1 00:00:02,465 --> 00:00:01,641 - HUMAN BEINGS WILL ALWAYS BETRAY YOU - 2 00:00:01,641 --> 00:00:03,344 10... 9... 8... 3 00:00:03,410 --> 00:00:06,883 - YOU CAN ONLY TRUST THE NUMBERS - 4 00:00:06,883 --> 00:00:13,560 7... 6... 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... 0. 5 00:00:14,060 --> 00:00:16,764 NARRATOR: The ultimate political goal at the heart of our age, 6 00:00:16,764 --> 00:00:19,235 is the idea of individual freedom. 7 00:00:19,269 --> 00:00:23,942 Bush: I believe freedom is the future of all humanity. 8 00:00:23,942 --> 00:00:27,281 NARRATOR: In Britain, our government has set out to create a revolution, 9 00:00:27,314 --> 00:00:31,988 that will free individuals from the control of old elites and bureaucracy. 10 00:00:31,988 --> 00:00:35,661 A new world where we are free to choose our lives, 11 00:00:35,661 --> 00:00:39,733 not be trapped by class our income into predestined roles. 12 00:00:42,037 --> 00:00:46,578 BLAIR: …to liberate Britain from all the old class divisions, 13 00:00:46,578 --> 00:00:49,416 old structures, old prejudices, 14 00:00:49,449 --> 00:00:52,019 to liberate the individual… 15 00:00:54,756 --> 00:00:57,695 NARRATOR: and abroad, in Iraq and Afghanistan, 16 00:00:57,728 --> 00:01:00,466 Britain and America have set out 17 00:01:00,466 --> 00:01:02,302 to liberate individuals from tyranny. 18 00:01:02,336 --> 00:01:07,042 For those leading it, it is just the first step in a global revolution for democracy. 19 00:01:08,778 --> 00:01:11,516 But if one steps back and looks at what has resulted, 20 00:01:11,516 --> 00:01:14,755 it is a very strange kind of freedom. 21 00:01:14,922 --> 00:01:18,326 The attempt to liberate people from the dead hand of bureaucracy, 22 00:01:18,326 --> 00:01:22,800 has led to the rise of a new and increasingly controlling system of management, 23 00:01:22,967 --> 00:01:25,839 driven by targets and numbers. 24 00:01:26,640 --> 00:01:30,846 While governments, committed to creating freedom of choice in all areas, 25 00:01:30,846 --> 00:01:36,922 have actually presided over a rise of inequalities, and a dramatic collapse in social mobility. 26 00:01:36,922 --> 00:01:42,965 The consequence has been a return of the power of class and privilege. 27 00:01:43,666 --> 00:01:46,203 And abroad, the attempt to create democracy 28 00:01:46,237 --> 00:01:48,006 has led not just to bloody mayhem, 29 00:01:48,040 --> 00:01:52,112 but a rejection of the American-led campaign to bring freedom. 30 00:01:52,379 --> 00:01:56,520 "Go home yankee, go home yankee" 31 00:01:56,520 --> 00:02:00,359 - "We're here for your fucking freedom, so back up right now!" 32 00:02:00,392 --> 00:02:05,433 And it has summoned up an antidemocratic authoritarian Islamism. 33 00:02:05,801 --> 00:02:10,374 This in turn, has helped inspire terrorist attacks in Britain itself. 34 00:02:10,607 --> 00:02:14,046 In response, government dismantled long standing laws 35 00:02:14,046 --> 00:02:17,085 designed to protect our freedom. 36 00:02:18,052 --> 00:02:20,190 This is a serious of films, 37 00:02:20,190 --> 00:02:23,862 about how this strange, paradoxical world came to be created. 38 00:02:23,895 --> 00:02:28,602 It begins in the dark and frightening days of the Cold War, 39 00:02:28,602 --> 00:02:31,040 and it will show how what we have today 40 00:02:31,040 --> 00:02:33,977 is a very narrow, and peculiar idea of freedom, 41 00:02:33,977 --> 00:02:36,882 that was born out of the paranoia of that time. 42 00:02:36,882 --> 00:02:39,619 It is based on an image of human beings 43 00:02:39,619 --> 00:02:42,891 as selfish, isolated, and suspicious creatures, 44 00:02:42,891 --> 00:02:47,665 who constantly monitor and strategise against each other. 45 00:02:47,766 --> 00:02:51,505 The films will show how politicians and scientists 46 00:02:51,505 --> 00:02:54,510 came to believe this idea of human nature 47 00:02:54,510 --> 00:02:58,482 could be the basis of a new type of free society. 48 00:02:58,516 --> 00:03:03,524 But what none of them would realise, was that within this dark and distrustful vision, 49 00:03:03,557 --> 00:03:08,197 lay the seeds of a new and revolutionary system of social control. 50 00:03:08,197 --> 00:03:10,333 It would use the language of freedom 51 00:03:10,333 --> 00:03:14,274 but in reality it would come to entrap us and our leaders 52 00:03:14,274 --> 00:03:17,211 in a narrow and empty world. 53 00:03:18,000 --> 00:03:21,074 Subtitles downloaded from Podnapisi.NET 54 00:03:24,289 --> 00:03:28,061 - THE TRAP - 55 00:03:28,094 --> 00:03:34,405 - WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR DREAM OF FREEDOM - 56 00:03:40,047 --> 00:03:44,053 "Part one F..K YOU BUDDY" 57 00:03:44,954 --> 00:03:47,024 At the end of second world war, 58 00:03:47,024 --> 00:03:50,864 America and American films celebrated not just victory, 59 00:03:50,864 --> 00:03:54,502 but many believe dawning of a new era. 60 00:03:58,575 --> 00:04:02,147 Back then, freedom meant not just liberation from Nazis, 61 00:04:02,147 --> 00:04:04,986 but also from the economic chaos and uncertainty 62 00:04:04,986 --> 00:04:08,056 that had caused the depression of the 1930s. 63 00:04:08,056 --> 00:04:12,330 Governments now believed their role was to manage and control the economy 64 00:04:12,330 --> 00:04:14,133 and protect society 65 00:04:14,133 --> 00:04:17,337 from the danger of self interest at the heart of capitalism. 66 00:04:19,173 --> 00:04:25,651 No longer did we worship at the shrine of no holds barred capitalism. No. 67 00:04:25,684 --> 00:04:28,956 We had been through the depression of the 1930s, 68 00:04:28,956 --> 00:04:34,765 we had been through World War 2. Now we were talking about the need for government 69 00:04:34,765 --> 00:04:38,737 to be the major balancing element in the economy. 70 00:04:38,771 --> 00:04:43,946 The individual was still important, but government would make sure 71 00:04:43,946 --> 00:04:47,952 that we would never slide into a deep depression again. 72 00:04:48,520 --> 00:04:53,126 In the following years, bureaucracies at the heart of the state grew enormously. 73 00:04:53,126 --> 00:04:57,132 Their job was to regulate capitalism for the benefit of everyone. 74 00:04:57,132 --> 00:05:01,640 In an age of optimism, there were few who challenged this new vision. 75 00:05:01,640 --> 00:05:07,482 But one man on the margins was convinced it would lead to disaster. 76 00:05:07,482 --> 00:05:10,854 He was an Austrian aristocrat called Friedrich Von Hayek, 77 00:05:10,854 --> 00:05:15,427 who had fled the Nazis and now taught at the University of Chicago. 78 00:05:15,427 --> 00:05:19,301 Hayek was convinced that the use of politics to plan society 79 00:05:19,301 --> 00:05:22,906 was far more dangerous than any problems produced by capitalism; 80 00:05:22,906 --> 00:05:27,346 because it inevitably led to tyranny and the end of freedom. 81 00:05:27,346 --> 00:05:32,154 A terrible example Hayek pointed to was Soviet Union. 82 00:05:32,154 --> 00:05:37,863 In their search for a utopia, the Soviet leaders had tried to plan and control everything, 83 00:05:37,863 --> 00:05:41,735 but this had led them to tyranny and dictatorship. 84 00:05:41,769 --> 00:05:45,975 The same would now inevitably happen to the West itself. 85 00:05:46,042 --> 00:05:50,749 It was on what he called "the road to serfdom". 86 00:05:53,654 --> 00:05:57,927 The only way of avoiding disaster was to go back into the past, 87 00:05:57,927 --> 00:06:00,731 back to a golden age of the free market, 88 00:06:00,731 --> 00:06:04,003 where individuals followed their own self interest, 89 00:06:04,003 --> 00:06:06,607 and government played little or no role. 90 00:06:06,607 --> 00:06:12,116 Out of this would come what Hayek called a: "self directing automatic system", 91 00:06:12,116 --> 00:06:18,559 a spontaneous order, created by millions of people pursuing their own game. 92 00:06:18,559 --> 00:06:22,098 FRIEDRICH VON HAYEK: We will benefit our fellow men 93 00:06:22,098 --> 00:06:25,736 most if we are guided solely by the striving for gain. 94 00:06:25,736 --> 00:06:31,178 For this purpose, we have to return to an automatic system which brings this about. 95 00:06:31,178 --> 00:06:36,787 Self directing automatic system which alone can restore the liberty and prosperity. 96 00:06:36,787 --> 00:06:38,991 That is my fundamental conception. 97 00:06:39,024 --> 00:06:43,064 Question: Isn't it a philosophy based essentially on selfishness? 98 00:06:43,064 --> 00:06:45,167 - What about altruism, where does that come in? 99 00:06:45,200 --> 00:06:47,036 FRIEDRICH VON HAYEK: erm, it doesn't come in. 100 00:06:47,036 --> 00:06:51,510 NARRATOR: Hayek's idea was dismissed by politicians and economists. 101 00:06:51,510 --> 00:06:56,284 The notion that one could create social order in a modern complex world 102 00:06:56,284 --> 00:06:59,589 simply by unleashing individual self interest, 103 00:06:59,589 --> 00:07:02,794 was seen as a failed, and discredited idea. 104 00:07:02,794 --> 00:07:05,632 But proof that he might be right, 105 00:07:05,632 --> 00:07:08,270 was about to emerge from most unlikely of sources: 106 00:07:08,270 --> 00:07:14,479 from scientists, struggling with the new, terrifying uncertainties of the Cold War. 107 00:07:16,515 --> 00:07:19,554 This is the heart of a giant, blast proof bunker 108 00:07:19,554 --> 00:07:22,057 48 km North of New York. 109 00:07:22,057 --> 00:07:25,930 Built in the late 50s, it housed the largest computer in the world, 110 00:07:25,930 --> 00:07:28,634 linked to a system of radars around the world, 111 00:07:28,668 --> 00:07:31,639 which constantly watched the soviet Union. 112 00:07:31,639 --> 00:07:35,345 Every second thousands of pieces of information, 113 00:07:35,345 --> 00:07:38,316 poured into this room to be analysed for signs of danger. 