"10... 9... 8..." " YOU CAN ONLY TRUST THE NUMBERS - 7... 6... 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... 0." "The ultimate political goal at the heart of our age, is the idea of individual freedom." "Bush:" "I believe freedom is the future of all humanity." "In Britain, our government has set out to create a revolution, that will free individuals from the control of old elites and bureaucracy." "A new world where we are free to choose our lives, not be trapped by class our income into predestined roles." "...to liberate Britain from all the old class divisions, old structures, old prejudices, to liberate the individual... and abroad, in Iraq and Afghanistan," "Britain and America have set out to liberate individuals from tyranny." "For those leading it, it is just the first step in a global revolution for democracy." "But if one steps back and looks at what has resulted, it is a very strange kind of freedom." "The attempt to liberate people from the dead hand of bureaucracy, has led to the rise of a new and increasingly controlling system of management, driven by targets and numbers." "While governments, committed to creating freedom of choice in all areas, have actually presided over a rise of inequalities, and a dramatic collapse in social mobility." "The consequence has been a return of the power of class and privilege." "And abroad, the attempt to create democracy has led not just to bloody mayhem, but a rejection of the American-led campaign to bring freedom." ""Go home yankee, go home yankee"" " "We're here for your fucking freedom, so back up right now!"" "And it has summoned up an antidemocratic authoritarian Islamism." "This in turn, has helped inspire terrorist attacks in Britain itself." "In response, government dismantled long standing laws designed to protect our freedom." "This is a serious of films, about how this strange, paradoxical world came to be created." "It begins in the dark and frightening days of the Cold War, and it will show how what we have today is a very narrow, and peculiar idea of freedom, that was born out of the paranoia of that time." "It is based on an image of human beings as selfish, isolated, and suspicious creatures, who constantly monitor and strategise against each other." "The films will show how politicians and scientists came to believe this idea of human nature could be the basis of a new type of free society." "But what none of them would realise, was that within this dark and distrustful vision, lay the seeds of a new and revolutionary system of social control." "It would use the language of freedom but in reality it would come to entrap us and our leaders in a narrow and empty world." "Subtitles downloaded from Podnapisi." "NET" " THE TRAP " " WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR DREAM OF FREEDOM " ""Part one F.." "K YOU BUDDY"" "At the end of second world war," "America and American films celebrated not just victory, but many believe dawning of a new era." "Back then, freedom meant not just liberation from Nazis, but also from the economic chaos and uncertainty that had caused the depression of the 1930s." "Governments now believed their role was to manage and control the economy and protect society from the danger of self interest at the heart of capitalism." "No longer did we worship at the shrine of no holds barred capitalism." "No." "We had been through the depression of the 1930s, we had been through World War 2." "Now we were talking about the need for government to be the major balancing element in the economy." "The individual was still important, but government would make sure that we would never slide into a deep depression again." "In the following years, bureaucracies at the heart of the state grew enormously." "Their job was to regulate capitalism for the benefit of everyone." "In an age of optimism, there were few who challenged this new vision." "But one man on the margins was convinced it would lead to disaster." "He was an Austrian aristocrat called Friedrich Von Hayek, who had fled the Nazis and now taught at the University of Chicago." "Hayek was convinced that the use of politics to plan society was far more dangerous than any problems produced by capitalism;" "because it inevitably led to tyranny and the end of freedom." "A terrible example Hayek pointed to was Soviet Union." "In their search for a utopia, the Soviet leaders had tried to plan and control everything, but this had led them to tyranny and dictatorship." "The same would now inevitably happen to the West itself." "It was on what he called "the road to serfdom"." "The only way of avoiding disaster was to go back into the past, back to a golden age of the free market, where individuals followed their own self interest, and government played little or no role." "Out of this would come what Hayek called a:" ""self directing automatic system", a spontaneous order, created by millions of people pursuing their own game." "We will benefit our fellow men most if we are guided solely by the striving for gain." "For this purpose, we have to return to an automatic system which brings this about." "Self directing automatic system which alone can restore the liberty and prosperity." "That is my fundamental conception." "Question:" "Isn't it a philosophy based essentially on selfishness?" " What about altruism, where does that come in?" "erm, it doesn't come in." "Hayek's idea was dismissed by politicians and economists." "The notion that one could create social order in a modern complex world simply by unleashing individual self interest, was seen as a failed, and discredited idea." "But proof that he might be right, was about to emerge from most unlikely of sources:" "from scientists, struggling with the new, terrifying uncertainties of the Cold War." "This is the heart of a giant, blast proof bunker 48 km North of New York." "Built in the late 50s, it housed the largest computer in the world, linked to a system of radars around the world, which constantly watched the soviet Union." "Every second thousands of pieces of information, poured into this room to be analysed for signs of danger." "The nuclear strategists who had designed this system, knew they were dealing with a completely new type of conflict." "Neither side could let it get out of control because of the terrifying consequences." "So the strategists wanted to find a way of using the information to anticipate what the Soviets might be about to do." "And to do this, they turned to a new idea, called GAME THEORY." "Game theory had been developed as a way of mathematically analysing poker games." "It looked at the game as a system where the players are locked together each trying to work out what other thinks they will do." "From that, Game Theory showed rationally what the best moves were for each of the players." ""This is a type of war that had never been fought before and of course as we all know, it would be so devastating that it is almost impossible to consider all of its consequences." "They still wanted to say there was a rational way to approach such a virtual war and GAME THEORY seemed to offer that to them, that you could, in a sense, incorporate your enemy into your own thinking" "that you could mathematically understand what your enemy would do, to the point where you and your enemy would play the exact same set of strategies. "" "The centre for developing nuclear strategy was a military think thank called RAND CORPORATION." "And the strategists at RAND, used Game Theory to create mathematical models that predicted how the Soviets would behave in response to what they saw the Americans doing." "Out of this came the fundamental structure of nuclear age hundreds of missiles protected in silos underground." "Fleets of bombers in the air 24 hours a day." "Just as in a game, they were strategic moves to convince the Soviets, that if they attacked," "America would always have missiles to destroy them in return." "And, in the rules of this game, fear and self interest stopped the Russians from attacking." "And it created a stable equilibrium called the "delicate balance of terror"." "Recommending missiles underground missiles in submarines and all that was a way of making that much more stable." "Sometimes the way I used to explained this is:" "we're trying very hard to reduce the likelihood of a nuclear war by creating powerful incentives for the Russians not to start a nuclear war ..." "Because we're trying to give them incentives not to attack, either with a nuclear attack or a conventional attack.." "yes, so incentives are important in that." " Target you!" "" "Underlying GAME THEORY, was a dark vision of human beings who are driven only by self interest, constantly distrustful of those around them." "There was a mathematician in the RAND Corporation who would take this dark vision much further." "He set out to show that one could create stability through suspicion and self interest, not just in the Cold War but in the whole of human society..." "He was the mathematical genius John Nash..." "Nash was portrayed in the Hollywood film, A Beautiful Mind, as a tortured hero... reality, Nash was difficult and spiky..." "He was notorious at RAND for inventing series of cruel games." "The most famous he called "fuck you buddy"" "in which the only way to win, was to ruthlessly betray your game partner." "Nash took Game theory and tried to apply it to all forms of human interaction." "To do this, he made the fundamental assumption;" "that all human behaviour was exactly like that involved in the hostile, competitive world of the nuclear stand-off." "That human beings constantly watched and monitored each other and to get what they wanted they would adjust their strategies to each other." "In a series of equations, for which he would win the Nobel Prize," "Nash showed that a system driven by suspicion and selfishness did not have to lead to chaos." "He proved that there could always be a point of equilibrium in which everyone's self interest was perfectly balanced against each other." "The equilibrium, this equilibrium which is used, is that, what I do is perfectly adjusted in relation to what you are doing." "And what you are doing, and what any other person is doing, is perfectly adjusted to what I am doing or what all other people are doing." "They are seeking separate optimisations just like poker players." " Question:" "Is each player alone?" "That's the idea that they are alone, and they're separate, doing something that is very non-cooperative - very selfish." "And then what all of them do, works together and there's driving from that there's a payoff to all the players." "That is the equilibrium, but it's understood not to be a cooperative idea." "Narrator:" "But the stability, the equilibrium, would only happen if everyone involved behaved selfishly, because if they cooperated the result became unpredictable and dangerous." "A famous game was developed at RAND, that showed that in any interaction, selfishness always led to a safer outcome." "It was called "The Prisoner's Dilemma. "" "There are many versions, but all of them involve two players having to decide whether to trust or betray each other." " The Prisoner's Dilemma " "Narrator:" "Imagine you have stolen the world's most valuable diamond." "You have agreed to sell it to a dangerous gangster." "He offers to meet you to exchange the diamond for the money." "But you think he may kill you." "So instead, you tell him you will take it to a remote field and hide it, while at the same time he must go to another field hundreds of miles away, and hide the money." "Then you will call him, and each will tell the other the hiding place." "But just as you are about to make the call, you realise you could betray him." "You keep the diamond, and then you go and get the money, while the gangster searches fruitlessly in an empty field." "But at the very same moment, you realise that he is probably thinking the same thing:" "that he could betray you." "You have no way of predicting how the other person will behave." "That is the dilemma." "But what Nash's equation showed showed was that the rational choice was always to betray the other person, because that way, at the worst, you got to keep the diamond." "And at the best, you got both the diamond and the money." "But if you trusted the other person, you ran the risk of losing everything, because he might betray you." "It was called the "sucker payoff"." "What the Prisoner's