The Trap: What Happened to Our Dreams of Freedom? (5 of 6)

The Trap: What Happened To Our Dream Of Freedom? (Episode 5 of 6)

Individual freedom is the dream of our age. It's what our leaders promise to give us, it defines how we think of ourselves and, repeatedly, we have gone to war to impose freedom around the world. But if you step back and look at what freedom actually means for us today, it's a strange and limited kind of freedom.

Politicians promised to liberate us from the old dead hand of bureaucracy, but they have created an evermore controlling system of social management, driven by targets and numbers. Governments committed to freedom of choice have presided over a rise in inequality and a dramatic collapse in social mobility. And abroad, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the attempt to enforce freedom has led to bloody mayhem and the rise of an authoritarian anti-democratic Islamism. This, in turn, has helped inspire terrorist attacks in Britain. In response, the Government has dismantled long-standing laws designed to protect our freedom.

The Trap is a series of three films by Bafta-winning producer Adam Curtis that explains the origins of our contemporary, narrow idea of freedom.

It shows how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today's idea of freedom. This model was derived from ideas and techniques developed by nuclear strategists during the Cold War to control the behaviour of the Soviet enemy.

Mathematicians such as John Nash developed paranoid game theories whose equations required people to be seen as selfish and isolated creatures, constantly monitoring each other suspiciously -- always intent on their own advantage.

This model was then developed by genetic biologists, anthropologists, radical psychiatrists and free market economists, and has come to dominate both political thinking since the Seventies and the way people think about themselves as human beings.

However, within this simplistic idea lay the seeds of new forms of control. And what people have forgotten is that there are other ideas of freedom. We are, says Curtis, in a trap of our own making that controls us, deprives us of meaning and causes death and chaos abroad. more vids @ http://www.soulcravings.net

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[UltimateLBP]

"The only way out was to point out that they're correct," kinda like with a college professor.

[aprofromuk]

I think everyone including me is crazy or sane depending on the microscope we are being observed under :)

[spitetdemonella]

Mosses , went to defend the same in my eyes just in a different time. Control is control and freedom is freedom . My labels depressed,anxiety.ADHD . Were all different ,just cause my mom has bipolar I'm also now Being texted for it as well . Crazy , the way of teaching should be better in my opinion we all learn differently . I'm also have dyslexia and can't process math like others . I've always heard negative things of what was expected of me how can you not start to belvedere them? Be str

[WonderWoman200290]

@chh5555 or you realise that something seriously needs to change in the way we live our lives. not just drugging people up to make them content to live in a screwy world but finding ways to change it.

[martinmoskal]

im pissed at how fucked society is

[chh5555]

It seems obvious to me that if you find systematically that most people aren't "normal" then you simply redefine the classification of normal to fit the systematic norm.... am I missing something here?

[viesturstube]

Erich Fromm would be a great friend of these ideas,

[TimothyParadox1]

Amen!

[CHEWDwivTHEinCrowd]

Prince 2?