Blairwatch Exclusive: Interview with Adam Curtis
Posted March 21st, 2007 by Davide Simonetti
Following on from the earlier syonopses of The Trap which you can read here and here, we have managed to get a short interview with Adam Curtis so we could discuss some of the issues he raises in the films. Here is the transcript.
Blairwatch: Okay, can I start by talking about the name, why The Trap?
Adam Curtis: Well, basically what the series is trying to say is that what we think of as the natural order, and that somehow this is what we call freedom, is actually a particular version of freedom and also a narrow version of freedom and by assuming that it is the only version of freedom we have led ourselves into somewhat of a trap. That is what it's about.
Blairwatch: I see, and what would you say the difference was between freedom then, say, pre Cold War and freedom now as we perceive it?
Adam Curtis: Well, the last film in the series goes and examines that, it looks at the other ideas of freedom. The point is that freedom is not just one particular narrow idea. What I'm trying to argue is that we have adopted, both our politicians and ourselves to an extent a narrow economic idea of what freedom means and that's based on the idea that the individual is free once his or her wants or needs are simply satisfied and is free just do what he or she wants.
Other Ideas of freedom are actually about changing the world both individually or collectively and transforming it and having the power to do that which is freeing yourself from the constraints, I don't know, scarcity or political oppression, all sorts of things. But really there are many, many different ideas, and much wider ideas of freedom. That's what I was trying to say.
Blairwatch: Would you say that politicians are consciously trying to limit freedoms using Game theory formula?
Adam Curtis: No, I don't agree with that at all. I don't think politicians are trying to limit our freedoms. What I think is that politicians have adopted a model of human beings and a model of how human beings behave in society which is a very limiting and narrow one and that, through unforeseen consequences, has led them into this rather limited world that we have today.
No, I don't think they are trying to control us at all. Politicians always try to manage things but I don't think that they're trying to limit our freedom. If anything, the irony of all this is that freedom is the mantra of our time, from Mrs Thatcher through to Tony Blair as I illustrate at the front of the films, they talk about freedom. And I think, to give them credit, to give them the benefit of the doubt, they genuinely do believe that they are going to achieve freedom, but what I'm trying to say is without realising it, because they haven't examined the roots of the ideas that they are using, it's a very narrow idea of freedom and I think actually it probably may have a purpose and function in times or war but now in a much more complicated world it's actually leading them to the very opposite of freedom which is a limiting thing.
For example, if you take the present government's obsession with mathematical managerial techniques, they adopted that because they thought it was an alternative to arrogant, elitist bureaucrats and others in power telling us what to do. They simply thought that this would be an objective system because it would be a way of defining what people should do for the greater good of the National Health Service or education, and then they could set those targets and that would be it.
In fact what happened was that it led to a very narrow and limited view of what they were doing but they genuinely thought it was going to be a better way of managing. Really what I'm saying in these films is that today's politicians have a very limited historical understanding of the ideological roots of the ideas they are dealing with. That's the real problem with New Labour. What's really fascinating about New Labour is it's a-historical. I think one of the reasons for that it so much wanted to define itself in the early 1990s as being against Old Labour so therefore anything that was historical was 'bad' but in the process of doing that they have neglected to look at the roots of the models of society and the models of human beings that they adopted and by doing that and just assuming that this is the natural way human beings are they've led themselves into a trap. That's what I'm arguing.
Blairwatch: So what would you make of, say, when Tony Blair talks of his third way, for example? How would you see that?
Adam Curtis: In the film I portray him as a sort of tragic character torn between two ideas of freedom; one is that idea of freedom which is the narrow one which the first two films of the series talk about which he and Gordon Brown adopted when they came to power which is a narrow economic vision of you and me.
They see us as primarily motivated by our own self interest, we may have a bit of sympathy for our nearest and dearest but that's about it - we don't have wider concerns. That's the model of freedom that he adopted. Blair is a very complicated character, obviously. He hankers after a wider, grander ideal. If you take him at his own words, he wants to spread freedom around the world, and that is another kind of freedom, and it's a revolutionary idea of freedom; it's saying "I can free people from tyrants and despots".
The only problem, which is what the last film says, is that when they then try and do that, the only thing they can offer, whether it be the Russian people or the Afghani people or Iraqi people, is a narrow economic idea of freedom which has no meaning or purpose if you are a complicated society divided along nationalist religious and political religious lines.