Dilemma expressed was the strange logic of The Cold War." "The optimum solution offering to get rid of all your weapons, provided the Russians did the same, could never happen, because you couldn't trust them not to cheat." "So instead, you went for stability, created by a balance of dangerous weapons on both sides." "What Nash had done, was to turn that, into a theory of how the whole of society worked." "It had enormous implications for politics, because it proved that one could have a society, based on individual freedom, that wouldn't degenerate into chaos." "But the price of that freedom would mean a world where everyone would have to be suspicious and distrustful of their fellow human-beings." "The Nash equilibrium is important, because one of the great fears of politics is that self-interest would lead to utter chaos, and what the Nash equilibrium suggests is that a rational pursuit of self-interest, even in the face of implacable hostile enemies, will lead to a kind of an order," "in which all players agree upon the strategies that they're playing, and that those strategies make sense to them." "But at the same time, it's also paranoid because it's the idea of a human being sitting alone in a room, being able to totally reconstruct their opponent." "Their opponent is totally implacable, totally hostile, and bent on their destruction." "But there was a small problem with Nash's equations." "They didn't seem to correlate with how human beings actually behave towards each other in the real world." "When the Prisoner's Dilemma game was tested out on the secretaries at the RAND corporation, none of them played the rational strategy." "Instead of betraying each other, they always trusted each other, and decided to cooperate." "And what no-one realised, was that John Nash himself, was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia." "He had delusions, in which he believed that those around him who wore red ties were communist spies." "And that he was part of a secret organisation that could save the world." "John Nash:" "You don't want to admit that you are crazy." "You see the other people as crazy, but you like to think of yourself as not crazy, as sort of rational." "So I thought there was some secret organisations of humans, or secret beliefs among some categories of humans, and I thought I had some relation to that." "I heard voices, and I ultimately realised that I didn't hear anything but something that I created in my own mind," "I was talking to myself mentally" "Narrator:" "In 1959, Nash was forcibly committed to a mental hospital, and he would spend the next ten years battling schizophrenia." "But despite the obvious problems with Nash's theories, the young technocrats at RAND were convinced that in them lay the seeds of a new form of ordering society, based on the free individual, because the equations provided a scientific basis" "for the alternative vision that Fredrick Von Hayek had called for." "But, for the moment, these ideas remained confined to a few thinkers at the heart of the Nuclear Establishment." "But Nash's ideas were about to spread in the most surprising way." "Thousands of miles away, there was a radical psychiatrist who had a vision." "He wanted to make people free of all the constraints that he believed controlled their minds without them realising." "And to make them free, like Nash, he would fundamentally question and undermine the old ideas of trust and love." " Is love possible?" " Is freedom possible?" "Is the truth possible?" "Is it possible to be one's actual self with another human being?" "Is it possible to be a human being anymore?" "Is it possible to be a person?" "Do persons even exist?" "Narrator:" "R.D. Laing had begun work as a psychiatrist in the mental hospitals in Glasgow in the 1950s." "It was a violent, frightening world, in which the doctors tried to manage and control schizophrenics the best they could." "Laing had noticed that the psychiatrists hardly even spoke to the schizophrenics, so as an experiment, he took twelve women, and spent months talking to them about their selves and their lives." "The results were dramatic." "After just a few months, al twelve were well enough to leave hospital." " "BUT 12 MONTHS LATER" " "Within a year, Laing discovered that all of them had returned to the hospital." "His attempt at a cure had failed completely." "After this experiment, these women left hospital and after another year they were all back again." "No-one knew why they'd come in in the first place, and no-one knew why they had to come back again." "And that shifted my focus off attention and interest, and research interest, out into the actual circumstances where this thing called madness is incubated." "Laing began to investigate the families of the schizophrenics." "His research led him to a hidden, closed world, where he studied how the families of the schizophrenics behaved towards each other in private." "And he became convinced that the roots of this madness lay concealed in this unexamined world." "The doctors and nurses, who used chemicals and ECT, to try and return the patients to their families, were making a terrible mistake." "They were sending them back to the private horror that had first created the madness." "If this were true, then the doctors, although they believed they were doing their public duty, and what was best for the patient, were in reality violent agents of oppression." "I think it's very important that a doctor remember his duty:" "to give the patient what is best for them in their long term interest, which isn't always what the patient asks for." "If you want to go home to your relatives, the relatives have got to be reasonably sure that you will fit in reasonably well in their home, so that they can go on living a normal life." "In the early sixties, Laing set up a psychiatric practice in Harley Street in London." "He offered radical new treatments for schizophrenia, and quickly became a media celebrity." "But his research into the causes of schizophrenia had convinced him that a much wider range of human problems were caused by the pressure cooker of family life." "Laing decided to investigate how power and control were exercised within the world of normal families." "And to do this, he would use the techniques of Game Theory." "Laing had learnt about Game Theory when he visited the mental research institute at Palo Alto in California." "A group of research scientists there were trying to use Game Theory as a way of analysing human interaction." "And Laing saw in this the perfect tool to dissect what went on between the members of families in Britain." "Laing used Game Theory in his analysis of families he was concerned with games, not in the sense of fun, more in the sense of people playing by rules, some of which were explicit, and some of which they were unaware of, and which in a sense were secret." "He thought he'd uncovered a fresh way of looking at human relations, those secret games that people had." "This was a way in which he could be subject to some sort of scientific investigation, it could be quantified, you could give people questionnaires." "Oh, it was very much the application of Game Theory, that's exactly what it was." "Laing took twenty couples to Britain, and using a complex series of questionnaires, he analysed how each of them saw the other, moment by moment, in their daily life, continually asking them what they secretly thought the other really intended." "Following Game Theory, he then coded the results, and had them analysed by computer." "Out of that, Laing produced matrices, which showed that, just as in the Cold War, couples use their everyday actions for strategies to control and manipulate each other." "His conclusions were stark:" "that what would normally be seen as acts of kindness and love, were in reality, weapons used selfishly to exert power and control." "Laing really did feel that the family was an arena for strategising." "Love was a way in which one person tried to dominate another person." ""I love you, but I'm making a condition for that love which is impossible for you to fulfil." "And so there's nothing you can do to earn my love, even though I'm telling you that you have to earn my love"." "From this research, Laing argued that the modern family, far from being a caring, nurturing institution, was in reality, a dark arena, where people played continuous selfish games with each other." "Out of this struggle came stability and society, but a bleak and limited existence for all the individuals involved." "The so-called "normal" family that I studied in the course of this work, it was like walking into a carbon monoxide gas chamber." "People induced their children to adjust to life by poisoning themselves to a level of subsistence existence that they called life." "Laing was radicalised by his findings." "He believed that the struggle for power and control that he had uncovered in the family, was inextricably linked with the struggle for power and control in the world." "In a violent and corrupt society, the family had become a machine for controlling people." "Laing believed that this was an objective reality, revealed by his scientific methods, above all by Game Theory." "But these very methods contain within them bleak paranoid assumptions about what human beings are really like." "Assumptions borne out of the hostility of the Cold War." "What Laing was actually doing, was helping spread these bleak, paranoid ideas into other areas of society." "Into the very way we thought about ourselves, and our relationships with each other." "He gave a message of:" ""I have seen things that you can hardly imagine." "A bleak cold landscape out there that I am going to do my best to armour you against." "We will walk into there together, and we will protect each other's backs out there in this cold bleak landscape, but don't you ever bullshit yourself that it's anything more or better than that, because that's where it is." "Laing wrote a series of books with titles like:" ""The Politics of Experience", that became huge best sellers." "And he became one of the leaders of the new counter-culture movement." "The aim of the movement was to make people realise that none of the state institutions of the post-war world could be trusted." "Those that claimed to be motivated by public duty, and the desire to help, were really part of the system that was trying to control your mind and destroy your freedom." "Their whole mind is like a cabbage, they're suppressed, they can't do exactly what they want, they haven't got any freedom, they haven't got any freedom to do exactly what they want under the system." "One had to be constantly on guard, never trusting anyone even those who said they loved you." "A lot of people are caught in a trap that they feel they ought to trust or believe the person they love, because they love them, but I don't see that that follows at all." "What Laing and the counter-culture movement were doing was tearing down Britain's institutions in the name of freedom." "And they were about to find the most unexpected allies." "They would be joined by a group of economists from the political right, who had exactly the same aim, and who'd become immensely powerful." "This group were all inspired by the ideas of Fredrick Hayek, and most of them had also worked at the RAND corporation." "And they brought with them the sophisticated mathematical techniques, like Game Theory." "They would use these techniques to prove scientifically that the idea of public duty, which had underpinned British public life for generations was a sham and a corrupt hypocrisy." "Their ideas would begin to demolish the old institutions of the British state." "They would also introduce the paranoid assumptions of the Cold War ever further into the heart of British society." "In the early Seventies, the government bureaucracies in Britain began to collapse." "Those around them blamed a growing economic crisis." "But it was clear that something much more fundamental had gone wrong." "What were supposed to be institutions to help people had become destructive." "Those around them seemed to turn against the very people they were supposed to serve." "Financial restrictions..." "Well, can you get him for a minute?" "Well it's urgent, this..." "Can't tell you that..." "I'm not allowed to disclose that..." "We don't deal with that sort of thing..." "Not available." "A group of right-wing economists