THE CURSE OF TINA

Adam Curtis | 13:06 UK time, Tuesday, 13 September 2011

The guiding idea at the heart of today's political system is freedom of choice. The belief that if you apply the ideals of the free market to all sorts of areas in society, people will be liberated from the dead hand of government. The wants and desires of individuals then become the primary motor of society.

But this has led to a very peculiar paradox. In politics today we have no choice at all. Quite simply There Is No Alternative.

That was fine when the system was working well. But since 2008 there has been a rolling economic crisis, and the system increasingly seems unable to rescue itself. You would expect that in response to such a crisis new, alternative ideas would emerge. But this hasn't happened.

Nobody - not just from the left, but from anywhere - has come forward and tried to grab the public imagination with a vision of a different way to organise and manage society.

It's a bit odd - and I thought I would tell a number of stories about why we find it impossible to imagine any alternative. Why we have become so possessed by the ideology of our age that we cannot think outside it.

The first story is called:

CARRY ON THINKING

It is about the rise of the modern Think Tank and how in a very strange way they have made thinking impossible.

Think Tanks surround politics today and are the very things that are supposed to generate new ideas. But if you go back and look at how they rose up - at who invented them and why - you discover they are not quite what they seem. That in reality they may have nothing to do with genuinely developing new ideas, but have become a branch of the PR industry whose aim is to do the very opposite - to endlessly prop up and reinforce today's accepted political wisdom.

So successful have they been in this task that many Think Tanks have actually become serious obstacles to really thinking about new and inspiring visions of how to change society for the better.

It is also a fantastically rich story about English life that takes you into a world that's a bit like Jonathan Coe's wonderful novel 'What a Carve Up', but for real. It is a rollicking saga that involves all sorts of things not normally associated with think tanks - chickens, pirate radio, retired colonels, Jean Paul Sartre, Screaming Lord Sutch, and at its heart is a dramatic and brutal killing committed by one of the very men who helped bring about the resurgence of the free market in Britain.

A couple of months ago the British branch of an obscure right wing think tank called the International Policy Network reportedly fell apart. The leaders apparently had an argument about climate change. Noone noticed and it was hardly mentioned in the newspapers.

But behind the IPN is the door to a forgotten history. The key to that door is the chairwoman of the IPN, Linda Whetstone.

Linda is very well connected. She is the mother of Rachel Whetstone who is the head of Global Communications for Google. And Rachel is the partner of the super-wonk Steve Hilton - he is David Cameron's personal adviser in No. 10.

Linda Whetstone believes passionately in the Free Market and hates state intervention practically more than anyone else on the planet. Here she is letting rip at the Conservative party conference in 1978. Great shirt. And notice that even Mrs Thatcher sitting on the platform behind Linda looks a little frightened.

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But the most interesting - and influential - member of the family is Linda's father from whom she inherited her fervour for the free market. He was called Sir Antony Fisher and he invented the first modern think tank back in the 1950s. The Institute for Economic Affairs. It is the template for practically all the think tanks today.

Fisher himself would go on to found another 150 think tanks around the world.

But back in the early 1950s he was an isolated figure who felt completely at odds with the mood of his time. He worked with his friend Major Oliver Smedley in pokey offices in an old alleyway in the City of London, called Austin Friars. Together Fisher and Smedley were fighting a lonely battle against the state planning that was trying to reconstruct Britain after the war - because they were convinced that it was going to lead to a totalitarian state and the end of democracy.

Fisher and Smedley had met at a fringe organisation called The Society of Individualists. They became friends because they were both convinced that the innocuous-looking, state-run Milk Marketing Board and Egg Marketing Board were actually the enemies of freedom. Major Smedley had formed an organisation called The Cheap Food League, and his first pamphlet had a wonderful title:

Antony Fisher was an intense, ascetic man who had been to Eton and Cambridge. He was a Christian Scientist and was prone to deep depressions. He spent much of the time running a farm in Sussex and was convinced that communists had infiltrated the establishment (which, of course they had).

Smedley was more the action man, he kept on creating groups with names like The Council for the Reduction of Taxation, and he also ran the Reliance School of Investment from Austin Friars - which gave out diplomas which apparently even Smedley himself admitted were completely unaccredited. There was also an accountant who had been in prison for forging cheques. The bank manager the accountant had swindled committed suicide.

Men like Fisher and Smedley were at the very margins of respectability in the 1950s, and the media never bothered with them.

They were ignored because practically all politicians and commentators from left and right believed in the Keynsian idea that the state should intervene to manage the economy. Everyone was convinced that left to itself the free-market led to disaster - as had happened in the 1930s. Fisher was a Conservative while Smedley was a Liberal - but both believed that their parties were leading Britain into the abyss - seduced by the false dreams of the planners.

Here is one fragment I have found of Major Smedley at the Liberal Party Conference in 1961 ranting against the Common Market. He had just founded another group - called Keep Britain Out. He hated the Common Market because it was yet another attempt to plan and control agriculture. The audience slow hand-clap him off. And the programme then approvingly interviews an earnest liberal who believes in planning.

To their opponents Fisher and Smedley were right-wing dinosaurs. But they both were convinced they were a part of the future - because they believed they had scientific proof that state planning was doomed.

Back in 1947 Fisher had read an article in Reader's Digest by an Austrian economist called Friederich Hayek. It was a summary of a book Hayek had written called the Road to Serfdom and it set out to prove scientifically that any attempt by politicians to plan and organise society so people could be free and have a better life would inevitably produce the opposite - the destruction of freedom and democracy

So one day Fisher plucked up courage and went to see Hayek at the LSE in London where Hayek was a professor. Fisher asked Hayek for advice - should he go into politics to try and stop the oncoming disaster?

Hayek told Fisher bluntly that this would be useless because politicians are trapped by the prevailing public opinion. Instead, Hayek said, Fisher should try and do something much more ambitious - he should try and change the very way politicians think - and the way to do that was to alter the climate of opinion that surrounded the political class. Fisher wrote down what Hayek said to him.

"He explained his view that the decisive influence in the battle of ideas and policy was wielded by intellectuals whom he characterised as the 'second-hand dealer in ideas'."

Hayek told Fisher to set up what he called a "scholarly institute" that would operate as a dealer in second-hand ideas. It's sole aim should be to persuade journalists and opinion-formers that state planning was leading to a totalitarian nightmare, and that the only way to rescue Britain was by bringing back the free market. If they did this successfully - that would put pressure on the politicians, and Fisher would change the course of history.

Antony Fisher was gripped by this vision. But then all his cattle died of Foot and Mouth. He got compensation from the government though (which unkind people might say was a subsidy) and went off on a trip to America.

In New York Fisher met another right-wing economist called "Baldy" Harper who introduced him to two new ideas. One was the concept of the "think tank", the other was broiler chicken farming.

Fisher brought both back to Britain. First of all he set up a company called Buxted Chickens, with tens of thousands of chickens being reared in a new mass way. He had introduced factory farming to Britain. Technology allowed him to cut costs massively and make what had previously been a luxury food available to everyone. And all without government subsidy - it showed what the free market could do.

But factory farming also became controversial. Here is part of a documentary the BBC made in the 1960s. It has a great character in the factory-farmer - a follower of the methods Fisher had pioneered - interviewed driving around in his Rolls Royce. He asserts that if a chicken is fat it must be happy. This leads to a very peculiar argument about whether there were fat people in the Nazi concentration camps and, if so, were they happy? It's a great example of the strange places that BBC editorial balance can lead you.

Antony Fisher made a fortune out of Buxted Chickens. He and Smedley then used the money to set up the first real think tank in Britain at their office in Austin Friars. It was called The Institute For Economic Affairs. And, as Professor Hayek hoped, it was going to change the course of history in a very big way.

The idea of the Think Tank had been invented in America. It's main roots lay in the research and development groups set up by the government and military during the war. Their aim in a time of crisis was to think imaginatively, to develop genuinely new ways of solving problems that would contribute to the war effort. This continued after the war with the RAND Corporation in California which was a Think Tank funded by the government. It was staffed by scientists, economists and social scientists all struggling to think of new ways of dealing not just with the dangers of the Cold War but also imagining new futures and new concepts of how society could work.