114 00:07:40,419 --> 00:07:43,624 NARRATOR: The nuclear strategists who had designed this system, 115 00:07:43,624 --> 00:07:47,129 knew they were dealing with a completely new type of conflict. 116 00:07:47,129 --> 00:07:49,701 Neither side could let it get out of control 117 00:07:49,701 --> 00:07:52,304 because of the terrifying consequences. 118 00:07:52,304 --> 00:07:56,110 So the strategists wanted to find a way of using the information 119 00:07:56,110 --> 00:07:59,916 to anticipate what the Soviets might be about to do. 120 00:07:59,916 --> 00:08:05,091 And to do this, they turned to a new idea, called GAME THEORY. 121 00:08:07,829 --> 00:08:11,133 Game theory had been developed as a way of mathematically 122 00:08:11,166 --> 00:08:13,137 analysing poker games. 123 00:08:13,170 --> 00:08:15,274 It looked at the game as a system 124 00:08:15,274 --> 00:08:17,343 where the players are locked together 125 00:08:17,343 --> 00:08:21,082 each trying to work out what other thinks they will do. 126 00:08:21,082 --> 00:08:24,121 From that, Game Theory showed rationally 127 00:08:24,121 --> 00:08:27,325 what the best moves were for each of the players. 128 00:08:27,325 --> 00:08:30,297 "This is a type of war that had never been fought before 129 00:08:30,297 --> 00:08:32,933 and of course as we all know, it would be so devastating 130 00:08:32,933 --> 00:08:36,205 that it is almost impossible to consider all of its consequences. 131 00:08:36,205 --> 00:08:39,644 They still wanted to say there was a rational way 132 00:08:39,644 --> 00:08:42,716 to approach such a virtual war 133 00:08:42,749 --> 00:08:45,153 and GAME THEORY seemed to offer that to them, 134 00:08:45,186 --> 00:08:50,328 that you could, in a sense, incorporate your enemy into your own thinking 135 00:08:50,328 --> 00:08:53,800 that you could mathematically understand 136 00:08:53,833 --> 00:08:57,339 what your enemy would do, to the point where you and your enemy 137 00:08:57,339 --> 00:09:00,610 would play the exact same set of strategies." 138 00:09:00,877 --> 00:09:03,414 The centre for developing nuclear strategy 139 00:09:03,414 --> 00:09:06,686 was a military think thank called RAND CORPORATION. 140 00:09:06,720 --> 00:09:11,461 And the strategists at RAND, used Game Theory to create mathematical models 141 00:09:11,461 --> 00:09:13,997 that predicted how the Soviets 142 00:09:13,997 --> 00:09:17,303 would behave in response to what they saw the Americans doing. 143 00:09:17,303 --> 00:09:21,442 Out of this came the fundamental structure of nuclear age 144 00:09:21,442 --> 00:09:25,081 hundreds of missiles protected in silos underground. 145 00:09:25,081 --> 00:09:28,620 Fleets of bombers in the air 24 hours a day. 146 00:09:28,653 --> 00:09:30,089 Just as in a game, 147 00:09:30,089 --> 00:09:34,329 they were strategic moves to convince the Soviets, that if they attacked, 148 00:09:34,329 --> 00:09:38,803 America would always have missiles to destroy them in return. 149 00:09:39,437 --> 00:09:45,680 And, in the rules of this game, fear and self interest stopped the Russians from attacking. 150 00:09:45,680 --> 00:09:52,690 And it created a stable equilibrium called the "delicate balance of terror". 151 00:09:53,826 --> 00:09:57,565 Recommending missiles underground missiles in submarines 152 00:09:57,565 --> 00:10:02,206 and all that was a way of making that much more stable. 153 00:10:02,206 --> 00:10:04,743 Sometimes the way I used to explained this is: 154 00:10:04,743 --> 00:10:08,649 we're trying very hard to reduce the likelihood of a nuclear war 155 00:10:08,649 --> 00:10:14,625 by creating powerful incentives for the Russians not to start a nuclear war … 156 00:10:14,625 --> 00:10:19,566 Because we're trying to give them incentives not to attack, 157 00:10:19,599 --> 00:10:24,373 either with a nuclear attack or a conventional attack.. 158 00:10:24,373 --> 00:10:26,310 yes, so incentives are important in that. 159 00:10:27,044 --> 00:10:28,947 - Target you! - 160 00:10:29,081 --> 00:10:32,920 Underlying GAME THEORY, was a dark vision of human beings 161 00:10:32,920 --> 00:10:35,257 who are driven only by self interest, 162 00:10:35,290 --> 00:10:37,827 constantly distrustful of those around them. 163 00:10:38,629 --> 00:10:41,500 There was a mathematician in the RAND Corporation 164 00:10:41,533 --> 00:10:44,438 who would take this dark vision much further. 165 00:10:44,438 --> 00:10:47,510 He set out to show that one could create stability 166 00:10:47,510 --> 00:10:49,880 through suspicion and self interest, 167 00:10:49,880 --> 00:10:53,852 not just in the Cold War but in the whole of human society… 168 00:10:54,152 --> 00:10:57,291 He was the mathematical genius John Nash… 169 00:10:57,291 --> 00:11:02,533 Nash was portrayed in the Hollywood film, A Beautiful Mind, as a tortured hero… 170 00:11:02,533 --> 00:11:06,772 reality, Nash was difficult and spiky… 171 00:11:06,772 --> 00:11:11,079 He was notorious at RAND for inventing series of cruel games. 172 00:11:11,079 --> 00:11:14,183 The most famous he called "fuck you buddy" 173 00:11:14,183 --> 00:11:16,054 in which the only way to win, 174 00:11:16,054 --> 00:11:19,125 was to ruthlessly betray your game partner. 175 00:11:19,258 --> 00:11:24,667 Nash took Game theory and tried to apply it to all forms of human interaction. 176 00:11:24,934 --> 00:11:28,339 To do this, he made the fundamental assumption; 177 00:11:28,339 --> 00:11:31,578 that all human behaviour was exactly 178 00:11:31,578 --> 00:11:35,650 like that involved in the hostile, competitive world of the nuclear stand-off. 179 00:11:35,684 --> 00:11:39,624 That human beings constantly watched and monitored each other 180 00:11:39,624 --> 00:11:44,531 and to get what they wanted they would adjust their strategies to each other. 181 00:11:44,898 --> 00:11:48,604 In a series of equations, for which he would win the Nobel Prize, 182 00:11:48,604 --> 00:11:52,777 Nash showed that a system driven by suspicion and selfishness 183 00:11:52,811 --> 00:11:56,083 did not have to lead to chaos. 184 00:11:56,249 --> 00:11:59,521 He proved that there could always be a point of equilibrium 185 00:11:59,521 --> 00:12:04,362 in which everyone's self interest was perfectly balanced against each other. 186 00:12:05,731 --> 00:12:09,570 NASH: The equilibrium, this equilibrium which is used, 187 00:12:09,570 --> 00:12:13,843 is that, what I do 188 00:12:13,876 --> 00:12:18,917 is perfectly adjusted in relation to what you are doing. 189 00:12:18,917 --> 00:12:22,690 And what you are doing, and what any other person is doing, 190 00:12:22,690 --> 00:12:26,997 is perfectly adjusted to what I am doing or what all other people are doing. 191 00:12:27,031 --> 00:12:30,770 They are seeking separate optimisations 192 00:12:30,770 --> 00:12:32,806 just like poker players. 193 00:12:34,976 --> 00:12:38,081 - Question: Is each player alone? 194 00:12:38,114 --> 00:12:43,690 NASH: That's the idea that they are alone, and they're separate, 195 00:12:43,756 --> 00:12:50,701 doing something that is very non-cooperative - very selfish. 196 00:12:53,304 --> 00:13:03,087 And then what all of them do, works together and there's driving from that there's a payoff to all the players. 197 00:13:03,587 --> 00:13:06,592 That is the equilibrium, 198 00:13:06,592 --> 00:13:11,499 but it's understood not to be a cooperative idea. 199 00:13:11,532 --> 00:13:14,604 Narrator: But the stability, the equilibrium, 200 00:13:14,604 --> 00:13:18,043 would only happen if everyone involved behaved selfishly, 201 00:13:18,043 --> 00:13:23,218 because if they cooperated the result became unpredictable and dangerous. 202 00:13:23,218 --> 00:13:27,924 A famous game was developed at RAND, that showed that in any interaction, 203 00:13:27,924 --> 00:13:31,363 selfishness always led to a safer outcome. 204 00:13:31,363 --> 00:13:34,034 It was called "The Prisoner's Dilemma." 205 00:13:34,068 --> 00:13:37,139 There are many versions, but all of them involve two players 206 00:13:37,139 --> 00:13:42,280 having to decide whether to trust or betray each other. 207 00:13:45,852 --> 00:13:50,293 - The Prisoner's Dilemma - 208 00:13:50,593 --> 00:13:54,332 Narrator: Imagine you have stolen the world's most valuable diamond. 209 00:13:54,332 --> 00:13:57,371 You have agreed to sell it to a dangerous gangster. 210 00:13:57,404 --> 00:14:00,742 He offers to meet you to exchange the diamond for the money. 211 00:14:00,742 --> 00:14:03,013 But you think he may kill you. 212 00:14:03,046 --> 00:14:07,319 So instead, you tell him you will take it to a remote field and hide it, 213 00:14:07,319 --> 00:14:13,629 while at the same time he must go to another field hundreds of miles away, and hide the money. 214 00:14:13,629 --> 00:14:18,336 Then you will call him, and each will tell the other the hiding place. 215 00:14:18,369 --> 00:14:23,311 But just as you are about to make the call, you realise you could betray him. 216 00:14:23,311 --> 00:14:26,716 You keep the diamond, and then you go and get the money, 217 00:14:26,716 --> 00:14:30,856 while the gangster searches fruitlessly in an empty field. 218 00:14:30,856 --> 00:14:35,530 But at the very same moment, you realise that he is probably thinking the same thing: 219 00:14:35,530 --> 00:14:38,634 that he could betray you. 220 00:14:38,634 --> 00:14:42,674 You have no way of predicting how the other person will behave. 221 00:14:42,708 --> 00:14:44,777 That is the dilemma. 222 00:14:44,777 --> 00:14:47,214 But what Nash's equation showed 223 00:14:47,214 --> 00:14:51,354 showed was that the rational choice was always to betray the other person, 224 00:14:51,387 --> 00:14:54,893 because that way, at the worst, you got to keep the diamond. 225 00:14:54,893 --> 00:14:58,900 And at the best, you got both the diamond and the money. 