The Trap

If you have not yet seen Adam Curtis’s 2007 documentary series The Trap now is your chance. All three episodes are included in full, below.

Here Curtis explores what we mean when we talk about Freedom, the ideas of negative and positive liberty, and the strange dichotomy between coercion and it’s apparent opposite.
It’s really interesting stuff whatever political side of the fence you prefer. The concept of freedom lies at the heart of many political ideologies, from the Neoconservatives and the Bush Administration to Anarcho-Communists to New Labour – what differs is how freedom is conceptualised and administered, who that freedom really benefits and what it is actually liberating us from…



2 Comments

  1. Love Adam Curtis, and these are particularly interesting. I suppose the only thing I feel he doesn’t cover here are how these ideas are used more deliberately in terms of psychology and propaganda, but these are further explored in both ‘Century of Self’ and ‘All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace’. He seems at times detached from the misery propagated, and occasionally even sympathetic to a status quo that misinterprets and misreads to the detriment of those they attempt to lead. There is a sense that everybody is trying to do good, but that the results are very bad.

  2. Yeah I get what your saying. A fatalist reading of this is quite possible: nobody is up to the job of leading anybody!


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