societies have become split and polarised,
not just in politics, but across the whole culture.
There is anger at the inequality and the ever-growing corruption
and a widespread distrust of the elites.
Yet, at the same time, there is a paralysis,
a sense that no-one knows how to escape from this.
Even in America, where there is now hope with the new president,
there are also fears that, despite the growing crisis,
the system will just return to normal.
This paralysis is also fuelled by a technology, driven by the aim
of giving you today another version of what you had yesterday...
..and never a different tomorrow.
These films are a history of how we got to this place
across the world that have led to now,
not just in the West, but in China and Russia as well.
And they are told in a different way.
They are an emotional history of what went on inside the heads
of all kinds of people.
Because in the age of the individual,
what you felt and what you wanted and what you dreamed of
were going to become the driving force across the world.
what happened when those hopes and dreams and uncertainties
inside people's minds met the much older forces of power.
Often power that was decaying
and desperate to keep its ascendancy.
These strange days did not just happen -
# Each day I walk along this lonely street
# Trying to find
# Find a future
# New pair of shoes are on my feet
# Cos fashion is my only culture
# Nothing ever change
# Oh, no
# Nothing ever change
# I'm just living in a life without meaning
# I walk and walk
# Do nothing
# I'm just living in a life without feeling
# I talk and talk
# Say nothing
# Nothing ever change
# Oh, no
# Nothing ever change. #
SONG FADES OUT
In the late 1950s, as the British Empire was falling apart,
there was a growing sense that something was badly wrong
under the surface.
It was a feeling of unease, that despite all the reforms
after the Second World War and the welfare state,
the old forms of power had not gone away.
And neither had the violence and the corruption
that had always been a part of that power.
The court opens with the traditional reading of names
and the wide experience available to the bank as apparent.
Mr Cobbold, Mr Minors,
Sir Charles Hambro...
Senior director...
The bankers in the City of London
had been at the very heart of the Empire.
In 1958, two of the most powerful of them,
Lord Kindersley and William Keswick,
..Lord Kindersley...
Chairman of Rolls-Royce, merchant banker.
..Mr Keswick...
Hudson's Bay Company and Far Eastern merchant.
The evidence against them was very strong.
But when Keswick was shown the evidence, he dismissed it
with a phrase that became notorious.
"It is difficult," he said,
"to remember conversations one has whilst shooting on a grouse moor."
A government inquiry said the two men were obviously innocent.
At the same time, reports had started to come back
from one of the last parts of the Empire - Kenya -
that seemed to show that those in charge had gone out of control.
They had been fighting a liberation movement called the Mau Mau.
The report said that hundreds of thousands of Kenyans had been put
into special camps, where they were going to be
psychologically adjusted.
The British were trying to manipulate
what their chief psychologist called the "African mind".
But what then happened in the camps turned into a frenzied madness.
The British used mass torture and killing
as they desperately tried to hold on to power.
The government in London denied all the accusations,
but the rumours of violence and horror continued.
ORGAN MUSIC PLAYS
But what had also not gone away was the fear and hatred
inside the minds of many of the British of the "others",
the people the British had ruled over
who were now coming to what they had been told was the homeland.
Now, listen carefully to this Indian's conversation
with a white barber when he entered a saloon with a BBC radio microphone
in his pocket.
BARBER: No! INDIAN MAN: What's the matter?
No!
Is there anything wrong?
Yes! What is it? I said no.
But I'd like to know what is the matter. I'm closed.
There's another half an hour... Well, I'm closed now.
But you didn't put the closed sign outside on the window, did you?
Will you clear off?
Look, if you give me any reason why, what is the matter,
then I shall go if you tell me...
I've told you - I'm closed!
You're not closed.
You're not... You're not closed yet.
Well, I am - to you.
Those who came from the Empire to Britain
were shocked by the strange country they found.
Michael de Freitas had come from Trinidad.
He had grown up with a picture of a strong and confident homeland
at the centre of the Empire.
Instead, what he found was, what seemed to him,
a sad and frightened country.
You must remember that, that when we came to this country,
we were not travelling to a foreign country.
We were taught, I was taught when I was a young man,
that my country, Trinidad, was an extension of this one.
We were weaned on the concept of the Empire.
When I was a young boy, I stood in 90 degrees of sun
day after day and sang all kinds of silly things
like God Save The Queen, Land of Hope and Glory,
"Britannia rule the waves",
with the greatest of fervour and believed every word of it.
but in actual fact, we weren't wanted
has been a very shattering blow.
Many people in this country who think that we are very hateful
are so wrong.
You see, this is the great mystery.
When you came here, you say you found you weren't wanted.
Why, then, did you stay?
Why did you choose to stay here?
This was the heartland of the whole thing
and one hoped against hope that what one saw was not right.
