 Hello, and thanks for tuning in. My name is Carbon Mike and We're here doing a Sunday session with Ben Pyle and Simon Roberts on the 2004 Documentary the power of nightmares And I'm gonna without any further ado. I'm gonna hand it over to Simon Roberts who's gonna moderate this discussion for us For nearly 30 years over more than a dozen major documentaries produced for the BBC Adam Curtis has mapped stories of our relation to power through the multivariate lenses of scientific rationalism and curated memory in series like Pandora's box and the living dead The rakish capitalist adventurism of the mayfair set and the ascendancy of psychiatry in politics and the PR industry in the century of the self The struggles between social engineering political managerialism and the emergence of technocratic utopianism in the trap and all watched over by machines of loving grace So later more complex and darkly immersive visual essays such as bitter lake and hypernormalization which sought to capture both an emotional Impressionism and an epic aerial sweep over the historical and economic trauma of the late 20th early 21st centuries post 9-11 geopolitics propaganda and the simultaneous collapse of Comprehension in societies having run out of in Curtis's view grand overarching stories to tell themselves about themselves In all of these Curtis not only plots the story arcs of familiar big historical figures But also reveals the often hitherto unknown and subtler bit park players of astonishing consequence Whether it is the mild mannered Jim Slater with his train spotterish study of monopoly game stats in the mayfair set the phenomenally Influential but unremarkable and dull looking Edward Bernays in the century of the self or the oddball cult figure of libertarian Hyperindividualism in iron rand in all watched over by machines of loving grace Curtis meshes his multi-strand Psychogeographies together through hypnotic montage by feats of obscure But apt archive retrieval mixing interstitial footage of unused news VT Dissector member of pop culture references from films TV and nature documentaries layered amidst a soundtrack of atmospheric eclecticism by turns ominous grandiose exhilarating or with archly comic cuts of any O Morricone Shostakovich Brian Eno John Carpenter horror soundtracks stereo total nine-inch nails or burial All right, that's the unapologetically intense fanboy introduction to the Curtis over and now I'd like to introduce those joining me for the chat tonight We have Ben pile Ben is a skeptic of environmental politics and scientist and he's contributing writer despite since 2006 He's a blogger at climate hyphen resistance org since 2007 and a Twitterer since 2009 at Climb eight resistance. That's see I see LIM eight resistance more recently He's a youtuber and carbon Mike started foundationism, which is an American political movement broadly speaking It's the politics of people who build things for a living our beliefs fall outside the boundaries of traditional left-right politics We are conservative about some issues and liberal about others say the foundationists We are secular but friendly to believers. We're forward-looking but respectful in on-off tradition So I'm leaping straight in. We've got our first clip from the power of nightmares, which will play now In the past politicians promised to create a better world They had different ways of achieving this but their power and authority came from the optimistic visions. They offered their people Those dreams fail and today people have lost faith in ideologies Increasingly politicians are seen simply as managers of public life But now they have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority Instead of delivering dreams politicians now promise to protect us from nightmares They say they will rescue you dreadful dangers that we cannot see and do not understand and the greatest danger of all is international terrorism Powerful and sinister network with sleep assertive countries across the world The threat that needs to be fought by a war on tone But much of this threat is a fantasy which has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians It's a dark illusion that has spread unquestion through governments around the world security services and the international media This is a series of films about how and why that fantasy was created and who it benefits At the heart of the story are two groups The American neoconservatives and the radical Islamist Last week's episode ended in the late 90s with both groups marginally and out of power But with the attacks on September the 11th the fates of both dramatically changed The Islamists after their moment at trial were virtually destroyed within months By the neoconservatives took power in Washington But then the neoconservatives began to reconstruct the islamists They created a phantom element And as this nightmare fantasy began to spread politicians realized the new power it gave in a deeply disillusioned age Those with the darkest nightmares became the most powerful So jumping off from there, Ben Pyle, we were talking about On the one hand it's kind of the most ball-dakingly obvious thing to talk about this as extremely relevant in the light of especially the announcements last night from Boris Johnson about, you know, again, the continuation of this current crisis by the sort of furious stoking of yet more convenient fictions for the political class But we mused, didn't we, before coming on that Curtis actually at the very end of the series tells us that he thinks as he says, quote, but the fear will not last and just as the dreams that politicians once promised turned out to be illusions so too will the nightmares and then our politicians will have to face the fact that they have no visions either good or bad to offer us any longer. Do you think that sentiment stands up after 17 years? Or are we still trapped in the power of nightmares? It very much seems like we are. Yeah, of course it does. Yeah. Yeah, many people, I think, probably have observed that the the the the the critique of biopolitics, the sort of that was produced by postmodernists in the 1970s became an instruction manual to to fear mongers. And I think that's true of this as well, whereas we sort of may have had our head in our hands and sort of gone, oh, wow, what what what WTF, you know, what's happened. Some people seem to have watched the power of nightmares and thought, what a fantastic idea and and and let's see how much how much further we can push this because there doesn't see that that critique isn't isn't isn't rare, but this wasn't the only person to make it. It wasn't unique to the 2000s, nor the 1990s, nor the 1980s. And at least it was happening in the 1970s. You know, we could see that in people making those comments in the 1970s. So so they must be aware of what they're doing. And and and and and seeing how much further they can take things. Carbon Mike, it's it's I think it's for you. I mean, Ben and I I think are both probably massive fanboys of Adam Curtis. I think that's fair to say. And you this is your first exposure to Curtis's work. And I'm interested to find out what you make of this from the US perspective, especially as a New Yorker, someone who was there when when 9 11 was sort of unfolding in front of you. What did you think of it? Good question. Yeah, I am a newcomer to Curtis's work. And the very first time I heard about either him or this film was when I was bending Ben's ear, you know, just talking about something I was annoyed about. And then he mentioned he mentioned this film. And immediately I went and looked it up and sort of watching it. I was I was mesmerized. I had what's what's what's interesting to me about, you know, watching this that film this many years later. And yes, I'm a native New Yorker. I was in New York on 9 11. I was actually actually rode my bike into Manhattan after the attacks on the towers, because I had a friend who lived in in lower Manhattan. And I was I was going to see if he needed assistance to to get out with his pets or what have you. So actually it, you know, it's so it's it's it's it's real to me in a way that in a way in which it's it's perhaps more abstract to people who who just saw it who just saw the actual events on television. I mean, I can remember, you know, streams of people coming across the bridge and I started to see people with dust on their faces and what have you. And then, you know, he with blood on their faces and literally people streaming out of Manhattan. OK, so, you know, what are my thoughts? What's what's funny is in 2001, I hadn't really begun my journey away from the left. So I was still very much of the left. I was still at least somewhat friendly to conspiratorial thinking in general. And when when those events happened and when American policy pivoted as it did, I remember I didn't I hadn't known about the players, the Neoconservatives at that time. I'd come I'd read some literature later about Leo Shrouse and the Straussians and what have you, but I didn't know all the players. I didn't know who site site Kutub was, etc., etc. But it struck me that the swiftness of the United States policy pivot was oddly was odd, right? Was that this thing seemingly came out of nowhere and all of a sudden there was an intellectual framework seemingly to understand it. They were talking about all these players whose names I hadn't heard before, right? And this was like either that day or the next day they were talking about a sound and a lot and what have you. It's like, well, whoa, how how was it that? You know, we've never heard about these guys and all of a sudden they took a title shot. But how, you know, and we never heard you talk about. So that's so even then it's you know, there were there were things that struck me as odd. And what was interesting about seeing the film is that it connected a lot of those dots for me. It turns out that, in fact, there was an intellectual framework, a policy framework of people who were ready to push that policy framework, operating in the halls of power, waiting to take their title shot, so to speak, to get back in the spotlight. So that that was that's that's something that really struck me as I was watching it. And then the other things I've I've I've been thinking a lot about illusion versus unreality, as you guys know, because we were talking in preparation for this thing. But I'm going to pause there. That that's that's the number one thing that that I took away that now as then you can you can get a sense of things moving under the surface. So, yeah. Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing is just sort of if we start ambling lightly through the kind of themes of the first the first episode, baby, it's cold outside. The interesting thing is that weirdly, it's it's not it's not some it's not the Middle East or the nations of Islam in the Middle East that are the focus here. Really, the whole thing emerges out of two responses to America, don't they? It's it's on the one hand, it's the fundamental Islamist. It's it's side cutter is a teacher in Egyptian school, teach you visits America in the late forties. And he he he he travels around making observations of of what he sees to be the the inner corruption at the heart of a heart of America, the the the sort of failure of the liberal dream as Curtis expresses it. At the same time or just about the same time, you've got Leo Strauss as a political philosopher in Chicago, who himself is is is about as Curtis presents it at least. I've done a little bit more reading on Strauss in the interim, so it's slightly different from how Curtis does presented. He himself is looking to form a kind of influential vanguard elite, you might say, with regards to the next generation of of political actors in America. And in so doing, he talks about, as Curtis relates, asserting a need for binding myths and in particular, religion and nation. Now, he sees that the potential for America as a country with, you know, great power and science and technology. And he wants to translate this back to Egypt as a sort of as a model for a kind of a government with Islam at the heart of it, but also a very strong and modern capability. But the thing about this, as I say, is it's about the sense of America, the response to America in decay. And yet, of course, we're looking at the footage that Curtis provides of of of seemingly benign Americana from from the 50s. How does that relate to that, Mike? How do you see that? I mean, was it was it a mythic time? Was it a time of people who were actually genuinely unhappy in some way at some deep level? This is what Kutub identifies as he's trawling around, you know, Greeley in Colorado, I think it is. Yeah. Well, the what is interesting to me about that is. I mean, look, when I looked at that, when I saw when I watched that part of the movie, one thing that struck me was that, well, this is a thoroughly nasty little man. That's that's the first thing like what an asshole. And then I also thought that he did. He did have a point about. About flying the ointment of American life, right? You know, this was what? Nineteen what? Nineteen fifties. What was the decade in 1949? Nineteen forty nine. Right. So so so all was not all was not was not well with America in that year. I mean, even even factoring out racial and ethnic turmoil that was rife in certainly some parts of the country is more than others. But yeah, all was not well with America during that time. And so flying the ointment. But he came here and he seemed to see. Fly ointment, he seemed to see it like everything was terrible to him. And it struck me that the problem with him was fundamentally a spiritual emptiness that he had. And they kind of a. And as I'm hearing him, I'm hearing Adam Curtis talk about Said Kutub. I'm thinking, right, about our modern version of that, which is they're not motivated by Islam. They're not motivated by a recognized religion, but they are also in the grip of religious fervor. And they're also they also look around and see nothing but horror, right? They see nothing but but decay and and and what have you. And you know, the Black Lives Matter of the world, the the antifers of the world, this kind of radical rejectionism, right? You know, what strikes me about Kutub and people like him is that none of them take a systems approach. None of them take the approach of saying of being of starting with gratitude, starting with wonder, starting with curiosity. He wasn't very. He didn't strike me as very curious about American life. He it's almost like he knew everything he wanted to know. And he just thought it was terrible. And he thought that, you know, high school kids dancing cheek to cheek at a at a at a dance, which to me is the, you know, in light of current cultures, the most innocent thing you could possibly imagine. And everything was just terrible. Everything stank of lust because he was a thoroughly nasty little man. And I noticed this. It seems to be a psychological thread that runs through the thinking of a lot of rejectionists, whether you talk about Greenpeace, you know, the Extinction Rebellion, the people, everything that they have. This kind of dour Calvinist rejection of the world is fundamentally bad. And that seems to that that that is the thing that struck me most most visually when I when I watched that footage. I mean, the the thing you've got in this series is it's sort of like it sort of ends like a lot of Curtis documentaries. The one prior has led to the next one. You know, I think this is this comes after the century of the self, which he did earlier, which was about the influence of of of Freud and then Edward Bernays in in in the development of politics and the development, I should say, of PR and then it's later infiltration into into politics in the US and in and in Britain as well. And it's it's it's in this case where we start with power of nightmares. It's that moment where a deep cultural reaction meets the the liberal desire and decay, as you say, of the kind of white picket fence America at that period. I think the interesting thing about what we find out about Strauss and his reaction to this is, as I say, this this notion of these myths that need to be deployed in order to counter this. And in particular, this sort of idea of the noble lie that comes up, that on the one hand, the funny anecdote is that Strauss is fascinated by a couple of particular TV shows. And in one case, it's