226 00:14:58,900 --> 00:15:03,273 But if you trusted the other person, you ran the risk of losing everything, 227 00:15:03,273 --> 00:15:08,514 because he might betray you. It was called the "sucker payoff". 228 00:15:09,683 --> 00:15:11,920 What the Prisoner's Dilemma expressed 229 00:15:11,920 --> 00:15:14,857 was the strange logic of The Cold War. 230 00:15:15,158 --> 00:15:18,729 The optimum solution offering to get rid of all your weapons, 231 00:15:18,764 --> 00:15:22,436 provided the Russians did the same, could never happen, 232 00:15:22,436 --> 00:15:25,473 because you couldn't trust them not to cheat. 233 00:15:25,473 --> 00:15:28,145 So instead, you went for stability, 234 00:15:28,145 --> 00:15:32,151 created by a balance of dangerous weapons on both sides. 235 00:15:33,185 --> 00:15:36,023 What Nash had done, was to turn that, 236 00:15:36,057 --> 00:15:39,462 into a theory of how the whole of society worked. 237 00:15:40,196 --> 00:15:43,034 It had enormous implications for politics, 238 00:15:43,034 --> 00:15:47,507 because it proved that one could have a society, based on individual freedom, 239 00:15:47,541 --> 00:15:50,579 that wouldn't degenerate into chaos. 240 00:15:50,779 --> 00:15:52,983 But the price of that freedom 241 00:15:52,983 --> 00:16:00,361 would mean a world where everyone would have to be suspicious and distrustful of their fellow human-beings. 242 00:16:06,804 --> 00:16:11,177 The Nash equilibrium is important, because one of the great fears of politics 243 00:16:11,177 --> 00:16:14,249 is that self-interest would lead to utter chaos, 244 00:16:14,249 --> 00:16:16,854 and what the Nash equilibrium suggests 245 00:16:16,854 --> 00:16:20,091 is that a rational pursuit of self-interest, 246 00:16:20,091 --> 00:16:26,235 even in the face of implacable hostile enemies, will lead to a kind of an order, 247 00:16:26,235 --> 00:16:31,610 in which all players agree upon the strategies that they're playing, 248 00:16:31,643 --> 00:16:35,182 and that those strategies make sense to them. 249 00:16:35,916 --> 00:16:41,625 But at the same time, it's also paranoid because it's the idea of a human being 250 00:16:41,625 --> 00:16:47,267 sitting alone in a room, being able to totally reconstruct their opponent. 251 00:16:47,267 --> 00:16:53,077 Their opponent is totally implacable, totally hostile, and bent on their destruction. 252 00:16:55,080 --> 00:16:58,184 But there was a small problem with Nash's equations. 253 00:16:58,452 --> 00:17:05,161 They didn't seem to correlate with how human beings actually behave towards each other in the real world. 254 00:17:05,195 --> 00:17:09,769 When the Prisoner's Dilemma game was tested out on the secretaries at the RAND corporation, 255 00:17:09,769 --> 00:17:12,739 none of them played the rational strategy. 256 00:17:12,739 --> 00:17:16,178 Instead of betraying each other, they always trusted each other, 257 00:17:16,178 --> 00:17:18,483 and decided to cooperate. 258 00:17:18,983 --> 00:17:25,326 And what no-one realised, was that John Nash himself, was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. 259 00:17:25,326 --> 00:17:29,333 He had delusions, in which he believed that those around him who wore red ties 260 00:17:29,333 --> 00:17:31,336 were communist spies. 261 00:17:31,402 --> 00:17:36,276 And that he was part of a secret organisation that could save the world. 262 00:17:37,745 --> 00:17:41,050 John Nash: You don't want to admit that you are crazy. 263 00:17:41,084 --> 00:17:43,822 You see the other people as crazy, 264 00:17:43,822 --> 00:17:48,962 but you like to think of yourself as not crazy, as sort of rational. 265 00:17:48,962 --> 00:17:53,670 So I thought there was some secret organisations of humans, or secret 266 00:17:53,670 --> 00:18:00,381 beliefs among some categories of humans, 267 00:18:00,414 --> 00:18:04,320 and I thought I had some relation to that. 268 00:18:04,320 --> 00:18:06,290 I heard voices, 269 00:18:06,290 --> 00:18:15,137 and I ultimately realised that I didn't hear anything but something that I created in my own mind, 270 00:18:15,137 --> 00:18:17,540 I was talking to myself mentally 271 00:18:18,209 --> 00:18:23,049 Narrator: In 1959, Nash was forcibly committed to a mental hospital, 272 00:18:23,049 --> 00:18:26,921 and he would spend the next ten years battling schizophrenia. 273 00:18:27,055 --> 00:18:30,895 But despite the obvious problems with Nash's theories, 274 00:18:30,895 --> 00:18:34,299 the young technocrats at RAND were convinced that in them lay 275 00:18:34,299 --> 00:18:37,371 the seeds of a new form of ordering society, 276 00:18:37,371 --> 00:18:39,541 based on the free individual, 277 00:18:39,541 --> 00:18:42,746 because the equations provided a scientific basis 278 00:18:42,746 --> 00:18:47,387 for the alternative vision that Fredrick Von Hayek had called for. 279 00:18:48,054 --> 00:18:52,261 But, for the moment, these ideas remained 280 00:18:52,261 --> 00:18:55,499 confined to a few thinkers at the heart of the Nuclear Establishment. 281 00:18:58,104 --> 00:19:03,278 But Nash's ideas were about to spread in the most surprising way. 282 00:19:05,282 --> 00:19:10,723 Thousands of miles away, there was a radical psychiatrist who had a vision. 283 00:19:10,723 --> 00:19:13,861 He wanted to make people free of all the constraints 284 00:19:13,894 --> 00:19:17,767 that he believed controlled their minds without them realising. 285 00:19:17,767 --> 00:19:23,710 And to make them free, like Nash, he would fundamentally question 286 00:19:23,743 --> 00:19:27,749 and undermine the old ideas of trust and love. 287 00:19:30,888 --> 00:19:34,660 - Is love possible? - Is freedom possible? 288 00:19:34,660 --> 00:19:39,902 Is the truth possible? Is it possible to be one's actual self with another human being? 289 00:19:39,902 --> 00:19:43,039 Is it possible to be a human being anymore? 290 00:19:43,073 --> 00:19:47,547 Is it possible to be a person? Do persons even exist? 291 00:19:50,618 --> 00:19:53,589 Narrator: R.D. Laing had begun work 292 00:19:53,589 --> 00:19:57,195 as a psychiatrist in the mental hospitals in Glasgow in the 1950s. 293 00:19:57,195 --> 00:19:59,632 It was a violent, frightening world, 294 00:19:59,632 --> 00:20:04,539 in which the doctors tried to manage and control schizophrenics the best they could. 295 00:20:04,539 --> 00:20:08,178 Laing had noticed that the psychiatrists 296 00:20:08,178 --> 00:20:11,117 hardly even spoke to the schizophrenics, 297 00:20:11,117 --> 00:20:13,988 so as an experiment, he took twelve women, 298 00:20:13,988 --> 00:20:18,762 and spent months talking to them about their selves and their lives. 299 00:20:19,262 --> 00:20:21,833 The results were dramatic. 300 00:20:21,833 --> 00:20:24,303 After just a few months, al twelve 301 00:20:24,337 --> 00:20:28,042 were well enough to leave hospital. 302 00:20:28,644 --> 00:20:30,947 - "BUT 12 MONTHS LATER" - 303 00:20:30,981 --> 00:20:34,987 Within a year, Laing discovered that all of them had returned to the hospital. 304 00:20:35,020 --> 00:20:39,226 His attempt at a cure had failed completely. 305 00:20:40,195 --> 00:20:44,969 After this experiment, 306 00:20:44,969 --> 00:20:50,578 these women left hospital and after another year they were all back again. 307 00:20:50,578 --> 00:20:53,850 No-one knew why they'd come in in the first place, 308 00:20:53,850 --> 00:20:57,789 and no-one knew why they had to come back again. 309 00:20:57,789 --> 00:21:04,466 And that shifted my focus off attention and interest, 310 00:21:04,466 --> 00:21:13,179 and research interest, out into the actual circumstances where this thing called madness is incubated. 311 00:21:13,948 --> 00:21:18,254 Laing began to investigate the families of the schizophrenics. 312 00:21:18,287 --> 00:21:21,626 His research led him to a hidden, closed world, 313 00:21:21,626 --> 00:21:24,063 where he studied how the families of the schizophrenics 314 00:21:24,063 --> 00:21:26,534 behaved towards each other in private. 315 00:21:26,634 --> 00:21:30,106 And he became convinced that the roots of this madness 316 00:21:30,106 --> 00:21:33,577 lay concealed in this unexamined world. 317 00:21:33,611 --> 00:21:37,284 The doctors and nurses, who used chemicals and ECT, 318 00:21:37,284 --> 00:21:39,988 to try and return the patients to their families, 319 00:21:39,988 --> 00:21:42,324 were making a terrible mistake. 320 00:21:42,324 --> 00:21:47,866 They were sending them back to the private horror that had first created the madness. 321 00:21:47,900 --> 00:21:50,538 If this were true, then the doctors, 322 00:21:50,538 --> 00:21:55,412 although they believed they were doing their public duty, and what was best for the patient, 323 00:21:55,412 --> 00:21:59,552 were in reality violent agents of oppression. 324 00:21:59,585 --> 00:22:01,621 I think it's very important 325 00:22:01,621 --> 00:22:03,925 that a doctor remember his duty: 326 00:22:03,925 --> 00:22:09,935 to give the patient what is best for them in their long term interest, 327 00:22:09,935 --> 00:22:14,207 which isn't always what the patient asks for. 328 00:22:16,945 --> 00:22:19,849 If you want to go home to your relatives, 329 00:22:19,849 --> 00:22:24,256 the relatives have got to be reasonably sure 330 00:22:24,256 --> 00:22:28,496 that you will fit in reasonably well in their home, 331 00:22:28,496 --> 00:22:32,069 so that they can go on living a normal life. 332 00:22:32,269 --> 00:22:38,144 In the early sixties, Laing set up a psychiatric practice in Harley Street in London. 333 00:22:38,144 --> 00:22:41,116 He offered radical new treatments for schizophrenia, 334 00:22:41,116 --> 00:22:43,987 and quickly became a media celebrity. 