Bitter Lake – Anna Bidoonism

At the outset of the 2015 BBC documentary Bitter Lake, Adam Curtis suggests that,

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We live in a world where nothing makes any sense and those in power tell stories to help us make sense of the complexity of reality, but those stories are increasingly unconvincing.

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The contention argued in Bitter Lake is that Western politicians have manufactured a simplified story about militant Islam into a “good” vs. “evil” argument. This argument, which is informed by and a reaction to Western society’s increasing chaos and disorder, is neither really understood by the governments and think-tanks that have manufactured it or the people (the citizenries) to which it is being peddled.

📹 Bitter Lake (2015)

“The Nightmare” by John Henry Fuseli.

“The Nightmare”

“I have a suspicion that the politicians’ revival of the old behaviourist ideas and techniques will be helped and reinforced by a powerful ally – the machines we have built. The computers.” — Adam Curtis”

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Bidoonism’s Adam Curtis collection

Post Script

1. Eric Hobsbawm
Hobsbawm focused on the rise of industrial capitalism, socialism and nationalism. His best-known work is his trilogy about what he called the “long 19th century” (The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 and The Age of Empire: 1875–1914). Read on …

2. Edward Saïd
Saïd focused on the history and nature of Western attitudes towards the East, and contends that “orientalism” is a powerful European ideological creation that is the key source of the inaccuracy in cultural representations that form the foundations of Western thought and perception of the Eastern world {نحن نعيش ، نموت}. Read on …

Orientalism

Western Conceptions of the Orient

Edward W. Said

3. Horses for courses 🐎
Proverb • British
— Different people are suited to different things.

4. Bidoonism ❱ Politics &c. ❱❱ History
According to me, “history’s basically histrionics… because, to attract attention, we inevitably state it melodramatically. Read on …

The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom is a 2007 BBC documentary series directed and produced by Adam Curtis (think: Hypernormalisation). It consists of three one-hour episodes which explore the concept and definition of freedom. In short, Curtis argues that today’s idea of freedom is based on a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures.

Episodes

01. — “F**k You Buddy.”
In this episode, Curtis examines the rise of game theory during the Cold War and the way in which its mathematical models of human behaviour filtered into economic thought.
📹 watch episode 1

02. — “The Lonely Robot.”
The second episode underscores the first but develops the theme that the drugs such as Prozac — Happy Pills — are being used to normalise behaviour and make us behave more predictably… more like machines.
📹 watch episode 2

03. — “We Will Force You To Be Free.”
The final episode focuses on the concepts of positive and negative liberty that were introduced in the 1950s by Isaiah Berlin.* Curtis explains how negative liberty might be defined as freedom from coercion, and positive liberty as the opportunity to strive to fulfill one’s potential.
📹 watch episode 3

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Bidoonism’s Adam Curtis collection:
📹 Adam Curtis documentaries

P.S.

* “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” This ancient Greek aphorism, preserved in a fragment from the poet Archilochus, describes a thesis put forward by Isaiah Berlin regarding the philosophy of history. Although there have been many interpretations of the aphorism, Berlin uses it to mark a fundamental distinction between human beings who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things and those who relate everything to a central, all-embracing system. Berlin’s extraordinary essay offers profound insights about Tolstoy, historical understanding, and human psychology.

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Isaiah Berlin’s essay:
📙 The Hedgehog and the Fox

According to Berlin, humans can be divided into two categories: hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea (he cites: Plato, Dante, Hegel, Nietzsche and Proust), and foxes, who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be summed up into a single idea (he cites: Aristotle, Erasmus, Shakespeare, and Joyce).