Adam Curtis wrote this recently on his BBC blog under the above title:
The guiding idea at the heart of today's political system is freedom of choice. The belief that if you apply the ideals of the free market to all sorts of areas in society, people will be liberated from the dead hand of government. The wants and desires of individuals then become the primary motor of society.
But this has led to a very peculiar paradox. In politics today we have no choice at all. Quite simply There Is No Alternative.
That was fine when the system was working well. But since 2008 there has been a rolling economic crisis, and the system increasingly seems unable to rescue itself. You would expect that in response to such a crisis new, alternative ideas would emerge. But this hasn't happened.
Nobody - not just from the left, but from anywhere - has come forward and tried to grab the public imagination with a vision of a different way to organise and manage society.
It's a bit odd - and I thought I would tell a number of stories about why we find it impossible to imagine any alternative.
I suggest he slightly overstates the case (but only very slightly) and what follows shows how the right set out to create the myth of free markets - a myth not matched by any reality.
It's well worth reading.
This is a story of the most audacious takeover of thought ever attempted - and how it has been so successful.
Some of us stand up against the corruption inherent in that thinking. I'm delighted to be one of them.
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Is this a pre-curser to one of his documentries (“The Power of Nightmares” being one of them), i hope so.
The Curse of Tina is a stunning piece of work and well worth reading/watching in full. It is particularly fascinating on Sir Anthony Fisher and the origins of the Institute of Economic Affairs. When founded in London in 1955, this was one of the world’s first thinktanks. However, as Adam Curtis explains, it was never really a think tank. He describes it as an ideologically-driven spin machine masquerading as “a scholarly institute”. The video interview with Friedrich Hayek, and the Tory conference clip of Linda Whetstone (a fee market extremist and daughter of Sir Anthony) are both somewhat terrifying – even Mrs Thatcher appears to find the latter scary. The blog can be somewhat discursive – for example when it strays into Pirate Radio – but discursiveness is part of Curtis’s genius.
George Monbiot is on to the same issue: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/12/thinktanks-crushing-democracy-pr-agenices
If you are interested in reading more about the pirate radio tangent of Adam Curtis’s blog, then download issues 58 and 59 of “Lobster” from http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/
Has anyone looked into the influence of Think Tanks on education? They provide teaching materials. Have they had any say as to what goes into the economics syllabus? Young adults will be more likely to believe that there is no alternative if they have never heard of any alternatives.