Gunsmoke, the classic kind of, you know, white hat cowboy meets black hat cowboy, good evil morality tale, which he thinks needs to be part of the cultural deployment for ordinary people. And at the same time, he's telling the the elite class that he's cultivating to be more like a kind of Perry Mason, you know, the the crafty lawyer deploying his his rhetoric and his skills to, you know, to to, you know, on the one hand, give people the the the the the the the the leading kind of myth of, you know, the basic American good versus evil exceptionalism that we see expressed later. And and and to say at the same time to the elites, you can cultivate your own kind of private morality here, regardless, as long as it doesn't intrude into your into your your public positioning. And the the the the thing that that Kutub then focuses on is is the the sense of what they call jahiliya. This is this false consciousness, which he sees as the that the kind of corrosive threat to Islam that has come because of American liberalism being translated over to to Egypt through the through the government of of Gamal Abdel Nasser, who wants to have a sort of secular government and the US influence. Ben, what's what's what's your reaction to this? Well, just just to carry on from what you what you would your might we're talking about moment ago, I that that that that was a big that the sort of span of that first episode was was sort of compressed quite a lot from from 49 to around 66, which is quite a you know, it's quite a it's immediately in the aftermath of the of the of the Second World War, well, and and and it's you know, and it's fallout and into that sort of liberal order of the late 60s, where there was experiments with policies that liberals had had advanced and that had seemed to have failed by that time. This was LBJ's great society project, which is do you know about a bit about this mic at all, because I think we talked about this in passing in the past, this is there was a series of spending programs that were designed to address various things like education and medical care, rural poverty, stuff like that. Yeah. Yes, correct. So yes. And fundamentally, the problem was that many of the issues that the Great Society programs were designed to address, of course, it ended up making worse. And, you know, regardless of the intentions behind them, there's it's arguable that some of the intentions behind the Great Society were cynical in that. Well, we're going to we're going to get these people stuck on federal money. And where it in other words, a giant vote buying program. It's possible to look at it as having only been that the longer I live, the longer I tend the more I tend to see problems as being over determined. So I think that was a big part of it. I think there was some notion of having to tackle these problems in a serious way, because there was pervasive poverty in some parts of the United States. And when I say poverty, I don't mean like like we I don't know the mild kind we see now. I mean, people literally not having enough to eat, not like it is now where we're actually substantial portions of our poor population are actually overweight. It wasn't like that back then. And and it wasn't wasn't just urban America was also rural America. So yes, long story short, there was there was this well intentioned, let's say, set of programs put in place. And many of those programs ended up having the the opposite of their desired effect. And in any case, what they did was they made it more, they made a federal government that was larger, more intrusive, there was more of a financial incentive to interfere in private life, and in so doing kind of destroy many of the things that that that are properly the province of private life and family and community interactions. So rambling a bit there, I'll pause. But yes, I it's funny. At the time again, years ago, well, let's say when even when 9 11 that happened, you know, I used to I had this notion that conservatives who were always attacking the great society were just in the grip of whatever, you know, whatever madness. But I think if I could just go back a little bit, you know, the it strikes me that all of these and again, I'm thinking about these things as a foundationist is that all of the players we've talked about so far strike me as being fundamentally kind of rootless. When I say rootless, I mean, they're not they don't have enough of a found that they don't they don't understand the foundation that they themselves stand on. And so everything they plan is almost it's almost like the setup for a great Shakespearean tragedy. Everything's bound to fail. Like Saeed Kutub doesn't understand he's only because he's such a small man. And because he doesn't really have a grasp on systems thinking, all he can see is, you know, people are lustful and this thing, which they pretend is perfect. It's not perfect. He didn't really it doesn't strike me that he thought deeply about things like abundance and logistics and supply chains and design engineering and why exactly America seemed to be so prosperous and was and could bring so much mass to the fight economically speaking, you know, separate from your cultural critiques, he seemed to be very narrow. And then you had Strauss, who was fundamentally he was about power. But he never struck me that he had a clear understanding of what power was for. OK, the actual purpose. He had a couple of narrow ideas and he had a very kind of ruthless way to him. And he had some some loyal acolytes. But he never his his his ideas, his his framework struck me as fundamentally irreligious. And we can get more into that later. And then LBJ, same thing. It's like they never seem to understand what society took over the great society or what is society for? What is mankind for? And of course, these are not the kinds of things that that Washington officials tend to think about, which is part of the problem. Sorry, go on. It's interesting. You should say that. I mean, because what I'm reading from this is as you go through the episode, you introduce these sort of characters, these alumni of of Strauss's Strauss's teaching, people like Crystal, you know, senior and junior Paul Warfruits, even Francis Fukuyama. I didn't know he'd gone through through Strauss. Yeah. The the end of history, chap, as we all know. And I mean, what they were about was kind of actually a very deeply moral vision, but it was about reinvigorating a kind of US exceptionalism. And the interesting thing I want to put to you and to Ben, as a matter of fact, is I remember when the series came out, obviously, you know, we're in the wake of 9-11 and then, you know, the Iraq War and the invasion of Afghanistan. And the neocons are, you know, by that point have they've lived long enough to see themselves become the villains. It's at this point in the power of nightmares, he introduces the notion of the neocons being sort of on the make towards Washington, towards the centers of power. And they hit the figure of Henry Kissinger, you know, and this is the interesting sort of clash here that he, Curtis draws this very firm line that the the the neocons are these these hugely young and energetic and idealistic young men. And they meet Kissinger, who is this the real politic Machiavellian who's talking in terms of, quote, a truly global society. The weird thing at the time this documentary came out was, of course, I remember people in reviews and critiques saying, Oh, isn't it strange? Kissinger is almost coming across as the hero here because he's he's setting out to thwart the neocons. Ben, do you remember that? I remember the film, obviously, as to as to people's comments and people's comments about the power of nightmares were varied in their their quality. I'm not I'm not Adam Curtis became a hero because I think he was what Mike and I were talking about this the other day, because he was he was sort of ostensibly anti-war, but and just just as Mike was explaining there, people not knowing what that's not enough. You've got to know why you're anti-war. And it becomes an almost tribal thing for some people that you could you can you can have quite a low quality critique and people will rally around it and right right behind it as long as it seems popular for just that reason that it fulfills some sort of disgust of the war in them. So I mean, and the sort of epitome of that would have been the but it's really does speak to Mike's point. The anti-war movement rallying around the slogan not in my name was was was the most pathetic display. I mean, it was it was little wonder that the governments don't respond to their public when when when despite there being a million people on the streets apparently saying that this war was wrong with with no real intention to go any further. It's like the dog that catches the squirrel doesn't really know what to do with it when it's got it. It's a huge movement like the bigger than any political party and massive potential to turn it to something but but didn't. It's almost a tragedy or almost just a symbolic gesture in and of itself. This running into this this conflict between the Kissinger's and the and the and the Straussians. I think was an attempt. I mean, I think that that's something that's only I've really sort of cottoned on to relatively recently as well. That the sort of the that there was always the notion of this of the neocons are being an ever-present force that had just in American politics that some good, you know, some good good people had had had had had lost to and and and that sort of as often, you know, as a recovering green leftoid myself at probably at the time, that would have been invisible to me. The notion that there was any complexity to the right, you know, the right of center argument would have been almost a stupid point to my ears at the time. So so, you know, and further removed from it by being British as well, not not not being connected to the state. So it was it's an interesting thing to see that there was conflict between two equally nasty sites or more than two. You've got the you've got the the neocon, the Rumsfeld movement, the Straussian movement, and you've got cut them and and and that stuff developing over there and then many and then bringing in the Dems. I mean, you know, we learn since, you know, as we recover from being leftoid environmentalists, we discover that the Democrats weren't much too much to celebrate either. So so very binary views of of of politics, especially U.S. politics from these shores, get disintegrated, you know, in turn and disintegrated further and further. And and so I'm not I'm not going to punish people now, you know, retrospectively, retroactively for not getting it because I didn't get it either, you know, even even even with the benefit of watching the film in 2004. I mean, it's a complex and long film, but, you know, so I'll give them some slack if you like. Well, you know, as you as you're talking, Ben, I keep circling back to the thing that you've probably I probably bent your ear about before, which is which is the whole fallacy opposition thing. You know, my half-assed theory that the Cold War was this tremendously destructive thing to American politics in general, it destroyed our ability to think reasonably about certain things. It strikes me that this fallacy of opposition is all over the place here. In other words, the side side could to thoroughly unpleasant man and has some really bad ideas. He is opposed by a bunch of thoroughly unpleasant people who also have really bad ideas. In other words, the opposite of a bad idea is very often not a good idea. It's simply another bad idea that's bad in the opposite direction. OK. And this is, you know, having started to think about this and really that that got sparked off by reading C.S. Lewis and C.S. Lewis famously said that that that the adversary sends enemies into the world two at a time as pairs of opposites. And he sends deceptions into the world in this way so that when you as you lurch back from the one, you stumble into the other. And, you know, now that you know, having been attuned to that and having gotten on board with that, I see that everywhere, you know, you know, big state, meaning socialism, communism and big capital are not, in fact, opposites. They're kissing cousins. You know, Islamic radicalism and this this notion of of of of overarching state power are also not really opposites that the neocons weren't really the opposites of of the of the of the radical Islamists, even though they opposed them in some sense. But it strikes me that. I'll just say briefly that. I watched this film very much in a spirit of this is interesting. This is a kind of thing that happens. We're watching a design pattern play out. How do we avoid this? These kinds of outcomes in the future. How do we become better at reasoning about reality, reasoning about politics, thinking about how to how to retaliate against our very real enemies? How do we get better at that without falling into this that this nonsense fallacy of opposition? And this goes directly to, you know, your stuff, your work, Ben, with with with climate, you know, climate resistance, the kind of stuff we're seeing with with with pharmaceutical hysteria and kind of bio hysteria, the the the the industrialization and the weaponization of the covid freak out. I mean, it all comes down to to, you know, one's ability to kind of face things and reason honestly about them. And and that that's what really strikes me from this. So the the the binary opposites thing is what I think really that the speaks the film really speaks to me about the the the I mean, that it's the premise of it, of course, that the two sides make each other. But it is remarkable that there is this synthesis very quickly. You know, seemingly to to challenge the problems of relativism. They the the Straussians and the Kissinger's find find find a agreement very quickly. In fact, and the terrorists and the near the neocons find an agreement very quickly. So essentially what I what I take from all of them is that it's not just cut up and his his his followers who believe in Jahlia. That's very much the basis from which the the neocons, the Straussians are all operating from the necessity of regulating individuals through through myths is an elite preoccupation that that's been that's been in in motion since at least since then and to now. And I read them and I do I do think so. You know, Kamal Habib said in the film psychologically, we thought we were superior to reality. We despised the everyday vision of the world and we wanted to transform or change this reality. And I'm thinking all the time and there are a number of quotes. I probably went all the way with them. But I just I just think Mombio, George Mombio, you know, the insulate that they say the masses failed to rise up. Well, that's an insulate Britain. Like these kind of there's very much on both on both sides of the story, essentially aristocrats having great ideas about how society must be reorganized. And once they've sort of made these gestures, you know, and sort of got the ball rolling on their grand projet, the the the masses are going to follow, just follow them. Like, you know, Osama bin Laden is a classic playboy who sort of discovers he's sort of entitled to something or believes himself. Yes, that's right. That's right. And, you know, and and and not for nothing. People have called Eaton, you know, a green Al-Qaeda training. Wow, this is as rough. Yeah. Yeah. So it speaks to a dynamic, I think, of of of of people believing themselves to to be entitled to occupy a place in a natural order of things. Yes. With, you know, near the top that that that's probably off the topic of the film and not quite, not quite. I think this is part of what interests me about the sort of this part of this first episode, where, you know, you get into this stuff of Team B. This was the the the neocons for forming a think tank to, I mean, essentially kind of invert the findings to redefine certainty by a lack of visible evidence when it came to considering, you know, the the the purported enemy, the Soviet Union at that time, of course. I mean, it is it is the enemy at that time. But they they begin to, you know, wildly overestimate the capability in in in the Soviet Union by claiming that the fact that the CIA is saying there's no evidence of these guys having all of these astonishing technological capabilities that in itself is evidence of