MUSIC: Song for Zula by Phosphorescent
# Some say love is a burning thing
# That it makes a fiery ring
# Oh, but I know love as a fading thing
# Just as fickle as a feather in a stream
# See, honey, I saw love
# You see it came to me
# It puts its face up to my face so I could see
# Yeah, then I saw love disfigure me
# Into something I am not recognising
# See the cage, it called
# I said, "Come on in"
# I will not open myself up this way... #
Mao Zedong's wife was going mad.
She was called Jiang Qing.
She lived alone, surrounded by pet monkeys
and nurses, who she was convinced were conspiring against her.
Those in charge of the revolution in China
had completely marginalised her.
She was too dangerous, they thought, to be allowed anywhere
near her husband or power.
They had even sent her to Moscow to be locked in a sanatorium
with real and imagined illnesses.
But now Jiang Qing's husband was facing disaster.
The revolution had led to horror.
30 million people had died from starvation
in the past three years.
The other leaders wanted to get rid of him.
And suddenly, he called for her.
CALMING MUSIC PLAYS
Jiang Qing was an extraordinary person.
She believed in nothing except the power of her will to shape reality.
SHE SINGS
She had begun as an actor in films in Shanghai in the 1930s.
The other actors looked down at her for her driving ambition.
SHE GROANS
She liked to be on the top, always.
She's a very ambitious woman and she liked to be top
and she plays with the, you know,
with all the directors, cameramen,
make them...make them, you know, pay attention, you see,
and the interest in her
so she can have a better part of the film.
THEY SPEAK CHINESE
She married a quite famous writer called Tang Na
and after married, she doesn't feel
very satisfied by her husband
because her husband is not the very, very strong man.
And she left him and he jumped to the river,
and then the water was very cold, so he jump up again, you see?
So... You mean he tried to commit suicide?
Yes, he's trying to commit...commit suicide.
After the suicide attempt,
Jiang Qing wrote a long letter to her husband.
It said she was leaving him
and also explained why with an extraordinary openness.
There were powerful forces inside her, she said,
that kept driving her towards fame and power
and it was only those forces that held her together psychologically.
"Nothing must hold them back."
It ended, "What matters is that you remember me
"as a woman who never caves in before anyone
"and who will never bear to be treated as inferior to men."
But Jiang Qing failed to become a star.
The men who ran the studios scorned her ambition.
Her most famous part was as a supporting actor in a film
called Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain.
HOWLING
The star of the film was called Li Lili.
THEY SCREAM
Jiang Qing was convinced that Li
was trying to upstage her all the time
and she became the focus of all Jiang Qing's anger
over her treatment by the Shanghai establishment.
MUSIC: Hua Yang De Nian Hua by Zhou Xuan
on a remote mountain in Yan'an.
The camp was an intense, exciting place
and many of the young revolutionaries had affairs.
Sex was called "undisciplined guerrilla warfare".
But when Jiang Qing started an affair with the leader, Mao Zedong,
that was different.
She was scorned by the other revolutionaries
as a social-climbing upstart.
Then it got worse.
Mao announced that he was going to divorce his wife
and marry Jiang Qing.
The other communist leaders were horrified.
They saw Jiang Qing as a dangerous, destructive force
because she was driven by a fierce radical individualism
that threatened their collective dream.
In the communist structure, everyone was part of a unit.
She insisted, "I am a unit of one."
No-one could work out what to do.
They even went and asked Stalin in Moscow for his advice.
He said, "Let them marry.
"But Jiang Qing must sign a document promising to refrain
"from political activity for 30 years."
BELL TOLLS
She signed, but she was furious with the men who now controlled her.
They even tracked down and destroyed prints of her old films
because they didn't fit with the image of Mao's wife.
Her fury grew.
Jiang Wing wanted power on her own behalf,
as an individual.
And she wanted revenge.
Now, 20 years later, in 1959, Mao was facing disaster
and he was calling for her.
GUNSHOT, GIRL SCREAMS
GUNSHOT
BOY: You're dead, you're dead!
In America, the idea of individualism
had become central to the politics of the Cold War...
MAN: What are you, bulletproof?
Get out from behind that tree.
..because it was what defined the United States
against the collective ideology of Russia.
At the heart of it was the picture of a strong, confident individual
living an independent life in the new giant suburbs
outside the old cities.
My gun won't shoot that far.
GUNSHOT
But there was a weakness,
because the people in the suburbs were alone.
And in their isolation, away from the old communities,
they started to become fearful and lost.
Out of these fears came a paranoia
that was fuelled by groups on the extreme right,
like the John Birch Society.
ALL: ..and to the republic, for which it stands,
one nation under God, indivisible...
They said that the American government had been taken over
by hidden groups, controlled by the communists.
And at the end of the 1950s, a theory spread like wildfire
through the suburbs that President Eisenhower himself
had really been put into power by the communists.
