Chapo Trap House - 502 - Units of One feat. Adam Curtis (3/1/21)

Episode Date: March 2, 2021

Chapo UK correspondent Adam Curtis returns to discuss the limits of individualism, goodies and baddies, conspiracies, manipulation, and dancing, all through the themes and characters of his new film series Can’t Get You Out of My Head.

all right guys oh man this is a big one this is a big one but I mean like I actually have some good ideas of shit we can ask him like I know that none of us okay didn't watch didn't watch any of these movies me neither me neither I yeah I was watching Fred and headlights again but like we saw the one we talked to him four years ago and I like listened to some of that episode but I think there's some like shit we could ask him that would be really funny and cool I got this one who is more important to the left Vladimir Lenin or gritty that's good that's good good writing that down it's off there um I mean I'm just

thinking like it'd be funny if we just ask him if he knows what up dog is and if he says what's up dog we can just like be like oh that's a that's a clap that's a joke right there he we could fucking that one gets get over on him real good with that one and I think that's like with those two that's like about 15 minutes I think we can get like 35 minutes even I might be being a little ambitious here but should we be like you know mr. Curtis is a hot dog a sandwich that would be great right yeah I mean like like the sandwich planners thought that it would just be meat between two pieces of bread but

then something strange happened that they couldn't predict when people on the internet started saying that sort of sort of a tubular meat in a bread-like bun was also a sandwich okay good done I would like to know what he thinks about Jonathan shape getting corn cobbed yeah yeah yeah yeah definitely okay I have a dude I just got a fucking gold mine of questions we can answer or ask him check this out without saying the city itself where are you from okay what's your favorite breakup song I mean I I mean like I understand like it's it's a podcast it's an audio medium but maybe we could ask him like without downloading

any new photos like Adam like what are four characters that's your vibe yeah without downloading any new pictures yeah absolutely oh here's a great quit I think he'll like this one what song did you find had a darker meaning after reading the lyrics all right yeah but then something strange in dark happen when I listen to that song good I'm hearing in my head right now I would like to know what his vibe is using the last three images saved on his phone that's a good one I've been a sort of involved in the mentally ill astrology community lately and I was wondering if I could ask him is it true that seven or

seven times four equals 28 has the same energy as Thursday and it's a Pisces okay I think this is like an hour actually I'm not only look if we if we if we run out of time we feel like we're spinning their wheels like I've been watching a lot of the OC lately for the first time ever actually and I just like I have I want to know if he thinks like I do that Seth Cohen represents like the poisoned decadence of a failing Western culture okay yeah all right I think we got it Chris did you write all those down I didn't write any of them down yeah and if I can just add one I would be curious just based on his past output if

he thinks that Anya Taylor Joy's Golden Globes look served an iconic style or if Jason Sudakis stole the show with his tie-dye hoodie yeah I think honestly I hope he's as mad as I am about the the fucking double standards for how men can accept awards and what women have to dress like Jason Sudakis look like a look like trash oh man that reminds me if we have time we should show him that WandaVision thing where the robot says that oh yeah I don't like price you pay for love or something yeah I know let's see if he'll say just like fuck under his breath yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah do you want to see things it wants to

hang out for like a few hours after to watch WandaVision with us okay I would actually like to take WandaVision would be because I presume he's never seen the Marvel Cinematic Universe I think it's pretty funny it's I mean it's like it's like you know like it's like classic television but on frickin crack it's like it's lynch Ian you know what I mean like I think there's a lot of shit there that like vibes with whatever it is this new series is about I think he would love it okay cool I mean oh dude he's calling right now game mode game mode game mode let's get your game face guys game face let's go let's go let's

get this money and it's four years ago welcome to show everyone it's me Matt and Felix with you and along with a very special guest today now the last time we had this guest on Trump had just become president and we had begun a four-year journey to see just how insane he could make everyone now Biden is president and we're all assured that the worst has been prevented from happening and things can go back to normal despite this on the left and right basically everybody feels defeated exhausted and most importantly like nothing we say or do has any effect on

the politics that govern us or how our lives are playing out catastrophes keep happening and daily evidence mounts up that absolutely no one in charge wants to or even can do anything to help there's a sense of paralysis among both the people and the powerful that nothing can seem to change in the age of the individual none of us seem to be able to get out of our own heads well at least there is a new film series that attempts to explain just how we got here Adam Curtis welcome back to the show thank you Adam at the end of our very last our last interview four years ago you posed a question that has

stayed with me or haunted me you might say ever since then it was essentially you asked do you really want change because real change requires the possibility that you yourself will also be changed this new series can't get you out of my head an emotional history of the modern world seems to me to be a continued exploration of that question so Adam what is it that all of us can't seem to get out of our own heads I mean I would still ask you that same question today actually yeah is do you really want change because it seems to me what marked out those four years you've just talked about was on the one hand inside

everyone's heads was continual chaos fury hysteria on both the left and the right but actually if you look at what happened during those last four years both in your country and in mine in real terms actually nothing happened none of what Trump promised happened he promised to come in and get rid of the corruption in Washington he would drain the swamp he promised to end that the horrible foreign wars that were killing people needlessly he promised to bring the factories back he promised to build a wall none of that happened so he failed completely yet at the same time those who oppose Donald Trump and those who

oppose Brexit in my country failed to come up with an alternative which has to put it bluntly changed the world and so we're sort of back where we started which makes me just just as a skeptical journalist what was all that about then if they didn't manage to change anything either side not I'm not talking just about the left and the liberals and talking about the right as well they both failed why and is it and the question I set out to answer in these films is is it something to do with the fear of change or is it something that they didn't understand about change and I that's what I want to examine well

