Adam Curtis Interview
Published in ‘INTERNATIONAL TIMES 50th Anniversary Edition’ – purchase here
Adam Curtis: I’m sure your magazine has roots in IT and the counterculture, doesn’t it?
Dazed was definitely inspired by the spirit of magazines like IT and OZ. I used to love looking at those archive issues.
Adam Curtis: Those magazine’s recognized that people talked to each other about culture, not about politics any longer. Or the language they used to talk about politics was also in terms of culture. They referenced movies and music, which is where we are now, and we may be at the end of that. I have this theory at the moment which you won’t want to hear as a founder of Dazed & Confused is that the moment in which culture became the discourse, the language, that people talk to each other through…
… your identity becomes bound to it?
Yes. So if you met someone and they said they liked Bowie, you’d think oh yes, I like them or I don’t like people like that. And what died away at that point was people talking to each other about politics, about political parties and trade unions and things like this, which people did used to identify themselves with. And I sometimes wonder whether, actually, this obsession with culture as the thing, has become as stuck and as conformist today as politics was then.
It was anti-conformist because that political discourse seemed so tired.
Adam Curtis: Tired and rigid. And also it made you want to be part of something… you wanted to be more free to choose what you liked. It was the rise of individualism.
Which you talk about in your film Hypernormalisation and you use Patti Smith as the model of that individualism.
Adam Curtis: That’s right. Because Patti Smith… it’s a really interesting book that she wrote (Just Kids) because she describes how people, like Robert Mapplethorpe, didn’t really want to be part of organised movements because it didn’t suit how they felt about themselves. They wanted to express their own dissatisfaction with the system. That really was the central idea because what she would then do is go and create culture that expressed her dissatisfaction. Now of course that united people, they went to her gigs and they bought her albums, but it was very much an expression… Culture became a way of expressing yourself, which then became part of mass marketing. You expressed yourself through your trainers in the 80s and all that stuff. And I just wonder whether we’re maybe at the sort of fag end of that because it’s become everything, hasn’t it? And you are now… And have you noticed how stuck culture has become? They don’t say remake now, they say reboot, so you’re rebooting movies from the 1970s continually.
Everything’s a remake.
Adam Curtis: Yes, exactly. So you, I remember watching that series called ‘Stranger Things’. It’s actually the institutionalization of that thing that grew up in the 90s. Do you remember people coming out of movie houses going… usually coming out of something like Tarantino, going “yeah he’s referencing Jackie Brown or he’s referencing…”
The art world would refer to it as “meta”.
Adam Curtis: They love the word meta, it’s very “meta.” What they mean is “it’s very knowing”. At the moment, you could argue that the moment culture became knowing, it signed it’s own death because it becomes stuck. You endlessly become… It’s a meta thing. You’re constantly meta-ing. And then at which point Hollywood realised that really what meta was about was nostalgia. It’s a posh word for nostalgia.
I spent some time interviewing Patti Smith and what was interesting about her story is that at the height of her success, she opted out of the system and actually went to live in Detroit with Sonic Smith and stopped recording and touring music to raise children. Then she came back into the system in the late 90’s. I met her in the 2000’s. I talked to her about that time and she felt that the culture had sold itself out. Her way of talking about it was very much that they were fighting for a political ideology which was anti-corporate, left, etc but that many of the musicians and artists that she had been connected to had sold themselves out of that system by taking corporate sponsorship and signing to major labels.
