We are living through strange days.
Across Britain, Europe and America,
societies have become split and polarised,
not just in politics, but across the whole culture.
There is anger at the inequality and the ever-growing corruption
and a widespread distrust of the elites.
Yet, at the same time, there is a paralysis,
a sense that no-one knows how to escape from this.
Even in America, where there is now hope with the new president,
there are also fears that, despite the growing crisis,
the system will just return to normal.
This paralysis is also fuelled by a technology, driven by the aim
of giving you today another version of what you had yesterday...
..and never a different tomorrow.
These films are a history of how we got to this place
and why both those in power, and we, find it so difficult to move on.
They will trace different forces
across the world that have led to now,
not just in the West, but in China and Russia as well.
And they are told in a different way.
They are an emotional history of what went on inside the heads
of all kinds of people.
Because in the age of the individual,
what you felt and what you wanted and what you dreamed of
were going to become the driving force across the world.
And to understand the present, you have to go back and see
what happened when those hopes and dreams and uncertainties
inside people's minds met the much older forces of power.
Often power that was decaying
and desperate to keep its ascendancy.
These strange days did not just happen -
we, and those in power, created them together.
YELLING
# Each day I walk along this lonely street
# Trying to find
# Find a future
# New pair of shoes are on my feet
# Cos fashion is my only culture
# Nothing ever change
# Oh, no
# Nothing ever change
# I'm just living in a life without meaning
# I walk and walk
# Do nothing
# I'm just living in a life without feeling
# I talk and talk
# Say nothing
# Nothing ever change
# Oh, no
# Nothing ever change. #
SONG FADES OUT
In the late 1950s, as the British Empire was falling apart,
there was a growing sense that something was badly wrong
under the surface.
It was a feeling of unease, that despite all the reforms
after the Second World War and the welfare state,
the old forms of power had not gone away.
And neither had the violence and the corruption
that had always been a part of that power.
The court opens with the traditional reading of names
and the wide experience available to the bank as apparent.
Mr Cobbold, Mr Minors,
Sir Charles Hambro...
Senior director...
The bankers in the City of London
had been at the very heart of the Empire.
In 1958, two of the most powerful of them,
Lord Kindersley and William Keswick,
were accused of using insider information
to make millions for themselves.
..Lord Kindersley...
Chairman of Rolls-Royce, merchant banker.
..Mr Keswick...
Hudson's Bay Company and Far Eastern merchant.
The evidence against them was very strong.
But when Keswick was shown the evidence, he dismissed it
with a phrase that became notorious.
"It is difficult," he said,
"to remember conversations one has whilst shooting on a grouse moor."
A government inquiry said the two men were obviously innocent.
At the same time, reports had started to come back
from one of the last parts of the Empire - Kenya -
that seemed to show that those in charge had gone out of control.
They had been fighting a liberation movement called the Mau Mau.
The report said that hundreds of thousands of Kenyans had been put
into special camps, where they were going to be
psychologically adjusted.
The British were trying to manipulate
what their chief psychologist called the "African mind".
But what then happened in the camps turned into a frenzied madness.
The British used mass torture and killing
as they desperately tried to hold on to power.
The government in London denied all the accusations,
but the rumours of violence and horror continued.
ORGAN MUSIC PLAYS
But what had also not gone away was the fear and hatred
inside the minds of many of the British of the "others",
the people the British had ruled over
who were now coming to what they had been told was the homeland.
Now, listen carefully to this Indian's conversation
with a white barber when he entered a saloon with a BBC radio microphone
in his pocket.
BARBER: No! INDIAN MAN: What's the matter?
No!
Is there anything wrong?
Yes! What is it? I said no.
But I'd like to know what is the matter. I'm closed.
There's another half an hour... Well, I'm closed now.
But you didn't put the closed sign outside on the window, did you?
Will you clear off?
Look, if you give me any reason why, what is the matter,
then I shall go if you tell me...
I've told you - I'm closed!
You're not closed.
You're not... You're not closed yet.
Well, I am - to you.
Those who came from the Empire to Britain
were shocked by the strange country they found.
Michael de Freitas had come from Trinidad.
He had grown up with a picture of a strong and confident homeland
at the centre of the Empire.
Instead, what he found was, what seemed to him,
a sad and frightened country.
You must remember that, that when we came to this country,
we were not travelling to a foreign country.
We were taught, I was taught when I was a young man,
that my country, Trinidad, was an extension of this one.
We were weaned on the concept of the Empire.
When I was a young boy, I stood in 90 degrees of sun
day after day and sang all kinds of silly things
like God Save The Queen, Land of Hope and Glory,
"Britannia rule the waves",
with the greatest of fervour and believed every word of it.
To come here and discover that not only wasn't I not travelling
to the capital of the whole thing, which we were led to believe was so,
but in actual fact, we weren't wanted
has been a very shattering blow.
Many people in this country who think that we are very hateful
are so wrong.
You see, this is the great mystery.
When you came here, you say you found you weren't wanted.
Why, then, did you stay?
Why did you choose to stay here?
This was the heartland of the whole thing
and one hoped against hope that what one saw was not right.
MUSIC: Song for Zula by Phosphorescent
# Some say love is a burning thing
# That it makes a fiery ring
# Oh, but I know love as a fading thing
# Just as fickle as a feather in a stream
# See, honey, I saw love
# You see it came to me
# It puts its face up to my face so I could see
# Yeah, then I saw love disfigure me
# Into something I am not recognising
# See the cage, it called
# I said, "Come on in"
# I will not open myself up this way... #
Mao Zedong's wife was going mad.
She was called Jiang Qing.
She lived alone, surrounded by pet monkeys
and nurses, who she was convinced were conspiring against her.
Those in charge of the revolution in China
had completely marginalised her.
She was too dangerous, they thought, to be allowed anywhere
near her husband or power.
They had even sent her to Moscow to be locked in a sanatorium
with real and imagined illnesses.
But now Jiang Qing's husband was facing disaster.
The revolution had led to horror.
30 million people had died from starvation
in the past three years.
The other leaders wanted to get rid of him.
And suddenly, he called for her.
CALMING MUSIC PLAYS
Jiang Qing was an extraordinary person.
She believed in nothing except the power of her will to shape reality.
SHE SINGS
She had begun as an actor in films in Shanghai in the 1930s.
The other actors looked down at her for her driving ambition.
SHE GROANS
She liked to be on the top, always.
She's a very ambitious woman and she liked to be top
and she plays with the, you know,
with all the directors, cameramen,
make them...make them, you know, pay attention, you see,
and the interest in her
so she can have a better part of the film.
THEY SPEAK CHINESE
She married a quite famous writer called Tang Na
and after married, she doesn't feel
very satisfied by her husband
because her husband is not the very, very strong man.
And she left him and he jumped to the river,
and then the water was very cold, so he jump up again, you see?
So... You mean he tried to commit suicide?
Yes, he's trying to commit...commit suicide.
After the suicide attempt,
Jiang Qing wrote a long letter to her husband.
It said she was leaving him
and also explained why with an extraordinary openness.
There were powerful forces inside her, she said,
that kept driving her towards fame and power
and it was only those forces that held her together psychologically.
"Nothing must hold them back."
It ended, "What matters is that you remember me
"as a woman who never caves in before anyone
"and who will never bear to be treated as inferior to men."
But Jiang Qing failed to become a star.
The men who ran the studios scorned her ambition.
Her most famous part was as a supporting actor in a film
called Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain.
HOWLING
The star of the film was called Li Lili.
THEY SCREAM
Jiang Qing was convinced that Li
was trying to upstage her all the time
and she became the focus of all Jiang Qing's anger
over her treatment by the Shanghai establishment.
MUSIC: Hua Yang De Nian Hua by Zhou Xuan
Bitter and disillusioned, Jiang Qing left Shanghai
and travelled to join the communist resistance
on a remote mountain in Yan'an.
The camp was an intense, exciting place
and many of the young revolutionaries had affairs.
Sex was called "undisciplined guerrilla warfare".
But when Jiang Qing started an affair with the leader, Mao Zedong,
that was different.
She was scorned by the other revolutionaries
as a social-climbing upstart.
Then it got worse.
Mao announced that he was going to divorce his wife
and marry Jiang Qing.
The other communist leaders were horrified.
They saw Jiang Qing as a dangerous, destructive force
because she was driven by a fierce radical individualism
that threatened their collective dream.
In the communist structure, everyone was part of a unit.
She insisted, "I am a unit of one."
No-one could work out what to do.
They even went and asked Stalin in Moscow for his advice.
He said, "Let them marry.
"But Jiang Qing must sign a document promising to refrain
"from political activity for 30 years."
BELL TOLLS
She signed, but she was furious with the men who now controlled her.
They even tracked down and destroyed prints of her old films
because they didn't fit with the image of Mao's wife.
Her fury grew.
Jiang Wing wanted power on her own behalf,
as an individual.
And she wanted revenge.
Now, 20 years later, in 1959, Mao was facing disaster
and he was calling for her.
GUNSHOT, GIRL SCREAMS
GUNSHOT
BOY: You're dead, you're dead!
In America, the idea of individualism
had become central to the politics of the Cold War...
MAN: What are you, bulletproof?
Get out from behind that tree.
..because it was what defined the United States
against the collective ideology of Russia.
At the heart of it was the picture of a strong, confident individual
living an independent life in the new giant suburbs
outside the old cities.
My gun won't shoot that far.
GUNSHOT
But there was a weakness,
because the people in the suburbs were alone.
And in their isolation, away from the old communities,
they started to become fearful and lost.
Out of these fears came a paranoia
that was fuelled by groups on the extreme right,
like the John Birch Society.
ALL: ..and to the republic, for which it stands,
one nation under God, indivisible...
They said that the American government had been taken over
by hidden groups, controlled by the communists.
And at the end of the 1950s, a theory spread like wildfire
through the suburbs that President Eisenhower himself
had really been put into power by the communists.
"He is a dedicated, conscious agent of the Russians,"
the head of the John Birch Society said.
"That conclusion is based on detailed evidence so extensive
"that it is beyond any reasonable doubt."
But this paranoia was not a new thing.
An influential political scientist called Richard Hofstadter
published an article that caused a sensation.
He said that there had always been a dark paranoia
built into America from the very start.
The first settlers had come from Europe to America
to flee from the corruption of power in the Old World.
But although they had got away from the old power,
they hadn't got away from their suspicious minds,
and alone, out in the vast wilderness of the new America,
that led them to imagining dark, hidden conspiracies
in their own government, far away in Washington.
One of the first of these, in the early 19th century,
said that a secret group from Europe,
called the Bavarian Illuminati,
were running a giant conspiracy in America
to destroy the new democracy.
In reality, the Illuminati had been a utopian movement
who wanted to replace religion with reason.
But instead, they now became the first of a series
of frightening suspicions that fed off the isolation
of the settlers in the New World.
"The paranoia in the suburbs," Hofstadter said,
"is just part of a much larger darkness
"built into the very structure of America itself
"that was feeding, yet again,
"on people's separateness and isolation."
But in the same suburbs, there was a new movement rising up
that was going to confront and challenge these fears.
It was driven by a radical individualism that said
that you as an individual can shape the world the way you want it to be,
not accept what the dark fears tell you it is.
It would be one of the main foundations
of the counterculture movement
that was going to spread throughout the West.
But now, it was just beginning,
born out of odd moments across the suburbs of California.
One night, Kerry Thornley went with his friend Greg Hill
to a bowling alley.
They started to discuss reality.
Thornley insisted that there was a fixed order to the universe,
but Greg said that the universe was chaos and it was human thought
that projected an order onto the chaos.
Sitting around in a bowling alley in 1958, to be exact,
somewhere in the vicinity of Whittier, California,
and we were discussing philosophy
and we were talking about order and chaos.
Greg's theory was that order was projected on the universe,
that it didn't exist at all,
that it was a creation of the human mind,
that order was entirely in perception and had nothing to do
with what was going on out there in a completely chaotic universe.
Thornley was inspired by this, and together he and Greg Hill decided
to set up a movement dedicated to the idea of chaos.
They called it Discordianism.
Underlying it was the belief that individuals had the power
inside themselves to bring order and meaning to the chaos,
not the old systems of power that created the fear and suspicion.
But then an extraordinary coincidence happened
that was going to lead Thornley back towards that darkness in America.
Thornley was sent to do service with the Marines,
and at the camp, he met another recruit
who seemed to embody the figure of the free, independent individual
he so admired because he refused to bow to the power of the officers.
He was called Lee Harvey Oswald...
..and they became close friends.
Thornley had read the novels of Ayn Rand
and he decided he was going to write a novel
with Oswald as the central figure, a hero of this new age.
But then, suddenly, Oswald defected to the Soviet Union
and things became very strange.
It seemed that the reality outside
was even more chaotic than he had imagined.
It was really a weird experience for me
because I was writing this novel based on Oswald.
When Oswald defected to the Soviet Union, I decided to write a novel
about a Marine who becomes disenchanted with the US
and goes to the Soviet Union,
and so it was like the hero... And I didn't like Kennedy.
I was extremely anti-Kennedy myself because I was so much into Ayn Rand,
laissez faire capitalism, objectivism,
and Kennedy was the arch villain of our...
..of our movement at that time.
And it was like the hero of my novel jumped up off the pages of my book
and shot the President, and it was...it was...
It was very weird.
MUSIC: Air by The Incredible String Band
# Breathing
# All creatures are
# Brighter than that brightest star
# You are by far
# You come right inside of me
# Close as you can be
# You kiss my blood
# And my blood kiss me... #
Although the British Empire was now finally collapsing
and the last colonies being given their independence,
in the homeland, England, the old structure of power remained intact.
And not only in the institutions,
but inside people's heads as well.
The old attitudes of power were still deeply embedded
in the minds of the establishment who dominated the country.
Those in charge demanded obedience,
not just from those they governed or employed,
but also from their wives.
They expected them to submit too.
CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS And again. Fine.
Sandra Paul had grown up in Africa and the Far East.
Her father had been a doctor in the Royal Air Force.
She came back to England and became a successful model.
Just take that knee a little wider here.
Good.
Then she met Robin Douglas-Home.
He was at the heart of the ruling class.
His uncle had been Prime Minister.
She was incredibly beautiful.
She had a tremendous quality of innocence.
And, erm...
She was, I thought, a vulnerable creature
in a highly suspect world,
the world of models and fashion,
which I despised then,
and I despise even more now.
Erm... And so, in a sense, maybe I was trying to rescue her
from what I thought was going to be a decline
in her character due to her career.
Can you take that leg, that knee a little wider out that way?
Sort of, really... That's right.
But she was earning considerably more than you were
and, presumably, this money was useful in setting up your home,
so I suppose you could hardly be resentful about it.
I was earning considerably less, yes.
They married, and Robin Douglas-Home insisted
that they went to live in the country.
Sandra Paul agreed...
..but she found that he also insisted
that she should stop her modelling career
and remain in the country while he went to their house in London.
Then eventually, Robin wanted to be in London more.
And...
He didn't really want the routine so much.
He wanted to be going out to parties on his own,
and when he realised that if he was in London
and I would be in London too...
..erm...
..this meant that he had to share his life,
and he was beginning to want to be...
..just a little independent.
Do you mean he was getting bored with you?
Yes, probably,
because I used to want to know what he'd been doing or where he'd been
and he didn't want to say, and so we'd have a row.
But just because I was wanting to know about his life
and he thought that I shouldn't have to know everything about his life.
I felt that when you were married that you should share things
and you should have a right, really, to know what your husband was doing.
Even if he was to make it up,
he should take the trouble to make something up to tell you
so you could put it out of your mind.
Michael de Freitas was now working for a notorious landlord
in Notting Hill called Peter Rachman.
Rachman owned hundreds of flats and decaying houses in Notting Hill,
which he rented out to prostitutes and immigrants.
De Freitas's job was to be Rachman's enforcer,
often using threats and violence,
including breaking in and wrecking the flats.
When we came back in the night, we see everything outside.
All the floor mashed up.
All the wardrobe, all the chair, all the table,
all the clothes on the floor, dirty.
He took my brother's tools and mashed up all the floor.
Pulled up all the lights.
No water.
I say, "Well, well, well, well."
Michael de Freitas was fascinated by his new employer
because Peter Rachman was far more than just the brutal gangster
that he was portrayed as.
He had lived an extraordinary life.
He had been born in Lvov, on the border of Ukraine and Poland.
Then the Nazis invaded
and Rachman was arrested and forcibly sterilised
because he was Jewish.
But he managed to escape.
He fled into Russia, but was captured again,
this time by the Russians,
who sent him to the labour camps in Siberia,
where he watched people survive by killing each other
and then eating the human flesh.
But then the Nazis invaded Russia
and suddenly, Rachman became Russia's ally.
He was sent off to fight with the Free Polish Army.
And he ended up, after the war, in London,
stateless and a complete outsider.
That horror meant that Rachman judged nobody.
For him, the differences between right and wrong
were luxuries for the privileged.
In the face of horror, everyone was the same,
focused entirely on survival.
But the English judged him.
He was hated with an overwhelming disgust as the face of evil.
De Freitas believed that this revealed something
that was hidden in English society.
We start with the story of a man,
let me say straight away a sordid story
that some of you may well not want the younger children to hear.
This is Peter Rachman,
one of Britain's big-time 20th-century racketeers.
On the surface, there was the overt racism against the immigrants
that Rachman was bringing into Notting Hill.
A large number of people in Notting Hill
are trying to mix the two races, are trying to bring about
a coffee-coloured mulatto population in Britain,
and I regard it as no disgrace for the White Defence League
to come on the scene and stand up for white interests.
But de Freitas saw something deeper.
Rachman's property empire was a brutal and violent one,
but it was doing something that polite English society
completely refused to do.
He was giving people on the very margins of society -
prostitutes and black immigrants - somewhere to live.
His empire shone a harsh light on the hypocrisy of the nice people
at the top of English society,
who would never think of themselves as racist
but wanted nothing to do with the people he was moving
into Notting Hill.
And they hated him for it.
This was captured in an interview that the BBC did
with the local upmarket journalists in Notting Hill
about the day Rachman visited their offices.
What struck me about him
was his extraordinary sense of being so evil.
This was a really evil man.
We'd heard a lot about Rachman -
and finally, here he was, sitting in this room.
But I don't think any of us were prepared to see
such a grotesque individual.
Kind of gravelly type of voice,
a sort of...almost a diseased voice, if you like,
the kind of thing which went...
SPEAKS IN HIGH-PITCH: "Oh, what do you want to see me for?
"I mean, I've done nothing."
De Freitas decided that there was a fear in England that went far deeper
than just the working-class racism...
..that behind the polite veneer of the middle classes,
there was a hard ruthlessness and a suspicion of others.
De Freitas gave it a name.
He called it Englishism.
It came, he said, from both an anger and a melancholy
at the loss of their empire.
Then Peter Rachman died of a heart attack,
and Michael de Freitas suddenly found
that he was the new face of evil.
Mr de Freitas?
Why will you not take the rent from this man here?
I don't own the property.
But your name's on the rent book. Is it?
Well, you know it is. We can probably show it to you.
Come here, Mr de Freitas, cos I need to know the facts about this.
Why will you not take his rent from him?
INAUDIBLE
Jiang Qing came in secret to Mount Lushan to meet Mao Zedong,
where he was confronting the other revolutionaries.
She was determined to stop them from overthrowing Mao.
Many of them were the men who had forced her
into her strange, isolated life
and she hated them.
Jiang Qing was also convinced that these men
weren't really revolutionaries.
They were actually ghosts from the past who, without realising it,
were destroying the revolution
because their minds were still possessed by the patterns of thought
of the old, decaying and corrupt empire
that had ruled China for 300 years.
Mao pretended to give in to the demands
of the other revolutionaries,
but he told Jiang Qing to go to Shanghai
and to prepare quietly for a new kind of revolution -
one that would sweep the opposition away.
Jiang Qing returned to where she had started -
the studios of Shanghai.
But now she was in control.
And the new revolution was going to be driven by HER self-expression
and HER imagination that had been stifled back then.
The unit of one was going to take over the revolution
and reshape the minds of the Chinese people.
Because she could control the people's minds,
she could control their images, she was...
She became, er... She became the mistress of the arts
and of propaganda and culture.
She does have great personal charm.
It's a severe charm.
It's the charm of being able to do what she wanted
and to say what she wanted to
in a society where most people say what they're expected to say,
most people express the current political line.
Her daring to reflect upon the past,
to speak extensively about herself
and to make judgments of all sorts was extraordinary.
And she's a woman of many parts
so, needless to say, her relationship to the Chairman
was always the trump card.
Jiang Qing began by taking old Chinese operas and reworked them
so they became dramatic melodramas about the need to struggle
against the evil forces still hidden in Chinese society.
CALLS IN MANDARIN
GUNSHOT, MUSIC CRESCENDOES
Hate was a key word in the script.
"It must be shouted," she said,
"as if it was a grenade that you were hurling at the enemy."
"And never forget," she told the heroine,
"that beauty is less important than will and power."
SHE SINGS IN MANDARIN
But the operas were just the start.
Jiang Qing's real aim was to turn the whole of China itself
into a giant melodrama,
to work millions of people up into an intense frenzy
that would have the power to smash through the old corrupt ideas
that were still lodged in people's heads
and break through to a new kind of society.
But at the same time,
Jiang Qing herself was driven by old hatreds from her own past.
And she was also going to turn that frenzy
into a crusade of revenge against her old enemies...
..including Li Lili,
who had upstaged her in Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain.
ORCHESTRAL CRESCENDO BUILDS
Living quietly in New York, completely forgotten,
was an Irish woman called Ethel Boole
who personified the very opposite of what Jiang Qing believed -
because Boole thought that the way to change the world
was to give yourself up to the force of revolution,
to surrender your individual self and your identity
to the dream of a better future for others.
At the end of the 19th century,
Ethel Boole had gone to Russia as a young girl
and become involved with the revolutionaries in St Petersburg.
And she wrote a novel called The Gadfly.
It told a powerful romantic story of a young girl
who sacrificed everything for revolution.
She then married a Polish revolutionary
called Wilfrid Voynich,
and in the 1920s, they went to live in New York,
where he worked as an antiquarian book-seller
and Ethel Boole forgot about revolution.
But in 1959, when the Bolshoi Ballet came to New York,
the dancers were astonished to find that she was alive
and they rushed to visit her
because Ethel Boole, without her realising it,
had become a hero of the Russian Revolution.
She discovered that her novel
had inspired millions of young revolutionaries in the 1920s
to rise up and fight for the revolution,
inspired by the idea of surrendering themselves
to a grand historic cause.
Then, the same had happened in China.
Again, millions of young revolutionaries
had carried The Gadfly in their backpacks
as they fought to create a new kind of future.
Now, Boole was living alone.
And she had inherited a mysterious book from her husband.
It was called the Voynich manuscript,
and it was written in a language no-one has been able to decipher.
But one ballerina in the Bolshoi group
didn't go to visit Ethel Boole.
She was called Maya Plisetskaya.
She was the most famous ballerina in the world
and she hated the communist system.
Plisetskaya's father had been executed by firing squad
during the purges of the 1930s.
Her mother had been sent to a prison in the wastes of Siberia.
As she became famous, she was watched all the time
by agents from the KGB.
She couldn't trust anyone.
Everyone around her had been told to inform on her.
And she hated what she called "the men with sweaty faces,"
the party bosses who leered at her as she danced.
In private, Maya Plisetskaya wrote out her own manifesto.
"I don't know about other people," she wrote, "I'll say it for myself.
"I don't want to be a slave.
"I don't want people whom I don't know to decide my fate.
"I don't want a leash on my neck.
"I don't want a cage, even if it is a platinum one.
"I don't want to be rejected or branded.
"I don't want to hide what I am thinking.
"I don't want to bow my head,
"and I won't do it.
"That's not what I was born for."
Both Plisetskaya and Jiang Qing were part of the new individualism
that was rising up everywhere...
..while Ethel Boole's collective vision was dying.
But at the same time, a new revolution was about to begin.
It would offer a dream of liberation and freedom for the new individuals.
But it would end by controlling them.
And in a strange twist, the person whose ideas
would guide that revolution was Ethel Boole's father.
He was a mathematician from the 19th century called George Boole.
Boole had been a deeply religious man.
And one afternoon in the 1840s,
as he walked across a field near Doncaster,
a thought had flashed into his head
that he believed was a religious vision.
Boole suddenly saw how you could use mathematics
to unlock the mysterious processes of human thought.
The same symbols that were used in algebra
could be used to describe what went on inside people's heads
as they followed a train of thought,
expressing all the twists and turns in simple binary form.
If this, then that.
If that, then not this.
And in 1854, Boole wrote a book that caused a sensation.
It was called An Investigation of the Laws of Thought.
Its aim - to investigate the fundamental laws
of those operations of the mind by which reasoning is performed.
Boole showed how even abstract concepts like virtue and passion
could be put into equations,
and then the symbols used to follow a pattern of thought
to its conclusion.
Boole was driven by an almost messianic belief
that he had been allowed a glimpse by God
into the truth of the human mind.
But there were those who doubted this.
The philosopher Bertrand Russell was astonished
by the brilliance of Boole's mathematics,
but he didn't believe that what Boole had discovered
was anything to do with human thought.
"Human beings," Russell said, "do not think like that."
What Boole was really doing was something else.
Throughout the British Empire, science had played a powerful role
which has been wiped and forgotten today.
Its job had been to create abstract systems,
to catalogue and order the chaotic reality
that the British ruled over,
to turn it into something that could be managed and controlled.
It ranged from making maps of what was called the dark interior
to cataloguing millions of species of animals and insects,
and studying and categorising different human types.
And what Boole was doing was the next step in that process.
He was taking the chaotic reality of human thought
and making a simplified, rational map
of that other dark interior,
the human mind,
so it could be managed and controlled.
But in the 19th century, no-one could see any way
of using the system that Boole had created
and it languished and was quietly forgotten
when the British Empire began to collapse.
One day, Sandra Paul discovered her husband having sex
in the back of a car with the Marchioness of Londonderry.
It was the final straw
and she decided the marriage would have to end.
She told Robin Douglas-Home that she wanted a divorce,
but he refused...
..so she said that she would seek a petition for cruelty.
It meant that many of the details of their marriage
and the struggles between them would be made public.
And he couldn't bear the thought of going through a divorce,
so he refused to give me a divorce.
He blamed me for...
..dragging the whole thing out in...
Erm... Well, I don't think he blamed me coherently.
He just blamed me because I divorced him
and he couldn't understand that there wasn't any other way.
I... Well, I don't think I was unfair
because it was the only thing I could do,
and I did think that it was hopeless for us to stay in a separated state,
hopeless for me.
I was being selfish. I wanted to be free.
Erm... You had to be fairly ruthless.
Yes, I had to be ruthless in order to be free.
And she insisted on continuing
with this petition for cruelty.
Now, when I received the petition for cruelty,
I can only describe one's feelings to you as if,
you know, a small bomb had gone off inside your head.
Because, erm...
..it chapterised the marriage almost day by day...
..and incidentally, letter by letter, roneoed...
..in the most unpleasant and vicious terms...
..with me as the aggressor and the cruel one.
Five years of one's life...
..say, 70% of which were very happy,
reduced to a great wad of foolscap,
typed out by leering little clerks
in solicitors' offices.
Your letters from the moment you'd met,
typed out, roneoed -
your letters to your mother,
her letters to her mother,
her mother's letters to me.
It was all right, you felt, to be regarded as an adulterer,
but you couldn't bear to be regarded as cruel?
I couldn't bear her to...to...
..put a...a...
..a kind of tombstone on...
..this marriage reading in the way that that petition read.
For men like Robin Douglas-Home, the expectation of power
had been deeply embedded inside their minds,
but as the world had changed around them and real power ebbed away,
they were left with a terrible melancholy
that in some would turn to despair.
A year after the filming, Robin Douglas-Home committed suicide.
HE PLAYS PIANO
MUSIC: Sag Mir Wo Die Blumen Sind by Marlene Dietrich
# Sag mir wo die Blumen sind
# Wo sind sie geblieben?
# Sag mir wo die Blumen sind
# Was ist geschehen?
# Sag mir wo die Blumen sind
# Madchen pfluckten sie geschwind
# Wann wird man je verstehen?
# Sag mir wo die Madchen sind
# Wo sind sie geblieben?
# Sag mir wo die Madchen sind
# Was ist geschehen?
# Sag mir wo die Madchen sind
# Manner nahmen sie geschwind
# Wann wird man je verstehen?
# Sag mir wo die Manner sind
# Wo sind sie geblieben?
# Sag mir wo die Manner sind
# Was ist geschehen?
# Sag mir wo die Manner sind
# Zogen fort, der Krieg beginnt
# Wann wird man je verstehen?
# Wann wird man je verstehen? #
Kerry Thornley had left California
and gone to live in New Orleans, where he worked in a bar.
The movement that he and his friend Greg Hill had started -
Discordianism - was beginning to grow,
spreading by word of mouth.
Like much of the new counterculture, it was against all politics.
It distrusted all the old systems of power - left and right -
because they were just trying to force you
into their version of reality.
Thornley also published his novel
with Lee Harvey Oswald as the central figure.
It was called The Idle Warriors.
But New Orleans was also the city where Lee Harvey Oswald had lived
before the Kennedy assassination.
And as a result, Thornley came to the notice of the man
who was going to be the main creator of the JFK conspiracy theory.
He was the district attorney of New Orleans,
called Jim Garrison.
Garrison said that Oswald had just been part of a giant conspiracy
that included the CIA, big business,
the news media and anti-Castro Cubans,
who, together, had killed the President.
There's no question about that.
There was a conspiracy.
A number of men were involved.
An apparatus which was lethal in nature...
..of which Lee Harvey, Harvey Oswald was a part,
assigned the role, essentially, as decoy.
Now, don't ask me what the organisation is because I can't say.
But the implication, clearly, is the Central Intelligence Agency,
your own security organisation in the United States.
It almost sounds like that, doesn't it?
I have no comment about that.
Jim Garrison believed that the modern democratic system in America
was just a facade,
that behind it was another secret system of power
that really controlled the country.
But you could never discover it through normal means
because it was so deeply hidden.
Garrison wrote a memo to his staff,
explaining how you could uncover this secret world.
He called it Time and Propinquity.
"You didn't bother with meaning or with logic," he said,
"because that will always be hidden."
Instead, you look for patterns,
strange coincidences and links that may seem to have no meaning
but are actually telltale signs on the surface
of the hidden system of power underneath.
This theory was going to have a very powerful effect in the future
because it would lead to a profound shift
in how many people understood the world,
because what it said was that in a dark world of hidden power,
you couldn't expect everything to make sense,
that it was pointless to try and understand the meaning
of why something happened,
because that would always be hidden from you.
What you looked for were the patterns.
And when Garrison read Kerry Thornley's novel,
he saw a pattern.