335 00:22:43,987 --> 00:22:46,958 But his research into the causes of schizophrenia 336 00:22:46,958 --> 00:22:50,163 had convinced him that a much wider range of human problems 337 00:22:50,163 --> 00:22:53,669 were caused by the pressure cooker of family life. 338 00:22:54,570 --> 00:23:02,750 Laing decided to investigate how power and control were exercised within the world of normal families. 339 00:23:02,783 --> 00:23:07,556 And to do this, he would use the techniques of Game Theory. 340 00:23:07,556 --> 00:23:11,730 Laing had learnt about Game Theory when he visited the mental research institute 341 00:23:11,764 --> 00:23:14,000 at Palo Alto in California. 342 00:23:14,000 --> 00:23:17,973 A group of research scientists there were trying to use Game Theory 343 00:23:17,973 --> 00:23:20,443 as a way of analysing human interaction. 344 00:23:20,811 --> 00:23:23,214 And Laing saw in this the perfect tool 345 00:23:23,214 --> 00:23:28,256 to dissect what went on between the members of families in Britain. 346 00:23:29,057 --> 00:23:32,228 Laing used Game Theory in his analysis of families 347 00:23:32,228 --> 00:23:35,967 he was concerned with games, not in the sense of fun, 348 00:23:36,001 --> 00:23:38,504 more in the sense of people playing by rules, 349 00:23:38,504 --> 00:23:44,281 some of which were explicit, and some of which they were unaware of, and which in a sense were secret. 350 00:23:44,781 --> 00:23:50,590 He thought he'd uncovered a fresh way of looking at human relations, 351 00:23:50,590 --> 00:23:54,162 those secret games that people had. 352 00:23:54,830 --> 00:24:02,409 This was a way in which he could be subject to some sort of scientific investigation, 353 00:24:02,409 --> 00:24:05,981 it could be quantified, you could give people questionnaires. 354 00:24:06,014 --> 00:24:10,788 Oh, it was very much the application of Game Theory, that's exactly what it was. 355 00:24:10,821 --> 00:24:13,526 Laing took twenty couples to Britain, 356 00:24:13,526 --> 00:24:15,996 and using a complex series of questionnaires, 357 00:24:15,996 --> 00:24:21,238 he analysed how each of them saw the other, moment by moment, in their daily life, 358 00:24:21,238 --> 00:24:26,980 continually asking them what they secretly thought the other really intended. 359 00:24:26,980 --> 00:24:32,822 Following Game Theory, he then coded the results, and had them analysed by computer. 360 00:24:32,822 --> 00:24:35,527 Out of that, Laing produced matrices, 361 00:24:35,527 --> 00:24:37,963 which showed that, just as in the Cold War, 362 00:24:37,997 --> 00:24:41,068 couples use their everyday actions for strategies 363 00:24:41,068 --> 00:24:43,973 to control and manipulate each other. 364 00:24:43,973 --> 00:24:46,377 His conclusions were stark: 365 00:24:46,377 --> 00:24:49,749 that what would normally be seen as acts of kindness and love, 366 00:24:49,749 --> 00:24:55,090 were in reality, weapons used selfishly to exert power and control. 367 00:24:55,124 --> 00:25:01,300 Laing really did feel that the family was an arena for strategising. 368 00:25:01,300 --> 00:25:08,444 Love was a way in which one person tried to dominate another person. 369 00:25:08,444 --> 00:25:15,322 "I love you, but I'm making a condition for that love which is impossible for you to fulfil. 370 00:25:15,322 --> 00:25:18,226 And so there's nothing you can do 371 00:25:18,260 --> 00:25:22,733 to earn my love, even though I'm telling you that you have to earn my love". 372 00:25:22,733 --> 00:25:26,439 From this research, Laing argued that the modern family, 373 00:25:26,439 --> 00:25:31,647 far from being a caring, nurturing institution, was in reality, a dark arena, 374 00:25:31,647 --> 00:25:35,553 where people played continuous selfish games with each other. 375 00:25:35,586 --> 00:25:38,424 Out of this struggle came stability and society, 376 00:25:38,424 --> 00:25:43,599 but a bleak and limited existence for all the individuals involved. 377 00:25:44,500 --> 00:25:49,575 The so-called "normal" family that I studied in the course of this work, 378 00:25:49,575 --> 00:25:55,584 it was like walking into a carbon monoxide gas chamber. 379 00:25:55,584 --> 00:26:01,593 People induced their children to adjust to life 380 00:26:01,593 --> 00:26:13,178 by poisoning themselves to a level of subsistence existence that they called life. 381 00:26:13,345 --> 00:26:16,417 Laing was radicalised by his findings. 382 00:26:16,450 --> 00:26:20,990 He believed that the struggle for power and control that he had uncovered in the family, 383 00:26:20,990 --> 00:26:25,831 was inextricably linked with the struggle for power and control in the world. 384 00:26:25,831 --> 00:26:31,807 In a violent and corrupt society, the family had become a machine for controlling people. 385 00:26:32,240 --> 00:26:35,679 Laing believed that this was an objective reality, 386 00:26:35,679 --> 00:26:39,987 revealed by his scientific methods, above all by Game Theory. 387 00:26:39,987 --> 00:26:44,994 But these very methods contain within them bleak paranoid assumptions 388 00:26:44,994 --> 00:26:47,832 about what human beings are really like. 389 00:26:47,865 --> 00:26:51,771 Assumptions borne out of the hostility of the Cold War. 390 00:26:52,338 --> 00:26:54,609 What Laing was actually doing, 391 00:26:54,609 --> 00:27:00,218 was helping spread these bleak, paranoid ideas into other areas of society. 392 00:27:00,218 --> 00:27:02,788 Into the very way we thought about ourselves, 393 00:27:02,788 --> 00:27:05,493 and our relationships with each other. 394 00:27:05,793 --> 00:27:11,568 He gave a message of: "I have seen things that you can hardly imagine. 395 00:27:11,602 --> 00:27:16,143 A bleak cold landscape out there that I am going 396 00:27:16,143 --> 00:27:20,115 to do my best to armour you against. 397 00:27:20,115 --> 00:27:25,357 We will walk into there together, and we will protect each other's backs out there in this cold bleak landscape, 398 00:27:25,357 --> 00:27:32,167 but don't you ever bullshit yourself that it's anything more or better than that, because that's where it is. 399 00:27:33,469 --> 00:27:37,943 Laing wrote a series of books with titles like: "The Politics of Experience", 400 00:27:37,976 --> 00:27:40,280 that became huge best sellers. 401 00:27:40,280 --> 00:27:44,119 And he became one of the leaders of the new counter-culture movement. 402 00:27:46,389 --> 00:27:49,594 The aim of the movement was to make people realise 403 00:27:49,594 --> 00:27:54,202 that none of the state institutions of the post-war world could be trusted. 404 00:27:54,202 --> 00:27:59,209 Those that claimed to be motivated by public duty, and the desire to help, 405 00:27:59,209 --> 00:28:05,219 were really part of the system that was trying to control your mind and destroy your freedom. 406 00:28:05,219 --> 00:28:09,291 Their whole mind is like a cabbage, they're suppressed, they can't do exactly what they want, 407 00:28:09,291 --> 00:28:13,664 they haven't got any freedom, they haven't got any freedom to do exactly what they want under the system. 408 00:28:13,664 --> 00:28:17,605 One had to be constantly on guard, never trusting anyone 409 00:28:17,638 --> 00:28:20,642 even those who said they loved you. 410 00:28:20,675 --> 00:28:24,248 A lot of people are caught in a trap that they feel they ought to trust 411 00:28:24,281 --> 00:28:26,451 or believe the person they love, 412 00:28:26,451 --> 00:28:30,458 because they love them, 413 00:28:30,458 --> 00:28:35,532 but I don't see that that follows at all. 414 00:28:36,467 --> 00:28:39,438 What Laing and the counter-culture movement 415 00:28:39,438 --> 00:28:43,478 were doing was tearing down Britain's institutions in the name of freedom. 416 00:28:43,478 --> 00:28:47,817 And they were about to find the most unexpected allies. 417 00:28:47,851 --> 00:28:52,192 They would be joined by a group of economists from the political right, 418 00:28:52,192 --> 00:28:54,361 who had exactly the same aim, 419 00:28:54,361 --> 00:28:57,232 and who'd become immensely powerful. 420 00:28:57,533 --> 00:29:01,639 This group were all inspired by the ideas of Fredrick Hayek, 421 00:29:01,639 --> 00:29:05,879 and most of them had also worked at the RAND corporation. 422 00:29:05,879 --> 00:29:11,754 And they brought with them the sophisticated mathematical techniques, like Game Theory. 423 00:29:11,788 --> 00:29:15,595 They would use these techniques to prove scientifically 424 00:29:15,595 --> 00:29:17,931 that the idea of public duty, 425 00:29:17,931 --> 00:29:21,537 which had underpinned British public life for generations 426 00:29:21,537 --> 00:29:25,543 was a sham and a corrupt hypocrisy. 427 00:29:25,543 --> 00:29:31,252 Their ideas would begin to demolish the old institutions of the British state. 428 00:29:31,252 --> 00:29:35,726 They would also introduce the paranoid assumptions of the Cold War 429 00:29:35,759 --> 00:29:39,465 ever further into the heart of British society. 430 00:29:47,744 --> 00:29:53,219 In the early Seventies, the government bureaucracies in Britain began to collapse. 431 00:29:53,219 --> 00:29:56,457 Those around them blamed a growing economic crisis. 432 00:29:56,491 --> 00:30:00,297 But it was clear that something much more fundamental had gone wrong. 433 00:30:00,330 --> 00:30:04,971 What were supposed to be institutions to help people had become destructive. 434 00:30:04,971 --> 00:30:07,875 Those around them seemed to turn against the very people 435 00:30:07,875 --> 00:30:09,912 they were supposed to serve. 436 00:30:11,013 --> 00:30:13,484 Financial restrictions… 437 00:30:13,484 --> 00:30:17,090 Well, can you get him for a minute? Well it's urgent, this… 438 00:30:17,123 --> 00:30:18,325 Can't tell you that… 439 00:30:18,325 --> 00:30:19,960 I'm not allowed to disclose that… 440 00:30:19,960 --> 00:30:22,130 We don't deal with that sort of thing… 441 00:30:22,130 --> 00:30:23,433 Not available. 