The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom, 2007

de Adam Curtis

Pt.1: Fuck you buddy
Durant la guerre froide, les analystes sont desesperees d'arrive a mettre au point un model de prediction pour les comportement humains, afin de pourvoir prevoir scientifiquement le next moove de l'URSS. Nuclear strategy with USSR. Conception mathematique de l'etre humain comme des etre individualiste et isole les uns des autres qui complotent les uns contre les autres en permanance pour ameliorer leur situation personnelle. Cette théorie a été majoritairement développée par Steve Nash (hero de "A beautiful Mind"); un paranoïaque schizophrène qui entendait des voix et qui n'avait pas une vision très flatteuse de la race humaine. Cela ne l'a pas empêché de recevoir le prix d’économie de la banque Suisse (équivalent du prix Nobel d’Économie).
En parrallele, travail de R.D Laing sur la psychanalyse et sa guérison complète de patiente schizophrènes simplement par le dialogue. 3semaines apres avoir ete soignee et decharge de l'hopital, toutes les patientes reviennent avec les même symptômes. Laing conclu que la cellule familiale est le reel causeur de trouble psychologique et mental: humains are inherently selfish, shrewd, and spontaneously generate stratagems during everyday interactions.Il met au point l’expérience de Rosenhan: 15 personnes prétendant toutes avoir les même symptômes (entendre un mot dans sa tête) seront internés pendant des mois. Puis des dizaines de patients relâchées car soit disant faisant parti de l’expérience (alors que pas du tout). Cette expérience est un désastre pour l'industrie psychiatrique aux US.
Public interest= self interst.
The episode ends with the suggestion that this mathematically modelled society is run on data—performance targets, quotas, statistics—and that it is 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.

Pt.2: The lonely robot
The second episode reiterated many of the ideas of the first, but developed the theme that drugs such as Prozac and lists of psychological symptoms which might indicate anxiety or depression were being used to normalise behaviour and make humans behave more predictably, like machines.
Meeting entre Clinton et Greenan boss de la federal reserve et Robert Ruben, conseiller financier et boss de Goldman-Sax 2 semaines avant son inoguration. Sa vision politiques est irréalisable car le deficite etait deja trop grand et il ne peutplus emprunter d'argent pour eviter une catastrophe economique. Il doit reduire les depenses d’entré de jeu. L'aletrnative etait de laisse la loi de l'economie de marche decide de ce que les gens voulaient. L’économie est mieux apte que la democratie a determiner les besoins et les sentiments du publique. Clinton accepte et recule.psychos et economistes sont les seuls categorie de personne qui suivent un comportement egoiste dictee par la theorie du jeu dans toutes les situations de la vie.
The programme describes how the Clinton administration gave in to market theorists in the US and how New Labour in the UK decided to measure everything it could, the better to improve it, introducing such artificial and unmeasurable targets as the reduction of hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa by 48%; or the reduction of global conflict by 6%.
Curtis's narration concludes with the observation that the game theory/free market model is now undergoing interrogation by economists who suspect a more irrational model of behaviour 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, and psychopaths.

Pt.3: We will force you to be free
The final programme focussed on the concepts of positive and negative liberty introduced in the 1950s by Isaiah Berlin. Curtis briefly explained how negative liberty could be defined as freedom from coercion and positive liberty as the opportunity to strive to fulfill one's potential.
The programme began with a description of the Two Concepts of Liberty and Berlin's opinion that, since it lacked coercion, negative liberty was the safer of the two.
 Curtis then explained 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.
The programme reviewed the government of Tony Blair and its role in achieving its vision of a stable society. In fact, argued 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 UK and these terrorist actions were in turn used to justify restrictions of liberty.
In essence, the programme suggested that following the path of negative liberty to its logical conclusions, as governments have done in the West for the past 50 years, resulted in a society without meaning populated only by selfish automatons, and that there was some value in positive liberty in that it allowed 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 the series, they would have to realise that Isaiah Berlin was wrong and that not all attempts to change the world for the better necessarily lead to tyranny.
Note: 9.42/10