"The Trap": THIS is what documentary TV should be like

Just finished watching part 2 of The Trap, the three-part documentary on BBC2 which has been asking the question: 'what happened to our dream of freedom'? The documentary maker, Adam Curtis, previously produced The Power of Nightmares, another 3-part documentary shown by the BBC a few years back which argued that the enemy in the 'war on terror', as it is construed by George Bush, Tony Blair and the US neoconservatives, is a carefully constructed illusion constructed to keep the population obedient and ensure social cohesion through fear. It was a very powerful piece of work which I hope the BBC will reshow at some point.

In contrast to eThe Power of Nightmares, which was largely about foreign policy, The Trap focuses largely on domestic policy. Curtis's main idea is that the rise of game theory in economics from the 1950s onwards, which was originally used to analyse the logic behind nuclear deterrence in the Cold War, led to an exponential increase in the popularity of the idea of human beings as rational, self-interested calculating machines. This model of human behaviour, originally used by people like John Nash (one of the founders of game theory) as a convenient simplification t a time when technology was unable to model anything more complex, was then elevated to the status of an ideal which humanity should aspire to. From the late 1970s onwards there was a movement towards a view that markets were the ideal form of human organisation as they allowed these game-theoretical humans to best express their preferences through the market. These ideas also affected political science through 'public choice' theory which argued that politicians and civil servants were as ruthlessly self-interested as investment bankers, out to maximise their own welfare at other people's expense. It was interesting to see James Buchanan, one of the key architects of public choice theory and as important a figure in right-wing academia as Friedman or Hayek, given some screen time. He seemed intelligent, but off-the-wall; when asked by Curtis what role idealism might play in politics, he literally couldn't understand the question.

There is much more to Curtis's thesis than just a critique of game theory and the neoclassical economists' "rational economic man", but I'm headed for a very long post if I'm not careful, so I'll probably break there and review the rest once I've seen the third part this coming Sunday. But, based on the first two parts, this is largely superb stuff well worth seeing if you haven't already and I hope the BBC will reshow it on BBC4 (together with The Power of Nightmares) pretty soon so that anyone who didn't get the chance to see it, can do. That, or the file-sharing sites will have to do their job... and I'm sure they'll do it admirably.

Some amusement just to finish off: The Trap was also the title of an early 1990s book on the follies of modern global economic policy, by everyone's favourite businessman-turned-politician, the late James Goldsmith, a.k.a. "the unacceptable face of capitalism", and the man who founded the Referendum Party. I know one of the people who voted for those guys in the 1997 election, but I haven't found the other one yet.