Here they are thinking:

The Think Tank that Antony Fisher set up was very different. It had no interest in thinking up new ideas because it already knew the "truth". It already had all the ideas it needed laid out in Professor Hayek's books. Its aim instead was to influence public opinion - through promoting those ideas.

It was a big shift away from the RAND model - you gave up being the manufacturing dept for ideas and instead became the sales and promotion dept for what Hayek had bluntly called "second-hand ideas".

To do this Fisher and Smedley knew they had to disguise what they were really up to. In 1955 Smedley wrote to Fisher - telling him bluntly that the new Institute had to be "cagey" about what its real function was. It should pretend to be non-political and neutral, but in reality they both knew that would be a front.

The IEA would masquerade as a "scholarly institute", as Hayek had suggested to Fisher, while behind that it would really function as an ideologically motivated PR organisation. It was, Smedley wrote:

"Imperative that we should give no indication in our literature that we are working to educate the Public along certain lines which might be interpreted as having a political bias. In other words, if we said openly that we were re-teaching the economics of the free-market, it might enable our enemies to question the charitableness of our motives. That is why the first draft (of the Institute's aims) is written in rather cagey terms."

But what was it that Fisher and Smedley were selling? The conventional wisdom about Friedrich Hayek is that he wanted to bring back 19th century laissez faire - to recreate a lost past.

The reality is far more science-fiction.

The real victor at the end of the second world war had been the ideology of science. A new, powerful group of technocrats had risen up in America, Britain and the Soviet Union who had used scientific ideas to plan and organise the war effort. They now believed they could apply the same methods in peacetime - to transform their societies.

State planning was technocratic and was thus seen as the way forward. Old conservative ideas of free trade were seen as traditional and non-scientific, and thus bad.

Hayek's solution was to turn this round. He made the idea of the free market technocratic as well. He transformed it from being a fusty old set of prejudices and traditions into a scientifically based free-market system for the modern age.

He did this by turning Adam Smith's idea of the Invisible Hand into a cybernetic system of information exchange. He said that all the knowledge of a society is dispersed among millions of people. But each person only knows just a few fragments of the whole, and no one person can know or comprehend all that knowledge. Instead those millions of people are constantly sending "abstract signals" to each other, and out of that comes the "pricing system". And out of that comes order without central control.

He even gave the whole theory a new science-like name. He called it Catallaxy.

Here are some sections of Hayek being interviewed in 1977 - they give a good sense of his technocratic and almost robotic vision of society - what he calls "a self-directing automatic signalling system".

But Hayek didn't see himself as a robot but as a revolutionary - he believed that power must be seized in order to create what he calls a "stabilisation crisis" in Britain in order to bring about his new world.

The key to making this system work, Hayek said, was allowing information to flow freely around society. Governments tried to do the opposite - to control the flow of information so they could manage the signals.

And in the mid 1960s Major Oliver Smedley - the action man - decided he was going to do more than just PR for Hayek's theory. He was going to try and break the creeping government monopoly of information in order to free up the "signalling system".

And to do it he was going to create Pirate Radio in Britain.

Smedley got the idea from one of the legendary figures in the London theatre world of the 1950s. She was called Dorothy "Kitty" Black and she translated plays by Jean Paul Sartre, Cocteau and Anouilh so they could be put on in London. When she was on the continent seeing Sartre she discovered the first pirate radio station in the world - off the coast of Denmark. Kitty came back and she and a friend called Allan Crawford suggested the idea to Oliver Smedley.

Here is a picture of Kitty

Smedley thought it was a brilliant idea, and together they set up Project Atlanta. They bought an old boat from America and began to fit it out. But Smedley and the others soon found themselves in a race with a music promoter called Rohan O'Rahilly who had got his own boat. After lots of arguments they all ended up by amalgamating, and in the summer of 1964 Smedley's boat started broadcasting off the coast of Essex as Radio Caroline South, while Ronan O'Rahilly's boat was Radio Caroline North.

Radio Caroline was an immediate success. In the media mythology of the 1960s it is seen as part of the rebellious counterculture. In reality it had been deliberately created by the New Right - as a part of their counter-revolution.

By now Smedley and Antony Fisher had had a terrible argument - and their paths had diverged. But Smedley was deliberately using Radio Caroline as a weapon to promote Hayek's theories about the freedom of information.

In 1965 the IEA published a booklet that made this clear. It's aim was to "lay out the philosophical and political theory behing Pirate Radio". It concluded with a section called "Piracy as a Business Force". The new heroes it said were the "privateers" who were going to open up the system of information flow - so the market could work efficiently.

Smedley's opponent was the Postmaster General - Tony Benn. Here is Benn in 1964 fulminating about Pirate radio because it was breaking the rules of copyright. This is the same argument that would reappear with the cyber-utopians of the 1990s.

But then Oliver Smedley met Reg Calvert.

Reg really was a "privateer" and a true modern pirate. And at this point Major Smedley found that his vision of the free market got a bit sticky.

Reg is really the hero of this whole story. He was a bucaneering kind of pop promoter and entrepreneur that emerged in the music business in the 1950s and 60s. He was a working class boy who had gone into the music business in the late 50s as it morphed from rock and roll to pop. He had set up his own school to create new stars in a derelict mansion near Rugby. He called it "The School of Rock n Roll". Here is a picture of Reg surrounded by his shock troops who were going to assault the charts - one of them was his answer to Elvis Presley - called "Eddie Sex". Another one was called "Buddy Britten".

Reg Calvert was a part of the new confident individualism that was bubbling up in working class Britain in the late 50s - and would find its way into both the music business and the art schools of the early 60s.

Here is a wonderful photograph of Reg lowering a glitter ball down to his wife Dorothy. They are taking it to a show they were putting on in Southampton.

It was given to me by Reg's daughter, Susan Moore. She told me that her father hated all politicians - and the one thing that drove him was the feeling "that he didn't want to be controlled by anyone"

A hero of our time.

Then Reg found David Sutch - renamed him Screaming Lord Sutch - and created a star. Reg persuaded Sutch to stand as a candidate in the byelection in 1963 that had resulted because of the scandal of the War minister John Profumo - which involved prostitutes and spies, and Sutch became a national figure.

Here is a wonderful fly on the wall documentary I found that was made about Screaming Lord Sutch in 1965. It has brilliant long hand-held takes of Sutch performing in a tiny club in an unnamed town. He is a strange hybrid of early American garage-band sound crossed with Victorian music hall. His version of Jack the Ripper at the end is great. Unfortunately it was filmed just after Jimmy Page left as the band's guitarist, and a couple of month's before Ritchie Blackmore joined.

With hindsight it is also very sad. In the film Sutch is filmed at home, living with his mother. He always remained very close to her and, after she died Sutch - who had been plagued by depression - hung himself in his mother's house.

Then Reg decided he was going to set up his own Pirate Radio Station. Instead of a boat he took over an old gun fort in the Thames Estuary. It was called Shivering Sands. To begin with it was called Radio Sutch, but then it became Radio City. Reg Calvert ran it as a true privateer, doing some of the disc jockeying himself. It was all a bit haphazard - once Reg spent the whole evening reading out Lady Chatterley's Lover to the South of England.

Here is a fragment of Reg at work on Shivering Sands. It is followed by a great shot of the engineer and the transmitter.

Major Oliver Smedley didn't like this competition - so he did what all good free-marketeers do. He created a monopoly.

He went to Reg and persuaded him to amalgamate with Radio Caroline - and become part of the pirate network. In return Smedley promised to give Reg a brand new transmitter - which would be much more powerful.

But then things went wrong.

When the transmitter was delivered it turned out to be rubbish. So Reg refused to pay Smedley any of the promised revenues from Radio City. And it also looked like Ronan O'Rahilly might be conspiring with Reg. Smedley was furious and, ever the action man, he decided he was going to raid Reg's radio station in revenge. He hired a tug and got together a group of riggers led by "Big Alf" and late one night Smedley, Alf, and Jean-Paul Sartre's friend and translator - Kitty, went out and boarded the fort.

They forced their way into the control room and stole the crystal which was the key part of the transmitter.

And the newspapers loved it - the Pirates go to war with each other.

The Express got an exclusive. A picture of Big Alf chatting and having tea with his hostages on the fort. I think it's quite obvious which one is Big Alf.