442 00:30:25,969 --> 00:30:28,541 A group of right-wing economists in America 443 00:30:28,541 --> 00:30:33,449 now put forward a theory that, they said, explained why this was happening. 444 00:30:33,582 --> 00:30:37,288 At the heart of their idea was Game Theory. 445 00:30:37,288 --> 00:30:40,459 They said that the fundamental reality of life and society 446 00:30:40,459 --> 00:30:43,864 was one of millions of people continually watching and strategising 447 00:30:43,864 --> 00:30:45,467 against each other, 448 00:30:45,467 --> 00:30:48,505 all seeking only their own advantage. 449 00:30:48,505 --> 00:30:51,543 But assumption had become a truth. 450 00:30:51,543 --> 00:30:54,214 A self-interested model of human behaviour, 451 00:30:54,214 --> 00:30:58,620 that had been developed in the Cold War to make the mathematical equations work, 452 00:30:58,620 --> 00:31:02,394 had now been adopted by these economists as a fundamental truth 453 00:31:02,394 --> 00:31:06,066 about the reality of all human social interaction. 454 00:31:06,066 --> 00:31:10,672 We're always trying to infer the intentions of the other. 455 00:31:10,672 --> 00:31:17,784 We're always trying to convey our intentions, either deceptively or truthfully. 456 00:31:17,817 --> 00:31:22,491 We're always trying to find ways to make believable promises, 457 00:31:22,491 --> 00:31:26,097 and sometimes to make believable threats. 458 00:31:26,097 --> 00:31:33,308 Threatening the Soviet Union, threatening a misbehaving animal, threatening a child, threatening a neighbour… 459 00:31:33,875 --> 00:31:37,848 I think what we're doing is what we call strategising. 460 00:31:37,848 --> 00:31:41,654 What does he think that I think he thinks that I think he's going to do? 461 00:31:41,654 --> 00:31:44,826 It has to come to some kind of equilibrium. 462 00:31:44,826 --> 00:31:49,132 What is it that we can both recognise, is the obvious thing to do? 463 00:31:49,332 --> 00:31:51,570 What this meant, the economists argued, 464 00:31:51,570 --> 00:31:57,011 was that the politicians and bureaucrats belief that they were working for what they called "the public good" 465 00:31:57,011 --> 00:32:03,621 was a complete fantasy - because to do that depended upon creating shared goals in society, 466 00:32:03,621 --> 00:32:07,093 based on self-sacrifice and altruism, 467 00:32:07,093 --> 00:32:12,001 but in a world that was really driven by millions of suspicious, self-seeking individuals, 468 00:32:12,001 --> 00:32:15,874 such concepts could not exist. 469 00:32:15,874 --> 00:32:19,246 Out of this came a theory called "Public Choice," 470 00:32:19,246 --> 00:32:22,751 and a group of economists who were determined to destroy 471 00:32:22,751 --> 00:32:27,391 the politician's dream that they were working for the public interest. 472 00:32:27,391 --> 00:32:30,630 Their leader was called James Buchanan. 473 00:32:30,630 --> 00:32:37,807 There's certainly no measurable concept that could meaningfully be called the public interest. 474 00:32:37,807 --> 00:32:44,818 Because how do you weigh different interests of different groups and what they can get out of it? 475 00:32:44,818 --> 00:32:49,393 The public interest as a politician thinks, does not mean it exists, 476 00:32:49,426 --> 00:32:52,730 it's what he thinks is good for the country. 477 00:32:52,730 --> 00:32:56,771 And if he would come out and say that, 478 00:32:56,771 --> 00:33:02,046 that's one thing, but behind this hypocrisy of calling something "the public interest" as if it exists, 479 00:33:02,046 --> 00:33:05,050 that's what I was trying to tear down. 480 00:33:06,352 --> 00:33:10,993 In 1975, Mrs Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party. 481 00:33:10,993 --> 00:33:14,364 And Buchanan's ideas had a powerful influence on her, 482 00:33:14,397 --> 00:33:17,869 and the group of radicals gathered around her. 483 00:33:17,869 --> 00:33:20,674 A rightwing think-tank advising Mrs Thatcher 484 00:33:20,674 --> 00:33:24,113 brought James Buchanan to London for a series of seminars. 485 00:33:24,113 --> 00:33:28,353 And he explained starkly why the British state was failing. 486 00:33:28,353 --> 00:33:30,255 It was pure Game Theory: 487 00:33:30,289 --> 00:33:33,294 Because there was no agreed version of "the public good", 488 00:33:33,327 --> 00:33:38,802 the bureaucrats and the politicians schemed and strategised in their own self interest, 489 00:33:38,802 --> 00:33:42,008 building up their power and their own empires. 490 00:33:42,008 --> 00:33:46,247 They claimed to be helping others. In fact it was the very opposite, 491 00:33:46,247 --> 00:33:50,520 and the result was economic chaos, and a breakdown of society. 492 00:33:50,520 --> 00:33:53,392 It was chaos, there is no other word for it, 493 00:33:53,392 --> 00:33:57,131 and then Public Choice Theory came along and told us why. 494 00:33:57,131 --> 00:34:02,673 It's because the self-interest of the groups that have managed to acquire control of the process, 495 00:34:02,706 --> 00:34:06,011 is such that they're directing these activities to their own advantage 496 00:34:06,011 --> 00:34:08,882 at the expense of society. 497 00:34:08,882 --> 00:34:13,322 When public servants and politicians say they're pursuing the public interest, 498 00:34:13,322 --> 00:34:16,361 the words are those of public service, 499 00:34:16,394 --> 00:34:21,168 the actions are those of self-interest: maximising personal advantage. 500 00:34:21,168 --> 00:34:25,375 Now, this is certainly not true, because contrary to popular belief, 501 00:34:25,375 --> 00:34:28,412 both myself and my staff here 502 00:34:28,412 --> 00:34:31,818 we take a very very great personal interest in individual people… 503 00:34:31,818 --> 00:34:35,156 I think you're scared, I think because there won't be so much opposition 504 00:34:35,156 --> 00:34:36,859 you don't know whether you're doing the right thing or not. 505 00:34:36,859 --> 00:34:40,264 If you don't want me to answer, I'll go home, it's a lovely evening, 506 00:34:40,264 --> 00:34:45,306 I don't need to be here, but if you do want me to answer, I will stay. Please… Will you give the… Listen! 507 00:34:46,807 --> 00:34:49,946 As the British economy spiralled out of control, 508 00:34:49,946 --> 00:34:54,286 the political and bureaucratic elite who had dominated Britain since the war, 509 00:34:54,286 --> 00:34:57,925 found themselves under attack from both the Right and the Left. 510 00:34:58,392 --> 00:35:01,865 Where once they had been heroic figures who would create a new world, 511 00:35:01,898 --> 00:35:06,571 now they were accused of being agents of control, not freedom. 512 00:35:06,939 --> 00:35:11,279 We've been ruled by men who live by illusions. 513 00:35:11,279 --> 00:35:15,786 The illusion that you can have freedom by government decree… 514 00:35:15,786 --> 00:35:17,255 And they don't give that… 515 00:35:17,288 --> 00:35:21,060 And these new theories began to spread into the public imagination, 516 00:35:21,060 --> 00:35:24,132 the writer who was part of the group advising Mrs Thatcher, 517 00:35:24,132 --> 00:35:25,935 began to write a sitcom 518 00:35:25,935 --> 00:35:29,374 that explicitly put forward the theories of public choice. 519 00:35:29,374 --> 00:35:35,416 As well as being funny, it was ideological propaganda for a political movement. 520 00:35:36,819 --> 00:35:39,690 Humphrey, we have got to slim down the Civil Service. 521 00:35:40,424 --> 00:35:42,894 How many people have we got in this department? 522 00:35:42,894 --> 00:35:45,732 Two… thousand? Three thousand? 523 00:35:45,766 --> 00:35:47,902 About twenty three thousand, I think, Minister. 524 00:35:47,902 --> 00:35:52,310 Twenty three thousand?! In the Department for Administrative Affairs?! 525 00:35:52,310 --> 00:35:55,514 Twenty three thousand people just administering other administrators? 526 00:35:55,514 --> 00:35:58,719 We'll have to do a time and motion study, see who we can get rid of. 527 00:35:58,719 --> 00:36:00,856 Er, we did one of those last year, minister… 528 00:36:00,856 --> 00:36:04,761 - And? - It transpired we needed another five hundred people. 529 00:36:04,761 --> 00:36:08,768 The fallacy that Public Choice Economics took on, 530 00:36:08,768 --> 00:36:13,408 was the fallacy that government is working entirely for the benefit of the citizen. 531 00:36:14,210 --> 00:36:19,284 This was reflected by showing that in "Yes Minister", 532 00:36:19,284 --> 00:36:22,556 we showed that almost everything that the government 533 00:36:22,556 --> 00:36:25,561 has to decide is a conflict between two lots of private interest 534 00:36:25,561 --> 00:36:28,331 - that of the politicians, and that of the civil servants 535 00:36:28,331 --> 00:36:31,436 trying to advance their own careers, and improve their own lives. 536 00:36:31,470 --> 00:36:34,441 And that's why Public Choice Economics, 537 00:36:34,441 --> 00:36:40,817 which explains why all this was going on, was at the root of almost every episode of Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister. 538 00:36:46,092 --> 00:36:49,932 At the same time, R.D. Laing was continuing his assault 539 00:36:49,932 --> 00:36:53,304 assault on what he saw as the corrupt elites. 540 00:36:54,306 --> 00:36:56,943 He was about to use his growing power 541 00:36:56,943 --> 00:37:00,214 to attract one of the most powerful professions in America 542 00:37:00,214 --> 00:37:04,187 the medical and psychiatric establishment. 543 00:37:06,491 --> 00:37:09,262 The results would be dramatic. 544 00:37:09,262 --> 00:37:13,836 But the outcome would be very different from what Laing intended. 545 00:37:13,836 --> 00:37:18,042 His ideas would undermine the all-controlling medical elite. 546 00:37:18,042 --> 00:37:21,748 But far from liberating people, 547 00:37:21,748 --> 00:37:25,887 what would actually emerge would be a revolutionary new system of order and control, 548 00:37:25,887 --> 00:37:28,993 driven by the objective power of numbers. 