The Trap

I much enjoyed Adam Curtis's documentary The Power of Nightmares, and his newest film, The Trap is even better. The premise is that since the Cold War, the idea of what Isaiah Berlin called "positive freedom," that is, freedom to things, like freedom to housing, food and shelter, things that were supplied by the government in communist countries, has proven to lead to tyranny, because it inevitably undermines "negative freedom", freedom from government interference in a person's life. The goal of the West was guarantee negative freedom by eliminating as much positive freedom as they could, giving things over to market forces and reducing the role of the state in providing for the welfare of the people.

This approach grew out of and fed into a very cynical idea that everybody is out to serve their own interests only and that anybody who says they want power so they can use it for "the public good" is lying and not to be trusted. Game theory, the mathematical system that calculates what strategy any two or more competing forces should adopt to maximize their own advantage, became the new model of how society really behaves. The predictability of society then depended on the assumption that people actually acted only in their own rational self-interest.

There's an interview with the economist James M. Buchanan, who believes that anybody who truly does believe that they should be serving the public good is a "zealot" who must be gotten rid of, because these "zealots" will not act in the predictable way that strictly self-interested people will act. They only system that can be trusted is one that plays off of people's greed and selfishness, and uses those assumed patterns of behavior to establish a predictable order, i.e. market capitalism.

So in the West's current concept of "freedom," we are free to act selfishly, but any deviation from that and any organization or government that asks you to put your energy into something bigger than yourself or your immediate interests is strongly discouraged. Curtis points out that this "is a strange concept of freedom."

I have a few criticisms of this movie. One is that Curtis says that the paranoid, cynical idea that people always act in their own interest is something that came out of the rejection of Soviet Communism. This idea, however, has been around for lot longer. The American system of checks and balances was based on that assumption when it was designed in the 16th century. The other problem I have with this documentary is how he completely leaves out the influence of the religious right. This is a part of society that is asking people to sacrifice themselves for their concept of a greater good (although they too curiously subscribe to the cynical system of market capitalism.)

Overall, though, it was quite good. The conclusion Adam Curtis comes to at the end is that "we have to learn that not all attempts to do what is in the interest of the public good lead to tyranny." Interesting idea.

You can watch it here on YouTube. But be warned, it comes in 23 parts and is three hours long in total.