Not only had Thornley been in the Marines with Oswald
and written a novel about him, but he had come to live in the same city
that Oswald had lived in before the assassination.
And in 1967, Garrison accused Thornley
of being part of the conspiracy.
Thornley was furious.
He knew that Garrison was wrong...
..but he also hated the very idea of conspiracy theories.
He believed that they were one of the ways
those in power controlled you.
Conspiracy theories made you believe that there were hidden forces
that really controlled the world,
and that made you as an individual feel weak and powerless.
Suspicion, he believed, was just another form of control.
Thornley wanted to find ways to free people
from that kind of conditioning that held them back as individuals.
There are ways of deconditioning people,
and this is what I'm interested in.
I'm interested in finding some technique
by which great masses of people
can be broken out of their authoritarian conditioning
all at once, to figure out exactly what that type of enlightenment is,
that type of liberation from authoritarian conditioning is,
and how to achieve it on a wholesale basis.
Thornley was right that most of what Garrison alleged
was complete fantasy.
Despite all the patterns,
he could produce no evidence of a hidden conspiracy.
But what Thornley didn't realise was that at the same time,
there was another very real conspiracy being run
by the American government,
and its aim was to try and do the very same thing
as he wanted to do.
The Central Intelligence Agency was trying to find ways
to wipe the past from people's minds,
to see if they could free them from the conditioning
that had been implanted there.
Psychologists working for the CIA had come to believe
that individuals were far weaker than they had believed...
..and they wanted to see if they could implant
new patterns of thought in their minds.
The image of the human being that was being built up
at that particular time was that there was a great deal
of vulnerability in every human being
and that that vulnerability could be manipulated
to programme somebody to be something
that I wanted them to be
and they didn't want to be...
..that you could manipulate people in such a way
that they could be automatons, if you will,
for whatever your own purposes were.
This was the image that people thought was possible.
The CIA set up a secret project called MKUltra.
It was led by a psychiatrist called Ewen Cameron,
who worked in a hospital in Montreal called the Allan Memorial.
He took patients and, without telling them, experimented
to see if he could wipe what he called "the sick memories"
from their minds.
To do this, he used repeated electroshocks
and massive doses of LSD.
They shipped me up to what they called the Sleep Room,
and they gave me all of these electroconvulsive shock treatments
and megadoses of drugs and LSD and all of that.
And I have no memory of any of that -
nothing of that time at the Allan Memorial
or any of my life previous to that.
All gone. Wiped.
Some members of Discordianism were working at Playboy magazine,
and Thornley decided that he was going to use Playboy magazine
to start an experiment that would make people see how absurd
all conspiracy theories really were.
He called it Operation Mindfuck.
In 1969, he and Greg Hill began Operation Mindfuck
by placing a false letter in the Playboy letters page.
They put it between another letter
asking if gun fanatics had small penises
and one from a man asking about the physical danger
to his testicles from heavy petting.
Thornley's fake letter asked whether all the political assassinations
in America were really being masterminded
by a single secret society,
and the society it named was the Illuminati.
It said that the Illuminati were behind all the chaos
and the fear that was now gripping America.
He and the other Discordians then proceeded to spread this idea
all across America through the counterculture,
in magazines and books and even in plays.
Thornley's aim was to try and break the spell of conspiracy theories
by making people see the absurdity of believing them,
and he had chosen the Illuminati for the experiment
because no-one could possibly believe
that an 18th-century organisation from Bavaria was really,
in the second half of the 20th century,
the secret rulers of the modern world.
It was clearly ridiculous.
Dr Cameron's experiments were a disaster.
His brutal techniques succeeded only
in wiping the minds of those he experimented on.
He then found he could put nothing back.
He totally failed to implant any new memories
or any new ways of seeing the world.
His patients found themselves in a world
that had no meaning any longer.
When I was discharged from the Allan Memorial,
I felt like a...
..like an alien from another world visiting this world.
I knew I was different
and I didn't know how to become like everybody else.
And it was a very lonely, scary place to be.
"This is your husband."
What? What's "husband?"
What's "making love?"
In the world of individualism that was about to come,
psychology was going to play a powerful role
because it said it could help to change
what was inside people's minds.
But what Cameron and the CIA had done
showed, in a dramatic and extreme way, the weakness of this.
They had assumed that most of what people felt came from within them,
and to make them happier,
you just had to alter what was inside their brains.
What was forgotten was the other view -
that what shapes how people feel is the society around them...
..above all, the structure of power that not only controls their lives,
but also how they feel.
And if you want to change the way people feel,
you have to find a way to change that, too.
Memory is wrapped in what society has decided
we should feel like.
"You should cry at funerals."
I found myself not crying at a funeral
and I felt just fine.
And I thought, "Gee, there's something the matter with me.
"I'm not crying. I should cry.
"Everybody else is crying."
But... But there wasn't that...
..that need to.
MUSIC: Recharge & Revolt by The Raveonettes
CROWD SHOUTING
MUSIC CONTINUES
# With a hole in my head
# I looked for you
# Through the trenches of war
# The whole world through
# My desire to leave with you I just can't constrain
# I regret everything I've done so far
# When the pillars of love are blown apart
# I stumble through the rubble and decay
# When I'm terrified, I close my eyes... #
My old man died for this country!
Don't you dare say that to me!
Michael de Freitas decided that he was going to become a revolutionary.
He was going to challenge and expose the corrupt old structures of power
that he believed still haunted and controlled
the minds of the English people, even though their empire was gone.
I can't live in this system.
I don't like it, I don't want it.
I want to destroy everything down to the ground, the lot, ashes.
That's what I want.
MUSIC: Overture (For Other Halfs) by Brian McBride
All three -
Jiang Qing, Michael de Freitas and Kerry Thornley -
knew that their struggle was with the forces
from the old power of the past
that they believed were still lodged in people's minds.
But at the same time, quietly rising up was a new system
that seemed as if it would never have to face that struggle -
because it would be completely free of the past.
The laws of human thought that George Boole had created
had become the central structure of all thinking machines, computers,
because it fitted perfectly with the binary switching system
inside them - either zero or one -
and it was used by the machines to create endless branching pathways
of binary logic called algorithms.
Out of that was going to come the dream of artificial intelligence,
machines that could think independently,
that could then order and manage the world as a rational system,
not driven by the dangerous ideologies of the past.
But back in the 1960s,
as the engineers began to build the first neural networks,
what they had forgotten was that the system of thought
they were creating inside the machines did have its own history,
that it had been born out of a time
when science had become deeply involved in questions
of power and control in the British Empire...
..that what lay behind the computer logic
was the aim of simplifying human thought,
which would finally allow you to colonise the last free outpost -
the human mind.
But unlike the old empires, where power was visible,
this power would be hidden in remote places, in the servers.
But something else from the past
would also find its way into those servers.
In the political and economic chaos of the early 1970s,
conspiracy theories were going to spread like wildfire
through the counterculture.
As they did, the fake conspiracies
about the Illuminati and the secret rulers of the world
that Kerry Thornley thought that no-one could ever believe
began to get mixed up with the true conspiracies like MKUltra.
And more and more people began to follow
Jim Garrison's theory of time and propinquity,
looking for patterns of a hidden power in America,
not for logic or meaning any longer.
And when the internet was created, almost immediately,
those patterns of suspicion would move into the data
and multiply endlessly across the system.
And that dark paranoia, that 200 years before
had spread across the prairies and the mountains
among isolated settlers,
now spread across the virtual world,
among isolated individuals sitting alone in front of their screens...
..and suspicion and distrust crept back into what was going to be
the new system of power.
MUSIC: Who Killed Bambi? by Sex Pistols
# Gentle pretty thing
# Who only had one spring
# You bravely faced the world
# Ready for anything
# I'm happy that you lived
# For your life is mine
# What have I except to cry?
# Spirit never die!
# Birds of the air
# Beasts of the earth
# Overjoyed at Bambi's birth
# They gambolled in the glade
# Who killed Bambi?
# Murder, murder, murder
# Someone should be angry
# The crime of the century
# Who shot little Bambi?
# Never trust a hippy
# I love punky Bambi
# I'll kill to find the killer
# In the rotten roll army
# All the spikey punkers
# Believers in the ruins
# With one big shout, they all cry out
# Who killed Bambi? #
SHOUTING, GLASS SMASHING
Have you ever been to a labour exchange?
You know, the last time I went there,
I was paid my money by a Sikh.
A Sikh, sitting there with his turban and a bangle
on his hand.
Now, I was three years with the Indian army in India.
I was three years in India in civilian life.
Erm, I got on well with Sikhs, Hindus,
the whole lot of them.
But to walk into a British labour exchange
and find you're being paid out your money by a Sikh...
These are the people, that in my small way, I helped train
and educate...
..erm... To go into labour exchange is not
a very edifying experience at all.
You know, you change into your old clothes to go
to the labour exchange, you know?
But you've got to go.
Edgar Mittelholzer had come to England in the 1950s
from British Guiana.
But he had become a best-selling novelist.
What Mittelholzer wrote about was violence...
..the violence and the racism that had been at the heart
of the European empires.
Mittelholzer believed that it still haunted the minds
of those who had ruled the empires.
One of his most famous stories, My Bones and My Flute,
is about a group of colonialists who travel up a river
into the jungle in Guyana.
They're searching for the remains of a giant slave rebellion
in the past, guided by an old manuscript.
But anyone who reads the manuscript starts to hear the distant sound
of a flute...
..and they change.
They become possessed by something that is reaching out
from the jungle and working its way into their minds.
It is the anger and the fear of the slave owner who put
down the rebellion.
And it will not let them escape.
And Mittelholzer himself became angry with England.
He saw it as a decaying, corrupted country.
I feel we've reached the stage, you know, when we have become
so soft, you know, so effete, in other words,
so effete, that we feel that, well, even criminals...
..erm, must be mollycoddled.
And you feel so strongly that you are prepared to go
as far as to say that... Yes. ..there are human beings
who should be categorised as vermin.
As vermin, exactly, quite.
Anyone who is guilty of violence on the human person and property,
should be considered as human vermin, and eradicated.
I know it's a rather, it's a violent thing to advocate,
but I can't see any other cure to the crime problem.
Every evening, he sat with his wife in his house in Surrey,
listening to the music of Wagner.
Until one night, Mittelholzer walked up the hill by his house,
poured paraffin over himself...
..and set himself alight.
He burned to death.
The anger and the fear had reached out to the colonised too.
In 1966, engineers monitoring Chinese television
from a mountain in Hong Kong, began to realise that something unusual
was happening in Beijing.
China was sealed off from the rest of the world.
But what they saw were hundreds of thousands of people streaming
in from other cities and the countryside.
By August 11th, 1.5 million people had assembled
in Tiananmen Square.
Most of them were students or schoolchildren.
Then, Mao Zedong appeared on the balcony above them.
SINGING AND CHANTING
Mao Zedong and his wife, Jiang Qing, had unleashed
a new force in China.
These were what Mao called, "The little devils of youth."
He told them that they were going to save the revolution.
Their job was to go and seek out the demons and the monsters
who were corrupting the revolution.
"No-one should be safe," he said, "They should all be torn
"down and smashed to pulp."
The new revolutionaries gave themselves a name,
the Red Guards.
Jiang Qing now had great power.
She saw herself as equal to Mao.
But she was convinced that the threat to the revolution
also came from inside people's minds.
She knew that even though China had gone through a revolution,
little had changed inside the heads of millions of the people -
including those in power.
They still believed in a rigid hierarchy.
She had been scorned as a woman
by the other revolutionaries around Mao.
They had done anything they could to stop her.
Jiang Qing had rewritten old Chinese operas into epic melodramas
about the need to challenge and destroy the old order.
All the old figures of authority were banished.
Instead, the ordinary people, including women,
took centre stage.
They were performed to millions of young Red Guards,
and in talks before the performances,
Jiang Qing told the audience how what they were about to watch
were heroes awakening
and realising that they could take control.
MUSIC PLAYS
Till today, I still vividly remember the first time
I saw the revolutionary play.
I was about 14 or 13 years old...
..and there was a rush of emotion, of identity.
I was so excited.
Suddenly...
I saw those plays after Jiang Qing's talk that night.
And suddenly what she was saying made sense to me,
that there was a fundamental difference
between the revolutionary art and the traditional art.
There was something in the play
about the working-class emotions and working-class world outlook,
and just the flamboyance of the working-class figure
on stage, moved me.
That is my society. That's my life.
That's the people I see. That's the people I live with.
And they're on stage.
Mao and Jiang Qing suspended all schools and universities,
which released 120 million students,
who were then sent out to find and destroy
the demons that were hiding among those in authority.
TRANSLATION: Our teachers were often paraded through the streets,
and we made them chant, "I'm a demon, I'm a devil.
"I deserve to die."
That's the song, and they had to sing it.
And they all sang.
Whoever didn't, got beaten up - some very badly.
We used our belts to whip them.
Some people used sticks.
And the mother of this teacher was pushed over a bridge
and fell to her death.
SINGING
Horst Mahler had been born in what was now East Germany.
His father had been a fervent Nazi and an anti-Semite.
In 1945,
his family fled across Germany from the approaching Red Army.
Then his father committed suicide.
Mahler grew up in West Berlin,
and everything was buried.
DRIVER: Bitte, alle aussteigen.
In 1964, Mahler joined a new group called the APO -
the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition.
They knew that many of those in charge of the country
had been senior members of the Nazi Party.
But no-one talked about it.
They wanted to expose the Nazi crimes of those in charge...
CHANTING
..and challenge their control of the country.
There was the memory knocking at the door,
and we asked our parents and our grandfathers,
"What did you do all this time?
"Did you resist or had you been a little Nazi?
"Or had you been an opportunist?"
HE CLEARS HIS THROAT And...
..this discussion was blocked by the elder generation.
And so it became hostile.
SHOUTING
The student movement was astonished by the violent reaction
of the German government.
And Horst Mahler and other radicals began to think that the problem
was far deeper than just individual Nazis.
That maybe the whole Nazi system had also survived...
..and was hiding behind the facade of modern capitalism.
They argued that the very system of industrial rationality
and bureaucratic control that had made the Nazi state
so efficient, had simply mutated.
It had been taken up by the victors -
above all by America -
and was now being used to run the new global capitalism
and the multinational corporations
that were ruthlessly exploiting what was called the Third World.
Anything that stood in the system's way was bombed or burnt...
..with weapons created by the same rational industrial techniques
that made the mass-consumer goods.
But the people in the West couldn't see this,
because they have been led into a dream world
that used mass consumerism and sexualized imagery
to entrance and distract everyone.
Und zauberhaft schon.
Die randlosen Strumpfhosen...
In reality, it was an iron cage
designed to look like an open and free welfare state -
a full state of peace that was built really on horror and war.
We were convinced that our situation here,
the welfare state...
..is only possible - and a result -
- by the exploitation of the Third World.
And we said we must disturb this peace,
this false peace in our country
in order to show the responsibility of us,
that it is our task to implement sabotage
in the centres of imperialism.
Hey, black power.
What's the reaction to your arrest, Mr Brown?
Of course, racist America has done it again.
But that's not going to end the burning in Detroit, brother,
because we built the country up and we'll burn it down,
honkies and all.
Mr Brown, did you tell them to burn down that school?
Be serious, I ain't got to tell black folks what to burn.
Did you tell them to shoot Lady Bird?
Did I tell them to burn down Detroit?
Did I tell America to bring black people here?
Did you tell them to shoot at Lady Bird?
I say, if they give me a gun and tell me to shoot my enemy,
I might shoot you.
Where have you been since the other night, Mr Brown? OK, let's go.
Oh, well.
Nonviolence is OK,
but you get nowhere with nonviolence.
I like violence.
Malcolm X started but didn't finish.
Malcolm X said, you know, the idea.
He rooted it in the minds of many blacks.
He really started the ball rolling.
You feel that violence is necessary in order to get rid of...
..what you would call the oppression?
It wouldn't get rid of it.
But it will open, you know, some of whiteys eyes to say,
"Well, you know, we're not joking.
"We really mean what we say."
Do you find yourself really hating white people?
Hm, yes.
Some people hold grudges, and I do.
Look how they treat...
How many floors did my great-grandmother scrub, you know?
How many babies did she take care of that weren't hers?
You know, stuff like that.
And I'm just one of those people that holds things.
Alice Faye Williams had been born in North Carolina.
She had run away from home when she was young
because she was frightened of her violent father,
and she came to New York when she was 15.
She managed to get a place to study at the School of Performing Arts.
Then, one day, on 125th Street in Harlem,
she listened to a speech by Bobby Seale,
one of the leaders of the Black Panthers.
The Black Panthers believed that the only way to stop racism
in America was for black people to get power.
Simply changing the law was not enough.
The anger and the fear remained hidden away
in millions of people's minds.
The solution was Black Power,
and the first person to articulate this
was Stokely Carmichael
on a civil rights march in Mississippi
on one day when the more moderate Martin Luther King was absent.
So I just made a speech building up to it,
building up, building up, building up,
showing that it wasn't a question of morality.
It wasn't a question of being good or bad.
It was simply a question of power,
and the way black people had no power,
and we had to have some power.
Only type of power we could have is Black Power.
Black Power.
We want Black Power.
CROWD CHEERS
We want Black Power. Black Power!
We want Black Power. We want Black Power.
CROWD CHANTS: Black Power!
We want Black Power. Black Power!
That's right, that's what we want, Black Power.
They responded immediately, in a healthy manner.
Dr King came back the next day,
but it was too late then.
Black Power had been established.
Alice Williams decided to join the Black Panthers.
She became a member of a new chapter that had been set up in Harlem,
and she changed her name to Afeni Shakur.
She later explained what the Panthers meant for her.
"For the first time," she said, "there was now something I could do
"with all this aggression and all this fear inside me.
"The Panther Party at that time took my rage
"and channelled it against THEM,
"instead of against us.
"They educated my mind and gave me direction.
"And with that direction came hope."
CHANTING: We want justice! We want justice!
OFFICER SPEAKS INDISTINCTLY
There's a line in there, now. Fucking get her out of here.
I'm trying.
PROTESTER SCREAMS
Watch out behind you now.
You men! He's trying to...
GUNSHOTS
HORN HONKS
See anybody?
Oh, there were...
I saw in the precinct a number of men and women
being brought in.
I had contact with some of the women
when we were in the precinct,
and they were also beaten.
Some had black eyes, some had swollen lips and so forth.
And from what most of them said, they were just walking
along the street and most of them were pushed or hit with a club.
And when they protested the fact that they were being hit
for nothing, then they were beaten and arrested.
We teach children that the policeman is a friend.
In Harlem, however - although I know that there are policemen
who are friendly and kind and decent and fair -
this type of policeman is a rare thing.
Eh?
You don't scare me, mate.
I do shows in aid of people like you.
ROARING LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
Michael de Freitas had been a gangster.
He had worked as an enforcer
for the notorious slum landlord Peter Rachman.
But now he wanted to be a revolutionary.
Then, one day, he met
the American black leader Malcolm X,
who was on a tour of England.
They began to travel around the country together.
When they arrived in Birmingham, the hotel receptionist thought
that Michael de Freitas was Malcolm X's brother,
and he called him Michael X.
De Freitas decided that, in the future,
this was going to be his revolutionary name
and he was going to lead a revolution in Britain.
Michael X soon became famous.
I would hate to be described as a politician
because they are all such liars and thieves.
If I'm going to deal in the realms of that type of public relations,
I'd rather think of myself in terms of being a statesman,
which is an art that this country has long since forgotten,
like we have no statesmen today.
I'm probably the only one in the country.
Unfortunately, we find that the people of pale pigmentation
are people who are so barbaric - like, for instance, right now,
this country, which is run by those type of people,
have got more weapons of destruction
to create...to destroy the entire world.
And they are so savage, they are building even more.
You see, the British are such a strange people.
Many of Michael X's supporters were the young white radicals
who had moved into Notting Hill,
into the very houses that he and the gangster Peter Rachman
had run ten years before.
Because Michael was an outsider, the white radicals believed
that he could see the system for what it really was.
Like all revolutionaries before them,
they had tried to appeal to the white working class
and get them to rise up against the system.
But no-one seemed to be interested.
And what we've been talking
about here today is the problem of racialism
and the problem of the attack by the government
and by the employers on working people's conditions.
The radicals decided that this was because the ordinary people
had been brainwashed by the media and by consumerism
and turned into what their theory called one-dimensional creatures.
Which meant that they were the wrong kind of person
to start a revolution with.
Their whole mind is, you know, like a cabbage. They're suppressed,
they can't do exactly what they want,
they haven't got any freedom,
they haven't got any freedom to do exactly what they want
under the system. I mean, we certainly do. What is freedom?
Well, being able to express yourself in whichever way you feel is right.
But I think it's not only the system that's wrong.
I think it's the people that's wrong.
JOYFUL SINGING
Would you be interested in working every night for me?
Um... Yes, possibly every night, yes.
Fine. Well, you know, if you do us well, we'll get the band to play it.
Anything in particular you'd like us to play?
Anything at all. Anything at all?
Would you? Yeah, if you'd like to come...
# When I was waiting in the bar, where were you?
# When I was pouring you a drink, where were you?
# When I was crying at home in bed, where were you?
# I wanna talk to you all night Do you like me?
# I wanna find out about your life And do you like me?
# Could you ever be my wife? Do you like me? #
MUSIC DISTORTS INTO EERIE DRONES
But one evening, after making a speech in Reading,
Michael X was arrested...
..and he was sent to prison for ten months
for inciting racial hatred.
The MP Enoch Powell had also made a speech at the same time,
violently attacking immigrants.
He wasn't charged and he carried on being an MP...
CHEERS AND APPLAUSE
..which Michael X said rather proved his point
about the racism underlying the country.
GUNFIRE
WHIRRING
BELL RINGS
SHOUTING
YELLING, GUNSHOTS
I'm telling you! Don't make me come walking...
Certainly no-one is going to tell you not to think
what you honestly believe, but I think maybe...
..maybe you should re-examine
a little bit the things that you believe, huh?
Think about it.
In the Cold War, the very idea of the individual
and how the individual self worked had become political,
because it was what defined the United States
against the collective ideology of Russia.
I think maybe...
..maybe you should re-examine a little bit
the things that you believe, huh?
What concerned many psychologists, though,
was that the Second World War had revealed how frightening
and deceptive human beings could be.
Particularly in Nazi Germany,
where ordinary people, who had apparently been good citizens,
had indulged in the most terrible horrors.
And psychologists started to examine what really went on
inside people's minds,
trying to find ways of bypassing
the conscious explanations that humans gave,
because those explanations could be deceptive.
They wanted to find a way of getting directly
at what was going on inside the brain.
One of the key figures was a psychologist called
Dr Eckhard Hess.
He had begun his career recording and analysing
animal behaviour on film.
Now he did the same with human beings.
Dr Hess had discovered that the pupils in the eyes
of individuals reacted dramatically
when they were shown different kinds of images.
The changes had nothing to do with the changes in the light -
they came from within the human being.
And Dr Hess believed that they gave you a way of seeing
the hidden emotional responses that were going on inside the mind.
Feelings that the individual might not want to tell you about...
..or even be aware of.
You were looking directly at the brain.
Really, since the...
..the eye is very, very intimately a part of the brain,
embryologically and anatomically,
it is almost the same as though they were a piece of the brain
sticking out, behaving,
and all the world is there to be able to see it.
And if that's so, what ought to be reflected or mirrored
in the eye...
..is really the behaviour of the brain.
SHE SPEAKS MANDARIN
Jiang Qing was now the most powerful woman in the world.
She was in charge of giant cohorts of Red Guards
that she'd guided and told who to attack and destroy.
High-up members of the Communist Party were seized
and paraded in front of tens of thousands of screaming people
and forced to confess to thought crimes
against the revolution.
If they didn't, they were beaten and killed.
But in reality, Jiang Qing had lost control.
The revolution had never really changed the structure of power
in China,
and what she and Mao Zedong had unleashed was a vast anger
and resentment against the elites that was now bursting out
and overwhelming the country.
In Beijing, there were mass killings,
with bodies being thrown down wells
or intercommunal burial pits.
In Shanghai, hundreds of those targeted by the Red Guards
committed suicide.
APPLAUSE
in the West. But Jiang Qing had become famous
A feminist writer from America, called Roxane Witke,
came to Beijing to interview her.
But as she talked to Jiang Qing, Witke began to realise
that something else was also going on,
that Jiang Qing was using her new power
to avenge herself and all those who had dismissed her
or patronised her in the past.
Jiang Qing also had a demon inside her.
One of the main themes of her life was avenging herself against men
who wronged her - politically, mainly -
when she was in her 20s.
And she did not strike back against them
until the time of the Cultural Revolution,
some 20 years later.
They still had refused to give her access to the masses
and to allow her to work.
And she finally destroyed them.
How?
They were removed from their posts,
they were humiliated before the people,
placards were put over their chests,
they were dragged before the masses.
They were humiliated. They were destroyed.
Jiang Qing also turned on everyone who, in Shanghai in the 1930s,
had held her film career back.
Studio heads, directors
and journalists were dismissed and beaten up.
But the worst was saved for the film star Li Lili.
They had starred together in Bloodshed On Wolf Mountain.
Jiang Qing had always believed
that Li Lili had deliberately upstaged her.
THEY SPEAK MANDARIN
Now, Li Lili and her husband were seized by Red Guards.
Jiang Qing ordered them to be tortured.
Li Lili survived...
..but her husband couldn't bear it,
and he committed suicide.
We have warned every person in the world
not to visit Palestine
because Palestine is not a tourist attraction.
It's a battlefield,
and it is our land.
Anybody who'll get killed or injured in Palestine
would be carrying his own responsibility.
Horst Mahler and a group of other German revolutionaries
secretly went to a Palestinian training camp in Jordan.
They had decided to train in urban guerrilla warfare.
But things didn't go well from the very start.
One of the leaders of the group, Andreas Baader,
insisted on having mixed sleeping quarters.
Then the female members of the group started to sunbathe on the roof.
The commander of the camp told them to stop.
Overhead!
Baader argued with him.
The anti-imperialist struggle and sexual emancipation, he said,
must go hand in hand.
The commander refused.
Baader put it more bluntly.
"Fucking and shooting," he said, "are the same thing."
Then Horst Mahler found that the fedayeen fighters
in the camp had brought in pictures of Hitler.
They pointed at them and said, "Good man,"
because he had killed the Jews.
"That was very hard for us," Mahler later said,
"because we had a feeling of guilt about the Jews.
"We were very upset."
In the end, the Germans went on strike because they weren't
being given enough bullets each day to shoot with.
So the commander stormed their house and threw them out.
They came back to West Germany,
helped by the East German Stasi,
who saw it as a way of destabilising the West.
And the revolutionaries set out to use their training
to force the West German state to reveal its true fascist face.
Afeni Shakur was now a full-time member
of the Black Panther chapter in New York.
She was certain that the only solution in America
was violent uprising.
She spent her time writing poems calling for revolution.
But the problem was that she and many of the others
in her cell didn't know what to do to make this happen.
They watched enviously as other Black Panthers on the West Coast
fought running battles with the police and the military.
GUNFIRE
All we have to say is, all power to the people,
and you can jail a revolutionary
but you sure can't jail a revolution.
Baby, you're gonna have some dealing to do,
cos niggers ain't gonna stop until they either get freedom
or destroy everything that they run across.
The question of who to attack in New York
got more and more complicated.
Some of the Panthers argued that they should target the ruthless
landlords who made them live in rotting apartments,
and the bankers who refused to lend blacks money
so they could never escape from the slums.
These, they said, were the agents of imperialist control.
But in New York,
the majority of landlords and bankers were Jewish.
And we are being exploited by people who are not...
..do not live in our colonies, you see, or in our communities,
who come into our communities and exploit us every day, you see,
and they take the money back to their communities.
So this is like a colonial imperialism
in all content, you see.
And the people who exploit us in our immediate communities,
particularly in New York City, are Zionist Jews.
Afeni Shakur's group came up with a plan.
They were going to plant bombs
in big department stores like Macy's...
..and they would also bomb the Bronx Botanical Gardens
and attack local police stations.
But as they developed the plan, Afeni Shakur began to worry.
She didn't want to kill civilians...
..and she felt they were being bullied into it
by one of their group.
He was one of the founder members of the cell,
whose revolutionary name was Yedwa Sudan.
And Afeni Shakur started to be suspicious.
She wondered if he might really be an undercover policeman.
Shakur told another member of the group about her suspicions,
who then went and confronted Yedwa Sudan.
Sudan immediately pulled out a gun,
fired two bullets into the table in front of him and denied it.
He said that Afeni Shakur
was just being a typical emotional woman.
And the group believed him, not her.
When Michael X came out of jail,
he found that the world had completely changed,
but not in the way he had hoped.
The middle-class radicals who, only a year before,
had been his most fervent supporters,
suddenly didn't want to know him any more.
In Notting Hill, no-one talked of violent revolution
or of bringing down the corrupt power structure.
Instead, a new group had turned up.
They looked like young radicals,
but they had a rather different agenda.
# And there's no more war
# Cos there's no more world. #
Hundreds of student volunteers from all over the country
had come to do a massive survey
of everyone who lived in Notting Hill.
It was the beginning of what was called community action.
They were going to use the data to create neighbourhood centres,
which they said would be a different way of empowering the local people.
Parts of Notting Hill are closed off
from the general mainstream of society,
treated differently from society,
sometimes treated as a social dustbin,
sometimes treated as a ghetto.
Hello.
Now, I think you've got...?
We've got the lighting, we pay for it ourself.
And you pay for it yourself? Yes, and the heating.
Cleaning. This doesn't really apply to you, this applies to
TENANT LAUGHS other people...
..in other sorts of rented accommodations.
We do that ourselves. You do that yourself? Yes.
Also room service doesn't really apply either, I imagine.
No.
But soon, many of the local black residents who were involved
with the project resigned...
..because power seemed to remain firmly with the white professionals.
And we go in, in an orderly fashion
and no damage to the property at all, please.
Well, what made me resign is because I don't think
that enough local people
were being involved, is it?
And by local people, I mean West Indians.
Students can't do much.
They're relegated to a role
of just getting information.
Isn't that worthwhile?
Well, I suppose it's worthwhile,
but it depends on how the information
will be used afterwards.
The aim of Black Power had been that people would organise
themselves so they could stand up against those who ruled them.
Michael X realised that what was happening now in Notting Hill
was the opposite.
People were being treated as subjects,
to be counted and measured...
..and managed.
He became increasingly cynical about the liberals' real intentions.
These places always have fantastic space.
Oh, this is a tremendous place if you've got the money.
If you want to have a party or something. A party, yeah.
A few years ago, you were reported to have said
that whites who claim to help you
are out to kill you.
Do you, um, still believe that?
Yes.
I'm thinking, when I said that, I was referring to people
who are described as white liberals.