549 00:37:28,993 --> 00:37:32,198 It's a space where you can meet with her, 550 00:37:32,198 --> 00:37:37,539 where she's not gonna be frightened that you're gonna put her away, or that you're going to do anything to her at all… 551 00:37:37,539 --> 00:37:39,576 Laing was now a celebrity in America, 552 00:37:39,576 --> 00:37:43,515 and was one of the leaders of what was called the "anti-psychiatry" movement. 553 00:37:43,548 --> 00:37:46,320 Psychiatry, Laing said, was a fake science, 554 00:37:46,353 --> 00:37:51,962 used as a system of political control to shore-up a violent collapsing society. 555 00:37:52,029 --> 00:37:55,768 Its categories of madness and sanity had no reality. 556 00:37:55,768 --> 00:37:57,804 Madness was simply a convenient label 557 00:37:57,837 --> 00:38:01,243 used to lock away those who wanted to break free. 558 00:38:02,144 --> 00:38:06,050 Hundreds of young psychiatrists came to Laing's talks, 559 00:38:06,050 --> 00:38:08,421 and one of them was inspired, 560 00:38:08,421 --> 00:38:13,629 and decided to find a way of testing whether what Laing said was true or not. 561 00:38:13,629 --> 00:38:19,004 Could psychiatrists in America distinguish between madness and sanity? 562 00:38:19,404 --> 00:38:24,379 He was called David Rosenham, and he devised a dramatic experiment. 563 00:38:24,412 --> 00:38:27,183 He assembled eight people, including himself, 564 00:38:27,183 --> 00:38:30,822 none of whom had ever had any psychiatric problems. 565 00:38:30,855 --> 00:38:36,130 Each person was then sent across the country to a specific mental hospital. 566 00:38:36,130 --> 00:38:40,570 At an agreed time, they all presented themselves at their hospital, 567 00:38:40,570 --> 00:38:44,844 and told the psychiatrist on duty they were hearing a voice in their head 568 00:38:44,844 --> 00:38:47,814 that said the word "thud". 569 00:38:47,814 --> 00:38:50,819 That was the only lie they should tell. 570 00:38:50,819 --> 00:38:55,794 Otherwise, they were to behave and respond completely normally. 571 00:39:01,269 --> 00:39:03,139 Interviewer: And then what happened? 572 00:39:03,139 --> 00:39:06,144 Rosenham: They were all diagnosed as insane 573 00:39:06,144 --> 00:39:09,214 and admitted to the hospital. 574 00:39:10,383 --> 00:39:12,052 Interviewer: All of them? 575 00:39:12,052 --> 00:39:14,189 Rosenham: All of them. 576 00:39:14,189 --> 00:39:16,192 Interviewer: And were any of them insane? 577 00:39:16,192 --> 00:39:21,300 Rosenham: No. There was nobody who could have judged these people as insane. 578 00:39:21,300 --> 00:39:26,341 I told friends, I told my family I get out, when I get out that's all… 579 00:39:26,341 --> 00:39:32,317 I'll be there for a couple of days, then I'll get out. Nobody knew I'd be there for two months! 580 00:39:32,317 --> 00:39:36,925 Once admitted, all eight fake patients acted completely normally, 581 00:39:36,925 --> 00:39:39,361 yet the hospitals refused to release them, 582 00:39:39,361 --> 00:39:42,700 and diagnosed seven as suffering from schizophrenia, 583 00:39:42,733 --> 00:39:45,204 and one of bi-polar disorder. 584 00:39:45,204 --> 00:39:48,809 They were all given powerful psychotropic drugs. 585 00:39:48,809 --> 00:39:50,812 They found there was nothing 586 00:39:50,812 --> 00:39:53,150 they could do to convince the doctors they were sane, 587 00:39:53,217 --> 00:39:55,954 and it quickly became clear that the only way out 588 00:39:55,954 --> 00:40:01,395 would be to agree that they were insane, and then pretend to be getting better. 589 00:40:01,395 --> 00:40:05,501 The only way out was to point out that they were correct. 590 00:40:06,170 --> 00:40:12,079 "They had said I was insane, I am insane, but I am getting better". 591 00:40:12,112 --> 00:40:17,654 That was an affirmation of their view of me. 592 00:40:17,654 --> 00:40:22,328 When Rosenham finally got out and reported the experiment, there was an uproar. 593 00:40:22,328 --> 00:40:25,065 He was accused of trickery and deceit. 594 00:40:25,065 --> 00:40:29,339 And one major hospital challenged him to send some more fakes to them, 595 00:40:29,339 --> 00:40:32,810 guaranteeing that they would spot them this time. 596 00:40:32,844 --> 00:40:35,548 Rosenham agreed, and after a month, 597 00:40:35,548 --> 00:40:40,022 the hospital proudly announced that it had forty-one fakes. 598 00:40:40,022 --> 00:40:45,096 Rosenham then revealed he had sent no-one to the hospital. 599 00:40:47,467 --> 00:40:52,308 The effect of the "thud" experiment was a disaster for American psychiatry. 600 00:40:52,308 --> 00:40:55,579 It destroyed the idea that they were a privileged elite 601 00:40:55,613 --> 00:40:57,849 with specialist knowledge. 602 00:40:57,849 --> 00:41:02,223 But those in charge realised that psychiatry could not just give up. 603 00:41:02,257 --> 00:41:05,394 Debía hallarse otra manera de comprender y manejar 604 00:41:05,394 --> 00:41:08,833 Another way had to be found of understanding and managing 605 00:41:08,833 --> 00:41:15,043 people's inner feelings in modern society. And, like R.D. Laing, they turned to the objective purity of mathematical analysis. 606 00:41:15,043 --> 00:41:17,613 They set out to create a scientific system 607 00:41:17,613 --> 00:41:20,485 of diagnosing people's inner mental states, 608 00:41:20,485 --> 00:41:23,222 in which all human judgement would be removed, 609 00:41:23,222 --> 00:41:27,863 and replaced instead by a system based on the power of numbers. 610 00:41:27,863 --> 00:41:33,305 They gave up on the idea that they could understand the human mind, and cure it. 611 00:41:33,305 --> 00:41:35,908 Instead, American psychiatry created 612 00:41:35,908 --> 00:41:38,947 a new set of measurable categories 613 00:41:38,947 --> 00:41:43,387 that were only based on the surface behaviour of human beings 614 00:41:43,387 --> 00:41:45,189 . Many were given new names, 615 00:41:45,189 --> 00:41:49,830 like Attention Deficit Disorder, and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. 616 00:41:49,830 --> 00:41:53,836 Psychiatry says: "we don't know the causes for any of these conditions", and then just said 617 00:41:53,836 --> 00:41:56,508 "this is what they look like". 618 00:41:56,508 --> 00:42:01,816 This is what depression looks like, this is what ADHD looks like, 619 00:42:01,849 --> 00:42:06,523 this is what PTSD looks like, this is what Multiple Personality looks like, 620 00:42:06,523 --> 00:42:14,369 whether they exist in any particular way, or they exist in the same way, or if they are the same kinds of things didn't matter. 621 00:42:14,369 --> 00:42:16,572 This is just what they look like. 622 00:42:16,572 --> 00:42:21,512 What mattered was that these disorders could be observed, and thus recorded. 623 00:42:21,512 --> 00:42:25,286 The psychiatrists created a system in which a diagnosis 624 00:42:25,286 --> 00:42:27,856 could literally be done by a computer. 625 00:42:27,856 --> 00:42:32,464 The observable characteristics of each of the disorders were listed precisely, 626 00:42:32,464 --> 00:42:36,236 and questionnaires were then designed that asked people 627 00:42:36,269 --> 00:42:38,539 whether they had those characteristics. 628 00:42:38,539 --> 00:42:41,544 The answers were simply "yes" and "no". 629 00:42:41,544 --> 00:42:45,684 So they cold be asked by lay interviewers, not by psychiatrists. 630 00:42:46,051 --> 00:42:52,126 The computer would then decide whether people were normal, or abnormal. 631 00:42:52,795 --> 00:42:57,668 The lay interviewer asks specific questions and notes them. 632 00:42:57,668 --> 00:43:01,107 That person is not making the diagnosis. 633 00:43:01,107 --> 00:43:04,179 That data is fed into a computer. 634 00:43:04,179 --> 00:43:09,220 The computer program then looks at the pattern, and makes the diagnosis. 635 00:43:09,220 --> 00:43:12,191 So the diagnosis was made by the computer, 636 00:43:12,191 --> 00:43:15,696 there was no clinical judgement required. 637 00:43:15,730 --> 00:43:19,469 The psychiatrists then decided to test this system, 638 00:43:19,469 --> 00:43:22,207 and at the end of the 1970s, they sent interviewers 639 00:43:22,207 --> 00:43:25,312 out across America with the questionnaires. 640 00:43:25,312 --> 00:43:29,552 Hundreds of thousands of people selected at random were interviewed. 641 00:43:29,552 --> 00:43:35,727 Up to this point, psychiatrists had only dealt with individuals who had felt they needed help. 642 00:43:35,727 --> 00:43:42,405 This was the first time that anyone had gone out and asked ordinary people how they thought and felt. 643 00:43:42,405 --> 00:43:47,012 And the results, when processed by the computers, were astonishing. 644 00:43:47,012 --> 00:43:52,621 More than fifty percent of Americans suffered from some type of mental disorder. 645 00:43:52,621 --> 00:43:57,027 These studies revealed very high rates of mental disorder. 646 00:43:57,027 --> 00:44:00,800 There are very very high rates of disorders out there. 647 00:44:00,833 --> 00:44:03,504 Half the population has a mental disorder at some point, 648 00:44:03,504 --> 00:44:07,911 seventeen percent of the population has a depressive episode at some point, figures like that. 649 00:44:07,911 --> 00:44:11,383 These rates astonished people, they're enormous rates. 650 00:44:11,383 --> 00:44:16,825 And the general conclusion was: there is a hidden epidemic. 651 00:44:17,460 --> 00:44:19,963 More surveys were done, and yet again 652 00:44:19,963 --> 00:44:22,634 the computers returned the same disturbing data. 653 00:44:23,435 --> 00:44:26,907 The surveys showed that underneath the surface of normal life, 654 00:44:26,907 --> 00:44:31,581 millions of people, who never before would have been thought of as mentally ill, 655 00:44:31,648 --> 00:44:35,420 were secretly living with high levels of mental anxiety. 