Adam Curtis: I’m afraid I don’t buy that, with all due respect to Patti Smith. I think she’s really good. I just don’t buy that because what I think happened if you read her book carefully she describes the shift away from joining political movements, revolutionary ones like Black Panthers, or the SDAs which were the big political movements of the left in the 1960s… By the early 70s they had failed and they ended up all being arrested or sent to jail or blowing themselves up. The shift was, away from that which she describes, towards this idea that I as an individual will be a self-contained expressive being and I will express radically my criticism of the system. What then happened was that she was an earlier doctor of what rose up in the 70s with this idea that I as an individual can do what I want and express what I want. The problem with that is that it’s very difficult to know how to express yourself unless you’re as sophisticated a person as Patti Smith. So what really happened was that out of the economic crisis of the 1970s, consumer capitalism looked round and said, well instead of giving people the same thing so they all look alike, what you’ve got is this new thing, lots of Patti Smiths going “I want to express myself.” And they went, hang on, that means that we can give them lots of different things so that they can express themselves in different ways. At which point, consumer capitalism, and it’s not a conspiracy, it’s just a logical piece of theoretical marketing, they went hang on that means we can make a lot more money, because we’d make a lot more different things and people can then express themselves in different ways. So I’m afraid my argument is that what Patti Smith did was instrumental in helping bring about that the idea that expressing yourself as the most authentic thing you can do became quite early on captured by consumer capitalism because it’s very difficult to know how you do it. And people like Nike and all the marketers behind them took what she did and institutionalised it. And I don’t think, whether bands sell out to corporations or not is totally irrelevant to something much greater happened… which was the institutionalisation of individualism.
As being able to transcend their class.
Adam Curtis: Yes, being able to transcend that. So what values and lifestyle said is okay, let’s segment people by how they feel inside themselves, through the lifestyles they have. And I’m sure that early magazines like the Face spotted that themselves. People wanted to be part of different lifestyle groups and express themselves in that way. And you know, the torn jeans in the early 80s were part of that. They worked it out for you and it’s very kind because if you’re living in, I don’t know, I was born in the suburbs, and you wanted to express yourself, you wanted to find ways of doing it.
You were defined by what you wore and the music that you listened too.
Adam Curtis: Music was absolutely central to how you defined your identity. So class disappeared, culture became it. The godparents of that are people like the Velvet Underground, Patti Smith and early Punk, and I get into a lot of trouble but I think it’s really true, is that both Mrs Thatcher and Punk were on the coattails of something much bigger than either of them, which is this rise of individualism.
Because what I saw when we started Dazed & Confused was that the Face and i-D were at the height of…
Adam Curtis: When did you start?
Early ’90s, and it was just the end of Thatcher. It was the time of the poll tax riots and when we started Dazed & Confused we felt that way of defining ourselves was not valid… It wasn’t about what bands you were into and what you wore, but it was about what you said and what you did. So your actions defined you, not your look and if you didn’t stand for something, you fell for anything. And the weakness of being, of joining a group, of looking the part and acting the part through the assimilation of the clothing and just going to the right gigs, but actually not following through with a belief system was shallow, superficial and passé. What we wanted to do was inject a sense of deeper meaning… our own definition of authenticity into what we felt was inauthentic about those constructs. What I was looking at more was things like Interview magazine or even National Geographic and trying to take this idea of looking at youth culture in a more anthropological way and saying, okay where’s the energy? Who’s doing interesting stuff? How can we get them to interview and actually get them to create the stories? How can we give artists pages? How can we dis-intermediate, break down the barrier between the journalist and the reader? And it’s interesting because it almost feels like that’s become a trap in itself.
Adam Curtis: But you’ve now reached a point where what you started has become quite institutionalised.
Totally, yeah. And now it’s about understanding where things go next or if there is, what are the shifts? How to break out of a state of denial.
Adam Curtis: That’s what I was trying to get at with hyper nominalisation is that actually individualism constantly sends you back on yourself and it always ends up as a trap and the thing is how you transcend the prison of the self. I think that’s the next project whilst still feeling that you are an individual.
So I made this book and I wanted to give it to you as a present and it’s called ‘We Can’t Do This Alone” and the idea is really a return to an understanding that we have a collective responsibility or instinct. The title is called ‘Hack the System’, it’s a sort of play on my name, but the manifesto of that is that to stand apart from the system and just look at it and point at it and go, it’s broken and we’re gonna create an alternative utopia or alternative. Unless you have a very strong idea of what that is, it just creates a power vacuum for that system to grow stronger. And one of the points that I’m making is to actually work inside the system and change the system from within. So taking a hacker culture mentality of rewiring and re routing a system so that it can be a better version of itself… is about getting really stuck in and fundamentally understanding what it is.
