Time and Politics 22: The Masks of Simple Politics

Image Source: Archillect.

For today, see the Adam Curtis documentary, HyperNormalisation, which opened in the UK on 16 October 2016 and is circulating on the Internet. Produced by the BBC, it is reproduced here under Fair Use non-commercially for review and discussion. Told from a liberal-left perspective, this film starts in the mid-1970s and discusses big banks, Donald Trump, Brexit, Vladimir Putin, hypertechnology, and Syria.

Curtis argues that today's political and economic worlds are so intractably complex that in order maintain power, those in power have created fake, simplified worlds to calm and control the public:

"In the film, Curtis argues that since the 1970s, governments, financiers, and technological utopians have given up on the complex 'real world' and built a simple 'fake world' that is run by corporations and kept stable by politicians."

In a future post, I will discuss the origins of Curtis's idea of real complexity and delusional simplicity and how to overcome it.

Video Source: Youtube.

Adam Curtis interview with BBC to promote HyperNormalisation (16 October 2016). Video Source: Youtube.

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