Adam Curtis

The Power of Nightmares (2004)

In the past, politicians promised to create a better world. They had different
ways of achieving this. But their power and authority came from the
optimistic visions they offered to their people. Those dreams failed. And
today, people have lost faith in ideologies. Increasingly, politicians are seen
simply as managers of public life. But now, they have discovered a new role
that restores their power and authority. Instead of delivering dreams,
politicians now promise to protect us from nightmares. They say that they
will rescue us from dreadful dangers that we cannot see and do not
understand. And the greatest danger of all is international terrorism. A
powerful and sinister network, with sleeper cells in countries across the
world. A threat that needs to be fought by a war on terror. But much of this
threat is a fantasy, which has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians.
It's a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments
around the world, the security services, and the international media.

At the heart of the story are two groups: the American neoconservatives,
and the radical Islamists. Both were idealists who were born out of the
failure of the liberal dream to build a better world. And both had a very
similar explanation for what caused that failure. These two groups have
changed the world, but not in the way that either intended. Together, they
created today's nightmare vision of a secret, organized evil that threatens
the world. A fantasy that politicians then found restored their power and
authority in a disillusioned age. And those with the darkest fears became
the most powerful.
...when a middle-aged school inspector from Egypt arrived at the small
town of Greeley, in Colorado. His name was Sayyed Qutb. Qutb had been
sent to the U.S. to study its educational system, and he enrolled in the local
state college. His photographs appear in the college yearbook. But Qutb was
destined to become much more than a school inspector. Out of his
experiences of America that summer, Qutb was going to develop a powerful
set of ideas that would directly inspire those who flew the planes on the
attack of September the 11th. As he had traveled across the country, Qutb
had become increasingly disenchanted with America. The very things that,
on the surface, made the country look prosperous and happy, Qutb saw as
signs of an inner corruption and decay.

What Qutb believed he was seeing was a hidden and dangerous reality
underneath the surface of ordinary American life. One summer night, he
went to a dance at a local church hall. He later wrote that what he saw that
night crystallized his vision.

To most people watching this dance, it would have been an innocent picture
of youthful happiness. But Qutb saw something else: the dancers in front of
him were tragic lost souls. They believed that they were free. But in reality,
they were trapped by their own selfish and greedy desires. American society
was not going forwards; it was taking people backwards. They were
becoming isolated beings, driven by primitive animal forces. Such creatures,
Qutb believed, could corrode the very bonds that held society together. And
he became determined that night to prevent this culture of selfish
individualism taking over his own country.

But Qutb was not alone. At the same time, in Chicago, there was another
man who shared the same fears about the destructive force of individualism
in America. He was an obscure political philosopher at the University of
Chicago. But his ideas would also have far-reaching consequences, because
they would become the shaping force behind the neoconservative
movement, which now dominates the American administration. He was
called Leo Strauss. Strauss is a mysterious figure. He refused to be filmed or
interviewed. He devoted his time to creating a loyal band of students. And
what he taught them was that the prosperous liberal society they were
living in contained the seeds of its own destruction.

Strauss believed that the liberal idea of individual freedom led people to
question everythingall values, all moral truths. Instead, people were led by
their own selfish desires. And this threatened to tear apart the shared values
which held society together. But there was a way to stop this, Strauss
believed. It was for politicians to assert powerful and inspiring myths that
everyone could believe in. They might not be true, but they were necessary
illusions. One of these was religion; the other was the myth of the nation.
And in America, that was the idea that the country had a unique destiny to
battle the forces of evil throughout the world. This myth was epitomized,
Strauss told his students, in his favorite television program: Gunsmoke.

Leo Strauss' other favorite program was Perry Mason. And this, he told his
students, epitomized the role that they, the elite, had to play. In public, they
should promote the myths necessary to rescue America from decay. But in
private, they didn't have to believe in them.

In 1950, Sayyed Qutb traveled back to Egypt from America. He too was
determined to find some way of controlling the forces of selfish
individualism. And as he traveled, he began to envisage a new type of
society. It would have all the modern benefits of Western science and
technology, but a more political Islam would have a central role to play,
keeping individualism in check. It would provide a moral framework that
would stop people's selfish desires from overwhelming them. But Qutb
realized that American culture was already spreading to Egypt, trapping the
masses in its seductive dream. What was needed, he believed, was an elite,
a vanguard who could see through these illusions of freedom, just as he had
in America, and who would then lead the masses to realize the higher truth.

On his return, Qutb became politically active in Egypt. He joined a group

called the Muslim Brotherhood, who wanted Islam to play a major role in
governing Egyptian society. And in 1952, the Brotherhood supported the
revolution led by General Nasser that overthrew the last remnants of British
rule. But Nasser very quickly made it clear that the new Egypt was going to
be a secular society that emulated Western morals. He quickly forged an
alliance with America. And the CIA came to Egypt to organize security
agencies for the new regime. Faced with this, the Muslim Brotherhood began
to organize against Nasser, and in 1954 Qutb and other leading members of
the Brotherhood were arrested by the security services. What then
happened to Qutb was going to have consequences for the whole world.

In the 1970s, this film was made, that showed what happened in Nasser's
main prison in the 50s and 60s. It was based on the testimony of survivors.
Torturers who had been trained by the CIA unleashed an orgy of violence
against Muslim Brotherhood members accused of plotting to overthrow
Nasser. At one point, Qutb was covered with animal fat and locked in a cell
with dogs trained to attack humans. Inside the cell, he had a heart attack.

Qutb survived, but the torture had a powerful radicalizing effect on his
ideas. Up to this point, he had believed that the Western secular ideas
simply created the selfishness and the isolation he had seen in the United
States. But the torture, he believed, showed that this culture also unleashed
the most brutal and barbarous aspects of human beings. Qutb began to
have an apocalyptic vision of a disease that was spreading from the West
throughout the world. He called it jahilliyaha state of barbarous ignorance.
What made it so terrifying and insidious was that people didn't realize that
they were infected. They believed that they were free, and that their
politicians were taking them forward to a new world. But in fact, they were
regressing to a barbarous age.

To Qutb, this force of jahilliyah had now gone so deep into the minds of
Muslims that a dramatic way had to be found to free them. In a series of
books he wrote secretly in prison, which were then smuggled out, Qutb
called upon a revolutionary vanguard to rise up and overthrow the leaders
who had allowed jahilliyah to infect their countries. The implication was that
these leaders could justifiably be killed, because they had become so
corrupted, they were no longer Muslims, even though they said they were.
Faced with this, Nasser decided to crush Qutb and his ideas, and in 1966
Qutb was put on trial for treason. This is the only known film of Qutb as he
awaits sentence. The verdict was a foregone conclusion, and on August 29,
1966, Qutb was executed. But his ideas lived on. The day after his
execution, a young schoolboy set up a secret group. He hoped that it would
one day become the vanguard that Qutb had hoped for. His name was
Ayman Zawahiri, and Zawahiri was to become the mentor to Osama bin-
Laden.

But at the very moment when Sayyed Qutb's ideas seemed dead and
buried, Leo Strauss' ideas about how to transform America were about to
become powerful and influential, because the liberal political order that had
dominated America since the war started to collapse.

Only a few years before, President Johnson had promised policies that would
create a new and a better world in America. He had called it "the Great
Society."

But now, in the wake of some of the worst riots ever seen in America, that
dream seemed to have ended in violence and hatred. One prominent liberal
journalist called Irving Kristol began to question whether it might actually be
the policies themselves that were causing social breakdown.

In the early 70s, Irving Kristol became the focus of a group of disaffected
intellectuals in Washington. They were determined to understand why the
optimistic liberal policies had failed. And they found the answer in the
theories of Leo Strauss. Strauss explained that it was the very basis of the
liberal ideathe belief in individual freedomthat was causing the chaos,
because it undermined the shared moral framework that held society
together. Individuals pursued their own selfish interests, and this inevitably
led to conflict. As the movement grew, many young students who had
studied Strauss' ideas came to Washington to join this group. Some, like Paul
Wolfowitz, had been taught Strauss' ideas at the University of Chicago, as
had Francis Fukuyama. And others, like Irving Kristol's son William, had
studied Strauss' theories at Harvard. This group became known as the
neoconservatives.

The neoconservatives were idealists. Their aim was to try and stop the
social disintegration they believed liberal freedoms had unleashed. They
wanted to find a way of uniting the people, by giving them a shared
purpose. One of their great influences in doing this would be the theories of
Leo Strauss. They would set out to recreate the myth of America as a unique
nation whose destiny was to battle against evil in the world. And in this
project, the source of evil would be America's Cold War enemy: the Soviet
Union. And by doing this, they believed that they would not only give new
meaning and purpose to people's lives, but they would spread the good of
democracy around the world.
But to do this, the neoconservatives were going to have to defeat one of
the most powerful men in the world. Henry Kissinger was the Secretary of
State under President Nixon, and he didn't believe in a world of good and
evil. What drove Kissinger was a ruthless, pragmatic vision of power in the
world. With America's growing political and social chaos, Kissinger wanted
the country to give up its ideological battles. Instead, it should come to
terms with countries like the Soviet Union, to create a new kind of global
interdependence. A world in which America would be safe.

Kissinger had begun this process in 1972, when he persuaded the Soviet
Union to sign a treaty with America limiting nuclear arms. It was the start of
what was called "dtente." And President Nixon returned to Washington to
announce triumphantly that the age of fear was over.

But a world without fear was not what the neoconservatives needed to
pursue their project. They now set out to destroy Henry Kissinger's vision.
What gave them their opportunity was the growing collapse of American
political power, both abroad and at home. The defeat in Vietnam, and the
resignation of President Nixon over Watergate, led to a crisis of confidence
in America's political class. And the neoconservatives seized their moment.
They allied themselves with two right-wingers in the new administration of
Gerald Ford. One was Donald Rumsfeld, the new Secretary of Defense. The
other was Dick Cheney, the President's Chief of Staff. Rumsfeld began to
make speeches alleging that the Soviets were ignoring Kissinger's treaties
and secretly building up their weapons, with the intention of attacking
America.

The CIA, and other agencies who watched the Soviet Union continuously for
any sign of threat, said that this was a complete fiction. There was no truth
to Rumsfeld's allegations. But Rumsfeld used his position to persuade
President Ford to set up an independent inquiry. He said it would prove that
there was a hidden threat to America. And the inquiry would be run by a
group of neoconservatives, one of whom was Paul Wolfowitz. The aim was to
change the way America saw the Soviet Union.

The neoconservatives chose, as the inquiry chairman, a well-known critic

and historian of the Soviet Union called Richard Pipes. Pipes was convinced
that whatever the Soviets said publicly, secretly they still intended to attack
and conquer America. This was their hidden mindset. The inquiry was called
Team B, and the other leading member was Paul Wolfowitz.

Team B began examining all the CIA data on the Soviet Union. But however
closely they looked, there was little evidence of the dangerous weapons or
defense systems they claimed the Soviets were developing. Rather than
accept that this meant that the systems didn't exist, Team B made an
assumption that the Soviets had developed systems that were so
sophisticated, they were undetectable. For example, they could find no
evidence that the Soviet submarine fleet had an acoustic defense system.
What this meant, Team B said, was that the Soviets had actually invented a
new non-acoustic system, which was impossible to detect. And this meant
that the whole of the American submarine fleet was at risk from an invisible
threat that was there, even though there was no evidence for it.

What Team B accused the CIA of missing was a hidden and sinister reality in
the Soviet Union. Not only were there many secret weapons the CIA hadn't
found, but they were wrong about many of those they could observe, such
as the Soviet air defenses. The CIA were convinced that these were in a
state of collapse, reflecting the growing economic chaos in the Soviet Union.
Team B said that this was actually a cunning deception by the Soviet
regime. The air-defense system worked perfectly. But the only evidence they
produced to prove this was the official Soviet training manual, which proudly
asserted that their air-defense system was fully integrated and functioned
flawlessly. The CIA accused Team B of moving into a fantasy world.

The neoconservatives set up a lobby group to publicize the findings of Team

B. It was called the Committee on the Present Danger, and a growing
number of politicians joined, including a Presidential hopeful, Ronald
Reagan.

Through films and television, the Committee portrayed a world in which

America was under threat from hidden forces that could strike at any time,
forces that America must conquer to survive.

This dramatic battle between good and evil was precisely the kind of myth
that Leo Strauss had taught his students would be necessary to rescue the
country from moral decay. It might not be true, but it was necessary, to re-
engage the public in a grand vision of America's destiny, that would give
meaning and purpose to their lives. The neoconservatives were succeeding
in creating a simplistic fictiona vision of the Soviet Union as the center of
all evil in the world, and America as the only country that could rescue the
world. And this nightmarish vision was beginning to give the
neoconservatives great power and influence.

By the late 1970s, Egypt had been transformed. On the surface, it had
become a modern, Westernized state with a prosperous middle class who
were benefiting from a flood of Western capital that was being invested in
the country. One member of this prosperous Egyptian elite was Ayman
Zawahiri. He was now a young doctor, just starting his career.

In reality, Zawahiri was the leader of an underground Islamist cell. The group
that he had started as a schoolboy, which he had modeled on the ideas of
Sayyed Qutb, had grown. Sayyed Qutb's ideas were now spreading rapidly in
Egypt above all, among studentsbecause his predictions about the
corruption from the West seemed to have come true. The government of
President Sadat was controlled by a small group of millionaires, who were
backed by Western banks. The banks had been let in by what Sadat called
his open-door policy. To the Western media, Sadat denied any corruption. All
Egyptians knew that this was a blatant lie.

