2011 documentary in three episodes. Adam Curtis is very keen that you
should agree with him.
I found this series very disconcerting; I've heard many people
talk about Adam Curtis as a bold documentary-maker, but what I got was
disorientation and emotion-blasting rather than information. All
right, the form is intrinsically a superficial one: when you're
covering a field this wide in only three hours, you can't stop to
explain anything, just go on to the next bit of spectacle. But maybe
that should be a reason to choose a narrower field?
Anyway, I mentally subtitled episode 1 "Ayn Rand, cult leader". And
this is simply propaganda, and I abreact to propaganda even when I
agree with the cause in which it's being made; if all you can do is
shout and lie like the bad guys, how can you claim that your side is
any better than theirs?
Of course, "rationality" is a fine tool for self-deception: tell
yourself you're doing the rational thing (or what the cult leader told
you was the rational thing) and all your questions about the world are
answered. Why should I leave my husband so that the Boss can have him
instead? She said it was rational! Yes, of course it's hard work to
decide for yourself what the right thing to do is, particularly in a
world more complicated than the one in which major religions were
founded. But that doesn't mean that the first plausible-sounding
salesman you meet has all the answers…
I feel that it might have been worth mentioning that every single
time someone has started a "Galt's Gulch" project in the real world
their intentions have been strictly fraudulent.
But with the constant jumping from subject to subject and time to time
it's very hard to work out what sort of coherent argument might be
being made. If any.
Episode 2 is, in my head, "equilibrium". Yeah, I have a
biology/medicine background so I already know that the natural
equilibrium really isn't a thing. Curtis wants you to believe that
biologists still don't know that. Yes, it's very easy to fall into the
illusion of nature as a purposeful system, but this is basically the
same problem as seeing correlations and assuming that God did it.
The shameful roots of the original ecology movement are used to make
the entire field of study sound completely worthless. Did an ecologist
take Curtis's lunch money? The whole thing drifts into right-wing
paranoia: I don't care about your worries about the planet, you can't
take away my right to slog for an hour through carbon monoxide fumes!
Yes, I understand Curtis is scared of communist-flavoured
totalitarianism (as Rand was with rather more reason), but even in
2011 we had some idea of what pathological individualism could do.
(And some communes worked better than the carefully picked examples.
Some still do.)
So how do you plan to grow infinitely in a finite space? (There's
not even any mention of space development here.)
Episode 3 is "Idiots": some self-proclaimed experts have been wrong,
therefore nobody who claims to know anything can ever be right. Good
thing Curtis doesn't claim to know anything, eh, dear viewer?
This is populist garbage, delivered in a quick fire style with a
non-stop parade of images in the hope that the viewer won't notice. It
was hard work to watch and I can't recommend it.
Here (YouTube) is a fine
video spoofing the technique.
I talk about this further on Ribbon of
Memes.