we'll talk about the the whole history and a lot of things you go into here but just as a one recent event as kind of an aside how annoyed are you that I'm presuming that this series was pretty much in the can before you could edit in video footage of the Capitol Hill storming of just people breaking into Congress to overthrow a corrupt government and then basically just kind of walking around live streaming themselves taking selfies and whatnot because when I saw that on CNN I could just hear Apex Twin or Nine Inch Nails or some vague industrial ambient music in the background I would have probably

put an old traditional music in it yeah could he sacks I mean I mean I could have edited it in and I didn't because I thought that in a way what was really interesting about that was the hysterical reaction to it yeah I mean that is not to say that it wasn't a very sad moment because people died and that's horrible and it was it was a sort of very sad sense of something having gone completely wrong I mean what I really thought about it but but I I didn't want to do it because then you get caught by the Trump trap which is what to be honest I think all liberals do is that actually really what it represented was something

terribly sad also on the part of the people who were protesting I saw it from my perspective my country or my society as people who four years before believed as I said just now Trump was going to really change things and he hadn't done anything and they were there was a sort of sad fury to it all so when they got in there they didn't even really trash it they just wandered around between the guide ropes and it felt as well as the sadness of people being killed it also felt that they realized they had failed too and I just thought there was a melancholy to it really I mean to be honest as I watch your country from here

I see a terrible melancholy on both sides that they've just both given up now they don't know how to change things and and and this is just a sort of I don't know a slump and and they're waiting for something new and that's how I see it it it's sort of over here feels like it's we're just the empire is just a beached whale and we're all everyone's trying to do CPR on it and doesn't know how like one way or the other the Trump thing is we have to revive fortress America we have to we'll no longer occupy countries in this way we used to we'll just go in and take shit and leave in like some sort of in some

imitation of how empires behaved 200 years ago and then yeah on the other side there's a desire to recreate the Dolis Brothers mafia the same people who had a hysteria over January 6th I mean they were thrilled by it in a way because it got to be there 9-11 and the same way that Bush got to create the super modern deep state they would be able to recreate like yeah the Dolis mafia in the vision of the liberal world order everyone is just thrilled to portray weakness and sadness in front of the entire country yes it was weakness and sadness sort of being raised to a level of hysteria or fetishization or

something I really I don't think I quite got my head around I mean what was interesting was the reaction to it rather than the thing itself I mean the thing itself is not nice but I mean and there was sort of levels of levels of hypocrisy going on there just from here watching people going on about how Trump was claiming the election had been stolen they were the very same people it seemed to me who for four years who'd been claiming in the New York Times that the election had been stolen and that they were now accusing him of that in angry term and do you remember this thing called the resistance oh sure yeah

yeah well you know that that this was Trump's resistance I'm not in any way praising it but it's just you talk about a beached whale it's a hip there's a hypocrisy at the heart of your empire at the moment which I think may eat away at it quite deeply I think the the thing that the resistance liberals really were mad about and more resented than were mad about about Trump's claim of election fraud is that the people who he told that to cared enough to actually try to do something about it I mean obviously it ended up being kind of a sad pantomime but they were certainly more more charged and energized and

believed deeper than than the people the the the cable news addicts that the resistance were able to convince to mace basically just tweet yeah yeah yeah there were three years where the like mainstream line was Russia outright stole this like another country installed a leader and he is purposely weakening this country and weakening NATO from the inside and the response was to like Photoshop him like sucking a cock or something there yeah there's a very funny montage that you have towards the end of the series of clips from MSNB CNN of people saying the phrase the walls are closing in on him over and

over and over again which also tells you a lot about journalism and how that's become an echo chamber of its own but I mean there is I mean you talk about the empire that there is something interesting here is that it doesn't necessarily mean that your empire is over what it may mean I mean the British Empire went through these stages that doesn't mean that history repeats itself but the British Empire had a thing called informal imperialism which is basically where it let its companies go and run places like India then the natives got restless and started rising up and they start the British started

what was called formal imperialism where you just basically send the gunboats in you may yet America is still very strong you know and one of the things the other things I was arguing these films is that countries like China which many people on both right and left think is the future maybe far weaker and far more fragile than you think that there isn't an obvious I mean the most strongest cultural country is South Korea quite frankly you know which now occupies the places in people's imaginations that America used to in the 1890s you're still very strong what I'm trying to get my head around is is why has there been

this paralysis of the strongest country in the world it's a mystery to me well you bring up China and I mean just talk about the the series as a whole I mean in its most basic form it's kind of a history of America Great Britain Russia and China from the late 1950s right up to the very present minute told through the life stories of a number of different people and the ideas places and events that shaped their lives and the world we're living in today if there's a main character to the series or at least the first half of the series it's Jiang Qing who was an actress of stage and screen who became Mao's wife and if

you're somebody who knows very little or nothing at all about this person who was probably one of the most powerful women in history if not the most her story will probably be the most fascinating to you so how did you come to feature her as a subject of this series and how does what do you see in her life that illustrates one of your big themes which is the tension between individualism and collectivism well that's one of the things I'm following in the I mean the overall I trajectory of ideas in these films is from the collapse collapse of a collectivism the rise of individualism the rise within

individualism of the desire to change the world the collapse of that and the possibility that I raise at the end that maybe something else is coming that you know individualism may have just been one phase I chose her first of all because she's a fantastic story I mean she's absolutely fascinating secondly because as a journalist I'm fed up with the way journalism today increasingly just divides people into goodies and baddies you know you're either someone who's suffering from a warlord in which case you're a good person or you're a warlord who's banking all their money in the city of London in which case you're

