BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom

  
 
penitentvandal
07:19 / 12.03.07
Can't believe no-one's started a thread on this yet, but did anyone see 'The Trap' last night? New documentary series from Adam Curtis, the guy who directed the excellent 'The Power of Nightmares' a couple of years back. The theme this time seems to be the paradox that while our leaders continually say they want to give us more freedom, we actually find ourselves living ever more tightly controlled lives, with restrictions on freedom of speech, CCTV cameras all over the shop, and ID cards breathing down our necks. Curtis asks why this is, and looks at the theoretical underpinnings of it.

The basic thesis is that it occurred because of over-reliance on game theory by economists and psychiatrists. Game theory was useful to the US because it allowed them to win the cold war (allegedly) and from there the ideology spread to take over society. The problem is, game theory assumes that everyone's a selfish fucker who's only out to look after themselves, so it does away with notions like public duty and replaces them with a reliance on incentives and targets, because if people are selfish they'll only act in their own interests. The game theory argument is that this is in fact the best way to run a society, because everyone acting selfishly creates some kind of state of equilibrium in which everyone somehow gets, maybe not exactly what they want, but enough (in the same way that, for most of the cold war, you couldn't say you were winning, exactly, but you had stability).

Needless to say, there are problems with this argument. One of the main ones is that game theory seems to be a poor predictor of how people behave IRL. The programme talks about a version of the Prisoner's Dilemma cooked up by game theorist John Nash (yes, of Beautiful Mind fame) which he tried out on secretaries at the Rand corporation, where he worked. The rational, game theory thing to do in the PD is to act selfishly; but in fact whenever the secretaries played it they chose to co-operate. Similarly, when another game theorist, a guy called Alain Einthoven, tried to apply the principles of game theory to re-organising the US Army, replacing a patriotic ideal with a system of targets and incentives, the results were a disaster. Defence Sec Robert Mcnamara tried to run the Vietnam War using Einthoven's methods, and body count targets led to both farce and tragedy as soldiers either lied outright to inflate their body counts, or actually killed civilians to bump up the figures. Despite what would appear to be a pretty conclusive falsification of his hypothesis, Einthoven instead went on to apply the same principles to the US health system, and was then drafted in by Maggie Thatcher to do the same to the NHS.

Loads more good stuff in this programme I haven't got time to go into here - links between game theory, RD Laing, anti-psychiatry and the shift to a more mechanistic theory of psychiatry today, including a scene in which a psychiatrist gave an almost 'magical' definition of mental disorders: 'we can't say exactly why people have disorders. We can't say for certain they exist. But we do say this is what they look like.'; the suggestion that Nash's paranoid schizophrenia may have influenced his perception that people would always behave selfishly; 'Yes Minister' as public choice propaganda; some free-trade kool-aid drinker from the Adam Smith institute gushing about how 'targets allow people to act creatively, rather than feeling they're having goals imposed from above', which would seem not to mesh with any target-driven profession I know of; and the suggestion that next week Curtis will show that Blair's reliance on focus-grouping etc actually constitutes a 'replacement for democracy'. Did anyone else see this? What do you think?
 
 
Spaniel
08:25 / 12.03.07
Despite what would appear to be a pretty conclusive falsification of his hypothesis

Just to be accurate, I'm not sure Vietnam would necessarily count as a falsification of the hypothesis. I imagine Einthoven would argue that it was a failure to apply the theory effectively.

Following from that, I suppose there's a question here about whether these kinds of technocratic solutions can be called scientific in that it would seem to be difficult to come up with any experiment that would adequately define grounds for falsification.

Velvet, as an aside, did you watch the equally fascinating Century of the Self, also by Curtis.
 
 
Saveloy
08:58 / 12.03.07
I only saw half of this. How did the changes in psychiatric practice which Laing inadvertently triggered fit into the grand scheme that Curtis was putting forward? I saw the bit where he said that diagnosis was 'rationalised' and done by computer, but I didn't get how this fitted into the "selfish, paranoid individuals" thing.