in America now put forward a theory that, they said, explained why this was happening." "At the heart of their idea was Game Theory." "They said that the fundamental reality of life and society was one of millions of people continually watching and strategising against each other, all seeking only their own advantage." "But assumption had become a truth." "A self-interested model of human behaviour, that had been developed in the Cold War to make the mathematical equations work, had now been adopted by these economists as a fundamental truth about the reality of all human social interaction." "We're always trying to infer the intentions of the other." "We're always trying to convey our intentions, either deceptively or truthfully." "We're always trying to find ways to make believable promises, and sometimes to make believable threats." "Threatening the Soviet Union, threatening a misbehaving animal, threatening a child, threatening a neighbour..." "I think what we're doing is what we call strategising." "What does he think that I think he thinks that I think he's going to do?" "It has to come to some kind of equilibrium." "What is it that we can both recognise, is the obvious thing to do?" "What this meant, the economists argued, was that the politicians and bureaucrats belief that they were working for what they called "the public good"" "was a complete fantasy - because to do that depended upon creating shared goals in society, based on self-sacrifice and altruism, but in a world that was really driven by millions of suspicious, self-seeking individuals, such concepts could not exist." "Out of this came a theory called "Public Choice,"" "and a group of economists who were determined to destroy the politician's dream that they were working for the public interest." "Their leader was called James Buchanan." "There's certainly no measurable concept that could meaningfully be called the public interest." "Because how do you weigh different interests of different groups and what they can get out of it?" "The public interest as a politician thinks, does not mean it exists, it's what he thinks is good for the country." "And if he would come out and say that, that's one thing, but behind this hypocrisy of calling something "the public interest" as if it exists, that's what I was trying to tear down." "In 1975, Mrs Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party." "And Buchanan's ideas had a powerful influence on her, and the group of radicals gathered around her." "A rightwing think-tank advising Mrs Thatcher brought James Buchanan to London for a series of seminars." "And he explained starkly why the British state was failing." "It was pure Game Theory:" "Because there was no agreed version of "the public good", the bureaucrats and the politicians schemed and strategised in their own self interest, building up their power and their own empires." "They claimed to be helping others." "In fact it was the very opposite, and the result was economic chaos, and a breakdown of society." "It was chaos, there is no other word for it, and then Public Choice Theory came along and told us why." "It's because the self-interest of the groups that have managed to acquire control of the process, is such that they're directing these activities to their own advantage at the expense of society." "When public servants and politicians say they're pursuing the public interest, the words are those of public service, the actions are those of self-interest:" "maximising personal advantage." "Now, this is certainly not true, because contrary to popular belief, both myself and my staff here we take a very very great personal interest in individual people..." "I think you're scared, I think because there won't be so much opposition you don't know whether you're doing the right thing or not." "If you don't want me to answer, I'll go home, it's a lovely evening," "I don't need to be here, but if you do want me to answer, I will stay." "Please..." "Will you give the..." "Listen!" "As the British economy spiralled out of control, the political and bureaucratic elite who had dominated Britain since the war, found themselves under attack from both the Right and the Left." "Where once they had been heroic figures who would create a new world, now they were accused of being agents of control, not freedom." "We've been ruled by men who live by illusions." "The illusion that you can have freedom by government decree..." "And they don't give that..." "And these new theories began to spread into the public imagination, the writer who was part of the group advising Mrs Thatcher, began to write a sitcom that explicitly put forward the theories of public choice." "As well as being funny, it was ideological propaganda for a political movement." "Humphrey, we have got to slim down the Civil Service." "How many people have we got in this department?" "Two... thousand?" "Three thousand?" "About twenty three thousand, I think, Minister." "Twenty three thousand?" "!" "In the Department for Administrative Affairs?" "!" "Twenty three thousand people just administering other administrators?" "We'll have to do a time and motion study, see who we can get rid of." "Er, we did one of those last year, minister..." " And?" " It transpired we needed another five hundred people." "The fallacy that Public Choice Economics took on, was the fallacy that government is working entirely for the benefit of the citizen." "This was reflected by showing that in "Yes Minister", we showed that almost everything that the government has to decide is a conflict between two lots of private interest" " that of the politicians, and that of the civil servants trying to advance their own careers, and improve their own lives." "And that's why Public Choice Economics, which explains why all this was going on, was at the root of almost every episode of Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister." "At the same time, R.D. Laing was continuing his assault assault on what he saw as the corrupt elites." "He was about to use his growing power to attract one of the most powerful professions in America the medical and psychiatric establishment." "The results would be dramatic." "But the outcome would be very different from what Laing intended." "His ideas would undermine the all-controlling medical elite." "But far from liberating people, what would actually emerge would be a revolutionary new system of order and control, driven by the objective power of numbers." "It's a space where you can meet with her, where she's not gonna be frightened that you're gonna put her away, or that you're going to do anything to her at all..." "Laing was now a celebrity in America, and was one of the leaders of what was called the "anti-psychiatry" movement." "Psychiatry, Laing said, was a fake science, used as a system of political control to shore-up a violent collapsing society." "Its categories of madness and sanity had no reality." "Madness was simply a convenient label used to lock away those who wanted to break free." "Hundreds of young psychiatrists came to Laing's talks, and one of them was inspired, and decided to find a way of testing whether what Laing said was true or not." "Could psychiatrists in America distinguish between madness and sanity?" "He was called David Rosenham, and he devised a dramatic experiment." "He assembled eight people, including himself, none of whom had ever had any psychiatric problems." "Each person was then sent across the country to a specific mental hospital." "At an agreed time, they all presented themselves at their hospital, and told the psychiatrist on duty they were hearing a voice in their head that said the word "thud"." "That was the only lie they should tell." "Otherwise, they were to behave and respond completely normally." "Interviewer:" "And then what happened?" "Rosenham:" "They were all diagnosed as insane and admitted to the hospital." "Interviewer:" "All of them?" "Rosenham:" "All of them." "Interviewer:" "And were any of them insane?" "Rosenham:" "No." "There was nobody who could have judged these people as insane." "I told friends, I told my family I get out, when I get out that's all..." "I'll be there for a couple of days, then I'll get out." "Nobody knew I'd be there for two months!" "Once admitted, all eight fake patients acted completely normally, yet the hospitals refused to release them, and diagnosed seven as suffering from schizophrenia, and one of bi-polar disorder." "They were all given powerful psychotropic drugs." "They found there was nothing they could do to convince the doctors they were sane, and it quickly became clear that the only way out would be to agree that they were insane, and then pretend to be getting better." "The only way out was to point out that they were correct." ""They had said I was insane, I am insane, but I am getting better"." "That was an affirmation of their view of me." "When Rosenham finally got out and reported the experiment, there was an uproar." "He was accused of trickery and deceit." "And one major hospital challenged him to send some more fakes to them, guaranteeing that they would spot them this time." "Rosenham agreed, and after a month, the hospital proudly announced that it had forty-one fakes." "Rosenham then revealed he had sent no-one to the hospital." "The effect of the "thud" experiment was a disaster for American psychiatry." "It destroyed the idea that they were a privileged elite with specialist knowledge." "But those in charge realised that psychiatry could not just give up." "Debía hallarse otra manera de comprender y manejar" "Another way had to be found of understanding and managing people's inner feelings in modern society." "And, like R.D. Laing, they turned to the objective purity of mathematical analysis." "They set out to create a scientific system of diagnosing people's inner mental states, in which all human judgement would be removed, and replaced instead by a system based on the power of numbers." "They gave up on the idea that they could understand the human mind, and cure it." "Instead, American psychiatry created a new set of measurable categories that were only based on the surface behaviour of human beings" "." "Many were given new names, like Attention Deficit Disorder, and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder." "Psychiatry says: "we don't know the causes for any of these conditions", and then just said" ""this is what they look like"." "This is what depression looks like, this is what ADHD looks like, this is what PTSD looks like, this is what Multiple Personality looks like, whether they exist in any particular way, or they exist in the same way, or if they are the same kinds of things didn't matter." "This is just what they look like." "What mattered was that these disorders could be observed, and thus recorded." "The psychiatrists created a system in which a diagnosis could literally be done by a computer." "The observable characteristics of each of the disorders were listed precisely, and questionnaires were then designed that asked people whether they had those characteristics." "The answers were simply "yes" and "no"." "So they cold be asked by lay interviewers, not by psychiatrists." "The computer would then decide whether people were normal, or abnormal." "The lay interviewer asks specific questions and notes them." "That person is not making the diagnosis." "That data is fed into a computer." "The computer program then looks at the pattern, and makes the diagnosis." "So the diagnosis was made by the computer, there was no clinical judgement required." "The psychiatrists then decided to test this system, and at the end of the 1970s, they sent interviewers out across America with the questionnaires." "Hundreds of thousands of people selected at random were interviewed." "Up to this point, psychiatrists had only dealt with individuals who had felt they needed help." "This was the first time that anyone had gone out and asked ordinary people how they thought and felt." "And the results, when processed by the computers, were astonishing." "More than fifty percent of Americans suffered from some type of mental disorder." "These studies revealed very high rates of mental disorder." "There are very very high rates of disorders out there." "Half the population has a mental disorder at some point, seventeen percent of the population has a depressive episode at some point, figures like that." "These rates astonished