The Trap - Episode 2 - The Lonely Robot

Part two reiterated many of the ideas of the first part, but developed the theme that drugs such as Prozac and lists of psychological symptoms which might indicate anxiety or depression were being used to normalise behaviour and make humans behave more predictably, like machines. This was not presented as a conspiracy theory, but as a logical (although unpredicted) outcome of market-driven self-diagnosis by check-list based on symptoms, but not actual causes, discussed in part one. People with standard mood fluctuations diagnosed themselves as abnormal. They then presented themselves at psychiatrist s offices, fulfilled the diagnostic criteria without offering personal histories, and were medicated. The alleged result is that vast numbers of Western people have had their behaviour and mental activity modified by SSRIs without any strict medical necessity. The episode also showed a clip of a fight in a Yanomami village from the film The Ax Fight by Napoleon Chagnon and Tim Asch. According to Chagnon the fight is an example of the impact of kin selection on humans, since the people fighting chose sides on the basis of kinship. Curtis interviews Chagnon and puts to him the assertion of fellow anthropologist Brian Ferguson that much of the Yanamamo violence, particularly its intensity, was very strongly influenced by the presence of Westerners handing out goods which the tribesmen fought over; in this case the goods were highly prized and useful machetes. Chagnon, however, insists that his presence had had no influence whatsoever on the situation, citing the fact that similar fights happened when he wasn t present, which he also documented through informants. Curtis asked, You don t think a film crew in the middle of a fight in a village has an effect? Chagnon replied, No, I don t, and immediately stopped the interview. Footage of Richard Dawkins propounding his gene-centered view of evolution is shown, with archive clips spanning two decades to emphasise how the severely reductionist ideas of programmed behaviour have slowly been absorbed by mainstream culture. (Later, however, the documentary gives evidence that cells are able to selectively replicate parts of DNA dependent on current needs. According to Curtis, such evidence detracts from the simplified economic models of human beings.) This brings Curtis back to the economic models of Hayek and the game theories of the Cold War. Curtis explains how, with the robotic description of mankind apparently validated by geneticists, the game theory systems gained even more currency with society s engineers. The programme describes how the Clinton administration gave in to market theorists in the US and how New Labour in the UK decided to measure everything it could by introducing such arbitrary and unmeasurable targets as: Reduction of hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa by 48% Reduction of global conflict by 6% It also introduced a rural community vibrancy index in order to gauge the quality of life in Britain s villages and a birdsong index to measure the apparent decline of wildlife. In industry and public services, this way of thinking led to a plethora of targets, quotas and plans. It was meant to set workers free to achieve these targets in any way they chose. What the government did not realise was that the players, faced with impossible demands, would cheat. Curtis describes how, in order to meet arbitrary targets: Lothian and Borders Police reclassified dozens of criminal offences as suspicious occurrences in order to keep them out of crime figures; Some NHS hospital trusts created the unofficial post of The Hello Nurse, [8] whose sole task it was to greet new arrivals in order to claim for statistical purposes that the patient had been seen , even though no treatment or examination took place during the encounter; NHS managers took the wheels off trolleys and reclassified them as beds, while simultaneously reclassifying corridors as wards, in order to falsify Accident & Emergency waiting times statistics. In a section called The Death of Social Mobility , Curtis describes how the theory of the free market was applied to education. In the UK, the introduction of school performance league tables was intended to give individual schools more power and autonomy, to enable them to compete for pupils, the theory being that it would motivate the worst-performing schools to improve; it was an attempt to move away from the rigid state control that had offered little choice to parents while failing to improve educational standards, and towards a culture of free choice and incentivisation, without going as far as privatising the schools. Following publication of the school league tables, wealthier parents moved into the catchment areas of the best schools, causing house prices in those areas to rise dramatically—ensuring that poor children were left with the worst-performing schools. This is just one aspect of a more rigidly stratified society which Curtis identifies in the way in which the incomes of working class Americans have actually fallen in real terms since the 1970s, while the incomes of the middle class have increased slightly, and those of the highest one percent of earners (the upper class) have quadrupled. Similarly, babies in the poorest areas in the UK are twice as likely to die in their first year as children from prosperous areas. Curtis ends part two with the observation that game theory and the free market model is now undergoing interrogation by economists who suspect a more irrational model of behaviour is appropriate and useful. In fact, in formal experiments the only people who behaved exactly according to the mathematical models created by game theory are economists themselves, and psychopaths.