Descartes' Legacy: The Century of the Self

Padraig

Banned
Origin of the Ego.

decartes_big.jpg


Cerebral mechanisms of visuomotor coordination according to Descartes.

In our pomo-triumphant, renewed Ego-Cartesianism times, this four-part documentary series might be worth a look:

The Century of the Self

PART I

How politicians and business learned to create and manipulate mass-consumer society.

The Century of the Self tells the untold and sometimes controversial story of the growth of the mass-consumer society in Britain and the United States. How was the all-consuming self created, by whom, and in whose interests?

Download file - Real Media

Or - Windows Media
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PART II

Adam Curtis' acclaimed series examines the rise of the all-consuming self against the backdrop of the Freud dynasty.

Part II - The Engineering of Consent

How the US government, big business, and the CIA developed techniques to manage and control the minds of the American people.
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PART III

Adam Curtis' acclaimed series examines the rise of the all-consuming self against the backdrop of the Freud dynasty.

Part III Of IV - There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed

American corporations realised that self was not a threat but their greatest opportunity. It was in their interest to encourage people to feel they were unique individuals and then sell them ways to express that individuality. To do this they turned to techniques developed by Freudian psychoanalysts to read the inner desires of the new self.

PART IV imminent ...
 

dHarry

Well-known member
it's a fairly damning version of psychoanalysis' influence (including the Freud family) in the (intertwined) spheres of marketing and politics, from 20th C advertising right through to the Reagan/Thatcher/Clinton/Blair era of focus group politics, whereby policies (or at least election promises) are tailored and tweaked to suit the expectations and tastes of the electorate, who always get what they want and want what they get...
 

owen

Well-known member
possibly the best documentary made on british television like, ever. i wouldn't, by the way, necessarily call it a critique of psychoanalysis per se- more a study of its pernicious outgrowths, bearing in mind the freud line that psychoanalysis, if taken literally, turns people into revolutionaries...and what this admission of defeat entails. incredible footage as well...my dream job would possibly be adam curtis' archive assistant
century_self_wide.jpg

the (inferior, but still fascinating) 'sequel' caused much debate here-
http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=92&page=1&pp=15&highlight=power+nightmares
 

Padraig

Banned
owen said:
possibly the best documentary made on british television like, ever. i wouldn't, by the way, necessarily call it a critique of psychoanalysis per se- more a study of its pernicious outgrowths, bearing in mind the freud line that psychoanalysis, if taken literally, turns people into revolutionaries...and what this admission of defeat entails. incredible footage as well...my dream job would possibly be adam curtis' archive assistant
century_self_wide.jpg

the (inferior, but still fascinating) 'sequel' caused much debate here-
http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=92&page=1&pp=15&highlight=power+nightmares

Yes, Owen, its certainly very good indeed [I somehow missed it when it was aired a number of years ago], and, far from it being a critique of psychoanalysis, it - very simply - demonstrates how US corporate capitalism [via help from its opportunistic agent, Bernays] ruthlessly appropriated some psychoanalytic ideas for its own ends [something which Freud rightfully dismissed as vulgar, frivolous; even in later years, Freud rejected an offer of $100,000 from William Randolf Hearst as well as other lucrative Hollywood offers to come to America and scriptwrite a film ...], despite the doc's unfortunate over-emphasis on Bernay as agent provocateur rather than simply servile agent ...

Thanks for that link; yes, The Power of Nightmares didn't quite match the 'prequel.'
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
I have been loving this documentary over the last few evenings... makes better viewing than the dreck that passes for television these days...

Curtis' main flaw appears to be that his sense of grandiose narrative (which makes his docs so compelling, that sense of over-arching horror at it all) leads him to appear to argue that everything which occurs within his story is the direct result of the particular thread he is pursuing... at one point he comes onto the Nazis, and almost claims Joseph Goebbels got all his ideas from Bernays! Also, to assert that the rise of the individual from the late 60s to 80s was predominently due to the effects of self-actualisation gurus seems somewhat over the top (there are many other factors which were also at work here). Its not that his core arguments are wrong (they are not) but the way everything threads together so neatly, (and without outside factors contributing to the progress of his narrative) undermines in some respects his case.

