All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

**Justin Casey** · 14-06-2011, 10:00 PM

Adam Curtis's documentary series on our brave new world.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz2j3BhL47c"]1. "Love and Power"[/ame]

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq0xVuRG4ng"]2. "The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts"[/ame]

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXJYkkxh0rk"]3. "The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey"[/ame]

**Dr. FIVE** · 14-09-2011, 06:34 PM

Well worth a read. Turn off corrie.

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. Why we have become so possessed by the ideology of our age that we cannot think outside it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurti...e_of_tina.html

**C. Flower** · 14-09-2011, 06:46 PM

I heard a very depressed-sounding Greek commentator last week talking about the lack, even amongst the opposition protestors ("they are just against things") of any alternative social form for which people could aim - he described it as soul destroying.

Two things strike me as contributing to this
- the fall of the USSR - and the failure to fully analyse it ("nothing to see here, move on..") ?
- the long drawn out fictitious credit-based boom since the 70s, with phenomenally high living standards for a lot of people in the west ?

Even the "Arab spring" to a certain extent, has been demonstrating not for a new model, but because they couldn't get a slice of the old (credit boom) model.

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. Why we have become so possessed by the ideology of our age that we cannot think outside it.

The capacity to imagine something better has got rusty.

I've been thinking for a while that we need a "Utopia" subforum, along with the other world regions. I'll open it tonight.

**Dr. FIVE** · 14-09-2011, 06:51 PM

Yeah, was going to start an if not this then what? thread at some stage whenever I came up with a decent OP.

You could be waiting for that so a sub forum is a good idea

**jmcc** · 14-09-2011, 07:14 PM

Found it very tedious. It was like some kind of Arts undergrad trying to understand technological development without understanding why techies invent and create. The stuff on the Ayn Rand crap was quite a waste of airtime. How crystalised sociopathy could be considered a "philosophy" is strange. I guess the technology was too complicated despite techies making it simple enough to hold the world in the palm of your hand.

Regards...jmcc

**Lá an Lúbáin** · 14-09-2011, 07:21 PM

Originally Posted by jmcc

Found it very tedious. It was like some kind of Arts undergrad trying to understand technological development without understanding why techies invent and create. The stuff on the Ayn Rand crap was quite a waste of airtime. How crystalised sociopathy could be considered a "philosophy" is strange. I guess the technology was too complicated despite techies making it simple enough to hold the world in the palm of your hand.

Regards...jmcc

A bit too much credit given to her, I'd agree but some great insights into other financial explosions/ IMF bailouts, particularly how the west handled Indonesia.

**morticia** · 14-09-2011, 07:57 PM

I'm afraid radical new ideas tend to require resources to implement, in many cases. The fact that these are running out is what lies at the root of the current crisis

If oil were 10 bucks a barrel again, would we be where we are today?

Funnily enough, living standards peaked probably in 2007, a year after the IEA has now dated "peak oil".

we are all going to have to live with a lot less... in a way, it is somewhat immaterial whether this occurs under capitalist, communist, anarchist systems. There will be a lot less to go around. Period.

**C. Flower** · 14-09-2011, 08:05 PM

Originally Posted by morticia

I'm afraid radical new ideas tend to require resources to implement, in many cases. The fact that these are running out is what lies at the root of the current crisis

If oil were 10 bucks a barrel again, would we be where we are today?

Funnily enough, living standards peaked probably in 2007, a year after the IEA has now dated "peak oil".

we are all going to have to live with a lot less... in a way, it is somewhat immaterial whether this occurs under capitalist, communist, anarchist systems. There will be a lot less to go around. Period.

Do you not think that 2007 was a consumption peak fuelled by fictitious capital, as much as by oil ? Oil prices were surely high at that point ?

**jmcc** · 14-09-2011, 08:27 PM

Originally Posted by morticia

I'm afraid radical new ideas tend to require resources to implement, in many cases.

Radical ideas use existing resources differently.

we are all going to have to live with a lot less... in a way, it is somewhat immaterial whether this occurs under capitalist, communist, anarchist systems. There will be a lot less to go around. Period.

That's the difference in mentality between the creative mind and the non-creative. The non-creative think that everything is f*cked and the creative try to find solutions. The non-creative join CND and the Green Party and the creative figure out how to design more energy efficient devices and new power sources and generally work on how not to blow everything up. I think that creativity is hardwired at a genetic level and some people just regard challenges as opportunities. For me it is like reading all these clowns waffling about Leonardo DaVinci and seeing how they absolutely fail to understand how the need to know and understand is what really drives creativity. Not knowing is only a temporary state of affairs and harnessing this creativity is why we are not going to have to live with a lot less.

Regards...jmcc

**morticia** · 14-09-2011, 08:32 PM

Good luck with that creativity. There's a lot of hope, but for every new technology, there's a forest of NIMBY's that don't want anything about their area changed

The one that depressed me most was some local Roscommon group trying to defend a "historic pilgrimage site" from a wind farm development in the area.

The historic pilgrimage site was shown on the News.... 1950s concrete cross

AAUUGGHHH.....oh, and An Pleanala refusing a windfarm in the west owing to "scenic interest".... look, given current petrol prices, no-one's going to be able to get to the blinking scenery anyway, shortly, and the locals are mostly sheep.

I pray that the creativity triumphs.....