chomsky torrents

Chomsky Torrents

A site I stumbled across a few weeks ago. In their own words: the purpose of this site is to provide a gathering place for torrents with progressive and radical content.

Two documentaries I watched this week:

( corporations & electric cars right this way plz )

With programs like this, it shouldn't come as a surprise that Republicans are trying to cut support for pbs funding. Some on the left suggest that this might not be a bad thing - that PBS has become too dependent on government approval, and as a result their shows have become more conservative-inclined as the time passes, and maybe they should come up with ways to raise money so that they can ignore congressional whims. I don't see how their proposals are at all possible, though, in the current political climate - how would any tax of the sort they suggest get passed?

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bbc documentary: century of self

Just finished watching the BBC documentary The Century of Self. I'd heard most of the ideas before, but not all together and presented and like this. And, do you ever have moments when things just click, and stuff that had been puzzling you forever suddenly makes perfect sense? That's how I felt watching this. It's such a penetrating analysis of American and later British consumer culture, the forces and ideas that moved it, made it what it is today, of why people think like they do, and it had these moments when I was caught short, things that I'd taken for granted revealed to be mostly propaganda.

Watch this if you get the chance. The file quality & graphics aren't the best (they keep on using the same two shots of Freud over and OVER again, and there are these four or five closeups of skyscrapers that make up a quarter of the movie, set to a background of REALLY MENACING music), but I love the way it talks about ideas and how they mutated, can't recommend it highly enough for that.


These quotes are from the conclusion of the series, Eight Men Slipping Wine:

In 1939, Edward Bernays* created a vision of the future world in which the consumer was king. It was at the World's Fair in New York, and Bernays called it DemocroCity. It was one of the earliest and most dramatic portrayals of a consumer democracy, a society in which the needs and desires of the individuals were read and fulfilled by business and the free markets.

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There was this sort of notion that the free market was something that was not guided by ideologies or by political power, it was something that was simply guided by the people's will.

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But in reality, the world fair had been an elaborate piece of propaganda designed by Bernays for his clients, the giant American corporations. Privately, Bernays did not believe that true democracy could ever work. He had been profoundly influenced in this by his uncle's theories of human nature. Freud believed individuals were not driven by rational thought, but by primitive unconscious desires and feelings, and Bernays believed that this meant it was too dangerous to let the masses ever have control over their own lives. Consumerism was a way of giving people the illusion of control while allowing the responsible elite to continue managing society.

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It's not that the people are in charge but that the people's desires are in charge. The people are not in charge, the people exercise no decision-making power in this environment. So democracy is reduced from something which assumes an active citizenry to something that's now increasingly predicated on the idea of the public as passive consumers, the public as people as - essentially that what you're delivering them are doggie-treats.

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There are now growing demands that they [politicians] fulfill a grander vision, that they use the power of government to deal with the problems of growing inequality and the decaying social fabric of the country. But to do this they will have to appeal to the electorate to think outside their own self-interest and this would mean challenging the now-dominant Freudian view of human beings as selfish, instinct-driven individuals, which is a concept of human beings that has been fostered and encouraged by business because it produces ideal consumers. Although we feel we are free, in reality we have become a slave to our own desires. We have forgotten that we can be more than that, that there are other sides to human nature.

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Fundamentally we have two different views of human nature and of democracy. You have the view that people are irrational, that they are bundles of irrational emotions, that comes directly out of Freud, and businesses are very able to respond to that - that's what they have honed their skills doing, that's what marketing is about. Politics must be more than that. Politics and leadership are about engaging the public in a rational discussion and deliberation about what is best and treating people with respect in terms of their rational abilities to judge what is best.


*Edward Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, the founding father of public relations and the main architect of modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion. He seems to have worked with every major US corporation as well as the government.


ETA: Forgot to link the torrent.

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