BBC - The Trap, What Happened to Our Dreams of Freedom

part 1

John Nash - devised the Prisoner's Dilemma, equations showing that self interest always trumps helping others. Got Nobel Prize. Later diagnosed as schizophrenic. The idea: there's no grant unifying theory of "the people" since everybody has only self-interest at heart: the Impossibility Theory. (oh, he's the one portrayed in "A Beautiful Mind". How amazing that Disney left out the fact he was notorious for his cruel games, above all his "Fuck you buddy" where you could only win through betrayal.)

Cold War, resulting from game theory: ends in an equilibrium where you made sure "the other" had no interest in attacking you - in this case by keeping squadrons in the air 24/7, by having enough missiles to destroy them -. Both sides lowering the amount of weapons will never work: you cannot trust the other, then you'd give him an advantage.

Game theory: the idea you can incorporate your enemy into your own thinking.

Tests carried out in relationships: people constantly battle to "win".

Government wants control for a "perfect" society. The result, for some, is the dictatorship of the USSR.

A test: distinguish between madness and sanity? 8 people including David Rosenhan went to different mental hospitals, hearing voice in their head that said the word "Thud". That was the only lie. Otherwise they were to behave as normal as possible. None of them had a history of mental illness.
It took some of them two months to get out. Doctors didn't believe them. Only by pretending to be sick and then getting better, they got out.

Tests were made, hundreds of thousands of people were questioned. A computer "computed" who was sane. Half of the American people had a form of mental disorder.

The tests changed. Became checklists. Tell us what to do / how to be if we are not insane. If you don't have this-and-this, you are sane. A new form of control by the government.

Thatcher claimed a new freedom. But knew she needed a new way to control the people. Again, numbers. Public servants were encouraged to follow their self interest.

"Zealots are less interested in incentives and self-motivation like money. You don't want too many of them in a group."

Computations were made by some guy: how many megatons needed to be dropped on the USSR, how many people killed and how much of its industry destroyed, to win. When applied to the Vietnam War, it showed its horrible face. "body count" had been considered a rationele for success: kill enough enemies and we know we are doing fine. So troops started to shoot civilians to get to their targets...
A year later he resigned. And was later asked by Thatcher to oversee the reform of the NHS in Britain. "Give incentives to do a better job." Shedding all incentives to work for the public good.

All of this based on the kind of people John Nash created in the 50s to make his game theory work.

The idea of freedom in the West is deeply rooted in the paranoia and the suspicion of the Cold War.


part 2

John Mayor tried to mimic the self interested drive of free market. Public servants got performance targets --> can achieve them in any way. They become entrepeneurs.

Clinton made a "smaller" government. Couldn't pay for his plans with the existing deficit. Listened to Alan Greenspan and Citycorp guy: let the markets do their work. Thus, dismantled most of the safety nets put in place in the 30s.

Freedom redefined: the ability of individuals to get whatever they want.

"Liberation management", a real thing. Tom Peters is an ass.

"You can never win when you deal with the public" a very sour politician?

This would start to undermine the very ideas of democratic freedom.

James Buchanan: politicians, like public servants do not server the public. This is a fiction. They too followed their self interest.

John Nash idea, about people always just following their self interest. Philip Morowski: People are little information processors. The market is the ultimate information processor. Voting - or a democracy - is a weak information processor, inefficient.

"You think of yourself as trying to create more of yourself when you procreate. Instead, you are just a vehicle for your genes. They are using you to ensure their survival." And then of course Richard Dawkins comes looking around the corner.

During the cold war, people were reduced to mathematical equations, simple desires that could be modelled - using game theory - because they lived in a scary era full of unknown dangers. In the 90s, the Cold War was over, but the theory persisted and claimed to fully describe man, his desires, goals and aims. A machine model of human beings. Ready to be adjusted. Not through politics, but by how well every single machine performed. Doctors and psychiatrists are now in control, by defining and quantizing all mental illness, by defining who is healthy and who needs adjustment. "Generlized Anxiety Disorder". Everybody suffered from it. "Panic Disorder". Checklists with only objective symptoms, deliberately not listing WHY these were experienced.

Drug companies started to manufacture "rssi"'s, such as prozac, adjusting the amount of seratonine flowing through the brain. The checklist became a powerful, seemingly objective guideline to people what should be considered normal. A static society was created of "normal people", defined by the checklist. "They imagine living in a world where there's never grief"

They deliberately excluded any understanding of the patient's life. And guess what? "it confused genuine psychological disorder with normal human feelings, like sadness and anxiety. This was happening on a wide scale." All done by Robert Spitzer. "So you effectively medicalized ordinary human feelings like sadness, fear, ordinary experiences.."
RS: "I think, to some extend. I don't know what the percentage is. 20 or 30% That's considerable. But we don't know. Whether it's 20 or 30%"

"Those drugs made them happier human beings. But they also made them simpler, more ordinary. Easier to predict and manage. Closer to the machine-like creatures at the heart of the economic models. [...] More efficient. Less human."
"A medicalized illusion of an epidemic."

In the UK, Tony Blair, new Labour, followed Clinton, selling government organizations to the banks.

The treasury, under Gordon Brown: they invented ways to assign numbers to things that previously no one thought could be measured. Hunger in Africa was to be reduced below 48%. And all the villages in England were to be measured for their Community Vibrancy Index.  Even the life in the country side was broken down into a series of indices, one of them measuring how much bird song there should be."

Almost immediately, New Labour began to discover human beings were more complex than the simple model allowed for.

In hospitals, wheels of "trolleys" were removed so they were no longer trolleys. People were scheduled for meetings during their holidays, so they couldn't come... but targets were met. Polic reclassified many crimes (including assault) as mere "suspect behaviour"... so targets were met.

Government response? Even more levels of target management. A more rigid society emerged. At its heart: education. Government tallied best and worst schools: this would entice schools to do better, all of education would improve. The opposite happened. Rich parents moved into neighbourhoods of the best schools, driving up the house price, driving away poorer people. All schools started teaching their pupils only what they needed to know to pass the exam, in order to meet the criteria, thereby hiding the wider education from them that they needed to rise above their poverty.

The inequalities not only determine how you will live, but also when you will die.

Politicians see things spiralling out of control.

And now, the simplified equation of human beings being simple automatons, programmed by our DNA millions of years ago, begins to erode. In the 90's, scientists discover that cells choose which part of DNA to copy.

And now, John Nash, who once championed the idea of humans solely fighting for their own best interest, starts to doubt his own theories, starts to realize the human being is more complex than that.

part 3

Alan Enthoven: Recommending missiles under ground, missiles in submarines, and all that, was a way to make it all more stable. We're trying very hard to reduce the likelyhood of nuclear war by creating powerful incentives for the Russians not to start a nuclear war because we're trying to give them incentives not to attack, either a nuclear attack or a convential attack. Yeah, so, incentives are important to them.