656 00:44:35,453 --> 00:44:39,360 The psychiatrists began screening programmes across the country. 657 00:44:39,360 --> 00:44:43,066 For many people, the checklists were a liberation, 658 00:44:43,099 --> 00:44:46,838 their private suffering was finally being recognised. 659 00:44:46,838 --> 00:44:51,178 I actually heard they were having a National Anxiety Screening Day. 660 00:44:51,178 --> 00:44:54,417 They asked me a bunch of questions, and if you had these symptoms, 661 00:44:54,417 --> 00:45:00,492 which, there was like, 50 symptoms, and I had like 49 of them, they said what you're experiencing is common, 662 00:45:00,492 --> 00:45:06,068 and when I showed up to these meetings, I seen fire-fighters, construction workers… 663 00:45:06,068 --> 00:45:10,642 It was relieving to see I wasn't making this stuff up. 664 00:45:10,709 --> 00:45:14,448 These new categories of disorders spread quickly in society, 665 00:45:14,448 --> 00:45:17,386 and terms like Borderline Personality Disorder, and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder 666 00:45:17,386 --> 00:45:22,226 took hold of the public imagination. 667 00:45:22,661 --> 00:45:26,734 But as this happened, it had unforeseen consequences 668 00:45:26,767 --> 00:45:29,871 Millions of people began to use the checklist 669 00:45:29,871 --> 00:45:32,876 to monitor and diagnose themselves. 670 00:45:32,876 --> 00:45:36,815 They used them to identify what was aberrant or abnormal 671 00:45:36,849 --> 00:45:39,587 in their behaviour and feelings. 672 00:45:39,587 --> 00:45:43,259 But by definition, this also set up a powerful model 673 00:45:43,292 --> 00:45:48,200 for them of what were the normal behaviour and feelings to which they should aspire. 674 00:45:48,200 --> 00:45:51,605 And psychiatrists began to find more and more people coming to them, 675 00:45:51,605 --> 00:45:54,443 demanding to be made normal. 676 00:45:57,248 --> 00:46:00,252 was just a matter of asking people a couple of questions, 677 00:46:00,252 --> 00:46:04,057 checking the boxes in the diagnostic formula, 678 00:46:04,057 --> 00:46:06,996 and saying: "there you are, you have this disease!", 679 00:46:07,029 --> 00:46:12,137 or "I have this disorder, I'd better go to my doctor and tell him what I need!", 680 00:46:12,137 --> 00:46:16,177 and it was an amazing experience and a great change. 681 00:46:16,177 --> 00:46:19,982 Most people do not, previously at any rate, 682 00:46:19,982 --> 00:46:24,490 want to see themselves as in some way psychiatrically injured. 683 00:46:24,490 --> 00:46:32,635 But now, they tell me that they have an ideal in their mind about what the normal person is… 684 00:46:32,635 --> 00:46:41,115 "I don't fit that model, I want you to polish me down so that I fit". 685 00:46:41,883 --> 00:46:44,788 This new system of psychological disorders 686 00:46:44,788 --> 00:46:46,858 had been created by an attack 687 00:46:46,891 --> 00:46:51,565 on the arrogance and power of the psychiatric elite in the name of freedom. 688 00:46:51,565 --> 00:46:56,639 But was beginning to emerge from this was a new form of control. 689 00:46:56,639 --> 00:47:01,113 The disorders and checklists were becoming a powerful and objective guide 690 00:47:01,113 --> 00:47:04,085 to what were the correct and appropriate feelings 691 00:47:04,085 --> 00:47:07,891 in an age of individualism and emotion. 692 00:47:07,891 --> 00:47:10,895 But this was a very different system of order. 693 00:47:10,895 --> 00:47:14,767 No longer were people told how to behave by an elite. 694 00:47:14,767 --> 00:47:17,138 Instead, they now used the checklist 695 00:47:17,138 --> 00:47:21,211 to monitor their feelings and police their own behaviour. 696 00:47:21,211 --> 00:47:25,050 They were reassured that these new categories were scientific 697 00:47:25,050 --> 00:47:28,923 and could be checked by the power of numbers. 698 00:47:36,869 --> 00:47:43,045 For they are the party of yesterday, and tomorrow is ours! 699 00:47:45,381 --> 00:47:49,455 In 1979, Mrs Thatcher had come to power in Britain. 700 00:47:49,455 --> 00:47:54,495 What she promised to create was a society based on the dream of individual freedom. 701 00:47:54,495 --> 00:47:57,634 People would be liberated from the arrogant elites 702 00:47:57,634 --> 00:48:00,305 and state bureaucrats of the past. 703 00:48:00,305 --> 00:48:03,676 But Mrs Thatcher knew she would have to find a new way 704 00:48:03,676 --> 00:48:06,982 of managing and controlling these free individuals 705 00:48:06,982 --> 00:48:10,420 in a complex society, in order to avoid chaos. 706 00:48:11,289 --> 00:48:14,761 And to do this, just like the psychiatrists in America, 707 00:48:14,761 --> 00:48:19,868 she would turn to systems based on the objective power of numbers. 708 00:48:19,901 --> 00:48:24,009 But underlying the new mathematical models would, yet again, 709 00:48:24,009 --> 00:48:27,246 be the dark and suspicious model of human beings 710 00:48:27,246 --> 00:48:30,551 that the Cold War strategists had assumed. 711 00:48:30,585 --> 00:48:36,461 This vision would now penetrate to the very heart of the British state. 712 00:48:44,907 --> 00:48:47,945 The Thatcher government had begun in the early Eighties 713 00:48:47,945 --> 00:48:50,984 by selling off many of the state-owned industries, 714 00:48:50,984 --> 00:48:53,421 but it soon became clear that in the modern world 715 00:48:53,421 --> 00:48:58,295 were large areas of the stat that would have to remain under government control. 716 00:48:58,295 --> 00:49:01,533 Yet Mrs Thatcher was determined to free them 717 00:49:01,533 --> 00:49:03,770 too from old forms of management. 718 00:49:03,804 --> 00:49:09,279 To do this, she would bring in a system no longer run by ideas of public duty, 719 00:49:09,279 --> 00:49:13,318 instead - public servants would be encouraged by incentives 720 00:49:13,318 --> 00:49:16,022 to follow their self-interest. 721 00:49:16,022 --> 00:49:21,564 It was all in keeping with the ideas of the inventor of public choice, James Buchanan. 722 00:49:21,564 --> 00:49:24,602 He believed that it was those politicians and bureaucrats 723 00:49:24,602 --> 00:49:27,039 who preached the idea of public duty 724 00:49:27,039 --> 00:49:30,812 that were the most dangerous, who he called The Zealots. 725 00:49:30,812 --> 00:49:33,316 They had to be got rid of. 726 00:49:33,316 --> 00:49:36,754 We're safer if we have politicians 727 00:49:36,754 --> 00:49:40,494 who are a bit, er, self interested and greedy, 728 00:49:40,494 --> 00:49:43,131 than if we have these zealots. 729 00:49:43,131 --> 00:49:50,977 The greatest danger of course is the zealot who thinks that he knows best, or she knows best for the rest of us… 730 00:49:50,977 --> 00:49:56,185 As opposed to being for sale, so to speak. 731 00:49:56,185 --> 00:49:59,055 So in that sense, you can then use incentives? 732 00:49:59,055 --> 00:50:01,660 Yes, exactly. 733 00:50:01,660 --> 00:50:07,536 The zealot is not nearly as readily influenced by monetary incentives 734 00:50:07,536 --> 00:50:10,674 or incentives of office or rank as the non-zealot… 735 00:50:10,674 --> 00:50:12,510 como el que no es un zealot... 736 00:50:12,510 --> 00:50:15,848 So you don't want too many zealots in there. 737 00:50:16,616 --> 00:50:22,692 If our success depends on the goodness of politicians and bureaucrats, 738 00:50:22,725 --> 00:50:25,664 then we're in real trouble. 739 00:50:25,664 --> 00:50:29,536 It was a dark and pessimistic vision of human motivation. 740 00:50:29,570 --> 00:50:31,639 But it was about to become the basis 741 00:50:31,639 --> 00:50:35,145 for a new system of managing the British state. 742 00:50:36,714 --> 00:50:40,053 The proposals represent the most far reaching reform 743 00:50:40,053 --> 00:50:43,391 of the National Health Service in its 40 year history. 744 00:50:43,391 --> 00:50:45,695 They offer new opportunities 745 00:50:45,695 --> 00:50:50,536 yand pose new challenges for everyone concerned with the running of the service. 746 00:50:50,536 --> 00:50:53,940 In 1988, Mrs Thatcher announced a complete reform 747 00:50:53,940 --> 00:50:57,179 of the way the National Health Service was run. 748 00:50:57,179 --> 00:51:01,285 The fundamental aim was to overthrow the power of the medical establishment, 749 00:51:01,285 --> 00:51:05,092 and replace it with a new efficient system of management 750 00:51:05,092 --> 00:51:07,762 To do this, Mrs Thatcher turned to a man 751 00:51:07,795 --> 00:51:10,767 who had been one of the nuclear strategists at the RAND corporation, 752 00:51:10,767 --> 00:51:14,139 at the height of the Cold War. 753 00:51:14,139 --> 00:51:16,976 He was called Alan Enthoven. 754 00:51:16,976 --> 00:51:21,651 Back in the fifties, Enthoven's job had been to think the unthinkable: 755 00:51:21,651 --> 00:51:25,189 To plan how to fight and win a nuclear war. 756 00:51:25,189 --> 00:51:28,327 To do this, he had designed a mathematical system 757 00:51:28,360 --> 00:51:34,070 which would use nuclear weapons as rational incentives to manipulate the other side. 758 00:51:35,004 --> 00:51:39,144 Enthoven had designed charts that showed how many mega-tonnes of bombs 759 00:51:39,144 --> 00:51:43,551 to drop on which cities, and how many people it would be necessary to kill, 760 00:51:43,551 --> 00:51:49,393 to prove to the Russians that it was in their self-interest to come to the bargaining table. 761 00:51:51,997 --> 00:51:57,640 Out of this, Enthoven had developed a technique he called Systems Analysis 762 00:51:57,640 --> 00:52:00,077 It was a technique of management 763 00:52:00,077 --> 00:52:04,283 that he believed could be applied to any type of human organisation. 