However, I was still left with a sense of incredible anger and alienation from my world after watching this series. Its a shame that due to music and clips rights being dificult to clear neither this nor "The Power Of Nightmares" are likely to be made available on DVD... therefore have to make do with viewing them on

the smallest screen in the world!
 
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owen

Well-known member
gek-opel said:
Curtis' main flaw appears to be that his sense of grandiose narrative (which makes his docs so compelling, that sense of over-arching horror at it all) leads him to appear to argue that everything which occurs within his story is the direct result of the particular thread he is pursuing... ]

this is true. on the one hand the leninist, 'everything is connected line' is very attractive- but painting matthew freud as being in any way as significant as anna, sigmund or bernays is hmm, not entirely convincing. also would have liked some more marcuse in the 60s stuff, specially his critique of reich...but these are all minor flaws in a masterpiece.
 
Agreed - century of self one of the only documentaries on tv you're ever likely to want to watch again. Most have less than one thesis that they bash you over the head with until the will to think has left the room. I have played bits of the Curtis to various groups of students (philosophy/critical thinking), especially the smoking/suffragettes section - and it works brilliantly, conjuring up all many of arguments about 'free will', 'propaganda' (in its original etymologically 'neutral' English sense and the others), desire, politics, etc.

It is, of course, monomaniacal in its argumentation, as (fantastic new addition to dissensus!) gek-opel points out - but where else are you going to see footage of 'encounter groups', adverts, LSD therapy, focus groups et al worked into such a coherent and affecting argument?
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
Also: Curtis is brilliant at showing the twists and reversals of ideas and ideologies as they snake through history, here how anti-capitalist freedom fighters become twisted into the self-actualisers, who then become the voters for Thatcher-Reagan. In "The Power Of Nightmares" how the Neo-cons began as left wingers who have been "mugged by reality"... All these perversions and inversions...
 
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sufi

lala
bump to say i'm lovin' these doccos,

glommed 1st couple already, perhaps i'll get time to catch the others this weekend,
they also have 'the corporation' in that site which i'm thoroughly looking fwd to :)
 

zhao

there are no accidents
thanks for bump and thanks for post

just realized the bad but sometimes interesting apple's been banned. oh well...
 
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Ineluctable Modality of the Clearly Visible

High resolution [Mpeg4 and Mpeg2], freely downloadable (under creative commons public domain) versions of the entire series of both The Century of the Self and The Power of Nightmares are now available here:

The Century of the Self [Mpeg4]:

http://www.archive.org/details/AdaCurtisCenturyoftheSelf_0

http://www.archive.org/details/AdamCurtisCenturyoftheSelfPart2of4

http://www.archive.org/details/AdamCurtisCenturyoftheSelfPart3of4

http://www.archive.org/details/AdamCurtisCenturyoftheSelfPart4of4_0


The Power of Nightmares [Mpeg2 and Mpeg4]:

http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares
 

zhao

there are no accidents
thanks a hundred million Hundred Million - I could not view the WMP files on original page.
 

DJ PIMP

Well-known member
Watched the first part last night. Great stuff.

Interesting to see the implications of Freuds interpretation of the unconscious as being repressed animalistic desires etc, basically a destructive force, vs Jung who looked at art and myth and saw that energy as being part of the force that directs the individual toward becoming whole.

The fact that the unconscious exists isn't the problem, its that its not constructively channelled.
 
The Trap: Curtis Strikes Again

Part I [broadcast on 11th March 2007] of Adam Curtis' latest three-part BBC documentary series, The Trap.


"how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today's idea of freedom."

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Watch part I here (real media format, 30mb):

The Trap – What Happened To Our Dream Of Freedom: F**k You Buddy

[The Cold War, paranoia, the Rand Corporation, Game Theory, Nash, self-interest, reductivist scientism, Hayek, R D Laing ...]