Zawahiri was convinced that the time was now approaching to fulfill Qutb's
vision. The vanguard should rise up and overthrow this corrupt regime. And
the man who would give the Islamists that opportunity would be Henry
Kissinger. As part of his attempt to create a stable and balanced world,
Kissinger had persuaded President Sadat to begin peace negotiations with
the Israelis. To Kissinger, the ruthless pragmatist, religious divisions and
hatreds were irrelevant. The most important thing was to create a safer
world. And in 1977, Sadat had flown to Jerusalem to start the peace process.
To the West, it was a heroic act. But to the Islamists, it was a complete
betrayal. It showed that Sadat's mind had become so corrupted by the West
that he was now completely under their control. And under the theories of
Sayyed Qutb, this meant that he was no longer a Muslim, and so could
justifiably be killed. And then, in 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini showed
Zawahiri that his dream of creating an Islamist state was possible.

Khomeini had inspired an uprising against the Shah of Iran. The Shah was
another leader who had allowed Western banks to corrupt his country.

Khomeini had put forth the idea of an Islamist state that was remarkably
similar to Qutb's ideas. He acknowledged this by placing Qutb's face on one
of the postage stamps of the new Islamic republic. In his first sermon,
Khomeini addressed the West. "Yes," he told them, "we are reactionaries,
and you are enlightened intellectuals. You who want freedom for everything,
the freedom that will corrupt our country, corrupt our youth, and freedom
that will pave the way for the oppressorfreedom that would drag our
country to the bottom."

At the end of 1980, Ayman Zawahiri, with a number of other followers of

Qutb who had formed cells, came together. They created an organization
they called Islamic Jihad. Its leader was a man called Abdel Salam Faraj. And
Faraj argued that they should kill Sadat in a spectacular way that would
shock the masses. It would make them see the true reality of the corruption
surrounding them, and they would rise up and overthrow the regime.

Those who carried out the assassination were a group of Army officers who
were a part of Islamic Jihad. They were immediately arrested, and the
regime launched a massive manhunt for those behind the plot. But the
effect of the assassination on the Egyptian people was not what Zawahiri
had hoped for. That night, Cairo remained calm. The masses failed to rise
up. And in the following weeks, Zawahiri and many other conspirators were
arrested. The assassins were tried immediately and executed. But then,
nearly 300 Islamists, including Zawahiri, were put on trial in a pavilion in
Cairo's industrial exhibition park. It was agreed that Zawahiri would be their
spokesman.

At the trial, Zawahiri was sentenced to three years in prison, along with
many others of Islamic Jihad. He was taken to cells behind the Police
National Museum, where, like Sayyed Qutb, he was tortured. And under this
torture, he began to interpret Qutb's theories in a far more radical way. The
mystery, for Zawahiri, was why the Egyptian people had failed to see the
truth and rise up. It must be because the infection of selfish individualism
had gone so deep into people's minds that they were now as corrupted as
their leaders. Zawahiri now seized on a terrible ambiguity in Qutb's
argument. It wasn't just leaders like Sadat who were no longer real Muslims,
it was the people themselves. And Zawahiri believed that this meant that
they too could legitimately be killed. But such killing, Zawahiri believed,
would have a noble purpose, because of the fear and the terror that it would
create in the minds of ordinary Muslims. It would shock them into seeing
reality in a different way. They would then see the truth.

And at this very same moment, religion was being mobilized politically in
America, but for a very different purpose. And those encouraging this were
the neoconservatives. Many neoconservatives had become advisers to the
Presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan. And as they became more involved
with the Republican Party, they had forged an alliance with the religious
wing of the party, because it shared their aim of the moral regeneration of
America.

By the late 70s, there were millions of fundamentalist Christians in America.

But their preachers had always told them not to vote. It would mean
compromising with a doomed and immoral society. But the
neoconservatives and their new Republican allies made an alliance with a
number of powerful preachers, who told their followers to become involved
with politics for the first time.

And at the beginning of 1981, Ronald Reagan took power in America. The
religious vote was crucial in his election, because many millions of
fundamentalists voted for the first time. And as they had hoped, many
neoconservatives were given power in the new administration. Paul
Wolfowitz became head of the State Department policy staff, while his close
friend Richard Perle became the Assistant Secretary of Defense. And the
head of Team B, Richard Pipes, became one of Reagan's chief advisers. The
neoconservatives believed that they now had the chance to implement their
vision of America's revolutionary destinyto use the country's power
aggressively as a force for good in the world, in an epic battle to defeat the
Soviet Union. It was a vision that they shared with millions of their new
religious allies.

But the neoconservatives faced immense opposition to this new policy. It

came not just from the bureaucracies and Congress, but from the President
himself. Reagan was convinced that the Soviet Union was an evil force, but
he still believed that he could negotiate with them to end the Cold War.

To persuade the President, the neoconservatives set out to prove that the
Soviet threat was far greater than anyone, even Team B, had previously
shown. They would demonstrate that the majority of terrorism and
revolutionary movements around the world were actually part of a secret
network, coordinated by Moscow, to take over the world. The main
proponent of this theory was a leading neoconservative who was the special
adviser to the Secretary of State. His name was Michael Ledeen, and he had
been influenced by a best-selling book called The Terror Network. It alleged
that terrorism was not the fragmented phenomenon that it appeared to be.
In reality, all terrorist groups, from the PLO to the Baader-Meinhof group in
Germany, and the Provisional IRA, all of them were a part of a coordinated
strategy of terror run by the Soviet Union. But the CIA completely disagreed.
They said this was just another neoconservative fantasy.

But the neoconservatives had a powerful ally. He was William Casey, and he
was the new head of the CIA. Casey was sympathetic to the
neoconservative view. And when he read the Terror Network book, he was
convinced. He called a meeting of the CIA's Soviet analysts at their
headquarters, and told them to produce a report for the President that
proved this hidden network existed. But the analysts told him that this
would be impossible, because much of the information in the book came
from black propaganda the CIA themselves had invented to smear the
Soviet Union. They knew that the terror network didn't exist, because they
themselves had made it up.

In the end, Casey found a university professor who described himself as a

terror expert, and he produced a dossier that confirmed that the hidden
terror network did, in fact, exist. Under such intense lobbying, Reagan
agreed to give the neoconservatives what they wanted, and in 1983 he
signed a secret document that fundamentally changed American foreign
policy. The country would now fund covert wars to push back the hidden
Soviet threat around the world.

It was a triumph for the neoconservatives. America was now setting out to
do battle against the forces of evil in the world. But what had started out as
the kind of myth that Leo Strauss had said was necessary for the American
people increasingly came to be seen as the truth by the neoconservatives.
They began to believe their own fiction. They had become what they called
"democratic revolutionaries," who were going to use force to change the
world.

The neoconservatives now set out to transform the world. In next week's
episode, they find themselves joining forces with the Islamists in
Afghanistan, and together they fight an epic battle against the Soviet Union.
And both come to believe that they had defeated the Evil Empire. But this
imagined victory would leave them without an enemy. And in a world
disillusioned with grand political ideas, they would need to invent new
fantasies and new nightmares, in order to maintain their power.

The Islamists believed that this great victory would start a revolution that
would sweep across the Arab world and topple the corrupt leaders. But as
with the neoconservatives, this dream was built on an illusion. There was a
deep rift within the Islamist fighters based in Peshawarbetween the
moderates, led by Abdullah Azzam, who believed this revolution could be
accomplished politically; and the extremists, like Ayman Zawahiri, who saw
violent revolution as the only way. And Zawahiri now set out to extend his
influence over the movement, and to undermine Abdullah Azzam. To do this,
he seduced Osama bin-Ladenand his moneyaway from Azzam. He
promised bin-Laden that he could become the emir, the leader of Zawahiri's
small extremist group, Islamic Jihad.

Then, at the end of 1989, Abdullah Azzam was assassinated by a huge car
bomb in Peshawar. It is still unknown who carried out the assassination. But
despite his death, it seemed as if Azzam's vision of a political revolution
might prevail. In the early 90s, in countries across the Arab world, Islamist
parties began to gather mass support.

In Algeria, the Islamic Salvation Front won overwhelming victories in local

elections, and looked certain to win the coming general election. And at the
same time in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood began to win mass support,
and a growing number of seats in Parliament. Both parties were riding to
power on an idealistic vision. They would use Islam in a political way to
create a new type of model society through peaceful means.

But the governments in both Egypt and Algeria faced a terrible dilemma. At
the heart of the Islamist vision was the idea that the Koran should be used
as the political framework for the society. An absolute set of laws, beyond
debate, that all politicians had to follow. The implication of this was that
political parties would be irrelevant, because there could be no
disagreement. The people were about to vote in parties that might use that
power to end democracy.

Faced by this dilemma, in Algeria the army decided to step in, and in June
1991 they staged a coup d'tat and immediately canceled the elections.
Mass protests by the Islamists were repressed violently, and their leaders
arrested. At the same time, in Egypt, the government also clamped down.
They arrested hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood members, and banned the
organization from any political activity.

For Ayman Zawahiri, this was a dramatic confirmation of his belief that the
Western system of democracy was a corrupt sham. Groups of radical
Islamists who had developed his theories into even more extreme forms now
set out to create violent revolutions in Algeria and Egypt. It would be the
start of a jihad that would liberate the Muslim world from corruption.

At this same time, in Washington, the other group who believed that they
had brought down the Soviet Unionthe neoconservativeswere also
determined to push on with their revolutionary agenda. They were
convinced that the Soviet Union was just one of many evil regimes in the
world led by tyrants that threatened America. Regimes they had to conquer
to liberate the world and spread democracy.

One of the most evil of these tyrants, the neoconservatives decided, was
Saddam Hussein. In the 1980s, Saddam had been America's close ally. But
in 1990, he invaded Kuwait. The neoconservatives now saw him as a key to
pursuing the next stage of their transformation of the world. An American-
led coalition had been created by President Bush senior, to liberate Kuwait.
But the neoconservatives, like Paul Wolfowitz, who was Undersecretary of
Defense, wanted to push on to Baghdad, and bring about a transformation
of the Middle East. It would fulfill America's unique role to defeat evil in the
world.

But President Reagan was no longer in charge. The neoconservatives now

had a leader who did not share their vision.

President GEORGE HW BUSH : Kuwait is liberated. Iraq's army is defeated.

Our military objectives are met. And I am pleased to announce that all
United States and Coalition forces will suspend combat operations.

Once Kuwait was freed, Bush ordered the fighting to stop. His view was that
America's role was to create stability in the world, not to try and change it.
Like Henry Kissinger, who had been the enemy of the neoconservatives in
the 1970s, Bush saw questions of good and evil as irrelevant. The higher
aim was to achieve a stable balance of power in the Middle East.

In private, the neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz were furious. Not just
because Saddam Hussein had been left in power, but because they saw this
as a clear expression of the corrupt liberal values that dominated America
a moral relativism that was prepared to compromise with the forces of evil
in the world.

Faced by this defeat, the neoconservative movement now turned inwards,

to try and defeat the forces of liberalism that were holding it back. And to do
this, they turned again to the theories of Leo Strauss. Strauss believed that
good politicians should reassert the absolute moral values that would unite
society, and this would overcome the moral relativism that liberalism
created. One of the most influential Straussians was the new assistant to the
Vice-President, William Kristol.

The neoconservatives set out to reform America. And at the heart of their
project was the political use of religion. Together with their long-term allies,
the religious right, they began a campaign to bring moral and religious
issues back into the center of conservative politics. It became known as the
"culture wars."

For the religious right, this campaign was a genuine attempt to renew the
religious basis of American society. But for the neoconservatives, religion
was a myth, like the myth of America as a unique nation that they had
promoted in the Cold War. Strauss had taught that these myths were
necessary to give ordinary people meaning and purpose, and so ensure a
stable society.

Out of this campaign, a new and powerful moral agenda began to take over
the Republican Party. It reached a dramatic climax at the Republican
Convention in 1992, when the religious right seized control of the party's
policy-making machinery. George Bush became committed to running for
President with policies that would ban abortion, gay rights, and
multiculturalism. Speakers who tried to promote the traditional conservative
values of individual freedom were booed off the stage.

For the neoconservatives, the aim of this new morality was to unite the
nation. But in fact, it had completely the opposite effect. Mainstream
Republican voters were frightened away by the harsh moralism that had
taken over their party. They turned instead to Bill Clinton, a politician who
connected with their real concerns and needs, like tax and the state of the
economy.

At the end of 1992, Bill Clinton won a dramatic victory. But the
neoconservatives were determined to regain power. And to do this, they
were going to do to Bill Clinton what they had done to the Soviet Union: they
would transform the President of the United States into a fantasy enemy, an
image of evil that would make people realize the truth of the liberal
corruption of America.

In the early 90s, Algeria, Egypt, and other Arab countries were being torn
apart by a horrific wave of Islamist terror. The jihadists who had returned
from Afghanistan were trying to topple the regimes. At the heart of their
strategy was the idea that Ayman Zawahiri and others had taught them:
that those who were involved in politics could legitimately be killed, because
they had become corrupted and thus were no longer Muslims. This violence,
they believed, would shock people into rising up, and the corrupt regimes
would then be overthrown.

Ayman Zawahiri was now based with bin-Laden on this farm in the Sudan.
He used it as a base for his group, Islamic Jihad, to launch attacks on
politicians in Egypt. But as one of the leading ideologues of the revolution,
he also traveled throughout the Arab world, advising other groups on their
strategy. But the revolutionaries soon found that the masses did not rise up
and follow them. The regimes stayed in power, and the radical Islamists
were hunted down. Faced by this, the Islamists widened their terror. Their
logic was brutal: it was not just those who were involved with politics who
should be killed, but the ordinary people who supported it. Their refusal to
rise up showed that they, too, had become corrupted, and so had
condemned themselves to death.