a bad person I'm fed up with that and I want to try and do a thing which is much more like one of those 19th century multi-part novels where you have characters who in themselves are completely ambiguous so you're right she was she was an actor Zhang Xing in the 1930s in the Shanghai studios she was put down scorned and abused I don't mean physically abused just mentally abused by many of the directors in the studio heads she was absolutely furious with this and you're sympathetic about that you know she she's the she's one of the early people of what we all are now is we want to be individuals she wanted to

power on her own terms so she goes off joins the communist revolution then she becomes Mao's mistress and then once he wants to marry her the other male revolutionaries leading the revolution do everything they can to stop her they even send her off to be locked up in a sanatorium in Moscow and she's absolutely furious about this and she has this wonderful phrase which I just think sums up what to be honest all of us today in the communist revolution because of the you needed collective power everyone was in what was called a unit and she said I am a unit of one and that's it and I think that's what we

all are today we don't want to be in collective groups we are units of one and she's this fantastic character you're sympathetic with her up to that point and then once she gets in charge of the cultural revolution the demons in her own head come out and she uses it to take revenge on everyone who had held her back including killing them at which point you think well she's not very nice but by doing that and playing with an ambiguous character like that in a story like this you get much more of an insight into what are the problems with changing the world than you do with the goodies and baddies approach and that's

why I chose her as well as being just Jesus fantastic story there's another quote from her that towards towards the end of her story and I don't want to give too much away but in an in an address to you know her persecutors she says I am without heaven and am a law unto myself and that also really stuck with me as well but like what was it about her her personality and or just like her her view of revolution that was so dangerous to the communist ideal and to the men who were so suspicious of her because it undermined collectivism I mean the old idea of political change and to be honest the old idea of mass

democracy is that you as a politician assemble groups of people together and once you've got enough of them together you have a collective power that enables you to smash through the old unelected undemocratic power and it allows you to change the world the old revolutionaries who were horrible men saw something truthfully in her that that that unit of one attitude was going to eat away and corrode at that idea of collective power and would destroy their ability to change things and she did and that and I think that's one of the great interesting central things of our time not just in China but in your

country and in mind is that mass democracy produced collective power which enabled politicians to change the world but it also gave birth to individualism and it's seen individualism is seen as the child of mass democracy it is but then somewhere in the 1990s I argue in this film late 80s early 90s that child's turn around and started to eat mass democracy and what we've got now is not really mass democracy it's a system that has been set up to try and manage this really weird force of individualism where we're all like little squealing piglets all going our own little way and that that what

it's demolished is that idea that politicians can actually assemble us together and use that power to smash and challenge those unelected representatives of finance large computer companies so we're in a sense we're all freed little squealing piglets but we're powerless and the politicians have realized this and a feature of that that you bring up is that you know with with individual freedom and with just individualism it's good it feels great you feel like you're you're free to express yourself be yourself but when something terrible happens or when catastrophe or bad or something like bad happens to you

personally if all you have is individualism what you find is that you're actually very alone and very afraid yeah I think that that's its weakness it's I mean that it's very much like collectivism is like going into the woods at night with your friends it's really exciting individualism is like going into the woods at night on your own it's sort of exciting for a bit then let's you hear a twig snap and it's really scary it's really frightening and you run individualism has that problem and I argue in these films is that it ate away at the collective power of politicians during the 90s in response to that the

politicians turned to finance and to managerialist systems to try and manage and contain this sort of weird force that was emerging and then that worked very well until 2008 when the global financial crash led to that system beginning to collapse and it's been flatlining ever since but it also made us feel very scared and alone and I think a lot of the hysteria that we were talking about right at the beginning of the show sort of has its roots in that scaredness of individualism the sense of aloneness and not knowing really what's going to happen tomorrow and also thinking there isn't anyone in power who knows what's

going to happen tomorrow that we're all individuals and we're all on our own and we're all a bit scared and that leads to really strange hysterical stories and conspiracy theories rising up on both left and right well I mean in talking about the 90s and like your portrayal of like the Clinton and Blair years in America and Great Britain another idea communicated in this movie is that there are these old fears and this very real anger created by political systems in America and Great Britain that are been based on violence and exploitation at a really astonishing level that keep asserting themselves and there's a very

real and justified anger of the people outside of the cities at the elites that keeps coming back but the idea here is that thanks to like liberal politicians during the 90s like who you know even for sincere and altruistic reasons have created a world in which even if they wanted to do something about the problems people are angry at them about they couldn't because they explicitly gave away their power to institutions and bureaucracy that were explicitly designed to be completely independent of mass democratic will or consent and here I'm talking about yeah like like banks the EU and yeah these deep technology

companies and data yes that's true but but to be fair to the politicians which is probably wrong but it but try and be fair to the politicians they did that because we gave up wanting to join political parties right we removed ourselves from the arena of mass democracy and instead became expressive units of one like Zhang Qing said and in that at that point the politicians realized their power had gone so they literally they did 180 degrees switch and they became the representatives of those groups because not because they were partly in order to keep their sense of status and power but also because

they thought in almost unconsciously how the hell do you manage these these massive individuals and that was the system the 90s was this strange dream world I don't think we still got come to terms with the 90s yet it sort of floated through and then came 9-11 and then came the global economic crash both of which sort of exposed the weakness of that individualism but during the 90s that's what happened is you flooded money into that system of millions of individuals and allowed them to buy a dream world and that went worked until 2008 but outside you're right outside that system if you lived in I don't know

