Plus Ca Change....???

About 25 years ago I first doodled a little table which tried to identify the key subjects which had divided opinion in each of the decades since the 1930s

At the time I didn’t understand why I was doing this - but it was clearly an important idea for me because I would keep returning to it…I became fascinated by the failure of those who became disillusioned with ideas which had initially enthused them to ask the obvious question about the lessons they drew from both the seduction and disillusionment

It was, of course, Keynes who first drew our attention to the power of ideas. The quote is on my blog’s masthead –

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas"

But most of us seem to imagine that we are so hard-headed as to be resistant to anything but appeals to our self-interest.

As a result we fail to ask good questions about the rise and fall of ideas –

If only we would take time to explore the reasons for both the seductiveness and disappointments, we might learn to develop the art of scepticism…

The focus of my table (called “The Ebb and Flow of Ideas”) on fashionable ideas is, of course, rather idiosyncratic. The more normal way to handle social trends is that of social historians such as David Kynaston who emphasise the influence of technological change. But documentarist Adam Curtis shows us yet another way – choosing the theme of social control to demonstrate how the theories of a few individuals - from Freud to “game theorists” and characters such as RD Laing, JD Buchanan, Bob McNamara – were used by big business and politicians alike in the post-war period. And how an utterly negative assumption about human nature underpinned the basic model of social interaction they all used…

His series called The Trap is typical and its various parts can be viewed here, here – and here.

I knew that the author of the famous satirical series “Yes, Minister” (Anthony Jay - whose essay I reproduce in the final part of my own 5-part series) based it on the work of the “public choice” economists – (35 mins into part 1) but I had not, until viewing “The Trap” realised the role RD Laing had played in destroying the US psychology establishment and bringing in a new self-referential one…

Curtis’s work has attracted some good profiles – eg this one in 2007 and this one in 2012

His most recent documentary is Hypernormalisation which I am right now viewing and on which I may comment shortly…..

No less a journal than The Economist has just published a long interview with him – in which he makes the important point that - 

What no one saw coming was the effect of individualism on politics. It’s our fault. We all want to be individuals and we don’t want to see ourselves as parts of trade unions, political parties or religious groups. We want to be individuals who express ourselves and are in control of our own destiny. With the rise of that hyper-individualism in society, politics got screwed. That sense of being part of a movement that could challenge power and change the world began to die away and was replaced by a technocratic management system.That’s the thing that I’m really fascinated by. I think the old mass democracies sort of died in the early 90s and have been replaced by a system that manages us as individuals

My recent post on "controlling the Masses" led to another important series of posts about contemporary politics which included reading lists about the location of power….As I was rereading them, I was struck with exactly the same reaction as Curtis when he makes this comment about investigative journalism - 

“The problem I have with a lot of investigative journalism, is that they always say: “There should be more investigative journalism” and I think, “When you tell me that a lot of rich people aren't paying tax, I’m shocked but I’m not surprised because I know that. I don’t want to read another article that tells me that”. What I want is an article that tells me why, when I’m told that, nothing happens and nothing changes. And no one has ever explained that to me.

Curtis uses the opportunity of The Economist interview to emphasise the point that people are searching for a new politics which will give them a vision worth striving for....and that we all seem overcome with a dreadful fatalism....I very much agree with his opinion that our times need a new more positive and more social vision and that the central question indeed is how we learn to trust again…..
This gives me a chance to remind my readers of the great reading list I included recently for protestors