But Reg Calvert was furious. The next evening he drove down from London to Oliver Smedley's cottage outside a small village in Essex. He got there at about 11pm and started hammering and banging on the door. Major Smedley's secretary opened the door and Reg burst in.

Smedley then shot Reg Calvert with a shotgun, and Reg died immediately.

Noone knows what really happened that night. Oliver Smedley was arrested put on trial for manslaughter. But he claimed that he had acted in self-defence - believing that Reg Calvert was lunging forward to kill him. The jury acquitted him. But Reg's friends and family believe that Smedley had acted far more out of anger and a desire to destroy something that was standing in his way. And that Smedley only walked free because he was an upper-class Major.

And it was a bit odd. The police transcripts of one witness who was there paint a picture of Smedley as a man who seemed out of control that night.

Susan, Reg's daughter has written a wonderful and moving play about her father's life and tragic death. It is called "Reg". She is also directing it herself. It is at the Abbey Theatre in Nuneaton on Friday 4th November at 7.30pm. Everyone should go.

The killing also had bad consequences for "Kitty" Black. When Jean-Paul Sartre heard about the shooting and the right-wing crowd she had been associating with he refused to let her translate any more of his plays.

But Big Alf did well out of it - he knew how to handle the modern media.

A historian called Adrian Johns has written a brilliant book about Pirate Radio in the 1960s, called Death of a Pirate. In it he argues that Reg Calvert and Oliver Smedley represent two completely different kinds of "privateer".

Reg Calvert was part of an old, unruly tradition of true independence and libertarian freedom. A real bucaneer who would ignore rules and the structure of class and power in Britain while merrily going his own way.

Smedley on the other hand was a "privateer" only to the extent that he wanted to bring the private sector back to power in Britain. Other than that he wanted the traditional power structure to remain the same. And to do this he (and his Think Tank) wanted to reinvent the free market as a managed system - managed by them, and any true "privateer" - like Reg - who challenged that power was doomed.

Johns writes about the killing of Calvert.

"At that instant late in Midsummer Night 1966 when Smedley took his fatal decision, two kinds of piracy came into collision. Reg Calvert represented one kind - a kind whose history can be traced back centuries. He was an ingenious and imaginative entrepreneur, opportunistic and ambitious. He spoke in grandiose terms, but his operations were undercapitalized, seat-of-the-pants adventures that might bloom or collapse - as so many radical ventures initially are. The outsider, resistant to all rules.

Calvert represented the kind of pirate that the Institute of Economic Affairs hailed as holding the key to social and cultural progress. But in reality Smedley stood for a different kind of pirate altogether. He was the rational capitalist, well versed in both the maxims of accountancy and the abstract principles of liberal ideology. Privately educated, metropolitan and professional, Smedley saw himself as an agent in the political and cultural affairs of the nation.

It was this that Calvert threatened in 1966 - and what made Calvert so appealing was therefore precisely what also made him so dangerous. And as in military and political life, so in financial and entrepreneurial: Smedley's instinct was to stand fast. Hold his ground."

And the same was true of the ideas of Friedrich Hayek. He wasn't really trying to bring back an old, unpredictable, turbulent laissez-faire system - he wanted to create a new, technocratic system of managed competition that didn't in anyway threaten the existing structure of power.

Historians of the resurgence of economic liberalism have pointed out that, despite his rhetoric, Hayek's theories are very different from laissez-faire, because he wants governments to use their power to enforce and manage what he called "a competitive order" - driven by millions of rational consumers sending abstract signals to each other. And in this way, although his disciples like Fisher and Smedley would hate it, Hayek's vision shared a great deal with the "scientific" planners on the left that he thought were destroying Britain.

BY the early 1970s something weird was happening to the British economy. Inflation and unemployment started to go up at the same time - a combination that the government planners said was impossible. As a result the IEA began to move from the margins to the centre of political life - because they said it was exactly what they and Hayek had been predicting. It was the unforeseen consequences of trying to control the complex system.

Faced by the chaos the Conservative government under Edward Heath set up their own think tank. It was called the Central Policy Review Staff. But, unlike the IEA, it was an old-fashioned think tank that wanted to think up some new ideas to solve the crisis. The only problem was that they couldn't think of any - and it soon became a joke. Here is part of a lovely episode of Are You Being Served where the staff of Grace Brothers decide to set up their own Think Tank, just like the government.

In 1975 Mrs Thatcher became the leader of the Conservatives and, guided by her close ally Sir Keith Joseph, she turned to the Institute of Economic Affairs to create the policies for a future government.

What Fisher and Smedley had dreamt of twenty years before had finally happened. Once upon a time their Think Tank had been marginalised and despised - now it was at the centre of a counter-revolution that was about to triumph.

Back in 1992 I made a film about how this happened. It was called The League of Gentlemen, and was part of the Pandora's Box series about science and politics. Here is a section about how the IEA persuaded the Thatcher government to adopt Monetarism.

The "scientific" theory of Monetarism was necessary, the IEA said, to get rid of inflation, to force it out of the system. Trades unions were causing inflation through their wage claims - and that was disrupting the proper working of Hayek's "pricing system". It was corrupting and distorting the "abstract signals" that people sent around the system.

The technocratic theory said that the solution was for governments to pull a lever and take money out of the system - and so restore the proper signalling process.

And Hayek's vision would be realised.

The two men interviewed in the film at the IEA are Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon. They were both disciples of Hayek that Fisher and Smedley had installed to run the IEA.

The League Of Gentlemen then showed how in reality this led to a disaster - mass unemployment and the closing of great swathes of British manufacturing. As the film shows, the theory of monetarism was then ruthlessly discarded - and there is a wonderful bit of Mrs Thatcher being interviewed in 1985 when she completely denies that she ever believed in it.

But that didn't mean that Mrs Thatcher was going to give up on Hayek's vision. Most of British industry might have disappeared - but she believed that the free market utopia could still be created, this time by the banks and financial world .

Faced by the disastrous collapse of manufacturing some of the economists who had been the true believers in the Hayek revolution began to have their doubts. At the end of the film, Sir Alan Budd who was one of the chief architects of Thatcher's policies gave an extraordinarily honest - and revealing interview.

He says that he worried that he and his ideas had been ruthlessly used. That what he calls the "capitalist class" had simply seen in the ideas a way to engineer a crisis of capitalism that led to mass unemployment.

As a result of that unemployment unions were smashed, wages forced down - and the capitalist class managed to make high profits again.

And instead of giving the workers higher wages - the bankers lent them money. Simple really.

Meanwhile Smedley's career had gone into decline. He was always fighting by-elections as the anti-European candidate, and he always lost. Here is a fragment of him in 1977 - he is the other candidate who has to be mentioned at the end of a news report.

And as always the thing that worries is him is government control of food.

Antony Fisher on the other hand prospered and became powerful. In 1981 he set up The Atlas Economic Research Foundation that created Think Tanks across the world, all of them copies of the IEA. In all he set up 150 Think Tanks worldwide.

When Fisher and Smedley set up their original Think Tank in 1955 they were practically alone. Now politics in Britain is dominated by Think Tanks, and almost all of them are copies of what Fisher and Smedley first invented. They are ideologically motivated PR organisations masquerading as the sort of scholarly institute that Hayek first suggested to Antony Fisher

And what's more, most of these Think Tanks, whether on the left or right are peddling Hayek's ideology in some form another - a managed and technocratic version of the free market as the central dynamic of society.

They have different versions of this - and they vary in how the government should use its power to bring this about, and how far it should extend into society - but at bottom they are all pushing the same fundamental idea. There is no alternative vision on offer. And this points to a very strange fact. That while all the think tanks constantly promote new concepts of how to micro-manage today's free-market technocracy, none of them have come up with a genuinely new grand idea for a very long time.

And the question is whether most Think Tanks may actually be preventing people thinking of new visions of how society could be organised - and made fairer and freer. That in reality they have become the armoured shell that surrounds all politics, constantly setting the agenda through their PR operations which they then feed to the press, and that prevents genuinely new ideas breaking through.

Meanwhile the managed free-market system that Antony Fisher, Major Oliver Smedley, and Professor Hayek dreamed of has triumphed. And just as Smedley wanted, back in 1966, the elite doesn't change and isn't threatened by the real pirates and privateers. The system has maintained the protected position of the ruling elite in this country.

