Words matter. These are the best Adam Curtis Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
There is a lurking sense that there is a kind of seedy corruption underlying a lot of public life today. But while journalism does a very good job of describing that corruption, it is failing to bring it into a bigger focus. To explain what it is all about.
At the end of the nineteenth century, a fanatical craze for physical fitness swept through Britain. Millions of men and women took up gymnastics, body building, and other physical exercises. Such a thing had never happened before, and it was given a name – Physical Culture.
When communism collapsed in 1989, the big story that had been hardwired into citizens of western countries – that of the global battle against a distant dark and evil force – came to an abrupt end.
Journalists, whose job is to pull back and tell dramatic stories that bring power into focus, find it impossible because things like economic theory are both incomprehensible and, above all, boring. The same is true of ‘management science.’
Documentaries shouldn’t just reflect the world: they should try and explain why reality is like it is.
Together, the western elites and Gaddafi helped to lead us into a simplistic two-dimensional vision of the world – full of exaggerations and falsehoods. A fake bubble of certainty that has imprisoned us in the West – and is now preventing us from understanding what is really going on in the world outside.
BP is accused of destroying the wildlife and coastline of America, but if you look back into history, you find that BP did something even worse to America. They gave the world Ayatollah Khomeini.
Throughout the western world, new systems have risen up whose job is to constantly record and monitor the present – and then compare that to the recorded past. The aim is to discover patterns, coincidences and correlations, and from that, find ways of stopping change. Keeping things the same.
Tyler Kent himself is weird and mesmerising – but still unrepentantly anti-Semitic.
At its heart, ‘South Park’ has a touching faith in human beings: that despite their absurdities and flaws, people have the capacity to create a better world.
James Goldsmith is important because he used the power of the markets to break up the cosy patrician elite that ran Britain and its industries in the 1950s and ’60s. In the process, Goldsmith helped transfer power in this country away from politics and towards the markets and the financial sector.
Tyler Kent was a horrible man. He was a rabid anti-communist who believed that the Jews had been behind the Russian Revolution.
When you bring God into politics, very strange things happen.
Politicians used to have the confidence to tell us stories that made sense of the chaos of world events. But now there are no big stories, and politicians react randomly to every new crisis – leaving us bewildered and disorientated.
I have always thought that pandas, in evolutionary terms, are the most sophisticated animals in the world. They cannot look after themselves; they are useless at reproducing. But to compensate, they have managed to persuade the most advanced creatures on the planet – human beings – to care for their every need.
In the early 1970s in Washington, a small group of young conservative activists came together to try and change American politics. They called themselves the New Right, and they were convinced that unless they did something drastic, the liberals and the left-wingers in America were going to take over the country.
Sometimes history repeats itself. And sometimes it doesn’t.
The problem with wonks is that they can’t deal with emotion and feeling, and they don’t like stories. It means that they cannot connect at all with the feelings and imaginations of the voters.
‘American Honey’ takes you into the feelings of a girl travelling through the United States while giddily in love. You see modern America through her intense feelings. But again and again the film pulls the rug out from under your feet – scenes never play out as you expect.
In ‘Mad Men,’ we watch a group of people who live in a prosperous society that offers happiness and order like never before in history and yet are full of anxiety and unease. They feel there is something more, something beyond. And they feel stuck.
Henrietta Lacks’ cells are immortal. They are known as the HeLa cell line, and they have become deeply involved in all sorts of medical and genetic research – sometimes in the most unexpected ways.
Al-Qaida became the new Soviet Union, and in the process, Bin Laden became a demonic, terrifyingly powerful figure brooding in a cave while he controlled and directed the al-Qaida network throughout the world. In this way, a serious but manageable terrorist threat became grossly exaggerated.
The idea of elegance and aristocratic indulgence of an ocean cruise was born out of the image of the rich men and women who ruled the British Empire slowly sailing to India and the Far East while sipping gin and tonic on deck – served by men in white jackets.
Following the principle that you should know your enemy, the BBC has assiduously recorded the relentless rise of Rupert Murdoch and his assault on the old ‘decadent’ elites of Britain.
I have always been fascinated by the story of Henrietta Lacks.
Of course there are many factors that led to the Iranian revolution, but back in 1951, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company – which would later become BP – and its principal owner, the British government, conspired to destroy democracy and install a western-controlled regime in Iran.
A conveyor belt of Think Tank pundits and allied operatives poured into the TV studios, and together they built a fortress around Mrs. Thatcher’s memory that was rooted in theories about economics. They did this because economics is the only language that wonks understand.
In the battle for Kobane on the Syrian border, everyone talks about the enemy – IS – and the frightening ideas that drive them. No one talks about the Kurdish defenders and what inspires them.
Both individuals and societies tell themselves stories to simplify and make sense of the messy chaos of reality.
Things come and go in the news cycle like waves of fever.
