10... 9... 8...
- YOU CAN ONLY TRUST THE NUMBERS -
7... 6... 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... 0.
NARRATOR: The ultimate political goal at the heart of our age,
is the idea of individual freedom.
Bush: I believe freedom is the future of all humanity.
NARRATOR: In Britain, our government has set out to create a revolution,
that will free individuals from the control of old elites and bureaucracy.
A new world where we are free to choose our lives,
not be trapped by class our income into predestined roles.
BLAIR: …to liberate Britain from all the old class divisions,
old structures, old prejudices,
to liberate the individual…
NARRATOR: and abroad, in Iraq and Afghanistan,
Britain and America have set out
to liberate individuals from tyranny.
For those leading it, it is just the first step in a global revolution for democracy.
But if one steps back and looks at what has resulted,
it is a very strange kind of freedom.
The attempt to liberate people from the dead hand of bureaucracy,
has led to the rise of a new and increasingly controlling system of management,
driven by targets and numbers.
While governments, committed to creating freedom of choice in all areas,
have actually presided over a rise of inequalities, and a dramatic collapse in social mobility.
The consequence has been a return of the power of class and privilege.
And abroad, the attempt to create democracy
has led not just to bloody mayhem,
but a rejection of the American-led campaign to bring freedom.
"Go home yankee, go home yankee"
- "We're here for your fucking freedom, so back up right now!"
And it has summoned up an antidemocratic authoritarian Islamism.
This in turn, has helped inspire terrorist attacks in Britain itself.
In response, government dismantled long standing laws
designed to protect our freedom.
This is a serious of films,
about how this strange, paradoxical world came to be created.
It begins in the dark and frightening days of the Cold War,
and it will show how what we have today
is a very narrow, and peculiar idea of freedom,
that was born out of the paranoia of that time.
It is based on an image of human beings
as selfish, isolated, and suspicious creatures,
who constantly monitor and strategise against each other.
The films will show how politicians and scientists
came to believe this idea of human nature
could be the basis of a new type of free society.
But what none of them would realise, was that within this dark and distrustful vision,
lay the seeds of a new and revolutionary system of social control.
It would use the language of freedom
but in reality it would come to entrap us and our leaders
in a narrow and empty world.
- THE TRAP -
- WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR DREAM OF FREEDOM -
"Part one F..K YOU BUDDY"
At the end of second world war,
America and American films celebrated not just victory,
but many believe dawning of a new era.
Back then, freedom meant not just liberation from Nazis,
but also from the economic chaos and uncertainty
that had caused the depression of the 1930s.
Governments now believed their role was to manage and control the economy
and protect society
from the danger of self interest at the heart of capitalism.
No longer did we worship at the shrine of no holds barred capitalism. No.
We had been through the depression of the 1930s,
we had been through World War 2. Now we were talking about the need for government
to be the major balancing element in the economy.
The individual was still important, but government would make sure
that we would never slide into a deep depression again.
In the following years, bureaucracies at the heart of the state grew enormously.
Their job was to regulate capitalism for the benefit of everyone.
In an age of optimism, there were few who challenged this new vision.
But one man on the margins was convinced it would lead to disaster.
He was an Austrian aristocrat called Friedrich Von Hayek,
who had fled the Nazis and now taught at the University of Chicago.
Hayek was convinced that the use of politics to plan society
was far more dangerous than any problems produced by capitalism;
because it inevitably led to tyranny and the end of freedom.
A terrible example Hayek pointed to was Soviet Union.
In their search for a utopia, the Soviet leaders had tried to plan and control everything,
but this had led them to tyranny and dictatorship.
The same would now inevitably happen to the West itself.
It was on what he called "the road to serfdom".
The only way of avoiding disaster was to go back into the past,
back to a golden age of the free market,
where individuals followed their own self interest,
and government played little or no role.
Out of this would come what Hayek called a: "self directing automatic system",
a spontaneous order, created by millions of people pursuing their own game.
FRIEDRICH VON HAYEK: We will benefit our fellow men
most if we are guided solely by the striving for gain.
For this purpose, we have to return to an automatic system which brings this about.
Self directing automatic system which alone can restore the liberty and prosperity.
That is my fundamental conception.
Question: Isn't it a philosophy based essentially on selfishness?
- What about altruism, where does that come in?
FRIEDRICH VON HAYEK: erm, it doesn't come in.
NARRATOR: Hayek's idea was dismissed by politicians and economists.
The notion that one could create social order in a modern complex world
simply by unleashing individual self interest,
was seen as a failed, and discredited idea.
But proof that he might be right,
was about to emerge from most unlikely of sources:
from scientists, struggling with the new, terrifying uncertainties of the Cold War.
This is the heart of a giant, blast proof bunker
48 km North of New York.
Built in the late 50s, it housed the largest computer in the world,
linked to a system of radars around the world,
which constantly watched the soviet Union.