people, they're enormous rates." "And the general conclusion was:" "there is a hidden epidemic." "More surveys were done, and yet again the computers returned the same disturbing data." "The surveys showed that underneath the surface of normal life, millions of people, who never before would have been thought of as mentally ill, were secretly living with high levels of mental anxiety." "The psychiatrists began screening programmes across the country." "For many people, the checklists were a liberation, their private suffering was finally being recognised." "I actually heard they were having a National Anxiety Screening Day." "They asked me a bunch of questions, and if you had these symptoms, which, there was like, 50 symptoms, and I had like 49 of them, they said what you're experiencing is common," "and when I showed up to these meetings, I seen fire-fighters, construction workers..." "It was relieving to see I wasn't making this stuff up." "These new categories of disorders spread quickly in society, and terms like Borderline Personality Disorder, and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder took hold of the public imagination." "But as this happened, it had unforeseen consequences" "Millions of people began to use the checklist to monitor and diagnose themselves." "They used them to identify what was aberrant or abnormal in their behaviour and feelings." "But by definition, this also set up a powerful model for them of what were the normal behaviour and feelings to which they should aspire." "And psychiatrists began to find more and more people coming to them, demanding to be made normal." "was just a matter of asking people a couple of questions, checking the boxes in the diagnostic formula, and saying:" ""there you are, you have this disease!", or "I have this disorder, I'd better go to my doctor and tell him what I need!", and it was an amazing experience and a great change." "Most people do not, previously at any rate, want to see themselves as in some way psychiatrically injured." "But now, they tell me that they have an ideal in their mind about what the normal person is..." ""I don't fit that model, I want you to polish me down so that I fit"." "This new system of psychological disorders had been created by an attack on the arrogance and power of the psychiatric elite in the name of freedom." "But was beginning to emerge from this was a new form of control." "The disorders and checklists were becoming a powerful and objective guide to what were the correct and appropriate feelings in an age of individualism and emotion." "But this was a very different system of order." "No longer were people told how to behave by an elite." "Instead, they now used the checklist to monitor their feelings and police their own behaviour." "They were reassured that these new categories were scientific and could be checked by the power of numbers." "For they are the party of yesterday, and tomorrow is ours!" "In 1979, Mrs Thatcher had come to power in Britain." "What she promised to create was a society based on the dream of individual freedom." "People would be liberated from the arrogant elites and state bureaucrats of the past." "But Mrs Thatcher knew she would have to find a new way of managing and controlling these free individuals in a complex society, in order to avoid chaos." "And to do this, just like the psychiatrists in America, she would turn to systems based on the objective power of numbers." "But underlying the new mathematical models would, yet again, be the dark and suspicious model of human beings that the Cold War strategists had assumed." "This vision would now penetrate to the very heart of the British state." "The Thatcher government had begun in the early Eighties by selling off many of the state-owned industries, but it soon became clear that in the modern world were large areas of the stat that would have to remain under government control." "Yet Mrs Thatcher was determined to free them too from old forms of management." "To do this, she would bring in a system no longer run by ideas of public duty, instead - public servants would be encouraged by incentives to follow their self-interest." "It was all in keeping with the ideas of the inventor of public choice, James Buchanan." "He believed that it was those politicians and bureaucrats who preached the idea of public duty that were the most dangerous, who he called The Zealots." "They had to be got rid of." "We're safer if we have politicians who are a bit, er, self interested and greedy, than if we have these zealots." "The greatest danger of course is the zealot who thinks that he knows best, or she knows best for the rest of us..." "As opposed to being for sale, so to speak." "So in that sense, you can then use incentives?" "Yes, exactly." "The zealot is not nearly as readily influenced by monetary incentives or incentives of office or rank as the non-zealot... como el que no es un zealot..." "So you don't want too many zealots in there." "If our success depends on the goodness of politicians and bureaucrats, then we're in real trouble." "It was a dark and pessimistic vision of human motivation." "But it was about to become the basis for a new system of managing the British state." "The proposals represent the most far reaching reform of the National Health Service in its 40 year history." "They offer new opportunities yand pose new challenges for everyone concerned with the running of the service." "In 1988, Mrs Thatcher announced a complete reform of the way the National Health Service was run." "The fundamental aim was to overthrow the power of the medical establishment, and replace it with a new efficient system of management" "To do this, Mrs Thatcher turned to a man who had been one of the nuclear strategists at the RAND corporation, at the height of the Cold War." "He was called Alan Enthoven." "Back in the fifties, Enthoven's job had been to think the unthinkable:" "To plan how to fight and win a nuclear war." "To do this, he had designed a mathematical system which would use nuclear weapons as rational incentives to manipulate the other side." "Enthoven had designed charts that showed how many mega-tonnes of bombs to drop on which cities, and how many people it would be necessary to kill, to prove to the Russians that it was in their self-interest to come to the bargaining table." "Out of this, Enthoven had developed a technique he called Systems Analysis" "It was a technique of management that he believed could be applied to any type of human organisation." "Its aim was to get rid of all the emotional and subjective values that confused and corrupted the system." "And replace them with rational and objective methods, mathematically defined targets and incentives." "Enthoven had first tried to apply this system back in the 1960s when he was still in the military." "The Secretary of Defense, Robert MacNamara, asked him to help transform the way the Pentagon was run." "Enthoven began by getting rid of the idea that patriotism should be the guiding force in America's defense, and replacing it with a rational system based on numbers." "The approach we brought to the Pentagon was one based on rational behaviour." "Previously that had been, at that high level, it was kind of a political thing, and we were trying to make more an analytical thing." "In defense, most people thought it ought to be done on the basis of patriotism..." "There was quite a bit of that - emotion feeling - are you patriotic?" "and I was there with my slide rule, you know, my geeky sort of, MIT style." " What did the military think of this?" "Well, I think that, erm..." " They hated it?" "They hated it, yeah." "What replaced patriotism, and notions of public duty, were mathematically measurable outcomes." "But MacNamara's experiment had ended in disaster when he had tried to run the Vietnam war in a rational mathematical way, through performance targets and incentives." "The most infamous example had been the "body count"." "It had been designed as a rational measure of whether America was winning the war." "But in fact troops simply made it up, or even shot civilians to fulfil their performance targets." "And in 1967 MacNamara resigned." "But Enthoven was undaunted, and next he applied his systems to design a rational way of managing healthcare." "He began this in America, but in 1986 Mrs Thatcher had asked him to come and do the same for the NHS in Britain." "Just as he had challenged the power of the generals in the Pentagon, now he would do the same for the doctors in Britain." "I think in both cases, with the military in the defense department, and with the doctors both here and in Britain, that you have the power of organised elites, of authority and hierarchy, and the system needed to be reconfigured" "in such a way as to give incentives to do a better job, and it was a matter of - how would you re-wire the incentives to motivate self-interest?" "To create proper incentives to reward efficiency?" "And can we measure it?" "So, that was the challenge to the power of organised medicine." "What Enthoven proposed for the NHS, he called "the internal market"." "In fact, what it was, was a mathematical simulation of the free market." "Numbers were used to create measurable outputs and performance targets at all levels, while competition was created, driven by a system of incentives." "All of this mimicked the pressures of the free market on public servants." "To those who set out to create it, it was the engineering of a new freedom." "They were liberating millions of public employees from the arrogant control of elites." "Instead, a new and objective method, based on numbers, set the targets which individuals were then free to achieve any way they wanted." "It basically set free their talents." "Before, they had simply been instruments - doing what they were told." "Now, suddenly they were creative minds, allowed to examine and say "why don't we do this?", and that sense of freedom that comes from thinking "these were their targets", not something that had been wised on them from on high, and that was a very important part of motivation," "for they felt they owned their targets." "But it was a very narrow and specific type of freedom." "It meant shedding all ideas of working for the collective or public good." "And becoming instead, an individual constantly calculating what would be to one's advantage, in a system driven and defined by numbers." "At the root of this, were the simplified, self-interested creatures, that John Nash had created back in the 1950s, to make his Game Theory equations work" "But now, the aim of the system of targets and incentives was to transform public servants to just these simplified beings." "Individuals who calculated only what was best for them, and did not think any longer in wider political terms." "There is this vision of these individual, isolated humans." "That they are only information processors, there's no emotion involved, that people don't get some of their motives for participating in politics from emotion feelings and being part of something larger than themselves none of that is allowed in this particular theorem." "And so, what we have is this image of these little information processors who might possibly care about their family or whatever, but the idea that they have the interests in the welfare of the whole at heart is thought to be naïve." "This is the middle of the checkpoint, the gates have been opened, the police are no attempt to stop people as they go through and come back." "I have never seen such elation." ""Freedom!" "Freedom." "Just once!" "I watched the scenes on television last night, and again this morning." "You see the joy on people's faces you see what freedom means to them, it makes you realise that you can't stifle or suppress people's desire for liberty." " What do you think of tonight?" "Wonderful!" "In November 1989, the Berlin Wall collapsed, and the Cold War was finally over." "A new era of freedom had begun." "But the shape that freedom was going to take would be defined by the victors, the West." "And as this programme has shown, the idea of freedom that had now become dominant in the West, was deeply rooted in the suspicion and paranoia of the Cold War." "Next week's film will show how this idea spreads to take over politics itself, because it seemed to offer a new and better alternative to democracy." "What it actually leads to is corruption, growing