They are some of the most vicious
people I find in this country,
for the simple reason... Anywhere, not just in this country.
Because they're the kind of people who come to black neighbourhoods,
ostensibly to help black people.
UPBEAT MUSIC
Michael X had come to believe that the talk of revolution
had just been empty rhetoric that disguised something else.
The new groups might look like radicals
and dance to black music,
but really they were the children of the colonialists
who had run the Empire.
And they had no intention of giving up their power.
That old system of power was simply mutating,
morphing into a new form
that camouflaged itself in radicalism...
..but still would manage and control.
Michael X was an ambitious man
who had badly wanted political power.
I don't see anything to be terrified about, about powerful black people.
I'm a pretty powerful black man.
I'm the most powerful black man in Europe.
But now he saw that he was never going to get it.
So he decided that he, too, would revert
to the old forms of power that he knew well -
extortion and violence.
He set up a new organisation called the Black House.
It deliberately excluded whites.
He still talked of violent revolution,
but really it was a front for taking over drug-dealing
in parts of London.
He also persuaded John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who had shaved
off their hair, to donate it and a large amount of money
to the Black House.
Michael X took the money and pocketed it for himself.
Michael was putting every single cent he could get in his own pocket.
He didn't care about black people.
What did they think of him in the end, when it failed?
Well, they thought he was just a cheap con man.
They... They...
..lost faith in Michael
in the end,
but he was just playing his games, you know.
And why do you think he did that?
Because Michael doesn't
believe in Black Power.
Michael is just on a power trip
for, you know, for his own benefit.
Michael doesn't like black people
because Michael is half white.
In a short time, I'm going to ask you
to put your face up against that face piece and look in this box
while I ask you to solve some multiplication problems
in your head.
The problems will be relatively simple.
They'll give be given to you verbally,
and I will ask you to give me the answer verbally back.
Give me only the answer. Once you have given me the answer,
dismiss the problem from your mind and we'll go on to a next one.
Many psychologists had begun to take Dr Hess's experiments
with the pupils of the eye further.
They were fascinated by the idea that there might be other forces
inside the mind that people themselves weren't aware of.
One of them was a young psychologist studying
in America, called Daniel Kahneman.
His fascination with the complexity of the mind had come
from a moment of terror when he was a child,
living in Nazi-occupied France during the Second World War.
One day, he had been stopped by an SS officer.
Kahneman was a Jew,
and the SS was in charge of sending people to the death camps.
He was convinced that he was about to be sent away to be killed.
But the SS man picked him up, kissed him
and showed him pictures of his own son in Germany.
Kahneman decided that the human mind was very strange
and full of contradictory impulses.
17 times 19.
Now, he, along with other psychologists
inspired by Dr Hess, studied the pupils in people's eyes
as they gave them all kinds of problems to solve
while distracting them with music and noise.
223. CLICKING
They were trying to probe further into the human brain,
to see how it responded to the world outside
in ways that the individual wasn't aware of.
But as Kahneman and the others watched the individuals
in their laboratories, isolated from the society outside,
they were led down a very strange path,
that in the age when the individual self was going to become
the central focus, from politics through to consumerism,
the scientists were going to come to the conclusion
that maybe the conscious self wasn't fully in control of what humans did.
35 years later, Kahneman was going to be given the Nobel Prize
for a theory that began with his work in the 1960s.
He would come to believe that what we think of as the self
is really just a small part of something else
hidden inside our brains - a much larger part of the brain
that actually experiences the world outside.
But that experience makes no sense -
it is just an ongoing, chaotic rush of biochemical data
that flashes up and fades away.
And what humans think of as their self
is actually an accessory that tries to make sense
of this chaotic mass of incoming data.
But, to do that, it has to simplify
and turn that data into stories that are sometimes so simplified
that they bear little relationship to the reality outside.
It gives people the feeling that they are in control,
but that is just a comforting illusion.
Kahneman's theory was going to have far-reaching influence
beyond psychology.
Because the implication of what he was saying
was that you could never change people's behaviour
by appealing to them rationally.
And, in a strange way,
Kahneman was saying the same thing as the left-wing revolutionaries.
Human beings did live in a simplified dream world.
But what he was saying
was that there was nothing you could do about that.
And in an age of individualism,
when you could no longer order people about,
the only solution was to keep them in that dream world
and to make sure the dream world was safe and happy.
The idea of appealing to them rationally
and changing the world...
..was pointless.
SHE SPEAKS MANDARIN
HE GROANS
ECHOING
By now, China was in a state of almost civil war.
Different groups of armed Red Guards were fighting running battles
with each other in all the major cities.
But Jiang Qing still believed
that real power was almost within her grasp.
She had destroyed the one man who was seen as Mao's successor,
Liu Shaoqi.
CHANTING
Red Guards took Liu from his house,
and he was beaten up and imprisoned.
Everyone, including children,
were told that he, too, was a demon.
Then suddenly, Mao turned on Jiang Qing.
At a public meeting of those in charge
of the Cultural Revolution, he told her,
"You are someone who has grandiose aims
"but puny abilities,
"great ambition, but little talent."
Jiang Qing realised that she was being dropped.
In her operas, Jiang Qing had gone back into China's past.
Her aim had been to rework them, to express a new kind of revolution.
But, in reality, she had reawakened a dark and poisonous violence
that had lurked under the surface of China for hundreds of years.
It was driven by a resentment of the rigid hierarchies
that the revolution had not really changed.
Mao had not given her or anyone else guidance about what to do
with the fury that she had summoned up.
And now she knew why.
He had simply been using her - and the violence that she created -
as a way of destroying all opposition to him.
He had no other vision of how to solve the old divisions
and resentments in China.
His only aim had been to get rid of all his rivals in the party.
Jiang Qing had been betrayed yet again.
GUNSHOTS
GUNFIRE
The members of the Red Army Faction were now planting bombs
and robbing banks all across West Germany.
They announced that they had now become Maoists,
followers of Mao Zedong,
and they were going to awaken the popular masses.
The government were desperate to capture them,
and they turned to a man who said he knew how to find them.
He was called Horst Herold.
He was the head of a tiny federal crime investigation unit.
It had no real power,
because any national police system was prohibited by law
to stop Nazism from ever re-emerging.
But Herold insisted that the only way
to catch the terrorists hidden in the cities
was to reintroduce control from the centre.
His solution was to use a computer,
because there was no law to stop that.
Working day and night inside a protected complex,
Herold created a giant computer network
that monitored the movements of millions of people.
He also fed into the computer vast amounts of data,
not just about the terrorists themselves,
but others who, in his words, represented a danger -
individuals the data showed might become terrorists in the future.
From all this, Herold created what he called logical sequences -
patterns drawn from the data
that predicted where the terrorists might be hiding in the cities.
What he had invented was a new rational bureaucracy,
working from the centre, in which information was control.
It was the start of mass electronic surveillance.
And it caught the terrorists.
INDISTINCT CONVERSATION
GERMAN SPOKEN OVER TANNOY
GUNFIRE
GUNFIRE CONTINUES
But Horst Herold was not just an unthinking technocrat.
By studying all the data, he had, he believed, come to understand
that the terrorists were just a tiny part of something much bigger
that was happening all across the world -
something that those in power did not yet comprehend.
And, in 1973, he made an extraordinary speech
that laid out the world that he saw coming.
The violence and the horror that the terrorists created, he said,
did not just happen because of something evil or sick
inside their heads.
It was a reaction to the new system of power
that was rising up across the world.
It was the system that the radicals had identified in the 1960s -
the new global networks of multinational corporations
and international finance
that they believed were ruthlessly exploiting the world.
If you want to get rid of the terrorism, Herold said,
there are two alternatives.
You either use political power
to change and reform that global system.
Or you decide to systematically control the people,
and their anger and their discontent.
But, to do that, you would have to create surveillance networks
like the one he had built, but on a global scale.
In Notting Hill, all the politics had gone.
The counterculture had transformed completely
into a new kind of consumerism, with self-expression at its heart.
Michael X left London in disgust and he went back to Trinidad.
He moved into a large house hidden away in the suburbs.
He said that he was going to set up a new radical organisation
called the University of the Alternative,
but it was clear that he was in a manic state of mind
and increasingly paranoid.
Then, one night, the compound burned down,
and Michael X disappeared.
The police found a hidden grave in the garden.
In it was the body of one of Michael X's last disciples,
Gale Benson, the daughter of a conservative MP.
She had discovered that Michael X's real plan was to grow marijuana
and export it to the United States,
so he had ordered a group of his men to kill her.
He told one of them, Steve Yeates,
that she was an undercover agent from the CIA.
She was seized from behind and stabbed several times
across the body with a knife.
She was struggling very violently.
And Steve Yeates, who wasn't even supposed to be part
of this particular operation, became impatient.
He grabbed a cutlass,
which in these parts is a long knife used for cutting sugar cane,
and plunged it straight into her neck.
Well, that was the fatal blow.
The men then piled stones on top of her
and filled in the rest of the grave.
Sometime later, Malik phoned the house to see what the situation was,
and Steve Yeates simply told him, "The tree is planted."
Michael X fled to Guyana.
He then headed south, away from the towns,
down a small trail, past mining camps.
His aim was to get to the river
and take a boat upriver into the jungle,
where he would be safe.
It was the same jungle that Edgar Mittelholzer had described
in his story about the ghosts from the colonial past.
But there was one person who was about to show that,
even in the growing mood of paranoia and defeat,
an individual who believed in the idea of revolution
could take on the power of the state and defeat it.
One morning, armed police stormed into Afeni Shakur's apartment
and arrested her.
All the other members of her cell were also arrested.
They were charged with what the government said
was a giant plan to destroy "those elements of society,
"which the defendants call the power structure".
It included attacking police stations
and planning to bomb five large department stores
and the Bronx Botanical Gardens.
They became known as the Panther 21.
Their trial was held in a state of paranoia
about further attacks by the Panthers.
But it also caused a sensation
when it was revealed that three of the founding members of the group
had been undercover police officers.
What was stranger was that some of those officers
seemed to have been unaware that
there were other undercover agents in the cell.
They were also the most active members of the group.
"We had to organise everything,"
one of the undercover agents explained at the trial,
because everyone else in the group was off doing
what they called "their own shit".
DRUMS SOUND MILITARY MARCH
The prosecution claimed that the group had been inspired
by violent revolutionary propaganda,
and in particular by the film The Battle Of Algiers,
made about the Algerian struggle against French colonialism.
# Hasta manana... #
They showed the film in the court.
# No te retardes
# Mi vida
# Hasta manana, Rebecca
# Espero que tu no vas a olvidar. #
SCREAMING
Unlike all the other Panthers,
Afeni Shakur chose to defend herself,
and at the end of the trial,
she cross-examined the leading undercover agent.
He was the man she had suspected from the start,
Yedwa Sudan.
His real name was Ralph White.
A journalist who was in the courtroom
wrote a book that described what happened.
She started by getting White to admit
that, really, most of the inspiration for the plots
came from the undercover agents.
Not only had they continually pushed for the violence
and suggested the targets,
but they had also arranged to buy the dynamite
off yet another undercover agent.
They had also arranged for the cars to transport the dynamite.
That, really, the plot to attack America
had been created and driven by the American authorities.
But then Afeni Shakur went further.
She talked to White in the courtroom not as a police officer,
but as a comrade that she had spent 18 months with,
and asked him about the activism
that they had done together in the community.
He said that he thought what they had done
was "powerful, inspiring and," he said, "beautiful".
She asked if he had misrepresented the Panthers to his police bosses.
He said yes.
She asked if he had betrayed the community.
He said yes.
When the jury was sent out,
they talked for 40 minutes, came back
and acquitted all the defendants.
It was a powerful example
of how an individual could challenge those in power...
..and win.
But, at the same time, the revelations at the trial
of how the Panthers had been penetrated and manipulated
fed the growing paranoia that was tearing the radical movement apart.
MUSIC: Violent by Tupac
RAPID GUNFIRE
# They claim that I'm violent just cos I refuse to be silent
# These hypocrites are havin' fits cos I'm no buyin' it, defyin' it
# Envious because I will rebel against any oppressor
# And this is known as self-defence
# I show no mercy They claim that I'm a lunatic
# But when the shit gets thick, I'm the one you go and get
# Don't look confused The truth is so plain to see
# Cos I'm the nigga that you sell-outs are ashamed to be
# In every Jeep and every car, brothers stomp this
# I'm never ignorant Getting goals accomplished
# The Underground Railroad on an up rise
# This time the truth's gettin' told Heard enough lies
# I told 'em fight back, attack on society
# If this is violence, then violent's what I gotta be
# If you investigate
# You'll find out where it's comin' from
# Look through our history America's the violent one. #
All four - Jiang Qing, Afeni Shakur,
Michael X and the German revolutionaries
had all set out to try and confront their societies
and change the structure of power.
But all of them, in different ways, had unleashed violence
that was lurking underneath those societies.
The roots of that violence lay back in the past,
in anger and resentment against those in power
who had made their different countries rich and powerful,
but to do that had ruthlessly exploited others...
..and had kept much of the spoils for themselves.
The violence had burst out in different ways
across whole societies, among groups,
and inside the revolutionaries' own heads.
But all of them became overwhelmed by the paranoia and suspicion
and the horror that resulted.
And all of them had failed in their aims.
Now, those in charge of the societies
wanted to get rid of that violence, to wipe it and hide it away.
And, in Germany, the revolutionaries were going to help them do it.
In 1976, two of the remaining German revolutionaries
helped Palestinians hijack an Air France plane.
They flew it to Entebbe, in Uganda.
What happened next shocked the world.
The terrorists took the hostages into the departure hall.
Then they began to separate the Israeli passengers
from the non-Israelis.
The Israelis were the ones who would be executed
if the plane was stormed.
To the other radicals, watching from inside prisons in Germany,
who dreamed of revolution,
it seemed as if those dreams had now led them
to behave exactly as the Nazis had done.
Was it frightening when you realised that that was happening?
Yeah, of course. Awfully frightening.
This... One of the main points in the development -
the awareness that we are from the same...
..stuff as the fascists were.
We understood something,
we understood that fascism
is a component in all of us.
But we don't know how to handle this contradiction.
We don't have any way to live with this evil part in ourselves.
GUNFIRE
The Israelis mounted a rescue at Entebbe.
The hostages were saved, but the terrorists were killed.
But the Germans' behaviour in the hijack
had an incredibly powerful effect on radicals and liberals
all across the West.
Three years before, the man who had been chasing the terrorists,
Horst Herold, had argued that the violence
did not just come from inside them...
..that they were reacting
to something that was happening in the world.
But now the revolutionaries and many of their supporters
began to argue that maybe the violence was not in the system,
it was inside them.
A year later, a group of their supporters captured
and killed a leading industrialist called Hanns Martin Schleyer.
He had also been a leading Nazi in the war.
At the same time,
three of the leading revolutionaries killed themselves in prison.
In an extraordinary moment, on one day in October 1977,
two funerals were held in the same city, Stuttgart.
One was for the revolutionaries.
Hundreds of their supporters flooded into the cemetery,
watched by 1,000 armed police.
The other was for Hanns Martin Schleyer.
The leaders of the industrial and financial establishment
came together at a church in the centre of the city.
VOCALISING HYMNS
It was a moment that dramatically symbolised what had happened.
The industrialists and the bankers had come not just to mourn Schleyer,
but to bury any idea of radical change in Germany.
And, for the radicals, it was the moment after all the violence
and all the failures when pessimism finally took hold.
It said this is what all radical attempts to change the world
inevitably lead to.
And in the growing age of the individual,
it led to the conclusion that the fault is inside you,
the individual,
not in society.
Those who had wanted to change the world now began to turn inwards.
This distrust was going to be reinforced
by the growing influence of the psychologists
who said that human beings were really irrational
and lived in a dream world.
Out of that was going to come the modern system of power
in which psychology would join with economics and with finance
to make sure that that dream world was managed.
It would be a wonderful world to live in.
But its weakness will be that, at its root,
was a pessimism about human beings
and whether they should ever be allowed any control.
While outside the dream world,
the things that the revolutionaries had wanted to change so much -
the inequalities, the racism and the exploitation -
would all remain untouched
and would continue to grow, unnoticed.
But some of the revolutionaries saw what was happening and adjusted.
Eldridge Cleaver, who had been one of the leading Black Panthers,
set up his own fashion company.
He designed what he called revolutionary trousers.
They had a flap at the front,
which he said would liberate the penis.
While his fellow revolutionary, Bobby Seale,
became a celebrity chef.
ANNOUNCER: Featuring the founding chairman
of the Black Panther Party
and griller extraordinaire, Bobby Seale!
But one revolutionary was still not going to give up.
Jiang Qing now joined with three others
who had run the Cultural Revolution.
They were determined to seize power when Mao died.
They were known as the Gang of Four.
And Michael X never made it to the river.
He was captured and brought back to stand trial in Trinidad.
He was found guilty of murder...
..and hanged.
And, in the future, the violence and the anger would be played out
in the artificial world of culture.
It would be the images and the words of revolution.
But, in reality, nothing ever really changed.
And what was forgotten in this new age,
including by the psychologists
who were exploring the self by drilling ever deeper,
was that what you are and what you feel
comes not just from inside you
but from where you are in the power structure,
because that flows through you, too.
When you see an individual white boy,
you're not afraid of that individual white boy.
What you are afraid of is the power that he represents,
because behind him stands the local police force,
the state militia, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force...
When you see an African, there is no power behind him.
There is no-one speaking for his interests.
There is no-one to protect him.
The guerrilla studies.
The guerrilla studies, he doesn't rest.
He studies and keeps his mouth shut.
Study, children, study!
WOMAN'S VOICE: Oh, my God! Oh, my God. Please, God.
Please, God. Oh, my God!
SOBBING
Oh, my God, please, don't... Please, God, please.
SOBBING
I don't want to be in this tunnel.
Oh, my God. Oh, my God.
DISTANT SIRENS, RUMBLING
Oh, my God. Oh, my God.
Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.
DISTANT EXPLOSION
Oh, my God! Please, God, please.
Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Please let me out of here.
Please, God.
Please, God, please let me out of here.
Please, God, please.
Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.
FIRE CRACKLES
Oh, my God. Oh, my God.
DISTANT EXPLOSIONS
Oh, my God. Oh, my God.
Oh, my God. What am I doing?
One of the most complex systems ever created
was the pattern of detonations inside the atomic bomb
that began the chain reaction.
The scientist who created it, a physicist called John von Neumann,
said that there was only one thing as complex...
..it was the world's climate.
Like the bomb, it was a mass of different forces
moving around a central globe.
Von Neumann then used an early computer
to build a model that simulated the world's climate system.
His aim was to use it to predict and manipulate the weather
as a weapon with which to attack the Soviet Union.
But what he began had another consequence.
In 1961, a scientist called Edward Lorenz
made a mistake which revealed something that astonished him.
Lorenz had built his own computer model of the world's climate.
Then, one day, he ran a programme that he had run many times before,
but missed out one tiny piece of data -
a change at the fourth decimal point.
For 30 days, everything went as before,
but then, suddenly, the computer began to predict weather conditions
never seen before on the planet.
Other scientists said that his model was at fault.
But Lorenz ran it again and again, with tiny variations,
and each time, it led to different, often very strange futures.
He began to wonder whether the world's climate
was not the stable, self-correcting system
that other scientists believed...
..that it was unstable,
and that one tiny change somewhere in the world
could tip the whole system from one state into another.
# Dark moon
# Away up high up in the sky
# Oh, tell me why, oh, tell me why you've lost your splendour
# Dark moon
# What is the cause your light withdraws
# Is it because Is it because I've lost my love?
# Mortals have dreamed
# Of love's perfect schemes
# But they don't realise
# That love will sometimes bring
# A dark moon... #
In America, in the 1960s,
there was a man who was convinced that there was something frightening
hidden under the surface of the new modern suburbs.
Behind what looked like a confident individualism
that was rising up throughout America,
there were really hidden fears eating away at people from inside.
Oh, these are gorgeous!
Look! Salt and pepper.
There were feelings of anxiety, loneliness and emptiness.
And he was convinced he could make a lot of money out of these feelings.
He was called Arthur Sackler.
Sackler had trained as a psychiatrist
but in the 1950s
had turned to advertising drugs and medicines to doctors.
And more and more of the doctors he talked with
told him about people from the suburbs
coming to them with vague feelings of anxiety and fear...
..something the doctors didn't know how to deal with.
And in 1963, the company Hoffman LaRoche
hired Sackler to promote a new drug called Valium.
He offered it to the doctors as an extraordinary new way
to treat these inner anxieties,
and he said it wasn't dangerous or addictive.
Valium became an amazing success.
By 1971, it was the most widely prescribed medication
in the western world.
Hoffman's plant in New Jersey turned out 30 million pills in 15 hours -
enough to satisfy global consumption for just five days.
Valium had touched on something inside human beings,
but nobody knew what it was.
The new wave of feminists pointed out that far more women than men
were taking Valium.
They said the drug was being used to blot out the feeling
that millions of women were having
that there was something badly wrong with their lives.
That when they did what they were supposed to do,
it didn't bring the happiness they had been promised.
And I thought to myself, well, I...
There's got to be a better way for me,
and I went about it in the way that I wanted to.
I did what I wanted, regardless of what society was saying.
And then, it all kind of caved in on me.
And I just figured, well, you know, what's the use?
And so I ended up in the state hospital.
But now that I'm on the road back, I found if I...
I don't see there is any solution,
because if I act the way society tells me to act,
and do abide by the rules, my life is fine and everybody's happy.
But Arthur Sackler suspected
that the drug had touched on something much deeper,
that the women who spent their days alone in their new suburban homes
were in a kind of laboratory of the future.
They had discovered before anyone else
the underlying weakness with the new individualism -
that you were free, but you were alone.
Women told researchers, "I feel empty somehow,"
or, "I feel as if I don't exist."
And Sackler knew
more and more men were also beginning to take the drug.
The women had just got there first.
PLUCKS MELODY
SINGS TRADITIONAL SONG
The Dream Of The Red Chamber
is the most famous novel in China's history.
It was written 250 years before in the 18th century.
It tells the story of the rise and fall of two powerful families.
As their power declines,
the characters begin to find that the line between reality
and a dream world gets blurred.
They slip back and forth between the two.
DISCORDANT MUSIC
Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao Zedong,
had always been fascinated by The Dream Of The Red Chamber...
..because it seemed to show that it is the power of a ruling class
that shapes the very nature of reality itself.
And it was that idea that had driven her in the Cultural Revolution.
She had wanted to create a mass force
powerful enough to change
the very way millions of Chinese people saw the world.
But suddenly, Mao Zedong had turned on her.
He brutally dismissed all her ideas
and she began to realise that maybe he had been using her.
That Mao had used the mass frenzy that she had created
simply as a way of getting rid of his enemies.
It meant that everything that she had created -
the epic operas and ballets,
that promised a new kind of reality in the future -
had just been flimsy illusions
to disguise what had really been a brutal struggle for power.
And now, Mao had sent the Red Guards,
who had been the source of her power,
off to the distant deserts and mountains.
Jiang Qing was increasingly alone, and frightened,
because Mao was turning on all those who had helped him
in the Cultural Revolution.
He tricked the head of the People's Army, Lin Biao,
into plotting a coup.
Mao sent troops to arrest Lin,
but he and his family managed to escape on a plane.
But the plane ran out of fuel
and crashed in the desolate mountains of Mongolia.
Jiang Qing was terrified that she would be next.
She mounted anti-aircraft guns
on the roof of her house in the party compound.
She ate meals at random times to avoid being poisoned.
And she suspected the nurse who gave her sleeping pills
of being an assassin.
Jiang Qing's own sense of reality was beginning to dissolve.
But she also realised that, with Lin Biao destroyed,
she now had a much greater chance of taking power when Mao died.
In 1967, the Russians launched a space flight
to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Revolution.
It was called Soyuz 1.
Everything seemed to be going normally
but the astronaut knew that something terrible
was likely to happen.
He was called Vladimir Komarov.
Komarov's best friend was the Soviet hero Yuri Gagarin,
who had made the first human flight into space.
As they prepared for the launch,
Gagarin had inspected Komarov's spacecraft.
He discovered hundreds of faults in its construction.
He told Komarov what he had found,
that the spacecraft was a deathtrap.
Gagarin tried to get the launch stopped,
but the Communist Party leaders refused.
"The launch had to go ahead," they said,
"to celebrate the anniversary of the revolution."
Komarov went, but on one condition.
If he died, his body should be displayed in an open coffin.
Things went wrong from the start.
The spacecraft lost power.
Komarov tried to manually guide it back to Earth.
But then the parachutes failed to open.
An American listening post on the Russian border
recorded Komarov's final cries of rage
as he plunged to his death on the plains of Kazakhstan.
PANICKED YELLING
BEEPING
SCREAM ECHOES
Komarov's remains were put into an open casket
at the space headquarters.
It was his revenge.
It showed in a shocking way how the power of the Soviet leaders
was crumbling,
and how deeply the communist dream had become corrupted.
UPBEAT MUSIC
Eduard Limonov grew up in Ukraine in the 1950s.
His father worked in a lowly position
in the Ministry of Internal Security.
They were in charge of watching and reporting on people,
to make sure that everyone was a good communist.
Limonov admired his father as a Soviet hero.
And often, his father would travel to Siberia by train for his work.
TRAIN WHISTLE
One evening after his father had been away,
Limonov went to the station to meet him as he returned.
But his father didn't appear.
Limonov searched,
and found another train hidden away in the sidings.
He watched dozens of men in handcuffs
being taken off the train and put into trucks.
Each one was called out by a man with a clipboard.
The man was his father.
Later that night, Limonov overheard his father tell his mother
that all the men were being sent to a prison to be shot
because they were against the system.
Limonov realised that there was another
violent hidden reality in the Soviet system
that reached everywhere, even into his own family.
And he decided he would be against the system.
He would become a dissident.
# People steal
# They cheat and lie
# For wealth and what
# It will buy
# Don't they know
# On the Judgment Day
# That their gold and silver
# Will melt away? #
TRAIN WHISTLE
This coal train is symbolic of much of the dilemma of Appalachia.
Until very recently, the companies that mine the coal
owned all the mining communities.
They owned the mines themselves,
the tipples, the company towns,
the streets, the houses, the stores,
the commissaries, the hotels, the hospitals.
They even had their own brand of money, scrip,
which circulated only in company commissaries and stores.
This created a population that was totally dependent.
And the dependency lasted for more than 40 years.
Abruptly, a few years ago,
the company no longer needed its mining men,
it needed mining machines.
So the company withdrew its paternalism
in each of the mining valleys.
Millions, hundreds of millions,
even billions of dollars' worth of coal have gone out of these valleys.
Appalachia has produced, essentially, two crops of people -
the rich, who have followed the coal,
and the poor, who have stayed here, in the Appalachian valleys.
TRAIN WHISTLE
Harry Caudill was a lawyer in the giant coal-mining area
that stretched across the Cumberland Mountains in Appalachia.
He had spent his life representing the miners -
taking on and fighting those who owned the mines.
But now he had realised that something fundamental was happening.
The power of the miners all around him
was beginning to dissolve and collapse.
He wrote a book called Night Comes To The Cumberlands.
He described how coal had not only brought wealth and power
to those who owned the mines,
but also to the miners themselves.
It gave them power because it brought thousands of them together.
And together, they could block the coal from leaving the valleys.
It gave them enormous collective power,
out of which, organised labour had come.
For 40 years, they had mounted strikes and blockades
and fought violent battles with the private armies of the mine-owners.
And out of that had come strong leaders,
who had used the collective power to change society for the better.
In 1946,
the United Mine Workers of America,
under the leadership of John L Lewis,
who is generally regarded as
the greatest labour statesman in American history,
undertook to raise the medical standards of this area.
Lewis had a very dramatic confrontation
with the American coal operators at Pittsburgh.
"You have," he said, "made dead more than half a million
"of your fellow citizens.
"The product you sell in the markets of the world
"is drenched with the blood of your workmen.
"It is salted with the tears of their widows and orphans."
And he said, "Beginning today, beginning immediately,
"and at this bargaining table,
"you will begin to redress this old injustice."
The United Mine Workers Health and Welfare Fund came into existence
the following year.
It was comparable in many respects
to the National Health Service in Great Britain.
CLOCK TICKS
But now, Caudill realised that that power had gone.
First, the machines had come
and replaced thousands of workers.
Helpless to save their jobs, they now lived in growing poverty,
supported only by welfare.
And then there was the other fossil fuel - oil.
Oil was now rising up to replace coal.
And more and more of it came from the Middle East.
In countries like Saudi Arabia, the Western oil companies
had created their own managed communities.
But these communities were for the managers,
who lived a dreamlike existence in the middle of the desert.
Their golf courses created by rolling crude oil into the sand...
..while the workers were controlled by authoritarian governments.
They were no threat.
And across the world, the oil industry
was a scattered, diffused network,
where there was never any chance of enough workers
coming together to create a critical mass...
..out of which would come collective action.
But at that very moment, something was revealed
in another remote part of the world
that was going to lead to a realisation that fossil fuels
could not only change the nature of power,
they could also change the whole structure of the planet.
On the top of the world, below the surface of a giant ice cap,
a city is buried.
Camp Century is buried below the surface of this ice cap.
Beneath it, the ice descends for 6,000 feet.
In this remote setting, Camp Century is a symbol
of man's unceasing struggle to conquer his environment.
Camp Century pretended to be a scientific base.
In reality, it was a disguise for Project Iceworm.
600 nuclear missiles were going to be hidden
in hundreds of miles of tunnels under the ice,
targeted at Russia.
But as a part of the disguise,
climate scientists, working with army engineers,
began to drill hundreds of feet down into the ice
and bring up ice cores.
The ice sheet had been built up layer by layer
over hundreds of thousands of years.
That meant that it had within it a frozen record of the past.
What the scientists found in the cores astonished them.
That 11,000 years before, there had been a sudden cataclysmic shift.
The world's temperature had changed by ten degrees in just centuries.
Other ice cores then confirmed this.
That in the past, there had been repeated, sudden changes,
both heating and cooling,
of the world's climate at speeds that no-one thought possible.
This piece of ice records a spectacular cooling.
In fact, it's a quite new discovery for us
that the Earth can turn so cold so fast.
What was the reason?
We don't think that volcanic eruptions did it.
Maybe it was due to enormous breakout of Antarctic ice.
The problem is, could that happen again to us right now?
Or could we accidentally provoke such a catastrophe?
We must find the reason for this natural event long ago.
They believed that what the ice cores showed
was that the idea which dominated science,
that the world's climate was a stable,
self-correcting system, was wrong -
that it could suddenly shift into a completely different state...
..which would have extraordinary consequences.
WIND GUSTS
WIND WHISTLES
Richard Nixon came to power
because he had harnessed a new force.
He called it the silent majority.