Adam Curtis: Well, understanding power. That’s what you need to do. In hyper nominalisation I actually went back to the early hacker culture in the late 80s.
One of my favourite magazines in the early 90s was Mondo 2000. I remember seeing Terrance McKenna lecture at the LSE. It’s that connection that you made between LSD culture and the ideology of how those early thinkers like John Perry Barlow really felt that the internet was gonna bring a shift in consciousness.
Adam Curtis: Yeah it really is the concept. The people I was really interested in though, were the people who challenged that. In the pages of Mondo 2000 were these early, quite ruthless hackers who said this is rubbish. The merging computer networks were run by giant corporations and that, much as there is this nice little world, you are within their domain. And I think the hacker culture should be reassessed because what you’ve got now is exactly what my heroes pointed out.
Which are who?
Adam Curtis: One was called (19:12) Phreak and the other one was called Fibre Optic. And I just think they were so right because they were saying to people like John Perry Barlow, this is just a dream that you’ve got. You’re in a play world designed by a bunch of very giant corporations and who’s to say they were wrong? Look at where we now are. Facebook as I’m sure you know is the most dominant source of all information, people feel that they’re free but actually they are playing a game set by the algorithms of the coders who work to those corporations.
It was funny I remember talking to Malcolm McClaren about this in the late 90s, ’97-98 in an interview, and he referred to it as a “casino of authenticity”. And he really had this very clear vision that the stacks, the new internet platforms, were so gamified that they were like casinos and they were giving you the hits, the validation, the sense of connection. You’re getting the dopamine hit in this temperature controlled Las Vegas of the mind.
Adam Curtis: Yeah that’s exactly what these things are. And you constantly come back. Haven’t you noticed everyone is constantly like this? (Bows his head) It’s no different and he’s absolutely right but I buy your idea of working from within the system because what’s fascination about the internet at the moment, social media especially, is it has worked out how to deal with individualism. Political parties can’t deal with individualism because it’s like herding piglets. You can’t get them to join anything, at which point you just give up. Social media networks are brilliant because they let you feel that you’re an individual as you scroll down your news feed… but actually you’re being ruthlessly managed. A coder goes, oh if Jefferson likes that then he’ll probably like that. And they actually are quite similar to each other, this is the truth we don’t like to know about, but the computers know this. It’s so powerful that there must be some way of hacking it, yeah, and using it to breakthrough? At the moment what they do is they segment us, but I suspect that people are getting bored of that.
Well we’re starting to see it now. There’s a new informed cynicism about the filter bubble, the echo chamber. It was just surprising how long it took for people to wake up to that. I mean you’ve been talking about it a long time, Malcolm McLaren, many people have been talking about, you know, the obvious self-reflective, echo chamber of news and so forth… Why do you think it took so long for people to wake up to it?
Adam Curtis: Because it’s lovely, it’s magical. You can actually spend your time with people like yourself/ It’s beautiful because what it does, what social media did, is it squared the circle. The problem for politics and managing society is you can’t get all those piglets to do what they’re supposed to do because they’re running all over the hillside and you can’t get them together. Facebook puts them all together and puts them all together in a way that allows them to still feel that they’re little piglets doing what they want to do. Whereas actually the computer looks at them, the code looks at them, and says no they’re sheep really. And just like sheep, they are all behaving in exactly the same way, but it lets them feel they’re individuals, and that’s brilliant. It’s beautiful. Because actually what you end up with is talking to people like yourself… It’s like being at a lovely party where everyone agrees with you. But people are bored with it because it’s repetitive. People don’t like repetition, people like narrative. We’re born, we live, we die. That’s hardwired into us and there’s no narrative on the internet and what people want is a story, that’s what Brexit and that’s what Trump is all about, they just want to break out of this repetition. They didn’t have much to do to be honest, they were given a button that said ‘fuck off’ and they pressed it. There is a growing dissatisfaction on a grander scale, you can feel it, can’t you? It’s beginning with a cynicism and a knowingness but it’s also a boredom with it.