West Virginia where I've been to and those those towns there where the factories closed and there was nothing you felt very alone and very isolated just as we feel alone and isolated now since 2008 from about 92 onwards they were feeling that and there was this anger building up the same as true in my country up in the north real fury real anger I mean the politicians and the club and the class of think tank people who surround politics at the moment still do not realize how angry people here in my country got after the banking crash in 2008 it had an enormous effect because they try out the government simply

transferred what was a private debt by paying off the banks onto the public and people are not stupid that they may not understand economic theory but they can see exactly what was happening and they realized that the people who the politicians who once pretended to set said they represented them really no longer did they represented something else and they got very angry and that built up and up and up and I in the film I put in a bit from a speech by Steve Bannon which all my liberal friends would hate me for doing but it's fascinating because he sounds like a radical Marxist arguing exactly that

that a class of politicians was appropriated by unelected forces and gave up representing people which you know it's pretty shocking and just like another another element to this is that like in the 90s the the height of kind of a liberal era a liberal utopia almost in giving away their power to global financial system but also the American military through this idea of humanitarian intervention and that like you said in a world of only unique individuals that it's the responsibility of governments and their military to save individuals from the people other individuals who are oppressing them but in doing so let's

be just what are we talking about here giving all power to global financial systems and the military just like the grand old days of empire in the 19th century just as the 21st century begins again but that's because we did that sorry we allowed that to happen because we had given up not only talking about even thinking about power I mean it goes back to the goodies and baddies thing it wasn't just journalism that divided the world into goodies and baddies it was the politicians I mean the main culprit for this is my ex-prime minister Tony Blair he wanted to go to Iraq because he bought into that idea

that the world was simply divided into millions of innocent individuals who were in inverted commas good and evil bad dictators who were bad and if you went in and you got rid of the evil bad person then all the millions of individuals would rise up and you'd get democracy what happened when he and the Americans went in there is that they removed the bad person and what was revealed was a really complex power structure with all kinds of rivalries and groups and classes all the things that in the age of the individual we had forgotten about the complexities of power and we still haven't got our

heads around it because power is not discussed any longer and one of the things I point to in the films as well is that in the age of the individual what also rose up to manage us was a whole kind of psychology which said if you feel bad inside yourself it's your fault and what we can do is help you manage you in the kindest and nicest of ways to bring you back make you feel better and though thus fit within the system what was forgotten was the old idea of why you feel bad that you know if you're living in West Virginia or in the north of my country and you're feeling really bad it's not because

you're fault it's because you're living in a really bad system if you're feeling shit it's because it's a shit system and that was forgotten about that idea except for the people outside we brought into this idea that somehow everything you feel comes from inside you a lot of it does that's completely true but a lot of it that is also where you are in the power structure and the interesting thing about the COVID pandemic is that it has made blatantly clear how the closer you are to the centers of power the system of power or the higher up the hierarchy of power today the safer you are and the less

likely you are to die and I think that like the banking crisis is going to have a very big effect on people especially those people outside the system of power I mean this gets into another huge theme in the series which is the machine thinking and artificial intelligence and these attempts to kind of recreate and replicate the human brain inside machines and turn over management of society to them you talk about something called complexity theory and you describe it as the most powerful mythology of our age like what is complexity theory like where to come out of and what are some of the sort of

terrifying implications of of ordering our society around it complexity theory really came out at the end of the Cold War with the rise of computers it is the it's the early mythology that says that computers can understand the complexity of the world more than you human beings can which I would argue is one of the great you've heard the phrase big data that somehow big data can understand the world better than we can that we're limited human beings it's a bit in a funny way it's quite a religious view it says that there is something that knows us and the world more than we do which of course is God

it but it was born out of that idea that came out of the Cold War which said no the computer systems that ran that complex system of the Cold War were really powerful and we can then use that to actually analyze the data and then manage the world better the problem with it is that it it made one fundamental assumption it it said we can look at the data and work out how to manage the system better what it cannot do is ask the question of in whose benefit that system has been designed it just wants to keep it running it has no way of analyzing or even perceiving whether that systems good or bad which

is actually what politics should be about but instead the politicians sold their soul to that idea that these systems could manage complexity i.e. us squealing piglets better than they could at which point they gave up the ability to look at the system you have around you and say this system isn't good you see i would argue that people like Hillary Clinton are not bad people and the technocrats around her and the think tanks around her they're not bad people they had just bought into this idea that this system was going to be here forever and you had to find a way of managing it do you remember the phrase

they used to use in the late 90s it was called the Goldilocks economy it was neither too hot nor too cold it was just going to go on forever and they bought into this idea that things would go on forever and it was a really really really strange it was outside time in a way and and and I think one of the strongest mythologies of that is this idea that if you can just assemble enough information about the world you can keep it like that forever what was ignored was the great forces of history roaring on outside which which baguette has I still don't think it's over yet just has just started to come knocking at

the door Trump was that black lives matter was that it'll come back it's it hasn't gone away I mean but contained in that I in in in this idea of that like only only the data can see reality because it's only the only it can analyze that the patterns of what really matter about human beings which is not our thoughts not our feelings memories relationships it is only our behavior in this market in in these systems but also containing that idea is this idea that any attempt to change that system or to predict the future is doomed to fail because it is just too dangerous for human beings to to contemplate or even

attempt something when you're dealing with a system as complex as human human beings in general yes it's too complex so therefore you mustn't touch it which is one of the great mythologies of our time you must have heard it that that it's too difficult it's too dangerous to change things because it's too complex you can never tell the outcomes of it all look what happened with communism looked what happened with fascism that's true they led they both led to horror what is an elected in that argument is that there are many other things born out of extraordinary dramatic visions of the future I mean

your country America was born out of a great story there are many things wrong with your country but it's an extraordinary achievement that welfare state in my country was born out of a sort of strong vision of the future the mass democracy was born out of that it's it's a very partial view but it became very very very powerful but its weaknesses that you're right it's all about giving up on the idea of individual feelings and just observing people as their components in a system and then be able to predict what they do its weakness is that it doesn't tell you or I any visions of the future it