Every second thousands of pieces of information,
poured into this room to be analysed for signs of danger.
NARRATOR: The nuclear strategists who had designed this system,
knew they were dealing with a completely new type of conflict.
Neither side could let it get out of control
because of the terrifying consequences.
So the strategists wanted to find a way of using the information
to anticipate what the Soviets might be about to do.
And to do this, they turned to a new idea, called GAME THEORY.
Game theory had been developed as a way of mathematically
analysing poker games.
It looked at the game as a system
where the players are locked together
each trying to work out what other thinks they will do.
From that, Game Theory showed rationally
what the best moves were for each of the players.
"This is a type of war that had never been fought before
and of course as we all know, it would be so devastating
that it is almost impossible to consider all of its consequences.
They still wanted to say there was a rational way
to approach such a virtual war
and GAME THEORY seemed to offer that to them,
that you could, in a sense, incorporate your enemy into your own thinking
that you could mathematically understand
what your enemy would do, to the point where you and your enemy
would play the exact same set of strategies."
The centre for developing nuclear strategy
was a military think thank called RAND CORPORATION.
And the strategists at RAND, used Game Theory to create mathematical models
that predicted how the Soviets
would behave in response to what they saw the Americans doing.
Out of this came the fundamental structure of nuclear age
hundreds of missiles protected in silos underground.
Fleets of bombers in the air 24 hours a day.
Just as in a game,
they were strategic moves to convince the Soviets, that if they attacked,
America would always have missiles to destroy them in return.
And, in the rules of this game, fear and self interest stopped the Russians from attacking.
And it created a stable equilibrium called the "delicate balance of terror".
Recommending missiles underground missiles in submarines
and all that was a way of making that much more stable.
Sometimes the way I used to explained this is:
we're trying very hard to reduce the likelihood of a nuclear war
by creating powerful incentives for the Russians not to start a nuclear war …
Because we're trying to give them incentives not to attack,
either with a nuclear attack or a conventional attack..
yes, so incentives are important in that.
- Target you! -
Underlying GAME THEORY, was a dark vision of human beings
who are driven only by self interest,
constantly distrustful of those around them.
There was a mathematician in the RAND Corporation
who would take this dark vision much further.
He set out to show that one could create stability
through suspicion and self interest,
not just in the Cold War but in the whole of human society…
He was the mathematical genius John Nash…
Nash was portrayed in the Hollywood film, A Beautiful Mind, as a tortured hero…
reality, Nash was difficult and spiky…
He was notorious at RAND for inventing series of cruel games.
The most famous he called "fuck you buddy"
in which the only way to win,
was to ruthlessly betray your game partner.
Nash took Game theory and tried to apply it to all forms of human interaction.
To do this, he made the fundamental assumption;
that all human behaviour was exactly
like that involved in the hostile, competitive world of the nuclear stand-off.
That human beings constantly watched and monitored each other
and to get what they wanted they would adjust their strategies to each other.
In a series of equations, for which he would win the Nobel Prize,
Nash showed that a system driven by suspicion and selfishness
did not have to lead to chaos.
He proved that there could always be a point of equilibrium
in which everyone's self interest was perfectly balanced against each other.
NASH: The equilibrium, this equilibrium which is used,
is that, what I do
is perfectly adjusted in relation to what you are doing.
And what you are doing, and what any other person is doing,
is perfectly adjusted to what I am doing or what all other people are doing.
They are seeking separate optimisations
just like poker players.
- Question: Is each player alone?
NASH: That's the idea that they are alone, and they're separate,
doing something that is very non-cooperative - very selfish.
And then what all of them do, works together and there's driving from that there's a payoff to all the players.
That is the equilibrium,
but it's understood not to be a cooperative idea.
Narrator: But the stability, the equilibrium,
would only happen if everyone involved behaved selfishly,
because if they cooperated the result became unpredictable and dangerous.
A famous game was developed at RAND, that showed that in any interaction,
selfishness always led to a safer outcome.
It was called "The Prisoner's Dilemma."
There are many versions, but all of them involve two players
having to decide whether to trust or betray each other.
- The Prisoner's Dilemma -
Narrator: Imagine you have stolen the world's most valuable diamond.
You have agreed to sell it to a dangerous gangster.
He offers to meet you to exchange the diamond for the money.
But you think he may kill you.
So instead, you tell him you will take it to a remote field and hide it,
while at the same time he must go to another field hundreds of miles away, and hide the money.
Then you will call him, and each will tell the other the hiding place.
But just as you are about to make the call, you realise you could betray him.
You keep the diamond, and then you go and get the money,
while the gangster searches fruitlessly in an empty field.
But at the very same moment, you realise that he is probably thinking the same thing:
that he could betray you.
You have no way of predicting how the other person will behave.
That is the dilemma.