They were the people in the suburbs
that were rapidly growing around every city in America.
But it was a fragile power base,
because it wasn't like the old collective power
that had driven political parties in the past.
It was millions of individuals
who not only felt isolated and alone,
but also increasingly fearful of the chaos in America
as a result of the Vietnam War.
We were sitting in the living room watching the Miss Ohio pageant,
and all of a sudden, I heard a smack at the front
and I run out and heard something hit a window here in the back.
And I tore around the driveway here
and I looked all over, but I didn't see a thing.
I didn't see one guy.
You know, you can put up with this crap just so long
and then - pow! - somebody's going to get it.
ANIMATED SHOUTS
MUFFLED SPEECH
There are those who say, "How do we answer those who engage in violence?
"How do we answer those who try to shout down a speaker?"
And my answer is, don't answer in kind.
It's time for the great silent majority
just to stand up and be counted! APPLAUSE
Nixon promised to represent the silent majority.
But the truth was that he was also uncertain,
and frightened, too, just like them.
Nixon had been to see a psychiatrist about his feelings of dread.
He told the psychiatrist
that when he looked in the mirror in the morning,
it was as if there was no-one there.
He was also suspicious and paranoid.
Nixon was convinced that there was a conspiracy,
by what he called the liberal establishment, to destroy him.
In 1971, he told his aides to start what he called, the enemies list.
It included dozens of liberal journalists, academics
and even film stars.
Nixon had a tape machine running all the time in the White House.
And on it, he left a record of this paranoia.
But Nixon soon found that the chaos created by the Vietnam War
was also going to stop him delivering the new, stable America
that he had promised.
The cost of the war was huge, and America was deeply in debt.
In 1971, it forced Nixon to give up
one of the great symbols of America's global power -
the control of all the world's currencies.
Ever since the Second World War,
the value of all currencies in the world
had been fixed to the dollar.
They were backed by the gold reserves held in Fort Knox.
But then, overnight, Nixon let that go.
And suddenly, there was no fixed value for any currency
anywhere in the world.
What was that mark, John?
8.38-8.43.
8.38-8.43, I can deal with you in sterling mark.
And dollars? Just a second. Dollars, Chris?
2.44.59. 2.44.59 dollar sterling.
There was immediately confusion as banks around the world
struggled to come to terms with the new reality.
They set up new, improvised dealing rooms
buying and selling currencies
as, minute by minute, they went up and down in value.
But then President Nixon did something
that seemed to show he still had power to change the world.
He went to China.
His arrival was broadcast live in America.
Journalists compared it to the moon landings
because Nixon was going to a giant, mysterious country
that had been cut off from the rest of the world for decades.
And he was going to bring it into the modern global system.
By now, Mao could hardly walk.
The Americans had sent medical equipment ahead
in case of an assassination attempt on Nixon.
But the Chinese took it and used it instead to resuscitate Mao.
The meeting lasted for only an hour.
Mao went back to bed and Nixon didn't see him again.
Instead, he went with Mao's wife, Jiang Qing,
to see one of her revolutionary operas.
On the surface, Jiang Qing seemed confident.
But underneath, she realised she could be destroyed at any minute.
It wasn't just Mao.
By now, the whole system of authority in China
was beginning to fall apart.
As many of those in power realised that the revolution had failed.
CAST SING
But while Jiang Qing was preoccupied with real enemies,
Nixon, sitting next to her, had now become obsessed
with plotting to destroy his imaginary enemies.
He had set up a conspiracy, based in the White House.
It was run by a group of ex intelligence agents,
and they were already planning to bug, burgle
and blackmail Nixon's opponents.
Behind his smile, he was preoccupied with plotting and scheming.
Jiang Qing and Richard Nixon
were two of the most powerful people in the world at that moment.
But what they shared was a sense that power
was now slipping from their grasp.
While the new force that Nixon had unleashed - money -
was eating away at the idea that there was a fixed,
predictable system that any politician could control.
Because the bankers had realised that currencies could be traded
globally, like any other asset.
And what that had created was a fluid, constantly-changing reality
that no-one was fully in control of.
Try 35.42, then!
Hello? 35.42.
It dropped 100 points. We don't know why.
It just dropped down in points when everything else was staying still.
Right, 30 other way! 30 other way!
Change it! Change!
MUSIC PLAYS
THEY SING
CHILDREN SING
SINGING CONTINUES
Eduard Limonov had now left Ukraine and come to Moscow.
He became part of what was called the underground -
writers and painters who saw themselves
as the opponents of the regime.
Limonov became a poet.
And one night, at a party, he met a girl
who he fell passionately in love with.
She was called Yelena Shchapova.
And together, they became a glamorous couple
in the underground world.
But what Limonov began to discover
was that most of the dissidents did not have a clear idea
of what alternative they wanted.
They, too, were trapped by the Soviet ideology.
The most famous dissident was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
He was secretly writing a novel
that was going to expose the horror behind the communist facade.
It was called The Gulag Archipelago.
But in the novel, Solzhenitsyn also confronted the fact
that, faced by the failure of the revolutionary dream,
it was now difficult to believe in anything.
That maybe ideology itself was the problem.
The evildoers in Shakespeare, he said,
killed just a few dozen in their struggle for power.
But then came the belief that you could find a theory
that would create an ideal world.
The agents of the Inquisition, he said, invoked Christianity.
The great empires, like Britain,
justified it by the idea of civilisation.
The Nazis did it by race.
And the revolutionaries, both in France and in Russia,
justified it by equality, brotherhood
and the happiness of future generations.
But in every case, he said,
thousands, and often millions, were killed.
Solzhenitsyn's book contained a damning conclusion,
which was going to be one of the foundations
of the counter-ideology that dominates the world today.
It said that the only way to escape from that horror
was to stop trying to change the world.
Stop trying to reshape reality.
Instead, the safest thing to do in the future
was to believe in nothing.
Limonov scorned Solzhenitsyn.
He saw him as part of an older generation
trapped by their literary elitism.
Ever since his time in Ukraine,
he had been fascinated by what he saw as the real outsiders.
Those who refused in any way to be a part of the Soviet system.
Above all, the thousands of criminals
who lived most of their lives in the Russian prisons.
They were called the Vory v Zakone - thieves in law.
They had their own codes and hierarchies
that were expressed in the complex tattoos on their bodies.
The tattoos also expressed their fundamental belief
that in a society where ideology controlled the minds of everyone,
the only way to step outside the system
was through violent crime.
A singer called Arkady Severny
had secretly recorded what were called prison songs.
Songs from the Vory v Zakone inside the jails,
that attacked not just the Soviets,
but the whole Russian empire.
MAN SINGS IN RUSSIAN
MAN SPEAKS RUSSIAN
LAUGHTER
MAN SPEAKS RUSSIAN
But then, at the start of 1974,
the Soviet leaders discovered what Solzhenitsyn had been writing.
They debated whether to shoot him,
but decided instead to expel him to the West.
They also decided to take the opportunity
to get rid of some of the other dissidents, as well.
Eduard Limonov and Yelena were summoned to KGB headquarters
and told that they were being sent to New York.
While many of the leading criminals, the Vory v Zakone
were taken from the prisons and put on planes to New York, as well.
The Soviets told the Americans that they were another group of Jews
who were being allowed to emigrate.
ACTOR: I bet you can't hit me. Why don't you try?
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! GUNFIRE
You're going to miss. You're going to miss. Yes, you are!
Most of the Russian criminals set up home in Brighton Beach,
just outside New York.
They created their own organisation, called the Potato Bag Gang.
It was the start of the modern Russian mafia in America.
Limonov and Yelena
were helped by Russian emigre writers and artists
already in Manhattan.
And they soon became a glamorous couple,
invited to parties by rich Americans
who wanted to meet Soviet dissidents.
But the New York Limonov had arrived in
was not the city of his dreams.
SIRENS WAIL
Much of it was falling apart
with gangs burning down whole buildings for insurance claims.
But a strange, unreal mood spread through the ruins.
Well, this morning, on our way into work, we had a report that
the police had located a carcass
in a street on 172nd and Bryant.
It turned out to be a, er... stripped carcass of a gorilla.
It was headless and the, er... fur was removed,
the skin was removed.
South Bronx!
There was also a mood of paranoia spreading through America.
Nixon's own paranoia had been exposed by the Watergate scandal.
But in its wake, all kinds of other revelations came out,
of dark secrets in the political world
that had been kept hidden from the people.
That for 20 years, the CIA had been planning assassinations
and overthrowing leaders of foreign governments all around the world,
using poisons and specially-made secret weapons.
Don't...don't point it at me!
LAUGHTER
Does...does this...does this pistol, er...fire the dart?
Yes, it does, Mr Chairman.
And a special one was developed which would be able to
enter the target without perception.
As a murder instrument,
that's about as efficient as you can get, isn't it?
Yes.
The uncertainty even infected those
who had previously ridiculed all conspiracy theories.
Six years before, Kerry Thornley had begun Operation Mindfuck.
He and his friend Greg Hill had planted fake conspiracy theories
in the press and in underground magazines,
alleging that the Illuminati
were the secret organisation behind all the assassinations in America.
Their aim was to make people see how absurd all such theories were.
But one day in New York,
Thornley thought that he recognised a picture
of one of the Watergate burglars on a magazine stand.
He was certain he had met him 20 years before in New Orleans.
Back then, Thornley had been friends with Lee Harvey Oswald.
They had met when they were Marines together.
Thorney had then lived in New Orleans,
the same city that Oswald had lived in before the assassination.
And he had met people there
who later became suspects in the Kennedy conspiracy.
Thornley had always seen these as coincidences,
but in the new mood, he started to doubt.
I had met Guy Banister, a figure, a suspect in the Garrison probe,
I had met Clay Shaw two weeks before the assassination
and a discussion of my book about Oswald,
The Idle Warriors was involved.
I had even worked in a restaurant where Oswald
had lived in his youth with his mother right upstairs
in the same building.
So there were meaningful coincidences
and meaningless coincidences,
but I could not explain all these weird coincidences.
But at the same time, the fake conspiracy theories that Thornley
had been spreading into American culture with Operation Mindfuck
ever since the late 1960s, started to be believed as well.
Because the real conspiracies were so extraordinary.
Stories about the Illuminati and a plot to create a new world order
began to get mixed up with revelations
about brainwashing and secret mind control programmes run by the CIA.
The line between the reality of political corruption
and a dream world of conspiracy theories
started to get blurred in America.
But the sense of uncertainty, and a feeling that systems
might be out of control, was also creeping into other areas.
A group of climate scientists had begun to argue that the world
might be on the edge of another dramatic change.
That there might be a cataclysmic crisis coming.
WIND WHISTLES
And that the reason this time was human activity.
In the 1970s, there seemed to be dramatic shifts happening
in the climate.
In regions near the equator
there were droughts and famines,
but in the Arctic regions, it was getting colder.
Something was happening, but no-one knew what.
One group said that there was going to be a dramatic cooling
because the dust and smoke spreading around the world
was blocking out the sunlight.
A man-made dust pall is spreading over the Earth.
This dust blots out the sun and causes cooling
on a worldwide scale.
Not all scientists agree with this theory.
I hope it's wrong myself, but there is no doubting
its seriousness for if this is correct,
millions of people will be destined for chronic famine.
THUNDER RUMBLES
But others said the very opposite was about to happen.
There was more and more carbon dioxide being pumped
into the atmosphere.
That would trap the heat, but the world would grow hotter.
And the key force behind that was the hydrocarbon - oil.
In the mid 1970s, oil was about to play a crucial role
that would increase the uncertain mood that today has come to dominate
Western societies -
a feeling that we are somehow surrounded
by global systems, both natural and those made by humans themselves,
that are beyond control.
Systems so complex and unpredictable that they make a mockery of the idea
that national governments can shape and control the world.
100 years before, coal had done the same.
It had brought millions of people into the new industrial cities
where they worked for the men who owned the vast wealth
that the coal had created.
And that money was so powerful that it seemed to control everything -
not just people's lives, but politics as well.
But slowly, out of that, came a challenge to that power,
based on the workers organising together.
And from that came the idea of mass democracy.
That the role of politicians
was to represent the mass of the people against the powerful.
But now oil was about to start something
that was going to undermine that idea.
This is King Faisal of Saudi Arabia.
He's going to have a great deal to say in the next few years
about the way you live.
He rules over a desert kingdom of six million people.
In this decade of the oil shortage,
he's one of the most powerful men in the world.
Under these sands, there are proved deposits
of 160 billion barrels of oil.
Starting in 1973, the Arab countries, led by King Faisal,
decided to use oil as a weapon.
They wanted to force America to stop supporting Israel.
They did with oil just what the miners had done with coal
in the past.
The Arabs blocked supplies
and then suddenly raised the price four times.
It was a dramatic exercise of power.
And it caused chaos in the American economy.
TRANSLATION: As a friend of the United States,
we are deeply concerned
that if the United States does not change its policy in the Middle East
and continues to side with Zionism, then I'm afraid, such course
of action will affect our relations with our American friends
because it will place us in an untenable position in the Arab world
and vis a vis the countries which Zionism seeks to destroy.
For almost three decades, we have
been the richest, most powerful nation on Earth.
Now, a nation of six million warns us we must change our foreign policy
if we want full gas tanks.
It had a dramatic effect.
Money suddenly poured into the Arab world.
Within three years, Saudi Arabia had more foreign currency
than Japan, Germany and the United States put together.
But the Arab governments had no idea what to do
with this vast new wealth.
So they turned for help to the Western banks.
The banks realised that they could take these petrodollars and turn
them into a new kind of international currency,
free of all government control.
And soon, politicians from all around the world were coming
to the new headquarters of the Western banks
to elaborate signing ceremonies
where they borrowed billions of the petrodollars.
And that global financial system that President Nixon had created
by accident a few years before,
now became a giant force -
one that held the destiny of millions of people in its hands
and politicians became increasingly convinced they couldn't control.
And the money started to take charge of politics once again.
But it was only the beginning, because another component
was about to be fitted into this growing new system of power.
In China, as Mao approached death,
Jiang Qing was still determined to take his place as the leader.
But there was one person who is equally determined to stop her.
He was called Deng Xiaoping.
Deng was one of the original revolutionaries
and he had been sidelined during the Cultural Revolution.
But now, Deng believed that if Jiang Qing was allowed to take power,
it would be a disaster for China and the country
could splinter into civil war.
An anonymous poem appeared on a wall in Tiananmen Square.
It was obviously addressed to Jiang Qing.
"Lady X," it said, "you are insane.
"To be empress is your ambition.
"Instead, take this mirror and see what you are really like.
"You deceive your superiors and you delude your subordinates.
"Yet for types like you, good times won't last."
Then Mao died.
Jiang Qing came on her own, dressed in black.
She was already preparing to take power with three others
of the leadership.
They were called the Gang of Four.
But another group backed by Deng Xiaoping set out
to destroy them.
Wall posters went up all across China attacking the Gang of Four,
claiming that as well as being corrupt,
they were really working for the CIA to undermine China.
When Jiang Qing came to Tachai,
there seemed to be no end to her whims.
Now she wanted her room sprayed with perfume.
Then she wanted more carpets on the floor and for curtains,
she wanted to have special ones of a particular dark colour.
Jiang Qing and company demanded complete quietude.
No-one should laugh or talk loudly.
Planes at a nearby airport had to stop their sorties.
People had to be sent uphill to beat the woods to drive the birds away.
And four weeks after Mao's death, army units came in the middle
of the night and arrested Jiang Qing.
She was put in an underground cell,
next to the refrigeration unit that was holding Mao's body.
She later tried to commit suicide
by hitting her head against the wall.
So the soldiers covered the walls with rubber.
Within 18 months, Deng Xiaoping defeated all other rivals
and he took power in China.
The first thing he did was wipe the past everywhere.
In Shanghai, the giant sign that said, "Long live the victory
"of Chairman Mao's Revolutionary Road" was taken down.
While outside the Department of Public Tranquillity in Beijing,
which in reality was the headquarters of the secret police,
the thoughts of Chairman Mao were also removed.
Deng then set out to create a new kind of revolution.
He was going to bring capitalism into China,
but the state would control and manage the whole system.
His aim was simple.
Money would replace the old revolutionary dreams -
it was less dangerous.
But he was going to use it to restore China's power.
Deng Xiaoping knew that in the 19th century,
the British had used drugs to control the Chinese.
They had brought opium to China.
It led to what the Chinese called the century of humiliation.
Now, Deng was determined to reverse that, to reassert China's power.
You couldn't use drugs
because the Americans already had their own drugs.
Instead, he was going to use the mass mobilisation
of the Chinese people to invent
another force that would be the equivalent of opium.
A kind of mass consumerism never seen before in the world -
driven by goods so cheap that
everyone in the West would want them.
Whole cities were going to be built in China that made just one
kind of product.
They would be shipped in vast quantities to the West.
You gave up on utopian ideas about the future
and didn't believe in anything any longer,
apart from the money.
And his allies in this would be the Western banks
and their new system of global lending.
Because the banks would lend millions of people in the West
the money to buy the Chinese goods,
just like they had been lending to governments all around the world.
It was going to be the perfect system.
Eduard Limonov was now all alone in New York.
He had published an article attacking the other emigres,
so they all dropped him.
Then Yelena, the woman he loved more than anything else in the world,
met a photographer who promised to make her a model.
He seduced her and she left Limonov.
Without love or money, Limonov became destitute.
He lived in the cheapest hotel
surrounded by prostitutes and drug addicts.
And he spent his days and nights wandering the city alone...
GLASS BREAKS
The call car, yeah.
..while all around him
the newly powerful banks were building
their headquarters among the old ruins.
UPBEAT MUSIC
Then one day in Central Park, looking at the people
all around him, Limonov decided that he was going to write a novel,
but one that would have him as the central figure.
It would be about the real experience of America,
not the fake democracy.
In the book, he described watching Americans in a cafe
where he was working as a waiter.
"It is they," he wrote, "who have introduced a plague into this world.
"The plague of money, the disease of money, the plague of buying
"and selling is their handiwork.
"I hate this system, and I am not ashamed that my hatred has sprung
"from my wife's betrayal.
"I clear away your leftovers while my wife fucks
"and you amuse yourself with her,
"for the sole reason that there is an inequality.
"She has a cunt for which there are buyers, you,
"and I don't have a cunt.
"I'm going to blow up your world."
The book, called It's Me, Eddie, gave a picture of a new reality
that Limonov saw emerging from under the surface
of America's everyday life.
People think they are free, but really they are becoming
like simplified robots, following the rules of money,
limited to satisfying only those desires that can be bought and sold.
Every publisher he sent it to refused to publish it.
But there was another person at the very top of America
in the White House itself who was also about to expose
a frightening reality underneath the surface of the society.
In 1978, the president's wife, Betty Ford, revealed
that she had become addicted to Valium.
An addiction that she said had taken her into a strange state
where even her sense of time had become dislocated.
As I look back, it was December,
about a year ago when I realised...
..that there were some sort of
blank spots where I had
a hard time putting...
..events in their separate slots
in time.
To me, it was marvellous
and beautiful, but to the family,
I was beginning to show signs
of overmedication.
Betty Ford's admission had a dramatic effect.
In its wake, stories began to pour out of people all across America
who were also addicted to Valium.
It seemed that there was a private, hidden world of anxiety
behind the public faces that affected millions of people.
But Arthur Sackler, who in the 1960s had promoted Valium
as beneficial and non-addictive, was unrepentant.
And the company that he and his two brothers had started
was about to develop a new drug -
a synthetic form of opium called OxyContin.
And that was going to deal with the next wave of anxiety
that would hit America.
Over the next 20 years, as more and more factories closed
because of the cheap goods coming from China,
millions of people in the communities would take OxyContin...
..because it made them feel safe,
in a bubble,
protected from the growing uncertainties around them.
LIFT BELL DINGS
And Harry Caudill,
who had represented the miners in Appalachia,
became certain that the anger under the surface there
was going to grow.
"One day," he said, "it would break out and infect
"the whole of America."
How are you, Mrs Melchor? All right, thank you. How are you?
In 1990, he discovered he had Parkinson's, and he shot himself.
While Kerry Thornley had become convinced that the coincidences
in his past were not coincidences -
that the CIA had somehow manipulated him to set up
Operation Mindfuck, but he had no idea why, he had become lost.
20 years before,
he and his friend Greg Hill had been early individualists.
They believed that they could shape reality
the way they wanted.
But now, faced with the revelations about how intricate and complex
power had become in the modern world, they felt powerless and lost.
Thornley had retreated into a dream world of conspiracies,
while Greg Hill had become an alcoholic and was equally lost.
He wrote a letter to Thornley about how he had come
to believe in nothing.
"It is not injustice that overwhelms me now," he wrote,
"but my sheer damn inability
"to know anything with any deep level of certainty.
"When despair is deep enough, even death seems pointless.
"Now I live without justice.
"I don't know why. I just live it.
"So be it."
And Eduard Limonov would finally get his novel, It's Me, Eddie,
published in Russia.
It would cause a sensation and its dark vision of the reality
behind the rhetoric of American democracy is going to influence
an entire generation in Russia.
It was the generation to whom the Americans would then try
and sell the idea of democracy.
All the talk of democracy, the book told them, was just a sham.
Really, it was all about the money.
MUSIC: Starry Eyes by Cigarettes After Sex
# Starry eyes
# How can I get to you, my true little?
# Starry eyes
# What can I say or do for you, my little?
# Starry eyes
# Starry eyes forever
# Shall be mine
# Starry eyes
# What can I say to make you listen?
# Starry eyes
# What can I do for your attention?
# Starry eyes
# Starry eyes forever
# Shall be mine
# When I'm alone, I hear and feel you
# Wish that I could reach right out and touch you
# But knowing you're the one to greet me
# And meet me
# Two alone in the dark... #
# True love will find you in the end
# You'll find out just who was your friend
# Don't be sad, I know you will
# But don't give up until
# True love finds you in the end
# This is a promise with a catch
# Only if you're looking will it find you
# Cos true love is searching too
# But how can it recognise you
# Unless you step out into the light, the light
# Don't be sad, I know you will
# But don't give up until
# True love finds you in the end. #
In 1979, a Frenchman called Bernard Kouchner,
who had founded Medecins Sans Frontieres,
chartered an old cargo ship, and he went to rescue
thousands of starving refugees trapped on a tiny island.
Refugees that no-one else seemed to care about.
They were fleeing from the new communist government
that had taken over Vietnam.
To many liberals in the West,
the communists had been heroes in their fight against America,
which meant that the refugees did not deserve to be helped.
To Kouchner, this was outrageous.
The point is people are dying in the China Sea.
I mean, the boat people are now facing piracy.
I mean, they are attacked by pirates
ten times in their trip, if they are still alive,
and nobody are taking care of them.
And that's our purpose.
It's not possible to shut up now.
Kouchner's action had a powerful effect in the West,
because it started to undermine the self-belief of a whole generation,
who saw themselves as radical and pure...
..that possibly being good was not as easy as it seemed.
It began when the singer Joan Baez came out in support of Kouchner.
In the 1960s,
she had been deeply involved in the Civil Rights protests...
The mothers gave me five children to fully register...
You can't go in, nobody but students and parents.
..and also one of the leaders of the anti-Vietnam War movement.
She was a symbol of the idealism at its heart.
I'd like to try, if I may. You can't get in.
But now she said that the refusal to help the refugees
showed how radicals had become not only uncaring, but corrupt.
They would allow thousands of people to die,
simply because they had the wrong ideology.
Baez went on French television
and she gave an interview that caused a sensation.
INTERVIEWER, IN FRENCH:
No, I never defended the government of Vietnam.
I spoke for the people inside of Vietnam.
I was against the violence
that this country perpetrated inside of Vietnam,
but...I was equally against an American boy
being shot out of a plane as I was the women and children
of Vietnam being bombed,
so it was never possible for my position to be clear,
particularly somewhere like France, where peace movement means left.
I'm not left.
Baez was immediately attacked by other anti-war activists,
led by Jane Fonda.
They accused Baez of being an unwitting agent
of American imperialism.
..and leftism in a way that I'm not. I think that's as simple as...
Despite the row, Kouchner carried on,
rescuing thousands of refugees lost at sea in tiny sinking boats.
Kouchner believed that what he was doing
might also be the start of a completely new kind of radicalism,
one that really would make the world a better place.
The reaction in the West, he said,
had shown that the old political ideologies of left and right
had now lost all credibility.
Kouchner had an alternative idea
that was going to go very deep in the imagination of the West.
It said that we are all one world,
linked together simply as individuals,
not divided by political ideas or by nations.
And we, the good people in the West, had a duty to intervene
to help the victims of all evil political ideas,
wherever they were across the world.
We don't care on leftist and rightist countries,
there is no leftist and rightist suffering,
and there is no possibility to split the world in good people
and bad people, good dead and bad dead.
Because we think that this is a new kind of policy.
For us, human being is one.
To let the people speak to each other before dying.
# With the nice girl in the park
# You were strolling full of joy
# And you told me that you'd never kissed a girl before
# Hold your hand out, you naughty boy
# Last night in the pale moonlight
# I saw ya, I saw ya
# With the nice girl in the park... #
Julia Grant had grown up in the north of England, near Blackpool.
But, in the 1970s, she had moved south
and became part of the growing gay scene, and a drag artist.
She knew inside herself that she was a woman -
that was her true self.
Which made her an outsider everywhere,
including in the gay world.
When I was living on the apparently gay scene and being a drag artist...
..nobody thought any...
..any bad if I sort of went out, did my show,
and, when I came off stage, sort of toned down my make-up
and put on a dress, because I was accepted as a drag artist,
whereas if I try to go to a gay pub dressed as a woman...
..most gay people resent the fact that a man wants to change his sex.
Transvestites and transsexuals are a minority
within the actual gay world.
To have a gender reassignment operation,
Julia was going to have to go through a series of interviews
with a state psychiatrist.
He would decide who she really was.
Julia was part of a new idea rising up in the 1980s -
it said that to change the world and to make it a better place,
you should fight to become
who you as an individual truly were.
That was real freedom.
But, to do it,
Julia was going to have to take on the medical establishment.
Do you have a letter from your doctor for me?
Right. Well, what is the problem?
Well, I feel, um, that I've been having a fight with myself
for a long time, and I've come to terms with the fact
that I believe I am a woman...
..trapped within sort of a man's body.
Well, what do you mean by being a woman?
Well, my whole.... All my thoughts and everything are feminine,
there's nothing masculine.
I tend to reject my masculine body.
You know it to be masculine?
I identify it as masculine
because society identify me as masculine.
Well, it's not a matter of society. It's a matter of anatomy.
You say you feel like a woman?
Yes, I believe everything I do is feminine.
I believe I'm a woman inside.
Well, Michelle, how does it feel to be a woman?
It just feels like being me. Can't describe it as anything else.
You see? She's right.
Nobody knows how anybody else feels inside.
Well, I feel I don't...
I believe I don't actually feel the way a normal man should feel.
It may be that you identify with certain stereotypes
of the female gender role -
that is the traditions, the behaviour, the ideas,
but that doesn't make you a woman.
You know, styles do change, even if you think they don't.
Shoulders are wider, and they're higher.
See, they all had to have pads put in.
And, insofar as we could,
we've just lengthened them a little bit because they're longer.
And the thing we've learned is never really press your hem.
You know, sometimes you see people ironing a dress,
and they press along the hem until it looks like a knife edge.
And then, if you want to let it down, you can't.
Just leave the hem gently rolled, and then you'll...
Never press along the edge, then you can let them down.
The China News Agency supplied
all the news for everyone in China,
but it also ran a privileged news service
for the Communist Party elite.
And the higher you were in the party,
the more truth you were allowed to know.
There were three levels of secret newspapers published every day,
and at the top there was what was called Big Reference.
Very few copies were printed,
because they were only for the top leadership,
and it was printed in extra large type
to make it easier for the old men who ran the country to read it.
And at the very top was now Deng Xiaoping.
He was in complete control in China.
He had defeated all his rivals,
and to show his strength, in 1979, he put his main enemy on trial,
Jiang Qing.
HE SPEAKS IN MANDARIN
She was accused, along with the other members of the Gang of Four,
of killing and persecuting thousands of people
in the Cultural Revolution,
but she refused to recognise the court.
She continually attacked the judges.
SHE SHOUTS
The judges, she said, were hypocrites.
They had all followed Mao's ideas.
They were just turning on her to save themselves.
Instead, she presented herself as the one thing
that she knew Deng Xiaoping feared most -
a defiant individual.
As she was hustled out of the court, she shouted,
"I am without heaven, and a law unto myself.
"It is right to rebel."
But Deng showed her no mercy.
Deng Xiaoping decided to experiment with democracy.
He allowed people to put up posters and sell magazines
in Tiananmen Square.
It was known as Democracy Wall...
..and it quickly became a symbol of a new openness in China.
But then it started to run out of control.
People published details of widespread corruption, greed,
incompetence, and nepotism at the very top of the Communist Party...
..and then that force that Jiang Qing had prophesied, individualism,
re-emerged.
Wei Jingsheng worked as an electrician at Beijing Zoo.
Wei he was a charismatic figure,
and he quickly became a leading force at Democracy Wall.
He called for the overthrow of Deng Xiaoping.
He put up posters that said,
"We want no more gods or emperors or saviours of any kind.
"We want to be our own masters.
"Everything that is happening now is just a new-fangled lie.
"Deng is just a new fascist dictator."
The wall was closed down, all the posters hosed off,
and Wei was arrested.
Wei Jingsheng's trial was broadcast live on television.
He was accused of counter-revolutionary crimes
and passing secrets to foreign agents.
Why was it necessary to close down Democracy Wall?
Well, you see, on the democratic wall...
..everyone, without putting his name...
..can blame or charge any person...
..without any ground. They can do it without any legal obligation.
Do you think in England, do you have this kind of freedom?
I don't think so.
Blame any person without putting on his own name in the wall paper.
Do you think that is a kind of freedom?
I don't think so.
Do you think that there's freedom of speech?
The way it looks in the West
is that, the moment the lid came off for a second in China,
and people made contact with western journalists...
I think I have to go for another...
Some work to do.
Bernard Kouchner's humanitarian vision of a world without borders
was now spreading.
Idealists from the West, inspired by his ideas,
were travelling to conflicts all around the world.
In Afghanistan, they came to help the Mujahideen,
who they saw as noble idealists
struggling against the Russian invasion.
IN FRENCH:
And, in 1984, it suddenly became a truly global movement.
It started when the BBC shocked the world
with a report about the effect of a famine in Ethiopia.
The response was Live Aid, organised by Bob Geldof.
It was driven by a vast outpouring of sympathy
for those who were starving in Ethiopia...
..but also by an anger and a frustration
with all politicians in the West who had done nothing to help.
I find it incredible that the mass of people
probably feel that something should be done,
yet their own governments just don't do anything. They do very little.