rigidity, and a dramatic rise in inequality." "And we will come to believe that we really are the strange isolated beings the Cold War scientists had invented to make their models work." "This bleak vision, far from liberating us, will become our cage." "The ultimate political goal at the heart of our age, is the idea of individual freedom." "I believe that freedom is the future of all humanity." "In Britain, our government has set out to create a revolution that will free individuals from the control of old elites and bureaucracies." "A new world, where we are free to choose our lives, not be trapped by class or income into a pre-destined role." "To liberate Britain from all the old class divisions, old structures, old prejudices." "To liberate the individual." "And abroad, in Iraq and Afghanistan," "Britain and America have set out to liberate individuals from tyranny." "For those leading it, it is just a first step in a global revolution for democracy." "But if one steps back and looks at what has resulted, it is a very strange kind of freedom." "The attempt to liberate people from the dead hand of bureaucracy has led to the rise of a new, and increasingly controlling, system of management, driven by targets and numbers." "While governments, committed to creating freedom of choice in all areas, have actually presided over a rise of inequalities and a dramatic collapse in social mobility." "The consequence has been a return of the power of class and privilege." "And abroad, the attempt to create democracy has led not just to bloody mayhem, but to a rejection of the american-led campaign to bring freedom." ""GO HOME YANKEE, GO HOME YANKEE"" ""WE'RE HERE FOR YOUR FUCKING FREEDOM, SO BACK UP RIGHT NOW"" "And it has summoned up an anti-democratic, authoritarian islamism." "This in turn, has helped inspire terrorist attacks in Britain itself." "In response, the government has dismantled long-standing laws designed to protect our freedom." "This is a series of films about how this strange, paradoxical world came to be created." "This episode tells the story of how, in the 1990s, politicians from both the right and the left, tried to extend an idea of freedom, modeled on the freedom of the market to all other areas of society." "This was something that previously no-one, not even the high-priest of capitalism, Adam Smith, had thought possible or appropriate." "But now, it was seen as inevitable, because underlying it was a scientific model of ourselves, as simplified robots." "Rational, calculating beings, whose behavior and even feelings, could be analysed and managed by numbers." "But what resulted, was the very opposite of freedom." "The numbers took on a power of their own, which began to create new forms of control, greater inequalities, and a return of a rigid class structure, based on the power of money." "Second part:" " The Lonely Robot " "In 1991, the new leader of the Conservative Party, John Major, was searching for what his advisors called "the vision thing"." "A policy that would define his time in office." ""Can we turn left into Atlantic Road in a moment please?"" ""I think I'd like to go down there and have a look."" ""Is it still there?"" ""It is, it is..."" ""It's still there." "It's still there..."" "The pattern was set, and the world divided." "Not into male and female, oh no no no..." "That's just mere superficial division, of minor importance." "No, gentleman..." "There is another division..." "Another dichotomy..." "More basic, more profound..." "At that fateful moment, the world was divided into winners and losers." "Top men, and underdogs." "In a word, the one up, and the one down." "And in July, John Major announced that he was going to make Britain a fairer and more equal society." "And he was going to start with the public services." "The arrogant bureaucrats who had ruled Britain for so long, were now going to be made to serve the public." "There would be no "them and us" andy longer." ""Nothing less than a revolution in the way in which public services are delivered." "It will be the most comprehensive quality initiative ever launched." "New and tougher standards of services will be set." "The wide range of mechanisms to ensure that they are met to the citizens satisfaction." " "WAIT THERE!"" "Behind John Major's vision was a radical new political theory, which had been borne out of the strategic thinking of the Cold War." "As last week's programme showed, it argued that the idea of public duty, which had underpinned British public life for generations, was an illusion." "In reality, public servants were motivated only by self interest." "When they talked proudly of serving the public good, it was hypocrisy." "What they were actually doing was scheming to build up their empires." "John Major was setting out to create an alternative system, that tried to mimic the self-interested drive of the free market." "This would harness the true individualism of public servants in a productive way." "The management consultants who designed the systems, explained that this was liberation." "Once public servants were set performance targets, they could achieve them in any way they wanted." "The old bureaucratic rules could be thrown away, and they would become heroic entrepreneurs." ""Dispel for good our notions of bureaucratic inefficiency and complacency." "These people have visions, they set goals, they constantly seek customer feedback, they beat budgets and pursue innovations with zeal."" ""Right..."" "The bureaucracy-bashing revolution is underway." "It's no longer management by the book." "And in fact, the book has been rewritten, and in some cases literally thrown out." ""And anybody that deals with the public, you can never win." "You can never win when you deal with the public." "Never."" "But this radical new theory had an inexorable logic at its heart." "It wasn't just going to attack the old bureaucratic institutions, it was going to go much further." "It would undermine the very ideals of democratic politics, and the politicians belief that they could change the world." "The man who did most to drive through this logic, was one of the most influential economists in the world:" "James Buchanan." "His ideas had fundamentally shaped the conservative revolution in both Britain and America." "He argued that politicians, just like the civil servants, were hypocrites." "The idea they promoted - that they were serving the public - was a fiction." "In reality, they too followed their self-interest." "The illusion would be that politicians are out there, really seeking to do good for us." "Not for themselves, but doing good for us." "A kind of an optimistic illusion, that he is doing good for the public" " Whereas you believe..?" " believe that, for the most part, he's after his own interest." "I mean, that's where we model his behaviours." " What about idealism?" "Well, I don't know what you mean, you'd have to tell me more about what you mean by that word." " The idea that you're in politics for a greater public good than something you gain for yourself." "Well I don't think that meaningful." "I don't know how to put any handles on that." """...your Labour candidate speaking to you.." ""I ask you to support the Labour Party on March the twenty...."" "What Buchanan argued, was that all politicians followed their self-interest, because the idea that they could interpret and express the general will of the people, was logically impossible." "Behind this view, lay not just right-wing ideology, but a scientific theory called Game Theory." "As last week's programme showed, game theory had been used in the 1950s by nuclear strategists, but the idea had then been developed by the mathematical genius John Nash, as a way of looking at all social interaction." "Individuals lived their lives as a game, in which they pursued only their own self-interest, constantly adjusting to each other's strategies." "If this were true, the economist argued, then the very idea of collective peoples will, was mathematically impossible." "You simply cannot add up the millions of competing individual desires into one coherent goal." "They called it "The Impossibility Theorem"." "And the only system they said that could respond to what people really wanted in such an atomised world, was the free market, not politics." "In this game theory view of the world, everyone is out for their own personal advantage, and then if you take that as given, then all those individuals want to maximise their pleasure, in this very simplified scheme," "and that's what the Impossibility Theorem says, it says they actually do that in the market, but they don't do that in political situations, like voting situations." " It's a very narrow view of politics..." "Very narrow view of politics, but of course it has to be, because it's a narrow view of the human being." "But what it does, is it reduces what it means to be a human being to a few relatively mechanical principles." "That individuals are little information processors, the market is the best information processor, and voting, or democracy is a weak information processor." " Inefficient." " Inefficient, yes." "By the early 90s, this argument had come to dominate not just economics, but the thinking of those who ran the markets." "In 1992 Walter Riston, the head of CityCorp, the largest bank in the world, wrote a best-seller called "The Twilight of Sovereignty"" "in it, he predicted the coming triumph of a new market democracy, where the market would take over responsibility for running much of society from the politicians." ""Markets", he said, "are the only true voting machines." "If they are left untouched by politicians and regulation, they will truly come to act out the peoples will for the first time in modern history"." "And the bankers are about to find a way of making this happen." "Ohio wants change." "America wants change." "And Ohio cast 144 votes for the next president." "In 1992, Bill Clinton was running for president." "Under George Bush senior, America had slid into depression, and Clinton promised that he would use the political power of the presidency to rescue the nation." ""It's time to change America." "George Bush, if you won't use your power to help America, step aside, I will." "There is no "them", there is only "us"."" "Clinton promised to use the power of the state to reform America's healthcare, extend welfare, and invest in jobs." "And above all, reduce the inequalities that had risen up under president Reagan." "And at the end of 1992 he was triumphantly elected." "But in January, a few days before his inauguration, two leading members of the financial world, came to see Clinton in Washington." "One was Alan Greenspan, the head of the Federal Reserve." "The other was Clinton's new economic advisor, Robert Rubin, the head of Goldmann-Sachs." "What they told the president was dramatic." "His political plans were impossible." "He was inheriting a huge government deficit, and if he borrowed any more money to pay for his promises, interest rates would rise, people would stop borrowing and spending, and there would be an economic disaster." "The single most critical meeting with president Clinton, with respect to the economic strategy of the Clinton administration, was in early January during the transition, about two weeks before the inauguration." "And it was that meeting - what we were saying to the president was that we needed a dramatic change in policy, and it has to be accomplished as much as possible by cutting spending, even though that is very difficult politically." " It was a dramatic message though for a democratic president, wasn't it?" "I think any president would have found it a dramatic message, whether Democrat or Republican, to have to start his administration by both reducing programmes, and cutting spending, and that's very difficult for any politician." "But what both Rubin and Greenspan told Clinton, was that there was an alternative way to build a better society." "He should let the market do it." "Instead of seeing the markets as a dangerous force, that politics had to control, he should give away power, and let them flourish unrestricted" "The markets, they said were now so intertwined with people's lives, that they could respond democratically to people's needs, in all aspects of their lives, in a way that politics couldn't." "Alan Greenspan communicated a very clear message to Bill Clinton:" "that the economy, and people's