Last night was the first programme in Adam Curtis's new series The Trap, which is about how our society got landed with a false idea of freedom. Curtis (left) was a big influence in my life, because his earlier series The Century of the Self inspired me to become a writer. The Century of the Self was a brilliant essay on how a vision of the self taken from Freudian psychology - that is, that we are selfish, avaricious and isolated - was used to create modern marketing.
The inventor of the term "Public Relations" was Freud's nephew Edward Bernays (PR was itself a piece of PR-spin, invented to replace "Propaganda"). Bernays taught marketeers not to appeal to reason, but to the Freudian unconscious: not to say, "this lawnmower is made by expert engineers, is fairly priced and will last for at least 15 years" but "just imagine what the Joneses will say when they see this little baby!" Along the way, he demonstrated the effectiveness of his technique by persuading women to smoke, inventing the idea of "bacon and eggs", and toppling the government of Guatemala purely by PR and deceit, on behalf of the banana corporations ... Click "Read more"
What was important for me in this was (a) that our idea of the self makes a difference; and (b) that it is possible to deal with difficult subjects accessibly.
I'm not sure yet whether The Trap is going to come up to that level, but one fascinating piece of information is that John Nash, the mathematician portrayed in the film A Beautiful Mind by Russell "You'll believe a man can think!" Crowe was not a cuddly-but-deluded figure, but the paranoid creator of Game Theory, a new science that showed how to win in the game of life by double-crossing others. This eventually led, according to Curtis, to Thatcherite economics, which laid bare the essential "truth" of our selfish interactions and did away with the "illusory" ideas of public service and duty that had underpinned the old institutions. Instead of being motivated by public service, people would now act as "free" agents pursuing financial incentives.
What I find a bit limiting in Curtis's approach is perhaps that he doesn't offer an alternative. If we are not to be selfish, suspicious free economic agents, then what are the options?
This is an area the School could help with. The world needs a new philosophy: one that engages with the arguments of Freud, Nash etc and exposes their fallacies, and then proposes a better system. Whether we do it or someone else doesn't matter, but if we are going to lend a hand, then we need to make a start.
Maybe we could start by reading what they have to say? There's nothing wrong with studying the Upanishads, but we also need to engage with the present.
Monday, March 12, 2007
The Trap
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11 comments:
You hit upon what I believe to be one of the chief evils of our age. PR/marketing. I suspect the average 'natural' man, when left alone, is rather like one of Tolkien's hobbits. Enjoys his allotment, a few real ales, joke telling and a sing-song. It is the minds of the likes of Saruman that twist his desire. I find it an intriguing analogy. 'Magician' and those who manipulate 'imagery' to a particular end seem to be somewhat synonymous? The imagery teaches people:
- they are not content
- they need some 'thing' external to themselves to make them complete, successful, attractive etc
So it helps to keep the whole world enslaved so that a few can profit out of the slavery? Plus the consumption accelerates as people seek to satisfy the infinite in themselves with stuff that can never fill the hole. Kill the false desires produced by the advertising and you'll cure all environmental ills at their root. Consumption will fall to a natural level. But presumably those who profit from this situation are as entrenched as the land-owners who are averse to land value taxation?
When I raised this view with a long-standing student of economics in the school, his response was to the effect of, "well it serves people right for being asleep". Not the most insightful response.
What can we do about it? I don't know. Become 'white wizards'? i.e, use imagery to tell people they don't need anything. There is certainly one group who have been doing this:
http://www.adbusters.org/home/
Does anyone know of any other movements in this direction?
I suspect, though, that we are not hobbits really. The reason that this stuff works so well is that it does appeal to something in us.
We need to recognise it. If we imagine that the evils of the world are not in our own hearts we might get a shock.
By the way I recently watched all 3 LOTR films on DVD again. By the end I had developed that hearty hatred of the actor who plays Samwise that is surely the sign of a well-adjusted human being.
No, we are not hobbits. We are way too 'clever' for that. The hobbit symbolises the simple man devoid of the calculation of the more 'sophisticated'. But do you not meet people like this?
I take the point that these things must be within us otherwise they would have no effect. But the 'evil' of it is in the conscious manipulation. This is where the hobbit and Saruman differ. It is the difference between the man who experiences envy and the man who deliberately fuels it in others.
I do acknowledge the difference between a simple, decent person and a crafty manipulator. Nevertheless, I think each understands the other pretty well.