The very fact that it has to be done by people giving their own money
is ridiculous. I mean, we've given enough money into government.
Why can't they spend some of our money giving it back?
I mean, at the moment, you've got a problem with the butter mountain,
you don't know how to dispose of it.
To sell it to the Russians is the cheapest way.
I'm sorry, but butter doesn't do very much good in Africa,
as you know. Butter oil actually does.
It's one of the major sources...
Oh, butter OIL, if you can... If you can get it...
Well, it is a by-product of butter.
Yes, but, look, a lot is going. A lot of surplus food is going.
But, Prime Minister, there are millions dying,
and that's the terrible thing. Yes indeed...
# And the lesson today is how to die... #
What Live Aid seemed to show
was that it might be possible to change the world...
..but, to do it, you had to bypass all politics
because politicians, both left and right,
had become corrupted by power and petty nationalism.
Instead, you connected directly with others suffering
around the planet, and rescued them.
Bob Geldof travelled to Ethiopia
to visit the camps where the aid was being delivered.
But he began to realise
that something very strange was happening.
The Ethiopian regime was rounding up thousands of the starving people
who had come to the camps.
They were being taken to airstrips,
where they were loaded at gunpoint onto giant transport planes.
They were then flown to what were called resettlement camps.
Geldof was shocked by what he was seeing.
To him, it seemed to evoke an evil ghost from Europe's past.
The first pictures we saw of resettlement were these ancient
and beautiful people, starving and in rags,
under armed guard, going into these vast Russian planes.
They probably had never seen a plane.
They have nothing left, only their dignity.
And to the West, the immediate psychological reaction
is Jews being led at gunpoint into cattle trucks by the Nazis.
What Geldof had stumbled upon
was something that those who ran Ethiopia had been trying to hide -
that the food brought in by Live Aid
was being used as a weapon in a civil war.
Ethiopia's ruler was a brutal tyrant called Colonel Mengistu.
Mengistu had decided that the only way to win the war
was through a massive piece of social engineering.
He was going to literally move millions of people
out of the rebel areas in the north
and relocate them in the empty south,
where they could no longer fight,
and the food aid was being used as bait
to lure hundreds of thousands of people into the refugee camps,
where his troops then swooped in and rounded them up.
Live Aid was an extraordinary achievement.
It is estimated that it may have cut the death toll in the famine
by half.
But the group Medecins Sans Frontieres made the dramatic claim
that the aid might have also led to the same amount of deaths
as it had saved.
The mass relocations were so brutal, they said,
that over 100,000 people had died.
It showed the weakness at the heart
of the growing humanitarian movement -
that when they came face to face with a brutal ruler
like Colonel Mengistu, who was using their aid not to save people,
but to save himself and kill thousands more in the process,
they had no way of stopping him.
They couldn't challenge power.
I only wish I'd been born a woman, then I'd have the same privileges
as all the sort of women's libbers who were sort of showing off
about burning their bras and all the rest of it.
They can still marry. I can't.
So I've got to try that little bit harder by wearing make-up
and trying to look good all the time,
feminists liking it or not.
I think that if a woman's got pride in herself
and wants to look attractive and wants to wear make-up,
then, I don't know,
more people will turn and look at a fully-made-up woman.
Well, it ain't right, men dressing up as women.
They're just a bunch of queers, ain't they? BLEEP hell.
How do you know that? What? How do you know?
We've got one in our school, ain't we? Mr BLEEP.
Yeah. He's a queer. In the papers and everything.
He goes round touching all the kids' legs.
They're a disgrace, touching men's bollocks and everything.
Well, she wasn't doing that, was she?
I dunno. It's not even a she, is it?
It's a he trying be a she.
Julia Grant was now living as a woman,
while she carried on being interviewed by the NHS psychiatrist,
but she was becoming increasingly frustrated and angry
with the process, and she decided to challenge the power
the psychiatrist had over her.
She travelled to the south coast to see a surgeon at a private clinic.
She went with her partner, Amir.
He was a refugee who had fled persecution in Iraq.
The surgeon agreed to give Julia breast implants...
..and, after the operation, Julia went to confront the psychiatrist.
I am supposed to be directing your case
because it's primarily a psychiatric matter,
and I must confess, I take exception to you doing that.
Well, I thought it was something permanent.
I needed something to establish that I was doing what I was doing.
It's a medical matter. It isn't a personal choice.
I like to be informed.
See, once again, you're overstepping the mark,
and I don't like it one bit.
I don't wish to appear to be petulant,
but, really, you're not arranging this affair
in a manner that fits our protocol.
We like to do it in our way, where we know what's going on,
and I don't like people to step out of line.
I find it, to say the very least, irritating.
Well, I'm having difficulties with the guy I'm living with...
So do many of my patients with their associates.
Why should you be different?
I don't think you have conducted yourself particularly tactfully
in all this, and there I think the interview will end.
Thank you very much.
You'd better come and see me in another few months.
Why can't I have the operation?
Why can't I pay for it?
They don't like that.
They like you to be very placid and just sit there
and just do as you're told.
And if you don't do as you're told,
then you're going against the system,
and then the system won't help.
After all, it's my mind. I know what I want.
Nobody else can get inside me.
Julia went back north to see her family,
to tell them that she was going to defy the medical establishment.
She would find a way to pay for the operation herself.
She travelled through the old industrial cities,
where many of the factories were now closing
in the wave of de-industrialisation that was sweeping through Britain.
Factories and terraced houses. That's all it is.
It's like Coronation Street, innit?
That whole view. It's amazing.
Back-to-back.
# Take me out tonight
# Where there's music and there's people who are young and alive
# Driving in your car
# I never, never wanna go home
# Because I haven't got one any more
# Take me out tonight
# Cos I wanna see people and I wanna see lights
# Driving in your car
# Oh, please don't drop me home
# Because it's not my home, it's their home,
# And I'm welcome no more... #
In the mid 1980s, a young girl called Chai Ling
had come from the provinces to study psychology at Beijing University.
She became fascinated by an American psychologist called Abraham Maslow.
He taught that the human beings of the future
would be driven by what he called self-actualisation.
They would be guided
only by what they felt inside,
not by what they were told to do.
These are the people who would resist suggestions.
They would choose what they wanted to do.
You might urge them to do something, and somebody else might,
but it was their decision, doing what they themselves decided to do.
They look within, making real the inner self,
which is independent of the century, independent of the culture, even.
Then, one night, Chai Ling was drugged
and, she believed, raped by another student,
but the authorities did nothing,
and she decided to join the growing student protests
against what they saw as a corrupt regime
that was now in charge of China.
Deng Xiaoping had got rid of both revolutionary ideas and democracy...
..and, in that void, corruption had taken over the whole society.
Party officials everywhere were looting billions of dollars.
All that mattered now in China was money and connections.
TRANSLATION: The first thing in life is money,
and the second thing is connections.
It is very important to have connections.
When you know people,
then, wherever you go, things become so much easier.
In April 1989, the one leader that the students trusted, Hu Yaobang,
died of a heart attack at a party meeting.
Students started to come to Tiananmen Square to mourn him.
Chai Ling was among them.
And, as more and more people came to the square,
she became one of the most vocal of the protesters.
CROWD CHANTS BACK HER WORDS
CHEERING
Soon, over a million protesters filled the square...
..but the government refused the students' demands
for more democracy, and the movement started to split.
HEATED DISCUSSION
The radical faction began a hunger strike
to try and force the government to respond.
Chai Ling had now risen to become one of the leaders
of the radical movement.
She later wrote that the experience made her an independent woman.
She herself was liberated, and became a self-actualiser.
But many of the other student leaders were frightened
that she was going to create disaster.
The government was still refusing to negotiate,
and the protest leaders held a tense meeting.
Many of them argued that they should retreat now, on such a high,
which would force the party to accept real reform.
If they didn't, there would be stalemate,
and then killing.
In the vote, Chai Ling raised her hand, which made it unanimous.
But that evening, she changed her mind,
and she helped persuade the students to stay in the square.
The next day, she called an American journalist called Phil Cunningham,
and gave an extraordinary interview.
Chai Ling had suddenly realised
that combining the new force of individualism with collective action
was never going to work.
She felt the contradiction deep within herself.
She had realised that, in the age of the individual,
it was no longer going to be possible
for people to give up their lives for a greater cause.
TRANSLATION: To be honest, from the day I called for a hunger strike,
I knew we would not get any results.
Certain people, certain causes are bound to fail.
I have been very clear about this all along...
..but I've made an effort to present a staunch image
to show that we were striving for victory.
But, deep down, I knew it was all futile.
All along, I've kept it to myself, because, being Chinese,
I felt I shouldn't bad-mouth the Chinese.
But I can't help thinking sometimes, and I might as well say it.
You, the Chinese, you are not worth my struggle.
You are not worth my sacrifice.
The students keep asking, "What shall we do next?
"What can we accomplish?"
I feel so sad, because how can I tell them
that what we are actually hoping for is bloodshed?
For the moment when the government has no choice
but to brazenly butcher the people?
Only when the square is awash with blood
will the people of China open their eyes.
Only then will they really be united.
Are you going to stay in the square yourself?
No, I won't.
I'm not going to let myself be destroyed by this government.
I want to live.
Five days later,
Deng Xiaoping sent the troops and tanks in to clear the square.
HE SINGS
Boris Yeltsin was the president of the new Russia.
He had promised to turn the country into a mass democracy.
Yeltsin appointed a group of young technocrats,
and they set out to do this through what they called shock therapy,
advised by western bankers and economists.
They believed that they had to move fast
because the communists might try and take power again.
But behind it was a grander utopian idea
that it might start the spread of democracy all around the world.
But at this very moment,
in the West, the opposite started to happen.
The whole idea of mass democracy began to be questioned
and undermined from inside the political establishment itself.
It began almost unnoticed,
hidden behind the wave of enthusiasm after the fall of communism.
But a political scientist called Peter Mair
has argued that what happened in the 1990s
was that the old idea of democracy started to disappear in the West...
..and it was replaced by something else
which we haven't fully comprehended yet, or even seen.
because it is outside the old categories of politics.
Western politicians, Mair said, literally changed their roles.
They gave up being representatives of the people,
and instead they became the agents of a new bureaucracy
which was rising up and promising that it could manage
the dangerous and unpredictable force of individualism
better than the politicians could.
Just as the activists in China had found with Chai Ling,
individualism and its drive to self-actualisation
can corrode and eat away at the collective power of mass democracy.
Peter Mair said the same was now happening in the West.
The first politician to confront this was Bill Clinton.
He came to power promising to represent
what he called the forgotten middle class.
But very quickly, within weeks of entering the White House,
Clinton agreed to give up on many of his promised reforms,
and to give power over to the financial world.
He did this not through any cynical motive,
but because he knew that the old power base
of mass politics had gone.
No-one joined political parties any more.
Organised labour was a vanishing force.
Clinton might be in office,
but he no longer had the collective power of the people behind him.
The power that, in the past,
had allowed politicians to challenge the elites in society.
And, in the face of that, Clinton decided to give power instead
to the new force that promised that it could create a wealthier
and happier society -
the bankers and the economists and the management experts
who were now spreading and multiplying
through the corridors of Washington.
We know big government does not have all the answers.
We know there's not a programme for every problem.
The era of big government is over.
If the new bureaucracy delivered on their promises,
it was going to be a wonderful world.
But if something went wrong,
then the politicians would have no power with which to confront them.
The shift in politics had begun.
SHOUTING
In Russia, the democracy experiment had gone out of control.
The president, Boris Yeltsin, had lost all power.
It had been seized by a small group called the oligarchs,
who were using it to loot Russia.
There was massive inflation.
Millions of people were reduced
to selling what they owned on the street.
The life expectancy of a Russian man fell from 65 in 1987
to 58 in 1993.
There was fury in the Russian parliament.
Its leader accused Yeltsin of economic genocide,
and demanded that he stop the experiment.
Nyet.
Yeltsin responded by dissolving parliament.
He cut the phone lines and sealed the building off.
SHE RESPONDS
But a group of protesters broke through.
And fighting began around the parliament,
and then spread to the television station.
SHOUTING AND GUNFIRE
SHOUTING
GUNFIRE
Yeltsin portrayed it as a stark battle of good against evil.
He was backed by President Clinton.
Clinton said it was the only way
for Russia to become part of the new global economy
and defeat its dangerous past.
But in among the fighting
was a man who believed that he knew what was really happening.
Eduard Limonov had been expelled from the Soviet Union
20 years before.
He had lived in New York in the 1970s,
the moment when the banks who now ran the global system
were beginning their rise to power.
Limonov was convinced that what was happening now
had nothing to do with democracy.
It was what he called the geopolitics of money -
a force that had already enslaved the American people
and now wanted to bend the Russian people to its word.
And when Yeltsin ordered the tanks to attack the Russian parliament,
backed by the American president
and by the bankers and the economic experts,
Limonov decided he was going to fight this system.
Because he knew its one weakness.
It told no stories about the past...
..and it had no vision of the future.
Its only aim was to keep the system stable.
Limonov had visited the Serbian nationalists
who were besieging the city of Sarajevo.
He was the guest of their leader, Radovan Karadzic.
Karadzic told him about the powerful nationalism
that was now reawakening after the fall of communism.
Serbs used to possess the entire ground.
We own this country. This is our country.
Turks have been here occupiers,
and the Muslims are successors of those occupiers.
So traditional imposed geopolitics.
Geopolitics. Yes, exactly.
Limonov became notorious when he was then filmed firing a machinegun -
in what seemed a random manner - into the city below.
You are very courageous people,
despite anything what is against you,
it's a great power of almost...
Almost the entire world.
Yeah, 15 countries against you and you resist.
And I repeat again - we Russians, we should take example from you.
UPBEAT MUSIC
Limonov realised that something was re-emerging from the past in Bosnia
that might have the power to confront
the new system of global money.
It was nationalism, and the national myths that came with it.
They were powerful stories that linked people together
and gave them a collective power.
Something that individualism could never do.
DANCE REMIX OF: What's Up by 4 Non Blondes
All you girls that believe men are bastards,
you should be near the front. I'll need you later on.
Ah, they're coming.
# Oh, my God, do I try
# I try all the time... #
Oh, I remember the '60s. I used to dress like that.
In the end, Julia had realised
that her psychiatrist was never going to let her have surgery.
"She was," he said, "not ladylike enough and too pushy."
She had gone to a private surgeon
and finally become what she had always known was the true person.
But, only weeks after the surgery, she had collapsed from bleeding.
She was taken into hospital unconscious,
where she was treated for a suspected miscarriage
by doctors who had no idea of her medical history.
The surgery was damaged, she could no longer have sex...
..and Amir left her...
..and she was alone.
If the truth be known, some of my friends have never, ever asked
how I feel, how I am, why I'm always alone.
People... Well, there are one or two people
that I actually discuss the problems with.
The first time, maybe five or six years ago,
and the person that I told...
..only used it against me and he went off with somebody else.
And when I asked why, you know, it's thrown in my face.
"Well, you're not a real woman anyway.
"What am I supposed to do?"
And when you get knocked like that,
and you have to face up to that kind of thing,
I suppose it makes you just a little bit weary.
Most people listening to that would say,
"Oh, what a shame, how sad," but...
..I suppose if love slapped me in the face,
I wouldn't even recognise it now.
Julia had challenged the old power in Britain.
She had stood up against her psychiatrist and won.
Her victory was a symbol of the decline of that old paternalism.
But now she had discovered how difficult individualism could be.
That, when things go wrong, you are weak and alone.
SHE MOUTHS SILENTLY
But as individuals were beginning to feel
the limitations of their power,
the new class that had grown up to manage them
was growing stronger and more confident...
..and they began to see democracy
not just as something to be bypassed,
but as a potentially dangerous force.
By the mid-1990s,
technocrats in the political think-tanks in the West
were becoming frightened that elections all across the world
were producing what they called the wrong kind of result.
In Algeria, a party called the Islamic Salvation Front
took the majority of votes in the first round of an election.
It was a stunning victory.
But people feared that its real aim was to turn the country
into an Islamist state and get rid of democracy.
Western politicians found themselves supporting a military coup
that stopped the elections.
THEY CHANT
But, in Europe, the extreme right paraded openly.
They protested against the immigrants
coming from Africa and the Middle East.
THEY CHANT
TRANSLATION: The foreigners take away houses in Germany,
bring drugs and all kinds of filth.
They steal German workplaces and they filthy up the environment.
For me now, the most important inspiration is Adolf Hitler.
And faced by the horror in the Balkans,
President Clinton's representative, called Richard Holbrooke,
brought the question out into the open.
"Suppose elections are free and fair," he said,
"and those elected are racists, fascists, separatists.
"That is the dilemma."
An American political scientist called Fareed Zakaria,
put it more bluntly.
"The people, we are told," he said, "are the most important.
"We are driven by the phrase, 'the American people are not stupid,'
"but what if they are?"
But the political scientists were not alone in distrusting people,
for, at the same time, a group of behavioural psychologists
who were becoming increasingly influential
were insisting that individuals
also made the wrong decisions in the marketplace.
They were not behaving in the logical, self-interested ways
that economics said they should.
The most famous of them was called Daniel Kahneman.
He would win a Nobel Prize for his work.
For 30 years, Kahneman had been studying human behaviour
and he had discovered, he said,
that human beings actually had two systems inside their brains.
One of them they were aware of, which they thought was in control.
The other was an instinctive part
that really drove most of their actions.
A part that they were completely unaware of.
This new psychology was a powerful attack
on the whole idea of the confident self.
Because the picture the psychologists painted
of human society was of millions of individuals
living most of the time thinking that they were rational
and in control...
..whilst something else inside them
was really guiding many of their actions...
..without them knowing it.
But, Kahneman said,
there was an underlying pattern to this irrational behaviour.
It meant that if somehow you could gather enough data
on human beings' behaviour, you could see the patterns
and so predict what they would do, and manage them.
But, to do that,
you would have to bypass and ignore their conscious self,
because it was the behaviour - not the thoughts - that counted.
LOUD DANCE MUSIC
THEY TALK HEATEDLY
HE RESPONDS ANGRILY
RADIO: # Put your lovin' arms around me
# Inside your arms, I'm burning
# Put your lovin' arms around me... #
In Russia, President Yeltsin had lost all control.
He was drunk most of the time.
MURMURING
He had become the puppet of the oligarchs,
who had taken over all the media and blocked any opposition.
But there was one opponent.
It was Eduard Limonov.
..the Queen, the fascist regime!
HE SPEAKS ON TANNOY
THEY CHEER
He had started his own tiny party.
He called it the National Bolsheviks.
It was, he said, a fusion of fascism and communism,
and the party flag was designed to show this.
THEY CHANT
But it wasn't simple nostalgia.
Limonov wanted to shock people out of accepting
the completely corrupt society around them.
He wanted to go back to the original roots of fascism and nationalism.
To the idea that if you can find a story
powerful enough to inspire people,
you can then use that collective power
both to sweep away the corrupt rulers and change reality.
It was something that had been wiped and forgotten
because of the horrors it had led to in the past.
And the individualism that had been promoted so strongly in the West
after the Second World War had been a force shield against that.
A shield of one world composed of just individuals.
Limonov was the reappearance of the frightening old dream.
MUSIC: Vechnaya Vesna by Grazhdanskaya Oborona
The third person to join the party was the musician Yegor Letov.
He had led the opposition to communism in the 1980s.
Now he sang songs about how Russia was trapped in a frozen world,
buried under a mass of meaningless broken fragments from the past.
Ghosts from the past were returning at the margins in England, too.
In August 1999, a farmer in Norfolk called Tony Martin
shot two burglars who were travellers.
He killed one of them, called Fred Barras.
Tony Martin was a recluse.
He lived in a remote, half-ruined building called Bleak House.
Tony Martin considered himself a victim.
He'd been plagued by burglars for years.
He lived in squalid conditions, paranoid about being burgled.
The stairs of the house were booby trapped.
He slept fully dressed with his boots on and a gun by his bed.
Martin was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
His conviction touched off a wave of protest.
On the surface, it was about Martin's right to defend himself...
..but it also expressed a much wider feeling
that was simmering under the surface.
That the very institutions that were supposed to protect the people -
the law, the police and the politicians -
were now being turned against them.
A growing sense that you couldn't trust those in power any longer -
what began to be called the elites.
The Labour government was shocked by the anger that burst out.
Tony Blair wrote in a private memo, simply, "We have lost touch."
But what Blair and the other modern politicians had forgotten
was that that suspicion of the elites did not come out of nowhere.
It had its roots back in Britain's past,
at the moment when the empire was collapsing.
And Tony Martin himself was a direct link back to that anger.
In the 1950s, Martin's uncle had been a leading member
of a group called the League of Empire Loyalists.
The League were powerful because some of their members
were at the heart of the Conservative Party.
They were convinced that there was a global conspiracy
to destroy the British Empire.
It was being run by bankers in America,
working together with communists in Russia.
But they also believed that many of those in charge in Britain
were also involved in this conspiracy,
including most politicians.
Well, my reasons for joining the Empire Loyalists are many,
but they largely stem from the fact that I believe in the thesis
of nationalism and national independence
as opposed to internationalism,
which I consider would in time devolve into a world government
which would, of necessity, by sheer weight of numbers,
become a communist-controlled world government,
with the control of the world in the hands of very few people.
This would be a tyranny, and I consider the only way
to combat this possibility of a tyranny
is to encourage a nation toward a nationality.
And that anger was about to return.
By now, politicians in the West
had given large amounts of their power away.
What had begun with Bill Clinton in the early 1990s had spread.
When Tony Blair came to power,
he had immediately given control over much of the economy
to the Bank of England.
But, in 1998, the global financial system
showed how unstable it could be.
An economic crisis that began in Russia, and then spread to Asia,
had consequences throughout the world.
In response to the crisis,
the Bank of England had insisted that interest rates be raised.
But this made many British goods too expensive to export.
And in the north of England, factories began to close.
Tony Blair insisted, though, that it was a price the country had to pay
for being part of what he called the world economy.
He can say a world economy till he's blue in the face,
but it's not just us, is it? It's other people.
"He can say"? Mr Blair can say the world economy...?
He can say, "World economy, world economy," but...
So what do you say? People in the Northeast are suffering,
but why has he given all that power to the Bank of England? Why?
Why, you know? Why is that?
Is he passing the buck? What's he doing?
So he can't be blamed for things like this that go wrong. He can say,
"Well, it's the Bank of England's interest rates, none of us did it."
I don't know.
They're just opening their mouths
and letting the wind waffle their tongues about,
as far as I'm concerned. Get up here and get things sorted.
You vote a Labour government in,
you vote for them all your life and
this is the crap you get off of them.
You think it's all wrong, what's happened, what could they have done?
Give us more support, stepped in, put a shoulder behind us,
show a bit more muscle. Just...
..let them know that they canna do this.
And at the end of the century,
a new anger began to grow out of in the margins of England,
that in the future would get mixed up with the furies of the past.
But the politicians increasingly found
that there was little they could do to respond to this anger.
Because, over the past ten years,
all kinds of new organisations had grown up
that were deliberately designed to limit the politicians' power,
because national politics was dangerous
to the stability of the global system.
The idea had originally come from technocrats
inside the European Union.
One of the leaders was a political scientist
called Giandomenico Majone.
"Politicians," Majone said,
"were always driven by short-term, self-interested motives."
Which meant that they, too, were irrational.
The solution, he said, was to bypass the politicians completely.
HE SPEAKS FRENCH
Pardon?
..later in the afternoon...
And in the 1990s, behind the scenes
of the political debate in the European Union,
Majone and a group of technocrats created a range of new institutions
that were deliberately designed to avoid political interference,
and instead run large areas of society in a rational way.
Majone gave them a boring bureaucratic name.
He called them non-majoritarian institutions.
But, in reality, they were a completely radical invention
that challenged the very idea of democracy.
"These new organisations," Majone said,
"are, by design, not directly accountable to voters
"or to their elected representatives."
Out of it was going to come the massive range
of new bureaucracies that today run large parts of the modern world.
Not just central banks,
but all kinds of regulatory agencies,
special courts and expert bodies.
All of which govern not through political policies,
but through rational scientific assessment and measured outcomes.
And the European Union became the centre of this experiment.
In front of house,
the elected politicians debated subjects like human rights,
but continually failed to come to any conclusion.
Are we concerned with rights or with political objectives?
And much of what we're going to discuss today is...
But quietly, behind the scenes, what were being created
were, in Majone's words, "specialised institutions
"staffed with neutral experts, carrying out policies
"with a level of efficiency and effectiveness
"politicians cannot and never will achieve."
The original idea behind mass democracy
had been that the politicians would be the bridgehead
for the people into power.
They would challenge the powerful groups
at the top of society on behalf of the people.
But then the people, driven by the new individualism,
had retreated into their own private worlds.
So the politicians switched sides and became instead
the representatives of the new powerful technocratic class.
It still looked like they were powerful
and had control over events.
But now the people had gone,
beneath them was a void.
But, in 1999, Tony Blair realised that there might still be a way
to change the world dramatically and recapture some of that power.
The conflict between the Serbs and the Muslims in the Balkans
had erupted again.
Serbian nationalists were attacking the Albanian population in Kosovo.
Blair worked hard to persuade a reluctant President Clinton
to join in a bombing campaign to force the Serbs
to stop the ethnic cleansing.
And it succeeded.
Tony Blair came to Kosovo and was welcomed as a hero.
CHANTING AND APPLAUSE
At the refugee camp, Blair presented what they had done
as an expression of that epic vision
that Bernard Kouchner had put forward 20 years before.
We are all one world linked together simply as individuals,
not divided by political ideas or by nations.
And we, the good politicians in the West,
have a duty to intervene,
to help the victims of all evil dictators,
wherever they are in the world.
This is not a battle for territory.
This is a battle for humanity.
It is a just cause.
It is a rightful cause to make sure that these people, innocent people,
who have been driven from their homes at the point of a gun,
are allowed by the world community, acting together,
back to their homeland, back to Kosovo.
So these people can become symbols of hope, humanity and peace.
Thank you.
And the new ruler of the independent Kosovo,
appointed by the United Nations, was Bernard Kouchner.
We are taking a significant step towards stability
and democratic self-government in Kosovo.
In the 1990s,
the triumph over communism had ushered in a new era.
Liberal politicians in the West
had willingly given up much of their power
in the interests of the greater good of global stability.
The power had gone first to the global financial system.
And now it was being given to the American military as well.
It looked like a new world.
But, underneath, the old forces of money and military power
were reassembling and resuming their dominance...
..just as they had in the pre-democratic days
of the old empires.
And that was going to lead to other strange forces
rising up and coming back to haunt the West.
# And I just can't help believing
# Though believing sees me cursed
# For belief ignores the heathens
# Day by day sigh even worse
# But for all we are receiving
# There's an evens key to turn
# You was the generation that bought more shoes
# And you get what you deserve
# I can't help believing
# Though believing sees me cursed
# For belief ignores the heathens
# Day by day sigh even worse
# But for all we are receiving
# There's an evens key to turn
# You was the generation that bought more shoes
# And you get what you deserve... #
DALEK VOICE: Alert! Alert! We have located the Doctor!
# Yeah, yeah! Ooh, baby
# Winter sweeps the streets of evening
# This frequency's my universe
# To reel a deep or meaning feeling
# In seas where schools of fools be first
# But for all we are receiving
# There's an evens key to turn
# You was the generation that snorts fortunes
# And you get what you deserve
# Yeah, yeah! Yeah, yeah!
# Yeah, yeah! #
# It was more like a dream than reality
# I must have thought it was a dream
# While you were here with me
# When you were near I didn't think you would leave
# When you were gone, it was too much to believe
# So with tomorrow
# I will borrow
# Another moment of joy and sorrow
# In another dream
# And another with tomorrow
# So with the sun there won't be time just to look behind
# There won't be reasons, no descriptions for my place in mind
# There was so much I was told, it was not real
# So many things that I could not taste
# But I could feel
# So with tomorrow I will borrow
# Another moment of joy and sorrow
# In another dream
# And another
# With tomorrow. #
Jiang Qing, the widow of Mao Zedong had been locked away
in solitary confinement for ten years.
Over that time, she had hoarded socks and handkerchiefs
until she had enough to make a rope.
And, in 1991, she hanged herself.
She left a note.
It said, "Today the revolution has been stolen by a clique
"led by Deng Xiaoping.
"The result is that unending evils have been
"unleashed on the Chinese people.
"Chairman, your student and fighter is coming to see you."
Jiang Qing's great enemy, Deng Xiaoping, was now all-powerful.
The new China he had created was growing rapidly,
building vast factories to send goods to the West.
He had got rid of all Jiang Qing's revolutionary dreams,
but he had also smashed all visions of democracy,
by sending troops into Tiananmen Square.
But Tiananmen Square had been a disaster for the regime.
And it also raised a terrible question.
If China no longer believed in revolutionary communism
or in democracy, what did it believe in...
..apart from money?
Deng Xiaoping's solution was to go back into the past
and reawaken an old, powerful fear.
That what had happened in Tiananmen Square had really been
part of a giant conspiracy by the West to destroy China.
It was a conspiracy, he said, that had been going on for 150 years.
It had begun back in the 19th century
when the British had invaded China
and forced opium onto the Chinese people.
Deng now ordered a vast propaganda campaign to begin.
Its aim was to spread the idea of a conspiracy.
At the centre of the campaign was a multimillion dollar film,
including British actors.
It told the story of how the British had brought
hundreds of tonnes of opium into the Port of Canton...
..and how the Chinese had tried to stop them.
But the British, led by Queen Victoria,
were determined to smash their resistance
and use the opium to reduce the Chinese people to zombies
and so control the whole world.
Fire!
The Chinese propaganda even created an early computer game,
where you could fight against the British as they invaded.
Now, the campaign said, the West were trying to do the same again.
What the Chinese were alleging in their campaign
was historically accurate.
But what they didn't know was that the opium trade had also had
powerful consequences inside Britain itself.
It had started to undermine the self-confidence
of the British Empire...
..and introduce a dark and corrosive fear
into the heart of British society.
By the middle of the 19th century, those who ran Britain were
already aware of the horrors created by the slave trade.
For 200 years, the British had transported millions of Africans
to become slaves in their colonies in the Caribbean
and in the Americas.
It had been one of the main forces behind the rise
of the British Empire.
Now they began to realise that they had also done something
terrible to China.
That by forcing opium onto the country,
they had poisoned and corrupted millions of people.
They hadn't enslaved them physically,
they had enslaved their minds.
And, in return, Britain had received a vast wave of money - in silver -
that made it the richest and most powerful country in the world.
One historian wrote...
"Deeply involved as it was in one of the most pernicious,
"yet well-organised and profitable drug trades that has ever
"existed, the British Empire was rotten at its heart."
And that knowledge led to guilt.
In the 1870s, a mass movement was formed.
It was called the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade.