Part of where I got to with my thinking with it was a sense of spiritual hopelessness. Because hyper individualisation and also mixed with an idea of entitlement, plus large amount of drugs in the system, has lead people to a place where there is a lack of self. They’ve just kind of… the core of self has just been eaten out and that spiritual hopelessness has created an exacerbated reaction to what used to be a normal amount of fear. So people now can’t handle anything that looks or feels out of their control. I really think is one of the missing ingredients in positive change is how to bring a sense of spiritual belonging or spiritual value without being religious or being cultist about it. It’s got to come from a sense of a belief in something greater than yourself.
Adam Curtis: Something you give yourself over too.
And I think all that kind of early youth culture, my memory of early youth culture was yes it was about rebelling, but really it was about wanting to belong to something that was bigger than me.
Adam Curtis: I think drugs are really interesting because they’re everywhere in our culture. Most people have tried drugs at various points.
I think the satistic is 75% of Americans are on at least one prescribed drug? And 50% of them are on more than two?
Adam Curtis: Yeah, we never really look at what they all meant, and I think that if you look at how drug use has changed with the rise of the self… It starts off with trying to explore the self which is LSD. Then as you begin to realise that you’ve got to invent the self, which is the end of the 70s – you’ll all be free individuals but what is the self? You get things like cocaine which give you the fake self. And you end up… I remember in the 80s sitting in bars listening to people just talking absolute bollocks about themselves. But what they were doing was inventing a confident self for themselves. Then when that begin to fail, you get things like MDMA which allow you to free yourself from the self and you just become a happy self And you just sort of float around and you love everything and it’s sort of safe, you’re not in the heroin bubble, you’re open to experiences. But then that begins to fail because these get quite dark and frightening at which point you get things like Ketamine where you literally try and obliterate the self. And really what we’re talking about here is its very exhausting to be on your own, and frightening as an individual, and trapped by your own desires because there are other ideas of freedom. The old idea of freedom is that actually, just being an individual is not free, you’re trapped by the narrowness of your own desires. You learn nothing else except what’s inside your own head.
And all you end up hearing is a louder echo of the voice in your own head…
Adam Curtis: Yes. So you’ve got these things constantly attacking these voices in your head and you want to free yourself. And I look at Ketamine like that, it really is an attempt to obliterate all that. I think you’re absolutely right, I think it’s gonna come from some kind of religious idea because it’s got to be this idea… I don’t know quite what shape it’s gonna take but it’s going to be one where you surrender yourself to something, you lose yourself in something, but at the same time you still feel you’re an individual. You can’t put individualism back in the box, the genie is out of the bottle. And it’s got to be those two things put together. Social media did it for a bit, it gave you this illusion that you’re in control but actually it was managing you, and it became stuck and it’s repetitive and it increasingly wants to make you angry because anger keeps you engaged. I think people are getting tired of that. I think the whole idea of surrendering yourself to something that transcends your own individualism which will go on beyond you is interesting. I think one of the most interesting areas to look at is what’s happened to love in our age. The old idea of love was that you literally surrendered yourself to someone, you jumped into the void and you gave yourself up to this person that you loved. Now love is increasingly seen as a sort of negotiation between two individuals. It’s very nice, but it’s a narrowing of the idea because you don’t give yourself up completely. You’re still part of it, you’re still in control.
Yeah, surrender appears as such a weakness.