And here they are - with Rachel Whetstone, Antony Fisher's grandaughter, at the heart of them.

This is a section from a wonderful film made by Michael Cockerell in 2005 about Michael Howard who was then leader of the Conservative party. Cockerell is the most brilliant political journalist in the BBC - not just because he tells stories so well - but because he has an uncanny instinct to capture stuff on camera that then turns out to be important.

It is a skill he shows in this film - for here is the record of Rachel Whetstone, who was then Michael Howard's adviser, with the young David Cameron and George Osborne - all advising the hapless Michael Howard to go and give a public speech to Goldman Sachs - because that was the place to be seen.

And that's that in Britain. Until, of course, the real pirates come back.

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Comments Post your comment

Comment number 1.
At 16:00 13th Sep 2011, David wrote:

There's a lot to read, and I've not read it yet. However, I've one thing which I must tell you. Do you realise that the RAND vision of the future image is fake ? There's an old TV on the wall, and the printing terminal in the foreground which someone thought looked old is a DECwriter II. That was introduced in the mid-1970s and I was still using that exact model at work in 1985.

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Comment number 2.
At 16:06 13th Sep 2011, Adam_Curtis wrote:

David, you're absolutely right - I've just removed it. Thanks for your help. I'm going to replace it with a real shot of people thinking in the Rand Corporation.

Adam

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Comment number 3.
At 19:12 13th Sep 2011, loninappleton wrote:

A most important piece. Radio Caroline was an influence on me in the 80's. I did free programming as a towner at the local univeristy 15,000 watt station. We even had audio documentaries of Radio Caroline.

Since this view of the British off shore pirate radio is way different from and amazing informative about the motivations of the "message providers" and owners of RC described I have a question:

How did the on-air content present this message? In clips from RC I've not heard anything that sounded like propaganda just seat of the pants radio.

My understanding of Radio Caroline was that it was an outlet for indie bands financed by advertising and that advertising was not permitted by government on shore.

Any answers would be helpful.

Lon writing from USA

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Comment number 4.
At 19:32 13th Sep 2011, Fugger wrote:

Ha! Those poor girls were really terrified of Screaming Lord Sutch. Great blog post. Really interesting. Thanks.

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Comment number 5.
At 20:07 13th Sep 2011, mcjhn1 wrote:

Thanks again adam, great to learn more about Hayek...he's quite fashionable now.

Wouldn't Hayek have let RBS, HBOS, Northern Rock, Fanny and Freddie, JP Morgan, Goldman Sacs, .... go bust? Why do you think right wing politicians rescued them? to maintain the status quo?

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Comment number 6.
At 21:52 13th Sep 2011, Graeme wrote:

What a tremendous essay! Thank you. A typo though - Montetarism and also 'because they believed had scientific proof that state planning was doomed.' Feel free to delete the comment if you make corrections.. It was the only way to draw attention to them.

A great montage of ideas and films..

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Comment number 7.
At 08:44 14th Sep 2011, James wrote:

Quality article, thank you.

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Comment number 8.
At 12:56 14th Sep 2011, JeffreyNewman wrote:

Thanks so much for this illuminating piece. Two comments: I'm just re-reading Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism where she refers to Hayek and his Scientism (note 13 page 346) in relation to totalitarian propaganda. Secondly, the connexion between factory farming and concentration camps has important resonances. Heidegger notoriously never publicly mentioned the concentration camps - except for one comment in a 1949 lecture when he said, 'Agriculture now is a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps'. (See, for example https://bit.ly/paIlZu%29

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Comment number 9.
At 13:27 14th Sep 2011, Steffan wrote:

Really excellent piece Adam, though I think you're overestimating the extent to which Hayek saw his thinking as 'Scientific'. His book 'The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies in the Abuse of Reason' was an attack on scientism. Granted his main target here was 'scientific' socialism's planning, but at its core is the belief that you can't be scientific about the social world as you can be about the natural.

It was others - such as Paul Samuelson - which (successfully) sought to place economics on a 'scientific' positivist basis. The Austrian school was much more sociologically/historically based.

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Comment number 10.
At 13:50 14th Sep 2011, soussherpa wrote:

That was very good, I enjoyed it. I'm American, and it looks from that last clip that Britain is following Americas' tradition of marketing candidates personalities instead of ideas. I've heard Tony Blair's term in office being referred to as "Cool Britain" would that last clip be the conservative version of that?

BTW, you might find this interesting. There was a debate in Florida of the leading Republican/Tea Party candidates. You should listen to the audience response of a scenario posed to Congressman Ron Paul.

https://gawker.com/5839564/gop-debate-crowd-on-uninsured-sick-americans-let-them-die

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Comment number 11.
At 14:24 14th Sep 2011, onwhosplanet wrote:

What a great piece yet again, thanks! I noticed a few spelling / grammatical errors too but given the size of the piece (and the nature of web editing tools) I think we can forgive those!

That Saatchi 'touchy, feely' Conservative video is truly painful to watch, thanks for cutting right after Cameron's first (kiss) question.. I had no idea about Rachel Whetstone or her mother before this, will be doing a bit more reading on those two over the coming weeks.

My final comment is in response to soussherpa's video link above, what is wrong with those people!??! I can't fathom how people can generate such low levels of empathy, I may have much more socialist views than most but when it comes to health care and peoples lives I can never understand that total disregard for others that some people (proudly) have. The line from Ron Paul 'That's what freedom is all about, taking your own risks' was bad enough but the audience took it to the next level with their screams of 'Yes'.

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Comment number 12.
At 15:25 14th Sep 2011, soussherpa wrote:

Last week Gov. Rick Perry was about to be asked a question about the death penalty. Brian Williams started his question by stating that: "his state has executed more death row inmates' than any other in modern times..."; before he could even get to the question the audience broke out into applause.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/us-politics/8749327/Rick-Perrys-execution-record-greeted-by-wild-applause-from-Republicans.html

There weren't cheering his stance on the death penalty, they were just cheering the fact he sent more people to death than anyone else in the U.S.A..

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Comment number 13.
At 15:54 14th Sep 2011, Mark E Smith wrote:

This reminds me of what happened in the US after the right-wing took over the mass media. The self-styled "left" then started one or two broadcast stations, which turned out to be just propaganda arms of the Democratic Party, which has the same imperialist, colonialist, fascist agenda as the Republican Party and the Tea Party. Private multinational corporate interests are described as US "American" interests, and the taxpayer is forced to fund the wars of aggression needed to bolster and maintain private corporate profits anywhere in the world. In seeking profits, these multinationals avoid paying taxes here and utilize the concentration camp/factory farming methods that JeffreyNewman cites Heidegger referring to as "motorized" production. Basically, if cheap labor is better for maximizing corporate profits, slave labor is best, which is why so many of our defense industry needs are produced by prison labor here in the US, and also, of course, why we have more prisoners than any other nation on earth, and why some of our big corporations have admitted in court to paying foreign death squads to eliminate union leaders and organizers.

Fascists monetarize everything. Human life is worth no more than the fat a corpse can be melted down for or the gold in its teeth. The super-rich play upon the racism of those less ruthless and greedy, who can often, if they are white or fancy themselves to be white, can be easily co-opted. One tragic illustration of this in in Libya now, where the NATO-led anti-government forces have been slaughtering blacks and acting surprised whenever NATO bombs its own allies--not realizing that by NATO standards those allies themselves are also black.

Adam Curtis is correct that the message of the think tanks, the politicians, and the mass media is that there is no alternative (TINA). Many people cling to the only way of life that they know, however unsustainable and self-destructive it may be. But unlike the apathetic hordes who are content to vote even when there are no real choices on the ballot, those of us who care and who try to stay informed know that alternatives like Cuba, Venezuela, and Libya do exist, and that even if they are constantly under attack by the forces of evil, the rapid depletion of the nonrenewable resources necessary to mount those attacks means that unless the planet is totally destroyed first, the alternatives will prevail.