But what Nash's equation showed
showed was that the rational choice was always to betray the other person,
because that way, at the worst, you got to keep the diamond.
And at the best, you got both the diamond and the money.
But if you trusted the other person, you ran the risk of losing everything,
because he might betray you. It was called the "sucker payoff".
What the Prisoner's Dilemma expressed
was the strange logic of The Cold War.
The optimum solution offering to get rid of all your weapons,
provided the Russians did the same, could never happen,
because you couldn't trust them not to cheat.
So instead, you went for stability,
created by a balance of dangerous weapons on both sides.
What Nash had done, was to turn that,
into a theory of how the whole of society worked.
It had enormous implications for politics,
because it proved that one could have a society, based on individual freedom,
that wouldn't degenerate into chaos.
But the price of that freedom
would mean a world where everyone would have to be suspicious and distrustful of their fellow human-beings.
The Nash equilibrium is important, because one of the great fears of politics
is that self-interest would lead to utter chaos,
and what the Nash equilibrium suggests
is that a rational pursuit of self-interest,
even in the face of implacable hostile enemies, will lead to a kind of an order,
in which all players agree upon the strategies that they're playing,
and that those strategies make sense to them.
But at the same time, it's also paranoid because it's the idea of a human being
sitting alone in a room, being able to totally reconstruct their opponent.
Their opponent is totally implacable, totally hostile, and bent on their destruction.
But there was a small problem with Nash's equations.
They didn't seem to correlate with how human beings actually behave towards each other in the real world.
When the Prisoner's Dilemma game was tested out on the secretaries at the RAND corporation,
none of them played the rational strategy.
Instead of betraying each other, they always trusted each other,
and decided to cooperate.
And what no-one realised, was that John Nash himself, was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.
He had delusions, in which he believed that those around him who wore red ties
were communist spies.
And that he was part of a secret organisation that could save the world.
John Nash: You don't want to admit that you are crazy.
You see the other people as crazy,
but you like to think of yourself as not crazy, as sort of rational.
So I thought there was some secret organisations of humans, or secret
beliefs among some categories of humans,
and I thought I had some relation to that.
I heard voices,
and I ultimately realised that I didn't hear anything but something that I created in my own mind,
I was talking to myself mentally
Narrator: In 1959, Nash was forcibly committed to a mental hospital,
and he would spend the next ten years battling schizophrenia.
But despite the obvious problems with Nash's theories,
the young technocrats at RAND were convinced that in them lay
the seeds of a new form of ordering society,
based on the free individual,
because the equations provided a scientific basis
for the alternative vision that Fredrick Von Hayek had called for.
But, for the moment, these ideas remained
confined to a few thinkers at the heart of the Nuclear Establishment.
But Nash's ideas were about to spread in the most surprising way.
Thousands of miles away, there was a radical psychiatrist who had a vision.
He wanted to make people free of all the constraints
that he believed controlled their minds without them realising.
And to make them free, like Nash, he would fundamentally question
and undermine the old ideas of trust and love.
- Is love possible? - Is freedom possible?
Is the truth possible? Is it possible to be one's actual self with another human being?
Is it possible to be a human being anymore?
Is it possible to be a person? Do persons even exist?
Narrator: R.D. Laing had begun work
as a psychiatrist in the mental hospitals in Glasgow in the 1950s.
It was a violent, frightening world,
in which the doctors tried to manage and control schizophrenics the best they could.
Laing had noticed that the psychiatrists
hardly even spoke to the schizophrenics,
so as an experiment, he took twelve women,
and spent months talking to them about their selves and their lives.
The results were dramatic.
After just a few months, al twelve
were well enough to leave hospital.
- "BUT 12 MONTHS LATER" -
Within a year, Laing discovered that all of them had returned to the hospital.
His attempt at a cure had failed completely.
After this experiment,
these women left hospital and after another year they were all back again.
No-one knew why they'd come in in the first place,
and no-one knew why they had to come back again.
And that shifted my focus off attention and interest,
and research interest, out into the actual circumstances where this thing called madness is incubated.
Laing began to investigate the families of the schizophrenics.
His research led him to a hidden, closed world,
where he studied how the families of the schizophrenics
behaved towards each other in private.
And he became convinced that the roots of this madness
lay concealed in this unexamined world.
The doctors and nurses, who used chemicals and ECT,
to try and return the patients to their families,
were making a terrible mistake.
They were sending them back to the private horror that had first created the madness.
If this were true, then the doctors,
although they believed they were doing their public duty, and what was best for the patient,
were in reality violent agents of oppression.
I think it's very important
that a doctor remember his duty:
to give the patient what is best for them in their long term interest,
which isn't always what the patient asks for.
If you want to go home to your relatives,
the relatives have got to be reasonably sure
that you will fit in reasonably well in their home,
so that they can go on living a normal life.