Adam Curtis: Surrender seems a weakness, yes, but actually maybe surrender is a strength. The old religious phrase about freedom was “in whose service is perfect freedom” because you lose that trap, the cage of your own desires and you become part of something bigger and you learn something more. And this is all forgotten in the age of the self but, just to go back to drugs and what you were talking about, I can see that it’s gonna come because we’re getting fed up with it. That’s what I think.
Have you seen it played out in any shape, in novels or art or personal experience?
Adam Curtis: No I don’t think art is the place. I think art’s got stuck in the idea of self-expression. I think the problem for art is that, in an age where consumer capitalism has embraced the idea of self-expression, it’s very difficult not to move outside the system…
So, not talking about the art market, but talking about artists as society’s true seekers or as the poets or as the ones who are most likely to be the agitators, the ones that are most likely to hold a mirror up to society… surely that’s a good place to start to look for clues.
Adam Curtis: Well I’ll tell you where I see it. This is not really art. I think art is so self conscious at the moment, so meta, that it can’t let go and see it. The thing I’m really fascinated by at the moment is conspiracy theories on the internet. I’m fascinated by things like the whole thing about Britney Spears being brainwashed by Walt Disney and the CIA, do you know about all this stuff?
No!
Adam Curtis: The illuminati are really behind her. It’s just weird.
I really want to believe it though. It’s a compelling story.
Adam Curtis: Lots of people between the ages of 17 and 23 do. The story is basically that the Mouseketeers, the Disney club, brainwash people like Britney Spears along with the CIA and the illuminati, but the brainwashing only works for a bit which is why six years later they always go mad, like Britney does. But what I’m really saying is that these things.
It’s sort of Sleeping Beauty meets Jason Bourne. I love it.
Adam Curtis: Yeah. But what these things are about… and there are hundreds of conspiracy theories and things now… I mean Trump was one of them as well. It’s about trying to re-enchant the world. Make it mysterious and enchant it again, yes? Because the system of management that we have at the moment is so super rational, super measured outcomes, all the managerial stuff that you must have to deal with… I do it with the BBC all the time.
Targets.
Adam Curtis: Targets. All politics is about rational targeting and about the wellness of a society and how you can measure it. What’s disappeared is the acknowledgement that we know very little about the world and there are large chunks of the world…
That everybody’s, “making it up as they go along’.
Adam Curtis: Exactly.
Including everybody in charge. How do you describe the times we live in?
Adam Curtis: We are living through the collapse of the liberal project to manage the world in a rational way. The films I make are charting this, and I include in that not just the traditional liberal things but also the new right that rose up in the 80s. They thought you could also manage society. They looked at economics as the solution to manage the sytsem, and you can’t do it. The great sweep of history we are living through is the collapse of that.
And now this example of Surkov in Russia, he’s sort of mismanaging to manage, he’s using stage management tactics to create illusionary politics – that’s now the new form of political management.
Adam Curtis: What Surkov does is he pushes it one level further. He buys up political parties to pretend they’re the opposition, which means the opposition vote gets split and then Putin will be in power. But what’s brilliant is he then tells everyone and says what he’s doing, which means that if you’re an ordinary Russian, you’ve got absolutely no idea whether the party you’re going to vote for is a true party or a fake party. At which point you really do mess with people’s brains. In Surkov there’s not a glimpse of the future but the transition we’re heading towards. What Surkov is saying is you can make the world the way you want it to be. He’s saying, I’m doing this, at which point you’re dazed and confused right, you don’t know what the fucks going on. But as soon as people realise on a grand scale that you can make the world any way you want it to be and if they find a way of coming together then they will make the world.
There’s this idea of accelerationism there – the more insane it gets at one point there’s a break through. Hitting a moment of transcendence through to another reality, there’s a wake up call.
Adam Curtis: We’re living through that period of acceleration and what I was gently trying to hint at in Hypernormalisation is that just as the Soviet Union’s project collapsed in the 80s into a sort of strange, knowing corruption and confusion, we may be living through that same version now.
Just slightly slower.
Adam Curtis: Slightly slower. But it’s speeding up now.