I agree with most of what you are saying, but I don't think the enslaved are unwilling to be so, or that the enslavers are not victims themselves of impoverished philosophy.
The problem with Middle-Earth morality is that it depicts absolutely good and absolutely evil creatures, and that is exactly what we do not find.
In the Upanishads, the rakshasas are not evil, but are simply people who are satisfied with the idea that the self is the body. The clever proponent of this philosophy is, underneath it all, as much its victim as anyone else.
Freud was apparently deeply miserable - people commented on the sadness and anger in his eyes.
And even if there are depraved people who will never see the light, it still doesn't get us off the hook. We do not have the Godlike luxury of being able to see into people's hearts.
PS The "serves people right" philosophy is, as you suggest, unhelpful, and ultimately irresponsible. I'm glad we hear less and less of this these days in the School.
Kevin said:
"The problem with Middle-Earth morality is that it depicts absolutely good and absolutely evil creatures..."
Not so. Most of the 'good' characters battle with their own temptation and/or past at some point. I could get carried away here but this isn't a LOTR forum so I'll restrain myself!
I think we're broadly in agreement here though. Still begs the question about what the response should be to advertising and the like? This was your original question: how to engage with this?
Did Tolkein leave out some chapters about the moral struggles of the orcs? ;-)
Going back to your original comment, I don't think that marketing is a "chief evil". You seem to be saying that man is good in the "state of nature", but society corrupts him. I disagree with that. The evidence of life in primitive cultures (many of which still exist) is that murder is fairly common. Men kill each other for possessions, or wives, or just because they have a disagreement. Studies of European crime rates over the last six or seven centuries show murder steadily declining.
What you are calling "natural man" is, like the "natural countryside" of Britain, actually the product of a lot of human intervention. So the question is not whether to intervene in natural man's impulses, but how much and in what way.
Modern marketing of the kind we are describing (and it is far from the only kind that exists) is just the wrong intervention.
K - how do we put a notice on the Noticeboard so that it comes at the top rather than sliding towards the bottom?
As a blog member, if you log in you should be able to edit the post itself.
The second episode of The Trap was pretty interesting as well. He showed how a study of the Yanomani (?) tribe in Amazonia influenced our thinking about genetics. Apparently a study of an axe fight among the members of this warlike tribe showed that those genetically related to each other (in ways they could not know of) would instinctively protect each other. This led to the popularity of the idea that we are essentially "gene machines".
Then a study of that original study showed that the fight was between those who had received gifts from the scientists (including steel machetes) and those who wanted in on the action. The presence of the scientists had created the fight.
John Nash, inventor of game theory was also interviewed saying that he no longer believed that human beings are selfish, calculating creatures.
The coup de grace at the end was the revelation that there are only two sections of society which behaves in this "rational" way: economists and psychopaths.
There was also a lot of stuff about how "performance targets" came about: from the idea that without the carrot and stick, people would not do what you wanted them to.
... As was the 3rd episode yesterday evening. As with so many think pieces about the state of the world, I approached it with some trepidation, prepared to be habitually depressed.
But it wasn't like that. Although it looked at where we(in the West)have almost invariably gone wrong in our treatment of other nations (starting by ignoring Isaiah Berlin's warnings)and not knowing the difference between positive and negative freedoms - it was invigorating rather than otherwise.
This was because it showed the wider picture, gave something substantial to chew on and, by pointing out the wrong end of the stick, revealed rather convincingly how not to pick up that end again.
Basically - I think I've got this right - the trouble began with the Utilitarian view of the search for individual happiness, was compounded by Sartre and doubly compounded by a belief that democracy could be forced upon all people for their own good.
The conclusion though (I just watched it) was "Isaiah Berlin was wrong: not all attempts to change the world for the better lead to misery."
It was a very complex argument, which I would summarise as follows: the revolutionary violence of the 20th Century was ideology-driven; therefore it was replaced by the belief that ideology is bad and should be replaced by Berlin's "negative freedom" - a freedom to do what you like without state interference, so long as you harm no-one else; and that finally in Iraq the US and Britain tried to impose this negative freedom by force.
All of which leads me back to the central question: why a philosophy school? Maybe, because people do need an alternative vision of freedom. Freedom does not have to be wrested from the hands of the bourgeoisie; and it does not depend on the material wealth and autonomy offered by capitalism.
Freedom depends upon disciplined living and manifests as free thinking. It is all of us freely giving what we have to each other.
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