In Algeria, this logic went completely out of control. The Islamist

revolutionary groups killed thousands of civilians, because they believed
that all these people had become corrupted. In turn, the generals running
Algeria infiltrated the revolutionary groups. They told their agents to
persuade the Islamists to push the logic even further, to kill even more
people. This would create such horror that the groups would lose any
remaining support, and the generals could use the fear and revulsion to
increase their grip on power.

By 1997, the Islamist revolution was failing. There were mass

demonstrations against the Islamist groups by thousands of people horrified
by the violence. And then, in June of that year, a group of Egyptian Islamists
attacked Western tourists at the ruins of Luxor. 58 were killed in three hours
of random violence. The massacre shocked the Egyptian people, and the
leaders of the revolutionary groups agreed to call a cease-fire. In Algeria, a
few groups held out. But they began to tear each other apart, as they
followed the logic that had driven their revolution to its ultimateand logical
end: they started to kill each other.

The main Islamist group in Algeria, the GIA, ended up being led by a Mr.
Zouabri, a chicken farmer, who killed everyone who disagreed with him. He
issued a final communiqu, declaring that the whole of Algerian society
should be killed, with the exception of his tiny remaining band of Islamists.
They were the only ones who understood the truth.

By the mid-'90s, politics in Washington was dominated by one issue: the

moral character of the President of the United States.

Behind this were an extraordinary barrage of allegations against Clinton that

were obsessing the media. These included stories of sexual harassment;
stories that Clinton and his wife were involved in Whitewater, a corrupt
property deal; stories that they had murdered their close friend Vince Foster;
and stories that Clinton was involved in smuggling drugs from a small
airstrip in Arkansas. But none of these stories were true. All of them had
been orchestrated by a young group of neoconservatives, who were
determined to destroy Clinton. The campaign was centered on a small right-
wing magazine called the American Spectator, which had set up what was
called the "Arkansas Project" to investigate Clinton's past life. The journalist
at the center of this project was called David Brock.

Since then, Brock has turned against the neoconservative movement. He

now believes that the attacks on Clinton went too far, and corrupted
conservative politics.

The stories began to grip America, and despite Clinton's denials, the
Republicans in Congress seized on the scandals and began to press for
investigations into this immorality at the heart of government.
Out of this pressure, Clinton was forced to agree to an independent
investigation into Whitewater. It was headed by a senior judge in
Washington called Kenneth Starr. But what was not widely known was that
Starr was a member of a right-wing group of lawyers called the Federalist
Society, that had financial and ideological links to the neoconservatives. And
like the neoconservatives, they saw Clinton as a danger to the country, and
they were determined to prove this to the American people.

But despite all his efforts, Kenneth Starr could find no incriminating evidence
in Whitewater. Nor could he find any evidence to support any of the sexual
scandals that had come from the Arkansas Project. Until finally, his
committee stumbled upon Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky, which
Clinton denied. And in that lie, the neoconservative movement believed
they had found what they had been looking for: a way to make the American
people see the truth about the liberal corruption of their country. A
campaign now began to impeach the President. And in the hysteria, the
whole conservative movement portrayed Clinton as a depraved monster
who had to be removed from office. But yet again, the neoconservatives had
created a fantasy enemy by exaggerating and distorting reality.

But all the moral fury, and the deception, came to nothing. The
impeachment failed because the polls consistently showed that Americans
still did not care about these moral issues. One leading neoconservative,
William Bennett, wrote a book called The Death of Outrage, which blamed
the people. He accused the public of making a deal with the devil. Their
failure, he said, to support the impeachment, was evidence of their moral
corruption.
 By 1997, bin-Laden and Ayman Zawahiri had returned to Afghanistan,
where they had first met ten years before. Back then, it had seemed as if
Islamism might succeed as a popular revolutionary movement. But now,
they were facing failure. All attempts to topple regimes in the Arab world
had not succeeded. The people had turned against them because of the
horrific violence, and Afghanistan was the only place they had left to go.

In May, 1998, bin-Laden and Zawahiri invited a group of journalists to this

press conference, where they announced a new jihad. Zawahiri was
convinced that it was not their theories that were to blame for the failure; it
was the fault of the Muslim masses. Their minds had been corrupted by the
liberal ideas from the West. But rather than give up, they believed that the
solution was to attack the source of the corruption directly. The new jihad
would be against America itself.

This was a strategy of desperation, born out of failure by a small group

whose revolution had failed. And the anger that came from that failure was
about to be directed at the United States. What Zawahiri and bin-Laden
were about to do would dramatically affect the future of the
neoconservative movement. By 1998, all their attempts to transform
America by creating a moral revolution had failed. Faced with the
indifference of the people, the neoconservatives had become marginalized,
in both domestic and foreign policy. But with the attacks that were about to
hit America, the neoconservatives would at last find the evil enemy that
they had been searching for ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union. And
in their reaction to the attacks, the neoconservatives would transform the
failing Islamist movement into what would appear to be the grand
revolutionary force that Zawahiri had always dreamed of. But much of it
would exist only in people's imaginations. It would be the next phantom
enemy.

At the end of the 1990s, Osama bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan. He
was accompanied by Ayman Zawahiri, the most influential ideologist of the
Islamist movement. For 20 years, Zawahiri had struggled to create
revolutions in the Arab world, but all attempt had ended in bloody failure.

Zawahiri was a follower of the Egyptian revolutionary, Sayyed Qutb, who

had been executed in 1966. Qutb's vision had been of a new type of modern
state. It would contain all of the benefits of Western science and technology,
but it would use Islam as a moral framework to protect people from the
culture of Western liberalism. Qutb believed that this culture infected the
minds of Muslims, turning them into selfish creatures who threatened to
destroy the shared values that held society together. Throughout the 80s
and 90s, Zawahiri had tried to persuade the masses to rise up and topple
the rulers who had allowed this corruption to infect their countries.

But the revolutionaries became trapped in a horrific escalation of violence,

because the masses refused to follow them. Islamism failed as a mass
movement, and Zawahiri now came to the conclusion that a new strategy
was needed.

Zawahiri and bin Laden began implementing this new strategy in August,
1998. Two huge suicide bombs were detonated outside American embassies
in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than 200 people. The bombings had a
dramatic effect on the West. For the first time, the name "bin Laden"
entered the public consciousness as a terrorist mastermind.

The suicide bombers had been recruited by bin Laden from the Islamist
training camps in Afghanistan. But his and Zawahiri's operation was very
much on the fringes of the Islamist movement. The overwhelming majority
of the fighters in these camps had nothing at all to do with bin Laden or
international terrorism. They were training to fight regimes in their own
countries, such as Uzbekistan, Kashmir, and Chechnya. Their aim was to
establish Islamist societies in the Western world, and they had no interest in
attacking America. Bin Laden helped fund some of the camps, and in return
was allowed to look for volunteers for his operations. But a number of senior
Islamists were against his new strategy, including members of Zawahiri's
own group, Islamic Jihad.

Even bin Laden's displays of strength to the Western media were faked. The
fighters in this video had been hired for the day and told to bring their own
weapons. For beyond this small group, bin Laden had no formal organisation
until the Americans invented one for him.

In January, 2001, a trial began in a Manhattan courtroom of four men

accused of the embassy bombings in east Africa. But the Americans had
also decided to prosecute bin Laden in his absence. But to do this under
American law, the prosecutors needed evidence of a criminal organisation
because, as with the Mafia, that would allow them to prosecute the head of
the organisation even if he could not be linked directly to the crime. And the
evidence for that organisation was provided for them by an ex-associate of
bin Laden's called Jamal al-Fadl.

JASON BURKE , AUTHOR, "AL QAEDA" : During the investigation of the 1998
bombings, there is a walk-in source, Jamal al-Fadl, who is a Sudanese
militant who was with bin Laden in the early 90s, who has been passed
around a whole series of Middle East secret services, none of whom want
much to do with him, and who ends up in America and is taken on byuh
the American government, effectively, as a key prosecution witness and is
given a huge amount of American taxpayers' money at the same time. And
his account is used as raw material to build up a picture of Al Qaeda. The
picture that the FBI want to build up is one that will fit the existing laws that
they will have to use to prosecute those responsible for the bombing. Now,
those laws were drawn up to counteract organised crime: the Mafia, drugs
crime, crimes where people being a member of an organisation is extremely
important. You have to have an organisation to get a prosecution. And you
have al-Fadl and a number of other witness, a number of other sources, who
are happy to feed into this. You've got material that, looked at in a certain
way, can be seen to show this organisation's existence. You put the two
together and you get what is the first bin Laden myththe first Al Qaeda
myth. And because it's one of the first, it's extremely influential.

The picture al-Fadl drew for the Americans of bin Laden was of an all-
powerful figure at the head of a large terrorist network that had an
organised network of control. He also said that bin Laden had given this
network a name: "Al Qaeda." It was a dramatic and powerful picture of bin
Laden, but it bore little relationship to the truth.
The reality was that bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri had become the focus of
a loose association of disillusioned Islamist militants who were attracted by
the new strategy. But there was no organisation. These were militants who
mostly planned their own operations and looked to bin Laden for funding
and assistance. He was not their commander. There is also no evidence that
bin Laden used the term "Al Qaeda" to refer to the name of a group until
after September the 11th, when he realized that this was the term the
Americans have given it.

In reality, Jamal al-Fadl was on the run from bin Laden, having stolen money
from him. In return for his evidence, the Americans gave him witness
protection in America and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many lawyers at
the trial believed that al-Fadl exaggerated and lied to give the Americans
the picture of a terrorist organisation that they needed to prosecute bin
Laden.

What did exist was a powerful idea that was about to inspire a single,
devastating act that would lead the whole world into believing the myth that
had begun to be constructed in the Manhattan courtroom.

The attack on America by 19 hijackers shocked the world. It was Ayman

Zawahiri's new strategy, implemented in a brutal and spectacular way. But
neither he nor bin Laden were the originators of what was called the "Planes
Operation." It was the brainchild of an Islamist militant called Khalid Sheik
Mohammed, who came to bin Laden for funding and help in finding
volunteers. But in the wake of panic created by the attacks, the politicians
reached for the model which had been created by the trial earlier that year:
the hijackers were just the tip of a vast, international terrorist network which
was called, "Al Qaeda."

And the attacks had another dramatic effect: they brought the
neoconservatives back to power in America. When George Bush first
became president, he had appointed neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz,
and their allies like Donald Rumsfeld, to his administration. But their grand
vision of America's role in the world was largely ignored by this new regime.

But now, the neoconservatives became all-powerful, because this terror

network proved that what they had been predicting through the 1990s was
correct: that America was at risk from terrifying new forces in a hostile
world. A small group formed that began to shape America's response to the
attacks. At its heart were Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, along with
the vice-president, Dick Cheney, and Richard Perle, who was a senior
advisor to the Pentagon. The last time these men had been in power
together was 20 years before, under President Reagan. Back then, they had
taken on and, as they saw it, defeated a source of evil that wanted to take
over America: the Soviet Union. And now they saw this new war on terror in
the same epic terms.

The neoconservatives distorted and exaggerated the Soviet threat. They

created the image of a hidden, international web of evil run from Moscow
that planned to dominate the world, when, in reality, the Soviet Union was
on its last legs, collapsing from within. Now, they did the same with the
Islamists. They took a failing movement which had lost mass support and
began to reconstruct it into the image of a powerful network of evil,
controlled from the center by bin Laden from his lair in Afghanistan. They
did this because it fitted with their vision of America's unique destiny to
fight an epic battle against the forces of evil throughout the world.

To do this, the Americans allied themselves with a group called the Northern
Alliance. They were a loose collection of warlords, fighting a war of
resistance against the Taliban, the Islamists who controlled Afghanistan. The
Taliban's best troops were the thousands of foreign fighters from the training
camps who the Northern Alliance hated.

And now, they took their revenge on the foreign fighters. The Americans
believed that these men were Al Qaeda terrorists, and the Northern Alliance
did nothing to disabuse them of this, because they were paid by the
Americans for each prisoner they delivered. But the majority of these
fighters had never had anything to do with bin Laden or international
terrorism. Both they and the Taliban were radical nationalists who wanted to
create Islamist societies in their own countries. But now, they were either
killed or taken off to Guantnamo Bay and Islamism, as an organised
movement for changing the Muslim world, was obliterated in Afghanistan.
But as it disappeared, it was replaced by ever more extravagant fantasies
about the power and reach of the Al Qaeda network.

In December, the Northern Alliance told the Americans that bin Laden was
hiding in the mountains of Tora Bora. They were convinced they had found
the heart of his organisation.

For days, the Americans bombed the mountains of Tora Bora with the most
powerful weapons they had. The Northern Alliance had been paid more than
a million dollars for their help and information, and now their fighters set off
up the mountains to storm bin Laden's fortress and bring back the Al Qaeda
terrorists and their leader.

But all they found were a few small caves, which were either empty or had
been used to store ammunition. There was no underground bunker system,
no secret tunnels: the fortress didn't exist. The Northern Alliance did
produce some prisoners they claimed were Al Qaeda fighters, but there was
no proof of this, and one rumor was that the Northern Alliance was simply
kidnapping anyone who looked remotely like an Arab and selling them to the
Americans for yet more money.

The Americans now began to search all the caves in all the mountains in
eastern Afghanistan for the hidden Al Qaeda network.

But wherever they looked, there was nothing there. Al Qaeda seemed to
have completely disappeared.

But then, the British arrived to help. They were convinced they could hunt
down Al Qaeda because of what they said was their unique experience in
fighting terrorism in Northern Ireland. They could succeed where others had
failed.