I sort of feel like through 2018, 2018 is going to probably feel a little bit like 68.
Adam Curtis: Let’s see which way it goes. We don’t know.
That’s my hypothesis.
Adam Curtis: You’re hoping!
I’m not hoping! Good music was made, and there was a lot of protests and a lot of anger, but there was a change in consciousness and a shift in power. There was a momentary shift in power. Power was threatened.
Adam Curtis: There was a massive shift in consciousness among lots of people, ahead of their time, who wanted to be themselves as individuals. That was the big thing that happened. That was the beginning of the counterculture and we’re at the end of it now, I’m sorry. What you wouldn’t have known in 1967, let’s say 1962, was that you felt things were special but you wouldn’t have known which way it was going to go. We don’t know which way it’s going to go now, but I agree with you.
Let’s fast forward Hypernormalisation – what happens when it goes to the next stage? Let’s say AI takes on hyper normalisation and we get 20 years of unchecked consumer culture, runaway income division, doesn’t have to be 20 years could be the next 4 years of a Trump presidency.
Adam Curtis: Or it could break. What you and I have just been talking about is a growing sense of dissatisfaction, not just with particular things, but something likened to that. A dissatisfaction with the way the world feels. It feels odd. We live in an age where we are encouraged and have learnt to talk about our feelings and that was glorious because we grew more confident, but now we’ve still got all those feelings and we feel that that world where we encouraged to talk about feelings is closing in, becoming unreal, odd and sometimes a bit fake. We feel it. Therefore we are dissatisfied. Now, someone will come along in some form or another and offer an explanation, or they may not. The pessimistic view is you get the rise of AI or what they call artificial intelligence. Very complex, predictive systems, in which we increasingly as human beings become simplified. It’s sort of happening already. I don’t believe this idea that robots are going to take over from us, I think the opposite is happening. We’re being turned into simplified, flip flop switches. We’re nodes, in a very complex system of information, shaped by algorithms, that says “Adam do this. If you like this, do this”. Flip flop flip flop flip flop. We learn to do it. We become simplified and we just get rid of the system. Maybe that’s the future and we’re little managed nodes, right?
I had a touch of that when I went to see a Korean K-Pop concert a couple of weeks ago. It’s very managed. The audience’s relationship to the K pop star, the K pop process, it’s a hyper exaggerated version of your Britney conspiracy.
Adam Curtis: You’re just a managed thing. You’re a part of a system.
The other view of the future is what you were talking about is that someone comes along with a story about the future which you want to literally be part of and you want to surrender yourself to it. One of the reasons we’re so suspicious of that, and especially liberals are so suspicious of that, is because look what happened last time we did that. It was called Soviet Communism and then totalitarianism. It’s really powerful but it’s really dangerous. People can go that way, and it can be really dangerous because you unleash a power. But it’s also thrilling and it’s also the way you change the world. The real problem at the moment with individualism is that if you are just an individual, if you’re just Patti Smith expressing her dissatisfaction, however sincerely about the system, you’re not powerful. You’re just not. You’re only powerful if you come together in a big group then you can challenge it. Collective action is the key to all this thing. But to do that it’s really dangerous.
And it takes total commitment.
Adam Curtis: You have to give yourself up to it. The one I always hold out is the civil rights movement in the 50s. Young white activists went down to the Southern States and for 10 years near on, they gave themselves up to something and worked again and again and again at something. They really did that. I contrast that with, do you remember the March through London in 2003, against the Iraq war. Everyone walked along with that slogan that said “Not in my name”. Arch, individualistic protest. They all went home and went, “Well it’s not my war any longer”, and had a chai latte. And did nothing else, and the war happened.
Hashtag protest.
Adam Curtis: There you’ve got your vertu signifier of how it happens.
Do you feel there are any contemporary philosophers who are providing some vision.
Adam Curtis: It won’t come out of philosophy, it will come out of somebody who tells you a story. A politician. It really will.