In the early sixties, Laing set up a psychiatric practice in Harley Street in London.
He offered radical new treatments for schizophrenia,
and quickly became a media celebrity.
But his research into the causes of schizophrenia
had convinced him that a much wider range of human problems
were caused by the pressure cooker of family life.
Laing decided to investigate how power and control were exercised within the world of normal families.
And to do this, he would use the techniques of Game Theory.
Laing had learnt about Game Theory when he visited the mental research institute
at Palo Alto in California.
A group of research scientists there were trying to use Game Theory
as a way of analysing human interaction.
And Laing saw in this the perfect tool
to dissect what went on between the members of families in Britain.
Laing used Game Theory in his analysis of families
he was concerned with games, not in the sense of fun,
more in the sense of people playing by rules,
some of which were explicit, and some of which they were unaware of, and which in a sense were secret.
He thought he'd uncovered a fresh way of looking at human relations,
those secret games that people had.
This was a way in which he could be subject to some sort of scientific investigation,
it could be quantified, you could give people questionnaires.
Oh, it was very much the application of Game Theory, that's exactly what it was.
Laing took twenty couples to Britain,
and using a complex series of questionnaires,
he analysed how each of them saw the other, moment by moment, in their daily life,
continually asking them what they secretly thought the other really intended.
Following Game Theory, he then coded the results, and had them analysed by computer.
Out of that, Laing produced matrices,
which showed that, just as in the Cold War,
couples use their everyday actions for strategies
to control and manipulate each other.
His conclusions were stark:
that what would normally be seen as acts of kindness and love,
were in reality, weapons used selfishly to exert power and control.
Laing really did feel that the family was an arena for strategising.
Love was a way in which one person tried to dominate another person.
"I love you, but I'm making a condition for that love which is impossible for you to fulfil.
And so there's nothing you can do
to earn my love, even though I'm telling you that you have to earn my love".
From this research, Laing argued that the modern family,
far from being a caring, nurturing institution, was in reality, a dark arena,
where people played continuous selfish games with each other.
Out of this struggle came stability and society,
but a bleak and limited existence for all the individuals involved.
The so-called "normal" family that I studied in the course of this work,
it was like walking into a carbon monoxide gas chamber.
People induced their children to adjust to life
by poisoning themselves to a level of subsistence existence that they called life.
Laing was radicalised by his findings.
He believed that the struggle for power and control that he had uncovered in the family,
was inextricably linked with the struggle for power and control in the world.
In a violent and corrupt society, the family had become a machine for controlling people.
Laing believed that this was an objective reality,
revealed by his scientific methods, above all by Game Theory.
But these very methods contain within them bleak paranoid assumptions
about what human beings are really like.
Assumptions borne out of the hostility of the Cold War.
What Laing was actually doing,
was helping spread these bleak, paranoid ideas into other areas of society.
Into the very way we thought about ourselves,
and our relationships with each other.
He gave a message of: "I have seen things that you can hardly imagine.
A bleak cold landscape out there that I am going
to do my best to armour you against.
We will walk into there together, and we will protect each other's backs out there in this cold bleak landscape,
but don't you ever bullshit yourself that it's anything more or better than that, because that's where it is.
Laing wrote a series of books with titles like: "The Politics of Experience",
that became huge best sellers.
And he became one of the leaders of the new counter-culture movement.
The aim of the movement was to make people realise
that none of the state institutions of the post-war world could be trusted.
Those that claimed to be motivated by public duty, and the desire to help,
were really part of the system that was trying to control your mind and destroy your freedom.
Their whole mind is 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.
One had to be constantly on guard, never trusting anyone
even those who said they loved you.
A lot of people are caught in a trap that they feel they ought to trust
or believe the person they love,
because they love them,
but I don't see that that follows at all.
What Laing and the counter-culture movement
were doing was tearing down Britain's institutions in the name of freedom.
And they were about to find the most unexpected allies.
They would be joined by a group of economists from the political right,
who had exactly the same aim,
and who'd become immensely powerful.
This group were all inspired by the ideas of Fredrick Hayek,
and most of them had also worked at the RAND corporation.
And they brought with them the sophisticated mathematical techniques, like Game Theory.
They would use these techniques to prove scientifically
that the idea of public duty,
which had underpinned British public life for generations
was a sham and a corrupt hypocrisy.
Their ideas would begin to demolish the old institutions of the British state.
They would also introduce the paranoid assumptions of the Cold War
ever further into the heart of British society.
In the early Seventies, the government bureaucracies in Britain began to collapse.
Those around them blamed a growing economic crisis.
But it was clear that something much more fundamental had gone wrong.
What were supposed to be institutions to help people had become destructive.
Those around them seemed to turn against the very people
they were supposed to serve.