It published pamphlets and books about the horrors
that were happening in China.
They caused a sensation and hundreds of thousands joined the movement.
But as the campaign grew, a strange thing happened -
the guilt over what Britain had done to China began to mutate.
It changed into fear.
And at the end of the 19th century, a hysteria swept Britain -
that the Chinese were preparing to take their revenge.
There was a panic about Chinese-run opium dens in all the major cities.
The truth was that there were less than 1,000 Chinese in Britain
at that time, but the hysteria ran out of control.
It was called the Yellow Peril.
The panic also spread through America,
especially the west coast where there were Chinese migrant workers.
Novel after novel was published in both Britain and America,
with Chinese villains who were trying to destroy
Western civilisation.
It culminated with the invention of a global villain -
Dr Fu Manchu.
Fu Manchu is described by his creator,
a novelist called Sax Rohmer, as a yellow Satan,
an archangel of evil who wants to take over the whole world
and revenge himself on the white race.
The injection of the serum will make his brain mine.
In other words, he becomes a reflection of my will.
He will do as I command, exactly as though I were doing it.
In the name of the British government,
I demand the release of this boy. British government?
I'll wipe them and the whole accursed white race
off the face of the Earth when I get the sword and mask that will call
the teeming millions of Asia to the uprising.
This is only the beginning.
I will wipe out your whole accursed white race.
# C'est toi et seulement toi
# Qui ne voulais plus de moi
# Maintenant c'est trop tard pour pleure
# Sans doute t'imaginais
# Que j'allais rester enfermee
# Au carmel pendant dix annees mais tu t'es trompe
# C'est a l'amour comme a la guerre
# Tu l'as voulu et tu me perds
# Va faire soigner tes blessures ailleurs
# C'est a l'amour comme a la guerre
# Tu l'as voulu et tu me perds
# Et moi je ne suis ni la Croix rouge
# Ni ta mere
# C'est toi et seulement toi
# Qui t'ennuyais avec moi
# Qui connaissais toutes mes histoires
# Par coeur... #
In the early 1990s, the Western democracies seemed to be the future.
The collapse of the Soviet Union meant that their ideas
were now going to spread all across the world.
# C'est a l'amour comme a la guerre
# Tu l'as voulu et tu me perds
# Va faire soigner tes blessures ailleurs. #
But at home, in both Britain and America,
there were still forces deep in the heart of both societies that
had little to do with democracy.
Man with a gun.
12 Georgia 30, I need additional units,
6-7 and Dacre, I've got a 4-50 male with a gun...
It seemed that despite all the changes of the past 30 years,
that underneath,
the old structures of power and the corruption
and the anger that created was still there.
In Los Angeles in March 1991, Rodney King was chased
and stopped by police for drunken driving.
Despite offering no resistance, he was beaten repeatedly
by four officers.
It was videoed by a man watching from a balcony.
He took it to the police, but no-one was interested.
So he gave the tape to a local TV station.
When it was shown, there was an outburst of anger
against the police violence.
Four of the officers were put on trial.
But they were all acquitted by an overwhelmingly white jury.
Due to the escalation of the situation,
and seriousness of the problems that are occurring,
the sheriff has mobilised all department personnel.
For six days, thousands of people rose up
and rioted across Los Angeles.
It was only stopped when the National Guard and soldiers
and Marines were brought onto the streets.
It was an outpouring of the anger that had been simmering
throughout the 1980s in the black community.
But despite all the reforms and the changes in attitudes
since the 1960s, nothing had really changed.
It seemed that those in power in America were still deeply racist,
and would use violence against blacks in America
to maintain that power.
All of it needs to stop but I'm going to tell you...
Get down on our knees and pray to God...
One at a time.
That the violence... Let me talk.
I know that the government, whatever, can't stand
us black people.
He's doing everything in the world to make black man be extinct.
But I'm going to tell you one thing, us black people
are going to survive.
And that's wrong about the black people tearing up the, you know,
burning down buildings, that's wrong.
But still, through it all, we're going to survive.
So fuck everybody, I'm off.
All right, that's just an example of the frustration
that's being felt here.
In Britain, a series of scandals revealed that dozens
of innocent people had been held in jail...
..some for over 15 years.
They included the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six.
Most of them were Irishmen who'd been accused of being
members of the IRA and planting bombs in English cities.
Every time they had tried to prove their innocence,
they had been blocked by some of the most senior figures
in the British establishment,
despite overwhelming evidence of false confessions
and faked evidence.
Eminent men at the very centre of power,
from the most senior law lord to the Attorney General
and to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police,
all of them, it was alleged, knew that the prisoners were innocent.
But they had done nothing,
and the evidence remained locked away...
..because they had an unshakeable conviction that the establishment
must never be shown to be wrong.
Finally, in March 1991,
the Birmingham Six were freed at the Old Bailey.
Ladies and gentlemen.
For 16 and a half years, we have been used as political
scapegoats for people in there at the highest.
The police told us from the start that they knew we hadn't done it.
They told us they didn't care who'd done it.
They told us that we were selected and that they were going to
frame us just to keep the people in there happy.
That's what it's all about.
To save face.
Justice? I don't think them people in there have got the intelligence
nor the honesty to spell the word, never mind dispense it.
They're rotten.
But there were others, also at the heart of power in Britain,
who seemed to have lost all contact with reality.
The intelligence agencies, from MI6 to GCHQ,
whose job was to watch and monitor what was happening in the world,
had completely failed to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Mrs Thatcher, who had supported the spies throughout the 1980s,
was shocked.
Her foreign policy adviser wrote...
"All that intelligence that they gave us didn't tell us
"the one thing we needed to know.
"That the Soviet Union was about to collapse."
It was a colossal failure
of the whole Western system of intelligence.
But some of the spies still didn't believe what was happening.
Sir Percy Cradock was head of the Joint Intelligence Committee.
Despite everything, he was convinced the Soviets were just
faking the collapse.
They were just up to their usual tricks.
They were still planning to take over the world.
Both Britain and America were societies that had been
built on empire and conquest through violence and the exercise of power.
But neither of them had ever faced up to this.
And instead, they had both built dreamlike myths
about their exceptionalism, to shield and protect themselves.
But in both cases, those myths were rooted in fear.
In Britain at the start of the 20th century,
not only were those in charge frightened by what
they had done abroad, with the slave trade and in China,
they now had a feeling that it was coming closer,
that something dangerous might also be happening inside England itself.
The Empire had led to giant industrial cities
rising up all across England.
They were dark, frightening places where millions of people
lived in appalling conditions.
What alarmed those in charge was the violence and the anger that
was building up there among what was called the masses.
But the danger also seemed to come from the top of society as well.
From the new industrialists and bankers, who ran the global empire.
They also seemed to be out of control.
There was a wave of financial scandals
and no-one seemed to be able to stop them.
The novelist EM Forster wrote...
"England is being menaced by the inner darkness in high places
"that has come with this commercial age."
Trapped by what they saw as a danger below
and corruption above, the middle classes retreated.
They turned away into another imaginary version of England,
where there were none of these threats.
It was invented for them by a whole generation of writers,
artists and musicians who,
in an act of collective imagination,
created a complete dream image of England's past...
..one that still haunts the country today.
At its heart was a vision of a natural order in the countryside,
outside the cities.
One of the key figures was a man called Cecil Sharp.
He travelled through England recording old songs,
and he filmed himself and his friends learning old rural dances.
Sharp made it absolutely clear that this was a political project.
His aim was to create a new kind of English nationalism
which had, at its heart, the idea of the folk.
It was a concept that he had taken from German nationalism -
the innocent rural people and their culture.
Now, is the sort of dancing he does the dancing that would have been
done around here...? Yeah, there's a lot of that done in the pubs.
Do-do, do-do, do-diddly-do...
What was implicit in Sharp's vision was that it was
an England before mass democracy had come.
An England where villagers lived in harmony and safety,
taken care of by the lord of the manor.
I've never seen a thing like this before in my life.
What do you call him? I call it Dancing Doll.
Sharp was not alone.
In 1914, a festival was started in Glastonbury.
It ran every year until 1927.
It was organised by Rutland Boughton,
who wanted it to be the centre of this new English culture.
He composed an opera for the festival,
which became a national sensation.
It was called The Immortal Hour.
It is set in a dark, mysterious wood,
where there are powerful, ancient forces.
They can be frightening, but they are also a way of connecting
with a forgotten natural order of power in England.
They are the lordly ones.
# How beautiful they are
# The lordly ones
# Who dwell in the hills
# In the hollow hills
# They have faces like flowers
# And their breath is a wind
# That blows o'er the summer meadows
# Filled with dewy clover
# Their limbs are more white than shafts of moonshine
# They are more fleet than the March wind
# They laugh and are glad and are terrible
# When their lances shake and glitter
# Ev'ry green reed quivers. #
This is a story that begins in any part of America,
wherever you may be.
It's a story that begins at your front door, on the street
where you live, in your town or village or city,
somewhere in America.
And paths enchanted that lead to the wonderful pages
of a storybook, that tell the story of America, the beautiful.
Unlike Britain, America had emerged from the First World War
as the most powerful country in the world.
Its president, Woodrow Wilson, had a vision that America should
now use that power to spread democracy all around the globe.
Behind this was a belief in what was called American exceptionalism...
..that the country was special,
not like the old corrupt empires of Europe.
And it could use that specialness to remake the world.
But the Republicans who controlled Congress refused to back Wilson.
They thought that such a crusade would end up corrupting America...
..and Wilson's dream of a globalised democracy collapsed.
Instead, the American economy went into a severe depression.
In a growing mood of fear, there were race riots,
as whites turned on the black communities in the cities.
In 1921, a white mob attacked the black areas in the city of Tulsa...
..and destroyed them.
They even used aircraft to drop bombs.
Out of this fear came an organisation
called the Ku Klux Klan.
The Klan had first been formed after the American Civil War...
..but now it re-emerged.
The Klan also believed in the idea of America's exceptionalism.
They took that myth and turned it into something frightening
and violent,
and they used it to protect themselves against
the perceived threat of a growing black population.
The model for this dark and hateful version came from a feature film
made in 1915 called The Birth Of A Nation.
It was an epic that caused a sensation,
reaching a wider audience than any film had ever done.
The director, DW Griffith, had based the film
on a novel called The Clansman.
The image of the clansman in both the book
and in the film was of white-robed figures with burning crosses.
These had nothing to do with anything real in America's past.
Instead, the novelist had invented them
from a romantic vision of an old Scotland and Scottish clans
that were portrayed in the novels of Sir Walter Scott...
..which Scott himself had just made up.
Again, like in England, it was a vision of a stable society
watched over and protected by benevolent leaders.
Figures from a feudal time,
a time before mass democracy and all its dangers and uncertainties.
In real life, the new Klan then copied the costumes
and imitated the rituals from the film...
..and it quickly became a mass organisation.
By 1925, the Klan had five million members...
..and the political power to mount a mass march on Washington.
They called themselves the Invisible Empire.
The Klan had a powerful appeal to whites,
frightened of the blacks in the ever-expanding cities.
And they also revived fears of the Chinese, the Yellow Peril.
What the clansmen were doing was retreating
into a mythical version of the past.
It gave them a sense of power...
..and of being part of a natural order.
And in Britain, the belief in the idea of a natural order
of power continued to grow, even as the real power was declining.
And this deluded confidence was going to have very strange
consequences for the whole world.
After the First World War, a group of upper-class English men
and women were sent to Baghdad to create a new country
out of the ruins of what had been the Ottoman Empire.
The most famous was Gertrude Bell.
She was the daughter of a baronet and had been a famous explorer.
Almost immediately, hundreds of thousands of Arabs rose up,
demanding independence.
The British had been financially broken by the war,
so they invented a new and cheap way of suppressing the insurgency.
They used aircraft to bomb the rebels.
They called it aerial policing...
..and they took back control and set about creating the new country,
called Iraq.
But because there was no money,
the group could also not afford to survey the country.
Instead, with no information, Bell and the others
simply projected onto the Arabs that powerful, romantic dream
of an old England.
They decided that the middle classes in the cities, who had run
the country under the Ottoman Empire,
were corrupt and untrustworthy...
..which meant that they had to be excluded from power.
Instead, power should be given to the sheiks who ruled
the tribes out in the countryside.
To the British, the sheiks represented the true Iraq,
because they hadn't been infected by the corruption of the modern world.
Their system was one of a natural order,
just like in the England of the past.
"The sheiks," said Gertrude Bell, "are like great aristocrats.
"They will run a system that will maintain a natural equilibrium."
The truth was that this picture of Iraq
was completely detached from reality.
The sheiks were really marginal figures,
while the Ottomans had begun to create a modern,
progressive society in the cities.
The British now tore that apart,
and replaced it with a strange dream that had nothing to do with
the complex, multilayered society in front of their eyes...
..but was really rooted in the strange, dark fears that were rising
up in Britain itself as its power declined.
Then, in 1932, the British, facing an economic crisis at home,
packed up and went...
..leaving behind them a completely unreal and unstable society.
DOLLS CHATTER AND LAUGH
# I know that it is freezing
# But I think we have to walk
# I keep waving at the taxis
# They keep turning their lights off
# But Julie knows a party
# At some actor's West Side loft
# Supplies are endless in the evening
# By the morning they'll be gone
# I got a flask inside my pocket
# We can share it on the train
# And if you promise to stay conscious
# I will try and do the same
# Well, we might die from medication
# But we sure killed all the pain
# But what was normal in the evening
# By the morning seems insane
# And I'm not sure what the trouble was
# That started all of this
# The reasons all have run away
# But the feeling never did
# It's not something I would recommend
# But it is one way to live
# Cos what is simple in the moonlight
# By the morning never is. #
MECHANICAL VOICE: We have located the Doctor.
At the same time as large numbers of factories began to
close across America, a new drug was created.
It was made by a company that had been founded by Arthur Sackler.
In the 1970s, Sackler had marketed the drug Valium to deal with
the feelings of anxiety and loneliness in the suburbs.
He had died in the 1980s, but in the mid-'90s
his company released a new drug called OxyContin.
It was a synthetic form of opium, and it was sold as a painkiller.
But then, workers who were being laid off as the factories closed
found that they got more benefits if they were disabled...
Oh, shit! EXPLOSION
..so they went to their doctors and said they were injured.
And the doctors gave them OxyContin.
They got their benefits,
but they also discovered that OxyContin made them feel safe,
in a bubble, protected from the anxieties and fears
of the new post-industrial world.
CLOCK CHIMES
In the 1950s, as the Empire collapsed around them,
the British Government saw the intelligence agencies as one of
the few ways in which Britain could still remain powerful
around the world.
In the public's eyes, the spies were powerful, glamorous figures,
epitomised by James Bond,
who proved that Britain still had global power.
In reality, MI6 was full of communists who kept defecting
to the Soviet Union...
..while MI5, whose job was to catch such traitors,
hadn't caught one for years.
A tough police chief from Glasgow was sent in to reform MI5,
but the agents would only talk to him in Latin,
which he didn't understand.
He gave up, and told his wife that it was like working in a madhouse.
Then MI5 was told by the Americans that one of its own agents
was also a traitor.
Surveyor of the Queen's pictures, Sir Anthony Blunt.
He, of course, is here. Sir Anthony, if we are going to...
MI5 asked Blunt if he was spying for the Russians.
He said yes, he was,
so to avoid embarrassing the Queen, they gave him total immunity
from prosecution and let him carry on working at Buckingham Palace.
The negro is ticking under the picture.
I've been listening to him while you were talking.
And it is indeed a clock. Yes.
And the mechanism is peculiar because the actual time,
if you want to know the time, you have to look into the eyes.
John le Carre had worked as a spy for MI6,
and the experience made him understand what this secret world
was really about -
that, in a country whose power had collapsed,
leaving only a drab, decaying reality all around,
the spies had managed to recreate a magical world
where they could go anywhere they wanted,
bug, burgle, and even assassinate people
without any fear of judgment or control,
just like in the Empire.
There is something delicious about being told,
"Now, we're going to have to burgle that house tonight,
"and what we'll do is we'll have a policeman outside,
"and while the owners of the house are away, in case they come back,
"the policeman will say, 'I'm sorry, you can't come in.
"'We've had a burglary report on your premises.'"
And these larcenous instincts which are put to the service
of the Crown had a voluptuous quality in the sense
that this was a necessary sacrifice of morality.
I really believed at last that I had found a cause I could serve.
I also longed for the dignity which great secrecy confers upon you.
KNOCK AT DOOR
NO AUDIBLE DIALOGUE
In America, the spies and their secret operations
were also being used to maintain a fiction.
Ever since the Second World War,
the American Government had been using the CIA to manipulate
and overthrow the governments of many other countries.
One of the most senior members of the US State Department,
Hans Morgenthau, had given this hidden system of power a name.
He called it the dual state.
America had to do this, Morgenthau said,
because of the harsh realities of power in the world.
But it had to be kept secret from the people,
because revealing it would undermine their belief in democracy
and in their exceptionalism,
a belief that was essential in the Cold War.
From the 1950s onwards, the CIA rigged elections,
destabilised governments through fake information,
and organised violent coups in Italy, Greece, Syria, Iran,
Guatemala, South Vietnam, Indonesia, and Chile.
In all, the United States ran covert operations to overthrow
66 foreign governments, and in 26 cases, they succeeded.
Morgenthau believed that this secrecy was creating a dangerous
time bomb at the heart of America,
and in the mid-1960s, details started to leak out.
One of the senior members of the CIA, Miles Copeland,
revealed that he had been involved in organising coups
throughout the world, starting in Syria in 1951.
It seems to confirm from the inside, many of the people's fears,
worst fears, about the way in which American policy is conducted,
for example, plotting to overthrow the Syrian Government and others.
Do you think that's a useful way of conducting foreign policy?
Keith, I'm not going to make a moral judgment.
I've simply described the way things are done.
It is true. Now, let me finish.
It is true that in many cases, we would sit around, in our attics
of the State Department, and we would have long discussions.
"Our government does not interfere in the internal affairs
"of a sovereign nation."
And we meant that from the bottom of our hearts, and then we'd say,
"But this is one case where we have to,"
and so we had to try to decide
how to do what it was we said was against our policy to do.
And we did, in fact, interfere in internal affairs
of many sovereign nations.
Wherever he walked, all hell broke loose.
SCREAMING
Across all the Orient, the flames of violence leaped.
Was the quiet stranger the torch?
10,000 mysteries swirled about him.
Wherever danger exploded, they found the quiet American.
And in 1961, the CIA decided to overthrow a government
in the heart of Africa, in the Congo.
200 years before, the Congo had been at the centre of the slave trade.
Millions of Africans had been forcibly taken down the river
and shipped to America,
where their forced labour fuelled America's rise to economic power.
Now the country had been given independence by its old
colonial rulers, the Belgians, but it was completely unprepared,
and had collapsed into violence.
The CIA were frightened that the new Prime Minister,
Patrice Lumumba, was about to turn for help to the Soviet Union.
It meant that the Russians might take control of the
giant copper mines in the south of the country.
The copper was crucial to the new electronic systems
and computers that the Americans were building.
They were the foundations of America's new wealth and power...
..and the CIA helped Lumumba's opponents capture and kill him.
And they helped install a dictator in his place.
He was called Colonel Mobutu,
whose brutal regime the Americans would support for the next 30 years.
Rather than establishing a democracy,
what the Americans had found themselves doing was continuing
the instability that had been created by the old European empires,
and then they did the same in Iraq.
In 1963, agents from the CIA came to Baghdad to plan another coup.
One idea was to secretly poison the communists in the government...
..but the country the British had created was by now so unstable
that before the Americans could act,
the Ba'ath Party mounted their own coup.
The streets of ancient Baghdad become the scene of a short
but decisive revolution that topples the pro-communist government
of Premier Abd al-Karim Qasim, shown here on the right.
A six-man military junta seizes power on a holy day,
and within hours, the premier, who reportedly had executed
10,000 people, is himself shot.
But the American agents supported and helped the overthrow.
They even gave one of the young Ba'ath Party members, Saddam Hussein,
a list of communists in Iraq.
Saddam Hussein used it to execute thousands,
and it began his rise to power.
He later ordered a feature film to be made about his heroic role
in the coup.
It was made by the British director Terence Young,
who had also made the James Bond film Dr No.
When Deng Xiaoping died, the country he had created was growing fast,
becoming more and more powerful.
But those who took over knew there were threats.
They were frightened of their people,
because they knew that, having got rid of the communist ideals,
they were now totally dependent on the economic system
that Deng had created, but that had brought with it the growing force
of individualism, a force that had the power to eat away
at all the collective ideals that had held the society together.
And outside China, they were increasingly frightened
by the global financial system run by the Western bankers.
The paranoia and suspicion about the West
had gone very deep into the minds of the new rulers.
But for the moment, the money from the West continued to pour in,
and their power grew further.
At the end of 1997,
Britain had agreed to hand Hong Kong back to China.
During the negotiations, the British had insisted that Hong Kong
should remain democratic.
The Chinese were shocked by this.
They said it was completely hypocritical,
because the British had never allowed democracy in Hong Kong.
It had always been an authoritarian system,
controlled by a brutal and racist police force.
SHOUTING
Who's got the mace? Chemical mace? Sergeant, mace!
SHOUTING
Get the fuck out of it, you little gobshite.
Get out of it.
He's got to be subdued, man.
Get him! Hold him down!
Get him down! On the floor!
Come on, come on. Get him down.
HEAVY BREATHING
The British Government sent an envoy to negotiate with the Chinese.
He was Sir Percy Cradock,
who had finally accepted that the Cold War was over.
But after the talks,
Sir Percy announced that he agreed with the Chinese.
The demand for democracy, he said, was difficult
because when the British ruled Hong Kong,
there had never been any democracy.
Sir Percy was not invited to the handover.
And in the pouring rain, Prince Charles watched as the Chinese
said goodbye to the British by singing them a Rod Stewart song,
Rhythm Of My Heart.
THEY SING
And despite the Chinese triumphalism,
the BBC continued the fantasy of the special virtues of Britain's Empire.
NEWSREEL: China is certainly jubilant about the return of this
412 square miles of territory, and that jubilation is everywhere
in Hong Kong, but as we've seen tonight,
it isn't quite as simple as that.
There's a genuine fondness for Britain's decent contribution here,
a genuine fondness for the last governor, too.
"He's family," as one Chinese Hong Kong-er described it to me.
In 1998, the very thing the Chinese leaders were frightened of happened.
The global financial system went out of control.
It began in Thailand, where Western banks had been pouring
millions of dollars into a property boom.
Suddenly, the bubble burst,
and developers defaulted on their loans.
Western investors panicked, and rushed to get their money out.
The crisis then spread all across East Asia to Korea and Indonesia.
In every case, the country's exchange rate crashed,
causing economic chaos.
Indonesia's currency has collapsed, losing 80% of its value,
and the economy is in ruins.
With riots and looting breaking out across the country,
there are fears that it's now on the brink of anarchy.
The IMF gave huge loans to try and stabilise the countries.
For a moment, it worked, but then the currencies crashed again
as those dollars were used by Western banks
to get the rest of their money out of the countries.
It left the Asian societies in ruins.
To the countries' leaders, this was the old corrupt imperialism
returning in a modern form.
Power corrupts, as much as government can become corrupt
when invested with absolute power,
markets also can become corrupt when equally absolutely powerful.
We are seeing the effect of that absolute power today,
the impoverishment and misery of millions of people
and their eventual slavery.
China managed to escape the crisis,
but it seemed to confirm to the country's leaders
that their paranoia about the Western conspiracy was right,
that the West was prepared to use its economic power to loot
and wreck the Asian countries, just as it had in the past.
They decided that the only way to make China safe
was to take control.
The chairman, Jiang Zemin, instructed that all the dollars
that China got from exporting their goods should be sent back
to America and used to buy up the United States' Government debt.
This would make the dollar rise in value,
which meant that Chinese goods would be even cheaper,
but it would also make interest rates in America low,
which meant that people would borrow even more money from the banks,
and buy even more Chinese goods.
It was a virtuous circle.
What the Chinese were doing was using the money
to create a safe bubble, wrapped around the United States,
that would stabilise the system, and so keep China safe.
But in the process, the Chinese money would create the biggest
consumer and property boom ever in history,
and lead America into a protected dream world
that was increasingly detached from the reality outside.
And that dreamlike state was going to have extraordinary consequences,
not just for America and China, but for the whole world.
The city is going through its worst sandstorms in living memory.
It's swathed the city in this...
..ochre colour, this blanket of red dust, it's raining now...
It's literally raining mud.
Just look at it. I mean, this used to be just completely full
of the international press.
I mean, there's still a lot a lot of foreign journalists here,
but it's just blown apart by the worst sandstorms
that people say is in living memory.
Watch the cable.
In 2003, America and Britain were preparing to invade Iraq.
For George Bush and the Americans,
the aim was to bring stability to the Middle East,
but Tony Blair saw it in wider terms.
It was part of a new kind of global intervention
that was not like the empires of the past.
Instead, it was a way of liberating millions of people from a brutal
dictator, which would then allow them to become free democratic
individuals, but there were people in Britain who knew the
strange origins of Iraq, how 80 years before, English administrators
had gone there and created a highly unstable society
rooted in false dreams of England's past.
A group of six historians came to see Tony Blair.
They explained to him the complex reality of the different groups
in Iraq, and how they could easily turn on the Western intervention.
There was silence in the room.
Tony Blair said,
"Saddam Hussein is an evil man who needs to be removed,"
and the historians left.
Then the spies came to see Tony Blair.
They told him that there were hidden weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,
which justified the invasion.
But yet again, they were inventing a magical world of hidden threats...
..and the invasion began.
By 2007, the war in Iraq had become a nightmare.
The Americans were pouring nearly $1 billion in every day
to keep a conflict going that no-one knew how to win.
In the past, the Vietnam War had caused chaos at home in America,
not just in the mass protests,
but the cost of such a gigantic war had wrecked the American economy,
with growing inflation and unemployment.
The politicians had no idea how to deal with the economic chaos,
and it, as much as the protests, had forced them to admit defeat
and flee from Saigon.
But now with the Iraq war, there was no effect on the economy,
and there were no protests.
The reason was the Chinese money.
The Chinese continued to buy up more and more of the American
Government debt, which meant that the consumer boom continued,
and, safe in their protected bubble,
few of the American people protested.
The war was far away, and had no effect on their lives,
which meant there was no pressure on the politicians to admit defeat,
and that led them to try ever more desperate measures
to achieve victory.
But that desperation was going to awaken ghosts from the past
that would return in a distorted and frightening form.
Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Risha was the leader of one of the largest
Sunni tribes in Anbar Province outside Baghdad.
He came to the Americans and offered to help them.
In return for large amounts of money, he said,
his tribe would ally with the Americans and create a militia
to fight against the insurgents, above all, against al-Qaida in Iraq.
In desperation, the Americans agreed...
Which tribe?
..and the idea quickly spread across the country -
the Americans giving out millions of dollars to Sunni tribal leaders
to create private armies.
It was called the Awakening,
and Sheikh Abu Risha became a heroic figure.
When President Bush came to Iraq,
he met the sheikh to thank him personally for saving the Americans.
TRANSLATION:
But what the Americans had found themselves doing
was exactly the same as the British had done 80 years before.
Faced by a complex society that they did not understand,
they were turning to the tribes outside the cities
and giving them power.
They called the militias the Sons of Iraq,
and it seemed to work,
but in reality, it was going to lead to something even worse.
Three years later, as the American troops prepared to leave Iraq,
the money stopped, and the tribal leaders saw their power disappear.
So they made a tactical decision -
they turned and allied instead with the very people
they had been fighting - the al-Qaida in Iraq jihadists.
And out of that alliance came
the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
ISIS was far more than just another version of al-Qaida in Iraq.
Its public face were the jihadists,
but it was organised and guided by men from the Sunni tribes,
many of whom had been experienced soldiers in Saddam Hussein's army.
As a result, they swept through Iraq and on into Syria.
What had begun a long time ago as a make-believe version of England
created in the deserts of Mesopotamia as the British Empire
fell apart, had now turned into a terrifying nightmare.
# How beautiful they are, the lordly ones
# Who dwell in the hills, in the hollow hills
# They have faces like flowers
# And their breath is a wind that blows over summer meadows
# Filled with dewy clover
# How beautiful they are, the lordly ones
# Who dwell in the hills, in the hollow hills
# They have faces like flowers and their breath is a wind
# That blows over summer meadows filled with dewy clover
# Their limbs are more white than shafts of moonshine... #
And that mythical romantic view of the past was also about to return
at home in both America and Britain,
and it was going to have powerful consequences there too.
In his campaign, Donald Trump promised to recreate a lost America.
We will make America proud again.
CHEERING
We will make America safe again.
And we will make America great again.
God bless you and goodnight.
I love you.
But with the exceptionalism also came the fear,
and the violence.
And in Britain, thousands of those who had been marginalised
by the new global economy also came to believe in that romantic idea
of England as a special place.
A picture of a lost greatness that had been invented by
the upper classes in the 1920s.
Now, hundreds and thousands of frightened and angry people
demanded that Britain leave Europe...
..and the old ruling class come back and turn that dream into a reality.
CHEERING
HE SHOUTS TO CROWD
MUSIC: With Tomorrow by This Mortal Coil
# In another dream, and another
# With tomorrow. #
In America, in the 1950s, there was a famous exhibition called
The Family of Man.
It put forward a new way of seeing the world as an alternative
to the horrors of Nazism and communism.
It showed hundreds of photographs of individuals
from all around the world.
The message was simple -
we are all one world...
..and at the centre of that world is the individual self.
The man who helped design it was a refugee from Germany
called Herbert Bayer.
He saw it as a new kind of propaganda.
Instead of being overwhelmed by dramatic stories created
by those in power, the individual would make their own story
out of the photographs.
Bayer made a diagram to show his idea.
At the centre is the giant eye of the individual self,
surrounded by a mass of images.
It was a utopian vision of the self
selecting and arranging the fragments of images
into their own story,
and so becoming strong enough to withstand tyranny.
Confident individuals in control of their own world.
# Parents are the same No matter time nor place
# They don't understand that us kids are going to make some mistakes
# So to you other kids all across the land
# There's no need to argue
# Parents just don't understand
# You should have seen this girl's bodily dimensions
# I honked my horn just to get her attention
# She said was that for me? I said yeah
# She said why?
# I was like come on and take a ride with a hell of a guy... #
On the surface, Tupac Shakur was part of the age of the individual.
He believed deeply in the idea of self-expression.
But he was also one of the few in the 1980s who still believed
in the power of grand stories to move people,
and to inspire them to change the world.
His mother, Afeni, had been a Black Panther
and she still believed in the idea of revolution in America.
Tupac later said, "The phrase Black Power had been like a lullaby
"when I was a kid. My mother, she would tell me these stories
"of things she did or saw,
"and it made me feel part of something.