So it won’t come from a philosophical narrative, a new kind of language, it’ll come from something more visceral.
Adam Curtis: And fear. We live in a world of fear – you go to a bar on Friday night. Everyone’s talking about their feelings. What they felt about him, what you think she feels about her. It’s all feelings. It’s got to be a feeling. But it’s also got to have a coherent picture of the future, that you want to give yourself up to but where you can still feel you’re an individual. The person who does that is going to really change everything. I think there’s a desire for change, I’m optimistic. I don’t think it is going to be 20 years of Hypernormalisation I think what I was trying to chart in there is how we’ve got there and it’s beginning to fade.
It’s interesting because watching Hypernormalisation made me immediately want to watch The Trap and then back to The Century of the Self. Because it’s all one work. It started with Freud, and what was interesting about Freud and Edward Bernays. Actually the ideological shift between Freud and Jung is interesting I wonder if maybe some of the answer comes in some of Jung’s theories, which is more collective more spiritual, more non western, less managed, more LSD, less cocaine inspired than Freuds.
Adam Curtis: I don’t think it’s going to come out of Jung himself but you’re quite right. The freudian thing is all about the individual. It’s all in your head. Everything now stems from Bernays. It comes from marketing, control, advertising – And what are the triggers of our feelings. People in my circle have taken it to such a level that they tell you what they’re doing which makes you even more confused. So we may be at the end of that, and yes obviously something collective has got to turn up, but it won’t be like what we thought of before. It just won’t.
It won’t be a new version of Occupy
.
Adam Curtis: Well look what happens with Occupy. They confuse process with ideas. They got obsessed with how you manage a revolution without leaders. Which is a noble idea.
It’s very interesting that you say that because 90% of my conversations whether they’re creative, whether they’re about creating new projects, doing new things, everyone’s like what’s the process? No no, it’s the idea that’s important. The process will find itself.
Adam Curtis: It’s the rise in managerialism.
I’m trying to tap into who the real truth-seekers are, who are asking the big questions. Who do you think stands out in the culture as being a true provocateur or perhaps as someone who is shining a light on how things really are?
Adam Curtis: I think we’re living through a period where you’ve got the collapse of something, of certainties, and the people who express it best are those who express it in their confusions.
The polite answer would be find some artist or musician, the real truth and people who I find are telling are people like Donald Trump. Because really what Donald Trump is, he’s what in posh terms would be called a comedic character. He holds up a distorted mirror, which in an exaggerated way, shows to us liberals what kind of world we have actually created and we have tried to pretend is not there. The world that has given us Brexit and Trump is as much a part of the nice world we have lived through for the last 30 years as the nice world we know. We are part of it and we are as responsible for creating it as is Donald Trump – therefore he’s like a strange, in a way he’s quite inspiring because he’s broken through and shown us something, in this comedic way. Another person, is Colonel Gaddafi. He again is like a comedic character. He shows you dramatically just how hypocritical, corrupt and quite frankly venal, so many of the professional middle classes of this country have become. I am very tempted to make a musical out of him. He shines a searchlight on the total fakeness on so `much of the liberal thinking in this country. Britain, I’m talking about. Those are the people who I find most inspiring, a journalist – you look for a story that brings it alive. I don’t want to go and be some philosopher who wiffles about it, I want some story that tells me the truth. In his own weird way Donald Trump told us a truth which we just didn’t want to hear.
Were you surprised?
Adam Curtis: I was incredibly surprised by the liberal reaction, which sort of confirmed to me that Donald Trump is a comedic character because my idea was the reaction to both Brexit and Trump amongst the liberals, it was their Princess Diana moment. They just started crying. That’s not enough. It’s totally pathetic. Then they started saying “this is what happens when you let democracy be in the hands of stupid people”, and you go, No. You’re stupid. You lost the election.
Published in ‘INTERNATIONAL TIMES 50th Anniversary Edition’ – purchase here