the sophistication of of their their attack on us. You know, it's it's it's the invisible enemy. Again, it's then it's it becomes instantiated in something called the Committee for the present danger to lobby Washington for, you know, more power to the to the Team B side and to to people like Richard Pipes, this this academic who is a who is a sort of expert on the Soviet mindset, he says. So it's it's it's interesting that you've got that contrast between Kutub, you know, trying to do this through, I suppose, you know, the simple means of of inspirational revolutionary ideology and the Western powers, if you like, with with their ability to create institutionalized testing grounds and and and means of processing this this kind of myth making, if you like, they they can form committees, they can form lobbying groups, they can have think tanks. And this is the thing that sort of distinguishes us in this way. I think an interesting point also in this is part of the documentary is you've got this thing that Curtis often uses. You've got what I call what I call one of his anchor voices who comes in. He's got this professor, Stephen Holmes, who comes in who who describes what was happening with the neocons at that time and and Holmes himself is a law professor, I think at NYU. And, you know, Curtis never explicitly states his point of view, but you begin to realize once you look into Holmes, he's a man who who's authored books like The Anatomy of Anti-Liberalism and The Light That Failed, which was the idea that, you know, democracy didn't take off in Eastern Europe because it was it was overwhelmed by populist xenophobia that happened after the wall came down. So he's he's he's he's definitely very, very liberal, this this guy. And he explains everything in that in that period. What what what's some what's interesting here, though, is this this sense of which could have goes back to Egypt. And he notices that, you know, American influence is beginning to come in. And you've got these very, very funny sort of clips. I mean, they're from much later, but you you see the sorts of clips of adverts from Egypt in the 70s, which which are shot in a way just almost to make Egypt Egypt and Egyptians seem like they're from California, you know, blonde head children, you know, blonde women talking about Snoopy and cooking products and stuff like that. So it's it's interesting that that idea of U.S. cultural penetration that that is happening at the same time as as the neocons are sort of wrapping themselves up in this desire to kind of, you know, invert reality to the extent that it makes makes the case for attacking the Soviet Union. Well, you know, what's funny about this is that, you know, liberalism watching the I'm watching some of the I'm watching my notes and some of the comments in the in the chats. What was it? Bolero 393 said liberalism is moral civilist. I think that's a quote from Jonathan Bowden, by the way. Oh, that's that's awesome. That's good stuff. Yeah. But but what what strikes me is that again, these guys, for example, the again, Said Kutub was not animated by Oikophilia by a love of home. He didn't have a foundation. He was animated by something he saw that terrified him or that disgusted him. He's in it was he was animated by hatred and scorn. Now, I have nothing against hatred and scorn. They're fine emotions. They could be very useful. OK. But that's the problem. And when and and the you know, watching the films, the one thing that I hadn't even known a reality I hadn't known about, which Curtis mentions in the film, is that these radical Islamists in their home countries, like their revolutions and they were kind of like more than one attempt to start a revolution, the revolutions were all damp squibs. Like it didn't go off like people weren't having it. And this is in Muslim countries. OK. And the reason they kind of amp themselves up to kind of higher levels of of of of kind of almost bestial violence toward their own people is because their own people weren't weren't having it. They were like, no, listen, we can, you know, we'll work it out. Right. And now a flip in the script. Looking at these neocons, you know, fundamentally, they weren't they weren't. It doesn't seem to me they were animated. I mean, you could say that liberal is liberalism is not is not a good thing. But what I'm saying is these guys were animated by a hatred of liberalism. They weren't animated by love of home. They were animated by love of power and love of power is is a passion to be regulated. And so so I'll just I'll pause because I want to get you guys take on this. But it seems to me that the fundamental problem with with these guys is one that neither of them is standing on a foundation. Neither can't be standing on a good foundation. OK. They are chaotic. They are internally chaotic to begin with because they don't know what they are and who they are and why they are. And the problem with the Straussians, especially, is a love of power unmediated by virtue. It's a foreign policy that is irreligious in that there is there is no religion in it. That is yet they mentioned Christianity. But what I mean is the their values are not structured. They just know they don't like liberalism and that's not good enough. It seems like there's something lost in the translation at least between between Strauss and how his students develop, doesn't it? Because, I mean, this is one of the things that struck me towards the end of that first episode is you have, you know, the initial context of this is all about a reactionary take on the liberal decay of America. And then by the end, you've got an academic like Michael Ladine, who is kind of one of the sort of cheerleaders for the neocons as we get into the 80s with Reagan saying, you know, we're all about freedom. We always have been and there's the irony. You know, they started with the attack on liberal hyperindividualism. And then all of a sudden it's it's like, no, no, no, we're going to, you know, we're coming into force you all to be free. And that's part of the project. But they confuse as we see sort of later on when when they go into Afghanistan, they confuse the idea of us talking about freedom with the desire of countries that exist in a state of native reaction, if you like, to absorb and inhabit democracy. I think the consequent the sequelae they think from freedom is democracy, isn't it? That's that's the great sort of problem here. Well, that's one of the problems. I mean, you know, I would say that you're talking about, you know, freedom. Well, freedom itself does not. Liberty has no content. You know, liberty is not an end state. It's it's a it's a it's a set of potentialities, if you like. You have to come better than just wanting liberty, liberty to do what? What are you for? What is mankind for? What is the purpose of democracy? Same thing. Democracy is an instrument. And these guys never seem to understand that. They seem to think of democracy as they've not got a they've not got a complex theory of what democracy is. This is just a well, it's just a noun. Well, and I mean, that's implied in in by the. The idea of of of of necessary myth. Yes. Yeah. Pious lies. Yes. Yeah. Right. So you can just sort of publish. You get a great example of that if I just cut across slightly where that you've got the footage of Ayman al-Zawahiri on trial in in Egypt in the in the late 70s. You know, he's part of I think Egyptian Islamic jihad. And and he's talking about Islam as ideology and practice. But this is the interesting thing. Curtis then cuts in and tells you, you know, from from one of his commentators. But, you know, he comes from an aristocratic family himself. Right. So I mean, tying in with one of one of our academic agent here again, it's it's top down elite insurgency. That's being preached. Yes, never ground up. That's right. And not to be to not to be sympathetic to him as such. But the the experiences that may become in the later on in the sequence of films. They do see through democracy is the Western democracy as a sham. There's those guys, there's our highs and co. It is made plain to them that that it's not democracy that's going to happen to them. And and and and and they're just probably slightly more up front about the fact that it's a sham and therefore they're not going to to to to organize their societies in that way. They don't want to organize societies in that way. And and and maybe you can take their word for it that they believed. I've got the quote here. We believe in our religion, both as an ideology and a practice. And hence, we tried our best to establish Islamic slate, Islamic state and Islamic society again. And that just talks back to the Greek, the aristocratic greens to me. But. So. So, you know, it was always it was always sort of bauble dangled in front of people's eyes anyway, in the West, when it was called democracy, when when there wasn't anything really being contested. There's no structure in your terms, Mike, there's no there's no structures there in opposition to to sort of test against each other. There's no there's no there's no there's no foundation, essentially, to to to either of them. You just given it's as we see now, three or three or how many parties there are now here, all offering the same thing with just slightly different managerial styles, which is which is, of course, Curtis's point. But if you can't vote against a thing, you can't vote for a thing, is my view. And that and that and that and that's why it doesn't this sort of security stuff and the green stuff. It is is is is antithetical to democracy. But you can't test that. You can't test that antithesis and antithesis democratically, because there's that choice as an extended to you. I probably strayed from the point that you want to come in there, Mike, there was something you wanted to say. Well, yeah, I mean, again, the problem is not the problem is not democracy itself. The problem is that the problem isn't any specific political ideology necessarily. Some and not all ideologies are created equal. Some are better than others. Some are more toxic letters. I get all that. But the point is that, you know, these guys are talking about American democracy, American freedom. What is democracy? Democracy is an instrument. I see, by the way, a lot of people now on on the kind of online, you know, the online activist right, let's call it saying that, well, actually, you see, lefty say it to that. Well, democracy doesn't work, right? Democracy doesn't work. What do you mean it doesn't work? Democracy is an instrument. OK, you know, when I go to my workshop and I want to I want to cut a piece of lumber, I use a circular saw, not a hammer. If I try to use a hammer, then the chances are I will get suboptimal results because that is not the correct instrument. And it seems to me that people there's a notion in which people will will will focus on some thing. And they'll construct it wrongly because they have no foundation. And then let's say it doesn't work because they don't because they they take it. They take the they take the. Instrument for the outcome. Democracy is not an outcome that you aspire to. It is an instrument to to to hopefully push your society towards certain kinds of outcomes and avoid certain other kinds of outcomes. Again, I see academic agents saying democracy is a lie. I'm not. Listen, we can skip all that thing about how American democracy is not really democracy and how the politicians don't really work on our behalf. Forget about that for a second. What I'm saying is that, you know, the idea that one should be able to replace one's government, even notionally, on a regular basis is an instrument. Elections are an instrument. OK. What is the outcome and specifically the kind of outcomes that you want to avoid with democracy are the kinds that tend to stack up with monarchies, for example, which is that over time you get this inbred cabal of leaders who are not answerable to anybody and and and the system rots from within. Now, replacing that with a notionally democratic system or the Democratic Republic, whatever you want to call it, is not is not the solution. It is a design decision. It comes with trade offs. And as an engineer specifically for myself, it's like I'm just I'm just struck by how how utopian and how non informed by kind of just the normal sense that listen, you're going to build things a certain way. And as a result, you're going to get some you're going to be open to certain defects and you're going to be there's going to be a less of a tendency for different. But you're going to get defects. The systems will have a nonzero failure rate. That's that's just life. And there is no perfect political system. But these guys say Kutub wasn't it was a utopian. The Straussians were utopians. Extinction Rebellion, they're utopians. Right. It's the same thing. All these climate people. Oh, we want to be able to power our civilization, you know, using some energy source that has zero negative trade offs. Well, good luck with that. You know, these are with them at those guys. It's more about the the form of social organization to to the good point. Yes, a mode of production. Yeah, good point. Just to you know, you must live like you must look like this because there are no possibilities of producing the surplus. Yeah, that's right. That was literally literally utopian after Thomas Moyer. It's exactly how he conceived of his little island. Yeah, moving this on to the second episode, actually, the phantom victory. I think that's that's a good sort of link there because I think there's a very interesting sequence in the in the episode where you're talking about the getting to the 80s. We're talking about the Reagan doctrine, you know, seeing the Afghans as freedom fighters and and again, not not realizing the US notion of freedom isn't exactly isn't exactly compatible with the sensibility of the society that they are at this time, you know, funding to fight the Russians. And there's some sort of charming clips of the Mujahideen, you know, bombing around the place with stinger missiles and riding motorbikes and scooters. And they're playing a song by Donovan called Colours and interesting lyrics, which I looked up, actually, afterwards. So the lyrics go, I'm just going to paraphrase or not paraphrase, I'm going to shorten them. But freedom is a word I rarely use without thinking of the time when I've been loved. You know, so there's this kind of sort of touching romanticism about, you know, the US intervention at this point. But he seems to, you know, Curtis seems to certainly strongly apply the US thought that the Mujahideen would would bring a democracy and instead Afghanistan essentially becomes a radical jihadi magnet after that. So so what we what we really find out, though, is at this time the radicals are saying there's only one solution to this, it's Islam, it's no democracies, no party, no debate and and, you know, so at the same time, the neocons, you know, are eyeing up other other other people in the in the vicinity. You know, they're they're working with Saddam, of course, he's still an ally. As as as we go on, we're noticing things like when we get to the sort of George Bush senior period, we're seeing that the that he was actually sort of a check on the neocon ambition for a time, rather like Kissinger. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Well, they want the radicalism of the neocons was he was probably aware was too much to bear. And it's it's quite interesting that it's a small cabal, both in the Reagan that sort of formulated the Reagan doctrine and was then able to assert themselves partly in reaction to events through the Bush senior administration to and and it sort of speaks again to that notion or the false notion that the neocons were this extremely powerful force, you know, historical historical tendency, but actually doesn't seem to be the case. It seems like one of their sort of failing gambits, actually, was to kind of use religion as an expression in the culture wars at this point, wasn't in the late 80s, early 90s, when you're coming up to the 92 election. And and this is something this relates to a comment you and you and I talked about, Ben, where you talked about the the Straussians as or the neocons as parallel to Marxists here or using the same methodology as of covert radical entryism. Right. The right wing right wing Marxists. And I don't want to explain that. Well, well, I think it's it's to me, it's it's when I mean, it's also sort of a reference to my sort of foundation is and when when once the power once it becomes about power and it isn't, you know, I'm more in favor of democracy than some of the people in the comments. But because I agree, it's a it's a tool not just for removing people for testing ideas to the extent that they need to test it. So you know, in a sort of perfect idea, which I understand that why people would reject, there are ideologies established historically with their own traditions and their own way of looking things. But it seems that what's happened is that those as those ideologies have fallen apart, they've become tools for that power power gaming, essentially, that don't belong to either left or right or to progress or to reaction or reaction as such. And so once that's happened, sort of insights or or methodologies that might have been particular to Marxists at a certain point may have may may be deployed by you know, small cabals like that. You know, they you can be damn sure that those cabals of neocons had red marks and the rest and and were were about about using them to their own advantage. They weren't they weren't attached to to any any particular political philosophy that would have found any of that object objectionable. So it's all it's all just control leavers on a on a leavers on a control service service, you know, that's available to me. It's cynical and and and and that's why I think I'm you know, we can have a broader abstract conversation about democracy, but that's why I would suggest that democracy is a solution to it or a necessary answer to in in some form because because they were against democracy. They wanted power without accountability. They wanted they wanted to create myths for their own advantage. Right. All right. And and we'd be thrown out. Sorry, my god. No, so I didn't mean to cut you off. But yes, this is this is 100 percent right. And by the way, again, people it again, it's become fashionable to say democracy is a lie. Democracy is this democracy is a is one way of organizing human systems. It has drawbacks. OK, it degrades in a certain way. All systems do. All right. You know, look, it's also become very fashionable among the right. Well, excuse me, among the left, I say become, but it's been fashionable for quite a while to say capitalism is a lie or capitalism is a failure. Capitalism is a design pattern. That's all it is. OK. You know, markets, you know, I've you've probably heard me go off about free market fundamentalists, because that that's a thing to not having our conservatives not really being conservative. OK. All they've been doing since really the Cold War, since the depths of the Cold War has been saying, rah, rah, rah, markets, free markets, a market is an instrument. It's not a it's not a thing that you aspire to. It's a component of something else. Components fail. Here's my my basic engineering take on things. Components fail. Systems fail. That's the nature of components and systems. OK. If you want to if I'd be glad for anyone who says this is a liar, that is a liar, that doesn't work. That to come up with a system that that has a zero failure rate, it's not going to happen. And someone who is going lateral for a bit, someone who I'm very is almost like a like a philosophical father to me. Stanley Crouch, the late great cultural critic and and jazz critic Stanley Crouch, when he talked about America, when he talked about the American experiment, he had a lot of the same problems that that that we might have with what has become of American democracy and what has become of American politics and what have you. But he was animated by a fundamental love, like like a very radical humanism, like a radical love of human potential and understanding of of what the Constitution was for. He had no illusions that the Constitution was a perfect document or that it could by itself lead to a perfect society or that democratic elections or even notionally democratic elections would make all men good and happy. He wasn't such a fool. He thought that that was simply an instrument. And he talked about it as an instrument that would allow a society to experiment with ideas in a certain way. You know, but everything is a matter of tradeoffs. And, you know, the problem I have with fundamentalists and utopians is I come back to it's like they don't they don't understand tradeoffs. They're not maybe to just go on a slight tangent. You know, in foundationism, we talk about foundationism as having three core archetypes. We have 10 we have a manifesto, 10 point manifesto, but we have three core archetypes. The archetypes of the forge, the library and the tower. And the forge is the archetype of of practical experience of putting your hands on the world and making things, right? The blacksmith is the man of the forge. OK, and the library is the archetype of of recording and research and study and contemplation. And then the tower is the archetype that represents the contemplation of of the moral imperative, why we do what we do. So in in the forge, we actually do things in in the in the library. We we research things, we read things, we record what we know. And in the tower, we ask why. And it strikes me that all of these takes on this is a lie. This is terrible. This system needs to fall, whatever they are fundamentally unbalanced because they lack the the the forge knowledge that says that systems have breaking points and that you know, you're going to see stress fractures here and there. And you know, and that that's a fundamental to me, a fundamental foundationist idea is that civilization is just a house that is always falling down and always being renovated. And and you don't have the option of you don't have the option of taking the roof off because because it's leaking. You have to maintain continuity and balance that with adaptability. Sorry, I'll pause. No, it's OK. I don't want to get too bogged down in the question of democracy, although I know academic agents made an offer for you to have a chat with him at some point. So, you know, that presumably still stands. Maybe that would be good. What what's interesting towards the end of this episode is for me, it's this moment where you have the the breakaway of the Reagan Democrats because there's a complete failure to read tone and reception on on the part of the Republicans where the people are beginning to be frightened by the the the the fire breathing evangelical messages that are coming into play here. So there's a very sort of unsubtle frontal kind of attempt to to coerce the the electorate at that point into socially conservative values and it's resisted. And and and this this is the gap that you have later going back to one of his future documentaries, the the trap that's filled by kind of Clinton Blair managerialism. This is this is that sort of inflection point. But it's it's it's also interesting as well. In this episode, you have Curtis is building very heavily up on the theme having superseded the Russians as the enemy of Clinton, as the so-called fantasy enemy. Now, it's interesting watching this documentary from 17 years ago where it seems at times Curtis is at pains to almost bend over backwards to say that, you know, all of these stories were kind of groundless. You know, white water was just a property deal that went wrong. You know, and the sexual assault claims were very little to look at. Oh, oh, but then there was Monica Lewinsky. OK, that was a bit scandalous. But essentially, it was all neocon kind of dirty tricks brigade stuff which was which was being rolled out against Clinton. But it isn't interesting to look back on on that now and say, well, you know, perhaps they were onto something about Clinton. I'm not sure. Yeah, it's so I saw it. And I thought, well, was this was this sort of drubbing he was getting from star and the and the and the other. Yeah. Was was was that was that the sort of foreshadowing of the the the harassment that Trump got. The same, you know, the constant process of impeachments. And yeah, and so it's like sort of revenge. Well, actually, well, I don't think that's true, because Trump was quite a different animal to the to most of the Republican, you know, the Republican, certainly the HQ, I suppose you could call it. And then and then he, you know, I think Curtis was sort of putting him in a bit in a bit of a sort of victim mode. Exactly. Exactly. Is the the noble man under pressure almost as it was coming out then. I mean, I remember when Clinton was elected being at university and, you know, friends of mine were breaking out bottles of champagne. And I was sort of I found them in the student union lawn. And I said, well, what are you doing? So we're celebrating close. Clinton got elected. I mean, people people people have celebrated that man a bit too strongly, haven't they? But they will we'll find out I hope in the in the fullness of time. But the the I I think that what we should just reject that completely. You should just reject whether it's Curtis's intentional framing or not. I think I think you can say at that point that the the neocons and the Clintons. Let's just say that they deserve each other with the benefit of hindsight. They deserve each other. You don't have to. Again, it's opposing. It's false false false opposition. Correct. Yes. And and you know, they're just vying. It's game of thrones nonsense, isn't it? But it's they're vying for for their own opportunities. They're not they're not connected to broader constituencies. Well, this this this this puts me in mind is something that I have in my notes that I wanted to touch on, which was the thing of. The tendency of people to break a good point by pushing it too far. OK. And that that in a way is is is. That ties in with with this thing I keep coming back to of illusion versus unreality, you know, illusion versus unreality. The fact that something is illusory doesn't mean there's nothing there. It means that what is there is not what you think it is. So, for example, some of the attacks on Clinton were, I think, specious. It seemed clear to me. I ran some of the numbers. It seemed clear to me that white water was no big deal. OK. The sexual assault stuff is highly credible, actually. You know, the attacks on his character are credible. OK. He seems to be another example of this kind of this type of man who is who is who who is ambitious and kind of unmediated by virtue. OK. Both things can be true. The attacks on him can be dishonest and he can not be a very nice human being. So this is and we see this happening again and again, bringing it up to the current to the present day. All of us on this chat and very many of the people who listen to our online content or follow online content, probably agree that the response of our governments to the covid outbreak has been way over the top at best, right? And and motivated by all kinds of unsavory things. But then you have people who go even further and say, well, covid, you know, SARS, covid 2 is not a real pathogen. It doesn't exist. It's like, well, again, you're breaking, you're breaking a good point by pushing it too far. This is a real thing. It does make people sick. It's just nutty bola. That's all. And then and part of the reason why we're why why we're in the midst of this mess is because we have governments that we've allowed to to to amass too much power. We've farmed out too many of the things that we that we should that we should be responsible for as human beings, you know, things like mutual care, mutual aid, self-defense, what have you. And and we've lost our ability to reconcile with with with with grave and eternal things like time and death, right? So and so and so now we're in this state that doesn't mean that it's not a real pathogen. And what's funny going back to the film and going back to specifically the left and right political dynamic at the time that 9 11 happened is that part of the reason why the the neocons got so much traction, ironically, I think, is because the left, you know, was so over the top in their reaction to the government's reaction to 9 11 so that talking about the the Gulf War and like no blood for oil, which is a really stupid slogan. It's like that there were parts of the left that denied even the moral rectitude of simple retaliation. They thought there were there were lefties at the time who literally thought that America should just apologize for having caused trouble in the Middle East in the past, as opposed to no, we're going to find who who who killed our people. We're going to go get them. And that's you know, do you get what I'm saying? It's like it's like both. Both sides are kind of that they're kind of veering so wildly off from any kind of rational path that that they're almost it's it's difficult for an ordinary person to get a real take on things. And I think most people just lined up behind President George Bush, Junior, went when the when the when the when when 9 11 happened simply because they were so disgusted by the left. Does that make sense? Absolutely. And I think being so disgusted by the neocons just previously, I think it's yes. And I well, that's that that's the sort of turning point of the film. I mean, relating it to what you say about I mean, people in the chat asking about, you know, how does this relate to the the present situation of the the disease crisis? I'm just being careful here for for YouTube algorithm purposes. There is there is something we can talk about in that later. But I think there's one last bit in this second episode I want to get to before we race through the the third episode and get to the sort of the meat of Curtis's thesis is it was an interesting form of inoculation that happened at this time in Algeria, where the the jihadis, as we say, as we said, a number of them had returned to their own countries and tried to incite, you know, bottom up rebellions against the regimes in those countries. And the interesting thing that happened in Algeria was the regime actually infiltrated and the jihadi groups and encouraged them to actually accelerate the killing of ordinary citizens because obviously this was part of the total terror philosophy that jihadis were following to such an extent. This is this is an interesting lesson about how ruthless they were in that particular power regime, to the extent that the people turned against the jihadis. So, you know, that's just an interesting lesson about, you know, how how your enemies can exploit your purity spiral. Yes. And this is a lesson for today. But anyway, by the end of the second episode, you've got the Islamists in the late 90s, they've they've failed to summon the popular revolt and and the neocons have have have pretty much failed to get Clinton. He goes on, you know, essentially for eight years in power until the millennium and and things, you know, pass over to W, who who who pretty much is embracing a kind of a neoliberal agenda from from day one and non interventionist agenda. He's running on things like tax cuts. But we're on the sort of cusp of the, you know, the big moment, the big, the big, the big crash here. So we get to episode three, the shadows and the cave. And, you know, we're returning again again to the to the Islamist radicals who are who are essentially we're finding out we're actually really fighting for localized or national movements. And then you've got the embassy bombings in the embassy bombing in Nairobi in 1998. And this is the sort of emergence of Osama bin Laden as a as a figure, you know, in the region. But what happens after that is that the key part of Kurt Kurtz's thesis turns on this thing in 2001, January 2001. The FBI has brought a trial in the case of the Nairobi bombings. And in order to do it under American law, they have to be able to prosecute an organization. So they they use the RICO statutes to do this. And they have an informant who's been around bin Laden and he supplies a whole kind of legend for bin Laden, his activities and instantiates an organization to allow the prosecution to take place at which which gets called Al Qaeda, essentially. So it's kind of a similar process like you had with Team B, you know, a couple of decades before where you've got to kind of legitimize the fantasy by some kind of a process of collective formality, whether it's whether it's in this case, a legal process, a court case, or like a scientific or a technical process like you have with Team B, where they're looking at Russian military capabilities. And yet the contrast is that this is all complete odds with the Salma bin Laden's actual power and his actual effectiveness. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Go on. Yeah. The yeah, there's a there's a lot going on there, right? The again, I mean, essentially, they were trying to prosecute them in with the using laws that were designed to prosecute the mafia. So you you have to construct a sense of an organization. And this is where the main bit of curfews is this notion that we're being sold the myth at this time of a kind of a global organization, a bit like Spectre, you know, in James Bond, yes, that has that has these kind of, you know, loyal fight to the death kind of, you know, minions and recruits. And at the same time, has this sort of sense of darkly, almost supernatural power to threaten our society at an existential level. Yeah. And this is the prime fiction of the moment. Right. And this is I don't know if they used Rico, which which is a racketeering, racketeering, influenced and corrupt organizations that I know they use conspiracy statute. They might have used Rico as well. But yes, certainly it was under conspiracy law, which says that you don't have to be. You don't actually have to have done anything. You just have to be associated with with with with one of the key conspirators. But yes, this this goes back to the thing that I'm always harping on, which is that there's there's a sense of of threat magnification. In other words, there is an illusion versus on reality. That there was something real there. There are actually violent jihadis in all these countries. They can certainly pose a threat to to their own countries and to the West, and they have actually mounted kind of terrorist spectaculars here and elsewhere. That doesn't necessarily mean they're there. They're this this global kind of coherent organization. And then you have this feedback loop of because you because you were putting all this energy into going after this organization, so to speak. You almost you almost draw it out of out of. You almost draw that organization out of non-existence. Now those people have something to coalesce around. And I just I just noticed that this is this is a pattern that that happens in in certainly in American policymaking. I've seen it again and again and again. It's people in the chat have been talking about covid to just dip into that for a second and to tie that in, you know, we saw that one of the things that the hysterical overreaction to the emergence of this virus caused people to do was it caused policymakers to take the most heavy-handed approach and to take the most top-down approach when a bottom-up approach would have been much better. In other words, in the in the case of a pandemic, what you want is you want operators on the ground, you want clinicians to be looking at things very closely and making decisions based on the stuff they know, because they're closest to the information and then slow that information might percolate up to the levels of kind of state or federal policymakers that could maybe assist. But instead what we had was top-down thinkers saying, OK, we have to do this. And so, for example, in Italy, one reason why Italy got hit so hard early on in the outbreak is that the Italian policymakers did the worst possible thing. I think you're getting ahead of the story here, though. I think, I mean, going to COVID because I think the interesting discussion there is how the dark fantasy gets projected out. And what I say in those debates, when basically the problem you mentioned earlier is, look, the terrorists were real. The COVID is real. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Right, right. And then, and what people tend, what seems to happen then is then the fantasy gets unleashed about what each of those things is. And it was Bill DeRodi near the end who's asked if these things, if terrorism has been invented and he says, though, that's too strong a term and we projected it. We projected our own worst fears and that's how the fantasy has been created. Yeah, there are acts of terrorism, but there are no super powerful baddies, you know, just like there are moments of weather, but there is no global scale in pending disaster. There's no climate, exactly. There's climate change. There's no climate emergency. Correct, exactly. Yeah, right. And you also have a mechanism of, in that, of a sort of sunk cost fallacy as well, that once you've established the basic lie, I mean, it's a line in Shakespeare, you know, Richard III talks about, you know, but I am in so far in blood that sin will pluck on sin. You know, it becomes at a certain point, as you say, Mike, a set of feedback loops that are political and cultural as well that make it impossible to sort of get out without a profound loss of face, which of course is unthinkable for the political class. Sorry, go on. Yeah, yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, and the reason I've, the reason I don't think it's, I kind of see what you mean, Ben, but the reason I don't think it's getting necessarily getting ahead of the narrative is because this is, pardon me? Yeah, no, well, I mean, I'm getting ahead of the conversation. You're coming, you're coming in the summary. Yeah, coming in the summary. Yeah, but I mean, yeah, like, we're still talking about episode three. But I mean, yeah, to get, to get back to that. Go on, Mike, so quickly. You go first. Yeah, just, just, just the, I just, and again, this is my, this is my kind of software engineer geek, geek side manifesting itself. But it's just, I, you know, I'm always looking at these patterns and it sucks. So right away I say, oh yeah, this is the same kind of thing, right? There's, there's threat inflation and and then there's, there's a typically top-down response. Again, because we're talking about how concentrated power responds to these things. And, and so when you allow, ironically, when you allow too much power to concentrate, when you allow governments to get too big and too powerful, for example, then there is a built-in incentive for governments to overreact because they have the tools with which to react, right? As opposed to allowing local operators to actually figure things out on their own and, and, and, and grapple with the problems. So it's just, it's, it's this, it's a catamari ball of, of, of, of badness. Yeah. So there's this comment, there was a comment from, in the show, not on the stream, from, from the, a guy from the bulletin of atomic scientists. Now, if you know these guys, like they are not, they're, they're, they're not ones to, what would you say, damp down a scare story. Yeah. And, and, you know, like they're all over, they were, I mean, they were founded out the idea, you know, they, they, they, their, their emblem is a clock with like one minute to midnight. And, you know, and, and all they do is move the clock between five minutes and one minute to midnight. That's all they've been doing since their, their foundation. Yeah, there's not, there's not. Oh my God. Yeah. We're all going to die. We're all going to die. We're all going to die. We're all going to die. But then his comment was the, the, the danger is for, is, is, is not from the bomb, from a dirty bomb, which is what he's talking about. The danger is from fact panic, right? Yes. And, and now that, that, and like, so those, those conversations that you got, like those constant conversations were being had. Like there was, there was criticism around. They must, when, when they're making these decisions about the, you know, how to construct a response. Like, so that like, you know, it's possible to credit, I think the film does in a sense of the whole series does in a sense credit with them with too much agency for having sort of been able to carefully craft stories in order to be able to manipulate people and, and subvert democracy in this sort of neat way. But, but, but they did lose, they did lose control of things, both sides of that, that story was contracted, but, but they were aware of the criticisms of, of, of, of, of these scare stories. They were, so that they must have incorporated them into their thinking, like they weren't naive to the, to the, to the possibility that the dirty bomb doesn't do anything. The media weren't unaware of the fact that a dirty bomb is probably a useless device. Yes. So, so they, but they all ran with it. The media ran with it and the politicians ran with it. And I think, and, and, and that's got to be taken into account. I mean, what's interesting from what you're saying, Ben, is it parallels the sequences in this last episode where you've got this sense of the, the complete gulf in the size of the problem and the size of the response, the disparity. You know, so the bits of footage where you've got George W. Bush talking about, you know, we thwarted terror in Buffalo, Detroit, Seattle, Portland, Tampa, all, all Democrat cities, interestingly. But you get this sense of he's kind of looking and thinking, oh my God, do I really have to try and spin this crap? You know, because they sound ridiculous. And then, you know, Curtis goes through all the various cases that were kind of ludicrous really for, you know, these, these, these sleeper cell cases and so on where, you know, you've got on the one hand, there's one case where there's a convicted fraudster who's cut a plea deal with the FBI to, to amp up the case in some, in some way. And then there's the case in Lackawanna with the Yemenis who are sort of sending messages to each other about going overseas to attend a wedding and, you know, and the, the, the FBI is reading this all as kind of coded language when in fact they are just going to attend a wedding, you know, kind of a sort of semiotic fantasy begins to take hold and a linguistic sort of imagination begins to overpower the system when, you know, yeah, go on. They would have been under tremendous pressure to do so. And, you know, there's the, there's the archetypal, there's the satire of, of, of the, of the, you know, security forces trying to find, to try to try and discover the plots and, and, and thwart them. And, you know, all, all of the guys in the room plotting the, plotting the next atrocity bar one are FBI, right? Or Homeland Security, right? So, and I don't think that's an unfounded criticism that there were cases where, you know, quite sad individuals were sort of led, led to sort of act as, act as, you know, plodders. And they were just being led on by pairs of agents. Like, you know, the best story was about the four guys who went off to try and join Al-Qaeda who got lost in China. Right. Yeah. And Chris Morris did a decent satire on it as well. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. So we're getting towards the, the end of this last episode. So it takes the story to the UK, of course, you've got the, the UK taking up the, the, the baton from the US and going into hyperdrive with, with all the, the paranoid and legislative instruments being rolled out, you know, 664 people arrested and none of them Al-Qaeda. Any, any convictions under the terrorism laws that were brought in? I mean, do we remember these terrorism laws at the time where you could be, I mean, essentially you could be banged up for an indefinite period back under, in the Blair years, you know, and, and, and the only convictions were, were essentially relating to Northern Ireland. And it's at this point. And don't forget, don't forget that there was a, there was a young man. I forget his name, but I, I seem to remember he had a Portuguese or Brazilian sounding name who, who was killed by UK security forces in the subway. They just, you know, ran into a train in Shalimar. John Charles Menezes. Yeah. There we go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So go on. Sorry, go on. Yeah. Well, I was going to say I remember it very well. I remember all the, I remember the, I was thinking of doing a, a, you know, a website called time in because it was, it was, things were shut down. I mean, it was a mini lockdown. If a lot of people like that, you can go, I remember I was going, I was, I had calls to deliver something to the estate near Didcot power station in Oxford where I lived. And I, I just, you know, I just asked the guys on the door, you know, I had some young nieces and nephew at the time and I thought they could do with it was a trip that I did for school when I was a kid and going, looking the power station before they knocked it all down. I thought would be, you know, good for them and say, so I just, you know, to the guy on the door who was quite taken aback and probably, probably he had already summoned security. I said, can, can, so do you, do you still do a day trip, you know, at all? I said, oh, no, no, not, no, because the, the present, present situation. Yeah. So, so all these opportunities that were, were, were, you know, available to us sort of grew up in the 70s and 80s were, were denied to that generation of, of children because terrorism. And, and there was an, you know, I remember I was filming at a, you know, just a, just a silly little music video skit in either, not with a full crew or anything, just a tiny little hand cam in a, in the sort of a really run down crappy shopping center in, in Oxford and, you know, we got swept on by, by the security. Oh yeah. Which, which, I mean, we didn't look any bloody like terrorists. You know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't try and describe us, but like kind of, we'd been really, really undercover if, if, you know, but that was, that was all they needed to throw their weight around was the possibility that the our send of Oxford, which is not very glamorous was going to be the, the, the site of the next sort of global, active global terrorism. Well, and what's, and what's funny about this is I remember for, you know, to your point, Ben, I remember that train spotters, actual train spotters, which, which at one point were a thing, right? You have them in the States. Yeah, we had train spotters in the, yeah, yeah. Used, we're getting shut down. It's like, well, you can't take pictures of trains because terrorism. I remember I, I remember, I've been an aviation geek for a long time. I remember, I remember being on, being on a, a trip overseas and I was at a small regional airport and taking pictures of aircraft because I had some small aircraft that really like, you know, de-haveling twin otters and things like that. And someone came up to me, one of the person knocking up to me and said, you can't take pictures on a, on an air ramp because terrorism. You know, and, and, and which the funny thing is, what is it? What is it that people think taking a picture of an air, in other words, if someone wants to blow up an aircraft, do they really, is their ability to do so enhanced by having photographs of it? Well, this was the sort of, this was the reasoning used in some of the American cases. Wasn't it, you know, that an innocent tourist video of somebody filming inside Disneyland, you know, a note, noticing a dustbin was a, a sort of a cue about where to put a bar. Yeah, or like, or like, or like, or like, they're measuring as the cameras on and they're walking from one ride to another and it's like the, they're counting out the steps and the, you know, all it takes is for you to pull back and say, wait a minute, why would, if a terrorist wants to plant a bomb to blow up a, on the means, why doesn't he need to count the steps from one place to it doesn't make any sense, but, but there we have it. That's what, that's, you know, once you, once you, once you allow, what, well, this is, this is what I mean by the death of virtue, right, is that it's, it's, so, so we've come full circle or we've come, we've come around from policy operators, who are motivated by ambition without virtue and now they can have this outsized defect on a population that has not cultivated its own virtues, specifically virtue of courage, the virtue of fortitude, right, to where the people are only too happy to kind of say yes to everything because they're afraid and the thing, whether we're talking about heavy weather events or disease or terrorism, what, there are very many things to be afraid of in the world. Yeah, and to that point, to that, yeah, to that, to that point exactly that you say where, where the sense, the sensibility of people is such that, I mean, by this point, you know, we're