Financial restrictions…
Well, can you get him for a minute? Well it's urgent, this…
Can't tell you that…
I'm not allowed to disclose that…
We don't deal with that sort of thing…
Not available.
A group of right-wing economists in America
now put forward a theory that, they said, explained why this was happening.
At the heart of their idea was Game Theory.
They said that the fundamental reality of life and society
was one of millions of people continually watching and strategising
against each other,
all seeking only their own advantage.
But assumption had become a truth.
A self-interested model of human behaviour,
that had been developed in the Cold War to make the mathematical equations work,
had now been adopted by these economists as a fundamental truth
about the reality of all human social interaction.
We're always trying to infer the intentions of the other.
We're always trying to convey our intentions, either deceptively or truthfully.
We're always trying to find ways to make believable promises,
and sometimes to make believable threats.
Threatening the Soviet Union, threatening a misbehaving animal, threatening a child, threatening a neighbour…
I think what we're doing is what we call strategising.
What does he think that I think he thinks that I think he's going to do?
It has to come to some kind of equilibrium.
What is it that we can both recognise, is the obvious thing to do?
What this meant, the economists argued,
was that the politicians and bureaucrats belief that they were working for what they called "the public good"
was a complete fantasy - because to do that depended upon creating shared goals in society,
based on self-sacrifice and altruism,
but in a world that was really driven by millions of suspicious, self-seeking individuals,
such concepts could not exist.
Out of this came a theory called "Public Choice,"
and a group of economists who were determined to destroy
the politician's dream that they were working for the public interest.
Their leader was called James Buchanan.
There's certainly no measurable concept that could meaningfully be called the public interest.
Because how do you weigh different interests of different groups and what they can get out of it?
The public interest as a politician thinks, does not mean it exists,
it's what he thinks is good for the country.
And if he would come out and say that,
that's one thing, but behind this hypocrisy of calling something "the public interest" as if it exists,
that's what I was trying to tear down.
In 1975, Mrs Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party.
And Buchanan's ideas had a powerful influence on her,
and the group of radicals gathered around her.
A rightwing think-tank advising Mrs Thatcher
brought James Buchanan to London for a series of seminars.
And he explained starkly why the British state was failing.
It was pure Game Theory:
Because there was no agreed version of "the public good",
the bureaucrats and the politicians schemed and strategised in their own self interest,
building up their power and their own empires.
They claimed to be helping others. In fact it was the very opposite,
and the result was economic chaos, and a breakdown of society.
It was chaos, there is no other word for it,
and then Public Choice Theory came along and told us why.
It's because the self-interest of the groups that have managed to acquire control of the process,
is such that they're directing these activities to their own advantage
at the expense of society.
When public servants and politicians say they're pursuing the public interest,
the words are those of public service,
the actions are those of self-interest: maximising personal advantage.
Now, this is certainly not true, because contrary to popular belief,
both myself and my staff here
we take a very very great personal interest in individual people…
I think you're scared, I think because there won't be so much opposition
you don't know whether you're doing the right thing or not.
If you don't want me to answer, I'll go home, it's a lovely evening,
I don't need to be here, but if you do want me to answer, I will stay. Please… Will you give the… Listen!
As the British economy spiralled out of control,
the political and bureaucratic elite who had dominated Britain since the war,
found themselves under attack from both the Right and the Left.
Where once they had been heroic figures who would create a new world,
now they were accused of being agents of control, not freedom.
We've been ruled by men who live by illusions.
The illusion that you can have freedom by government decree…
And they don't give that…
And these new theories began to spread into the public imagination,
the writer who was part of the group advising Mrs Thatcher,
began to write a sitcom
that explicitly put forward the theories of public choice.
As well as being funny, it was ideological propaganda for a political movement.
Humphrey, we have got to slim down the Civil Service.
How many people have we got in this department?
Two… thousand? Three thousand?
About twenty three thousand, I think, Minister.
Twenty three thousand?! In the Department for Administrative Affairs?!
Twenty three thousand people just administering other administrators?
We'll have to do a time and motion study, see who we can get rid of.
Er, we did one of those last year, minister…
- And? - It transpired we needed another five hundred people.
The fallacy that Public Choice Economics took on,
was the fallacy that government is working entirely for the benefit of the citizen.
This was reflected by showing that in "Yes Minister",
we showed that almost everything that the government
has to decide is a conflict between two lots of private interest
- that of the politicians, and that of the civil servants
trying to advance their own careers, and improve their own lives.
And that's why Public Choice Economics,
which explains why all this was going on, was at the root of almost every episode of Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister.
At the same time, R.D. Laing was continuing his assault
assault on what he saw as the corrupt elites.
He was about to use his growing power
to attract one of the most powerful professions in America
the medical and psychiatric establishment.
The results would be dramatic.
But the outcome would be very different from what Laing intended.
His ideas would undermine the all-controlling medical elite.