The terrible truth was that there was nothing there because Al Qaeda as an
organisation did not exist. The attacks on America had been planned by a
small group that had come together around bin Laden in the late 90s. What
united them was an idea: an extreme interpretation of Islamism developed
by Ayman Zawahiri. With the American invasion, that group had been
destroyed, killed or scattered. What was left was the idea, and the real
danger was the way this idea could inspire groups and individuals around
the world who had no relationship to each other. In looking for an
organisation, the Americans and the British were chasing a phantom enemy
and missing the real threat.

But the neoconservatives were now increasingly locked into this fantasy,
and next they set out to uncover the network in America itself. The
American government set out to search for the Al Qaeda organisation inside
its own country. Thousands were detained as all branches of the law and the
military were told to look for terrorists.

The Americans called them "sleeper cells," and decided that they had just
been waiting to strike. But in reality there is very little evidence that any of
those arrested had anything at all to do with terrorist plots. From Portland to
the suburb of Buffalo called Lackawanna, yet again the Americans were
chasing a phantom enemy.

The evidence behind all of the sleeper cell cases is flimsy and often bizarre.
This tape was one of the central pieces of evidence in the first of the cases.
It was found in a raid on this house
... in Detroit. Four Arab men were arrested on suspicion of being an Al Qaeda
sleeper cell.

They had been accused by another immigrant called Mr Hmimssa. But Mr

Hmimssa was, in reality, an international con man with 12 aliases and
wanted for fraud across America.

Despite this, the FBI offered to reduce his sentence for fraud if he testified
against the men. And to back up Mr Hmimssa's allegations, the FBI turned to
the videotape. On the surface it was the innocent record of a trip to
Disneyland by a group of teenagers who had nothing to do with the
accused, but the government had discovered a hidden and sinister purpose
to the tape.

And what looked like a camera which had accidentally been left running was
in reality a terrorist secretly counting out distances to show others where to
place a bomb. And the government also said that the Detroit cell was
planning to attack US military bases around the world. Yet again, they found
hidden evidence of this in a day planner they discovered under the sofa in
the house in Detroit. What looked like doodles were in reality, they said, a
plan to attack a US base in Turkey.

But the drawings in the day planner were discovered to have actually been
the work of a madman. They were the fantasies of a Yemeni who believed
that he was the minister of defence for the whole of the Middle East. He had
committed suicide a year before any of the accused had arrived in Detroit,
leaving the day planner lying under the sofa in the house. Despite this, two
of the accused were found guilty. But then, the government's only witness,
Mr Hmimssa, told two of his cellmates that he had made the whole thing up
to get his fraud charges reduced. The terrorism convictions have now been
overturned by the judge in the case, but it was acclaimed by the President
as the first success in the war on terror at home.

Another case, in the city of Buffalo, New York, seemed on the surface to be
more substantial. Six young Yemeni-Americans had gone to an Islamist
training camp in Afghanistan. They travelled there in early 2001 and spent
between 2 and 6 weeks training and being taught Islamist revolutionary
theory. Two of them even met bin Laden on one of his tours of the camp.
They then returned to the Buffalo suburb of Lackawanna, where they lived,
but they did nothing. The FBI heard about their trip and they watched the
six men around the clock for nearly a year, but there was no suspicious
behavior.

But then, one of the men, Mr al-Bakri, went to Bahrain and sent his friends
an E-mail. It said he was going to get married and that he wouldn't be
seeing them for awhile. The CIA, who had been monitoring their E-mails,
understood this to be a coded message: the cell was about to launch a
suicide attack on the US Fifth Fleet.

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: Good afternoon. In the past 24 hours,

United States law enforcement has identified and disrupted an Al Qaeda-
trained terrorist cell on American soil.

The arrests were announced proudly by Washington as another sleeper cell

plotting an attack. But it soon became clear that there was no evidence for
this at all, other than the E-mail.

Faced with the fact that there was no evidence, the government quietly
dropped any charges of their being a terrorist cell. Instead, they were
prosecuted simply for having gone to the training camp, and for having
bought uniforms there. And all the other cases were even flimsier: A group
of students who supported the liberation of Kashmir were found paint-balling
in the woods of Virginia. They were convicted of training to attack America.
A group of African-Americans from Oregon tried to go to Afghanistan to
support the Taliban but got lost in China. All these groups, the government
said, were part of a hidden and terrifying Al Qaeda network.

But, yet again, there is very little evidence for this. Of the 664 people
arrested under the Terrorism Act since September the 11th, none of them
have been convicted of belonging to Al Qaeda. Only 3 people have so far
been convicted of having any association with any Islamist groups, and none
of those convictions were for being involved in a terror plot; they were for
fundraising, or possessing Islamist literature. The majority of people
convicted under the Terrorism Act since September the 11th have actually
been members of Irish terrorist groups like the UVF or the Real IRA. And
many of the arrests that were dramatically announced as being part of a
hidden Al Qaeda network were, in reality, as absurd as the cases in America.
For example, the London police swooped on a Mr Zain ul-Abedin who they
said was running an international network for terrorist training. It turned out
to be a self-defence course for bodyguards. He called it "Ultimate Jihad
Challenge." His only client was a security guard from a supermarket, who
wanted to learn how to defend himself against shoplifters. Mr Zain ul-Abedin
was cleared of all charges. Then there was the Hogmanay terror cell who, it
was alleged, were planning to attack Edinburgh. All charges against them
were quietly dropped when it was revealed that a key part of the evidence,
a map that showed the targets they were going to attack, turned out to
have been left in their flat by an Australian backpacker who had ringed the
tourist sites he wanted to see. And even the most frightening and high
profile of the plots uncovered turned out to be without foundation. No one
was ever arrested for planning gas attacks on the London tubes; it was a
fantasy that swept through the media. Just as in America, there is no
evidence yet of the terrifying and sinister network lurking under the surface
of our society which both government and the media continually tell us is
there.

What the British and American governments have done is both distort and
exaggerate the real nature of the threat. There are dangerous and fanatical
groups around the world who've been inspired by the extreme Islamist
theories, and they are prepared to use the techniques of mass terror on
civilians. The bombings in Madrid showed this only too clearly. But this is not
a new phenomenon. What is new is the way the American and other
governments have transformed this complex and disparate threat into a
simplistic fantasy of an organised web of uniquely powerful terrorists who
may strike anywhere and at any moment. But no one questioned this
fantasy because, increasingly, it was serving the interests of so many
people. For the press, television, and hundreds of terrorism experts, the fact
that it seemed so like fiction made it irresistible to their audiences. And the
Islamists, too, began to realise that by feeding this media fantasy they could
become a powerful organisationif only in people's imaginations.

The prime mover in this was one of bin Laden's associates, who had been
captured by the Americans. He was called Abu Zubaydah. He began to tell
his interrogators of terrifying plots that Al Qaeda was preparing, some of
which, he said, they had copied from Hollywood movies like Godzilla, which
they had watched in Afghanistan.

And the media took the bait. They portrayed the dirty bomb as an
extraordinary weapon that would kill thousands of people, and, in the
process, they made the hidden enemy even more terrifying. But, in reality,
the threat of a dirty bomb is yet another illusion. Its aim is to spread
radioactive material through a conventional explosion, but almost all studies
of such a possible weapon have concluded that the radiation spread in this
way would not kill anybody because the radioactive material would be so
dispersed, and, providing the area was cleaned promptly, the long-term
effects would be negligible. In the past, both the American army and the
Iraqi military tested such devices and both concluded that they were
completely ineffectual weapons for this very reason.

The scale of this fantasy just kept growing as more and more groups
realised the power it gave themabove all, the group that had been
instrumental in first spreading the idea: the neoconservatives. Because they
now found that they could use it to help them realise their vision: that
America had a special destiny to overcome evil in the world, and this epic
mission would give meaning and purpose to the American people. To do this,
they were going to start with Iraq, and, just as they had discovered a hidden
reality of terror beneath the surface in America, they now found hidden links
that previously no one had suspected between the Al Qaeda network and
Saddam Hussein.
The driving force behind these new global policies in the war on terror was
the power of a dark fantasy: a sinister web of hidden and interlinked threats
that stretched around the world. And such was the power of that fantasy
that it also began to transform the very nature of politics because,
increasingly, politicians were discovering that their ability to imagine the
future and the terrible dangers it held gave them a new and heroic role in
the world.

In the post-War years, politicians had also used their imaginations, but to
project optimistic visions of a better future that they could create for their
people, and it was these visions that gave them power and authority. But
those dreams collapsed, and politicians like Tony Blair became more like
managers of public life, their policies determined often by focus groups. But
now, the war on terror allowed politicians like Blair to portray a new, grand
vision of the future. But this vision was a dark one of imagined threats, and
a new force began to drive politics: the fear of an imagined future.

What Blair argued was that faced by the new threat of a global terror
network, the politician's role was now to look into the future and imagine the
worst that might happen and then act ahead of time to prevent it. In doing
this, Blair was embracing an idea that had actually been developed by the
Green movement: it was called the "precautionary principle." Back in the
1980s, thinkers within the ecology movement believed the world was being
threatened by global warming, but at the time there was little scientific
evidence to prove this. So they put forward the radical idea that
governments had a higher duty: they couldn't wait for the evidence,
because by then it would be too late; they had to act imaginatively, on
intuition, in order to save the world from a looming catastrophe.

The supporters of the precautionary principle argue that this loss of rights is
the price that society has to pay when faced by the unique and terrifying
threat of the Al Qaeda network. But, as this series has shown, the idea of a
hidden, organised web of terror is largely a fantasy, and by embracing the
precautionary principle, the politicians have become trapped in a vicious
circle: they imagine the worst about an organisation that doesn't even exist.
But no one questions this because the very basis of the precautionary
principle is to imagine the worst without supporting evidence, and, instead,
those with the darkest imaginations become the most influential.

This story began over 30 years ago as the dream that politics could create a
better world began to fall apart. Out of that collapse came two groups: the
Islamists and the neoconservatives. Looking back, we can now see that
these groups were the last political idealists who, in an age of growing
disillusion, tried to reassert the inspirational power of political visions that
would give meaning to people's lives.

But both have failed in their attempts to transform the world and, instead,
together they have created today's strange fantasy of fear which politicians
have seized on. Because in an age when all the grand ideas have lost
credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to
maintain their power.
But the fear will not last, and just as the dreams that politicians once
promised turned out to be illusions, so, too, will the nightmares, and then
our politicians will have to face the fact that they have no visions, either
good or bad, to offer us any longer.

The Trap! (2007)

