Adam Curtis: ''Those in power do not have a vision of future''

Last night famous documentary film-maker & journalist Adam Curtis was a guest in Croatian National Theatre (HNK) as a part of a program called The Philosophical Theatre (Filozofski Teatar) that was established by the Croatian author and philosopher Srećko Horvat.

Through monthly debates, it aims to re-establish the theater as a place of free discourse and the exchange of ideas, not only on the subjects of philosophy and the arts, but politics, sociology, and other global issues. Many distinguished philosophers, authors, and artists were guests at the debates, including Terry Eagleton, Slavoj Zizek, Thomas Piketty, and Julija Kristeva.

'“Those in power know that we are aware they do not know what to do,” Curtis said during a discussion on his latest documentary, “Hypernormalisation” (2016), which talks about a “fake world” built from the 1970s onwards by corporations, governments and financiers.''

HYPERNORMALISATION
“You were so much a part of the system that you were unable to see beyond it.”

 
’Hypernormalisation is titled after a term coined by the Russian-born Berkeley professor Anton Yurchak to describe the dying years of the Soviet Union, when both government and people agreed to jointly pretend that the rotten old Communist system was functioning normally. The film’s core thesis is that, somewhere around the mid-1970s, politicians began to realize the “paralyzing complexity” of modern society was too confusing and alarming for most citizens to grasp. In response, they “constructed a simpler version of the world in order to hang onto power,” spreading propaganda narratives that would eventually come back and explode in their faces.’’
 

Srećko Horvat  & Adam Curtis, source:  Igor Soban/PIXSELL

“Everybody knew that the plan was absurd, and those implementing it absolutely corrupt, but people, due to their lack of vision, accepted it as normal – hypernormal”, said Crutis, and added that we lived in a similar situation today.

“There is no one today in a position of power who has an alternative vision of the future, including China,” he said.

He said that, in spite of the crisis, we should not desire the collapse of the “stuck” western democracies, and named the two possible directions – a technocratic totalitarianism, similar to the current situation in China, or a revival of the democracy, which calls for the return of politics as a noble and moral profession.

“This could happen,” he said, adding that “the politicians today have power, but they don’t know how to use it.”

source: HINA