Wednesday, January 9, 2008

The Century of Self and The Power of Nightmares


We’ve been slowly working our way through these excellent documentaries from the BBC. What do they have to do with Italy? Nothing, but we are gonna mention them anyways. The videos are freely available on the web. They are both BBC documentaries by Adam Curtis. The first documentary, “The Century of Self”, is about “how those in power have used [Sigmund] Freud’s theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in the age of mass democracy.” The second documentary, “The Power of Nightmares”, discusses the similarities in the rise of the Neo-Conservative movement and the radical Islamist movement. In the respective wikipedia pages, scroll down to the bottom to find the links.

The Century of Self (Wikipedia)
- Episode 1, Happiness Machines (video)
- Episode 2, The Engineering of Consent (video)
- Episode 3, There is a Policeman Inside All our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed (video)
- Episode 4, Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering (video)

The Power of Nightmares (Wikipedia)
- Episode 1, Baby It’s Cold Outside (video)
- Episode 2, The Phantom Victory (video)
- Episode 3, The Shadows in the Cave (video)

1 comment:

  1. Cool link. Thanks. Very interesting stuff. I've always been a student of how to get people to work against their best interests. Facinating.

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