What is really happening to freedom

James Gubb, 26 March 2007

With great fanfare the BBC has launched a prime time documentary called The Trap – What Happened to our Dream of Freedom. It is the usual bravely radical, groundbreaking BBC stuff of course. In other words it is full of soft left clichés recycled from the heyday of collectivism, writes Graham Cunningham.
I was reminded of that 1960’s folk music ditty Little Boxes, popularised by Pete Seeger. Older readers may remember it. Here are a few snatches from memory:
And the people on the box
All went to the university,
Where they ticked all the trendy boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there’s teachers and film directors,
And tv executives,
And they’re all full of radical-chic tacky
And they all think just the same.
OK I confess. I might have changed the words a bit!

The basic thesis of The Trap is that since the 1980’s various politicians and economists have sought to order all human behaviour according to free market principles and that this has in fact made people more selfish but less free. It cherry picks individuals and events to create what amounts to a bogus conspiracy theory about an alleged Invasion of the Body Snatchers style assault on the human free spirit. Freedom is indeed threatened but there are at least three major flaws in this particular diagnosis. First of all it is not the case that any of history’s really big champions of free market capitalism have down played the moral dimension of human nature. It would be much fairer to acknowledge that they have more typically gone out of their way to emphasise individual personal responsibility. Secondly, the political climate of the last three decades was actually a response to the complete failure of collectivism/socialism to engender any increase in genuine (as opposed to sham) altruism whatsoever. It is a most telling glimpse of the programme maker’s agenda that this uncomfortable fact is left entirely out of account. Thirdly, what is also left out of account is discussion of the enormous power of the mass media in shaping our current condition.
In the first episode The Trap theorises that politicians have controlled us and skewed our collective psyche to suit their Cold War agenda. The irony here is that whatever influence Cold War politics may have had on recent history, this has been utterly dwarfed by the power of the mass media over the same period. A more profound truth is that big media brands like the BBC wield far more power than any modern politician to drip feed their world-view to you the viewer/listener. All the mainstream British political parties are running scared of media power. That media power is overwhelmingly soft left in philosophy, which means that it has relentlessly undermined the concept of personal responsibility in favour of a selfish victim culture. Much of the blame for the social malaise that the documentary correctly identifies in its second episode – such as the medicalization of all human behaviours – can in reality be laid at the door of the media intelligentsia itself. The system should be attending to your every need or anxiety. You meanwhile should be entertained and should know your rights so you can complain about the system. This is indeed a trap.
Our mass-mediated perception of reality has also stifled freedom of speech and even of thought. In times past people knew only what was going on in their own neck of the woods but they knew it intimately which perhaps provided some reality check. Also one community was relatively free from the influence of another. Not anymore. Now, thanks to the likes of the BBC you know so much more – have an opinion on so much more. Now you know that some brutal murders merit grief on a national scale whilst other barely a passing mention. You know that MacDonalds is wicked. America is wicked. You know that Live Aid virtually saved the world from poverty. You know that man made global warming is going to destroy the planet and its all the fault of capitalism. Just like you know that capitalism was virtually brought down on the stroke of midnight in 2000 by something called the Millenium Bug. Older people know that the world was very nearly overwhelmed in the 1970’s by The Next Ice Age. Best of all you know what the most important thing going on in the world at any one time is because it is the thing that headlines the news. Thus has the mass media deluged people’s consciousness with trashy certainties at huge cost to their freedom of spirit.
Little box in the corner
Your window on reality
Little boxes in the questionnaire
On who is your top celebrity.
Another part of The Trap thesis is the puerile business of picking out individuals – like the mathematician John Nash – to blame for all our problems. The programme grossly overstates the influence of Nash and Game Theory generally. It is a silly example of a formula beloved by BBC programme makers whereby a documentary is arbitrarily built around individual personalities and ephemeral events rather than coherent and sustained argument. It is part of our retreat from reason.
Talking of individual personalities, here’s a radical idea. Such freedoms as we enjoy in Western civilisation were created by its entrepreneurs, inventors, mathematicians, creative writers, adventurers, soldiers and yes, even politicians. They were categorically not created by the lefty intelligentsia. Had the media establishment been as dominant in previous centuries as they are now then they would have had to discourse in stagnant poverty under the yoke of some mediaeval tyranny. Whinging about the iniquities of capitalist enterprise might not have been quite so much fun then. The fashionable gambit about how bad they were at maths, science, economics etc would have not had quite the same cachet either.
If I allowed myself to be pessimistic I would say that the freedom heralded by the Age of Reason has come and gone. If there is any chance for freedom it is most categorically not going to come from the BBC. Its best chance is the Internet – that child of the demonised American enterprise culture – because it is probably uncontrollable unlike the mass media which is essentially elitist and controlling. The BBC and its hinterland of favoured contributors, is teeming with champagne lefties, celebrity poseurs and assorted other have your cake and eat it fellow travellers of the elite. And it is a veritable honey pot for the not so big wide world of the liberal establishment in the arts and academia. If any inquisitive space aliens are tuning into the BBC they must be utterly perplexed by the phenomenon of comfortable middle class ‘intellectuals’ bemoaning privilege in Western society. Many of them still hanker after the ‘radicalism’ of their student days. Funny business radicalism; the word suggests boldness, independent mindedness, freethinking. The reality is the opposite. It is a me- too mentality of fitting in with the prevailing ethos. I remember, when I was at university in the 1970’s, one or two lonely guys in tweeds and sports jackets flitting furtively across the psychedelic bead strewn quadrangle clutching their briefcases. I remember thinking those guys are the real radicals here. The Trap is not radical. It is a thoroughly predictable offering from one of the media in crowd. It is dripping with media establishment mythology and the depressing fact that most reviews so far have hailed it as iconoclastic thinking outside the box merely demonstrates the overwhelming brainwashing power that the little box in the corner now has on our intellectual horizons. It is like quicksand and it sucks you in. This subtle cultural bias has over recent decades been more corrosive of freedom than any political regime.
Perhaps the biggest problem with freedom is that when it comes down to it most people do not actually dream of freedom anyway. They would far rather fit in; you only have to look at the rapid spread of dress down Friday amongst British office workers to understand that. A herd instinct is inherent in human nature. The age of mass media has nationalised – even globalised – these group think tendencies.