appetites as expressed in the economy" " their buying - their ability to buy - what they buy - what they prefer - is a better gauge of public sentiment than any other." "The economy, to that extent, is superior to democracy." "In a democracy, it's less tidy." "People can express their preferences only indirectly, through their representatives and their representatives have to express the preferences of a lot of people, and, sometimes want to express their own preferences rather than their constituents." "So, in that way of viewing the world, an economy is preferable to a democracy." "Faced with the banker's arguments, Clinton agreed." "And on taking office, began to cut back on his reforms." "During his first term, he dismantled much of the welfare structure that had been put in place in the 1930s." "He abandoned all his healthcare reforms, and cut government regulation of business." "It was what the markets wanted." "As Greenspan had promised, the economy began to boom." "And in 1996, Clinton made a speech that announced the end of the vision of liberal politics that one could use the power of big government to change the world." ""We know big government does not have all the answers."" ""And we have worked to give the American people a smaller, less bureaucratic government in Washington."" ""And we have to give the American people one that lives within its means."" ""The era of big government is over."" "It was the triumph of market democracy:" "a belief that anyone who gave the public what they wanted was democratic, and thus good." "As opposed to the old political elites, who believed that they knew what was best for "us"" "and imposed their idea of what society should be." "In the process, business-men became transformed:" "They might be greedy and selfish, but they were also engineers of a new kind of freedom." "By responding to the needs and desires of individuals, they were interpreting the will of the people, in a way that politicians couldn't." "If markets are in fact democracy, if markets are a means of consent, a medium of consent, you know, which all of these people believe that they are, there's a very very commonplace view in the United States these days," "in fact this is a consensus view it's hard to find someone at the upper reaches of broadcasting, journalism, business, whatever, who doesn't think this." "If markets, in fact, are a medium of consent, then you've got all sorts of funny things come out - then CEOs are the people whom the market have chosen above all others are in fact "men of the people"." "They're not some kind of bloodthirsty robber-baron, like Americans thought they were in the 1930s." "When they speak to us, they say "you speak, we listen", or, Fox News - what is it - "we report, you decide", you know, or any of these slogans." "The promoters of this idea of market democracy portrayed it as a glorious return to a golden age." "A time in the 18th or 19th centuries when laissez-faire capitalism, not politics, had ordered society." "But this was a myth." "The political philosophers of that time had made a distinction between the self-interest of the marketplace, and other areas of social and political life, that involved what Adam Smith called:" ""moral sentiments"." "These were sympathy and understanding for others, which were just as important in the ordering of society." "What was happening at the end of the 20th century was something that had never been tried before." "The idea of democracy was being taken over by a simplified economic model of human beings." "And in the process, freedom was redefined to mean nothing more than the ability of individuals to get whatever they wanted." "If you go back to the 18th and 19th centuries, most political philosophers and most economists understood that there was a certain social contract." "People were bound together, not as individuals expressing themselves only through the marketplace, but as citizens." "We had obligations to one another." "We were not simply self-interested individuals purchasing things for ourselves, but we were a community." "Our very identities, our moral values, came from our relationships in these communities." "The view that the market was preferable to politics, as a means of giving people exactly what they wanted that notion - that notion - is a rather new idea." "Behind these new ideas about how society should be managed, was a model of the individual as a rational calculating machine, whose self-interested behaviour could be analysed by numbers." "This simplified version of us had been created back in the Cold War by Game Theorists." "They had made an assumption that we were like that, simply in order to make their equations and their models work." "But what was now rising up was a powerful scientific proof that this was not just an assumption." "It really did describe the very roots of our nature that everything human beings did and felt, had been programmed into us by our genes." "And all our actions were the result of rational calculations by that genetic programme:" "that we really were computing machines guided by numbers." "The roots of this idea go back to the 1970s, when geneticists who were studying the behaviour of animals, made a conceptual shift." "They started to look at the animals behaviour from what was called the gene's point of view." "They realised that from this perspective, the animals were simply machines that were being used by the genes, to survive and replicate themselves." "In effect, we can picture the body of the chicken as being a machine, a device, constructed by the gene, to ensure the production of more genes." "Now, this may seem a perverse way of looking at things..." "You may think of reproduction as your method of producing children like yourself." "And I'm asking you to look at it in a very different light." "The human body is simply the genes device for producing more genes like itself." "Behind this new way of seeing animals was, yet again, game theory." "Game theory had inspired the geneticists because it gave a powerful framework for understanding how the genes dictated behaviour." "Game theorists looked at society as a system of self-interested individuals, competing and strategising against one another." "And the geneticists applied exactly the same model to genes." "They developed complicated equations to show how all animal behaviour, from violence to altruism, were actually rational strategies played by the genes in a game of survival." "The geneticists asserted that the same must be true for human beings." "And one scientist did an extraordinary experiment to see whether our genes did control our behaviour in the same rational, mathematical, way." "It took place deep within the Amazon rain forest." "The Yanamamo people were famous for being one of the most violent societies on earth." "An anthropologist studying them, decided to see whether behind the chaos of the fighting, there was a hidden genetic pattern, guiding it in a mathematical way." "He was called Napoleon Chagnon, and his first step was to try and find out the names of everyone, and who was related to whom." "I assumed at the outset that the natives would be excited and eager and thrilled and flattered that I was interested in their culture and their society and their families and genealogies." "And so, I would innocently ask what the name of so-and-so was, and they would give me a name, and I would write it down." "And it turned out that they tricked me, that all of the names of the people in the village I was living in, were not only incorrect, but they were derogatory, vulgar, false not all of them were vulgar and derogatory, but a lot of them were." " Like what?" "Like "fart-breath", "hairy-c***", "long dong", things of that sort." ""Hairy pussy" - there's the name of the wife of the head man." "But Chagnon persisted." "He spent months checking and cross-checking names and relationships." "He also gave out western goods, above all the prized machete, in return for information," "Hasta que llegó el momento en que, a su parecer, until he built up what he believed which he then stored on a computer at his university." "Chagnon then returned with a film crew, and recorded in great detail, a fight in the village." ""Bring your camera over here"" " 'The Ax Fight', 1975 " "Chagnon returned to America, and went through the film frame by frame identifying all the participants." "On the surface there seemed no meaning to the fight, often individuals who appeared closely related, attacked each other." "But when Chagnon fed their details into the computer, and cross-checked them with his database, another reality emerged." "Because of the Yanomamis complex history of intermarriage, individuals were related to each other in the most surprising ways." "What the computer showed was that individuals who took risks for each other in the fight were always more closely genetically related than those they attacked." "There was a hidden pattern in the film and it was the computer that proved and demonstrated that the pattern was there, because you can't possibly remember everybody's genealogical relatedness to everybody else in the village." "So underneath all of this chaos and confusion what meets the eye, there were people who shared genes with each other and chose sides to defend on the basis of their relatedness to each other..." "Yeah, there is kind of a hidden mathematical dimension there to the whole thing that you have to really dig for to discover." "Chagnon's experiment caused a sensation within the human sciences." "Because it seemed to offer precise mathematical proof that genes played a powerful role in guiding human behaviour." "It became one of the fundamental pieces of evidence underpinning a new powerful model of human beings." "They were machines, whose actions and feelings were driven by coded instructions, implanted deep inside them millions of years ago, of which they were unaware." "It was an image that began to permeate deep into our culture." "The image of the organism, including ourselves, as a machine for passing on genes, to shift the focus away from the idea of the organism as being the agent in life, to the immortal replicator." "Our DNA is a coded description of the worlds in which our ancestors survived." "DNA it's the computer recipe for life itself." "Unravelling like a reel of magnetic tape on some giant computer." "Back in the dark and frightening days of the Cold War, mathematicians had developed a simplified, machine-like model of human beings, whose behaviours could be analysed and predicted by numbers." "They had done this to try to understand and control the terrifying uncertainties of that time." "Now in the 1990s, the Cold War was over, and its giant defenses lay empty." "But that simplified model had risen up and triumphed as an explanation of what we truly are as human beings on every level." "Politically, economically, and now, biologically." "We no longer see this theory as having historical inspiration in the Cold War, instead what we see is a quasi-natural-social-science theory of everything." "It applies to something as small as a gene, or something as medium-sized as a human being, or something as large as a nation-state." "The human being sort of dissolves in this social theory, that it isn't about necessarily, human beings anymore." "It's about these little entities that are constantly questing to reproduce themselves, and also to find their maximum advantage." "And with the rise of this machine model of human beings, a new idea about how to change society began to emerge." "Not through politics any longer, but by adjusting how well the individual machines function." "The technicians of this new idea would be the psychiatrists and the drug companies, who would free people from the terrible anxieties inside themselves." "But what it would lead to would be a new form of order and control, not defined by the old political elites, but by the objective power of numbers." ""I just found myself constantly worrying..." "I couldn't.." "I just couldn't stop."" ""My hands were shaking, and I was sure that people were looking at me and watching my hands."" "These college students didn't know it then, but they were each experiencing the symptoms of an anxiety disorder." "Panic disorder, generalised anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, social phobia, and post-traumatic stress disorder." "This year 23 million Americans will suffer