ended up
enforcing a single ideal of the normal human, so too did target-obsessed
Thatcherites and Blairites begin to turn people into the calculating
machines they'd wrongly assumed them to be. The precise results, however,
proved unexpected. The theory of the "invisible hand" of the free market,
first crystallised by Adam Smith, whereby the pursuit of self-interest
results in order, may apply in the world of business - but not necessarily
when artificially imposed elsewhere. Set a target for the reduction in
patients waiting on hospital trollies, and NHS managers are liable to
respond - as some notoriously did - by removing the wheels and reclassifying
them as beds.

"I realise what I said at some times may have over-emphasised rationality,"
an elderly John Nash tells Curtis in an extraordinary interview, after
emerging from years of battling schizophrenia. "Human beings are much more
complicated than the human being as a businessman." In fact, the documentary
notes sardonically, experiments show that only two kinds of people behave
like perfect little economists in every arena of life: economists
themselves, and psychopaths.

The Trap's argument won't convince everyone. The link between all these
ideas and the way "freedom" was used as a justification for the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq isn't so clear. And the truth about public service
workers may be that they are neither knights nor knaves, but a bit of both,
argues Professor Julian Le Grand, one of the architects of Blair's health
reforms. "The real trick is that you need a system of incentives that
encourages the knight and the knave in each of us, and gets them working in
the same direction," he says. But he agrees with the film's argument that 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."

Curtis enjoys an extraordinary latitude in his filmmaking: in a post-Hutton
BBC, it was extraordinary that he was allowed to make The Power of
Nightmares at all. (It put noses out of joint at the corporation, which
commissioned another documentary, The New Al-Qaida, essentially a riposte.)
"I love the BBC," Curtis says. "It's so complex that no-one can control it.
My job is to swim in the chaos and use it to my advantage." The BBC had its
own experience of internal-market culture, with similar effects to the
trolleys-and-beds fiasco detailed in the film. "Actually, though, the
Birtian revolution was fine," Curtis says. "It just meant more chaos."
The Power of Nightmares drew fire from some right-wingers, who accused
Curtis of imagining conspiracies and objected to the parallel he drew
between the evolution of neoconservatism and that of radical Islamism. In
the US, the conservative National Review accused him of fuelling "Chomskyite
visions of 'Amerika' as the fount of all evil". The criticism misses the
mark. The al-Qaida film shows that Curtis believes, above all, in the
political force of ideas; many "anti-imperialist" critics of western foreign
policy see nothing at work but blind economic forces. Where he differs from
the neocons is in pointing out that the consequences of their ideas weren't
the ones they predicted.

"That sort of pissed me off," Curtis says of the conspiracy theory charges.
"There's an affectionate tone in that series. I'm kind of taking the piss
out of conspiracy theories." His trademark filmmaking style, in fact,
undermines any too sinister interpretation of his subject-matter. The story
of the neocons is narrated against clips from black-and-white horror movies,
with appropriate scary background music.

It might also surprise his critics on the right that Curtis doesn't buy the
standard anti-Bush critique that the "war on terror" turned the imaginary
threat into a real one. "There's very little evidence that there actually
has been the rise of an organised al-Qaida network," he says. From the
media's point of view, he argues, "all you have to do is call yourself
Al-Qaida In Islington, and you're part of an organised network." The trick
"is to step back. If there's one thing that links all I do, it's trying to
make people pull back, look at their time. All the news journalists now are
so obsessed by the idea of 24-hour news that they have no idea what it all
means."
The Trap occasionally feels as if it is stepping a little too far back,
wrapping the whole past half-century into a single argument. As Curtis
readily concedes, the old civil service did need replacing; a world in which
psychological disorders are over-diagnosed has also seen thousands of lives
transformed by Prozac. It's not that our old ideas of how to run society
were any good; it's that our new ideas didn't work out as planned.

The most perceptive comment on the situation comes, in Curtis's film, from a
beleaguered bus conductor, in archive footage used as a counterpoint to the
visionary talk of targets and markets and freedom. It could serve as a
general diagnosis of the problem of how best to approach politics,
psychology, culture - the lot. "Anybody that deals with the public, you can
never win," he says, flatly. "You can never win when you deal with the
public. Never."

Under the microscope
1920: Little Albert
In an experiment that wouldn't make it past any university ethics committee
today, researcher John Watson tried to show how early experiences affect the
kinds of people we become.
The nine-month-old experimental subject, Albert B, was introduced to a white
rat, and a rabbit; he showed no fear. Then he was presented with the white
rat while Watson hit a metal bar with a hammer behind his back.
After this happened several times, the baby became afraid of the rat - and
of the rabbit, and of other furry animals and objects. Albert's mother never
gave her consent for the experiment, and the baby left the hospital before
any attempt could be made to eliminate his new fears.

1960s: The Yanomami
The anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon made headlines with his studies of
violence among the Yanomami people of Venezuela and Brazil.
What looked like orgies of aggression, he concluded, actually followed a
strict logic: tribe members defended those to whom they were more closely
genetically linked, protecting them from those who were genetically more
distant.
Doubters had another theory: that the violence was influenced by the
presence of the Western anthropologists. The fighting, they said, was
between village members to whom Chagnon's team had given machetes, and
visiting tribespeople, who wanted machetes too.

1961: The Milgram Experiments
These notorious studies on obedience to authority, by the Yale psychologist
Stanley Milgram, revealed what seemed to be a horrific dark side to
humanity: if told to do unconscionable things by someone who presents
themselves as an authority, we will.
Milgram's subjects were told they were helping to study the effects of
punishment on learning, and would have to administer electric shocks to
another so-called "subject", in another room, who was actually an actor.
The subjects proved willing to administer what they believed were electric
shocks to the actors, up to and including fatal levels, because the person
running the experiment told them that they must.

1971: Stanford Prison Experiment
Philip Zimbardo, at Stanford university, divided undergraduate volunteers
into prisoners and guards, confining them to a mocked-up prison.
Even though everyone understood they were part of a simulation, chaos
resulted as the subjects adapted with alarming speed to their assigned
personas. Guards became genuinely violent and sadistic; the prisoners
rioted, and showed signs of trauma.
Alarmed researchers called off the experiment early - reportedly to the
consternation of some of the guards, who had come to relish their roles.
· The first episode of The Trap is on Sunday March 11 on BBC2 at 9pm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/saturday/story/0,,2025578,00.html The Guardian
3 March 2007

================
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