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Comment number 14.
At 16:10 14th Sep 2011, Richard E wrote:

A fascinating piece as always, and a neat collection of unexpected connections. I would note that Radio Mercur was not so much "the first pirate radio station in the world" as the first OFFSHORE pirate station. And of course like many of these stations, they were not (initially, at least) actually breaking any law, broadcasting as they were from international waters (the same could not be said of the fort-based stations like Radio City). The first radio station to broadcast from a ship was probably VoA in the Mediterranean; the first "pirate" station was probably Captain Plugge's Radio Normandy in the 30s, though again they weren't breaking any law either.

While important in the history of radio in the UK, the offshore stations were seldom directly political (with the notable occasional exception of Cleveland Tory MP Wilf Proudfoot's Radio 270 in 1967) until the promotion of the Tories by Radio Caroline in the election campaign of 1970. However the ill-advised closure of the majority of offshore stations by the Labour government with the coming into force of the Marine &c Offences Act on 14 August 1967, plus the jamming of Caroline in 1970, almost certainly lost the Labour Party a number of seats in the East of England that they have never recovered (see https://www.transdiffusion.org/radio/offshore/the_politics_of ).

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Comment number 15.
At 16:26 14th Sep 2011, onwhosplanet wrote:

I'm also interested to hear in what way the Pirate Radio station was used to deliver the political messages and also in what context, would add to the rest of the article and help give some credibility to the following:

"But Smedley was deliberately using Radio Caroline as a weapon to promote Hayek's theories about the freedom of information."

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Comment number 16.
At 17:22 14th Sep 2011, Freddie Baveystock wrote:

A very British tale in your hands and a mordantly enjoyable one.

As a footnote, allow me to observe that the IEA comes across as a somewhat eccentric amateurish organisation here - which is not the impression I gained from reading Andy Beckett's terrific 'When the Lights Went Out', which narrates how cleverly they played their cards in Westminster. I was particularly interested to read how they used to host discreet lunches for both Labour and Tory MPs but never at the same time. In Beckett's hands, they come across as very canny operators.

And I wonder if you exaggerate a little when you say all think tanks are the same now in their relationship to free market ideas? That's not my impression of Demos, say, or the New Economics Foundation.

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Comment number 17.
At 20:15 14th Sep 2011, E_Heroux wrote:

A witty supplement to your "The Trap" here. Meanwhile, I wonder if you've read Foucault's lectures on the earlier history of the neoliberal technocratic management of a free market -- what he called "governmentality"? The main source is his annual lecture series in _The Birth of Biopolitics_. (At the end of the book, Foucault apologised for not discussing biopolitics because the introductory lecture on neoliberalism -- Hayek et al -- kept expanding and eventually took up the whole year's lecure.)

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Comment number 18.
At 21:34 14th Sep 2011, Hengist wrote:

Wow. Intriguing. It's stuff like this that is the very best of the BBC.

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Comment number 19.
At 11:00 15th Sep 2011, theartteacher wrote:

Blimey. Where to start.

I think Curtis has become more and more explicit in the criticism of our current system over the last year. This post is to the greatest extent yet. If you look at parts of the last Guardian article, and Terrifying Gangs and Gutter and Stars blog posts I think there are more overt references to challenging the current static system than his previous work. Or perhaps I'm just more sensitive to them in the context of the times.

I'm not sure he'd like the comparison but it's what the Frankfurt School tried to do in their work post-WWII. They recognised the limitations of Marx but they asked the question - why haven't people challenged a system where power is largely centralised, people are oppressed etc?

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Comment number 20.
At 11:01 15th Sep 2011, theartteacher wrote:

Another theme throughout his stuff, and present in this post, is people who are driven to despair and harm themselves or worse. In the stories they are sometimes victims of power, like Mossman. I think different points are made, but I think one is that frequently individual suffering is examined close up and in isolation, we concentrate on changing the individual to fit the conditions, but really we should question the broader conditions that undermine, I think, basic human needs. Price (in Machines) didn't really fail, and it wasn't the Hound of Heaven that got him. It was his inability on as a single individual to challenge the system that creates poverty that made what he wanted to do insurmountable, not his lack of will. This is at the heart of why it's hard to change things, a myopic view ignorant of anything outside a seemingly absolute and static system, and an atomised and individualisted existence that ironically weakens people's ability to become authentic individuals.

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Comment number 21.
At 11:32 15th Sep 2011, theartteacher wrote:

If you look at the emergence of Psychology as the discipline we know today, it develops as a response to industrialisation and modernity, the problems that people had adapting to that. It's part of a wider development, what happened to the human sciences and their separation into different disciplines. This occured (and I know this how this might sound) essentially in response to a new emerging class composition, and the threat of an increasingly politicised working class. There was one disciplinary exception - economics. This study became different from the others, in that rather than being based on empirical method, it was based on central axioms, essentially derived from partial readings of Smith and Ricardo i.e. Man is self-interested, rational and amoral, maximising utility etc. The result is two restrictions on our thought; the 'Trap' of economics' false axioms of human nature, and 'division of thought' that inhibit us from understanding a world that requires an understanding of economics, psychology, sociology, politics, aesthetics etc. IN RELATION to each other.

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Comment number 22.
At 15:22 15th Sep 2011, driverchris wrote:

sounds like Reg's School of Rock and Roll was the inspiration for Peter Sellers 'So Little Time'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq1YkCx6Flo

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Comment number 23.
At 19:10 15th Sep 2011, leedscitizen wrote:

A cracking tale well told. don't suppose you had time or space to explain how these think tank charlatans managed to get taken seriously by the media, to the extent that they wheedle their way onto every single show masquerading as news that gets broadcast these days (BBC included). Laziness, I guess.

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Comment number 24.
At 19:43 15th Sep 2011, leedscitizen wrote:

not your laziness. theirs.

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Comment number 25.
At 05:23 16th Sep 2011, Scott Thill wrote:

Brilliant post, Adam, and I can't wait to see it as an installment on one of of your future documentaries on technocratic madness. If you decide to do one, I've got to recommend the last episode of Danger Man, starring The Prisoner's television revolutionary Patrick McGoohan, in which he stars as John Drake, a disaster capitalist fixer for international crises and a more realistic precursor to the Bond fantasy. It was called "Not So Jolly Roger" and it's about Drake's attempt to uncover a murder at an offshore pirate radio station. Hearing McGoohan sling DJ slang is pretty awesome in itself, but the episode's murders and intrigue might also make great visuals for your section on the Radio City raid. In fact, the episode's fort looks exactly like the one in your clipping above!

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Comment number 26.
At 05:40 16th Sep 2011, soussherpa wrote:

I think my last two posts went off topic. They have more to do with the current zeitgeist of the Tea Party [and the right] of total " individual Freedom" of people pursuing their interest than with the topic of Think tanks. I think it has more in common with the themes Adam Curtis explored in "The Trap" and "All Watched over by machines of loving grace" , the Ayn Rand episode in particular, Because Atlas Shrugged is very influential With The right, including the religious/pseudo spiritual
Right. Pundits like Glenn Beck, and even Sean Hannity (who is Catholic) defend Atlas Shrugged as almost an adjunct ideology to religion.

Nevertheless, I would not be surprised, if "think Tanks" were somehow involved.

-I would bet on it.

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Comment number 27.
At 23:25 16th Sep 2011, Moor Larkin wrote:

@25

Red Sands WAS the location used in that episode of Danger Man.
There's another episode of that show which discusses 'Peak Oil'.... :-D

On the Blog itself:
One of the things about the current political/economic system paralysis is that the Market demands growth... for some reason.... Making profits is not enough - there must be Growth. This seems to lie behind the fact that blue-chip companies who regularly make real cash money profits are often rated as less valuable stock than illusory Internet companies that have never made a bean in real cash profit. This growth delusion seems to have certainly been going on since the 1990's, and lay directly behind the bizarre life and death of Enron. Similarly Banks spend money they never had and their staff can lose millions without anyone even noticing it's gone missing............. It's all IOU's, not actual cash.

I guess an Economist could explain why this is the way the capitalist system must work, but then, as Adam has pointed out before, it's economic theory that gets us into these predicaments in the first place.... :-D

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Comment number 28.
At 11:13 17th Sep 2011, Jim Buck wrote:

loninappleton wrote:
'How did the on-air content present this message? In clips from RC I've not heard anything that sounded like propaganda just seat of the pants radio.'