from one of these anxiety disorders, they're the most common mental illness in the country, and they can attack anyone at any time." "In the early nineties, an epidemic of mental disorder was sweeping America and Britain." "As last week's programme showed, it had been uncovered by a new system for identifying disorders." "Psychiatry had been attacked for relying on the personal and fallible judgement of psychiatrists." "But instead, a new objective method based on checklists had been invented." "These listed only the objective symptoms, and deliberately did not enquire into why and individual felt an anxiety." "In the late 80s, nationwide surveys had revealed an incredible picture:" "more than 50% of Americans suffered from mental disorders." " How are you feeling?" " I don't know, I'm just sad..." "But at the very same, the drug companies had announced that they had created a new type of drug, called an SSRI, which they claimed, targeted the circuits inside the brain that were causing these malfunctions." "The SSRIs were marketed under names like "Prozac"." "What they did was alter the amounts of serotonin that flowed across the circuit connections within the brain, and they readjusted the chemicals to normal levels." "And all of a sudden, here comes somebody that says "OK, now try these on, try this Prozac on", and I tried it on, and for the first time in my life" "I went - woah - is this the way reality really is?" "This pill could solve all of your problems." "It's called Prozac, and it may mean the end of depression as we know it." " I've been taking Prozac for two years." " And what difference has that made?" " Brilliant." " Oh, she's smiling!" "Eyes lighting up!" " And I feel as if I'm back to normal." " You feel normal?" " Yeah." " You feel a better person?" " Yeah." "Through treatment, I learned to function with my disorder, and now life is so much more enjoyable." "life is so much better now that I've gotten treatment, and I feel like I've got my OCD under control, and it feels really great." "A better life is waiting." "What now began to happen, was that millions of people who had been diagnosed by the checklist as disordered, went to psychiatrists to be medicated." "The result was liberation from anxiety on a wide scale." "But in the process, the checklist became a powerful, and seemingly objective guide for people, as to what should be their normal feelings, and what was abnormal." "And a number of leading psychiatrists began to argue that what they were actually doing was creating a static society, in which human beings were adjusted by the medication, so that they fitted to an agreed normal type, defined by the checklist." " People come to me all the time asking me to medicate them." "The implication behind that was that human beings, like all other animals, have a particular ideal model." "It had a machine-like quality to it." "We know what the model should be, and they ask the medications they ask of me, to give them medications that would push them back to this particular model they have..." "An unrealistic model, but a very static model, of man as machine." " Has it worked?" "You look very dubious my friend!" " Apparently it has." "I can't help being suspicious of it." " I don't think she's the woman I married." " Why?" " I think she's changed." " In what way?" "I don't know." "I don't know, but there's something there that is different." " OK, she's not the woman you married..." "Is she a better woman?" "No." "She's different." "They imagined that they might live in a world where there would never be a worry, not even a grief, where never did a conflict, concern, debate, worry over alternatives, make possible the kinds of progress that we've seen in the past." "But then, the man who had created the checklists admitted that it might actually be leading millions of people to believe that they were disordered when they were not." "The checklist added up only observable symptoms." "They deliberately excluded any understanding of a patients life." "Because of this, he said, it confused genuine psychological disorder with normal human feelings of sadness and anxiety, and that this was happening on a wide scale." "All this was being said by one of America's most powerful psychiatrists," "Dr. Robert Spitzer." "What happened is that we made estimates of prevalence of mental disorders totally descriptively, without considering that many of these conditions might be normal reactions which are not really disorders." "That's the problem." "Because we were not looking at the context within which those conditions developed." " You have effectively medicalised much of ordinary human sadness, fear, ordinary experiences, you've medicalised them." " I think we have, to some extent." "How serious a problem it is, is not known." "I don't know if it's twenty percent, thirty percent, I don't know." "But that's a considerable amount if it is twenty or thirty percent." "What was happening was that large parts of normal human experience grief, disappointment, loneliness, were all being reclassified as medical disorders." "In the process, a new system of management was emerging." "The drugs took away those complex and difficult feelings, and made the individuals happier." "But they also made them simpler beings, more easy to predict and manage." "And closer to the machine-like creatures at the heart of the economic models." "By using checklists of symptoms about emotions, you have gone out and confused normal human responses to life, with mental disorder, and therefore created an illusion of a vast epidemic." "A medicalised illusion." "And, obviously a situation where you medicalise, a situation where your focus, will not be on social change, it will be on controlling individuals to fit in properly." "That's the subtle and overall danger here." "That it could serve our social economic systems needs in a way in which we become more efficient, but less human." "What the psychiatrists had discovered, was that an objective system based on numbers had led them into a trap." "The numbers had imposed their own narrow logic on how we thought and felt about ourselves." "And the politicians were about to find that their attempts to manage society by using numbers would also have the strangest consequences." "Far from helping them achieve their progressive vision, they would actually make society more rigid, and even harder to change." "In 1997, New Labour was elected." "What it promised was a society free of the arrogance and prejudices of the old elites, who had dominated Britain's class system for so long." "It is us, the new radicals, a Labour party modernised, that must undertake this historic mission:" "To liberate Britain from all the old class divisions, old structures, old prejudices, old ways of working and of doing things that will not do in this world of change." "Throughout their campaign, New Labour had modeled themselves on the Clinton Democrats." "And now in power, they did exactly what Clinton had done." "They gave power away to the banks and the markets." "Gordon Brown's first announcement was to abandon politicians final lever of control over the economy." "The new Chancellor, Gordon Brown, announces a revolution in economic policy." "From now on, the Chancellor will hand control of interest rates to an independent Bank of England." "And in the management of society," "New Labour turned to the mathematical systems that John Major had brought it, but on a scale never seen before." "They believed that people actually behaved in the way described by the simplified economic model." "Performance targets and incentives would be set for everything and everyone." "Even cabinet ministers would have to fulfill their performance targets, or be punished." "Three hundred or so performance targets, over 150 efficiency targets, each public service agreement will have a named minister who is responsible for delivering and achieving those targets." "They may not have to resign, but they will have to explain why they haven't been able to meet their targets." "If a department fails to meet those targets, then it's only right and proper that government will look seriously at their ability to deliver." "The Treasury, under Gordon Brown, created a vast mathematical system." "They invented ways of giving numerical values to thing that, previously, no-one thought could be measured." "Hunger in sub-saharan Africa was to be reduced to below 48%, while world conflict was to be reduced by 6%." "And all the towns and villages in Britain were to be measured, for a Community Vibrancy Index." "And even the quality of life in the countryside was broken down into a series of indices, one of which measured how much bird-song there should be." " We want a barometer of the indicators of the quality of life, and they're not simply the economic ones... half of the skylarks have gone since 1970." "Now if you want to measure the quality of the life, one of the things is that dawn chorus." "It's about indices that affect everybody, in a quality of life barometer." "The original idea behind the mathematical system was that it would liberate public servants from old forms of bureaucratic control." "Once they were given the targets, they were free to achieve them any way they wanted." "But almost immediately, New Labour began to discover that people were more complex and more devious than the simple model allowed." "Public servants began to find the most ingenious ways of hitting their targets." "It's that the pressure to meet these targets is causing some NHS managers to "game" the system." "Hospital managers proved to be particularly devious." "When they were set targets to cut waiting lists, they ordered consultants to do the easiest operations first, like bunions and vasectomies." "Complicated ones like cancers were no longer prioritised." "And they found other clever ways of getting people off the list." "What happened at this hospital is truly shocking." "Administrators wrote to patients asking them when they would be on holiday." "They then used that information to set the timing of the operation, knowing that the patients would be away." "As a result, the patients did not get their operations, but the hospital managed to cut its waiting lists." "And when the managers were set a target to reduce waiting times in casualty, they came up with more, clever strategies." "A new job was invented, called the "hello nurse", who did nothing to treat the patient, but simply greeting them meant they had been seen, and were off the list." "When the government then tried to set a target to reduce the number of patients waiting on trolleys, the managers took the wheels off the trolleys, and reclassified them as beds." "And they redefined the corridors as wards." "And yet again, the patients were off the list." "The police were also under pressure to meet their targets." "One of the main ones was to reduce the rate of recorded crime." "Again, inventive strategies were found." "Lothian police announced the most successful crime figures in over 25 years." "But it was later found that they had reclassified hundreds of crimes, including assaults, robbery, and fire-raising as simply "suspicious occurrences", which wouldn't be included in the figures." "We are passionate about meeting these targets ...Fiddling By the management Altered their records But that's a bit odd..." "I mean you're the consultant And started to amend some of the answers that some of the youngsters had given Trolley waits - none Targets Three levels of targets Clear targets..." "Targets..." "Those targets..." "And focus on those targets..." "Why they're targets..." "Targets..." "The government tried to dismiss these reports as just a few bad examples." "But report after report came out which revealed that this inventive gaming of the system was now endemic throughout the public services" "What was supposed to be a rational system, was instead creating a strange world, in which no-one knew whether to believe the numbers or not." "The government's response was to introduce even more mathematical levels of management." "Complex systems of auditing were created to monitor workers, and make sure they fulfilled the targets in the correct way." "What had begun has a system of liberation was turning into a powerful system of control." "If I don't hit those targets, then I don't get a pay increase." "It's as simple as that." " They withhold your increment?" " They withhold my