Synopsis of Episode I

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.​

Reviews:

Matthew Carr

K-punk

Interview with Adam Curtis

Episode 2: "The Lonely Robot" (18 March, 2007)
Episode 3. "We Will Force You To Be Free" (25 March, 2007)
 

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
Davide Simonetti said:
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".

That's interesting. As a youngun watching 'Yes Minister' I took away the idea that the existence public choice in a democracy was largely a fallacy.
 
Part II [broadcast on 18th March 2007] of Adam Curtis' latest three-part BBC documentary series, The Trap.

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Continuing his examination of neo-liberal ideology, Curtis in this episode describes how politicians in the 1990s attempted to model freedom by utilising a scientific model of ourselves as simplified robots, rational calculating beings whose behaviour and even feelings could be predicted by numbers. Out of this came today's systems of management - from performance targets to the new categories of mental disorder, and reading the genetic codes buried inside us.

As with the first episode, Curtis combines extensive archive footage ["'The BBC has an archive of all these tapes where they have just dumped all the news items they have ever shown. One tape for every three months. So what you get is this odd collage, an accidental treasure trove. You sit in a darkened room, watch all these little news moments, and look for connections."] with an eclectic soundtrack - "Intermezzo" from The Karelia Suite, Jean Sibelius (Opening title, episode one); "Return To Hot Chicken", Yo La Tengo; "On Some Faraway Beach", Brian Eno ; "Age Of Consent", New Order ; verture from Tannhauser, Richard Wagner; and from feature film soundtracks: "Assault On Precinct 13 (Main Title)" from Assault On Precinct 13, John Carpenter; and Bernard Herrman pieces from Hitchcock's Psycho and Vertigo.

Watch Part II here (real media format, 34mb):

The Trap – What Happened To Our Dream Of Freedom: The Lonely Robot


Synopsis of Episode II

This episode shows how in the 1990s politicians from both the right and the left tried to extend an idea of freedom based on the freedom of the market to all other areas of society. This had never happened before and the basis of this new 'freedom' was Game Theory, a system which reduced people to calculating, self-interested robots led by incentives rather than any idea of public duty. The result was the opposite of freedom; new forms of control, greater inequalities and the return of a rigid class structure based on wealth.

This machine model of humans led to a new idea on how to change society. Now psychiatrists and drug companies had a role to play in adjusting these machines. This became new form of control as people took the new drug, Prozac (SSRIs) to relieve their anxieties and conform to an idea of 'normality'. Some psychiatrists began to wonder if people were being conditioned to fit into parameters of a static model of what they 'should' be, defined by checklists - checklists that only accounted for observable symptoms, not any understanding of the patient's life. Dr Robert Spitzer wondered if many people were being misdiagnosed, with normal feelings of happiness, sadness, loneliness being treated as a mental disorder. A new system of management was emerging with drugs taking away difficult feelings making individuals happier but also simpler beings, easier to manage and more like the machines they were assumed to be under Game Theory - more efficient but less human.

When politicians started using this machine model, the result was a more rigid society rather than a more free one. When New Labour came to power in 1997 Tony Blair promised a society free of the arrogance and prejudices of the old elites who dominated the class system. New Labour was modelled on the Clinton Democrats and when they came to power they did exactly as Clinton did, giving power away to the banks and the markets - Gordon Brown's first act was to let the Bank of England dictate interest rates. New Labour also used the mathematical systems brought in by John Major and expanded them on an unprecedented scale believing that humans actually behaved in this simplified way suggested by the models. Performance targets and incentives were set for everything and everyone, including cabinet ministers. The Treasury under Gordon Brown started creating a vast mathematical system and started putting numerical values to things people had thought impossible to measure previously - hunger in sub Saharan Africa to be reduced to below 48 percent, world conflict to be reduced by six percent. All towns and villages in Britain were to be measured for a "community vibrancy index". Even the amount of birdsong there should be in the countryside was quantified.