"She always raised me to think
"I was the black prince of the revolution."
What Afeni taught him was that the world most Americans lived in,
both white and black, was an unreal fairyland
that concealed the harsh reality of the power
that controlled their lives.
We're not being taught to deal with the world as it is.
We're being taught to deal with this fairyland,
which we're not even living in any more.
It is... It's sad because I'm telling you
and it should not be me telling you.
It should be common knowledge.
Aren't they wondering why death rates are going up,
and suicide is going up and drug abuse? Aren't they wondering?
Don't they understand that more people are...?
I mean, more kids are being handed crack
than are being handed diplomas.
I mean... I mean, it's like, you know, those little things
they have for the mice where they go round the circle and there's
little blocks for it and everything? Well, society is like that.
They'll let you go as far as you want.
But as soon as you start asking too many questions
and you're ready to change - boom.
By the 1980s, it was clear that the promises
of the civil rights movement had not been kept in America.
The idealism of black politics fell away.
And the communities divided into gangs,
that then turned on each other.
The shooting started about in, what, '76? Yeah.
1976.
You know, they stopped fighting. They just started shooting.
You know, it was something new to me, you know.
We used to fight all the time.
The next minute, I'm running from gunshots.
So, I said to myself, "Say, man, we're going to start doing
"what they're doing."
You know? Same thing they do to us, we do to them.
Do or die, stay in the house.
You know, fight or stay in the house.
So, I weren't gon' stay in the house for nobody.
Then crack swept through the black communities in America
and Afeni Shakur finally gave up.
She became addicted to crack.
And Tupac found himself alone.
At the end of the 1980s, he moved to California.
It was supposed to be
one of the most integrated parts of the country,
but one night, Tupac went to a party
and he realised that white racism was re-emerging even there.
There was a fight at the party.
And I was like, "What happened?" He said, "The skinheads came
"and told... Called the black people 'niggers' and made them...
"Said they had to leave. And of course, there was a fight."
I was like, "Oh, my God."
So we were sitting there... They went home, we were sitting there,
talking and everything, and my friend's just like,
"This couldn't happen in the '60s.
"You know, let's figure out what to do with it."
He was just like, "I know, we'll start the Black Panthers again."
So, we started the Black Panthers,
but we're doing it more to fit our views, you know?
Less violent and more silent.
You know, more knowledge.
Tupac Shakur set out to reawaken the radicalism of the Panthers...
..and to do it, he was going to use himself as the central character.
# I hear Brenda's got a baby
# But Brenda's barely got a brain
# A damn shame
# The girl can hardly spell her name
# That's not our problem That's up to Brenda's family
# Well, let me show you how it affects our whole community
# Now Brenda never really knew her mom
# And her dad was a junkie
# Putting death into his arms
# It's sad cos I bet Brenda doesn't even know
# Just cos you're in the ghetto doesn't mean you can't grow
# She wrapped the baby up and threw him in a trash heap
# She tried to sell crack but ended up getting robbed
# So she sees sex as a way of leaving hell
# So she really can't complain
# Prostitute found slain
# And Brenda's her name
# She's got a baby. #
But there was another country that was also like a fairy-tale land...
..Saudi Arabia.
Ever since the 1970s, billions of dollars had flooded
in from the West.
This vast wave of money had created a dream-like society,
run by an elite, where no-one paid any tax.
But there were those in Saudi Arabia
who saw another, much more sinister reality underneath this facade.
Abu Zubaydah had been born in Saudi Arabia,
but he was not a Saudi.
His family were Palestinian, and he quickly discovered
that if you were not a part of the Saudi elite, you were nothing.
He and his family were looked down on and scorned.
In the 1980s, Zubaydah grew more and more angry and lonely.
He began to write a special diary
into which he poured out his feelings.
It was special because it was written to be read
by just one person in the future -
himself in the year 2000.
The diary is full of a growing fury about how Saudi Arabia
had been taken over and corrupted
by the vast wealth that had come into the society.
He describes how everyone around him, including his friends,
were false and treacherous.
"They pretend to be pious, but really they have no values.
"The money has created a society where nobody believes in anything
"and nothing can be trusted."
Zubaydah tried to lose himself in music.
The singer he loved most was Chris de Burgh
and his songs like the Lady In Red.
But then at the end of the 1980s,
Zubaydah discovered the ideas of jihad.
At that point, modern Islamism was sweeping through the Arab world.
The attraction of jihad was that by losing yourself
in the struggle, you could free yourself from the emptiness
and the nihilism that the Western money was bringing into societies
like Saudi Arabia.
MUSIC: Lady In Red by Chris De Burgh
Abu Zubaydah travelled to the town of Peshawar on the Afghan border
to lose himself in the new revolutionary struggle
that was going to remake the Arab world and him.
# I've never seen you looking so lovely as you did tonight
# I've never seen you shine so bright
# Mm-mm-mm
# I've never seen so many men ask you if you wanted to dance
# They're looking for a little romance
# Given half a chance
# I have never seen that dress you're wearing
# Or the highlights in your hair that catch your eyes
# I have been blind
# The lady in red... #
EXPLOSIONS
Both Abu Zubaydah and Tupac Shakur, in their different ways,
are part of something that had begun 200 years before
with the French Revolution.
It was the idea that through revolution, you could break
through to a new kind of world,
something beyond the corrupt reality of this one.
But at this same moment, a completely new way
of seeing the world was rising up in America.
It said that all attempts to change the world through revolution
would always fail
because the world was too complicated for anyone
to be able to predict the consequences of their actions.
It came from engineers and scientists who were using computers
to model the way the world behaved.
MURMURING: If it's between the modus in relation to the advice...
It will not match this data in time.
The simulation would determine long it took the signal...
They saw the world as a series of complex systems.
Populations of animals, flocks of birds,
whole human societies and even global weather patterns
were all complex systems that you could recreate
as models inside the computers.
But when the scientists did this,
the computers began to reveal something they hadn't expected.
One tiny change in their equations
could have massive catastrophic consequences,
which they could never have predicted.
It was called Chaos Theory.
But we're beginning to learn
that very simple laws, very simple equations can generate astonishingly
complicated dynamical behaviour, apparently random behaviour,
which we call chaos.
So, the bad news is we can have nothing random in the system,
everything is known, and yet we cannot make long-term predictions
about the future because the fluttering of a butterfly's wing
will disturb the initial conditions.
Chaos Theory had a very powerful influence in the West
because it rose up at the very moment
the Soviet Union was collapsing...
SHOUTING
..and it seemed to explain why all attempts at revolution
had led to disaster.
The world was just too complex for human beings to change
in a predictable way.
But in the 1990s, as the computers became more powerful,
the scientists argued that even though human beings
would never be able to understand the complexity,
the computers could be used to see hidden underlying patterns
and make the chaos manageable.
This new idea was called Complexity Theory.
One of its main promoters was the man who had discovered
the elementary particles of all matter - quarks.
He was called Murray Gell-Mann
and he believed that there were underlying patterns
at every level of the universe,
not just in the particles,
but in the way people think,
in the structure of human societies,
and even in the languages they spoke.
You're always looking for patterns in nature? Yes.
Patterns in the way people think,
patterns in the elementary particles.
It's all part of the same way of doing things, I suppose.
Trying to spot the law, trying to spot the relationship...
The customs of primitive people,
languages and the relations among them.
And it's fascinating to try to figure out what these laws are.
As Complexity Theory spread,
it seemed to offer a new way of managing societies
by using computers to analyse vast amounts of data.
That would bypass the failed political ideas
that had always led to disaster in the past.
But it brought with it a deeply conservative idea that was going
to be the foundation of today's computer-dominated world.
It said that what you were looking for in the data
are the underlying laws that govern the systems,
as they already exist.
You never ask why those systems came to exist.
And who benefits from them existing?
One of the leading complexity scientists
insisted that the meaning of any system was irrelevant.
"I don't understand what meaning is," he said.
"In science, there is no meaning to anything.
"It doesn't ask the atom why it is going left
"when it is subjected to a magnetic field.
"It just observes and describes."
A mad's man gun. A man that go kill with this is really mad.
It will kill. You betcha. You better watch out. This is an M1 Carbine.
32 rounds.
I can go tap Lueders Park with this.
I can kill about 32 people if I hit them all. Guns!
All about shooting, taking them out. Yes.
And when they come shoot us, we go back and shoot them.
As he became more successful, Tupac Shakur dramatised in his music
what he called the thug life.
His aim, he said, was not to try and stop the violence,
but to make those in the gangs who were killing each other
realise that they could turn the violence outwards instead,
and fight back against those who really oppressed them.
But Shakur had begun to suspect
that maybe many people didn't really want change,
that they were happy living in their own fairy-tale world
of gangs and violence.
Now, if we do want to live a thug life and a gangster life
and all of that, OK. So, stop being cowards
and let's have a revolution.
But we don't want to do that.
Dudes just want to live a character.
They want to be cartoons. Mm-mm.
But if they really wanted to do something, if they was that tough -
all right, let's start our own country. Let's start a revolution.
Let's get out of here. Let's do something.
But they don't want to do that.
In response, Shakur was accused by a number of the gangs
of simply using them,
that he was sucking out details of their lives
and then acting it out in his music to make himself rich,
that he wasn't real.
In response, Tupac tried to become
more and more part of that world to prove his authenticity.
# You know, grab ya glocks when you see Tupac
# Call the cops when you see Tupac
# Who shot me, but ya punks didn't finish
# Now ya bout to feel the wrath of a menace
# Nigga, hit 'em up. #
But then the black radicals accused him
of getting lost in the character he had created,
that really he was reinforcing and intensifying the violence,
not changing it.
SCREAMING
One radical wrote, "Thug ambition is completely predatory...
"..because it is driven by an individualism
"that deliberately avoids the fellow feeling and the group solidarity
"needed by revolutionaries."
In 1994, Shakur was sent to jail for five months
for raping a 17-year-old girl.
Shakur found himself in the new world of mass incarceration
in America.
DOG BARKING
Let's go, let's go, let's go!
You're fat and slow, let's go.
Move it!
Driven by fears of a wave of violent crime,
President Clinton had brought in tough new crime rules,
even though, in reality, crime was falling.
You shut the fuck up and move, motherfucker!
Hundreds of thousands of young black men were now imprisoned
with no hope of parole, even for minor offences.
It seemed to show that President Clinton cared more about the fears
of the white middle-class voters
than he did about the lives of young black men.
But the white radicals, who were buying Tupac Shakur's music,
did nothing to challenge it.
By moving radical politics into the world of culture,
Tupac Shakur had also become part of the fairy-tale world,
because he helped keep the anger and the dissent sealed off
from the real world of politics and power.
And now he was all alone.
Trust nobody. Trust nobody.
After dark. You know what I mean?
Straight up. My closest friends did me in.
My closest friends, my homies,
people who I'd have took care of their whole family,
I'd have took care of everything for them, looked out for them,
put them in a gang, everything, turned on me.
Fear is stronger than love.
Remember that. Fear is stronger than love.
All the love I gave did me nothing when it came to fear.
So, it's all good. But I'm a soldier. I always survive.
I constantly come back, you know what I mean?
Only thing that can kill me is death.
That's the only thing that could ever stop me - is death.
One night at the end of 1991, Abu Zubaydah was part of a group
of jihadists attacking the city of Gardez in Afghanistan.
GUNFIRE
They were trying to overthrow the communist regime
left behind by the Russians three years before.
But then suddenly a mortar exploded next to Abu Zubaydah,
and a piece of shrapnel pierced his skull.
It went into his brain,
and his whole way of seeing
and understanding the world suddenly changed.
SIRENS
The next day, he was taken back from the front line,
over the mountains to Peshawar.
For two months, he was unconscious.
Then his memories from the past began to come back,
but in a mass of fragments.
Nothing linked them. They made no sense.
So, Zubaydah began to use his diary
to write down all the flashes of memory,
to try and make sense of who he was.
In the end, it would run to over 1,000 pages,
a vast collage of memories and feelings.
Moments of intense loneliness as a child.
Of watching Pluto meet an angel in a Disney cartoon.
Moments of fear in combat.
The smell of perfume.
The anger he felt at friends.
Moments of sexual desire.
And the sensation of autumn coming on.
When he had physically recovered,
Abu Zubaydah went back to the jihad training camps in Afghanistan,
but he found that whatever he did,
he could not put his memories back together.
They remained just fragments in his brain.
He also had a growing sense that the whole organisation of jihad
was disintegrating into rival factions.
All ideas of solidarity and collective action had gone.
In the diary, he describes how you couldn't trust
anyone any longer.
Zubaydah knew Bin Laden, who was running another jihad camp.
Bin Laden asked him to make an alliance, but Zubaydah refused.
He was aware that Bin Laden was planning some kind of retaliation
against the Americans,
but he didn't trust him.
EXPLOSION, HORSE NEIGHS
Zubaydah spent his time making explosives
and watching American movies like Rambo III.
Zubaydah wrote in his diary how up in the mountains,
everything was falling apart.
The revolutionary dream of Islamism was failing...
..while his sense of who he was, his identity,
had disintegrated into random memories.
They meant nothing.
There was no story that made sense.
He wrote how it was as though time had stopped.
He was trapped in a perpetual now,
haunted by fragments of memory...
..with no way of moving forward into the future.
But in the West, scientists were beginning to ask
whether the very idea of an integrated self
was actually a fiction for everyone.
In the 1980s, a new group of behavioural psychologists
had argued that what human beings think of as their self
was not fully in control of their actions.
Now, they had been joined by neuroscientists
who said they had discovered something even stranger -
that inside their brains,
human beings had all kinds of different selves
which the conscious mind had no awareness of at all.
They were led by Michael Gazzaniga,
who would win a Nobel Prize for his work.
With your right hand,
you point to this row.
And with your left hand, you point to this row. OK. OK?
Gazzaniga studied the brains of people like Vicki.
She suffered from extreme epilepsy.
To try and stop her attacks, surgeons had cut the nerve fibres
that linked the two sides of her brain.
It worked, but it also revealed something very strange.
There was another force inside Vicki that emerged,
that kept trying to take control.
I knew what I wanted to wear.
And I would open up my closet,
get ready to take it out.
And my other hand would, like, just take control.
It would just reach in
and get something that I wouldn't want at all.
And a couple of times I had a pair of shorts on,
and then I'd find myself putting another pair of shorts on
on top of a pair I already had on. And which I knew...
I knew was wrong.
Gazzaniga argued that really there
were multiple selves inside the human brain,
each one taking control at different moments.
Normally that is hidden because the one self that is conscious
constantly makes up stories to explain
what all the other selves are doing.
But when the connection between the two parts of the brain is cut,
it can't do that...
..and the other parts emerge.
Vicki wasn't strange, Gazzaniga said, she just showed the truth.
Gazzaniga argued that really all human beings live
in a made-up dream world of stories
which give them the illusion that they are in control.
But, really, there is something else inside them
that they will never contact.
We have to quit viewing man as a single psychological entity.
That, in fact, his psychological self is a multiple self,
that he has a variety of mental systems existing in his brain.
They have emotions, they have memories, they have incentives,
they have destinies.
And they're able to control the motor apparatus,
by which I mean they are able to make movements,
they're able to actually precipitate behaviours on the part of someone.
And once those actions are completed,
here comes this verbal system in to give an explanation
and to propose a theory
to itself to explain why these actions were carried out.
The 1990s was the high point of the idea of individualism.
With all the old revolutions gone, it promised the vision
of a new world of free, confident people.
But what was happening was that the sciences, that had grown up
with that individualism, were now turning on it and eating away at it.
Complexity theory said that human beings were just components
in vast, complex systems,
systems that they would never be able to understand,
which meant what they thought and what they felt
was irrelevant to the system...
..while psychology, and now neuroscience, said that much
of what went on inside people's brains was beyond their control...
..which meant that the conscious bit inside the brain,
the part that applies meaning to the world,
was actually irrelevant.
Bit by bit, the idea of the world as something that human beings
could understand and change was disappearing.
Human consciousness was being sidelined.
In 1996, Tupac Shakur was shot in Las Vegas.
He was taken to hospital in a critical condition.
Six days later, he died.
Still today, no-one knows who shot him.
The suspicion and the lack of trust that he had come to fear
was now spreading through the black community.
And in that mood, a new conspiracy theory was rising up.
It said that the crack epidemic in black areas had been created
by the CIA and the US government.
And the feelings of suspicion and paranoia spread even further.
This show is about finding some truth.
Was the CIA responsible for, in any way, shape or form,
funnelling cocaine into the United States of America
back in the early '80s,
and then helped to develop and turn it into crack,
which was then spread across America, and is the reason why
most of our inner cities are in the plight that they are in?
So, we're right between that house...
..and this house. We're renting this half of a house.
Right, so this is our garage.
Basically, nobody's in here,
but we've got a ping pong table, a computer.
But there was still a group of idealists,
at the heart of Silicon Valley, who still believed
that individuals could remake the world,
and they could help them do it in a new way.
It wouldn't confront the old systems of power.
It would simply bypass them.
There's Larry, the CEO of Google.
At Google, our mission is to make the world's information accessible
and useful, and that means all the world's information,
which now in our index numbers over a billion documents.
And it's an incredible resource.
I mean, in history, you have never had access to just, you know,
pretty much all the world's information in seconds.
And we have that now.
My hope is to provide instant access
to any information anybody ever wants in future.
I think I want to make the world a better place.
The idealism behind Google was the same vision
that had been behind The Family of Man exhibition 40 years before.
It said that everyone could use the information
to build their own story, free of the old elites,
who in the past had controlled what they read and what they saw.
But it would also link them together.
One world at the centre of which would be the individual self,
assembling the data in any way they wanted.
But in Russia, that same dream was now seen to have led to disaster.
At the start of the 1990s, a giant experiment had begun
to transform the country into a free market democracy.
But it had gone disastrously wrong.
SHOUTING
Russia had been taken over by a small group called the oligarchs
who had looted the country of much of its wealth.
THEY TALK IN RUSSIAN
And the idea that Russia could become a society of free individuals
was now seen as a joke.
No-one believed in communism or democracy any longer.
What does it mean...? What does democracy mean for most Russians,
not in Moscow? Unfortunately...
Well, the word "socialism" has lost its meaning and its value
in this country ten years ago.
After ten years, democracy is a kind of a curse.
You can curse,
you can offend someone, by naming him a democrat.
So this is the...
..answer to your question.
Thank you very much indeed. Thank you.
In 1999, the oligarchs decided to select Russia's next president
to make sure it was someone who would protect them.
They selected Vladimir Putin.
He was an anonymous bureaucrat running the security service.
And a man who believed in nothing.
With their money and the media they controlled backing him,
Putin was duly elected.
The oligarchs believed that they were now safe
and their power would continue undisturbed.
But then something unexpected happened.
In August of 2000, the nuclear submarine Kursk
set out on the first Navy exercise since the fall of the Soviet Union.
As a torpedo was being loaded, it exploded.
And the submarine sank to the ocean floor.
To begin with, the Russian Navy didn't notice
that anything had happened.
Then they began to search for the Kursk,
but they couldn't find it.
The families of the crew came to the base at Murmansk.
The officials assured them that they were in contact
with the crew, but this was a lie.
They knew that all 118 sailors were already dead.
The families grew desperate.
To begin with, Putin did nothing.
He had no idea how to react.
But, finally, he was forced to come to Murmansk
to confront the angry families in a closed meeting.
What Putin then did to save himself
was turn that anger away from himself
and towards the very people who had put him in power.
"The people who killed your sons," he told the families,
"were the corrupt elites in Moscow,
"the oligarchs who have all the money and control all the media.
"They are the ones who are lying to you.
"They are the ones who have destroyed the Army and the Navy.
"They are the ones who have stolen everything
"and have everyone in their pocket."
Faced by a catastrophe,
what Putin had discovered was a new source of power.
It was the raw anger of those outside the major cities in Russia
who felt lonely and isolated,
as their jobs and lives had collapsed around them.
They had been promised a democracy.
But what they got was chaos and corruption on a vast scale.
And Putin had realised the power that anger could give him.
But he himself still believed in nothing.
He had been taken and placed in power, and he had no goal.
The Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar wrote,
"There is no logic in the age of Putin.
"There is no plan or strategy.
"Everything that happens, like with the Kursk,
"is a tactical step, a real-time response to external stimuli
"devoid of any ultimate objective."
By the start of 2000, Silicon Valley had become the focus
of a giant financial boom.
Wall Street banks were pouring millions of dollars
into small companies that they knew were unlikely to ever make
any real profit.
Their real aim was to create massive share price rises
when they took the companies public on the stock exchange.
But then the bubble suddenly burst.
FAST SPEECH
Companies that only weeks before had been valued
at billions of dollars disappeared overnight,
their technology auctioned off in fire sales.
We have $100,000 computers
with eight processors and ten hard drives,
and just decked out with gigs of RAM.
And that stuff's going for ten cents, 20 cents on the dollar.
Google managed to survive,
but the crash meant that they met the power of money,
which was going to reshape their aims completely.
The venture capitalists, who had invested in the company,
now had the upper hand.
They told Sergey Brin that he had to find a way to make money.
And quickly.
And a sense of emergency gripped Google.
But then they found the solution.
Every time someone searched the web, they left trails behind them,
traces, as they travelled through the internet.
Up to this point, that mass of data had simply been used to make
the system of giving people information more efficient.
But now the company's engineers realised
that if they gathered enough of it together,
they could build up a picture of how every individual behaved
and how they were likely to behave in the future.
It meant they could predict
what advertisement an individual would click on and respond to...
..without having to ask them anything.
Google started to tell advertisers that they had found a way
of replacing the hit-and-miss of old advertising
with a new scientific certainty.
And very quickly, they began to make millions of dollars.
But there was a problem.
What Google were doing was gathering vast amounts of data on millions
of people without them being fully aware of it.
And by 2001, the Federal Trade Commission was preparing a law
which would stop much of what they were doing.
But then suddenly, many of those problems disappeared.
RADIO COMMUNICATIONS
The attacks on September the 11th shocked America because no-one
had seen them coming.
The phrase constantly used was, "We failed to join up the dots."
SCREAMING
And in the state of fear, the government passed
the Patriot Act. It said that everyone's personal data
must be open to examination, to stop further attacks.
Privacy of the individual now became irrelevant in the face of a much
higher need - security.
It meant that the very thing that Google had invented, looking
for patterns in a mass of data, now became central to the security
of the United States.
And the threat of new laws to stop Google
collecting as much data on people as they wanted faded away.
The shock of the attacks of 9/11 began a shift away
from the individualism that had been at the centre
of America since the 1950s.
And Google was going to become central to that shift.
Because rather than doing what they had originally dreamed of,
giving people data so they could make their own stories, what Google
were now doing was TAKING people's data and using it to predict
what those individuals would do, without having to ask them anything.
What they thought or felt as individuals
and the stories they told themselves was completely irrelevant.
Consciousness was being sidelined even more.
SHOUTING
GUNFIRE
EXPLOSION
When the coalition invaded Afghanistan, Abu Zubaydah had fled.
He had not been involved in the attacks, but he knew
that the Americans were arresting all the jihadists they could find.
He travelled back over the mountains and hid in Faisalabad in Pakistan.
But two months later, he was captured.
Within months of September the 11th, 2001, we captured a man
named Abu Zubaydah.
We believe that Zubaydah was a senior terrorist leader
and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden.
Zubaydah was severely wounded
during the firefight that brought him into custody.
These are dangerous men with unparalleled knowledge
about terrorist networks and their plans of new attacks.
Zubaydah was taken by the CIA to a secret prison
they ran in Pakistan.
He told them that he had had nothing to do with the attacks,
but they didn't believe him.
Then they read his diary that he had written to himself.
And the CIA decided it meant that Zubaydah had a multiple personality
and that the other, hidden, self was hiding the information
they desperately needed.
So, the CIA turned to psychology to unlock the information they knew
was concealed inside his head.
Is this the new positive psychology class?
Yes, it is.
So, what is this positive psychology stuff?
Is the rest of the field negative?
Well, that's not really the case.
Positive psychology is the study of the psychological aspects
of what makes life worth living.
It simply focuses on building the best in people as opposed
to repairing the worst.
I see. I need to get to my next class.
Catch you later.
Thank you for helping me learn more about this fascinating field.
Positive psychology was part of
the new psychology that had risen
up in the 1990s. It said that millions of people
were really far weaker than previously thought,
that they were trapped in a state of what the psychologists
called learned helplessness.
And positive psychology would develop techniques
to rescue these people.
But psychologists working for the CIA decided they would turn
the system in reverse.
They would use it to reduce Abu Zubaydah back to a state
of learned helplessness.
They called it enhanced interrogation.
And they did it by waterboarding Zubaydah 83 times,
by repeatedly smashing him against the wall,
and locking him naked in a freezing box for weeks at a time.
The CIA videotaped the interrogations, but later
destroyed the tapes.
They reportedly show Abu Zubaydah screaming,
shaking uncontrollably and vomiting.
What was done to him became the model for a system of torture
that the Americans then used across the War on Terror,
including the prison at Abu Ghraib.
Desperate for the torture to stop, Zubaydah just spewed out
all the disconnected memories inside his brain,
memories that even he had not been able to piece together.
They were fragmented images of what might happen in America,
many of them drawn from the films he had watched, including Godzilla.
And that same sense of incoherent confusion was now
unleashed on America.
The CIA believed them, and the fragments inside
Abu Zubaydah's brain now
spread out across America to create yet another wave of fear.
But there were more and more people who were beginning to realise
that out in the margins of Western societies, there was a growing anger
and a total disillusion with the system...
..because it offered hundreds of thousands of people nothing,
and gave their lives no purpose or meaning.
I was brought up in a working-class way, in a working-class background.
I were lucky. I were good at school.
I were academically minded. I were quick.
I could make people laugh, you know what I mean? I could do things.
I could chat and still get on with me work.
Most people couldn't do that.
They were people genuinely who were fantastic with working
with their hands, but the other five hours of the day,
they were just miserable.
It's just not set up to cater for working-class lads
who were that way inclined. There's just no end goal.
There's no end point. There's no path.
There's just... "Get on with it" is the main phrase that you hear
constantly, and that messes with your mind after a while.
Dominic Cummings worked as a political adviser
for the Conservative Party.
But he believed that all politicians, left and right,
had completely lost
touch with the people they were supposed to represent.
Cummings came from the North East and he had seen the disillusion
and the anger that had been growing there ever since a wave of factory
closures in the late 1990s.
The Labour Government had insisted
that there was nothing they could do in the face
of what was called globalism.
But Cummings wanted to find a way to remake politics,
so it could challenge these new forms of unaccountable power.
And the way to do that, he believed, was by using complexity theory.
Cummings was fascinated by the founder of complexity theory,
Murray Gell-Mann, because Cummings believed that Gell-Mann's ideas
explained why politicians, like Tony Blair, had failed to stand
up against the force of globalisation.
The systems of power, like international finance, were now
so complex that politicians could never predict
what effect their policies would have.
So, they had stopped trying to control them
and simply let them rip.
But complexity theory, he believed, would allow you to understand
and control these new forces...
..because if you looked at the world as a series of complex systems,
you would find that there were underlying patterns.
It's a very simple point, but a very important one, I think,
about sheer complexity.
If you look around at social networks, physical networks, mental
networks, they consist of...
They consist of complicated,
non-linear and independent systems.
In these networks, properties emerge from the interaction
of lots of different agents.
You can't tell what's going to happen just by looking
at a single agent.
So, for example, if you look at ant colonies, you have lots
of interacting ants.
And from this, you have emergent behaviours like farming,
slavery and war, that you can never predict from a single ant.
The extreme complexity means that prediction is extremely
difficult even over tiny timescales.
It means... The scale of complexity means you can't have centralised
control. There's no master ant, there's no master neuron,
there's no master immune cell.
Cummings wanted to use data and computers to see the underlying
patterns in modern society, and then use that knowledge to take
power back from the unelected elites who had seized control.
But to do that, he was going to have to find a way to harness
the anger and the disenchantment that was growing in the country.
THEY ALL CHANT
INSTRUCTOR SPEAKS
But Cummings was not alone.
Across the world, there was a growing feeling that politics
had completely lost touch with the people, and was therefore
losing its power to hold society together.
In China, the children of those who had led the Cultural Revolution
were now in power.
They were called the princelings.
We are very happy to invite the newly elected members
of the standing committee of the Political Bureau of the...
On the surface, the China they ruled over was a powerful country.
It had a rich and rapidly growing middle class.
What the hell?! What's happened?
And China was also pouring money into a rapidly
growing military force.
SHOUTING
But what had been buried and forgotten
was any guiding ideology,
any confident story about what this was all for.
Instead, money had filled the void.
And that now seemed to be dissolving
the bonds that held society together.
There was an extraordinary wave of organised crime sweeping
through Chinese cities.
Vast amounts of government money was being stolen and smuggled abroad.
SCREAMING AND SHOUTING
But at the centre of the corruption was land and property.
On the edge of the new giant cities,
organised gangs were forcing farmers out of their houses at gunpoint
and seizing their land.
SHOUTING
What's happening is quite literally a massive land grab.
Those with political power, or money and political connections, are doing
everything they can to take control of land.
And the reason is very simple.
Today in China, land is extremely valuable.
It's in demand for all sorts of things - for housing developments
like this one, for factories, for shopping malls.
Making money was never easier.
What made the corruption so widespread
was that under communism, no-one was allowed to own land.
All the land was owned by the party.
Which meant that hundreds of thousands of party officials
were being bombarded by bribes and threats from organised crime,
wanting to get the land.
And corruption spread on an extraordinary scale.
The government's chief advisor, Wang Huning, called
it ultra corruption.
He said it was so extensive that it was hollowing out the whole
political system of control.
The country, he said, risked fragmenting into the anarchy
of the 1920s,
when hundreds of separate areas were controlled by rival warlords.
But one man decided he was going to make a stand against this.
He was called Bo Xilai.
He was at the heart of the Chinese elite.
Bo's father had been one of the leaders of the revolution
with Mao Zedong.
But in the Cultural Revolution, Mao had turned on Bo's father
and he was brutally beaten.
And Bo's mother was killed mysteriously.
Bo himself had been a Red Guard, but was sent to a labour camp
for five years.
But Bo now announced that he was going to bring back
the dreams from that time.
In 2007, Bo was made the head of the city of Chongqing.
Chongqing was one of the biggest cities in the world.
It had a population of 32 million people.
And Bo decided to use the city as a laboratory
for a giant experiment.
FANFARE
He started to hold mass rallies in the city, which were broadcast
live on television, and Red songs from the Mao era,
were sung by thousands.
HE SPEAKS PASSIONATELY
SINGING
Bo said that the reason for the corruption in China
was because there was no shared vision of the future, no aim
or purpose other than money,
and he was going to reawaken the idealism of the past.
And he also passed sweeping laws to try and tackle the growing
inequalities, subsidising housing and education.