The thing that I find fascinating about the whole Iraq venture, which is really what I look at in the last film, is the way that they went into Baghdad with an economic plan which basically said that you get rid of all the elitist institutions that have ruled this society and spontaneously then people will rise up as these individuals in the marketplace. That was the idea, they had no other idea, and that's a very narrow idea of freedom. I see Blair's tragedy as a man who wanted to try and change the world but the sort of freedom he then tried to bring with him was too narrow and limited to cope with the complexities.
Blairwatch: In the films you suggest that this narrow idea of freedom and the economic theories used stem from game theory…
Adam Curtis: They stem from right wing economists like Friedrich Hayek, that's the sort of utopian vision as an alternative to communism. What Game theory provides is what seemed to be scientific proof that this vision would work because what Hayek is saying is instead of having planning we should just allow people to behave as they wanted and out of that would come order. That was his vision. What Game theory suggested was, well, that's true… and that's what I try and say.
Blairwatch: Game theory, starting as a mathematical formula seemed to be spread into so many other areas of research, from genetics to economics to war planning etc.
Adam Curtis: It seems to offer an explanation of how you can have complexes, create stability without having to have elites that guide them and so it explains how the natural world creates stability.
Blairwatch: And were there other Game theories that didn't assume that people were naturally selfish?
Adam Curtis: Well, the real problem with Game theory is that its fundamental assumption is that human beings are self interested. I mean they only did that to make their models work to begin with. People like Nash (who was one of the originators of all this) didn't actually assume that that's what people were like; he made that assumption in order to make his mathematical models work. What then shifted towards economists is they began to assume that really is how human beings are and actually in my second film I show that Nash has now recanted or believed that things are much more complicated than that.
Blairwatch: Yes, I was fascinated by that.
Adam Curtis: It was a shift towards that assumption, but the really interesting story, I always felt the key to all this is that when they tried to play on these games with the secretaries at the Rand corporation, really early on I think in something like the early 1950s, none of them behaved as one predicted, they just co-operated. And actually, there have been people subsequent to this who have done research in Game theory where you that if you play it over and over again (particular games) people very quickly learn that co-operation is by far the most efficient way of doing things.
But no, the fundamental assumption that Game theory brought with it was that people are self interested. This is what I'm trying to show in these films; that behind our everyday world are certain basic assumptions about human beings and the fundamental one is that we are what economists call 'rational utility maximisers' and we pursue rationally what we want, and that's it.
Blairwatch: When this was brought into economics, I think it's in the second film, you mention the perceived breakdown of the British public services. What would you attribute to this perceived breakdown other than the obvious financial stresses that were around at the time in the 70s?
Adam Curtis: There was obviously an economic crisis in the 70s which was leading to chaos, but also within that failure of that post war project, people had no goals any longer in their bureaucracies and they began to pursue their own self interest. The question then is whether that then means that you then create a world totally based on self interest because you think that's what human beings are like or whether actually things are much more complicated than that but if you actually have an organisation where morale is low people do become rather self-interested because they haven't got any one else.
Blairwatch: So would you say that we were (or are) sleepwalking into a nightmare or waking up from one?
Adam Curtis: No, I think you're trying to put words in my mouth…
Blairwatch: Oh no, I'm not, really…
Adam Curtis: What I'm trying to do in these films is show that behind the way you think about yourself and the way those who govern you think about you, there are ideas. There are specific ideologies… What I'm really trying to say is that the world we experience both personally and politically today is not the natural order. Many people think that, but maybe they think "oh this is it, we got there" because there aren't alternatives, and what I'm trying to say is "no, hang on. The way we think and the way we feel and the way those who govern us think and feel comes from very specific ideologies" and I was trying to dramatically share those conclusions.
Blairwatch: I see, and how would we get out of the trap?
Adam Curtis: That's not my job. I'm not a politician. My job simply to as best I can to analyse and dissect and show people, make people step back and look at it and hopefully people will start to think what are the alternatives, but that's not my job, you know I'm as much in the trap as everyone else.
Blairwatch: I was just wondering if you had an idea of where we went from here.
Adam Curtis: Personally I think there is just a mood around at the moment of disquiet. Slightly incoherent, at the back of people's minds, there is this "is this all there is, is this it?" and they're beginning to question that and I'm just trying to give a little more articulation to that.
Blairwatch: Thank you very much for your time.
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