doesn't tell us what this is all for what's this all about so when it goes bad and we get frightened we we start inventing our own stories to fill in that vacuum and that's the weakness of this system it has no story of what's coming tomorrow and it has no explanation of why something bad happens so it's that's why we all see if feel so anxious and fragmented at the moment and and less to go back to the people who were so angry with Donald Trump and with Brexit unless they come up with an alternative those dark dangerous nationalistic stories are going to come in and fill the void well I mean I

guess this would be a good time to bring up another character in the series Edward Limanov a fairly notorious character who before this series I was really only familiar with because I feel like I'm constantly being accused of being part of his red-brown alliance and Nasbol political ideology strangely enough a guy in you know 21st century New York City could have some connection to a political party he founded in Russia but anyway he's the founder of the national Bolshevik party and has been you know sort of a thorn in the side of the Soviet Union Yeltsin and Putin but how does he fit into this idea of like

in a world dominated by money and the meaninglessness and nihilism that that engenders like how did he he turned to these these old ideas as kind of a weapon to attack and smash it like you said directly at the heart of the weakness of of this world of only money that is covered up by democracy Edward Limanov I just found again he was like Zhang Qing I just found him a fascinating ambiguous character because his early life he's he's a dissident in in the Soviet Union in the 70s they kick him out and they send him off to New York City and he ends up in New York City at the height of the punk era and

becomes this completely destitute figure he then writes this extraordinary novel called It's Me Eddie it's one of the first of those sort of novels in which the novelist becomes the central character and it's a picture of America just as finances rising up and the old idea of state management and the politicians are declining in the 1970s it's an absolutely fascinating book and it's then published in America in Russia in the 80s and becomes incredibly influential and you're again with him you're really sympathetic to him because he sees something in America he sees how actually people in America who says

are like robots who are just following the rules of money they think they're fascinating complex individuals but actually they've been simplified by judging everything in terms of whether it can be bought or sold there's nothing else he says and in a way his book was warning the Soviet the people in Russia what was coming when he then comes back to Russia in the 90s and finds that that money has come into Russia and has corrupted everything and everyone he decides he sees that weakness which I was just talking about which is that that system of finance and managerialism is very strong and very powerful because we

as individuals have lost power and we've just become these little atomized creatures and don't have that collective power to challenge it he sees that but he knows that it's weakness is it doesn't have any stories to tell so what he does is he begins to he's one of the earliest people to begin to go back and say let's revive the old nationalist myths and he creates this party called the National Bolsheviks party where he deliberately fuses fascism and communism I mean the flat like the flag itself is such like it's such a fuck you to like everything because it's essentially the hammer and sickle inside the Nazi flag

but what's really cool is that they weren't the were at the same time old nostalgic communists he wasn't like that at all he was in a way trying to go back to the original modernist roots of fascism I'm not praising him at all but what he saw was it had that power to excite people that it gave you the energy what because what the early roots of fascism said he was fascinated by a man called Danuncio Gabriel Danuncio who's who was one of the early fascist Nicoli who said look human beings have the power to make the world anything they want it's the most exciting idea in the world and Limonov realized that that was

a thing that that was the thing that could challenge this managerialist system which said no no no we never change the world we just keep it as it is and if you're feeling shit it's your fault and that's it he realized that that was the sort of the thing that could push into it and the reason I took Limonov seriously to begin with is that one of the the third member of his Nazbo party the third person to join it was a musician I've always loved called Yegor Letov from the 1980s who was one of early Siberian punk musicians and I just thought he was brilliant and I thought if he's doing that party there's something

really interesting about it and that's when I started reading about Limonov he tell like all the many other characters in these films he tells you something about your time but he isn't a very nice person but he's sort of a truth teller and I rather I just thought that was a really interesting way to look at our time rather than just having goodies and baddies well yeah I mean it's there's the goodie and baddie dichotomy there because he is very very smart and funny and kind of just venomous and in his way of looking at the world but then of course then he meets with Serbian nationalists and fires a machine gun

into Sarajevo on news footage and you're sort of like a very nice man but on the other hand though when you read his novel it's me Eddie about New York in the 1970s it tells you something about America which just pulls you back like a helicopter you go oh yeah actually that's really interesting well okay speaking of his his vision of sort of a world dominated by money and people in democracy is essentially being being robots the next thing I want to ask you about is not a person but a motif that comes up again and again in your in your films and I'm talking about images of people dancing and I remember all the

way back in the power of nightmares there's a scene where you talk about a part in Saeed Koteb's memoirs where he writes about a revelation that he had attending a college dance in Colorado in the 1950s and it was this vivid moment of horror for him about what the West truly represented and like that is always gonna stuck with me in my head whenever dancing shows up in your movies because it's always vaguely disquieting you there are people in nightclubs on stage with a partner either in free form or these kind of mass choreograph movements for you do you find the image of people dancing does this sort of reflect the

ideas you're kind of communicating about this individualism and how people see themselves and how they actually behave because you know dance is an expression of the self the body movement freedom but in another sense it's also totally programmed and not of ourselves but in fact sort of coming from some somewhere else something controlling us almost yeah that's right that's why I do do it okay got it right so wish I would never normally talk about it like that but that's your private in that's exactly why I do put them in because I think again it's a very ambiguous thing to look at I mean that the underlying thing