//1. Fuck You Buddy

El objetivo final de la poltica actual en nuestra poca es la idea de la

libertad individual. Yo creo que la libertad es el futuro de toda la humanidad.
En Gran Bretaa, nuestro gobierno se prepar para iniciar una revolucin
que liberara a los individuos del control de todas las lites y los burcratas.
Un mundo nuevo en el que seremos libres de elegir nuestras propias vidas
sin estar limitados por la clase social o los ingresos econmicos en roles
predestinados.
Para liberar Gran Bretaa de todas las antiguas divisiones de clases de
todas las estruturas, de todos los prejuicios para liberar al individuo. En el
extranjero, en Iraq y en Afganistn, Gran Bretaa y Amrica se preparan
para liberar a los individuos de la tirana. Para estos lderes precursores sera
apenas el primer pas del proceso revolucionario global pero vayamos atrs
y veremos que el resultado es una especie de libertad bastante extraa. La
intencin de liberar a las personas de la burocracia interminable nos llev a
una nueva y creciente forma de sistemas de control dirigida a metas y
nmeros. En cuanto los gobiernos se comprometieron con la creacin de la
libertad de eleccin en todas las reas presidieron en realidad un aumento
de la desigualdad y a un colapso dramtico de la estructura social. La
consecuencia fue el retorno al poder de las clases altas y de los
privilegiados. En el extranjero la intencin de crear una democracia llev a
un derramamiento de sangre y a una reaccin en contra de la
campaa,....liderada por Amrica, para traer la libertad.
2:04Pero para Moktada al-Sadr, un autoritario y antidemocrtico islamista,
2:09esto por su parte, inspir la perpetracin de ataques en la propia Gran
Bretaa.
2:14En respuesta el gobierno desmantel antiguas leyes
2:17hechas para proteger nuestra libertad.
2:22Esta es una serie de documentales sobre como este extrao y
paradjico mundo acab por ser creado.
2:28Comienza en los sombros y aterrorizadores das de la Guerra Fra
2:32y nos muestra que lo que tenemos hoy en da
2:34es una idea bastante limitada y peculiar de lo que es la libertad
2:37que surgi de la paranoia de aquellos tiempos.
2:40Se basa en la propia imagen de los seres humanos criaturas egostas,
aisladas y sospechosas.
2:46Que vigilan y planifican constantemente unas en contra de otras.
2:51Los documentales mostrarn como polticos y cientficos
2:54acabarn por creer que esta idea de la naturaleza humana
2:58poda ser la base de un nuevo tipo de sociedad libre.
3:02Pero lo que nadie percibi fue que en esta sombra y sospechosa visin
3:07estaban las semillas de un nuevo y revolucionario sistema de control
social.
3:11Usan el lenguaje de la libertad pero en realidad
3:14acab por atraparnos a nosotros y a nuestros lderes en un mundo
limitado y vaco.
3:28LA TRAMPA
3:31QUE LE OCURRI A NUSTRO SUEO DE LIBERTAD
3:38Libertad...
3:40Libertad...
3:44Primera parte [JODE] A TU COMPAERO
3:48al final de la Segunda Guerra Mundial
3:50Amrica y el cine americano celebraban esta reciente victoria
3:54y lo que para muchos crean sera el nacimiento de una nueva era.
4:02A su vez, la libertad no significaba tan solo la liberacin de los nazis
4:05sino tambin del caos econmico y de la incertidumbre que caus la
depresin de los aos 30.
4:11Los gobiernos pensaban que su papel era dirigir y controlar la economa
4:15Y proteger a la sociedad de los peligrosos intereses del capitalismo
fantico.
4:23- Ya nunca ms prestaramos vasallaje a los seores de las Sociedades
Limitadas.
4:28Nunca!
4:29Habamos pasado la gran depresin de la dcada de los 30.
4:32Habamos pasado la Segunda Guerra Mundial.
4:34Ahora se hablaba de la necesidad de que el gobierno fuese
4:38el principal elemento de equilibrio en la economa.
4:42El individuo an era importante
4:45y el gobierno garantizaba que nunca iramos hacia otra gran depresin
otra vez.
4:52En los aos siguientes los burcratas en el corazn del estado crecieron
enormemente.
4:56Su trabajo era el de regular el capitalismo en beneficio de todos.
5:00En esta naturaleza de optimismo eran pocos los que desafiaban esta
nueva visin.
5:06Pero un hombre poco conocido estaba convencido de que llevaria al
desastre.
5:11Era un aristcrata austraco llamado Friedrich von Hayek
5:14que huy de los Nazis y ahora imparta clases en la Universidad de
Chicago.
5:18Hayek estaba convencido de que el uso de polticas que planificasen la
sociedad
5:22era mucho ms peligroso que cualquier otro problema producido por el
Capitalismo
5:26Porque llevara inevitablemente a la tirana y al fin de la libertad
5:31El terrible ejemplo apuntado por Hayek fue el de la Unin Sovitica.
5:35En su busca de la utopa, los lderes soviticos estaban tratando de
planificar y controlar todo.
5:41y eso los llevaba a la tirana y a la dictadura.
5:45Lo mismo acabar inevitablemente por acontecer en Occidente, segn
deca
5:48era lo que l llam "el camino hacia la servidumbre".
5:57La nica forma de evitar el desastre sera volviendo a la pasado,
6:01volver a la edad de oro del mercado libre
6:04donde los individuos siguen sus propios intereses, y el gobierno
representa poco o ningn papel.
6:10Despus de esto, resultara lo que Hayek llam un sistema auto-dirigido
y automtico
6:16un orden espontneo creada por millones de personas persiguiendo su
propio beneficio.
6:22- Beneficiaremos ms nuestro semejantes si tan solo nos guiamos por
nuestro beneficio.
6:29Para este propsito tendremos que volver a un sistema automtico
6:33un sistema auto-direccionado que por s solo puede restaurar la libertad
y prosperidad.
6:40sta es mi concepcin fundamental.
6:42- Esa filosofa no se basa esencialmente en el egosmo?
6:46- Qu hay del altruismo? Dnde encaja?
6:48- No encaja!
6:51Las ideas de Hayek fueron rechazadas por polticos y economistas.
6:55La nocin de que se podra crear un orden social en un complejo mundo
moderno
6:59simplemente a travs de un desenfrenado inters personal
7:02era vista como una idea errnea y sin el menor crdito.
7:06Pero la prueba de que l podra estar en lo cierto estaba a punto de
emerger de las fuentes menos probables.
7:11De los cientficos, envueltos en noticias y aterrorizadoras
incertidumbres de la Guerra Fra.
7:20ste es el corazn de un gigantesco Bunker a 48 kilmetros al norte de
Nueva York.
7:25Construido a finales de los 50, posee los ordenadores mas grandes del
mundo
7:29conectados a un sistema de radares distribuidos por todo el mundo
7:32que constantemente observaban a la Unin Sovitica.
7:35A cada segundo miles de informaciones llegaban a esta sala para ser
analizadas
7:39en busca de seales de peligro.
7:44Los estrategas nucleares disearon este sistema
7:47sabiendo que estaban tratando con un nuevo tipo de conflicto.
7:50Ninguno de los bandos poda permitirse dejar a un lado el control
7:52debido a las consecuencias aterradoras.
7:55As que, los estrategas tenan que encontrar un modo de usar la
informacin
7:59de forma que se anticipara a lo que los soviticos podan planear hacer.
8:03Y para hacer esto se volvieron hacia una nueva idea llamada la "Teora
de Juegos".
8:11La Teora de Juegos haba sido creada
8:13como una forma matemtica de se analizar juegos de Poker.
8:16Enfocaba el juego como un sistema donde los jugadores estaban
encerrados juntos
8:20cada uno tratando de adivinar lo que el otro pensaba hacer.
8:24A partir de eso, la Teora de Juegos muestra racionalmente
8:27cuales son las mejores jugadas para cada uno de los jugadores.
8:31- ste fue un tipo de guerra que nunca nos habamos encontrado
8:33y como todos sabemos sera tan devastadora
8:36que es casi imposible para nosotros considerar todas sus
consecuencias.
8:39Continuaba diciendo que hay un modo racional de enfoque similar a
una guerra virtual
8:45y la Teora de Juegos pareca ofrecer eso.
8:48De cierta forma se poda incorporar al enemigo, en nuestra forma de
pensar
8:54de modo que se comprendiera matemticamente lo que el enemigo
hara.
8:58En este punto, sted y su enemigo estaran jugando de acuerdo a esta
estrategia.
9:04El centro de desarrollo de la estrategia era un centro de inteligencia
militar llamado Corporacin RAND.
9:10Sus estrategas usaron la Teora de Juegos para crear modelos
matemticos
9:14para predecir como se iban a comportar los soviticos en respuesta a lo
que hiciese Amrica.
9:20De aqu naci la estructura fundamental de la era nuclear.
9:24Cientos de misiles protegidos en silos subterrneos
9:28y flotas de bombarderos en el aire 24 horas al da
9:32Tal y como si de un juego se tratase se hacan movimientos estratgicos
9:34para convencer a los soviticos de que si atacasen
9:37amrica tendra siempre los misiles suficientes para destruirlos como
represalia.
9:43Y segn las reglas de este juego, el miedo e inters personal
9:46impidi que los rusos atacasen.
9:49Y cre un equilibrio estable al que se llam "el delicado equilibrio del
terror".
9:57- Recomendando misiles subterrneos, misiles en submarinos, y todo
eso,
10:02fue una forma de hacerlo mucho ms estable.
10:06Otra forma de explicarlo es que
10:07tratamos de reducir enormemente la posibilidad de una guerra nuclear
10:11creando incentivos muy poderosos para que los rusos no iniciasen una
guerra nuclear.
10:17Porque intentabamos darles incentivos para que no atacaran
10:24ya fuese por va nuclear o por va convencional.
10:28S, desde ese punto de vista los incentivos eran importantes.
10:30"El OBJETIVO, USTED"
10:32En la base de la Teora de Juegos estaba una tenebrosa visin de los
seres humanos.
10:35en la cual simplemente se dejaban llevar por el interes personal
desconfiando siempre de los que les rodean.
10:42Haba una matemtico en la organizacin RAND que llev esta
tenebrosa visin mucho ms lejos.
10:47Se propuso demostrar que podra crear estabilidad
10:50a travs de la sospecha y del inters propio no tan solo en la Guerra
Fra
10:54sino en el conjunto de la sociedad humana.
10:57Era el gnio matemtico John Nash
11:00"UNA MENTE MARAVILLOSA"
11:01Nash fue retratado en una pelicula de Hollywood "Una Mente
Maravillosa"
11:03como un hroe atormentado.
11:06En la realidad, Nash era complicado y receloso.
11:10Se hizo famoso por haber inventado una serie de juegos crueles.
11:14Al ms famoso le llam "Fuck Your Buddy" [Jode a tu compaero].
11:17en el cual la nica forma de ganar era mediante la traicion al
compaero de juego.
11:23Nash tom la Teora de Juegos e intent aplicarla a todas las formas de
interaccin humana.
11:28Para llevarlo a cabo hizo la suposicin fundamental
11:31de que todo el comportamiento humano era exactamente el mismo
11:34que el aplicado en un mundo hostil y competitivo como el de la
amenaza nuclear.
11:39Los seres humanos se vigilan y monitorizan constantemente unos a los
otros
11:42y para conseguir lo que quieren ajustan sus estrategias mutuamente.
11:48En una serie de ecuaciones, por las cuales lograra ganar el Premio
Nobel,
11:51Nash demostr que un sistema dirigido por la sospecha y el egosmo
11:56no tendra obligatoriamente de llevar al caos.
11:59Prob que siempre podra haber un punto de equilibrio
12:02en el que los intereses de todos
12:04estaran perfectamente equilibrados mutuamente.
12:09- El equilibrio, ...
12:10... este llamado equilibrio ...
12:13... se refiere a ...
12:16... que lo que yo hago
12:18est perfectamente ajustado
12:20en relacin a lo que usted hace.
12:22Y lo que usted o cualquier otra persona hace
12:25est perfectamente ajustado a lo que yo o los otros hacen.
12:30Siempre buscan optimizaciones independientes como hacen los
jugadores de Poker.
12:38- Cada jugador, est solo?
12:41- sa es la idea por la cual cada jugador est solo
12:47haciendo cosas enfocadas hacia l mismo, muy egostas.
12:57Y lo que todos hacen se interrelaciona
13:01en forma de una recompensa para todos los jugadores.
13:07Eso es el equilibrio.
13:10Pero asumida como una idea no cooperativa.
13:15Pero la estabilidad, el equilibrio,
13:17ocurre slamente si todos los involucrados se comportan de forma
egosta.
13:21Porque si piensan en cooperar el resultado se vuelve impredecible y
peligroso.
13:26Un famoso juego, fue creado en RAND
13:29para demostrar que de todas las interacciones posibles
13:31la egosta llevara siempre a un mejor resultado.
13:34le llamaron el "Dilema del Prisionero".
13:37Hay muchas versiones, pero en todas hay dos jugadores
13:40y stos tienen de decidir se han de confiar o traicionar al otro.
13:49"El DILEMA DEL PRISIONERO"
13:54Imagine que ha robado uno de los diamantes ms valiosos .
13:57Podr vendrselo a un peligroso gngster.
14:00Y se ofrece para encontrarse con sted para cambiar el diamante por
el dinero.
14:04Pero piensas que podra matarte.
14:06En vez de eso, le dices que lo llevars un campo alejado donde lo
esconders.
14:11A su vez, l deber ir a otro campo a cientos de kilmetros de
distancia
14:14y esconder el dinero.
14:16Despus sted le telefonea y ambos se dirn cual el lugar del
escondrijo.
14:21Pero en el exacto momento en que va a hacer la llamada se da cuenta
que sted le puede traicionar.
14:26Toma el diamante consigo y va a buscar el dinero,
14:29mientras el bandido busca en vano en el campo vaco.
14:34Pero en ese mismo momento
14:35se da cuenta qu l puede estar pensando lo mismo.
14:38Que l lo puede traicionar a sted.
14:42No hay forma de prever el modo en que la otra persona se ir a
comportar.
14:45se es el dilema.
14:48Pero lo que las ecuaciones de Nash muestran
14:50es que la eleccin racional es siempre la de traicionar a la otra
persona.
14:54Porque de esa forma
14:55lo peor que le puede pasar es quedarse solo con el diamante.
14:58Y el mejor,
14:59es quedarse con el diamante y el dinero.
15:02Pero si confa en la otra persona corre el riesgo de perderlo todo,
15:06porque l le puede traicionar.
15:08A esto le llam, la recompensa del bobo.