Also, was his point that we have actually *become* selfish paranoid individuals as a result of encouragement by govt, or was it simply that govt policy assumes that we are, even though we are not?
 
 
penitentvandal
07:27 / 13.03.07
Boboss - that's a pretty good point, about the idea being unfalsifiable. I was thinking something along those lines myself, but found it diffiult to express.

It always strikes me as odd that economists, for example, are so keen to position their discipline as a science (albeit a dismal one), yet falsification of economic concepts is often very very tricky. Socialist economists will argue that no-one has ever tried 'real' socialism, and if it was done for real it would work; free market economists are, if anything, in an even more invidious position, arguing that a free market system would be the best against the fact that an entirely free market has never existed, and, whenever one does look like it might happen, governments immediately scramble to put fetters on it.

Einthoven's application of game theory to the millitary stands on similar ground. One of the problems of replacing notions of public duty with incentives is that you can never entirely get rid of the notion of public duty. Soldiers will probably join the army not because of incentives but because of a desire to defend their country (and the most effective incentives offered for joining would seem to be not money or promotion but training); people will become doctors and nurses because of a desire to help people; people will become teachers because they want to educate others. These might not be their entire and only motives, but they will be part of it. The game theory assumption actually provides no explanation of why people become soldiers, doctors or teachers, rather than CEOs or hedge fund managers: if people are inherently selfish, why do an awful lot choose to work in such (relatively) low-paid jobs helping others when they could be earning millions in the city?

In this sense, Einthoven could perhaps reasonably argue that, as no-one has entirely eradicated the idea of public duty from these professions, then no-one has ever ran a profession on 'true' game theory; which puts him in the same category as the economists above.

Saveloy - I imagine the relevance of the bit about the psychiatry/anti-psychiatry wars giving way to a new, more mechanised model of psychiatry is something Curtis is going to pick up on in the following episodes, and was just laying the groundwork here. Possibly the idea was that the proliferation of disorders this seemed to lead to - and the proliferation of people self-identifying as having these disorders - led more people to regard themselves as aberrant, therefore more willing to be controlled in order to become 'normal'? I can see that feeding in to the idea of the state becoming more controlling while talking freedom: they aren't controlling your behaviour, they're regulating it - freeing you from your syndrome so you can act normally. We'll just have to wait and see.

Of course, the idea that most people are walking around with a mental disorder or two is a problem for game theory again, as one of its assumptions is that rational agents are the ones who will act selfishly, and if most of the populace are a wee bit headmelty then they aren't rational agents so...bye-bye, equilibrium.
 
 
Twig the Wonder Kid
12:14 / 13.03.07
Is there going to be a repeat of the first episode sometime this week?
 
 
Spaniel
13:34 / 13.03.07
Not that I can see in the listings. I thought BBC4 might pick it up, but apparently not.

I'm sure it'll be repeated in the not too distant future, tho'
 
 
Milky Joe
18:33 / 15.03.07
If anyone is on 'Virgin media' (NTL) you can watch it again for free on the TV on demand service. It was a very interesting piece but I do agree some of his theories were a bit presumptuous.
 
 
Spaniel
20:57 / 15.03.07
Whose theories?
 
 
elene
21:04 / 16.03.07
I think it is not so much that people are willing to be controlled, velvetvandal, as that, concious of their own great anxiety and the ill effects it causes, they are willing to regulate themselves in order to minimise those ill effects. Of the near 50% of the population being identified as suffering from some form of mental illness under the new system, the fraction that is new and unexpected is, by and large, suffering not from psychosis, which I suppose one might describe as "headmelty," but merely from the effects of anxiety. Such anxiety is a natural consequence of exactly those circumstances - essentially circumstances of intense and ruthless competition - which the game theorists claim usefully characterise the whole human condition. It fits together quite well, I think.

It's very hard to argue that people are not essentially selfish, but it is equally clear that many of one's most important incentives are psychological in nature and that these often work in opposition to pure self-interest. The desire here to make everyone controllable goes beyond the simple application of game theory, making this whole affair ideological. It's fun to listen to James Buchanan warn that zealots can endanger his beautiful system of amenable politicians.

I found the program very interesting and I will certainly watch the next episode.
 
  
Add Your Reply