But far from liberating people,
what would actually emerge would be a revolutionary new system of order and control,
driven by the objective power of numbers.
It's a space where you can meet with her,
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…
Laing was now a celebrity in America,
and was one of the leaders of what was called the "anti-psychiatry" movement.
Psychiatry, Laing said, was a fake science,
used as a system of political control to shore-up a violent collapsing society.
Its categories of madness and sanity had no reality.
Madness was simply a convenient label
used to lock away those who wanted to break free.
Hundreds of young psychiatrists came to Laing's talks,
and one of them was inspired,
and decided to find a way of testing whether what Laing said was true or not.
Could psychiatrists in America distinguish between madness and sanity?
He was called David Rosenham, and he devised a dramatic experiment.
He assembled eight people, including himself,
none of whom had ever had any psychiatric problems.
Each person was then sent across the country to a specific mental hospital.
At an agreed time, they all presented themselves at their hospital,
and told the psychiatrist on duty they were hearing a voice in their head
that said the word "thud".
That was the only lie they should tell.
Otherwise, they were to behave and respond completely normally.
Interviewer: And then what happened?
Rosenham: They were all diagnosed as insane
and admitted to the hospital.
Interviewer: All of them?
Rosenham: All of them.
Interviewer: And were any of them insane?
Rosenham: No. There was nobody who could have judged these people as insane.
I told friends, I told my family I get out, when I get out that's all…
I'll be there for a couple of days, then I'll get out. Nobody knew I'd be there for two months!
Once admitted, all eight fake patients acted completely normally,
yet the hospitals refused to release them,
and diagnosed seven as suffering from schizophrenia,
and one of bi-polar disorder.
They were all given powerful psychotropic drugs.
They found there was nothing
they could do to convince the doctors they were sane,
and it quickly became clear that the only way out
would be to agree that they were insane, and then pretend to be getting better.
The only way out was to point out that they were correct.
"They had said I was insane, I am insane, but I am getting better".
That was an affirmation of their view of me.
When Rosenham finally got out and reported the experiment, there was an uproar.
He was accused of trickery and deceit.
And one major hospital challenged him to send some more fakes to them,
guaranteeing that they would spot them this time.
Rosenham agreed, and after a month,
the hospital proudly announced that it had forty-one fakes.
Rosenham then revealed he had sent no-one to the hospital.
The effect of the "thud" experiment was a disaster for American psychiatry.
It destroyed the idea that they were a privileged elite
with specialist knowledge.
But those in charge realised that psychiatry could not just give up.
Debía hallarse otra manera de comprender y manejar
Another way had to be found of understanding and managing
people's inner feelings in modern society. And, like R.D. Laing, they turned to the objective purity of mathematical analysis.
They set out to create a scientific system
of diagnosing people's inner mental states,
in which all human judgement would be removed,
and replaced instead by a system based on the power of numbers.
They gave up on the idea that they could understand the human mind, and cure it.
Instead, American psychiatry created
a new set of measurable categories
that were only based on the surface behaviour of human beings
. Many were given new names,
like Attention Deficit Disorder, and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
Psychiatry says: "we don't know the causes for any of these conditions", and then just said
"this is what they look like".
This is what depression looks like, this is what ADHD looks like,
this is what PTSD looks like, this is what Multiple Personality looks like,
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.
This is just what they look like.
What mattered was that these disorders could be observed, and thus recorded.
The psychiatrists created a system in which a diagnosis
could literally be done by a computer.
The observable characteristics of each of the disorders were listed precisely,
and questionnaires were then designed that asked people
whether they had those characteristics.
The answers were simply "yes" and "no".
So they cold be asked by lay interviewers, not by psychiatrists.
The computer would then decide whether people were normal, or abnormal.
The lay interviewer asks specific questions and notes them.
That person is not making the diagnosis.
That data is fed into a computer.
The computer program then looks at the pattern, and makes the diagnosis.
So the diagnosis was made by the computer,
there was no clinical judgement required.
The psychiatrists then decided to test this system,
and at the end of the 1970s, they sent interviewers
out across America with the questionnaires.
Hundreds of thousands of people selected at random were interviewed.
Up to this point, psychiatrists had only dealt with individuals who had felt they needed help.
This was the first time that anyone had gone out and asked ordinary people how they thought and felt.
And the results, when processed by the computers, were astonishing.
More than fifty percent of Americans suffered from some type of mental disorder.
These studies revealed very high rates of mental disorder.
There are very very high rates of disorders out there.
Half the population has a mental disorder at some point,
seventeen percent of the population has a depressive episode at some point, figures like that.
These rates astonished people, they're enormous rates.
And the general conclusion was: there is a hidden epidemic.
More surveys were done, and yet again
the computers returned the same disturbing data.
The surveys showed that underneath the surface of normal life,
millions of people, who never before would have been thought of as mentally ill,
were secretly living with high levels of mental anxiety.
