Wednesday, August 11 at 7:30 pm

Destination Moon

by George Pal

When production on this movie began in 1949, everything about the project was state of the art.  The great science fiction author Robert Heinlein co-wrote the script and served as technical advisor.  The movie’s astronomical visions were realized by Chesley Bonestell, whose artwork virtually defined the look of space travel at the dawn of the rocket era.  This movie is even noted in NASA’s official time line of space-travel history.  It remains a milestone science fiction film, not so much as classic science fiction but as an attempt to visualize the reality of space exploration.

The movie now seems quaintly nostalgic, and its depiction of humanity’s first lunar landing is inaccurate on several details.  Taken in context, however, it remains impressively authentic.  The motivation for the lunar conquest remains military:  the country that controls the moon will control the Earth, and cold war paranoia fuels the mission of the rocket ship Luna, which blasts off from the Mojave desert carrying four daring astronauts.

http://www.kqek.com/dvd_reviews/d/3453_DestinationMoon1950.htm

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Film evenings begin with optional potluck refreshments and social hour at  6:30 pm

followed by the film at 7:30 pm,

followed by a discussion after the film.

Wednesday,  January  13  at  7:30  pm

Episode One: Fuck You Buddy!

In this first episode of The Trap, Adam Curtis examines the rise of game theory during the Cold War and the way in which its mathematical models of human behavior filter into economic thought.  This episode traces the development of game theory with particular reference to the work of John Nash who believed that all humans are inherently suspicious and selfish creatures that stratagized constantly.  Using this as his first premise, Nash constructed logically consistent and mathematically verifiable models, for which he won the most prestigious prize in economics.  He invented system games reflecting his beliefs about human behavior, including one he called “Fuck You Buddy” in which the only way to win was to betray your playing partner.  These games were internally coherent and worked correctly as long as the players obeyed the ground rules that they should behave selfishly and outwit their opponents.

What was not known at the time was that Nash was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and, as a result, was deeply suspicious of everyone around him — including his colleagues — and was convinced that many were involved in conspiracies against him.  It was this mistaken belief that led to his view of people as a whole that formed the basis for his theories.

A separate strand in the documentary is the work of R. D. Laing, whose work in psychiatry led him to model familial interactions using game theory.  His conclusion was that humans are inherently selfish, shrewd, and spontaneously generate stratagems during everyday interactions.  Laing’s theories became more developed when he concluded that some forms of mental illness were merely artificial labels, used by the state to suppress individual suffering.  This belief became a staple tenet of counterculture during the 1960s.

These theories tended to support the beliefs of what were then fringe economists such as Friedrich von Hayek whose economic models left no room for altruism, but depended purely on self-interest, leading to the formation of public choice theory.  James M. Buchanan proposes that organizations employ managers motivated only by money.

As the 1960s became the 1970s, the theories of Laing and the models of Nash began to converge, producing a widespread popular belief that the state (a surrogate family) was purely and simply a mechanism of social control which calculatedly kept power out of the hands of the public.  Adam Curtis shows that it was this belief that allowed the theories of Hayek to look credible, and underpinned the free-market beliefs of Margaret Thatcher who sincerely believed that by dismantling as much of the British state as possible, a form of social equilibrium would be reached.  This was a return to Nash’s work, in which he proved mathematically that if everyone was pursuing their own interests, a stable, yet perpetually dynamic, society could result.

The episode ends with the suggestion that this mathematically modeled society is run on data — performance targets, quotas, statistics — and that it’s these figures combined with the exaggerated belief in human selfishness that has created “a cage” for Western humans.  The precise nature of the “cage” is to be discussed in the next episode.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_(television_documentary_series)

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Film evenings begin with optional potluck refreshments and social hour at  6:30 pm

followed by the film at  7:30 pm,

followed by a discussion after the film.

Wednesday,  January  20  at  7:30  pm

Episode Two: The Lonely Robot

This second episode of The Trap develops the theme that drugs such as Prozac were being used to normalize behavior and make humans more predictable, like machines.  People with standard mood fluctuations diagnosed themselves as abnormal.  They then presented themselves at psychiatrist’s offices, fulfilled the diagnostic criteria without offering personal histories, and were medicated.  The alleged result was that vast numbers of Western people have had their behavior and mentation modified by SSRI drugs without any strict medical necessity.

Adam Curtis shows Richard Dawkins propounding his ultra-strict “selfish gene” with archive clips emphasizing how the severely reductionist ideas of programmed behavior have been absorbed by mainstream culture.  This brought Curtis back to the economic models of Hayek and the game theories of the Cold War.  He explains how, with the robotic description of humankind apparently validated by geneticists, the game theory systems gained even more hold over society’s engineers.

This episode describes how the Clinton administration gave in to market theorists in the U.S. and how New Labour in the U.K. decided to measure everything it could, the better to improve it.  In industry and public services, this way of thinking led to a plethora of targets, quotas, and plans.  It was meant to set workers free to achieve these targets in any way they chose.  What these game-theory schemes did not predict was that the players, faced with impossible demands, would cheat.

Then Curtis describes how the theory of the free market was applied to education.  With league tables of school performance published, the richest parents moved to new homes to get their children into better schools.  This caused house prices in the appropriate catchment areas to rise dramatically — thus excluding poorer parents who were left with the worst-performing schools.  This is just one aspect of a more rigidly stratified society, which Curtis identifies in the way in which the incomes of the poorest (working class) Americans have actually fallen in real terms since the 1970s, while the incomes of the average (middle class) have increased slightly and those of the highest earners (upper class) have quadrupled.  Similarly, babies in poorer areas in the U.K. are twice as likely to die in their first year as children from prosperous areas.

Curtis concludes that the game theory/free market model is now undergoing interrogation by economists who suspect a more irrational model of behavior is appropriate and useful.  In fact, in formal experiments the only people who behaved exactly according to the mathematical models created by game theory are economists themselves or psychopaths.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_(television_documentary_series)

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