15:13Lo qu el Dilema del Prisionero manifiesta es la extraa lgica de la
Guerra Fra.
15:18La suposicin ptima de ofrecer eliminar todas sus armas,
15:21ofreciendo a los rusos hacer lo mismo,
15:23nunca ocurrira, porque no se poda confar en que el otro no le
engaase.
15:28De este modo se consigui la estabilidad
15:31creada por un peligroso equilibrio de armamento en ambos bandos.
15:36Y lo que Nash hizo, fue transformar eso
15:39en una teora de como funcionaba toda la sociedad.
15:43Tuvo grandes implicaciones para los polticos
15:46porque prob que se poda tener una sociedad basada en la libertad
individual
15:50que no degenerara en un caos.
15:54Pero el precio de esa libertad significaba un mundo donde todos
deban ser desconfiados
15:59y "destructivos" con nuestros semejantes.
16:10- El equilibrio de Nash, es importante porque uno de los grandes
miedos de los polticos
16:14era que el inters individual puede llevar al caos.
16:17Y lo que el equilibrio de Nash sugiere es que el beneficio racional del
inters propio
16:22incluso el de nuestros enemigos implacables lleva a un tipo de orden
16:29en el cual todos los jugadores concuerdan en cuanto a las estrategias
a seguir
16:34y son esas estrategias las que les dan sentido.
16:39Pero al mismo tiempo es tambin paranoico,
16:41porque es la idea de un ser humano sentado solo en una habitacin.
16:47Listo para reconstruir completamente a su oponente
16:50donde su oponente es totalmente implacable, completamente hostil
16:53y est comprometido en su destruccin.
16:58Pero haba un pequeo problema con las ecuaciones de Nash.
17:01No parecan correlacionarse
17:03con la forma en que los seres humanos en la realidad se portan entre
s
17:06en el mundo real.
17:08Cuando el juego del Dilema del Prisionero fue probado con las
secretarias de la organizacin RAND
17:12ninguna de ellas emple la estrategia racional.
17:15En vez de traicionarse mutuamente, siempre confiaron en el otro y
decidieron cooperar.
17:22De lo que nadie se percat era que el propio John Nash sufra de
esquizofrenia paranoica.
17:28Tena alucinaciones en las cuales crea que los que estaban a su
alrededor
17:31que usaban corbatas rojas eran espas comunistas.
17:34Y que l formaba parte de una organizacin secreta que podra salvar
el mundo.
17:41No se quiere admitir que tu mismo eres el loco, ves a las otras
personas como locas
17:47pero agrada vernos a nosotros mismos como no locos, tal y como
seres racionales.
17:52Yo pensaba que haba organizaciones secretas de humanos o
17:56algunas creencias secretas de algunas categoras de humanos
18:04y yo pensaba que tena alguna relacin con eso.
18:07Oa voces,
18:10pero finalmente me di cuenta que no oa nada
18:14excepto lo que yo creara en mi propia mente
18:18de modo que hablaba conmigo mismo mentalmente.
18:21En 1959, Nash fue obligado a internarse en un Hospital Mental
18:26y pas los siguientes diez aos encerrado por esquizofrenia.
18:30Pero a pesar de los problemas obvios con las teoras de Nash
18:33los jvenes tecncratas de RAND estaban convencidos de que en ellas
18:37estaba una nueva forma de orden social basada en la libertad
individual.
18:42Porque las ecuaciones suministraban una base cientifica
18:45para la visin alternativa a las que Friedrich von Hayek poda recurrir.
18:51Pero por ahora stas ideas estaban limitadas
18:54a una pequeo grupo de intelectuales en el corazn de la alta
burocracia.
19:01Pero las ideas de Nash estaban listas para esparcirse
19:03de la forma ms sorprendente.
19:09Schatzman era un psiquiatra radical que tuvo una visin.
19:13Se propuso liberar a la gente de todas las opresiones
19:16que crea que controlaban sus mentes sin que se dieran cuenta.
19:21Y para hacerlas libres, tal como Nash, cuestionar la esencia
fundamental
19:25y minar toda idea de confianza y amor.
19:34Es posible el amor?
19:35Es posible la libertad?
19:37Es posible la verdad?
19:39Es posible ser #@%@# como un ser humano molecular?
19:42Es posible ser un ser humano nunca ms?
19:46Es posible ser una persona para las personas, incluso si existen?
19:53R. D. Laing, empez a trabajar como psiquiatra
19:56en el hospital psiquitrico en Glasgow en los aos 50.
20:00Era un mundo violento y aterrador,
20:02donde los mdicos intentaban manejar y controlar a los
esquizofrnicos
20:05lo mejor que pudiesen.
20:08Laing percibi que los psiquiatras raramente hablaban con los
esquizofrnicos.
20:14Y como experimento tom a 12 mujeres
20:16y pas meses hablando con ellas sobre ellas y sus vidas.
20:22Los resultado fueron impresionantes.
20:24Pasados pocos meses, todas las 12 estaban aptas a dejar el hospital.
20:31"PERO 12 MESES DESPUS"
20:33Un ao ms tarde
20:34Laing descubri que todas haban regresado al hospital.
20:38Su tentativa de curarlas haba fallado completamente.
20:43Despus de este experiemento
20:47estas mujeres dejaron el hospital y despues de un ao volvieron otra
vez.
20:53Nadie saba por qu haban entrado la primera vez ni nadie saba por
qu haban vuelto otra vez.
21:00As que modifiqu mi foco de atencin e inters de la investigacin
21:07hacia las circunstancias reales en las que este pensamiento de locura
es incubado.
21:17Laing comenz investigando las familias de los esquizofrnicos.
21:21Sus investigaciones le llevaron a un mundo oculto y cerrado
21:24donde comenz estudiando el modo en que los miembros de la familia
21:26se relacionan unos con otros en privado.
21:29Y empez a convencerse de que las races de esta locura residan en
este mundo por analizar.
21:36Los mdicos y enfermeras que usaban qumicos en los esquizofrnicos
21:39para retornar a los pacientes con sus familias estaban cometiendo un
terrible error.
21:45Los estaban mandando de vuelta
21:46hacia el horror privado que inicialmente les haba originado la locura.
21:51Si esto fuese verdad, entonces los mdicos
21:53aunque creyesen que estaban cumpliendo con su deber
21:56y haciendo lo mejor para los pacientes
21:58eran en realidad valiosos agentes de la represin.
22:03- Creo que es muy importante que el mdico se recuerde que su deber
22:07es dar al enfermo lo que es mejor para l a largo plazo
22:13lo cual no es siempre lo que el enfermo pide.
22:20Si quiere ir a casa con sus familiares, stos tienen que tener una
certeza razonable
22:27de que se adaptar razonablemente bien en su casa para que puedan
llevar una vida normal.
22:35A principios de los 60, Laing abri una clnica mental en Harley Street
en Londres.
22:41Ofreci nuevos y radicales tratamientos para la esquizofrenia
22:43convirtindose rpidamente en una celebridad meditica.
22:47Fueron sus investigaciones sobre las causas de la esquizofrenia
22:49lo que le convenci de que un amplio conjunto de problemas mentales
22:52eran causados por la presin de la vida familiar.
22:58Laing decidi investigar
22:59como el poder y el control es ejercido en el mundo de las familias
corrientes.
23:05Y para hacerlo, recurrira a las tcnicas de la Teora de Juegos.
23:10Laing conoci la Teora de Juegos
23:12cuando visit el Instituto de Investigacin Mental en Palo Alto en
California.
23:17Un grupo de investigadores locales estaban tratando de usar la Teora
de Juegos
23:20como forma de analizar las iteracciones humanas.
23:23Laing vio en esto la herramienta perfecta para diseccionar
23:26las relaciones internas entre miembros de las familias inglesas.
23:32- Laing us la Teora de Juegos en sus anlisis sobra la familia.
23:34Consideraba los Juegos no en el sentido de diversin
23:38sino en el sentido de personas que juegan segn unas normas
23:41algunas de las cuales eran explcitas
23:43y otras que en esencia eran secretas.
23:47Sinti que haba descubrido una nueva forma de analizar las
relaciones humanas.
23:53Ese juego secreto que las personas tienen.
23:58Era una forma por la cual se poda obtener de modo objetivo una
investigacin cientfica
24:05se poda cuantificar, se poda dar a las personas cuestionarios,
24:09era prcticamente la aplicacin de la Teora de Juegos. Eso era
exctamente lo que era.
24:13Laing tom a 20 parejas britnicas y usando una compleja serie de
cuestionarios
24:18analiz como cada uno vea al otro en cada momento en sus vidas
diarias.
24:24Preguntando repetidamente lo qu pensaba secretamente cada uno,
querer del otro.
24:30Siguiendo la Teora de Juegos, codific las respuestas y las llev a
analizar por el ordenador.
24:35De esos anlisis Laing obtuvo matrices
24:38para mostrar, que tal como en la Guerra Fra, las parejas usaban sus
acciones diarias
24:42como si fueran estrategias para controlar y manipular el uno al otro.
24:47Sus conclusiones fueron ttricas.
24:49Lo que normalmente era visto como un acto de amabilidad y amor
24:52eran en realidad armas usadas de forma egosta para ejercer poder y
control.
24:58- Laing crea realmente que la familia era el tablero para la estrategia.
25:04El amor era una forma por la cual una persona intentaba dominar a la
otra.
25:11Te amo, pero te pongo una condicin para ese amor que es imposible
para t de satisfacer.
25:19No hay nada que puedas hacer para ganar mi amor
25:22aun cuando yo diga que tienes que ganar mi amor.
25:26De esta investigacin Laing concluy que la familia moderna
25:29lejos de ser una institucin atenta y protectora es en la realidad un
siniestro tablero
25:34donde las personas juegan continuamente de modo egoista uno
contra otro.
25:38De esta lucha se obtienen la estabilidad y sociabilidad que @impregna
la existencia limitada
25:43de todos los individuos involucrados.
25:47- Las llamadas familias normales que estudi a travs de este trabajo
25:53eran como hombres de las cavernas fuera de una Cmara de gas.
26:00Las personas obligan los nios, para que se ajusten a la vida
26:05envenenndolas hasta un nivel de subsistencia al que llaman vida.
26:16Laing era radical por sus hallazgos.
26:18Crea que la lucha por el poder y el control que descubriera en la
familia
26:23tena una estrecha relacin con la lucha por el poder y el control en el
mundo.
26:28En una sociedad violenta y corrupta
26:30la familia se convirti en una mquina de controlar a las personas.
26:35Laing crea que sta era una realidad objetiva manifestada por sus
mtodos cientficos
26:40sobre todo, por la Teora de Juegos.
26:43Pero casi todos estos mtodos contienen en s mismos
26:45suposiciones paranoicas y desoladoras de lo que los seres humanos
son realmente.
26:50Suposiciones nacidas de la hostilidad de la Guerra Fra.
26:55Lo que Laing estaba haciendo en realidad
26:57fue ayudar a esparcir stas ideas desoladoras y paranoicas en otras
reas de la sociedad.
27:03El modo en como pensamos sobre nosotros mismos y sobre nuestras
relaciones sociales.
27:08- Dio a entender haber visto cosas que difcilmente usted conseguira
imaginar.
27:15Un paisaje fro y desolador all fuera, en el que iba a hacer lo posible
para protegerte.
27:22De que entraramos juntos y nos protegeramos mutuamente en este
paisaje desolador.
27:28Pero nunca te dejes engaar de que existe algo ms o mejor de lo que
esto es.
27:33Porque esto es lo que es!
27:36La serie de libros de Laing
27:37con ttulos como "The Politics of Experience" llegaron a ser grandes
bestseller.
27:43Y l lleg a ser uno de los lderes del nuevo movimiento contra-
cultural.
27:49El objetivo del movimiento era el de hacer que la gente se diera
cuenta
27:51que no se poda confiar en ninguna de las instituciones posteriores a la
guerra mundial.
27:57Aqullos que se decan motivados por el deber pblico y por el deseo
de ayudar
28:01formaban parte del sistema que intentaba controlar sus mentes y
destruir su libertad.
28:07- Todas estas mentes, suprimidas @@@no tienen ninguna libertad
28:13no tienen ninguna libertad de hacer lo que quieren dentro del sistema.
28:16Tendran que estar siempre alerta,
28:18nunca confiar en nadie, ni siquiera en aqullos qu decan amarlos.
28:23- Quiero llamar la atencin de las personas que piensan
28:26que tiene que haber confianza, o creencia en que las personas se
aman
28:29Solo porque se aman.
28:33Pero yo no veo eso ocurra de modo alguno.
28:39Lo qu Laing y el movimiento contra-cultura estaban haciendo
28:42era echar abajo las instituciones britnicas en nombre de la libertad.
28:46Y estaban a punto de encontrar a los aliados ms inesperados.
28:50Se les uni un grupo de economistas de la derecha poltica
28:55que tenan exactamente el mismo objetivo y que se volveran
inmensamente poderosos.
29:00Este grupo haba sido inspirado por las ideas de Friedrich Hayek
29:04y la mayora de ellos haba trabajado tambin para la Coorporacin
RAND
29:08y trajeron con ellos sofisticadas tcnicas matemticas
29:12como la Teora de Juegos.
29:14Usaran estas tcnicas para probar cientficamente que la idea del
deber pblico
29:20en la cual siempre se sostuvo el servicio pblico britnico durante
generaciones
29:24era una hipocresa negligente y corrupta.
29:28Sus ideas empezaron a demoler las antiguas instituciones del estado
britnico
29:34Introdujeron tambin las suposiciones paranoicas de la Guerra Fra
29:38cada vez ms en el corazn de la sociedad britnica
29:51A principios de los aos 70, los servicios burocrticos del gobierno en
Gran Bretaa
29:54se comenzaron a colapsar.
29:56Quienes estaban involucrados culparon a la creciente crisis
econmica,
29:59pero estaba claro, de que algo mucho ms importante haba ido mal.
30:03Lo que supuestamente eran instituciones para ayudar a la gente se
volvieron perniciosas.
30:07Quienes formaban parte de ellas pareca como si estuviesen en contra
de la misma gente
30:10a la que supuestamente servan.
30:13- Lo llamamos restricciones.
30:16- Puede esperar un minuto?
30:18Ah! es urgente!
30:19- No le puedo dar esa informacin.
30:21- No tenemos permiso para hacerlo.
30:22- Nosotros no prestamos esa clase de servicio.
30:24- No estn disponibles!
30:28El grupo de economistas de derecha en Amrica divulgaron una teora
