Words from Adam Curtis

Listened to a recent episode of Talking Politics which involved Adam Curtis who said some words about his new documentary, Can’t Get You Out of My Head. He made some good, observant points, some of which I’ve written down...

The mood, not just on the right, but on the left, and the liberals as well, at the present moment, is a sort of sense of inevitability. It’s very, very deep – you find it everywhere – is that when stuff happens, bad stuff happens, it’s just inevitable and that feeling of inevitability has gone so deep. What I was trying to show in the films, is no, what has been constructed today, was not only constructed by giant tech barons who are like the old robber barons of the past, or grubby politicians or lobbyists. That’s true, but it’s also been constructed by us wanting to be self-expressive individuals and then finding ourselves, when things go wrong, alone and frightened. And instead of actually turning round and finding a way to challenge the bad things, because we feel lonely and frightened, we start to feel that everything is inevitable.

I was trying to say, ‘No look, we’ve all done this together.’ Everyone plays different roles in it, and I choose a lot of characters to try and show you all the different roles people have played, some on the left, some on the right, from Nixon, through to revolutionaries. But we all built this together. And if we’ve managed to build it together, and some of it is very good, we can actually make it differently, and therefore what we have to do is find again, a new form of collectivism.

In the age of the squealing piglets, how do you find a way of reforming a collectivism? That yet at the same time allows people still to feel that they are confident, empowered individuals? Because individualism isn’t going to go back into the box. And it’s not just in the West. People like Jiang Qing in China were harbingers of what was happening and is happening there.

It’s the question of how you square that circle. How do you actually allow people still to feel that they’re in control of their own lives, that they’re not being told by snobby patricians at places like the BBC, what to think and how to behave? How do they feel that they’re in control of what they do, and in their own destiny? Yet at the same time, can also feel confident that they’re part of something that will change things in the future. And I think that’s waiting to be invented. I think that’s where the next politics is going to come from. I suspect, that the internet could be part of that. If it could be taken back from those people who have narrowed it and distorted it and weakened it and chiseled away at its possibility and promise. That would require a confident political class to say, ‘No, we’re taking it back.’ But I don’t know whether that’s going to happen or not.

Beyond that, the new politics will find a way of allowing you and me, who are all arch-individuals, to carry on feeling that, yet also feel something, I don’t know, which hasn’t probably been invented yet. An excitement of, whilst feeling that, also be part of something that really can change things.

Because that’s the thing that’s been lost in that mood of inevitability. That sense of, ‘No, we actually can change the world. We could make it something different.’ Instead of feeling, ‘Oh my god, there’s another thing happened. Oh dear, it’s terrible,’ and hunkering down.

You know when things go wrong on aircraft and you’re told to adopt the brace position and you’re absolutely terrified to look out the window, because you can see the wing going up and down? That’s where we are at the moment and I just think the new politics has got to find a way of breaking us out of that brace position. I genuinely don’t know how it’s going to happen. But you can sort of feel that it’s got to happen really. Or, you’re going to live in the iron cage forever.

...and hopefully get you thinking!