The Grammar of Happiness • 2012

Category: People

A language that can be spoken, hummed, or whistled? A language with no unique words for colour or numbers? Linguistics professor Daniel Everett claims that the unique language of the Piraha people of the Amazon is exactly that. More than 30 years ago, he travelled as a missionary into the Amazon rainforest to teach the tribe, but they ended up teaching him. Their way of life and unique form of communication have profoundly changed Everett, and inspired a theory that could undermine the most powerful theory (or theorist) of linguistics.

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Freud

Bettany Hughes travels to Vienna on the trail of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. Freud's influence surrounds us. In our vocabulary - repression, penis envy, the Freudian slip - and in the freedom we take for granted, to talk openly about our deepest feelings and insecurities. A pioneer in the study of the human mind, Freud's psychoanalytic methods addressed emotional issues, seldom even discussed in the 19th century. Talking to his patients inspired his radical understanding of the unconscious mind, as a repository of hidden repressed emotions and irrational primal desires.

Part 3Genius of the Modern World • 2016 • People

Can't Get You Out of My Head

(All 6 parts are merged into one) Love, power, money, ghosts of empire, conspiracies, artificial intelligence – and You.An emotional history of the modern world by Adam Curtis. Chapter 1 - Bloodshed on Wolf MountainWe are living through strange days. Across Britain, Europe and America societies have become split and polarised. There is anger at the inequality and the ever growing corruption - and a widespread distrust of the elites. Into this has come the pandemic that has brutally dramatised those divisions. But despite the chaos, there is a paralysis - a sense that no one knows how to escape from this.Can't Get You Out of My Head tells how we got to this place. And why both those in power - and we - find it so difficult to move on. At its heart is the strange story of what happened when people's inner feelings got mixed up with power in the age of individualism. How the hopes and dreams and uncertainties inside people's minds met the decaying forces of old power in Britain, America, Russia and China. What resulted was a block not just in the society - but also inside our own heads - that stops us imagining anything else than this. Chapter 2 - Shooting and F**king are the Same ThingThe story of what tore the revolutions in the 1960s apart. Jiang Qing in China, Michael X in London, Afeni Shakur in New York believed that millions of people's minds were haunted by the corruption and the violence of the past. They wanted to show people how to escape those ghosts.But they hadn't reckoned with the fact that the old structures of power still haunted their minds too. They too had been scarred by the past - and some of them wanted violent revenge. While psychologists and neuroscientists were starting to discover what they said were hidden forces inside the human brain that really controlled what they did. But the people weren't aware. Chapter 3 - Money Changes EverythingThe story of how in the 1970s those in power set out to create a world free of the dangerous big ideas of the past. They banished the grand dreams of changing the world. And replaced them with money. People would live from now on in their own heads - in their own dreams. And the banks would lend them the money to create those dreams. While China would supply a wave of cheap consumer goods on a scale never seen before in the world.But then money broke free across the world. And people started to get frightened that things were out of control. Not just money - but the world's climate too seemed to be behaving in a strange, unpredictable way. The systems seemed to have a life of their own. Beyond the ability of anyone to shape and predict. Chapter 4 - But What If the People Are Stupid?No one trusted politics or politicians any longer. Instead we were all one world of free individuals. And we could intervene to save other individuals around the world without bothering with old politics and power. And people became what they as individuals truly were - emotionally and sexually. But power was mutating and finding ways to work its way back into our heads.The politicians realised that they no longer had the support or the trust of the people. So they switched sides and gave up being our representatives who would challenge the powerful on our behalf. Instead they began to tell us what to do on behalf of the powerful. And they made new alliances - with the psychologists who said that human beings were irrational and needed to be managed. But we didn't notice because we were too busy shopping. Chapter 5 - The Lordly OnesIt wasn't just the Slave Trade. 150 years ago Britain had wrecked China by forcing opium on the country. It made Britain the richest and most powerful country in the world. But it enslaved the minds of millions of the Chinese and helped destroy the society. 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How all the different forces of our age - that started out as separate have come together to create what is a block against imagining another kind of future than this.How, money and debt, melancholy over the loss of empire, the strange roots of modern conspiracy theories, the history of China, opium and opioids, Artificial Intelligence - and love and power have all fed into creating the present time of anxiety and fearfulness about the future.And whether modern culture, despite its radicalism, is really also part of the rigid system - in the West and in Russia and China - where those in power have run out of all ideas. The film also lays out what are the different possible roads from here into the future, and the choices we will have to make about the very different futures we will have to choose very soon.

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If there’s one question Matt Walsh never thought he’d be seriously asking the general public, it’s "What is a woman?" But unfortunately, he is. Help Matt find the answer to this elusive question.

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Jemeker Thompson: Crack Queen of L.A.

Once the undisputed crack queen of LA, Jemeker Thompson speaks about her unorthodox reign and how her maternal instinct led to her downfall.

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Mussolini: The First Fascist

Benito Mussolini seized power in Italy in October 1922, after his March on Rome. He would hold it in his grasp until his death in 1945, establishing a dictatorship that lasted more than two decades. Long considered a buffoon and a second-rate dictator, Il Duce invented fascism that was imitated by Adolf Hitler, who viewed the Italian as his political master. Mussolini wanted to transform his country into a warrior nation and promised Italians a return to the grandeur of the Roman Empire. He governed by violence and trickery and was one of the first populist leaders of modern times, leading his country into the catastrophe of the Second World War. But who was Benito Mussolini, this former teacher who came from the extreme left to become a newspaper editor and creator of the Italian Fascist Party? Why did he ally himself with Adolf Hitler? Were the Italian people really behind him? With rare archives, some of which have been colorized, and interviews with the last-surviving witnesses of the era, along with perspectives from historian Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci, this portrait takes a look back at one of the most notorious dictators of the 20th century.

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Filmmaker Kevin Smith and a host of tech insiders examine the dawn of the digital age in 1989, the year the first modern GPS satellites roamed above the earth, the Game Boy appeared, and the World Wide Web debuted.

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