30:32que segn ellos explicaba la razn por la cual suceda esto.
30:36En el ncleo de su idea estaba la Teora de Juegos.
30:40Decan, que la realidad fundamental de la vida en sociedad
30:43estaba formada por millones de personas que vigilaban y planificaban
constantemente
30:46unas contra las otras, todas en busca de su exclusivo inters.
30:51Una suposicin que se haba hecho realidad.
30:54El modelo del comportamiento humano centrado en uno mismo
30:56que haba sido desarrollado durante la Guerra Fra
30:58para hacer que las ecuaciones matemticas funcionasen,
31:01ahora haba sido adoptado por estos economistas
31:03como una verdad fundamental
31:05acerca de la realidad de todas las intearcciones sociales de los seres
humanos.
31:08- Estamos siempre intentando influir en las intenciones del otro,
31:13o estamos siempre intentando convencer de nuestras intenciones,
31:18ya sea de forma engaosa o sincera, o intentamos siempre encontrar
formas
31:23de hacer nuestras promesas crebles y algunas veces hacer amenazas
crebles
31:29amenazando la Unin Sovitica amenazando un animal que se porta
mal
31:32amenazando un nio amenazando un vecino.
31:37Creo que lo qu todos hacemos se llama crear estrategias.
31:40Qu es lo que l piensa, que yo pienso que l har?
31:44Todo esto tiene que llegar a una especie de equilibrio.
31:47Qu es lo que ambos podemos reconocer?
31:50Eso ser lo obvio que se har.
31:52Lo qu esto significaba segn los economistas
31:54era que la creencia de que los polticos y los burcratas
31:56trabajaban enteramente por el bien comn era una total fantasa.
32:01Porque para hacerlo depende de la creacin de objetivos compartidos
en la sociedad
32:06basados en el sacrificio propio y en el altruismo.
32:09Pero en el mundo real, constituido por millones de individuos
sospechosos y egostas,
32:15tales conceptos no podan existir.
32:18Despus de esto, emergi una teora llamada de eleccin pblica,
32:22y un grupo de economistas determinados en destruir
32:25la ilusin de los polticos de que trabajaban por el inters pblico.
32:30Su lder se llamaba James Buchanan.
32:33- Ciertamente no existe ningn concepto mensurable
32:37que signifique que pueda llamarse de inters comn, Porque
32:42@como es que diferentes intereses y diferentes grupos y como
pueden salir de eso.
32:47El inters pblico, como idea poltica no significa que exista
32:52es lo que piensa que es bueno para el pas.
32:57Venir a decir eso es una cosa,
32:59pero detrs de ello existe la hipocresa de que el inters pblico existe
efectivamente
33:05eso era lo que estaba intentando derribar.
33:09En 1975 Tatcher se convirti en lder del partido conservador.
33:13Y las ideas de Buchanan tuvieron una influencia poderosa
33:16en ella y en el grupo de radicales que estaban a su alrededor.
33:20Un consejero del ala derecha de Tatcher trajo a James Buchanan a
Londres
33:25para una serie de seminarios.
33:27Y l explic claramente porque estaba fracasando el estado britnico.
33:31Era pura Teora de Juegos.
33:32Porque no haba un verdadero deseo por el inters pblico
33:35los burcratas y polticos esquematizaban y planificaban segn su
inters propio.
33:41Construyendo su poder y sus imperios.
33:44Reivindicaban estar para ayudar a los otros pero de hecho era
exactamente lo contrario.
33:48Y el resultado fue un caos econmico y la quiebra de la sociedad.
33:53- Era el caos, no haba otra palabra.
33:56Y despus la teora de la eleccin pblica nos dijo porqu.
33:59Es la causa del inters propio de los grupos
34:02que consiguieron lograr el control del proceso.
34:05@Es que generen estas actividades para su ventaja
34:08a expensas del resto de la sociedad.
34:11Cuando los funcionarios pblicos y los polticos dicen perseguir el
inters pblico
34:15las palabras son las del servicio pblico las acciones son las del inters
propio.
34:21Maximizando las ventajas personales.
34:23- Eso ciertamente no es verdad pues contra la creencia pblica
34:28yo y mis empleados tenemos mucha consideracin por las personas.
34:34- Creo que est asustado, pienso que al no tener suficiente oposicin
34:37no har los cosas lo bastante bien.
34:39- Si no quiere que conteste me puedo ir a mi casa
34:42que hace una bonita noche y no preciso estar aqu,
34:44pero si quiere que conteste, me puedo quedar.
34:47- Por favor, no dejen ... escuchen ...
34:49En medida que los economistas britnicos estn fuera de control,
34:53la elite poltica y burocrtica que domin el pas desde la guerra,
34:56comienza a sufrir ataques tanto de la derecha como de la izquierda.
35:01"El CAMINO PARA LA RECUPERACIN" Antao fueron figuras heroicas
35:03que crearon un nuevo mundo.
35:04Ahora eran acusadas de ser agentes de control y no de libertad.
35:09- Hemos sido liderados por hombres que viven por ilusiones
35:14Ilusiones de que podemos tener libertad por decreto gubernamental.
35:18- @.
35:20Y estas nuevas teoras empezaron a esparcirse por la imaginacin
pblica.
35:23Un escritor que formaba parte de los consejeros de Tatcher
35:26escribi una serie que expona explcitamente las teoras de la
eleccin pblica.
35:32Adems de ser divertida era tambin una propaganda ideolgica para
un movimiento poltico.
35:39- Humphrey tenemos de reducir el servicio pblico.
35:43Cuntas personas tenemos en este departamento?
35:452.000 ...?
35:473.000?
35:48- Cerca de 23.000 creo yo, Sr. Ministro.
35:50- 23.000!
35:52En el departamento del ministerio de la administracin pblica?
35:5423.000 personas slo para administrar a otros administradores?
35:58Tenemos que hacer un estudio concienzudo para ver quien sobra.
36:01- Hicimos uno de esos el ao pasado, Sr. Ministro,
36:03Sus conclusiones fueron que necesitaban otras 50.000 personas ms.
36:07- La falacia econmica en que se bas la eleccin pblica
36:11fue la falacia de que el gobierno trabaja enteramente por el beneficio
del sistema.
36:16Esto fue reflejado en el programa "S, Sr. Ministro" mostramos que casi
todo
36:23lo que el gobierno decida entraba en conflicto entre dos grupos de
intereses privados,
36:28por un lado los polticos y por otro los funcionarios pblicos
36:30tratando de sacar ventaja para su carreras profesionales y mejorando
sus vidas.
36:34Y ese fue el porqu la economa de la eleccin pblica
36:36que explicaba la razn de que ocurriera esto fuese la base de casi
todos los episodios
36:41de "S, Sr. Ministro" y "S, Primer Ministro".
36:49Al mismo tiempo R. D. Laing, continu su asalto
36:52a lo que l vea como las lites corruptas.
36:57Se dispona a utlizar su creciente poder para atacar una de las
profesiones ms poderosas de Amrica.
37:03La autoridad mdica y psiquitrica.
37:09Los resultados seran impresionantes.
37:11Pero el resultado sera muy diferente de lo que Laing pretenda.
37:16Sus ideas se encaminaban a minar todo el control de la lite mdica.
37:20Pero lejos de libertar las personas lo que surgi en realidad
37:24sera un nuevo sistema y revolucionario de orden y control dirigido por
el poder objetivo de los nmeros.
37:31- Sospeche cuando vaya a encuentrarse con ella si ella no est
asustada
37:36entonces la pone de su lado o har algo para ...
37:39Laing era ahora una celebridad en Amrica y era uno de los lideres del
movimiento anti-psiquitrico.
37:45Laing deca que la psiquiatra era una falsa ciencia usada como un
sistema de control poltico
37:50para sostener una sociedad violenta y en colapso.
37:54Sus categoras de locura y demencia no tenan ningn fundamento.
37:58La locura era simplemente una etiqueta convencional
38:00usada para mantener alejados a aqullos, que queran romper la
libertad.
38:05Cientos de jvenes psiquiatras fueron a las conferencias de Laing
38:08y uno de ellos se inspir.
38:10Decidi encontrar una forma de comprobar si lo que Laing deca era
cierto o no.
38:16Podran los psiquiatras americanos distinguir entre locura y cordura?
38:22Se llamaba David Rosenhand e ide un experimento dramtico.
38:26Agrup a ocho personas, incluyndose l mismo,
38:29ninguno de ellos tuvo jams cualquier problema mental.
38:33stas personas fueron entonces enviadas por todo el pas, a hospitales
mentales concretos.
38:38En un momento acordado se presentaron todos en su respectivo
hospital
38:42y dijeron a los psiquiatras de guardia que oan una voz en su cabeza
38:47que deca la palabra "concepto".
38:50sa era la nica mentira que podan decir.
38:53Aparte de eso deberan responder de forma perfectamente normal.
39:04- Y despus qu pas?
39:05- Fueron todos ellos diagnosticados como enfermos.
39:09Enfermos segn el hospital!
39:13- Todos?
39:14- Todos!
39:16- Y haban estado alguna vez enfermos?
39:18- No.
39:19No haba nadie que pudiese juzgar a estas personas como enfermos.
39:23Dije a mis amigos, y a mi familia puedo salir cuando quiera!
39:27Tan solo pasados un par de das, yo salgo.
39:31Nadie esperaba que estuviese all durante dos meses.
39:34- Una vez hubieron confesado todos los ocho falsos enfermos actuaron
con normalidad
39:39pero los hospitales se negaban a soltarlos.
39:41Diagnosticaron que siete sufran de esquizofrenia y uno desorden
bipolar.
39:47Les dieron a todos potentes drogas psicotpicas.
39:51Se dieron cuenta qu no haba nada que pudiesen hacer
39:53para convencer los doctores de que estaban cuerdos.
39:55Y rpidamente qued claro que la nica forma de salir
39:58sera aceptar que estaban enfermos y fingir mejorar.
40:03La nica salida fue mostrar que su punto de vista era el correcto.
40:09Dijeron que estaba enfermo, pues yo estoy enfermo pero voy a
ponerme mejor.
40:15Fue una afirmacin de su visin hacia m.
40:20Cuando Rosenhand finalmente sali e inform del experimento
40:23hubo un tumulto fue acusado de fraude y @.
40:27Uno de los hospitales ms importantes le ret a enviar ms falsos
enfermos
40:31garantizando que esta vez iban a ser detectados.
40:35Rosenhand acept y un mes despus, el hospital anunci haber
descubierto a 41 enfermos falsos.
40:42Rosenhand revel entonces que no haba enviado a nadie al hospital.
40:50El efecto del experimento de Rosenhand fue un deserte para la
psiquiatra americana.
40:54Destruy la idea de que eran una lite privilegiada con conocimientos
especiales.
41:00Pero aqullos en el poder entendieron que la psiquiatra no podra
rendirse.
41:04Una nueva forma tena de ser encontrada de como entender y
administrar
41:07personas y sus sentimientos en la sociedad moderna.
41:11Y tal como hizo R. D. Laing se volvieron hacia el purismo objetivo del
anlisis matemtico.
41:17Organizaron y crearon un sistema cientfico de diagnstico de
personas en estados mentales.
41:22donde todos los criterios humanos seran eliminados
41:25y remplazados en cambio por un sistema basado en el poder de los
nmeros.
41:30Desistieron de la idea de que pudieran entender la mente humana y
curarla.
41:35En vez de eso los psiquiatras americanos crearon una nueva serie de
categoras mensurables
41:41basadas nicamente en el comportamiento visible de los seres
humanos.
41:45Muchas recibieron nombres nuevos
41:47como desorden de dficit de atencin o desorden de obsesin
compulsiva.
41:51- Los psiquiatras decan que no saban las causas para ninguna de
estas enfermedades
41:55y al final dijeron
41:57sta es la que se parece a sta es la que se parece a la depresin
42:01sta es la que se parece al ADS sta es la que se parece al PDS
42:06sta es la que se parece a la personalidad mltiple.
42:08Ahora, si existen de alguna forma particular o si existen de la misma
forma
42:13o si existen otras clases, no interesaba, tan slo en cuanto se parecen.
42:19Lo que interesaba era que estos desrdenes
42:21podran ser observadas y asmismo grabadas.
42:24Los psiquiatras crearon un sistema en el cual el diagnstico pudiese
ser hecho por una computadora.
42:30Las caractersticas observables de cada uno de los desrdenes fueron
catalogadas de forma precisa.
42:35Y los cuestionarios que disearon preguntaban a las personas si tenan
estas caractersticas.
42:40Las respuestas eran simplemente S o No
42:43para que pudiesen ser realizadas por personal no preparado, no por
psiquiatras.
42:48La computadora decida entonces si las personas eran normales o
anormales.
42:55- El entrevistador no preparado hace preguntas especficas, las anota.
43:00Esa persona no va a realizar el diagnstico.
43:03Esa informacin es introducida posteriormente en una computadora.
43:06El programa de computadora entonces comprueba un patrn y emite
el diagnstico.
43:11As el diagnstico era realizado por la computadora, no haba
necesidad de ningn juicio clnico.
43:18Los psiquiatras decidieron entonces probar este sistema
43:21y a finales de los 70 enviaron entrevistadores por toda Amrica con los
cuestionarios.
43:27Cientos de miles de personas seleccionadas aleatoriamente fueron
entrevistadas.
43:32En este punto los psiquiatras trataron slo con individuos que
pensaban que necesitaban su ayuda.
43:38sta fue la primera vez que alguien sala y preguntaba a gente
corriente lo que pensaban y sentan.
43:44Los resultados, cuando fueron procesados por las computadoras
fueron espantosos.
43:49Ms del 50% de los americanos sufra de algn tipo de desorden
mental.
43:54- Estos estudios revelaron niveles muy altos de desorden mental.
44:00Haba niveles muy, muy altos niveles de desrdenes all afuera,
44:03la mitad de la poblacin tena alguna tipo de desorden
44:05el 70% de la poblacin haba tenido episodios de depresin alguna
vez, y cosas as.
44:10Estos porcentajes espantaron a la gente, eran porcentajes enormes.
44:13Y la conclusin general fue que deba haber una epidemia oculta.
44:19Se hicieron mas cuestionarios y una vez ms las computadoras
devolvan los mismos datos perturbadores.
44:25Los cuestionarios mostraban que debajo de la superficie de la vida
normal.
44:29millones de personas que nunca pensaron estar mentalmente
enfermos
