The Trap

[Jayson Funke <jfunke@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I've had the pleasure of recently watching this wonderful series, and I have
to rank it as one of the best documentaries I've seen in some time. I highly
recommend PEN-Lers locate a copy. It can also be watched online, though I
cannot verify the quality: http://www.disseminate.com/2007/04/bbcs-trap.html


The Trap ? What Happened To Our Dream Of Freedom?

Individual freedom is the dream of our age. It's what our leaders promise to
give us, it defines how we think of ourselves and, repeatedly, we have gone
to war to impose freedom around the world. But if you step back and look at
what freedom actually means for us today, it's a strange and limited kind of
freedom. 
  
Politicians promised to liberate us from the old dead hand of bureaucracy,
but they have created an evermore controlling system of social management,
driven by targets and numbers. Governments committed to freedom of choice
have presided over a rise in inequality and a dramatic collapse in social
mobility. And abroad, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the attempt to enforce
freedom has led to bloody mayhem and the rise of an authoritarian
anti-democratic Islamism. This, in turn, has helped inspire terrorist
attacks in Britain. In response, the Government has dismantled long-standing
laws designed to protect our freedom. 
  
The Trap is a series of three films by Bafta-winning producer Adam Curtis
that explains the origins of our contemporary, narrow idea of freedom. 
  
It shows how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost
robotic, creatures led to today's idea of freedom. This model was derived
from ideas and techniques developed by nuclear strategists during the Cold
War to control the behaviour of the Soviet enemy. 
  
Mathematicians such as John Nash developed paranoid game theories whose
equations required people to be seen as selfish and isolated creatures,
constantly monitoring each other suspiciously ? always intent on their own
advantage. 
  
This model was then developed by genetic biologists, anthropologists,
radical psychiatrists and free market economists, and has come to dominate
both political thinking since the Seventies and the way people think about
themselves as human beings. 
  
However, within this simplistic idea lay the seeds of new forms of control.
And what people have forgotten is that there are other ideas of freedom. We
are, says Curtis, in a trap of our own making that controls us, deprives us
of meaning and causes death and chaos abroad.

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Jayson Funke

Graduate School of Geography
Clark University
950 Main Street
Worcester, MA 01610