The psychiatrists began screening programmes across the country.
For many people, the checklists were a liberation,
their private suffering was finally being recognised.
I actually heard they were having a National Anxiety Screening Day.
They asked me a bunch of questions, and if you had these symptoms,
which, there was like, 50 symptoms, and I had like 49 of them, they said what you're experiencing is common,
and when I showed up to these meetings, I seen fire-fighters, construction workers…
It was relieving to see I wasn't making this stuff up.
These new categories of disorders spread quickly in society,
and terms like Borderline Personality Disorder, and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
took hold of the public imagination.
But as this happened, it had unforeseen consequences
Millions of people began to use the checklist
to monitor and diagnose themselves.
They used them to identify what was aberrant or abnormal
in their behaviour and feelings.
But by definition, this also set up a powerful model
for them of what were the normal behaviour and feelings to which they should aspire.
And psychiatrists began to find more and more people coming to them,
demanding to be made normal.
was just a matter of asking people a couple of questions,
checking the boxes in the diagnostic formula,
and saying: "there you are, you have this disease!",
or "I have this disorder, I'd better go to my doctor and tell him what I need!",
and it was an amazing experience and a great change.
Most people do not, previously at any rate,
want to see themselves as in some way psychiatrically injured.
But now, they tell me that they have an ideal in their mind about what the normal person is…
"I don't fit that model, I want you to polish me down so that I fit".
This new system of psychological disorders
had been created by an attack
on the arrogance and power of the psychiatric elite in the name of freedom.
But was beginning to emerge from this was a new form of control.
The disorders and checklists were becoming a powerful and objective guide
to what were the correct and appropriate feelings
in an age of individualism and emotion.
But this was a very different system of order.
No longer were people told how to behave by an elite.
Instead, they now used the checklist
to monitor their feelings and police their own behaviour.
They were reassured that these new categories were scientific
and could be checked by the power of numbers.
For they are the party of yesterday, and tomorrow is ours!
In 1979, Mrs Thatcher had come to power in Britain.
What she promised to create was a society based on the dream of individual freedom.
People would be liberated from the arrogant elites
and state bureaucrats of the past.
But Mrs Thatcher knew she would have to find a new way
of managing and controlling these free individuals
in a complex society, in order to avoid chaos.
And to do this, just like the psychiatrists in America,
she would turn to systems based on the objective power of numbers.
But underlying the new mathematical models would, yet again,
be the dark and suspicious model of human beings
that the Cold War strategists had assumed.
This vision would now penetrate to the very heart of the British state.
The Thatcher government had begun in the early Eighties
by selling off many of the state-owned industries,
but it soon became clear that in the modern world
were large areas of the stat that would have to remain under government control.
Yet Mrs Thatcher was determined to free them
too from old forms of management.
To do this, she would bring in a system no longer run by ideas of public duty,
instead - public servants would be encouraged by incentives
to follow their self-interest.
It was all in keeping with the ideas of the inventor of public choice, James Buchanan.
He believed that it was those politicians and bureaucrats
who preached the idea of public duty
that were the most dangerous, who he called The Zealots.
They had to be got rid of.
We're safer if we have politicians
who are a bit, er, self interested and greedy,
than if we have these zealots.
The greatest danger of course is the zealot who thinks that he knows best, or she knows best for the rest of us…
As opposed to being for sale, so to speak.
So in that sense, you can then use incentives?
Yes, exactly.
The zealot is not nearly as readily influenced by monetary incentives
or incentives of office or rank as the non-zealot…
como el que no es un zealot...
So you don't want too many zealots in there.
If our success depends on the goodness of politicians and bureaucrats,
then we're in real trouble.
It was a dark and pessimistic vision of human motivation.
But it was about to become the basis
for a new system of managing the British state.
The proposals represent the most far reaching reform
of the National Health Service in its 40 year history.
They offer new opportunities
yand pose new challenges for everyone concerned with the running of the service.
In 1988, Mrs Thatcher announced a complete reform
of the way the National Health Service was run.
The fundamental aim was to overthrow the power of the medical establishment,
and replace it with a new efficient system of management
To do this, Mrs Thatcher turned to a man
who had been one of the nuclear strategists at the RAND corporation,
at the height of the Cold War.
He was called Alan Enthoven.
Back in the fifties, Enthoven's job had been to think the unthinkable:
To plan how to fight and win a nuclear war.
To do this, he had designed a mathematical system
which would use nuclear weapons as rational incentives to manipulate the other side.
Enthoven had designed charts that showed how many mega-tonnes of bombs
to drop on which cities, and how many people it would be necessary to kill,
to prove to the Russians that it was in their self-interest to come to the bargaining table.
Out of this, Enthoven had developed a technique he called Systems Analysis
It was a technique of management
that he believed could be applied to any type of human organisation.
