In the last part of his documentary, Adam Curtis completed his thesis illustrating how a particular idea of freedom (Berlin’s negative freedom) led to the pursuit of over-zealous policies in post-Communist Russia and Iraq.
The idea is fairly cogent; negative liberty, as pursued most vociferously by rigid libertarians, contends that ‘freedom from…’ is more important than ‘freedom to…’ and that the former can result in stable societies. Because of this, all the machines of state control were sold off or disbanded in Iraq.
Whether this is exactly how the US and UK thought I can’t comment on, but in any case the idea that only negative freedom is important is itself warped, especially in the context of promoting a market economy.
Consider that if the rights to transact freely, without interference from anyone (including the state) are to be protected then free markets are permissable. Free markets can then be defended not because of the welfare they generate, but because people should be free to transact. If this were really true, then we would have to justify markets not on grounds of Pareto efficiency, but on antecedent rights. Consequences would have no place in this analysis.
Judgng by the consequences in Iraq, perhaps that’s how the allies really thought, but even hardline liberatrians accept that positive freedom is important; consequences and outcomes matter for people. Thus one can have all the process demanded by negative liberty (and indeed one should), but such a society will rapidly become unstable unless people can actually achieve desired outcomes; there must be some substance to our freedom.
I think Curtis makes two mistakes. Firstly, he doesn’t acknowledge the fact that the mess in Iraq may be because individuals’ negative freedom is still being violated; the ethnic and religious violence perpetrated across the country hardly allows citizens to act without the encroachment of others. The Americans may have focused too much on the process of freedom but that the outcomes didn’t arise may simply be because one central tyrant has been displaced by several hundred more dispersed ones who do an equaly good job of restricting freedom and liberty.
The second point has been picked up by not saussure.
You cannot expect to have any sort of free society without the institutions to run it, and without people’s consent to those institutions — which will only come, if it comes at all, over time as people learn whether or not they can trust them.
That is, freedom does not, cannot possibly equate with the smallest government imagineable and an absence of buy-in. The reason why markets work well in Western Europe is because a legacy of freedom has created institutions and cultural practices that people believe in and that create trust. Trust engenders willing co-operation and that is surely the essence of a market economy.
What I started to wonder as the program ended is, was Curtis’ earlier documentary, The Power of Nightmares, as equally hashed? I found that work more compelling, but did it actually have similar gaps in analysis and reasoning? Would ‘normal’ people find The Trap a consistent and true story?
I’m not sure. TPON relied less on the dubious interpretion of scientific theory, and its equally dubious linkages to genetics and psychiatry. This is where I t hink the The Trap lost it. I think overall, the general idea that The US in particular has tended to promote one kind of freedom at the expense of anoher is probably true; I just don’t think Curtis presented the argument in the most compelling way.
[…] It also explored the ways in which, as Curtis put it, Western anti-Communism had created a ’strange mutant idea that used the techniques of violent revolution to create a world of negative freedom’, and how economic freedom had been used as a form of ’shock therapy’ in both Russia and Iraq, with catastrophic results that were not predicted by those who recommended and implemented it. I’d previously expressed my reservations about this aspect of the programme, and all I can really say is that they were confirmed by watching it and that there’s a very good piece about it at Fixed Point. I would, though, add that Curtis gave a very misleading impression of how privatisation was handled in Russia, in that he completely ignored the way that much of the economy was already effectively in the hands of the private sector before; it was just that then it was called ‘the black market’ and ‘the Russian mafia’ (many of whom were also members of the nomenklatura. Privatisation, to a great extent, was merely a legitimisation of what had already happened, accompanied by a great deal of corruption from which some Western consultants and financial institutions had the good fortune to profit, inadvertently, I’m sure. […]
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