764 00:52:04,283 --> 00:52:08,022 Its aim was to get rid of all the emotional and subjective values 765 00:52:08,022 --> 00:52:11,160 that confused and corrupted the system. 766 00:52:11,160 --> 00:52:14,733 And replace them with rational and objective methods, 767 00:52:14,733 --> 00:52:18,939 mathematically defined targets and incentives. 768 00:52:18,939 --> 00:52:24,882 Enthoven had first tried to apply this system back in the 1960s when he was still in the military. 769 00:52:24,915 --> 00:52:27,786 The Secretary of Defense, Robert MacNamara, 770 00:52:27,786 --> 00:52:32,694 asked him to help transform the way the Pentagon was run. 771 00:52:32,694 --> 00:52:36,633 Enthoven began by getting rid of the idea that patriotism 772 00:52:36,633 --> 00:52:39,738 should be the guiding force in America's defense, 773 00:52:39,738 --> 00:52:44,545 and replacing it with a rational system based on numbers. 774 00:52:45,080 --> 00:52:47,717 The approach we brought to the Pentagon 775 00:52:47,717 --> 00:52:50,622 was one based on rational behaviour. 776 00:52:50,622 --> 00:52:55,295 Previously that had been, at that high level, it was kind of a political thing, 777 00:52:55,328 --> 00:52:58,801 and we were trying to make more an analytical thing. 778 00:52:58,801 --> 00:53:03,809 In defense, most people thought it ought to be done on the basis of patriotism… 779 00:53:04,443 --> 00:53:09,584 There was quite a bit of that - emotion feeling - are you patriotic? 780 00:53:09,617 --> 00:53:16,028 and I was there with my slide rule, you know, my geeky sort of, MIT style. 781 00:53:19,867 --> 00:53:22,237 - What did the military think of this? 782 00:53:22,237 --> 00:53:24,273 Well, I think that, erm… 783 00:53:24,307 --> 00:53:25,943 - They hated it? 784 00:53:25,943 --> 00:53:28,180 They hated it, yeah. 785 00:53:28,180 --> 00:53:31,986 What replaced patriotism, and notions of public duty, 786 00:53:31,986 --> 00:53:35,658 were mathematically measurable outcomes. 787 00:53:35,658 --> 00:53:38,762 But MacNamara's experiment had ended in disaster 788 00:53:38,796 --> 00:53:43,136 when he had tried to run the Vietnam war in a rational mathematical way, 789 00:53:43,136 --> 00:53:46,175 through performance targets and incentives. 790 00:53:46,175 --> 00:53:49,546 The most infamous example had been the "body count". 791 00:53:49,546 --> 00:53:52,351 It had been designed as a rational measure 792 00:53:52,351 --> 00:53:54,454 of whether America was winning the war. 793 00:53:54,521 --> 00:53:57,292 But in fact troops simply made it up, 794 00:53:57,325 --> 00:54:01,832 or even shot civilians to fulfil their performance targets. 795 00:54:01,832 --> 00:54:06,406 And in 1967 MacNamara resigned. 796 00:54:06,406 --> 00:54:09,477 But Enthoven was undaunted, 797 00:54:09,477 --> 00:54:12,882 and next he applied his systems to design a rational way 798 00:54:12,882 --> 00:54:15,119 of managing healthcare. 799 00:54:15,119 --> 00:54:20,962 He began this in America, but in 1986 Mrs Thatcher had asked him to come 800 00:54:20,962 --> 00:54:23,766 and do the same for the NHS in Britain. 801 00:54:24,334 --> 00:54:28,473 Just as he had challenged the power of the generals in the Pentagon, 802 00:54:28,473 --> 00:54:32,313 now he would do the same for the doctors in Britain. 803 00:54:32,346 --> 00:54:38,422 I think in both cases, with the military in the defense department, and with the doctors both here and in Britain, 804 00:54:38,422 --> 00:54:44,064 that you have the power of organised elites, of authority and hierarchy, 805 00:54:44,064 --> 00:54:46,969 and the system needed to be reconfigured 806 00:54:46,969 --> 00:54:50,975 in such a way as to give incentives to do a better job, 807 00:54:50,975 --> 00:54:58,252 and it was a matter of - how would you re-wire the incentives to motivate self-interest? 808 00:54:58,252 --> 00:55:02,393 To create proper incentives to reward efficiency? 809 00:55:02,393 --> 00:55:04,696 And can we measure it? 810 00:55:04,696 --> 00:55:07,935 So, that was the challenge to the power of organised medicine. 811 00:55:09,069 --> 00:55:13,910 What Enthoven proposed for the NHS, he called "the internal market". 812 00:55:13,910 --> 00:55:18,785 In fact, what it was, was a mathematical simulation of the free market. 813 00:55:18,785 --> 00:55:21,522 Numbers were used to create measurable outputs 814 00:55:21,522 --> 00:55:24,193 and performance targets at all levels, 815 00:55:24,193 --> 00:55:28,833 while competition was created, driven by a system of incentives. 816 00:55:28,833 --> 00:55:33,808 All of this mimicked the pressures of the free market on public servants. 817 00:55:33,808 --> 00:55:38,348 To those who set out to create it, it was the engineering of a new freedom. 818 00:55:38,381 --> 00:55:41,153 They were liberating millions of public employees 819 00:55:41,186 --> 00:55:44,324 from the arrogant control of elites. 820 00:55:44,324 --> 00:55:48,431 Instead, a new and objective method, based on numbers, 821 00:55:48,464 --> 00:55:51,903 set the targets which individuals were then free to achieve 822 00:55:51,903 --> 00:55:53,906 any way they wanted. 823 00:55:53,939 --> 00:55:56,744 It basically set free their talents. 824 00:55:56,744 --> 00:56:00,650 Before, they had simply been instruments - doing what they were told. 825 00:56:00,650 --> 00:56:03,922 Now, suddenly they were creative minds, 826 00:56:03,955 --> 00:56:07,226 allowed to examine and say "why don't we do this?", 827 00:56:07,226 --> 00:56:12,301 and that sense of freedom that comes from thinking "these were their targets", 828 00:56:12,301 --> 00:56:17,109 not something that had been wised on them from on high, and that was a very important part of motivation, 829 00:56:17,109 --> 00:56:19,979 for they felt they owned their targets. 830 00:56:19,979 --> 00:56:23,518 But it was a very narrow and specific type of freedom. 831 00:56:23,518 --> 00:56:28,359 It meant shedding all ideas of working for the collective or public good. 832 00:56:28,359 --> 00:56:34,468 And becoming instead, an individual constantly calculating what would be to one's advantage, 833 00:56:34,468 --> 00:56:37,440 in a system driven and defined by numbers. 834 00:56:37,440 --> 00:56:41,981 At the root of this, were the simplified, self-interested creatures, 835 00:56:42,014 --> 00:56:45,318 that John Nash had created back in the 1950s, 836 00:56:45,318 --> 00:56:48,290 to make his Game Theory equations work 837 00:56:48,290 --> 00:56:52,229 But now, the aim of the system of targets and incentives 838 00:56:52,263 --> 00:56:57,171 was to transform public servants to just these simplified beings. 839 00:56:57,171 --> 00:57:01,443 Individuals who calculated only what was best for them, 840 00:57:01,443 --> 00:57:06,084 and did not think any longer in wider political terms. 841 00:57:06,084 --> 00:57:10,224 There is this vision of these individual, isolated humans. 842 00:57:10,224 --> 00:57:14,230 That they are only information processors, there's no emotion involved, 843 00:57:14,230 --> 00:57:22,376 that people don't get some of their motives for participating in politics from emotion feelings 844 00:57:22,376 --> 00:57:25,515 and being part of something larger than themselves 845 00:57:25,515 --> 00:57:28,552 none of that is allowed in this particular theorem. 846 00:57:28,552 --> 00:57:32,860 And so, what we have is this image of these little information processors 847 00:57:32,860 --> 00:57:35,663 who might possibly care about their family or whatever, 848 00:57:35,663 --> 00:57:39,603 but the idea that they have the interests in the welfare 849 00:57:39,603 --> 00:57:42,574 of the whole at heart is thought to be naïve. 850 00:57:45,246 --> 00:57:48,083 This is the middle of the checkpoint, the gates have been opened, 851 00:57:48,083 --> 00:57:51,889 the police are no attempt to stop people as they go through and come back. 852 00:57:51,889 --> 00:57:53,892 I have never seen such elation. 853 00:58:00,435 --> 00:58:02,972 "Freedom! Freedom. Just once! 854 00:58:02,972 --> 00:58:06,845 I watched the scenes on television last night, and again this morning. 855 00:58:06,845 --> 00:58:09,216 You see the joy on people's faces 856 00:58:09,216 --> 00:58:11,486 you see what freedom means to them, 857 00:58:11,486 --> 00:58:16,294 it makes you realise that you can't stifle or suppress people's desire for liberty. 858 00:58:16,294 --> 00:58:18,096 - What do you think of tonight? 859 00:58:18,096 --> 00:58:21,468 Wonderful! 860 00:58:22,102 --> 00:58:25,942 In November 1989, the Berlin Wall collapsed, 861 00:58:25,942 --> 00:58:28,746 and the Cold War was finally over. 862 00:58:28,746 --> 00:58:31,216 A new era of freedom had begun. 863 00:58:31,216 --> 00:58:37,192 But the shape that freedom was going to take would be defined by the victors, the West. 864 00:58:37,192 --> 00:58:42,968 And as this programme has shown, the idea of freedom that had now become dominant in the West, 865 00:58:42,968 --> 00:58:47,742 was deeply rooted in the suspicion and paranoia of the Cold War. 866 00:58:48,409 --> 00:58:51,614 Next week's film will show how this idea spreads 867 00:58:51,648 --> 00:58:54,186 to take over politics itself, 868 00:58:54,186 --> 00:58:58,392 because it seemed to offer a new and better alternative to democracy. 869 00:58:59,093 --> 00:59:03,266 What it actually leads to is corruption, growing rigidity, 870 00:59:03,266 --> 00:59:06,270 and a dramatic rise in inequality. 871 00:59:06,671 --> 00:59:11,946 And we will come to believe that we really are the strange isolated beings 872 00:59:12,013 --> 00:59:16,687 the Cold War scientists had invented to make their models work. 873 00:59:16,687 --> 00:59:23,297 This bleak vision, far from liberating us, will become our cage. 874 00:59:23,598 --> 00:59:27,604 Thanks to: ovisnigra (spanish subtitle and english transcript) 875 00:59:28,000 --> 00:59:31,099