Its aim was to get rid of all the emotional and subjective values
that confused and corrupted the system.
And replace them with rational and objective methods,
mathematically defined targets and incentives.
Enthoven had first tried to apply this system back in the 1960s when he was still in the military.
The Secretary of Defense, Robert MacNamara,
asked him to help transform the way the Pentagon was run.
Enthoven began by getting rid of the idea that patriotism
should be the guiding force in America's defense,
and replacing it with a rational system based on numbers.
The approach we brought to the Pentagon
was one based on rational behaviour.
Previously that had been, at that high level, it was kind of a political thing,
and we were trying to make more an analytical thing.
In defense, most people thought it ought to be done on the basis of patriotism…
There was quite a bit of that - emotion feeling - are you patriotic?
and I was there with my slide rule, you know, my geeky sort of, MIT style.
- What did the military think of this?
Well, I think that, erm…
- They hated it?
They hated it, yeah.
What replaced patriotism, and notions of public duty,
were mathematically measurable outcomes.
But MacNamara's experiment had ended in disaster
when he had tried to run the Vietnam war in a rational mathematical way,
through performance targets and incentives.
The most infamous example had been the "body count".
It had been designed as a rational measure
of whether America was winning the war.
But in fact troops simply made it up,
or even shot civilians to fulfil their performance targets.
And in 1967 MacNamara resigned.
But Enthoven was undaunted,
and next he applied his systems to design a rational way
of managing healthcare.
He began this in America, but in 1986 Mrs Thatcher had asked him to come
and do the same for the NHS in Britain.
Just as he had challenged the power of the generals in the Pentagon,
now he would do the same for the doctors in Britain.
I think in both cases, with the military in the defense department, and with the doctors both here and in Britain,
that you have the power of organised elites, of authority and hierarchy,
and the system needed to be reconfigured
in such a way as to give incentives to do a better job,
and it was a matter of - how would you re-wire the incentives to motivate self-interest?
To create proper incentives to reward efficiency?
And can we measure it?
So, that was the challenge to the power of organised medicine.
What Enthoven proposed for the NHS, he called "the internal market".
In fact, what it was, was a mathematical simulation of the free market.
Numbers were used to create measurable outputs
and performance targets at all levels,
while competition was created, driven by a system of incentives.
All of this mimicked the pressures of the free market on public servants.
To those who set out to create it, it was the engineering of a new freedom.
They were liberating millions of public employees
from the arrogant control of elites.
Instead, a new and objective method, based on numbers,
set the targets which individuals were then free to achieve
any way they wanted.
It basically set free their talents.
Before, they had simply been instruments - doing what they were told.
Now, suddenly they were creative minds,
allowed to examine and say "why don't we do this?",
and that sense of freedom that comes from thinking "these were their targets",
not something that had been wised on them from on high, and that was a very important part of motivation,
for they felt they owned their targets.
But it was a very narrow and specific type of freedom.
It meant shedding all ideas of working for the collective or public good.
And becoming instead, an individual constantly calculating what would be to one's advantage,
in a system driven and defined by numbers.
At the root of this, were the simplified, self-interested creatures,
that John Nash had created back in the 1950s,
to make his Game Theory equations work
But now, the aim of the system of targets and incentives
was to transform public servants to just these simplified beings.
Individuals who calculated only what was best for them,
and did not think any longer in wider political terms.
There is this vision of these individual, isolated humans.
That they are only information processors, there's no emotion involved,
that people don't get some of their motives for participating in politics from emotion feelings
and being part of something larger than themselves
none of that is allowed in this particular theorem.
And so, what we have is this image of these little information processors
who might possibly care about their family or whatever,
but the idea that they have the interests in the welfare
of the whole at heart is thought to be naïve.
This is the middle of the checkpoint, the gates have been opened,
the police are no attempt to stop people as they go through and come back.
I have never seen such elation.
"Freedom! Freedom. Just once!
I watched the scenes on television last night, and again this morning.
You see the joy on people's faces
you see what freedom means to them,
it makes you realise that you can't stifle or suppress people's desire for liberty.
- What do you think of tonight?
Wonderful!
In November 1989, the Berlin Wall collapsed,
and the Cold War was finally over.
A new era of freedom had begun.
But the shape that freedom was going to take would be defined by the victors, the West.
And as this programme has shown, the idea of freedom that had now become dominant in the West,
was deeply rooted in the suspicion and paranoia of the Cold War.
Next week's film will show how this idea spreads
to take over politics itself,
because it seemed to offer a new and better alternative to democracy.
What it actually leads to is corruption, growing rigidity,
and a dramatic rise in inequality.
And we will come to believe that we really are the strange isolated beings
the Cold War scientists had invented to make their models work.
This bleak vision, far from liberating us, will become our cage.
Thanks to: ovisnigra (spanish subtitle and english transcript)