in the age of the of individualism the age of the self that we've all lived through is whilst at the same whilst on the one hand we are very free and we're very conscious that we are free and that we can express ourselves there is also a deep sense of self-contrastness in our time which I think previous ages didn't really have I mean I know they were self-conscious in other ways but there is a sense that you get throughout all this I've never managed to get this into a film because I don't know how to express it is that people have a sense they're being watched and you get this online all the time that people behave as though

they are being watched even if they're not dancing is this really strange moment because on the one hand it's that moment when many people give up that sense of self-consciousness and really let themselves be what they are but at the same time you're right they're dancing within a quite a pre-programmed you know everyone every DJ knows the range of beats per minutes that you can work with it it changes through the decades and rather like the characters in the films dancing is exactly the same ambiguous thing it's on the one hand it's the moment when you are looking at people truly being themselves and it's

wonderful and it's glorious there's a right at the bit of one of the characters at the end called Julia I have her dancing in a club and it's just beautiful it's just lovely you're watching someone you want to cry whereas there are other moments when there are people just dancing and you feel a bit like Limonioff said they think they're free but they're like robots in a system and it's that again that paradox of our time is that we feel completely free but what we don't see are the tendrils of others of the systems of power that sort of hold us together there's a Chinese science fiction writer who I really

like called Liu Chichen who said once what what we don't realise is that we're always dancing in chains and that's I get that is that we're dancing but there are chains that are holding us sometimes gently and sometimes beautifully but that's how power works in these days there are these invisible chains around us and sometimes dancing shows that sometimes it shows people freeing themselves for this chance you'll find out just who was your friend don't be sad I know you will

but don't give up until true love finds you in the end to move on to another one of the main characters of this series and two people that will probably be most familiar to our audience and an American audience are Afeni and Tupac Shakur how does the life of this woman and her son illustrate the shift in revolutionary ideals from the realm of politics to what you call the artificial terrain of culture yeah I always get a lot of trouble with this one fans of Tupac's music might get mad at you for this one Adam I mean when I've sort of tried gently to suggest other times that maybe culture isn't the radical force that people think it is

it's actually one of the conservative forces of our time and I get in much more trouble with that but Afeni Shakur is really the hero of these films her and Julia the other person I was talking about she showed I don't want to give too much away but she was a Black Panther and she was put on trial for allegations of planning with her cell of Black Panthers to plant bombs in New York and she defended herself and she proved that actually they'd all been set up by agents undercover agents who were within the cell to do the bombings and she did it so powerfully and so strongly

the transcripts of what she says are amazing and how she gets the undercover agents to actually admit at the end that what they thought she and the other Panthers were really doing was incredible beautiful and wonderful even though they tried to set up the bombings it's an extraordinary moment and it shows that an individual can stand up and take on that system and it was amazing I mean it's really good and she's the sort of hero of that I don't want to give too much away but if you jump on then to Patshakur

when he comes and becomes he realizes at the end of the 80s that although many things have changed the racism in America was still incredibly deep much deeper than people thought and he decided to try and revive the Black Panthers and I found this extraordinary interview with him when he's talking about going to a party in the late 80s and realizing this and wanting to bring back the Black Panthers but he decides to do it through culture

and I'm afraid I don't want to go into it too much because we're giving too much of his story but I think what he discovered was that culture had become this arena in which you could act out being radical and you all felt very radical and then really nothing ever changed which is sort of true I mean it's one of the great mysteries of our time

is the way the left retreated into radical culture in inverted commas at a time when actually inequalities the structure of power became much more rigid, much worse and has done very little to change it it's always baffled me this one it doesn't mean that that culture isn't very good and it doesn't express its time beautifully but it may be actually expressing its time beautifully

in its very inability to change the world do you see what I mean? rather than its rhetoric and that sometimes you have to look at art and think actually what it really expresses is something that those who were doing it at the time didn't even really realize I think Tupac Shakur got very angry when he began to realize when he was put in jail, you know, a third of the way through the 90s is that he realized that actually he was being locked away in culture as well

and I don't know, I think it's... I just have this theory that we may look back at culture as the way in which this system managed radicalism it created this lovely little nursery in which everyone could go and be radical and this goes back to the question I asked at the end of the last time we talked which is, do you really want change? is that if you really want to have a revolution in your country and my country

then you would have to accept that maybe you'd lose power and not only would you lose power, you might actually lose your income you might have to lose your status you might have to lose a lot of the things that make your life so happy you might lose your life you might lose your life like people have done in the past when they have fought to change the world but they did it because they believed they were part of something bigger than themselves

and wanted this to go on beyond their own existence in the age of the individual, no one thinks like that any longer no one does they marched through London against the Iraq war saying, not in my name no one thought about that in revolutions it's to go back to the corrosive effect of individualism it eats away at that collective power that can give people the possibility of change in the world

but on the other hand though, we don't want to be in a collective we want to be free individuals it's wonderful, it's lovely but it limits us and as you said earlier on when things go bad, you feel alone and very weak pick up another big thread in this movie and one that fascinated me a lot was another character is this guy named Kerry Thornley

who is this pseudo-objectivist who along with a friend of his in Playboy magazine starts something called Operation Mindfuck which was the genesis of the Illuminati conspiracy theory in American culture but for him, when he created it it was a totally satirical attempt to illustrate the absurdity of all conspiracy theories what you show here how did Operation Mindfuck achieve the exact opposite of its intended effect

both in the public imagination but in the mind of the very man who created it himself again, I don't want to give too much away but Thornley is fascinating the role of fake conspiracy theories and real conspiracies how they got mixed up together in your country it is absolutely fascinating