My recollection is that there was little overt right-wing propaganda; what there was, was concentrated on the evils of a government monopoly of radio broadcasting. However, there was a crafty redirection of the anti-establishment sentiment which had emerged, as a powerful force, at the time of the Profumo scandal ('That Was The Week That Was'; 'Private Eye' et.al.) A great irony is that a generation of British youth was turned against a Labour government which had refused to send those mods and rockers off to the slaughter in Vietnam.

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Comment number 29.
At 12:50 17th Sep 2011, wisden wrote:

Excellent as always, Adam.

Marrying your themes of science and capitalism, the think tank du jour is the Science Media Centre. Purportedly telling the media how to report the truth about science, it's funded by many of the world's most powerful corporate interests. It purveys instant 'expert scientific opinion' that always seems to exonerate profit-driven technological excess, while minimising human costs.

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Comment number 30.
At 15:11 17th Sep 2011, egbert_the_atheist wrote:

This was a great blog essay, and the best I've seen since I started reading this blog. Another term for think tank could be group think.

What particularly struck me was the documentary about Lord Sutch. To me, he was a quintessential artist of the Dionysian spirit. I think such artists are revolutionary, rebellious, dangerous and destructive, but they help shatter the illusions we create of ourselves and society. But they are not constructive artists, and it is to that type of artist that can help renew culture and society and help create a new vision.

I could not help but feel a bit of sadness at the love letters read out by Sutch's female fans. I think people liberated from dreams can't help but either turn to despair or seek a new dream. It is interesting that the 50s and 60s were a kind of dream and the 70s were a kind of destruction of that dream, then the 80s and 90s another dream, and now we're entering that phase of destruction again. A new dream will inevitably rise out of the ashes.

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Comment number 31.
At 19:03 17th Sep 2011, Reluctant Commenter wrote:

Mr Curtis,

I appreciate your work, as do many others, but there is one fundamental error with your account. Hayek was not a monetarist and had nothing to do with any policy advocating central management of monetary policy whatsoever. Hayek eschews all 'macro' economics. The conflation between Hayek and Friedman is an injustice to the thought of Hayek as Friedman has more in common with Keynes. Friedman is a macro-economist. Any true economist of the free market recognises that the most critical prerequisite for removing the artificial business cycle (for of course the co-ordination function of pricing does not eradicate the flaws of human psychology) is the introduction of competition into the supply of currency, with the government offering one service amongst many. This is the holy grail for free market economics, not Thatcherite manipulations of currency.

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Comment number 32.
At 05:23 19th Sep 2011, BlandCake wrote:

Mr Curtis who seem to be shouting out for the left to have an idea. A big idea. How about several hundred smaller ones? It can be though placed under one big idea called workplace or industrial democracy. Where power is not disseminated through an autocratic boss or through 'nodes' but rather a compromise between the two. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler gives an insight to what can be achieved. Though the one important thing they fail to mention is that employees in coordination with upper management vote for their immediate supervisors\managers through a lengthy HR process (I do recommend you read the book). From my experience governments may change and so big ideas with them but the public sector remains the same be it politics (internal or external) or inertia. It is time to realise the public sector for what it is- a monopoly but change that institution so that it operates better with transparency, innovation and productivity. Once you can change the role of the public sector than you can change the relationship between politicians and the public sector where the two work in coordination rather than one simply serving the short term interests of the other. I do hope you read this.

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Comment number 33.
At 10:15 19th Sep 2011, Eugene_N wrote:

I have a different conspiracy theory. The UK is run by a conspiratorial group from OXBridge called The Establishment, dominating ( largely) the State sector and the Professional sector, and Adam Curtis is one of this elite. In fact that is the only reason why Curtis - whose opinions are utterly insane and without foundation, and subject to change at a whim - is on this site is because of his Establishment Oxbridge background.

Before I go on, I am a centrist. Lets keep the BBC. The NHS etc.

First point:

Hayek is right about market signalling provided there is enough information ( and, he has in fact information technology on this side). Take the number of restaurants in London. Lets say people get sick of steak, maybe there is a vegetarian, or health scare. The customers signal this to the restaurants by choosing what to buy. The restaraunts signal this to their suppliers. The suppliers signal this to their farmers, or chose new ones. This happens instantaneously, more or less. The opposite - and the system Hayek was complaining about - would be a centralised food distribution system where a planner gets to decide what to order from farms that week for the centrally controlled restaurants and shops in London. And he was writing in the war, which had such a central system to a certain extent. Socialists claimed the opposite, central planning is more efficient. you decide.

Second Point:
Notice the way Curtis makes the fact he is supposedly trying to refute. Stuff like " although his disciples like Fisher and Smedley would hate it, Hayek's vision shared a great deal with the "scientific" planners on the left that he thought were destroying Britain."

No it doesn't. Claiming that the system works, and can be scientifically modelled, is not the same as claiming it needs to be controlled by a scientific doctrine.

Third point: There really is no link between Radio Caroline and hayek, and the Evil Right Wing Think Tanks. All I am seeing here is some dubious claims and weaslly words which wouldn't survive the wikipedia bots, with a dubious link to one IEA document on pirates which may, or may not have said what Curtis said it said. Not that it matters, but the bots would ask for a link. Wikipedia, which is itself a libertarian-anarchist mode of information, proves Curtis wrong. It needs control, of course, and moderation, but it is an information system with multiple peer inputs. This piece, by a member of the Establishment, wouldn't survive moderation, and be dismissed as pure fantasy. It is here because of Curtis' background. He believes in top down information, from the elites to the masses. From the BBC to you. He argues ( like Adorno) for the opposite using weasel words which describe him, rather than his opponents.

Fourth point: Clearly freedom is increased with more sources of information, and in the absurd link between Hayek and Pirate radio, Curtis is making some nonsense ideological points about the differences between Smedley and Calvery. Both were in fact entrepreneurs, and even in this horribly argued piece it's clear that they are, in fact, signallers of information up the hierarchical chain, proving Hayek's main thesis. Rock music starts in the US. It spreads to Europe. People buy it because they like it, not because they are told to. The State broadcasters ignore it, it is illegal to put forth more information than the State wants to give you, so to bypass that laws ships are moored in international waters, and they make money because people get to listen to what they want to, not to what the BBC is telling them to. This actually proves Hayek.

Fifthly: As can be seen by his place on the BBC site, and his OXBridge background, Curtis is actually defending his class position, that is as a Statist, or one supported by Statists. The Establishment, he is saying, should tell you what to think If you choose to listen to pirate radio, that is wrong. He then turns that on it's head, and proves north is south, because the people who produced the pirate radio is the establishment controlling you innit?

Whatever about other free market ideologies, the idea of the free market of ideas is well worth preserving unless monopolistic ( This works within the private sector too, which is why murdoch should have one newspaper, or one TV). Curtis is merely presenting a class based ideology here. The working class lads who set up pirate radio, were - unlike himself and Postmaster general Lord Stansgate - not of the right ilk to influence opinion. Information needs to come from the State not from Hayek's multiple nodes, it needs to come from people like Curtis. Only then are you free.

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Comment number 34.
At 03:54 20th Sep 2011, spencer_xx wrote:

An absolutely excellent, provocative essay.

Perhaps someday you should also cover Hayek's ideological foil, the Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi, whose book The Great Transformation came out the very same year as Road to Serfdom and completely refuted free-market Austrian school economists of the day. In many ways, you could say Polanyi was to Hayek what Calvert was to Smedley in your narrative:

In his work, Polanyi used a historical analysis of the Speedhamland laws in England at the end of the 18th century to show how from it's onset, the modern market system has always fundamentally required massive state intervention to establish any so-called "free market" conditions, much less the more radical ones proposed by Hayek and to an even greater extent later by Friedman. Indeed, the establishment of those conditions is as political and interventionist an act as any other, just that it favors and privileges the interests of capital. Or as Polanyi famously puts it "laissez faire was planned." The public exchange between Polanyi and Hayek (and his colleagues) during this period (they were both living in Vienna at the time) in so many ways were in essence the same debates we are having at this moment.