increment." " Not meeting the targets is really not an option." " It's such an important target, that I get to keep my job this month, because there's no red on the screen." " If they don't reach the targets they're axed, and if they speak out against them, they're axed, here you have a catch-22 situation." " If you get zero star rated, you are being watched like a hawk." " I think you should go." "But the numbers were also having a strange and perverse effect on New Labour's vision of a freer and more open Britain." "They were in fact creating a more rigid and stratified society." "At the heart of this was education, and the league tables for schools." "The tables showed parents which were the best performing schools, and which were the worst ones." "The government said that this would incentivise the less successful ones to compete, and improve their services, and standards would then rise across the country." "In fact, the very opposite happened." "Rich parents moved into the areas with the best schools, which then caused house prices to spiral, keeping the poor out." "And nearly all schools taught pupils only those narrow facts they would need to answer in exams, and so would help the schools rise up the league tables." "What was lost was the wider education that would help the poorer children rise up in society." "In 2006, a series of reports made it clear that there was a definite link between the government's policies in education, and the rise of social segregation based on wealth." "This has contributed to a much wider problem." "Social mobility in Britain has now ground to a halt." "The stark fact is that the children of rich families in Britain today are much more likely to live and die rich, than in the recent past." "While children in poor families are more likely to live and die poor." "The country has become more rigid and stratified than at any time since the second world war." "New Labour had adopted the market model of freedom, believing that there would be a trade-off." "They gave up their old political role of intervening in the market to reduce inequality but what was supposed to follow was a new openness and fluidity in society." "In fact, they now have the worst of both worlds." "Society has become more rigid, while the inequalities have become more extreme." "Under New Labour, the country is even more unequal than it was under Mrs Thatcher." "With an ever-increasing share of the wealth going to a tiny 1% at the top of society." "And the inequalities not only affect how you live, but also when you will die" "Across the country, differences in life expectancy have increased since 1997." "And inequalities in child mortality by class have also increased." "A baby born in Hackney is now twice as likely to die in its first year as a baby born in Bexley." "Beneath the meritocratic surface, social class divisions in Britain are hardening and deepening." "And in America, throughout the 1990s, the economic model of democracy was leading not just to the rise of inequality, but to financial and political corruption on a huge scale." "America had experienced a spectacular market boom." "But those running the market had realised that the numbers were not telling the truth, because the giant accounting firms had become corrupted." "There was a new element of FUD, the very foundation of the market, the numbers that represented the sanctity of the market, the reliability of the market, were becoming unreliable because the accountants had violated the trust the government had placed in them." "I knew that the great accounting firms of America had engaged in practices that were very very questionable." "And very often fraudulent - we were seeing more and more and more of these cases." " How widespread did it become?" " Extremely widespread." "Those who ran many of America's corporations were faking profits on an enormous scale." "They did this because it would then increase their personal bonuses." ""Come on", they would say, "isn't there another way of looking at those numbers?"," ""Can we compromise?"" ""Can we spread, for example, this misrepresentation over a number of years?"" "In all of these cases the effect is one of corruption." "We were trusted." "We had a rational system, based on numbers that could not be disputed." "We ended up now with a fictitious, irrational system." "The officials, whose job was to regulate the market, tried to persuade politicians in Congress to act and expose this." "But they were blocked at every turn." "They found that all the key politicians were being given millions of dollars in campaign contributions by both the corporations and the accounting firms." "I mean massive amounts of money were spent in lobbying committees of Congress." "I knew they were motivated by concern for business interests." " You mean they'd been bribed?" " No." "I wouldn't use that word." "That's your word." " What word would you use?" ""Seduced."" "Despite the growing evidence of corruption, the Clinton administration portrayed the boom as something revolutionary." "It was a genuine democracy of the marketplace, in which everyone, at all levels of society was benefitting." "But this was completely untrue." "If one compares the incomes of Americans in real terms, between the end of the 1970s and the end of the 1990s, those at the bottom of society saw their income actually fall." "Those in the middle saw a slight increase, while those at the top increased by an extraordinary amount." "If you take income after taxes, you find that the average household cash income in the bottom fifth of Americans went from $9300 a year to $8700." "You find that the average household cash income in the middle fifth - the median - went from about $31,800 to $33,200." "You take the top one percent in the same time period, you go from $256,000 a year to $644,000 a year." "That's to me is the simplest set of numbers I can use to sum it all up." "I have many variations, but those just eat right out of the box at you." "It's just incredible how you can have something like that." "Underlying the political experiments of the 1990s had been a simplified idea of human beings, that at heart they were just self-seeking individuals, whose needs could be best met through the marketplace, not politics." "If left unregulated, the markets would benefit everyone." "In the face of this simple, irresistible argument, politicians had given away much of their power." "But what had actually happened was the return of inequalities and social injustices not seen for a hundred years." "The very thing politicians were supposed to prevent." "Politicians now found themselves weakened and corrupted." "And without the power to change society." "And millions of individuals were left without representation, and even less control over their lives." "Here is the ultimate irony." "Because as people began to believe they are just self seeking acquisitive individuals, that the democratic systems are fundamentally not nearly as good as the market for fulfilling whatever it is you want, people allowed elites to takeover politics." "And politics to be distorted, and corrupted, so that politics became even less capable of fulfilling people's needs." "And meanwhile, the market did not give people good jobs, secure jobs, and so ultimately the individual cannot be fulfilled either through politics or through the market." "What had given this simplified view of human beings much of its power had been ideas drawn from both mathematics and biology." "As this programme has shown, it underpinned a powerful model of ourselves as almost computer-like machines, whose instincts had largely been encoded within them, millions of years before." "But now, questions were beginning to be asked in the scientific world about whether this was too simple a view of human beings." "In genetics, the idea that the DNA is the all-controlling set of instructions for life, has been replaced by a more complex idea." "Scientists have shown that a cell actually chooses and edits which parts of the DNA to use, depending on the environmental forces acting on it." "One of the key experiments that showed that the self-interested actions of genes controlled behavior, has also been questioned." "Anthropologists looked into the history of the Yanamamo tribes, and discovered a pattern to their violence, that could be explained by very different causes than genes." "It only seemed to happen when the Yanamamo came into contact with Westerners who gave them goods." "The tribes then fought with each other for access to those goods." "What I discovered was that there was pattern, in which the warfare became more intense, or happened at all, during times of greater Western penetration into the area." "You're not going to get any help by looking at their reproductive striving." "I think what will explain that for you, is what is the historical interactions with the powerful outside forces." "That explains when and where they fight." " And those powerful outside forces are what?" "The powerful outside forces are predominantly the Westerners who come in who were sources of these much desired goods." "Anthropologists have looked again at the film of "The Ax Fight"." "They argue that what one actually sees is a struggle between two factions:" "One, a group who have been given machetes by the film maker, Napoleon Chagnon." "The other, a group of visitors to the village, who are refusing to leave, because they too want access to these precious gifts." "The real cause of the fight, they say, is not the genes, but a struggle of politics and power, aggravated by the film maker himself." "But Chagnon completely disagrees, and stands by his experiment." "No, I don't think the ax fight happened because I was there." " Are you sure?" "Well, are you sure your father's your father?" "I think it would be a reasonable presumption that this ax fight would have happened whether or not I was there, and the very fact that I was there and documented it was not the cause of it." "Ax fights or club fights happen in many other villages when I'm not there, and I've documented these as well through informants who describe them." "So I don't think this particular fight was anything extraordinary and out of the pattern of Yanamomo violence." " You don't think a film crew in the middle of a fight in a village has an effect?" " No I don't." "That's the end of my interview." "And in mathematics, the man who had created the equations that lay behind the simplified economic model of society was also expressing doubts about the assumptions on which his work had been based." "He was the mathematician John Nash." "Nash, who has now recovered from paranoid schizophrenia, and still works at Princeton, has come to believe that the purely rational, calculating creatures in his model, what he calls "the human as businessman"," "have little connection with the complexity of real human beings." "I have had some trouble myself on the psychological level, I've been in mental hospitals, and so I have," "I may be developing a pattern of rationally" "I've realised that what I had said at some time may have over emphasised rationality or some type of thinking, and I don't want to over emphasise rational thinking on the part of humans." "Human beings are much more complicated, like, than the human being as a businessman." "Human behavior is not entirely motivated by self interest of each human." " But the underlying assumption of Game Theory is that it is?" "Game theory works in terms of self interest." "But it was like the viewpoint that some game theory concepts could be unsound there's over-dependence on rationality." "That is my enlightenment." "And Nash is not alone." "In economics, the whole idea that the free market is an efficient system is coming under serious attack." "Over the past five years, many of the Nobel prizes for economics have been awarded for research that shows that markets do not create stability or order." "That what Adam Smith called "The Invisible Hand", is invisible because it isn't actually there." "And politicians do have a powerful role to play in controlling the markets." "And a new discipline, called Behavioural Economics, has been studying whether people really do behave as the simplified model says they do." "Their studies show that only two groups in society actually behave in a rational self interested way in all experimental situations." "One is economists themselves, the other is psychopaths."