Thornley, you're right, was a follower of Iron Rand he believed that all conspiracy theories were a way of actually making people feel weak because you don't know who to trust and he set up Operation Mindfuck he was part of the prankster counterculture to give it its best term and he decided he was going to parody all conspiracy theories by starting in Playboy magazine but all through the counterculture spreading the story that all the chaos, all the assassinations of the 1960s

were the work of the Illuminati who were really the secret rulers of the world he just thought this was so ridiculous that it would parody it as that spread through the counterculture in the late 60s, early 1970s what also began to be revealed was that actually ever since the 1950s the American government had been doing conspiracies it had been doing secretly assassinating leaders of other countries around the world

with things like poison toothpaste and strange poison dart guns whilst at the same time at home they'd also been trying to experiment with mind control on their own citizens without telling them when that started to come out those were seen as so absurd but true people began to get confused about what because of the level of absurdity of these conspiracies

with the absurd conspiracy theories and what I try and show in the films is how those two got mixed up together and ever since the 1970s that began to blur the line between what was true and what was false and I think when you then get the internet coming along from late 90s that just explodes

and you see it, I would argue both in QAnon and in the Russia Gate everyone falls into the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories because that crucial line got eaten away out of the counterculture attempts to parody things when they actually met real absurd conspiracies because the great distinction is that conspiracy theories and conspiracies are very different things

but we've forgotten that these days QAnon obviously is the most cutting edge of these because it's this crowdsourced attempt that comes from an anonymous individual or individual that is just like ceding these cryptic little things that then masses millions of people then take it upon themselves to interpret and create their own stories

you do the work yeah, like do the work it's this crowdsourced attempt to investigate not just a satanic cabal of pedophiles running the government like that's almost incidental I think it's really become an attempt to investigate what is reality itself and can an individual know anything about

or interpreting any of these signals or data that we're getting now and it has taken on an entire life of its own that it seems like something exactly I don't want to hear movies and it's a tiny part of this new documentary but I guess I'm just wondering where do you see this going I don't think it's as important as you think it is I think that's one of the mythologies

sorry, I'm not trying to be rude here but I think it is one of the mythologies of the liberals conspiracy theories are terribly dangerous when I started to investigate some of the conspiracy theories that people believe online like the fact that Beyonce and Britney Spears have actually been mind controlled by the CIA using MK Ultra techniques

what you begin to find with people who believe them and inverted commas is that they sort of know they're not that true but they love them because they are epic and wonderful and dreamlike and they take you into some kind of world which this present system of power doesn't give you because it's so banal

like it's the power of a big story right, sort of what you're saying like a power of a story to tell communicate some truth about the present and about the future that is big and captures people's imaginations and it's sort of like the truth of it is almost irrelevant Hillary Clinton did not capture anyone's imagination

wait, no you're going too far Adam whereas the idea that Britney Spears has been mind controlled by an alliance between the Illuminati the CIA and Walt Disney but it only lasts for seven years which is why it goes at certain points

and she goes mad is a sort of epic and weird and wonderful story that people sort of know is probably not true but it's just you go into that world because what you're faced by is a strange mixture of technocrats like Hillary Clinton who have no story to tell you and genuine conspiracies

like the weapons of mass destruction that was not a conspiracy theory that you could argue, allegedly was a conspiracy by high up people within government to actually justify an illegal invasion so when you've got a world like that why not go and believe that Britney Spears is controlled by MK Ultra

even if you don't, in inverted commas really believe it because this goes back to goodies and baddies the liberal and left wing attitude to those who believe in conspiracy theories is that they're stupid because they're believing in something that you know, no, the moment you start investigating people

who believe those kind of conspiracy theories yes of course there are some very stupid people who believe at all but there's actually something much more sophisticated going on really and actually the really stupid people who then go and try and believe that actually Vladimir Putin gave Donald Trump

and completely ignore the elephant in the centre of the room they're just peering around the edges which is that actually millions and millions of people are really angry and really fed up and were given a big button that just said fuck off and they pressed it which is Donald Trump and Brexit and they would not face it

there's something really sophisticated going on but also what QAnon was also a way of those on the right justifying why Donald Trump did nothing because he was being stopped by lots of pedophiles in Washington so it's obvious that's why he wasn't doing anything this I mean you touched on this as well I mean we talked about this on the show as well

like not just to blaming conspiracy theories for the rise of Donald Trump or something like Brexit a lot of like in the media and among intellectuals a big thing you hear a lot about now is like as a reason for why people vote the wrong way or have bad beliefs in their head is this idea of misinformation that there's so much that they're being directly controlled

through like targeted misinformation through the internet that if only they got better information or more responsible mediators of that information these things wouldn't happen Yeah Well I don't believe that, do you? No, I mean this gets into I think one of the more hopeful parts

of the movie which is saying a lot is that according to like your interpretation of like the latest like neuroscience on this issue is cutting against what was the dominant belief of like the last half century or so that human beings as individuals are fundamentally weak and easily manipulated and what you're saying is that like new information

would seem to imply just the opposite Yes, I do think it's really interesting it's one of the under-reported things of recent times is that over the last few years psychological researchers have tried to repeat many of the major experiments that have been used to justify this argument of what they call it priming that you can prime people or nudge them

you all see is the phrase by sending them, targeting them with messages that unconsciously can actually affect the way they think and behave when they try to repeat many of these experiments they found they couldn't do it and there are really big questions being asked in psychology at the moment

about whether this whole idea of human beings as fundamentally manipulable is not true you can keep people in a state of hysteria online by sending lots of memes around all the time but what you can't do is fundamentally alter how they think and how they feel that it means that people might have voted for Donald Trump and for Brexit

because they might have been misguided and they might be wrong but they might have done it because they believed in it or in a more sophisticated way they saw it in an age when the mainstream of political parties had become a monopoly, simple system in which there were no alternatives

they saw it as the only way they could register their anger which is a sophisticated reading and maybe they were far more sophisticated than we think I didn't believe in Brexit I wouldn't have voted for Donald Trump but I can see why they did it and for the last four years those who were so angry with this

refused to actually face up to that question of why did they do it? Instead they're either stupid or they have been manipulated which of course you would never be manipulated Yeah, exactly, I'm not the object of propaganda I can't be propagandized too I don't even bother to because I'm smart