Polanyi's prophetic work and influence on both increasingly marginalized, progressive hetrodox economists to follow and the ideas of subsequent global justice movements, today remain largely unrecognized and unread outside of the academy. He was also an interesting character personally - though quite radical in his early years, he was a refugee first from Hungary after the Bela Kun bolshevist government took power, and subsequently a refugee from Austria in 1933. He then moved to the UK where his seminal work was completed. He was later offered a position at Columbia University in the US, but because his wife was a former communist revolutionary (in the real sense) from Austria/Hungary (and whose own story is perhaps even more fascinating) she was denied a US visa. But Polanyi nevertheless chose to commute regularly by train to New York to work while remaining with his wife in Canada

Anyways, just another tangent to the story... Kudos again for the piece.

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Comment number 35.
At 13:07 20th Sep 2011, theartteacher wrote:

@Spencer_xx

That's really interesting. I think you've hit the nail there regarding different capitalisms and planning. I need to check that book and his ideas out in detail.

I was just going to ask the Hayekians a few questions -

What is private property?

And do you know the way to Mont Pelerin?

But I hate sarcasm.

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Comment number 36.
At 15:05 20th Sep 2011, egbert_the_atheist wrote:

@ spencer_xx

Thanks for the heads up about Karl Polanyi and his book.

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Comment number 37.
At 19:57 20th Sep 2011, Huckelberry wrote:

Hey, so I know some people disagree with me, but its funny that Hayek called for second-hand dealers in ideas... because he himself was sort of a second-hand dealer in ideas. He took the more philosophic leaning ideas of Ludwig von Mises and really, as you put nicely, made them technocratic. (Specifically, if your interested, Mises' theory of the business cycle and the idea of "catallaxy," or the "science of exchanges".)

P.S. Keep up the great work! I have only just discovered your work so I get to enjoy the process of watching it all.

P.S.S. There is a school of economic thought called ordo-liberalism which is a interesting synthesis of gov't control of "forms" and "free markets." I need to study them more (the authors of the school are verbose unfortunately) but their ideas are interesting.

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Comment number 38.
At 13:30 21st Sep 2011, James Clegg wrote:

Fantastic post as ever.

Michael Cockerell is indeed an excellent journalist as has been demonstrated by his recent 'Secret world of Whitehall' series, the last of which is still on the iPlayer.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00zwny7/The_Secret_World_of_Whitehall_The_Network/

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Comment number 39.
At 16:42 21st Sep 2011, Freddie Baveystock wrote:

I'd love to see a considered response to Eugene N, as he makes a few telling points.

Yet trying to pin the label of Establishment Statist onto Adam Curtis won't wash because above all else he's a storyteller, an entertainer, whose use of 'literary' techniques such as juxtaposition, irony and humour is highly pronounced.

The fact that he narrates these stories himself makes it very clear that he is not interested in 'writing history' in any formal sense of the word. He likes to explore the evolution of ideas to see what patterns they reveal and whether they can ever give rise to a genuinely new idea.

Generally speaking, in his analysis, most ideas are doomed to be recycled, reinterpreted or transmitted in a way that does some damage to their original integrity - a process he likes to highlight in his TV work through an overtly 'creative' editing technique which foregrounds his own subjectivity. It's also foregrounded in both his TV work and on this blog by the fact that the vast majority of his sources are themselves already implicated in that process of transmission and reinterpretation - they are TV interviews, court proceedings, journalese, PR pieces etc.

Let's face it - he's a provocateur, so good on Eugene N for rising to the challenge.

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Comment number 40.
At 15:20 22nd Sep 2011, theartteacher wrote:

@ Eugene_N - Nice post by the way,

First point - I think this is a basically an idealised abstract view of information systems. It really doesn't happen 'instantaneously' either, even in the simple restaurant example you suggest. It's fair to call a 'centralised' system, in a superficial sense, the opposite of the efficient market scenario you posit. It sets up the idea that a few people make decisions rather than everybody doing it as individual agents - and creating efficiency and equilibrium. But the market is not an inert, democratic system of representation of individual needs/wants. How do people communicate the soup could do with more basil? How does the guy out back doing dishes 'signal' that he thinks it's unfair he earns 100th of what the owner earns? What would a tramp looking through the window signal?

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Comment number 41.
At 15:21 22nd Sep 2011, theartteacher wrote:

By the way I'm pretty sympathetic of a guy who lived to through the time of Stalinist Russia. But part of the reason that there was some centralisation during the war is that it was arguably necessary, and certainly a better option than the 'free' market taking care of allocation of resources. Not perfect, but once you're in that war you've gotta win. I think it's better that we won, but a serious examination of why it all happened tells you something about markets, how they are not free magical realms to exchange of goods and information, and how they are specifically and purposefully structured for the benefit of certain parties.

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Comment number 42.
At 15:22 22nd Sep 2011, theartteacher wrote:

Point 2. and also @Reluctant Commenter.

Why Hayek's vision shares a great deal with scientific planners is this - he did use doctrine (the market is efficient, the market promotes well-being, the market represents the freedom that underpines ALL freedom) and justified it "scientifically" (his ideas on interest rates and price theory). This is ironic considering his views on 'scientism' - he pays lip service to empiricism but really what underpins his ideas are a priori economic 'truths', in reality axioms about human nature. He wanted to use the state apparatus to create his vision of a particular market environment, and wanted the government, centrally, to use it's power with regard to MACRO-economic concerns (fiscal AND monetary policy), as well as providing some social welfare, to perpetuate the 'free' system. It's all there, explicitly, in Serfdom, but I can give you references if you want.

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Comment number 43.
At 15:24 22nd Sep 2011, theartteacher wrote:

Third point - I like the story and if I don't trust the content I can do some research - I think the whole point about it is it reveals an interesting link. This isn't an encyclopedia entry, and I think it's here because AC does good stuff, people
like it, people at the BBC like it, so he gets to do it. Simples. I'm not gonna say that going to Oxbridge doesn't get you through some doors....I'm sure LSE does too ;)

What I will say is that I think Wikipedia is interesting and has some use, but the system it's based on means it's prone to innaccuracies, and it can be abused. I'd also say that the libertarian/anarchist label for it is fine, but what is the ability, say, of non-English speakers to change the dominant English language articles? Who mightn't be able to get access to the web because of techonological, monetary, geopolitical, time constraints.....you see my point? What about the format? The internet, and Wikipedia, is still a private party. Like I say, I quite like it, but it has certain inherent limits.

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Comment number 44.
At 15:24 22nd Sep 2011, theartteacher wrote:

Fourth point - "Clearly freedom is increased with more sources of information" - That's quite an outrageous statement. The means to understand the information, to verify it, the means to act upon it, aren't these vital conditions? Once again you
make the rise of rock music and pirate radio sound very neat, but I think the people involved are more than just 'signallers', they react to and signal a complex and contradictory load of information.....much like Hayek.

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At 15:26 22nd Sep 2011, theartteacher wrote:

Fifthly - Wouldn't Hayek's belief in rational choice (and his work played a big part in the incursion of micro-economic axiomatic rationality into other fields) suggest than Curtis and the BBC can't do anything else but defend their position, perhaps even that it's right for them to do so? I felt he told quite a romantic story of private radio, perhaps that's just me, I don't think the whole of pirate radio is fingered. His whole schtick is to question the mediation that goes on with regard to how we find out about stuff, so incredulity is kinda built it to his work. Plus if you look at the Pandora's Box series, you'd do well to argue he favours centralised scientific planning.

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At 15:31 22nd Sep 2011, theartteacher wrote:

This market we live in can't give people freedom, despite that being it's central claim (even more than 'efficiency' I think) deriving from Hayek. The word 'liberal' has been hijacked. If a freedom depends on what you own then it can't underpin all other freedoms. Liberty as private enterprise necessarily undermines democratic liberty, because where the latter is an equal say for everyone in the system we want to live in and the conditions we want to create, the former bases the importance of your say on what you own, which of course has nothing to do with any kind of justice. All it can give is limited choice, deriving essentially from what property you have and what you can acquire, nothing more, whilst the system in reality maintains the power and wealth of the few.

And that's the triple truth, Ruth.

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At 01:33 23rd Sep 2011, pappygold wrote:

As ever, an incredibly provocative article. Comments ur no hauf bad either, but.
Hooray for theartteacher!