The idea behind the mathematical system was to liberate public servants from old forms of bureaucratic control and workers were free to meet their targets anyway they wanted. However, New Labour soon discovered that people were more complicated and devious than their simple models allowed. Public servants began to find ingenious ways of meeting their targets. In the NHS, hospital managers used a variety of tricks. When ordered to cut waiting lists, they got consultants to do the easiest operations first meaning that complicated conditions like cancers were no longer prioritised. In one hospital patients were phoned up and asked when they were taking their holidays and the operations were then scheduled for the time they'd be away. In casualty departments a new role was invented - a "hello nurse" who did nothing except greet the patient so it could be recorded that the patient had been 'seen'. In order to meet the targets for a reduction of patients waiting on trolleys, managers simply removed the wheels and reclassified them as beds. Similarly corridors were reclassified as wards. In the police force, a trick to reduce the rate of recorded crime, was to reclassify numerous serious crimes as "suspicious occurrences" which wouldn't be recorded in the figures.

The government responded by introducing even more mathematical levels of management. Complex auditing systems were used to monitor public servants meeting their targets in the correct way which meant even more control was exerted over them. A more rigid and stratified society was being created. In education, the government wanted to introduce league tables for schools so parents could see which schools were the best and which the worst. The idea was to provide an incentive for less successful schools to compete and improve thus raising standards across the country. The opposite happened. Rich parents moved into the areas which had the best schools. This forced up house prices and squeezed poorer families out. Schools taught pupils only the narrow facts needed to pass exams instead of giving them a fuller education in order to rise up the league tables. Because of this, children had a less of a chance of rising up in society. A series of reports in 2006 showed that there was a clear link between New Labour's education policy and the rise of social segregation. Social Mobility in Britain has now ground to a halt and the country is more rigid and stratified than at any time since the Second World War. At the same time the inequalities in society have become more extreme. Britain under New Labour is now even more unequal than it was under Margaret Thatcher with more and more wealth going to the tiny one percent at the top. Since 1997 differences in life expectancy and also in child mortality in different regions have increased too.

In America throughout the 1990s the economic model of democracy was leading not just to a rise in inequality, but also to financial and political corruption on a huge scale. The numbers behind the economic boom of the Clinton Presidency were not telling the truth - the giant accounting firms had become corrupted as they found new methods to make their figures look good, some of them were questionable and others fraudulent. This corruption was widespread. By faking profits on a huge scale, personal bonuses would be increased. Attempts to stop this corruption failed because of the huge donations of millions of dollars in campaign contributions given by the fraudulent corporations and accounting firms.

The Clinton administration portrayed the boom as a revolutionary success despite the growing evidence of corruption. This "democracy of the marketplace" was spun to make it look like all levels of society were benefiting, but this was completely false. Those at the bottom of society saw their income actually fall between the 1970s and 1990s. People in the middle saw a slight increase, while those at the top received massive increases.

Now questions were being asked in scientific circles as to whether too simple a picture of human beings was being portrayed by the mathematical models used in this new system. In genetics the idea that DNA is the all-controlling set of instructions for life has been replaced by a more complex model. Science has shown that the cell actually chooses and edits which parts of the DNA to use depending on the environmental forces acting on it. And the research done by Napoleon Chagnon into the Yanomamo people has also been questioned. It seems that the presence of an anthropologist and film crew may have affected the behaviour of the tribes and they were fighting for the gifts of machetes that were offered. Even John Nash has now expressed some doubts about his model of simplistic selfish individuals now that he has recovered from his schizophrenia. The idea of the free market as an efficient system is coming under attack and new research is showing that markets do not create stability or order. Politics has been shown to have a powerful role to play in control of the markets. The New discipline of behavioral economics has been studying to see if people really do behave as the simplified model suggests. Their studies show that only two groups in society actually behave in a rational self-interested way in all experimental situations. One is economists themselves, and the other is psychopaths.​
 
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