The Think Tank Archipelago

[prole]

Loves me some Adam Curtis.

 

The curse of TINA

 

The guiding idea at the heart of today's political system is freedom of choice. The belief that if you apply the ideals of the free market to all sorts of areas in society, people will be liberated from the dead hand of government. The wants and desires of individuals then become the primary motor of society.

 

But this has led to a very peculiar paradox. In politics today we have no choice at all. Quite simply There Is No Alternative.

 

That was fine when the system was working well. But since 2008 there has been a rolling economic crisis, and the system increasingly seems unable to rescue itself. You would expect that in response to such a crisis new, alternative ideas would emerge. But this hasn't happened.

 

Nobody - not just from the left, but from anywhere - has come forward and tried to grab the public imagination with a vision of a different way to organise and manage society.

 

It's a bit odd - and I thought I would tell a number of stories about why we find it impossible to imagine any alternative. Why we have become so possessed by the ideology of our age that we cannot think outside it.

[billcoe]

Loves me some Adam Curtis.

 

The curse of TINA

 

Ditto, that was a great link Prole, thanks for sharing it.

[JayB]

Meh.

 

Reminds me of Wolfgang Pauli's response to a proposition in physics that was the so far off the mark that it was off the map. "That's not right. It's not even wrong." Given his audience, it's not surprising that he can call Hayek a monetarist and a technocrat without his readers doing a double take.

 

What's more puzzling is the claim that the rise of Hayek and Friedman brought about the demise of the planned economy. This gets it precisely backwards. It was the demise of the planned economy that brought about the rise of Hayek and Friedman.

 

If, in England for example, Attlee's post-war planning regimen hadn't imploded big-time, and England hadn't generally been circling the drain for three decades prior to the "Winter of Discontent" no one would have remembered who the guy was, nor would anyone have voted for a party who proposed to upset the happy, prosperous, ascendant apple cart that was 1970's England by invoking Hayek's arguments against a system that had worked so well in practice.

 

It's also strange to see someone treat liberalism, in *England* of all places, like the intellectual equivalent of an invasive species that managed to skitter across the beach at some point in the 1950's, and socialist dirigisme as the native stock that got wiped out by the voracious transplant.

 

Very interesting all of the same, in a meta kind of way.

 

 

 

 

[G-spotter]

Nobody - not just from the left, but from anywhere - has come forward and tried to grab the public imagination with a vision of a different way to organise and manage society.

 

[KaskadskyjKozak]

Nobody - not just from the left, but from anywhere - has come forward and tried to grab the public imagination with a vision of a different way to organise and manage society.

 

 

Yeah, that's just what we want/need - another asshole to tell us how to (re)organize society. Hey Prole:

[prole]

The reorganization has been happening, just not in a good way. Need to see those charts again?

[KaskadskyjKozak]

The reorganization has been happening...

 

Your kind always wants to come up with a plan to forcibly "reorganize" backed by thugs running a one-party-show.

 

Whatever stats you dredge up (which are flawed and arguable), only show trends that develop as a result of policies and behaviors in the aggregate, not by some brain-trust of pseudo-intellectual, wanna-be revolutionaries systematically and trying to impose their ideological social world-view on the rest of us.

 

[prole]

Whatever stats you dredge up (which are flawed and arguable), only show trends that develop as a result of policies and behaviors in the aggregate, not by some brain-trust of pseudo-intellectual, wanna-be revolutionaries systematically and trying to impose their ideological social world-view on the rest of us.

 

When you consider the reanimation of market fundamentalism from fringe wacko status it earned as a result of the Great Depression to the dominant mode of thought in policy and social discourse it's pretty clear that's exactly what happened. The growth of the Addams Family think-tank complex is an important part of that history. Yes, struggle is part of that history and the mild extent to which it's been resisted probably accounts for the fact we're not yet living in one of Jay_B's carceral free-trade paradises. The charts simply show how horribly these ideas have failed us.

Edited September 19, 2011 by prole

[j_b]

yeah prole, when are you going to stop imposing your deregulating, privatizing, outsourcing, racing to the bottom, neocon warmongering on the rest of us?

[j_b]

On-going since Saturday:

 

[video:youtube]CzVAw9DvMVA