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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Wednesday,  January  27  at  7:30  pm

Episode Three:

We Force You to be Free

This third episode of The Trap focuses on the concepts of positive and negative liberty introduced in the 1950s by Isaiah Berlin.  Curtis briefly explains how negative liberty could be defined as freedom from coercion and positive liberty as the opportunity to strive to fulfill one’s potential.  He claims that it was Berlin’s opinion that, since it lacked coercion, negative liberty was the safer of the two.  He then explains how many political groups who sought their vision of freedom ended up using violence to achieve it.  For example the French revolutionaries wished to overthrow a monarchical system which they viewed as antithetical to freedom, but in so doing ended up with the Reign of Terror.  Similarly, the Bolshevik revolutionaries in Russia, who sought to overthrow the old order and replace it with a society in which everyone was equal, ended up creating a totalitarian regime which used violence to achieve its ends.

Using violence, not simply as a means to achieve one’s goals, but also as an expression of freedom from Western bourgeois norms, was an idea developed by African revolutionary Frantz Fanon.  He developed it from the Existentialist ideology of Jean-Paul Sartre who argued that terrorism was a “terrible weapon but the oppressed poor have no others.”

This episode also explores how economic freedom had been used in Russia and the problems this had introduced.  A set of policies known as “shock therapy” were brought in mainly by outsiders, which had the effect of destroying the social safety net that existed in most other western nations and Russia.  In Russia, the sudden removal of the subsidies for basic goods caused their prices to rise enormously, making them hardly affordable for ordinary people.  An economic crisis escalated during the 1990s and some people were paid in goods rather than money.  Yeltsin was accused by his parliamentary deputies of “economic genocide” due to the large numbers of people now too poor to eat.   Yeltsin responded to this by removing parliament’s power and becoming increasingly autocratic.  At the same time, many formerly state-owned industries were sold to private businesses, often at a fraction of their real value.  Ordinary people, often in financial difficulties, would sell shares, which to them were worthless, for cash, without appreciating their true value.  This ended up with the rise of the Oligarchs — super-rich businessmen who attributed their rise to the sell-offs of the ’90s.  It resulted in a polarization of society into the poor and ultra-rich, and indirectly led to a more autocratic style of government under Vladimir Putin, which, while less free, promised to provide people with dignity and basic living requirements.

There’s a similar review of post-war Iraq, in which an even more extreme “shock therapy” was employed — the removal from government of all Ba’ath party employees and the introduction of economic models which followed the simplified economic model of human beings outlined in the first two episodes — this had the result of immediately disintegrating Iraqi society and the rise of two strongly autocratic insurgencies, one based on Sunni-Ba’athist ideals and another based on revolutionary Shi’a philosophies.

Adam Curtis also looks at the neo-conservative agenda of the 1980s.  Like Sartre, they argue that violence would sometimes be necessary to achieve their goals, except they wish to spread what they described as democracy.  Curtis argues that although the version of society espoused by the neo-conservatives made some concessions towards freedom, it did not offer true freedom.  The neo-conservatives were ardent supporters of the Augusto Pinochet regime in Chile which used violence to crush opponents in a virtual police state.

Curtis also examines the Western-backed government of the Shah in Iran, and how the mixing of Sartre’s positive libertarian ideals with Shia religious philosophy led to the revolution which overthrew it.  Having previously been a meek philosophy of acceptance of the social order, Revolutionary Shia Islam became a meaningful force to overthrow tyranny.

This episode reviews the Blair government and its role in achieving its vision of a stable society.  In fact, argues Curtis, the Blair government had created the opposite of freedom, in that the type of liberty it had engendered wholly lacked any kind of meaning.  Its military intervention in Iraq had provoked terrorist actions in the U.K. and these terrorist actions were in turn used to justify restrictions of liberty.

In essence, this episode suggests that following the path of negative liberty to its logical conclusions, as governments have done in the West for the past 50 years, results in a society without meaning populated only by selfish automatons, and that there is some value in positive liberty in that it allows people to strive to better themselves.

The closing minutes directly state that if Western humans were ever to find their way out of the “trap” described in this film series, they would have to realize that Isaiah Berlin was wrong and that not all attempts at creating positive liberty necessarily end in coercion and tyranny.

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