‘The Trap’ by Adam Curtis, BBC
I wanted to post about the Trap, a documentary by Adam Curtis, the man behind the the-West-created-Al-Qaeda film, ‘The Power of Nightmares’, and ‘Century of the Self’.
The BBC site is typically dumbed-down for what was a comprehensive overview of the past fifty years of governmental attempts to secure freedom for its citizens (whatever freedom may mean, is the implicit question).
“Stuff from you”
“‘Agree with what it said or not, The Trap was brilliant…’”
and
“Just how free are we? According to Adam Curtis - we’re not.”
wasy just some of the idiot-banter on the site describing this pivotal documentary series. It’s a shame…
Personally, I was enthused by the ideas uncovered and clearly described by Curtis, and, as you might expect, the tone of the programmes had a bias towards Curtis’s opinion and was not an example of the BBC’s impartiality remit, but it’s one of the few programmes on television within the last half-decade that have genuinely excited me.
At points his summaries tended to be reductive towards complex issues, but his arguments were very persuasive, despite the fact that he did not express a personal opinion until the very last words in the last episode, where he stated that Isaiah Berlin may have been wrong in static that positive freedom could only lead to tyranny, suggesting that something akin to a ‘revolution for good’ could be possible, although his thesis was not made explicit, just implied by his editing narrative style.
He would seem to reject Game Theory, as its implementation by post-Cold War governments was flawed in its assumptions, however Game Theory itself stands, just that any assumption that people will necessarily make the choice for most gain is not an intrinsic part of it. Curtis made this point by showing that the secretaries in the Rand corporation did not choose to betray in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, but Curtis did not reiterate this in his repeated recaps, saying only that governments saw their people as ‘machines’.
That said, Curtis’s documentaries stand as some of the best of the BBC’s increasingly dire output and should be commended for their insight and originality.