talking about having made ourselves hostage to this fear and you've got people so emptied out of, of any kind of independent principle or, you know, sort of, personal moral positioning that you, you get this situation where, as at this point in the documentary, Curtis says, this is an inflection where the Islamists suddenly realize that they're in a codependency with the, with the elite powers of the superpowers of the West. You know, it's, again, it's that moment where something breaks beyond the notion of conspiracy into emergence where the behavior simply becomes apparent and that they realize that they can capitalize upon this situation and they become part of those feedback loops. Again, that reinforced the ongoing, you know, 20 years since kind of timeline of this thing. So again, you, you get the cultural feedback loops where like, you've got the stories about the Islamists are watching Hollywood movies for ideas about how to, you know, initiate the American apocalypse, you know, blow up the Brooklyn Bridge and, you know, they get these ideas from watching crap like Godzilla. You know, so the liberal system that they're trying to attack is feeding them and the sort of the inspirational means of its demise. Go on. Sorry. So the point of that for me is, is when Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense and says that it's a net that, you know, that the terrorist network has penetrated 60 countries and including the USA and it's got to be rooted out. And then the same, same obviously happened here and that for me, that's that that's and the parallel is happening in the, in the Islamic world as well and the neocons as we described, they turn against their own country. They turn everyone becomes the enemy. That's when the you know, they, they, just like in the total terrorist strategy of the Islamists themselves, where the people become culpable. Right. Yeah, because they, yeah, exactly, because they're insufficiently, the Jahilis penetrated so deeply. Yeah. So they can all, they're all just they're all they're all fair game. Right. And and and it was the same here. I think you know that really beginning beginning of the radical turn against the popular radical transformation of the relationship between state and individuals, the government and individuals to really sort of hammer this idea of individualism that was that was running, you know, the attack on it that was running through the whole story. Now it's now it's really now it's gone full circle. It's got it's it's complete in it saying you are a suspect and in the same way you say you are a carbon emitter, you are a transmitter of COVID-19. And by the way, and by the way, this this echoes right back to the Cold War or harks right back to the Cold War, right where there was this it it was a shadow war to begin with. And so we spent that few decades jumping at shadows, right and and everything everything around the world was what are the communists going to do here? What's going to happen here? We have to purge and there were communists in the United States, but it was like we have to get the communists out of this and we have to find that because they're lurking and the threat and threat inflation and and threat amplification go on sorry. Peter Hitchens has a really good point on this and he says that the difference then is that in the West the government's had to sustain a notion of liberty and democracy in order to have some to a ballast against what appeared to be happening in the USSR. Interesting. So like you know they could never they were you know there were there's the security forces in the very aggressive but it was always kept in check by the necessity of providing an image that was opposite to to the other and that was limited obviously to you know into like if you want to be lefty about it you say consumer capitalism or something but but nonetheless we were we had you know radical trots and lefties of all favours were free to operate in in in the West in the way that they weren't in you know or the counterparts weren't in the in the Soviet block. Yeah. So you had we had to have an illusion of political diversity and liberty and and so on here. So they couldn't go too far in the way that they did under the under the logic of you know post 9 11 stuff. Yes. There's more liberty under the Cold War where there was an extant threat of annihilation at any moment in in theory there's more liberty then in the West than there was seemingly when we were at war with men in caves and having come out of the Cold War because you know Western politics will specifically American politics was characterized by this kind of oppositional fallacy what it meant was that we didn't have we didn't come out of that we didn't come out of that shadow conflict with political parties that actually represented anything domestic that actually that actually correctly described the divisions in American society because that hadn't been their focus and again that they had they had destroyed their ability their own ability to reason about things look look fear does that fear if you know unmediated by the virtue of of courage or fortitude destroys your ability to reason and it was also an element. I mean again going back to Curtis that he touches on in the trap where Cold War thinking in America was very much propagated by the advancement of game theory you know of the cynical expectation that your opponent is always going to do the wrong thing and that is always going to modulate your response into into one that is I suppose is is how can I put it is less about your your individual altruism and more about your expectation of hostility from from others. And so politics as you say becomes kind of sort of shrunken down by the sort of arithmetic laws that begin to be formulated about you know what's the expected Soviet response you know and and then it goes on into things like developing the metrics of things like the body count how do we how do we tell how well we're doing within this constrained system of of poker face that's being adopted as an international policy system but the interesting thing I want to pick up on on what you just guys was just saying then was was this notion of the the clamping down on individual freedoms I suppose you could say in the West at this time and this instantiation of this kind of you know surveillance state that that has resonance now was the way although that that kind of suppressed individual agency in Liberty it did as Curtis says here that the sort of the whole fantasy element built up about the enemy transform politics and it renewed it with a sense of the heroic in political leaders and it elevated figures like Tony Blair for instance beyond being mere kind of managers being beyond being sort of focus group triangulators yeah and it gave them a sense of higher calling so at this moment they could say like Blair did I think in a clip in one of the parts that he you know he's talking about the terrorist threat it all feels a bit sort of nebulous but he says but I really do believe it yeah and then it's and I think Ben you've talked about this isn't it's the sort of the sincerity of his anxiety then becomes the metric by which you judge his effectiveness as a leader. So so yeah and I think he's talking to I think he's talking to the blob the establishment so to speak rather than rather than speaking about the broader sort of rediscovery of his political authority right because actually what happens under Blair is that people stop voting like it's the first Blair's election is the first time I don't know whether it's the first or the second election but it's the first time in in well at least since the second world war which the time I've looked it's the first time in history that more people didn't vote than voted for the the the winning party right so you know none of the above is the is the winner in in in under Tony Blair and it category a lot of anxiety starts to emerge about from the political establishments that people are no longer engaged with politics. So the idea of the hero and they certainly and their and their and their you know their fans in the establishment certainly presented Bush and Bush and Blair is sort of church hilly and standing against you know they just try and draw these these analogies with World War Two which was just and it's obvious that Blair has been a hero figure for the conservative party ever since hasn't he because of his because of his effectiveness you know the the the Dark Lord skills you know as something to aspire to not not to and and ones which ones which the the actual Churchill clone doesn't act submit seem seem able to summon up either like that that night or certainly he's exhausted them very quickly. Yeah, but so I I was people have been talking about monkey dust earlier on in the comments. What is that actually I like if you haven't seen it is the most acute dissection of the Blair era that is possible to do and it's a cartoon cartoon it's extremely cynical cartoon about about the the nature of the politics in that era. It's just it's just dark as hell. Okay. Basically and and it's comment comment just comically bleak statement about how people relate and you know got from everything from Blair's sort of hollow hollow speeches and that we promise is through to you know what what what's happening at dinner parties in in in North London you know and they're they're bizarre but they sort of eat a tramp you know we're one of the dinner parties. This is a little we've got this trap and you know like the the the the the sort of the the the class of people that are doing very well out of the Blair years the sort of this wonderful you know which very much in part based in that part of but so so you've got to look at it and I've I've realized I've gone off on a on a spiel I don't know where what I was talking about. No, no, no, that's all that's all that's all good. I mean what what we're on the cusp of here is is the part of the documentary where they're talking about this this emergence of what they they call the paradigm of prevention and the idea that the loss of individual rights is the price that society pays for safety they talk about this. He talks about the famous triple negative statement of the precautionary principle Ben would you would obviously be able to speak to this idea that not having evidence is not a justification for not taking action. Oh, that's the roadie again isn't it? Isn't it right to talk about but yeah. Yeah, so that that that's and and and he flags it up and this is where I love what I love about Curtis's films where he where the where the green left sort of watch him and then they must sort of slowly quietly turn it off and go and watch something else because he's quite damning of the green movement. You know the the precautionary principle is the innovation of the green movement in the 1980s. He attributes it to global warming but actually the the proper attribution is to the Montreux protocol. That's the first instantiation of the precautionary principle designed to protect the ozone layer. There wasn't actually any any a very good evidence of the of the effect of CFCs on on on the ozone layer but the the action was taken in all the same on the basis of the precaution principle literally says the lack of the lack of full scientific evidence shall not be used to I forget that but anyway so and that and that that's how I think the two interesting things about that apart from the broadening out of the precautionary principle through to international relations on our foreign policy but it also and I think this is the sort of the turning point that sort of we more speaks to what has happened since is the internationalization of fear mongering. So the precautionary I mean as Bill DeRodi points out in the film anything can be justified on the basis of a story that has no ground in reality and it looks and this is what I'm talking about people taking taking the power of nightmares or the you know the critique of biopolitics taking it as instruction manuals and that very much seems to be the way that all global political institutions have been organized since and there's a really telling point. It's not actually in the film but I'll talk about it anyway. After the Soviet Union has collapsed in 90 ish whatever 1989 right there is there is one edition of the United Nations Human Development Report which is going now we can get on with the agenda now we can in a good way right now we can get rid of poverty you know we can eradicate diseases now we can irrigate people and they're saying this is a moment of optimism the contrast sort of Francis Fukuyama's sort of weirdness right so it's a and then and then within a year the Human Development Report is just more bleak than it's ever been and in fact these and it's full of global warming global warming just turns up like that the moment the Soviet Union collapses and it looks like all these institutions that have been established you know during the Cold War have really really starting to mourn the loss and that they need they need some reorientation and and so I think that's where this sort of political innovation really really comes from that they're ordered a loss like you know there's all this infrastructure there's all these institutions that have all been established around the principle that tomorrow might never happen and then they're deprived of their raison d'etre and that's got to leave that's got to leave some inertia on momentum well this this this leads me to the thing the other thing I want to talk about which was scale I mean fundamentally you know I'm as I look at this stuff as I watch the power of nightmares I'm I'm always thinking about again what are the attack patterns what are the attack surfaces what can we do concretely to to to act against this tendency because this is a tendency of these kinds of systems earlier one of you mentioned global organizations that are that have been organized to fight poverty if you think about what poverty is and how complicated it is how complicated the causes can be from one region to another nevermind from one country to another if you know that from a very kind of street level way the way someone like my man Nick Buckley from Manchester knows it because he's been on the streets talking to marginal people if you know that then the idea of a global poverty fighting organization is ridiculous on its face and it seems to me that in general we've we've because we've farmed out just as societies in the West in general we've gotten soft we've gotten lazy we've farmed out so many fundamental responsibilities to to to government to the state what that has meant is the state has grown larger the state has taken on these responsibilities the state does very many things badly as a result because it's overstretched they're simply too much money they're too many and they're too distant from the problem this is an echo of what Hayek said about planned economies planned economies fail because the people doing the planning are not where the information is that's this problem as well and it just strikes me that if it is one thing to take away from all this it is at scale is is is at or near the root of the problem if you have much smaller bureaucracies and fewer bureaucracies for that matter then they simply don't have the ability to to spin these fantasies and to throw them up on a big screen and get everyone on board and you've you've abstracted the targeting to such hidden and unseen enemies that it becomes impossible to do it because at the same time you've tethered those hidden enemies to a sense of absolutely apocalyptic stakes yes so it's it's impossible to take them on at a sort of a localized or any level indeed what that makes sense in quitedian politics because that's your poisoned well already that's great and by the way that what you the defect you just mentioned to those organizations is a benefit because if it's a problem that can never be solved then it's like well you just got to keep we just got to keep doing more of whatever which transitions we got to keep you know approving these budgets and we just got to keep going and bureaucrats will always seek to justify their own existence but when you let these things get too large again they start literally that they get something that they're like cities they create their own weather patterns and and that's a problem so yeah I mean in tangibles like poverty or or climate or terror you know what the