All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace: Adam Curtis

A series of films about how humans have been colonized by the machines they have built. Although we don't realize it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers. It claims that computers have failed to liberate us and instead have distorted and simplified our view of the world around us.

1. Love and Power. This is the story of the dream that rose up in the 1990s that computers could create a new kind of stable world. They would bring about a new kind global capitalism free of all risk and without the boom and bust of the past. They would also abolish political power and create a new kind of democracy through the Internet where millions of individuals would be connected as nodes in cybernetic systems - without hierarchy.

2. The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts. This is the story of how our modern scientific idea of nature, the self-regulating ecosystem, is actually a machine fantasy. It has little to do with the real complexity of nature. It is based on cybernetic ideas that were projected on to nature in the 1950s by ambitious scientists. A static machine theory of order that sees humans, and everything else on the planet, as components - cogs - in a system.

3. The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey. This episode looks at why we humans find this machine vision so beguiling. The film argues it is because all political dreams of changing the world for the better seem to have failed - so we have retreated into machine-fantasies that say we have no control over our actions because they excuse our failure.

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.

Love and Power

The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts

The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey

Enlightened, Really?

I have come to the realisation that there are two basic types of people. There are those with an apocalyptic worldview and there are the Utopianists.
Of the latter there is little difference between the variations, but they are premised upon the age old Gnostic doctrine of "becoming" (Ye shall be as gods. Gen 3:5)

How utterly corrupt are the ranks of those that claim enlightenment when they speak of mans evolutionary journey, while systematically subjugating entire continents to slavery and death. Socio-political utopia in action.

I am referring primarily of the plight of Central Africa.
A recent "Top Ten" report placed the Congo as the poorest nation on earth with an average annual income of less than $200 per head, and this despite being one of the richest countries on earth in natural resources. Furthermore, Rwanda is in the news again this week as it embarks on a time of mourning, twenty years after the genocide.

The details of such suffering are truly heart wrenching, yet I believe that we owe a debt, to expose the cancerous root of the type of system which not only permits crime against humanity, but encourages it in the name of whatever nonsense ideology is popular at the time!

I have previously written about the exploits of Lever and the expropriation of huge swathes of the Belgian Congo for palm oil plantations and the ill treatment of workers under the policy of "force travail".
The facts still astound me and I struggle to understand how anyone could reach a level of disconnectedness to willingly participate is such a regime.

I read recently that while acting as Egyptian Foreign Minister, future U.N. Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali presided over the supply of the weapons which were used by Hutus to slaughter Tutsis.
The U.N. is full of apologies for not acting to stop the genocide, but it has been complicit all along.
Belgium's administration particularly had led to the ethnic tensions arising between tribes who had coexisted relatively harmoniously for centuries before.
The faulty premise that Tutsis were racially superior is explained in detail in part three of the documentary series, "All watched over by machines of loving grace" by Adam Curtis. I will post the entire series up next time.

There are few better examples of human behaviour that is beyond hypocrisy, than the treatment of the poorest people on earth by those who claim to know how society can be improved.

As for "becoming", they are actually attempting to build a world based upon Babylonian principals of rebellion towards God.

The Century Of The Self: Adam Curtis

Im delighted to be able to post this series of excellent videos by Adam Curtis. Enjoy!

This series is about how those in power have used Freud's theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, changed the perception of the human mind and its workings profoundly.

His influence on the 20th century is widely regarded as massive. The documentary describes the impact of Freud's theories on the perception of the human mind, and the ways public relations agencies and politicians have used this during the last 100 years for their engineering of consent. Among the main characters are Freud himself and his nephew Edward Bernays, who was the first to use psychological techniques in advertising. He is often seen as the father of the public relations industry.

Freud's daughter Anna Freud, a pioneer of child psychology, is mentioned in the second part, as well as Wilhelm Reich, one of the main opponents of Freud's theories. Along these general themes, The Century of the Self asks deeper questions about the roots and methods of modern consumerism, representative democracy and its implications. It also questions the modern way we see ourselves, the attitude to fashion and superficiality.

Happiness Machines. Part one documents the story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays who invented Public Relations in the 1920s, being the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses.

The Engineering of Consent. Part two explores how those in power in post-war America used Freud's ideas about the unconscious mind to try and control the masses. Politicians and planners came to believe Freud's underlying premise that deep within all human beings were dangerous and irrational desires.

There is a Policeman Inside All of Our Heads, He Must Be Destroyed. In the 1960s, a radical group of psychotherapists challenged the influence of Freudian ideas, which lead to the creation of a new political movement that sought to create new people, free of the psychological conformity that had been implanted in people's minds by business and politics.

Eight People Sipping Wine In Kettering. This episode explains how politicians turned to the same techniques used by business in order to read and manipulate the inner desires of the masses. Both New Labor with Tony Blair and the Democrats led by Bill Clinton, used the focus group which had been invented by psychoanalysts in order to regain power.