44:33estaban viviendo secretamente con elevados niveles de ansiedad
mental.
44:37Los psiquiatras llevaron a cable programas de escrutinio por el pas.
44:41Para muchas personas las listas, fueron una liberacin.
44:45Su sufrimiento privado haba sido finalmente reconocido.
44:49- O en la radio que iban a hacer un estudio nacional sobre la ansiedad
44:53me hicieron muchas preguntas para ver si tena los sntomas
44:56eran cerca de 50 sntomas y yo tena 49 de ellos
45:00@de lo que est a pasar es comn. Y como garanta de su significado
45:05veo bomberos, trabajadores sociales, fue un alivio percibir qu... yo no
estaba a inventar.
45:13Estas nuevas categoras de desorden se esparcieron rpidamente en
la sociedad
45:16y trminos como el desorden DBP o desorden obsesivo compulsivo
45:21@entraron en la imaginacin de la gente.
45:25Y en medida que esto pasaba tendra consecuencias impredecibles.
45:29Miles de personas empezaron a usar los cuestionarios para controlarse
y diagnosticarse
45:34los usaban para identificar lo que era aberrante o anormal en sus
comportamientos y sentimientos.
45:41Pero por definicin, es tambin un modelo poderoso para ellos
45:45sobre lo que eran los comportamientos y sentimientos normales por el
que se iban a guiar.
45:50Los psiquiatras empezaron a encontrar cada vez ms y ms personas
45:52que llegaban y les pedan que las volviesen normales.
45:59- Era tan solo una forma de hacer a las personas un par de preguntas
46:02marcar las casillas de los cuestionarios de diagnsticos
46:05y decir, ve? Tiene sted esta enfermedad.
46:08Ah! Tengo este desorden es mejor ir al mdico y decirle lo que
necesito.
46:14Y fue una experiencia espantosa, un gran cambio,
46:18la mayora de las personas no queran, anteriormente a cualquier
clasificacin,
46:21ser vistas como de alguna forma mentalmente enfermos.
46:26Pero ahora me dicen que tienen un ideal en mente de lo que es una
persona normal.
46:35Yo no encajo en ese modelo quiero que sted me empuje, para que
encaje.
46:44Este nuevo sistema de desrdenes psicolgicos
46:46fue creado como un ataque a la arrogancia y el poder de la elite
psiquitrica
46:51en nombre de la libertad.
46:54Pero lo que empez a emerger fue una nueva forma de control.
46:59Los desrdenes y los formularios pasaron a ser una gua poderosa y
objetiva
47:03@para los sentimientos correctos y propios en la era del
individualismo y la emocin.
47:10Pero ste era un sistema muy diferente de orden,
47:12nunca ms ninguna lite dira a las personas como deben
comportarse.
47:16En vez de eso usaban ahora los formularios para monitorizar sus
sentimientos
47:20y vigilar su propio comportamiento.
47:23Estaban realmente seguros que estas nuevas categoras eran
cientficas
47:27y que podran ser verificadas por el poder de los nmeros.
47:39- Para ellos la fiesta del pasado, pero el maana es nuestro.
47:47En 1979 Mrs. Tatcher lleg al poder en Gran Bretaa.
47:51Lo que prometi crear fue una sociedad basada en el sueo de la
libertad individual.
47:57La gente iba a ser liberada de las lites arrogantes y de los burcratas
estatales del pasado.
48:02Pero Tatcher saba que tena de encontrar una nueva forma
48:05de administrar y controlar estos individuos libres en una sociedad
compleja para evitar el caos.
48:12"ESTA UNIDAD ES PROPIEDAD DE LA MQUINA 3"
48:14Y para hacerlo, tal como los psiquiatras americanos, se vir hacia
sistemas
48:18basados en el poder objetivo de los nmeros.
48:22Pero en la base del nuevo modelo matemtico
48:25estaba otra vez la sombra y sospecha visin de los seres humanos
48:28que los estrategas de la Guerra Fra haban asumido.
48:32Esta visin ahora iba a penetrar muy profundamente en el estado
britnico.
48:47El gobierno de Tatcher comenz a principios de los aos 80 vendiendo
muchas de las industrias del estado.
48:52Pero pronto se hizo claro que en el mundo moderno haban grandes
reas del estado
48:57que deban mantenerse bajo el control del gobierno.
49:00Pero Tatcher estaba determinada a liberarlos tambin de las antiguas
formas de gestin.
49:06Para lo hacer implant un sistema que esta vez no estaba guiado por
ideas de deber pblico
49:11pero en vez de eso los funcionarios pblicos seran motivados
mediante incentivos que obedeciesen su inters personal.
49:17Todo de acuerdo con las ideas del inventor de la eleccin pblica
James Buchanan.
49:23l crea que eran estos polticos y burcratas que predican la idea del
deber pblico
49:28los ms peligrosos.
49:30El los llam "Zealot" (Fanticos) y tenan que ser eliminados.
49:36- Estamos ms seguros si tenemos polticos egostas y avariciosos que
con los Zealots.
49:45El mayor peligro son por supuesto los Zealots que piensan que saben
lo que es mejor para el resto de nosotros
49:52en contraste con lo que est en venta en cierta forma.
49:58- As de esa forma, puede usar incentivos.
50:01- Exactamente.
50:01- Puede explicar mejor?
50:02- Exactamente, exactamente.
50:03El Zealot no est ni de cerca
50:06influenciado por incentivos econmicos, o incentivos de oficina o de
otro tipo,
50:12ningn Zealot lo est. De modo que no se quieren muchos Zealots por
ah.
50:19Si nuestro xito dependiese de la bondad de los polticos y de los
burcratas
50:25entonces tendramos un gran problema
50:27Era una visin sombra y pesimista de la motivacin humana.
50:31Pero llegara a ser la base para el nuevo sistema de gestin del estado
britnico.
50:38- Las propuestas representan la reforma ms profunda del Servicio
Nacional de Salud en sus 40 aos de historia.
50:45Ofrecen nuevas oportunidades y presentan nuevos desafos
50:49para todos aquellos relacionados con el funcionamiento de los
servicios.
50:52En 1988 Mrs. Tatcher anunci una reforma total en el modo de
funcionamiento del Servicio Nacional de Salud.
50:59El objetivo esencial era de retirar el poder a la autoridad mdica y
sustituirlo por un nuevo y eficiente sistema de gestin.
51:07Para hacer esto, Mrs. Tatcher, se volvi hacia un hombre que haba
sido uno de los estrategas nucleares
51:11de la Cooperacin RAND en el pico de la Guerra Fra.
51:16Se llamaba Alain Enthoven.
51:19Regresando a los aos 50, el trabajo de Enthonven era el de pensar lo
impensable.
51:23Planear como combatir y ganar una guerra nuclear.
51:27Para hacerlo dise un sistema matemtico que usaba el armamento
nuclear
51:31como incentivo racional para manipular al otro bando.
51:37Enthoven tuvo de elaborar escenarios para saber cuntas mega
toneladas de bombas
51:40deberan lanzarse y en que ciudades y cuntas personas sera
necesario matar
51:45para probar a los rusos que era por su propio inters volver a la mesa
de negociaciones.
51:54Despus de esto, Enthoven desarroll una tcnica
51:57que llam de anlisis de sistemas.
52:00Era una tcnica de gestin que crea poder aplicarse
52:03a cualquier tipo de organizacin humana.
52:06Su objetivo, era liberarse de todas las emociones y valores subjetivos
52:09que confunden y corrompen el sistema
52:13y remplazarlos por mtodos racionales y objetivos
52:16definidos matemticamente como objetivos e incentivos.
52:21Enthoven intent aplicar este sistema por la primera vez en los aos
60
52:24cuando an estaba en el ejrcito.
52:27El secretario de la defensa Robert McNamara
52:29le pidi ayuda para transformar el modo de funcionamiento del
pentgono.
52:34Enthoven comenz liberndose de la idea de que el patriotismo
52:38deba ser la gua de la defensa americana.
52:41Y la cambi, por el sistema racional basado en nmeros.
52:47- La estrategia que tragimos al Pentgono se basaba en el
comportamiento racional
52:52previamente deba hacerse en el ms alto nivel donde haba un
pensamiento poltico
52:57y estabamos tratando transformarlo ms en un pensamiento analtico.
53:00En Defensa, la mayora de las personas pensaba que se deban hacer
las cosas
53:04basndose en el patriotismo. Haba muchas cosas de tipo sentimiento
emotivo
53:09Eres patriota? y cosas as.
53:13Y all estaba yo, con mis diapositivas y mi estilo Geek y @MIT.
53:18- Aerotransportados.
53:18- Siempre, Seor!
53:20- Sintense, por favor.
53:21- Qu pensaban los militares?
53:24- Bien, pienso que
53:26- Lo odiaban, verdad?
53:27- S, lo odiaban.
53:30Lo que sustituy al patriotismo y las nociones del deber pblico fueron
los resultados matemticos mensurables.
53:36Pero el experimento de McNamara acab en desastre cuando intent
llevarlo a cabo en la guerra de Vietnam
53:42de una forma racional y matemtica definiendo objetivos e incentivos.
53:48El ejemplo ms infame fue el del recuento de cuerpos.
53:51Fue diseado como un coeficiente racional de ver si Amrica estaba
ganando la guerra.
53:56Pero el hecho fue que las tropas sencillamente adulteraron los
resultados
53:59llegando a disparar sobre civiles para alcanzar los objetivos
representados.
54:04En 1967 McNamara dimiti.
54:09Pero Enthoven se mantuvo en su cargo.
54:10Seguidamente, aplic sus sistemas para disear una forma racional de
gestin del servicio de salud.
54:16Comenz sto en Amrica.
54:18Pero en 1986 Mrs. Tatcher le pidi que hiciera lo mismo para el
Servicio Nacional de Salud britnico.
54:26Al igual que desafo el poder de los generales en el Pentgono
54:30ahora iba a hacer lo mismo con los mdicos ingleses.
54:34- Pienso que en ambos casos,
54:35con los militares del Departamento de Defensa y con los mdicos aqu
en Gran Bretaa,
54:39donde tienes a una lite poderosa organizada con autoridad y
jerarqua,
54:46el sistema necesitaba ser reconfigurado de tal forma
54:50como dar incentivos para hacer un trabajo mejor
54:53era cuestin de como distribuyes los incentivos
54:57para motivar el inters personal para crear incentivos propios
55:02para recompensar la eficiencia y que podamos medir.
55:06As que fue un desafo al poder mdico organizado.
55:11Lo que Enthoven propuso para SNS (Sevicio de Salud) lo llam "El
Mercado Interno".
55:15De hecho lo que era realmente, era una simulacin matemtica del
mercado libre.
55:20Los nmeros eran utilizados para crear
55:22resultados mensurables y objetivos de rendimiento a todos los niveles.
55:26Se cre la competividad a travs de un sistema de incentivos.
55:30Todo esto imitaba las presiones del mercado libre en el servicio
pblico.
55:35Para aqullos que lo crearon era la ingeniera de una nueva libertad.
55:40Iban a liberar a millones de empleados pblicos del control arrogante
de las antiguas lites.
55:46En su lugar, un mtodo nuevo y objetivo basado en nmeros
55:50defini los objetivos que los individuos eran libres de alcanzar del
modo que quisiesen.
55:55- Bsicamente libera sus talentos.
55:58Antes eran simples instrumentos haciendo lo que se les peda.
56:02Ahora de repente eran mentes creativas con permiso para evaluar y
decir en alto
56:07Porque no hacemos esto?
56:08Y ese sentimiento de libertad que viene de su talento eran sus
objetivos,
56:13no era algo que les hubiese sido ordenado desde arriba
56:16y esto era una parte muy importante de la motivacin
56:18para que sintieran como propios los objetivos.
56:22Pero era un tipo de libertad muy estrecha y especfica.
56:25Significaba renunciar a todas las ideas
56:27de trabajo para el bien colectivo o pblico.
56:30Convirtindose en su lugar en un individuo que constantemente
calculaba
56:33cuales podran ser sus ventajas en un sistema guado y definido por
nmeros.
56:39Pero en los cimientos de esto estaban las criaturas simples y egostas
56:43que John Nash creara all por 1950 para hacer funcionar sus
ecuaciones de la Teora de Juegos.
56:50Pero ahora el objetivo de metas e incentivos
56:53fu lo que transform el servicio pblico precisamente en estos seres
simplificados.
56:59Individuos que calculan tan slo lo que es mejor para ellos
57:03y ya no pensarn ms en trminos polticos ms amplios.
57:08- Hay esta visin de estos individuos humanos aislados
57:11de que son tan solo procesadores de informacin sin emociones
57:16las personas no obtienen sus objetivos participando en poltica desde
sentimientos emocionales
57:25@de algo ms grande.
57:27Nada de esto se permite en este particular teorema.
57:30Y de ese modo, lo que tenemos es esta imagen de procesadores de
informacin
57:34que podrn posiblemente preocuparse por su familia o lo que sea
57:37pero la idea que tienen del inters y el bienestar pblico en el corazn
57:42es visto como algo Romntico (naive?).
57:47- Estamos en medio del puesto de control las puertas se han abierto
57:49y la polica no hace nada que impida la entrada y salida de la gente.
57:53Nunca vi tanta ilusin.
58:02- Libertad, Libertad, por una vez!
58:05- Vi las escenas en televisin anoche y otra vez esta maana
58:08Ves la alegra en la cara de las personas Ve lo que la libertad significa
a ellos.
58:13nos hace darnos cuenta que no se puede impedir el deseo de la gente
por la libertad.
58:18- Qu piensa de esta noche?
58:19- Es maravillosa!
58:21- Es maravilloso...
58:22Es maravilloso...
58:24En Noviembre de 1989 el muro de Berln cay y la Guerra Fra termin
finalmente.
58:30Y una nueva era de libertad haba comenzado
58:33Pero la forma que esa libertad iba a tomar sera definida por los
vencedores
58:37Occidente.
58:38Y como ha mostrado este programa la idea de libertad
58:42que lleg a ser dominante en Occidente
58:44est profundamente enraizada en la sospecha y la paranoia de la
Guerra Fra.
58:50En el programa de la prxima semana mostraremos como sta idea
58:52se esparci para conquistar a los propios polticos.
58:55Porque parece ofrecer una nueva y mejor alternativa a la democracia.
59:01Pero lo que realmente resulta es, corrupcin, creciente austeridad
59:04y un aumento dramtico de la desigualdad.
59:08Y nosotros acabaremos por creer que somos realmente los seres
extraos y aislados
59:13que los cientficos de la Guerra Fra inventaron para hacer que sus
modelos funcionaran.
59:18Esta limitada visin lejos de liberarnos se convertir en nuestra jaula.