abstract nouns yeah yeah they are a gift to bureaucracies correct you can like the global issue is is the is the is the is the best kind of issue for a for a bureaucracy to try and confront because where are your what is your metric how do you make a success that's right that's right and and they're always saying you know global policy assuming global problems require global solutions that is that is precisely wrong again we have too few people in the in the analyst classes or I say too many people in the analyst classes don't have any forge about them they have no practical because people who do real things for living understand that global problems almost always require local solutions so I'll pause there but you're gonna say something something I was interested in in the idea of these these these these abstract problems and the coping mechanisms that are they've also evolved out of it I it's just I'm thinking out loud slightly here but the idea of you know of obviously at the moment with the the disease situation we've also got a sort of a massive conspiracy scene as well around that and and there's a sense in which let me see if I can go with this but it's almost like it's almost like a completely rational act psychologically to have that conspiracy scene it's like a mirroring of the kind of situation you have with the elites with with team B you know sort of inverting the truth about the Soviet Union you know the fact that we can't detect their submarines must mean that you know they've got some special equipment yeah or something like that and and conspiracy you know for if you like the the populist masses is a way of a psychological anchoring where you have a little bit of control still in some sense you know you've you've you're dispossessed from the political space by this this this kind of managerialism and this this kind of you know instrumentalizing of fear that you you create your own kind of little world of ominous takes in conspiracy and you can actually control that so in a sense it's almost like a kind of benign tumor that grows on the side of of all of this stuff as well it's maybe kind of like a sort of almost like an immune response well I would I would I see what you mean I like that I like that analogy I would I would liken it more to the tendency of people to believe elaborate conspiracy theories is a side effect of a human cognitive cognitive superpower which is pattern detection and scenario spinning like we are we are the pattern creatures that's what makes us apex creatures in nature in the first place where we're very very very good at doing it's almost like it's almost spiritually though like striking back at this system in a way you know it's like a kind of an existential self-defence at some level you know hitting back at this system where you're being told lies and you well let's make up our own kind of you know vagaries now and we'll kind of you know will inhabit that space instead because it's you know it's as much a truth as the nonsense that you're being spun well it's a bit like sort of you're suggesting it's a bit like sort of sticking your feet in the not being drawn on drawn drawn into that in it rather than a it's a negative response rather than I just it's I mean look I would I would say this that that I'm not sure I'm with you there only because the people like today in in the in the online ferment for example about about COVID it's the very people or really about government overreaction and government overreach it's the people who are most conspiratorily minded who are also least motivated to actually do any real things that's the that's the problem I have if you want to get the conspiracy theorists we're all saying okay and now we're going to go and do this we're going to do this how we're going to let's get a game plan together let's blah blah blah but that's not what's happening the people who are saying who have most gone down the quote-unquote rabbit hole are the same people who are saying yeah it's all you it's in other words it seems to serve them as an excuse to pull out of the political process exactly to pull out of the process in general just to pull out and just not do anything yeah sorry but I'm going to say something well I've written I've written a bit about conspiracy theory lately because there are a number of new outfits sort of born out of the wake of extremism and and sort of slowly more thing as you know the Mission Creek thing as as the government's priorities have sort of changed from terrorism to COVID and climate and so so they're sort of working double time with with quite large budgets to sort of try and try and synthesize some some hypothesis about what drives us recalcitrance so they did you know they build these complicated webs of our interactions on Twitter and YouTube and so on and so forth and and they're sort of they're they're essentially just really supercharged smear mongering outfits but born out of the you know the kind of the behavioral insights team the nudge unit and sort of way of looking at things of you know trying to control we didn't have an agreement by the way listeners that we would not use the word narrative but it does doesn't does apply here that there's an attempt to sort of control narratives you know by by studying the way ideas sort of propagate and and and through the internet anyway I've cut that's a bit of a round the way of how round that has where saying what I'm trying to get at so what the the the founder of the nudge sort of philosophy cast Sunstein also did a lot of work on conspiracy theories for the same reason he wants to be able to delimit public conversations about important subjects the terrorism climate being the two obvious ones and so you know he did he did he did he did a lot of way he didn't do a lot of research to some very superficial research and and he talks about how terrible it was that people weren't believing the plot the sorry the terror plot the the the narrative around 9 11 was getting out of control so he said people in New York didn't believe it and people in the Islamic Islamic countries that you know the the the targets of the war on terror didn't believe it they had other ideas about who had done it and and the point the big point that he misses in his is his research is that and it's there but he doesn't pick up on it is the enemy drives conspiracy theorizing the disconnect between the political establishment and ordinary life is what what create you can see it statistically and no and no shit right if if you're in New York and you probably relate to this more than me but this massive thing just happened that that that has never been experienced domestically before you know a domestic attack and people are going to ask well where the hell were you where were the hell were the where the security services and they start to this that's going to naturally lead to other theories about why that happened or why it was allowed to happen and ditto in in in Muslim countries who who who may have had had another idea about what was driving the war on terror similarly would have had their lives were being turned upside down so you know that the essentially what the cats done sign and then the nudges and the the the the the the the covid class and the and the climate aristocracy want is to have their cake and eat it they want to be able to have failed to deliver what people need and to be able to say these people are idiots who don't know what they're talking about that this this very much ties to another thing that I was you know that seems to trail on from from the power of nightmares in fact and goes back to the to the earlier documentary the century of the self where the insight there is Edward Bernay is bringing in the work of Freud to determine in in commercial terms let's say how you sell more goods to people where he realizes that the the the model of consumption up to that point has simply been been based on utility and the way in fact in which you can keep you know the capitalist process going and reinventing itself is to sell people products based on the the added value they will gain in their life from having the product so it's the idea of you're not selling them the car you're selling them the dream that goes with the car and simultaneously this is the period in which they'd also learned that you weren't just selling people the crisis at a realistic scale you were selling them the nightmare you know so you've got a kind of double whammy of you know fear and consumption in a kind of you know yin yang feedback loop that that kind of is perfected at this moment well and this this is a this is an effect you know I think of governments that are at once too large and too ineffectual I should say institutions not just governments right institutions that are at once too large and and and too ineffectual and are ineffectual in part because they are so large because they try to do so much and again going back I'm you know I'm always kind of trying to circling back to practical to getting a practical handle on things it seems to me that one thing that's important for for for the people who care about this stuff you're trying to rebuild our societies trying to prevent these elites from taking us down with them because they're obviously trying to commit suicide our elites is it's it's to it's to reconnect to become radical again to get down to the roots of what of what of what what the what the proper relationship of the state and the citizen is what what the what the what the uses of democracy are what the uses of market economies are but but that's but that's going to take a lot of work because we we've got to get out of kind of radical materialism back to purpose and meaning and it's like it's very easy for us to to to kind of allow someone else to to define overarching fear as the meaning of life if we don't have we lack that meaning ourselves this is this is the thing I think I think it's that believes in nothing is terrified by those that believe in something something exactly correct yeah correct yeah so I mean kind of I think we sort of we've gone through the documentary in its in its sort of substance and it's in its kind of the way it obtains to the to the present situation the the the notion of of you know the the confected threat and the and thereby the acquisition to political elites of of a power that seeming it seemingly offers a sort of it's almost a nuclear reactor of endless kind of you know control I just thought we'd kind of sort of roll roll roll up a bit towards just looking at the the documentary itself you know maybe stylistically impressions of it I mean there are things there are things about this particular Curtis documentary I think they're interesting in that they do I think to me the I one could sort of do a deeper analysis of word by word and you know gesture by gesture by there's certainly things that reveal to me that Curtis is is far more of a liberal than I am certainly and and that you know there are there are certain I mean interestingly there are certain sort of stylistic differences between a lot of the stuff that you associate and think of with Curtis actually isn't isn't so much in the power of nightmares it's actually a relatively straight telling for him I think a lot of the kind of favorite sort of tropes that he does as he goes on you know sort of endless corridors stretching away and you know 1960s computers spinning around and retroamericana and you know people looking alienated and politicians looking shifty while they're waiting for the camera to start an interview that kind of stuff is is not so much here and and it's interesting how the way he uses the footage as well he kind of sort of favors a kind of God's I view of everything you know he's kind of either floating through urban landscapes between buildings or he's panning across sort of massed uncomprehending leaderless faces of people you know and what what he referred you know what they refer to as the bewildered herd in in the century of the self and and he he's sort of he he he very much he's very emphatic about how how we're all terribly frightened and we've lost grip of of the narrative and at or bemoaning the kind of lack of solutions coming from the left you know very often he's often sort of saying you know you know this is well it's certainly an interviews he's had since he's he's been very much hinting that you know why hasn't the left come up with anything and it's again it's this thing I mean academic agent was chatting on a stream to Keith Woods today he's he's a dissident right thinker and he was he was very much talking about the way that liberals they always how how he put it but they're always embedded within their own world view and they never interrogate he said the narrowness of that they never kind of want to look at the possibility of a solution coming from the right for example it's always that all the left has run out of ideas therefore we're in a crisis you know but but hang on what's all this stuff over here we're not even looking at it you know yeah I would I would agree with that except I'll go farther than that I would say the problem with the right is that it's always it's the that of seems to be that of markets as God like to so so to to the to the left the state the institution is God to the right the market those have been the dominant voices in the mainstream this is sure and that's that's that's been my entire complaint again going going back to the cold war and yeah both of those things are wrong and that's the moral the moral right has been somewhat submerged for some time and has not been allowed to come up for air well you know and going back to the documentary I think I was talked to a Christian friend of mine a while ago who was saying about that that period where the televangelists kind of became prominent would have you and he was saying again as a believing Christian he was saying and I agreed with him that he thought that that was a huge error on the part of American Christendom they should never have gotten into bed with the state the way they did it was it was a huge problem they enjoyed much of their credibility much of what they have had to say in retrospect made sense but by but by kind of infecting themselves with the disease of scale okay they and by tying themselves to a lot of other political agendas that that that a Christian should at least want to stop and take stock before co-signing with that they did themselves a huge disservice so we're always I think we're always coming back to the to the sense of and to me anyway the sense of of meaning into the problem of of of human relationships and human civilization I think you recently use the term bewildered which is a very interesting term because the classical meaning of bewildered is turned out into the wilderness you are outside of civilization you know you left the structure and it seems to me that that that a radical yeah investment in the structure from the foundation up is is going to be something like what we need sorry God pause yeah yeah go on Ben you're going to say something I was and then I was caught up in what what might you say that yeah it's I think I was going to go on about how in I'm not sure that speaks to your discussion about the stylistic content of the film but what what Mike is saying is essentially fear these these and you and you mentioned the the moral right but I'd counter on the the the sort of the emotional left and maybe and then there's and maybe maybe you could hypothesize an emotional right and the only way really to to that that's that's the limits of any possible conversation it's not even a conversation anymore it's more of a transmission from the state as it were to to the rest of society is just it can only be fear because of the the nature of what you've just been discussing right that that that that that configuration of of of institutions so far apart from from meaning as such essentially as as meanings a a whittled down and destroyed by that distance the only thing you've got to do you're able to do that it is to to to to to to to and to sort of desiccate the the locus of authority in some way as well because one interesting takeaway I had from this was looking at how many clips of you had of like experts and pundits yes actually probably weren't that many clips actually it's probably my memory playing trace but the experts pundits sort of like being interviewed on bbc tv or or the classic one with donald rumsfeld talking