I'm of the group of people that doesn't fall for that kind of thing Well, if you believe that chances are you're absolutely the victim of propaganda You're back to a sort of class distinction here between those who can be manipulated who are not you and those who can't be manipulated

who are you and I just think that's quite a dangerous line to start drawing I like that there's an interesting Russian journalist who works for the New Yorker called Masha Gassman who's consistently said No, Vladimir Putin did not elect Donald Trump

she put it very simply she said Russians did not elect Donald Trump Americans elected Donald Trump and they cannot get their heads round this fact and I think that says a lot about I think this is one of the things that's just gently coming back into focus in this age of individualism

especially in this country but I think it's also true in yours is maybe social class never really went away and that sense of entitlement and superiority never really went away it just lived under the surface quietly while everyone behaved as radicals in the area of culture

social class and elitism carried on unquestioned and it sort of come out and people like Trump and Brexit have brought it out in a rather raw and frightening way I mean it's this idea about manipulating or priming people it's sort of very similar to the idea of hypnotism

and what the CIA actually did find out with their MK Ultra programs is that you cannot actually hypnotize someone to do anything that they would otherwise be morally opposed to that's a very good point back in 19, whatever it was, 58 they discovered that you cannot actually alter how people behave

and the failure to repeat psychology experiments 60 years later, 50 years later are showing exactly the same thing that doesn't mean that people can't be sold things for advertising doesn't mean people can't be kept in a state of what's called high arousal emotions online but underneath

there's something much deeper in human beings which is they actually have a conscious understanding of what they think and what they believe depending on their experience where they are in the power structure there's quality of life they actually are much stronger than you think which gives me great optimism

because if we could recapture that if we could get that confidence back then actually you might be able to keep the world of the individualism it's not going to go away you can't go back into the old collectism yet at the same time begin to give people confidence

to really try and challenge power and do things and change the world properly rather than patronising them all the time and telling them they're stupid which I just think is wrong I guess this gets into my last question for you which is that this whole idea of living in the age of individualism

that is the dominant hegemonic ethos of our times but at the same time in our lifetimes or as you show in the movie the idea of our sense of confidence in ourselves as individuals or as even being able in charge of our own minds

has been steadily chipped away at and I guess I'm wondering like to regain a sense of confidence in ourselves or at least our ability to oppose these kind of systems of management and control is our confidence as individuals in conflict with the idea of individualism as like a primary goal or ideal in our society

I think what I'm quietly underneath these films suggesting that really we've lived through an age of individualism that came out of the Second World War and the horrors of collectivism like fascism like communist totalitarianism it has been a glorious and wonderful and liberating time it's been a time in history unlike anything else it has all its problems

and it had lots of other things that were wrong with it but it was a moment of great liberation but it is very strange that what started off as an idea of empowerment has now led in America and throughout the West and in China and Russia to a sense of millions and millions of individuals feeling anxious and uncertain and frightened about the future and those in power having nothing to offer

to explain to them how to get out of that you get a sense that something might be at the end of its natural life but what I also know is that you can't put individualism back in the box and what we're waiting for is something or someone or some idea, some vision of the future which says no I can square the circle I can actually create a system which will allow you to carry on thinking and feeling genuinely

that you are a confident individual yet also relish and like being part the feeling of being part of something that can build something in the future which will go on past your own existence because that's quite thrilling and quite exciting we're waiting for that part of me thinks in a practical way

the first thing to do is literally take the internet back from the people who got hold of it, the venture capitalists in about 2000 when the dot-com crash and they've skewed it and narrowed it and distorted it and screwed up journalism in the process take it back and actually use it as a way of genuinely connecting people collectively which was its original utopian ideas

and I've always believed in those sort of things that was the good ideas in the 90s that's one practical thing the other is just a story about the world it doesn't have to be very complicated but it just have to have this sense that I quote this guy called David Graber who is an activist

both at the front of the series and the end of the series who simply said the great hidden truth about the world is that we made this world and if we made it then we can make it differently and I find that really thrilling I love that idea because we've been persuaded that we can't complexity theory, psychology

all those things now tell us we're weak, uncertain and you can't do anything but the truth is, which is really what I'm trying to demonstrate in these films, is we did make this world together we all did it's our responsibility for having been individuals that corroded the power of the politicians it's the politicians fault for having given up

on the idea that you actually can challenge those in power we did this together and if we did that together we can make it different together and I think that's really quite thrilling but the way to do that is someone's got to come along and say yes you can still be an individual but you can actually work together

to create something beyond this and I think that will happen if it doesn't then the horrible nationalisms and the oldness of the past are going to come back but you don't do it by telling people they're stupid you have to go and talk to those people who voted for Donald Trump and voted for Brexit they're racist

they're not racist because they're just racism doesn't come out of nowhere it comes because they're frightened and scared and angry you've got to go and talk to those people and you've got to do it and the only person I ever saw do it was Bernie Sanders he went and talked to people after Donald Trump was elected and I thought that was quite right

really good you can't change the world just by talking to each other and producing radical culture I think that's a good place to wrap it up Matt, do you have any closing comments, thoughts or questions? I think we did it okay

put a ball on that one Adam Curtis, thank you so much for the new series and thank you for spending some time with us thank you Adam bye you