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Comment number 48.
At 19:08 25th Sep 2011, SONICBOOMER wrote:

Whetstone is the partner of Steve Hilton?
Hilton of Cameron's Big Society idea? (Re-launched as of today 4 or 5 times, you lose count).
Quite apart from the inevitable shortening to 'BS', Hilton's ideas seem right out of the character Julius Nicholson, government 'Blue Sky Thinker' from the sublime comedy 'The Thick Of It', and just as daft.
Though I suspect the Tory spin doctor from the show, Stewart Pearson was in part based upon Hilton too.
An ex BBC man, John Birt, was Blair's Blue Sky Thinker and probably initial inspiration for Nicholson same from there.

'Yes Minister' in the 1980's was seen to reflect, in it's comedy, some actual realities of government life, many stories being inspired by events, perhaps The Thick Of It just brought that up to date.

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At 19:17 25th Sep 2011, SONICBOOMER wrote:

Don't know if you are making a satirical point Adam with that final pic, an advert for the post war Avro Tudor airliner. Basically a crude machine cobbled together from bomber components.
It was lethal, even by the standards of the day, with a number of crashes (the first even killed Roy Chadwick designer of the Lancaster), which eventually led to it's early retirement from passenger service.
It's systems were hopeless, all squeezed in with no thought, unstable, unreliable, no separation and so prone to disaster. Not unlike the financial system.

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Comment number 50.
At 17:09 26th Sep 2011, loninappleton wrote:

Please join my campaign to eliminate the tedious use of the word 'basically.'

Here is the reasoning:

The word "basically" is an overused verbal tic which demeans and condescends to the listener. It is at the same time a way for the speaker to inflate his own self esteem by flogging and repeating words that appear to emphasize personal knowledge.

It is a fault which has become, I fear, some sort of custom or accepted
colloquialism.

Whether in Britain or US the "basically" trope has become pandemic. It is still unacceptable. It's an adverb, you know, and cannot modify "to be." It is the trope of the meritocratic narcissist and for that reason alone should be suspect and avoided.

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At 17:17 28th Sep 2011, theartteacher wrote:

@loninappleton - I couldn't agree more. Nice to see someone take this so seriously. Basically I think it's a really interesting issue, so kudos to you.

Is this the future - squabbling over grammar whilst everything burns? Oh well.....

I guess the only thing left to do is kick back and watch cartoons

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pd60nYW577U

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At 17:53 29th Sep 2011, loninappleton wrote:

Reactively-moderated posts means that what I've said is valuable to someone. That's logic. I am actively insulted by the use of... that word... and also "essentially," another rubbish bit of verbosity popular with the academic crowd. "Simply put" can be used instead and to better effect. Any further responses I might make will look like a flame war so it ends here.

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At 15:38 30th Sep 2011, mididoctors wrote:

Makes me want to say "But this was a fantasy"

genuinely amusing.

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At 00:50 1st Oct 2011, Translator from Hebrew wrote:

Interestingly, a couple of journalists in Stanford ran across the SOLE written communication between one of the Koch brothers & Hayek.
Apparently, Koch had wanted to Hayek to come to the US on a speaking tour, and Hayek was concerned that his health expenses (if needed) would be untenable, as he had just had his gall bladder removed.
According to these journalists, Koch checked with the U Chicago and found that while working in the US, Hayek had opted into to social security (he was visiting from abroad and didn't have to) and therefore was entitled to full social security and any hospital care he would need without payment at the point of service. Koch even included a Social Security brochure, to help sell Hayek on the idea that coming to the US was not going to bankrupt him.

The researchers (Mark Ames & Yasha Levine) were fairly mind-boggled that Koch used the existence of Social Security as an argument for getting Hayek to come to the US in order to help destroy Social Security. This is a pretty big story in the US, I'll recommend searching for it based on the names (I'm not sure if it's ok to post links in the blog).

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At 00:51 1st Oct 2011, Translator from Hebrew wrote:

And a link, just in case it's permitted: the report is in the flash movie at the bottom of the page. https://www.dylanratigan.com/2011/09/30/mark-ames-koch-hayek-ideas-for-sale/

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At 10:33 2nd Oct 2011, tobytunstall wrote:

I DISAGREE - There are new ideas on the horizon from THINK TANKS about how to organise society.

A scientific revolution has been gathering pace over many decades with names such as Chaos Theory, Complexity Science and more recently Network Science and is a progression from Systems Thinking that Mr Curtis will be familiar with (courtesy of RAND).

An important THINK TANK that is one of the intellectual centers of this revolution is the Santa Fe Institute in California (https://www.santafe.edu )[Broken URL edited by Moderator] Research covers many interdisciplinary areas from ant colonies, the human heart, cities to financial networks.

There are several brits associated with the Santa Fe Institute such as Geoffrey West (double the size of the city, more than double the increase in crime,patents awarded etc by about 15%) and Mark Newman's research on networks - computer, social and biological.

Another THINK TANK is George Soros' Institute for New Economic Thinking (https://ineteconomics.org ) [Broken URL edited by Moderator] which is an attempt at developing new economic theories. Interestingly it is funding research by physicists such as Doyne Farmer (also of the Santa Fe Institute) and others who are approaching economics with the benefit of the latest modelling techniques and advances in our understanding of nature.

The problem with Economics as its stands in its current guise is that it is little more than the bastard child of physics. However this is the physics of the mid nineteenth century. This is detailed at length in Philip Mirowski book 'More Heat than Light'. I would be surprised if Mr Curtis has not come across him as they both document the history of ideas.

For instance Adam Smiths theories are works of philosophy not science. The same is true for Hayek. Neither of them follow the scientific method. There is no evidence that free markets naturally achieve equilibrium. The actual evidence of data from real financial markets points to the opposite conclusion.

Even some of the most cherished mathematical theories that the economists have constructed don't even add up, literally. This is discussed in 'The Dynamics of Markets - Econophysics and Finance' by Joseph McCauley.

Without doubt economists are a stubborn bunch as indicated by this interview (https://video.ft.com/v/1044030606001/Chicago-School-defends-its-research%29. After all there is nothing wrong with their theories just how other people have applied them. Added to which with all that work that they have invested in them (and their reputations) might as well carry on as usual.

Even citation analysis indicates this. I once came across an analysis of academic papers of various disciplines (physics, chemistry, economics etc) and the degree to which they referenced other disciplines. Not surprisingly the most introverted bunch were the economists who are very resistant to adopting new ideas and techniques from outside their discipline.

The neo-liberal think tanks (left and right) may be at their Zenith at the moment , but their intellectual foundations and legitimacy are very shaky.

However my biggest concern is how much blood will be spilt when new ideas emerge from complexity science, how they will be used and misappropriated to suit different interests.

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At 22:36 25th Oct 2011, radio53 wrote:

Thank you Adam,
I enjoyed this article very much. The documentary about Lord Sutch is great. I am not certain but I think the sound engineer in the Sutch doc' might be Joe Meek. He was a very influencal person and pioneer in musical sound recording. Do a web search on him and you'll be impressed.
Thanks,
Alan

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At 18:47 1st Nov 2011, Mancha Negra wrote:

@41, theartteacher2 wrote:
"...and how they are specifically and purposefully structured for the benefit of certain parties."

And certain pirates.

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At 18:57 24th Mar 2012, de rosie wrote:

The guiding idea at the heart of today's political system is freedom of choice. The belief that if you apply the ideals of the free market to all sorts of areas in society, people will be liberated from the dead hand of government. The wants and desires of individuals then become the primary [Unsuitable/Broken URL removed by Moderator] of society.

ist very good post. Your sentence could be the driving force and motivation for everyone

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At 16:17 14th Apr 2012, Gilly wrote:

The left-right dialectic suits the banking interests. If savings (liabilities) increase, then encourage 'social' programs, which must be paid for from borrowings with interest. If there is an inflationary spiral encourage 'austerity'. Banks can gain control of private property at knock down prices & pressurize govts to adopt 'free market' regulations. All our money is just promises to pay (with interest) and as Meyer Rothschild said 'give me control of a nations money supply & I care not who makes its laws'. We should know what Thomas Jefferson knew which is that banks are more dangerous than standing armies.

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At 11:10 11th Sep 2012, hany home design wrote:

thanks for information THE CURSE OF TINA ,

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Adam Curtis is a documentary film maker, whose work includes The Power of Nightmares, The Century of the Self, The Mayfair Set, Pandora's Box, The Trap and The Living Dead.

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