about you know oh sure they've got these underground bunkers you know with ventilation systems and computers and you can drive tanks in there and there was some clips I think on the on a on a bbc program of of someone being extremely certain about the terrorist threat you know and it to an extent that that kind of looks ridiculous now and I think that the not one of the nice things was how it undermined the plausibility of tv pundits yes yes that's right that's right you know the certainty the pronouncement that's right I'm so torn on that and I'm so torn on the idea of people being just either sort of just withdrawn from it reluctant to make judgments about the the public's view you know how they how they receive it or how they respond to it but but in in account of that I remember the time but it was I think it must have been 99 and one of my housemates who who I she's pretty posh so she wouldn't she probably would so probably exclude her from from the hoi ploi but she we were watching the the the the hands blik and co was blik or blik blik's the the hands bricks and hands yeah and uh said again let me get it right Bricks hands blicks hands blicks okay right Bricks blik blik I don't know what it is anyway I'm doing a team America pronunciation sorry okay right so so uh I you know and I I was cynical from about about foreign policy since golf or one but this was you know just a good seven years later and out of my childhood into my early adulthood but I remember we you know we were sat on the sofa and and I sat on the bollocks and my my housemates comment was um well of course they've got WNDs they wouldn't be looking for them if they didn't exist again yeah it's back to the team B reasoning isn't it you know the the absence of evidence ensures that there must be evidence yeah and and you know and and then when I try and protest you know like well look look you know get to get to grips with the logic of your own your own claim and then well you're just playing with words now right yeah right right so so uh yeah I'm I'm not I'm not sure on the on the question of how it's received well you know what would you that that I've I've had interchanges like that with people um about a variety of topics you know for years you know that one and others right you know climate hysterics same thing COVID bedwetters same thing and in all these cases I mean what what keeps what I keep coming back to when I think about the kind of the almost the ridiculousness of it is that this is what it like this is what it is like to talk to someone who is in a panic that's that's what that's like um you know what we just got to do something well hold on a second do what you know do you know enough about the the baseline situation to know what the game plan should be can you interrogate the game plan can and again this whole thing of farming out you know in the foundation society we have we have a private chat room that I run in my data center and uh one of my people over there um Abigail we're always talking about this thing of farming out you're farming out things you're farming out defense you're farming out education uh to quote unquote experts this is a general problem that we have and you know they're overly large and ineffectual and full of elites who are morally and intellectually exhausted are only too happy to take advantage of that uh for example I mean in a nation that really had its stuff together I mean here like for example in the United States we have a second amendment where we have the right to keep in bare arms so here's the thing you know the the state might have said like a sensible state might have said listen there are some people around the world who might be coming here to to talk our shit up so we should you know we're gonna we encourage the states to to facilitate local militias uh here's where you can get training here's where you can get information here's where you can da da da you know and and you would you would have ended up uh prompting ordinary citizens to be more vigilant to perhaps arm themselves and train themselves and just be better at being in the world and acknowledging that this is a threat you have to live with but here's what we can actually do about it we meaning the people but increasingly uh over the past few decades it's been all about what we the you know the the the governors can do about it and so the and and what I'm always telling people is you know God save us from politicians with ideas Jesus you know we hired you to run a machine you're you're you're drawing a parallel I mean you're you're not studying it as a parallel you've got the the sort of uh the the thing that's been on the uh news the last few weeks has been the written house you're saying yes sir like a and the the sort of American conversation is about whether to go out our silly route which is the you you have to stand there whilst people what people kill you exactly and rob you correct and then and then then eventually a policeman will turn up and sort it all out for you but you may be dead or you may be exactly right right but you've retained the moral high ground being dead yeah that's right you get the right thing that's the British approach right and conversely by the way you mentioned because yes I did actually have the Kyle Rittenhouse case in mind because what struck me was not just that the out out the out and out uh rank dishonesty of the left in that case but also the the kind of the the the the is minging a word minging minging the kind of the the the kind of mealy mouth kind of like acquiescence of of some people on the right to the idea that that he shouldn't have been there in the first place or that he only uh he only had a quote unquote right to be there if he had some local connection to the community which is nonsense he's an American citizen and and if a mob is if a mob is trying to destroy an American city then American citizens who have the time and the wherewithal should show up with weapons and defend themselves and defend their city that's interesting isn't it from the point of view of fear mongering yes sir that uh uh you know the the uh emotional left again is terrified you know is whipped up into a frenzy about the notion of even here that you know you've got the weirdo marxist Paul Mason writing about how this gives you know the the trial verb it gives a license to militias to go and shoot anti-racists the the the fear script has been really really refined there the fear is not apparently hordes of rioters setting fire to your city exactly it's the far right it's what what this guy this is a boy with a with a gun was not the far right was not so it's like kind of this mobilization of of angst and fear in complete distinction to the facts well that's correct and listen you can you can use it's not like fear is not a useful emotion it is but you have to channel it towards something constructive and and that's the problem with the left and the right as I see it in my country right now is that the left doesn't want is not interested in human ability because they've placed all their faith in the state and the right seems to only be interested in the human ability to buy things to participate in markets because they don't know what markets are for and so and so you have the left saying that well he shouldn't have been there the open borders left saying he shouldn't have crossed state lines now now borders are good again I guess but then you have the right instead of the right taking up the mantle and saying this is a fundamental duty that young American men have this is a fundamental duty that American men have to defend their cities now that would have been something for them to say because they have no problem they have no look they have no problem with lionizing law enforcement and lionizing the military and saying you know God bless our men and women who serve the military well you know good character and sound mind and you get a game plan together and you act with virtue that is an armed service right but the right isn't interested in that for some reason I wonder why just want to bring this back then so I think we're sort of getting towards a winding up point here aren't we yes we are towards back to the power of nightmares the couple of key quotes again I think the one that we started with Curtis saying as the dreams that politicians once promise turned out to be illusions so too will the nightmares and then our politicians will have to face the fact that they have no visions either good or bad to offer us any longer any thoughts on that you know given the where we're at now yeah that was a nice statement wasn't it that was the that was wishful thinking or maybe maybe he had a longer time frame in mind but I think I think I mentioned it earlier I think it's fear is become global that's become the ideologies in it's in it's instituted through the UN and all its agencies and it's defined the nature of their governments domestic governments under the under the logic of global institutions responses to COVID and I so I think it's going to deliberately so as well like you know they they knew and this is from Laura book they knew that people had a total misconception about the the fatality rate of COVID infections but you know like a hundred fold or some people believed that 10% of people had been killed or more than 10% people have been killed by the disease and the government ran with that so I think there's a lot more work to do to start unpacking given the number of contracts they issued and the number of billions of pounds they issued on tracking apps I think another quote of Curtis at the end of the of the show captures that but no one questioned this fantasy because increasingly it was serving the interests of so many people well we did well ironically it was serving the interests of so few people in total numbers the numbers of people I mean how big is the neocon how many neocons are there in a country where people you know so I like I like I like Ben's take on it I would say that I mean Simon you mentioned vision that he he talked I think he said I don't remember the exact quote but you know talking about a vision in or vision as held by politicians increasingly what I arrive at the conclusion I arrive at God save us from politicians with visions visions are not the other hand well wait a minute let me let me just hear me out vision is supposed to come from the people it's not supposed to come from politicians politicians again government is an instrument it's not it's not an end state just a tool you know it's it's a necessary evil and and our the people who run our government are people we've hired to run a machine to do specific things and this is especially true in America we have a constitution that lays out the idea of a limited government with enumerated powers I think that we have to if anything this one of the things this tells us is that we really have to get about the business of taking back on board the responsibilities that we've decided to farm out now no one can do that for us and the good news is we don't have to wait for a government to tell us it's okay to do that we can just do it okay and it starts from a radical stance a foundational stance a rooted stance of these are my responsibilities as a citizen as a human being okay as a creation if you like and then and then everything else has to be downstream of that at the end of the day we're talking about a very small number of people of the government of any country and they simply cannot govern the population without the population's consent so this war that we're in this spiritual war this soft war as we call in the foundation society it will not be one on the basis of quote-unquote convincing people they've been lied to although that's always it's not going to be one on the basis of you know relating the correct set of statistics it's not going to be one on the basis of this or that political party winning or losing an election although that can help or hurt us this will be one or lost on the basis of meaning as it resides in individuals and families and communities and that's what I think well there you go so gentlemen thank you very much for joining us this evening and to the chat the audience thank you very much for tuning in I think we've had a very interesting discuses on this particular Adam Curtis documentary maybe there'll be more I'd like to think that other people might take up or challenge some of the points we've been making and take it further but for now any last words Ben Mike yeah thanks no it's good I'm happy I'm happy well don't forget to plug what you're working on what's you've got some you've got some stuff out and some things in the works do you know you go Ben shill your stuff oh shill my stuff well I've just done a series of live streams on the cop nonsense the cop 26 nonsense you can check that out or there's gonna be a few more between now and Christmas but I'm not entirely sure when because work is quite demanding and so is podcasting and live streaming so yeah follow follow me on Twitter if it's not in the description climate CLIM 8 Resistance cheers carbon Mike where can we find you before we talk about where to find me is your website still active climate-resistance.org Ben yeah are you having problems I'm no I just no I just I just want to say to people that they should also check you out at climateresistance.org climate-resistance.org and I think the name of your YouTube channel hey you got an actual real name for your YouTube channel youtube.com climate resistance so and I'll just tell everyone who's listening that Ben's conversation with Martin Durkin was awesome and and there was also one with Rupert Darwall which was amazing so yeah great stuff and everyone should check that out and everyone should be following Ben at CLIM number 8 resistance on Twitter as for me my Twitter handle is future radiocast but where the action is is really the foundationist website and the foundationist society private chat room which is it's censorship proof it's a social media platform but it's small it's local I run it in my own data center and it's invitation only but I'm you know I'm pretty pretty liberal in terms of with handing out invitations and my website the foundationist the foundationist society website is www.futurad.io you know drop by check out our manifesto check out our wall of fame you know drop us a line drop us a drop us a comment on the contact page we've got some issues of our monthly periodical cornerstone it's also available there and a few episodes some episodes of the dangerous space podcast on the podcast page so yeah that's it I'd like to thank everyone for tuning in what about Simon's podcast I've got minimally important stuff I am on Hector Drummond's channel on the guff stream which is every Friday at five minutes past one follow, subscribe, like, share Hector Drummond on YouTube I have my own podcast called the difficult second album it's been enjoying a bit of a hiatus recently but I'll be back and doing some more live streaming in the next couple of weeks I hope to be perhaps speaking to some interesting YouTubers out there who may have been watching this evening and in the meantime I'm on Twitter at Simon underscore underscore Roberts welcome all of your feedback and your criticism as well this has been a little bit fly by the sea of the pants tonight in terms of digesting quite a lot of notes to follow the series but I'm glad you've tuned in I hope it's been interesting but if you do have anything you want to put at me just fire it over to me on Twitter either by DM or an insulting tweet is what I usually prefer hopefully we can maybe talk more I would like to do more stuff about Adam Curtis in the future absolutely and if anybody wants to join and do that I would very much like to chat about his whole uvra I haven't forgiven him for his last documentary which is I can't get you out of my head I think Ben Pyle is his natural heir and he will go on and do far, far greater things than Curtis is now capable he's had his best years he's had his seasons in the sun and now it's his it's his pirate's twilight and Ben is sailing interview hoving interview there you go with a completely a new form of portrait documentary what haven't we we may indeed we may indeed more of that and on the crimson climate resistance sails into the sunset well also by the way I'd like to thank you for moderating this discussion it's been a lot of fun and time flew by so thank you