And Bo brought in a new police chief, whose job was to root
out the gangsters
who had corrupted every part of the city government,
and were still demolishing thousands of people's houses.
Bo soon became famous and he was seen
as a future leader.
He and his wife, a lawyer called Gu Kailai,
became a glamorous couple.
They, like many others of the Chinese elite, had a fascination
for old England.
Many of the estates being built for the new rich
in China's cities were designed to look like an imaginary version
of England's past.
Bo and Gu decided to send their son to an English public school, Harrow.
And it led them to meet an Englishman who had come to China,
called Neil Heywood.
He had also been to Harrow and he helped their son.
And he soon became close to the family.
Heywood also lived in the old dreams of England,
from a time when it was powerful.
He dropped hints that he worked for MI6 and he drove around Beijing
in an Aston Martin with the numberplate 007.
Heywood used his friendship with the family to make a property
deal in Chongqing.
But then for some reason, the deal went wrong
and Heywood blamed Gu Kailai.
At the same time, rumours started to come from the centre, in Beijing,
that what Bo Xilai was doing in Chongqing might not
be as idealistic as it seemed.
# I love how your eyes close
# Whenever you kiss me
# And when I'm away from you
# I love how you miss me
# I love the way you always treat me tenderly
# But, darling, most of all
# I love how you love me
# Love how you love me
# I love how your heart beats
# Whenever I hold you
# I love how you think of me
# Without being told to
# I love the way your touch is always heavenly
# But, darling, most of all
# I love how you love me
# Love how you love me... #
And in Russia, there were those who were also trying to attack
and expose the emptiness and the corruption that had taken
over the society there.
SHOUTING
In 2007, members of the small National Bolshevik Party,
that was led by Eduard Limonov,
burst into the finance ministry in Moscow.
SHOUTING
They wanted to make people realise the corruption of Russia
hadn't gone away.
It was now spreading even deeper into the society.
And that Putin had to go.
They were arrested and 39 of them were put on trial together
in a giant cage.
I believe we are a most effective organisation of Russia
who irritate the government. But very effective, very effective.
The clumsy police state cannot struggle against us.
39 young people behind bars, more than six months.
What they said, they said, "We want Putin to go out."
Putin's other main opponent was the journalist Anna Politkovskaya.
What Putin had done, she said, was simply take the vast corruption
that had begun with the oligarchs and shift it into the public sector.
So the civil servants, the managers, and the intelligence agents
around Putin all now benefited.
One of them put it simply,
"Why take hand-outs from billionaires
"if you can become a billionaire yourself?"
Politkovskaya said that the society Putin had created
was one in his own image.
It, too, believed in nothing.
TRANSLATION: He became president without any programme,
without any words.
If there was independent television,
they would tear Putin apart piece by piece.
He has nothing to debate.
He has no programme, he has no personality, he has no interests.
The bureaucrats have made literally millions,
together with their families.
I think they were very happy with Putin.
They knew he would create favourable conditions
in which corruption could flourish.
Three months after the interview,
Anna Politkovskaya was shot outside her apartment in Moscow.
But despite the shock and outrage, nothing changed.
Since Putin had come to power, the global price of oil
had increased massively.
And money had poured into Russia.
One journalist described what happened.
"The country", he said, "rode through the first decade
"of the 21st century in a state of semi-oblivion.
"In a dream world of consumption."
Like Bo Xilai in China,
Eduard Limonov believed that the only way to escape
from this empty world was to bring back the old dreams from the past.
But in his case,
the communism was mixed with a fascist nationalism.
MUSIC: The End Of The World by Skeeter Davis
# Why does the sun go on shining?
# Why does the sea rush to shore?
# Don't they know
# It's the end of the world?
# Cos you don't love me any more... #
Google was now making billions,
and at the heart of it was data.
It had become a new gold rush.
Products of more and more companies around the world
were set up to mine all the traces of human behaviour everywhere.
And nothing was quite what it seemed.
The makers of Roomba revealed that new models would also be able
to gather and transmit information about the inside of people's homes.
People, though, they added, could always turn this off if they wanted.
Hi, I'm Tristan - Global Passion Ambassador
for We-Vibe couples' vibrator.
Even the vibrator We-Vibe was discovered transmitting data
about people's private behaviour back to the servers.
Good morning, Cayla.
DOLL: Good morning. I love the morning. Don't you?
While the German government instructed parents to destroy
any models of Cayla the doll,
because it contained what they called a concealed espionage device
that could also transmit personal data
about the behaviour of the whole family.
And Pokemon GO, which was created by a subsidiary of Google,
was more than just a game.
As well as extracting even more data from the players' phones,
it was also what one researcher described as persuasive gaming.
An experiment to see if you could move mass groups of people around
to where you wanted them.
As well as having fun, the players could also be guided
to what was called sponsored locations.
Cafes and bars that would pay to be a part of the system.
One journalist described the aim.
"Pokemon", she said, "is about herding people
"to monetised checkpoints without them being fully aware of it."
All this was not only creating a world where human behaviour
could be predicted, it was going to do something else.
Something that scientists and engineers
had been struggling with for 50 years.
It was finally going to solve the problem of how to create
real artificial intelligence.
But it would do it by creating machines
that could see a different kind of reality.
One that was hidden from human beings.
The key figure who did this was a psychologist
called Geoffrey Hinton.
He was the great-great-grandson of George Boole,
who had invented Boolean logic -
that is behind all the algorithms in modern computers.
In the 1990s, Hinton realised that the idea that you can create AI
by feeding rules of human logic into the machines had completely failed.
What Hinton said was that you do the opposite -
you get rid of all the rules of logic
and instead feed a mass of data into the computer
and let it look for its own connections and patterns.
He used what were called neural networks, where the connections
inside the computer mimicked the human brain.
Back in the '90s, there was a completely different paradigm
that wasn't called artificial intelligence,
it was called neural networks,
that said, we know about an intelligence system,
it's the brain, and the way that works is you have lots
of little processors with lots of connections between them,
and you change the strengths of the connections
and that's how you learn things.
And those connection strength changes have to somehow be driven by data.
You're not programmed, you somehow absorb information from data.
And you can't do it with rules. There's too many rules to write.
You just have to learn it from data.
Now, that data was available online,
and Hinton began to feed millions of words and images into the machines
and instructed them to look for patterns.
To learn a language, the neural network
would look for which particular words appeared next to each other
in the billions of sentences they were scanning
and which were far apart.
The machine is not interested in the meaning of the sentence,
only the patterns.
It was a completely different way of making sense of reality.
Human beings told themselves stories about what was happening around them
minute by minute.
Hinton's neural networks were a kind of intelligence
that completely ignored all stories.
Instead, they crossed back and forth across time and space
as they searched through data on the internet
looking for links and patterns that human beings
would never be able to see or understand.
Hinton began to work on artificial intelligence at Google,
and he gave what he had created a name.
He called it Vector-World.
It expressed what was becoming
one of the most powerful mythologies of our age.
The idea that had begun with complexity theory
in the early 1990s.
It said that the world is too complicated
for us as human beings to understand.
But nothing is too complicated for the machines and the data,
for they can see the hidden reality under the surface.
And this new fragmented way of ordering reality into patterns
was going to spread.
And as it did, it would detach human beings even further
from understanding what was happening in the real world.
In the banks, computers were being used to package the vast amounts
of mortgages that were being lent in the property boom
to everyone and anyone.
The computers cut up the dangerous high-risk loans
and recombined them with other safer loans.
The bankers believed that this neutralised the risk
and stabilised the system.
But as they did this, the connection of the debts
to human reality was broken.
Instead, they simply became patterns of millions of fragments
of meaningless data moving harmlessly around the system
in the server farms.
What had happened was that the bankers, the risk analysts,
the rating agencies, the accountants, and the politicians,
had all given themselves up to this new way of thinking.
A way of thinking that said that the data and the algorithms
understood the complexity of the world better than you did...
..which meant that none of them saw the absurdity
of what was really happening.
A vast wave of money was being lent to millions of poor people
who could never afford to pay it back.
But then it got more complicated because human beings were also
exposed to the avalanche of data online...
..and they started to behave in very much the same way
as Geoffrey Hinton's artificial intelligence machines.
They, too, spent vast amounts of time searching through all the data,
looking for patterns, links and coincidences
that had no obvious meaning.
But, being human beings,
they then turned them into fantastic elaborate stories.
They were called conspiracy theories.
40 years before, Kerry Thornley and his friend Greg Hill
had started what they called Operation Mindfuck.
They had spread the conspiracy theory that the Illuminati
were really the secret rulers of the world.
They had done it to parody and ridicule all conspiracy theories
because they thought that they undermined the confidence
of individuals and made them easier to control.
But now, in the mass of data online,
those stories about the Illuminati got mixed up
with other conspiracies, both true and false,
and out of it came extraordinary dreamlike stories
built out of fragments of truth and fiction.
Millions of people became convinced that all the major stars,
from Britney Spears to Beyonce,
were being manipulated and controlled by the Illuminati.
The theory said that the Illuminati had worked with the CIA
and their MK-Ultra project
and with Walt Disney to create a new system of mind control.
The stars' videos contained hidden messages.
Above all, images of triangles, put there by the Illuminati.
Telltale clues to what is really happening.
AMBIENT MUSIC
But one star had anticipated this.
In 2012, the Coachella festival and Dr Dre
used computers and fragments of data from the past
to reconstruct Tupac Shakur on stage.
You know what the fuck this is!
What up, Dre? I'm chillin'. What's up, Pac?
What up, Snoop? What's up, my nigga?
What the fuck is up, Coachella?!
And an album Tupac had recorded just before his death
was also released.
He had called it Killuminati...
..and in it, Shakur had attacked the way the black community
was already, in the 1990s,
retreating into conspiracy theories about the Illuminati.
They were doing it, he said, to avoid confronting
the very real powers that did control their lives.
His message was simple.
That suspicion was just another form of control.
Tonight, turmoil on the American housing market gets even worse
and the aftershocks wipe tens of billions off world stock markets.
The organisations which underpin mortgage lending in America
need a multibillion dollar bailout.
SHOUTING
Are you ask... Are you checking me? Are you asking me if I'm trading?!
In 2008, the systems in the banks
that had structured the mortgage loans failed completely.
It led to a global economic crash.
The governments in Britain and America rescued the banks...
..but they then decided to transfer the debt that incurred
away from the private sector to the public sector.
And what was called austerity began.
That decision was going to have powerful consequences
because it created anger among millions of people
outside the system.
Then, in the wake of the crash,
evidence of widespread corruption came out.
That all the major banks had been rigging interest rates
and many of them had been laundering money for organised crime,
including the drug cartels in Mexico.
But, again, nothing seemed to change.
A few lowly people were prosecuted
and experts talked of reforms and stress tests,
and the shock among those outside the system grew further.
And from that came the reaction.
It was the elites.
And people like you and me.
People that bought into the system.
And who's been held accountable?
Name me one banker, one CEO,
one law firm, one accounting firm.
We basically just flooded the zone with liquidity,
we bailed out the party of Davos.
And let me say it differently, the party of Davos,
the scientific, engineering, managerial,
financial, cultural elite, bail themselves out.
Remember, this populist movement and Donald Trump...
..is not the cause of this, they're the product of this.
And it worked on different levels.
It wasn't... The most obvious level was, we've got to take back control
from Brussels, but it was also, and I think David Cameron
and George Osborne didn't quite appreciate this,
it was also about taking back control from...
..of the system itself.
It was, for a lot of people, "Take back control",
made them think, yeah, these are the guys who screwed up the economy,
who drove it off a cliff in 2008, whose mates are all
the Goldman Sachs bankers and hedge funders on massive bonuses,
us mugs on PAYE are the ones paying the bills for this,
we'll show those guys, we'll take back control from you lot in London.
For Dominic Cummings, Brexit was not an end in itself.
For him, it was a way of getting rid of the failed elites
and the old political systems that ran Britain.
In their place, he was going to use modern network technologies and data
to transform an old, decaying society.
But what Cummings hadn't reckoned with was how the campaign
that he had begun would awaken ghosts from Britain's past...
SIREN
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage
the leader of the Brexit Party, Nigel Farage.
..and how they would reach out to possess Brexit and modern Britain.
AMBIENT MUSIC
At the end of 2011,
the body of a British man was discovered
in the Lucky Holiday Hotel in Chongqing.
It was Neil Heywood, who had been friends with Bo Xilai and his wife.
There were rumours that he had been murdered.
Did a British man die here?
You don't know? You don't take interviews?
Do you know if it's factually true that that happened?
Did that actually happened?
OK.
After the body was found, Bo's police chief came to him
and he told him that Bo's wife had arranged the murder
because Heywood was threatening to reveal
that she had been illegally moving large amounts of money abroad.
The police chief then fled to the American consulate
in nearby Chengdu because he feared that Bo was going to kill him.
And he told the press that Bo and his wife
were really ruthless gangsters who had brought corruption
to the very top of the Communist Party.
What then came out shocked China.
It was alleged that while Bo had portrayed himself
as an idealistic hero and paraded gangsters and corrupt officials
in front of the cameras,
he and his police chief had really been using extreme violence
and torture, taking millions from organised criminals
and bribes from property developers
and then keeping the money for themselves.
SINGING
While Bo sang songs praising Mao Zedong,
he had really just been using those revolutionary ideas
as a smokescreen to hide corruption that went to the very heart
of the city government.
But Bo Xilai denied all the allegations.
He came to the party conference in Beijing and insisted
that what was happening was an attempt to smear him
by the corrupt networks that he was rooting out in Chongqing.
No-one knew who to believe.
There were rumours that really it was an even more complex plot
by his rivals in Beijing to stop Bo from getting power.
And in the middle of the conference,
he and his wife were arrested and thrown into jail.
SHOUTING
ROCK MUSIC
Suddenly, at the end of 2011,
a wave of protests burst out in Russia.
As well as Pussy Riot, one night, a young internet blogger
called Alexei Navalny got up on a platform
and he chanted the phrase that redefined Russia
for what up to then had been an apolitical generation.
Putin was furious. It was complete hypocrisy.
He had given the new Russian middle classes prosperity,
now they were stabbing him in the back.
He grew increasingly paranoid, fearful that those groups
who had benefited from the corruption would turn against him.
And to protect himself, he shapeshifted again.
Putin did the very thing that Eduard Limonov had called for.
He created a new organisation called the Popular Front,
to promote Russian nationalism.
But Putin went much further than Limonov
because he summoned up a dark, frightening vision
from Russia's past.
It's said that Russia as a whole, what was called Eurasia,
was the last defence against a corrupt West
that was trying to take over the whole world.
It was a great power nationalism
that challenged America's idea of its exceptionalism.
What Putin was promoting was Russian exceptionalism.
It was epitomised by the Night Wolves -
an extreme nationalist motorcycle club,
who announced that they were now Putin's bodyguards.
MUSIC: We Won't Leave Our Cities by DEKABR
The Night Wolves put on mass shows
that dramatised the paranoid conspiracy theory
that America, led by Barack Obama and the bankers, and the Illuminati,
were planning to undermine Vladimir Putin and destroy Russia.
DRAMATIC MUSIC
In the West, after the crash,
the bankers had also now become the villains.
They were at the centre of conspiracy theories
that said that they were running a global system of corruption.
A wave of leaked documents seemed to show that the City of London
had become the centre of an international network
that was being used to hide the illegal fortunes
of kleptocrats from all around the world.
Hundreds of billions, it was alleged,
was being taken through London and then hidden in a network
of secretive offshore territories
that anti-corruption investigators called the Second Empire.
But the problem was, no-one could actually find out
how much of this was really true...
..because of something else the City of London
had always prided itself on from the time of the Empire.
Its discretion.
Hello, Jim. How's the markets?
Firm.
There's not much doing.
Nothing else? As it's you, I'll give you seven pence ha'penny.
Sorry, old man, wrong way, I'm afraid.
Is that all? Has he done it?
No, he's evidently not satisfied.
He'll try somewhere else.
Now, the discretion that the City was still so proud of
had in reality turned into a force shield that stopped
any proper investigation of what was really going on.
Eminent law firms immediately issued libel writs
to anyone trying to find out what was happening.
But by suppressing any real information, the suspicions grew
that there was a dark, frightening world of dictators, drug lords,
Russian gangsters, arms dealers, and international bankers
all thriving together in the shadows of the City of London...
..which reinforced the idea that the world
was bewilderingly complicated...
..and way beyond our control.
In China, Gu Kailai was put on trial for poisoning Neil Heywood.
She had confessed, the court said,
and she was given a suspended death sentence.
Then her husband, Bo Xilai, was put on trial in the city of Jinan.
He denied all the charges of corruption.
But outside the court, something unexpected began to happen.
And as you can see, Jinan has never seen anything like it.
There are huge crowds here, watching the media, watching the trial,
and everybody who has any sort of grievance,
any sort of complaint against the local government
or the national government, is here to try and get it aired.
To make their case, they've been thrusting pieces of paper
into my hand.
SHOUTING
What happened outside the court in Jinan gave a glimpse
of the widespread anger and frustration in China
with the ruling system and its corruption.
Forces simmering under the surface of the society.
The party leaders were split on how to deal
both with what Bo Xilai had done
and the forces of anger that had now unleashed.
Wen Jiabao, who was the Premier, said that the problem
was that the party had never confronted
what had happened during Mao's time.
"Unless you have political reform and open up the society
"for democratic debate", Wen said, those ghosts will always threaten."
But others disagreed.
Above all, the man who had just been appointed
the next party secretary, Xi Jinping.
His family, like Bo's, had been at the very centre
of the frightening forces that Mao Zedong had unleashed.
One journalist wrote,
"They want to keep that great black box
"that conceals the struggles and the brutality
"upon which China has built its staggering economic transformation,
"firmly closed."
And to keep it closed, Xi Jinping decided to turn China
into a giant system in which everyone's behaviour
could be predicted, managed and controlled.
The aim was to learn from the data
how all the individuals linked together in the society
so their behaviour could be predicted,
like components in a system.
But there was a further aim - to adjust the behaviour of people
so they would fit better into the system.
It was called Algorithmic Governance.
If the data from all the different sources
showed a person behaving well,
buying the right food for their children,
not cheating at computer games, and not jaywalking,
then they would be given what were called social credits.
This would then give them rewards,
from discounts on bills, to getting better visibility on dating sites,
even avoiding the queue to pay to see a doctor.
50 years before, an American psychologist called BF Skinner
had become notorious when he had outlined just such a society.
Skinner had shown how he could easily alter the behaviour
of animals like pigeons by using a simple system of rewards.
He called it Operant Conditioning.
In this experiment, he must peck at the cross ten times
before the food is forthcoming. After four or five sessions,
the pigeon learns the routine perfectly
and pecks at the cross wherever he sees it, without being in the least
upset at being made to work for his living.
Now, that produces in a rat or a pigeon or a monkey,
and in a man, a very high rate of activity,
and if you build up, you can get enormous amounts of behaviour
out of these organisms for very little pay.
You don't need to give them very much to induce a lot of that.
A world in which a great many productive things occur
on this schedule, will be a wonderful world.
Skinner wrote a novel called Walden Two
that described a future utopia where all human behaviour
would be controlled through this kind of operant conditioning.
"It was a utopia", he said, "because it would free society
"from all the dangerous and irrational impulses
"inside individuals' minds."
All of that could be sealed off
by managing people's behaviour with rewards and treats.
Now China had found a way of creating just such a system
of managing people through the mass of data it was gathering.
It was being used to create a whole society
where what went on inside people's heads was completely irrelevant.
Their rational thought and their feelings were all bypassed.
It was only their observed behaviour that counted.
And this allowed those in charge to bury and hide
the anger and frustration that had been created in a society
that was riddled with corruption and growing inequalities.
And if people didn't respond to the treats,
they could be forcibly reprogrammed,
as it is alleged is happening in large re-education facilities
in Xinjiang to hundreds of thousands of the Muslim Uighur population.
In the West, the corruption and the inequalities
also continued to grow.
And the politicians seemed unable to do anything about it.
But the technology systems were mutating,
morphing into ever more extreme forms...
..and out of that was going to come a completely new kind
of management and control in the modern world.
Unlike in China, it wouldn't try and bury people's emotions
and feelings.
It would work by doing the very opposite -
pushing and exaggerating those emotions
to a pitch of continual hysteria and suspicion
that would create a frozen world, paralysed by the distrust
of everyone and everything.
By now, the social media corporations had realised
that intense emotions were the key to increased profits...
..and what were called viral content factories
were growing rapidly online.
Their aim was to spread memes and other material
that would create what they called high-arousal emotions,
or activating emotions,
such as lust and nostalgia and envy,
or, best of all, outrage...
..because these were feelings that got people to pay attention longer
and react more intensely,
which then translated into many more clicks and shares.
Then in 2014, a group of psychologists working with Facebook
announced that they had found a way to put hidden messages
into people's newsfeeds
that would then create specific moods and feelings
without the individuals being aware of it.
It was the moment when the psychologists' theories of priming,
or nudging, fused with the power of the new technology,
and it seemed to show that manipulation could work
on an industrial scale.
But when it was revealed, it also had another unintended effect.
It began to sew a dark suspicion into people's minds...
..because they no longer knew whether what they were feeling
or thinking was their own
or really coming from outside sources.
But for the machines, that was no problem,
because suspicion was also another perfect high-arousal emotion
that they could feed off.
And suspicion was about to spread uncontrollably across the internet,
because into this mix came two terrible shocks.
The first was Brexit,
the other was the election of Donald Trump.
The shock of both of these was enormous.
Especially for the liberal classes,
who'd always seen themselves as protecting the working class.
They protested, but the shock was so intense
that many people found it difficult to process what had happened.
They couldn't imagine why the people had not only turned against them
and their benign care,
but also seemed to have voted against their own best interests,
and to explain it, they latched on to the idea
of hidden manipulation.
That thousands of voters in America and in Britain
had been manipulated online without them realising it.
But then things became more complicated...
..because evidence had started to come out from the world of science
that questioned the whole idea that people could be manipulated
in such a way.
Psychology researchers had tried to repeat a number
of the most important experiments
that were the foundations of modern behavioural psychology.
They were astonished to find that again and again,
when they repeated the experiments,
they failed to get the original results.
It seemed that much of the evidence for priming just wasn't there.
It got so bad that one of the most famous psychologists in the world,
who had promoted the idea of priming, Daniel Kahneman,
wrote an open email to the science of psychology.
"I see a train wreck looming", he said.
"We have become the poster child for doubts
"about the integrity of psychological research."
Kahneman was frightened because it was undermining the idea
that he had helped create -
that in the human brain were systems
that the conscious self was unaware of
but which you, the psychologist, could trigger unconsciously.
But it also had wider implications
because it meant that companies like Cambridge Analytica,
who claimed that they could alter the way people behaved by priming,
might just be exploiting the hysteria and the suspicion.
The truth was that you might be able to keep millions of people
in a state of constant anxiety online
by bombarding them with memes...
..but you couldn't alter underneath -
what they thought and what they believed.
People might be far stronger than the scientists believed.
But it was too late,
because once you believe you are being manipulated,
there is no way back.
Even being told you are not being manipulated
might be manipulation.
The liberal opposition became lost in an endless conspiracy theory,
constantly searching for hidden clues,
links and fragments of evidence to prove that, really,
Vladimir Putin and firms like Cambridge Analytica
had orchestrated Brexit and the election of Donald Trump.
It was a mood of hysteria that ran out of control.
..whether the president of the United States was a Russian agent.
Let me say that again - whether the US president
might have been working for the Russians.
The wall's closing in.
As it appears the walls are closing in
in terms of the Mueller investigation.
The walls are closing in.
I do feel that he feels the walls closing in on him.
Legal walls are closing in on Donald Trump tonight.
From a Democratic perspective,
this is the president feels like the walls are closing in.
As he feels the walls are closing in...
I think he's feeling the Russia investigation.
I think he's feeling the walls closing in on him.
But what had really been manufactured
by the hysteria and the suspicion
was a constant source of those high-arousal emotions
that the machines needed.
They didn't care about the meaning
of what people thought or felt about Donald Trump.
They just fed off the waves of paranoia,
making the technology companies ever more profitable and powerful.
But many of those old institutions, who had been sidelined,
also found that by promoting the suspicions,
they could regain their power.
Trump is about to call me.
You can't trust what they tell us.
Major newspapers in America and in Britain
that might have gone bankrupt without Donald Trump
were rescued by the continual waves
of conspiracy theories they revealed...
..while the intelligence agencies,
who only a few years before had been hated
because they had invented the weapons of mass destruction,
now became heroic truth tellers,
revealing ever more hidden conspiracies.
And Vladimir Putin, whose power, in reality,
was becoming increasingly fragile at home in Russia,
became, in the eyes of the West, a dark, malevolent force,
which made him seem far stronger than he really was.
HE BLOWS RASPBERRY
But for Donald Trump,
the paranoia allowed him to hide the fact
that he was doing nothing to get rid of the corruption in America,
as he had promised.
His supporters, though, had their own conspiracy theory -
QAnon - that explained why nothing was happening.
Trump was being stopped by a secret cabal of paedophiles in Washington.
And for the liberal opposition, it was a way of avoiding facing up
to the genuine grievances and the very real anger in America
that Trump's election had revealed,
that he might be the product of a country where large areas
had fallen into both desolation and despair -
towns where all the factories had closed,
millions had become addicted to opioids,
and yet no-one in power had come to rescue them.
But the liberals couldn't face this because they, too, had no idea
of how to solve those problems.
And outside, in the real world, nothing actually changed.
The structure of power, the inequalities and the decay
all carried on unchecked...
..while all kinds of groups who wanted to cling on to power
protected themselves behind this brittle shell
of conspiracy theories built out of disconnected fragments.
But it was a very fragile structure.
And at this point, Google's engineers demonstrated
how easily reality in this fragmented world
could become strange and frightening.
They created an AI programme to learn how to see dogs.
They then showed how, if they ran the algorithm backwards,
the machines would alter the images of reality they were being fed,
so they would see dogs everywhere.
It was a world where anything could be anything
because there was no real meaning any longer.
MUSIC: Song For Zula by Phosphorescent
# Some say love is a burning thing
# That it makes a fiery ring
# Oh, but I know love as a fading thing
# Just as fickle as a feather in a stream
# See, honey, I saw love
# You see, it came to me
# It puts its face up to my face so I could see
# Yeah, then I saw love disfigure me
# Into something I am not recognising
# See the cage, it called
# I said, come on in. #
And then into this fragile structure came a catastrophe - Covid.
Unlike the other catastrophes of the past 20 years,
like 9/11 and the economic crash of 2008,
the virus was a force that came from completely outside
the systems of power.
But it has come at a moment when many of the old certainties
of this age are already cracking.
LOUD BANGS
But the virus did more than just accelerate the chaos.
It has dramatically brought into focus just how deep
the inequalities in modern Western societies have gone.
The millions of low-paid workers who have to keep working
to prevent the societies from collapsing are at much higher risk,
and those living in deprived areas
are suffering much higher rates of illness and of death.
Those who benefit from the system of power, it seems,
are much safer than those who do not,
and are also getting much richer
as the markets keep rising in the pandemic.
In the past, the shock of catastrophes has often led
to a radical reorganisation of societies.
And it may be that, even in the grim uncertainty of these days,
that that same impulse to imagine other kinds of future will emerge.
One possible future is that individualism will disappear,
and with it the very idea of individual freedom.
As has already begun in China,
data will be gathered and used on a massive scale
to predict and manage all human behaviour,
in the way that the psychologist BF Skinner predicted.
He said that individualism would be just a brief moment in history
before science would find a way to manage and control everyone.
"You would," said Skinner, "create a world
"that is beyond freedom and dignity."
ARCHIVE: Skinner believes that the experimental analysis
of behaviour suggests that man's environment performs
many of the functions once attributed to his inner feelings.
A man feels free if he believes he is free,
and he will believe he is free if he is conditioned
by positive reinforcement to think so.
His only hope is that he will come under the control
of a natural and social environment which will enable him
to pursue happiness successfully.
Another possibility is that the future will be like the past.
Many people are hoping that with the election of Joe Biden in America,
it will be possible to return to an old stability...
..where individualism can continue to be managed by a benign elite.
But although Donald Trump is gone and the Brexit deal done,
what they both revealed was that underneath Western societies,
there are enormous pressures building up that will not go away...
..while protests have broken out again in Russia.
After the arrest of Alexei Navalny,
tens of thousands came out onto the streets,
demanding an end to the corrupt regime led by Vladimir Putin.
The reality is that all these societies -
not just America and Britain, but China and Russia, too -
are exhausted, empty of any new ideas.
All of them have corruption
that has burrowed deep into their institutions,
corruption that the politicians seem powerless to stop...
..while China, which many believe is a model for the future,
is underneath a society not only riddled with corruption,
but its growth is declining far more than the official figures reveal,
while its population is rapidly ageing.
Far from being an alternative future,
China may well be yet another old, decaying society
that relies on a powerful surveillance system
to maintain its power,
because it too has no other vision of the future.
The third possibility is to try to imagine genuinely new kinds
of futures, ones that have never existed before.
But to do that, we as individuals will have to regain the confidence
that we have lost in this frightened and uncertain time.
But already, the psychological theories that tell us
we are weak and manipulable are cracking...
..and more and more people are beginning to realise
that the fragmented emotions of anxiety and suspicion
that they feel inside them may really be just the raw material
for the technology corporations to feed off.
It may be that we are really far stronger than we think.
The one thing that is certain is that the world of the future
will be different, and that the people in that future
will feel and think differently too.
If we can regain our confidence, we will find that we have the power
to influence how that future turns out.
And as a first step,
we have to start imagining what kind of future it is we want to build.
The anthropologist and activist David Graeber, who died last year,
described the forgotten idea that is waiting to be rediscovered
and how thrilling it could be.
"The ultimate hidden truth of the world," he wrote...
MUSIC: 'Til I Gain Control Again by This Mortal Coil
# Just like the sun over the mountain tops
# You know I'll always come again
# What you've seen is what I've been
# There is nothing I could hide from you
# You see me better than I can
# Out on the roads that lie before me now
# There are some turns where I will spin
# I only hope that you can hold me now
# Till I can gain control again
# Like a lighthouse, you must stand alone
# And mark the sailor's journey's end
# No matter what seas I have been sailing on
# I'll always row this way again
# Out on the roads that lie before me now
# There are some turns where I will spin
# I only hope that you can hold me now
# Till I can gain control again
# I only hope that you can hold me now
# Till I can gain control again
# Ah-ah
# Ah... #
MUSIC: Natural's Not In It by Gang of Four
# The problem of leisure
# What to do for pleasure
# Ideal love, a new purchase
# A market of the senses
# Dream of the perfect life
# Economic circumstances
# The body is good business
# Sell out, maintain the interest
# Remember Lot's wife... #