"He is a dedicated, conscious agent of the Russians,"
the head of the John Birch Society said.
"That conclusion is based on detailed evidence so extensive
"that it is beyond any reasonable doubt."
But this paranoia was not a new thing.
An influential political scientist called Richard Hofstadter
published an article that caused a sensation.
He said that there had always been a dark paranoia
built into America from the very start.
The first settlers had come from Europe to America
to flee from the corruption of power in the Old World.
But although they had got away from the old power,
they hadn't got away from their suspicious minds,
and alone, out in the vast wilderness of the new America,
that led them to imagining dark, hidden conspiracies
in their own government, far away in Washington.
One of the first of these, in the early 19th century,
said that a secret group from Europe,
called the Bavarian Illuminati,
In reality, the Illuminati had been a utopian movement
who wanted to replace religion with reason.
But instead, they now became the first of a series
of frightening suspicions that fed off the isolation
of the settlers in the New World.
"The paranoia in the suburbs," Hofstadter said,
"is just part of a much larger darkness
"built into the very structure of America itself
"that was feeding, yet again,
But in the same suburbs, there was a new movement rising up
that was going to confront and challenge these fears.
It was driven by a radical individualism that said
that you as an individual can shape the world the way you want it to be,
not accept what the dark fears tell you it is.
It would be one of the main foundations
of the counterculture movement
that was going to spread throughout the West.
But now, it was just beginning,
born out of odd moments across the suburbs of California.
One night, Kerry Thornley went with his friend Greg Hill
to a bowling alley.
They started to discuss reality.
Thornley insisted that there was a fixed order to the universe,
but Greg said that the universe was chaos and it was human thought
that projected an order onto the chaos.
Sitting around in a bowling alley in 1958, to be exact,
somewhere in the vicinity of Whittier, California,
and we were discussing philosophy
and we were talking about order and chaos.
Greg's theory was that order was projected on the universe,
that order was entirely in perception and had nothing to do
with what was going on out there in a completely chaotic universe.
Thornley was inspired by this, and together he and Greg Hill decided
to set up a movement dedicated to the idea of chaos.
They called it Discordianism.
Underlying it was the belief that individuals had the power
inside themselves to bring order and meaning to the chaos,
not the old systems of power that created the fear and suspicion.
But then an extraordinary coincidence happened
that was going to lead Thornley back towards that darkness in America.
Thornley was sent to do service with the Marines,
and at the camp, he met another recruit
who seemed to embody the figure of the free, independent individual
he so admired because he refused to bow to the power of the officers.
He was called Lee Harvey Oswald...
..and they became close friends.
Thornley had read the novels of Ayn Rand
and he decided he was going to write a novel
with Oswald as the central figure, a hero of this new age.
But then, suddenly, Oswald defected to the Soviet Union
and things became very strange.
It seemed that the reality outside
was even more chaotic than he had imagined.
It was really a weird experience for me
because I was writing this novel based on Oswald.
When Oswald defected to the Soviet Union, I decided to write a novel
about a Marine who becomes disenchanted with the US
I was extremely anti-Kennedy myself because I was so much into Ayn Rand,
laissez faire capitalism, objectivism,
and Kennedy was the arch villain of our...
..of our movement at that time.
And it was like the hero of my novel jumped up off the pages of my book
and shot the President, and it was...it was...
It was very weird.
MUSIC: Air by The Incredible String Band
# You come right inside of me
# Close as you can be
# You kiss my blood
# And my blood kiss me... #
Although the British Empire was now finally collapsing
and the last colonies being given their independence,
in the homeland, England, the old structure of power remained intact.
And not only in the institutions,
but inside people's heads as well.
The old attitudes of power were still deeply embedded
in the minds of the establishment who dominated the country.
Those in charge demanded obedience,
not just from those they governed or employed,
but also from their wives.
They expected them to submit too.
And again. Fine.
CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS
Sandra Paul had grown up in Africa and the Far East.
Her father had been a doctor in the Royal Air Force.
She came back to England and became a successful model.
Just take that knee a little wider here.
Then she met Robin Douglas-Home.
He was at the heart of the ruling class.
His uncle had been Prime Minister.
She was incredibly beautiful.
She had a tremendous quality of innocence.
And, erm...
She was, I thought, a vulnerable creature
in a highly suspect world,
the world of models and fashion,
which I despised then,
and I despise even more now.
Erm... And so, in a sense, maybe I was trying to rescue her
from what I thought was going to be a decline
in her character due to her career.
Can you take that leg, that knee a little wider out that way?
Sort of, really... That's right.
But she was earning considerably more than you were
and, presumably, this money was useful in setting up your home,
so I suppose you could hardly be resentful about it.
I was earning considerably less, yes.
They married, and Robin Douglas-Home insisted
that they went to live in the country.
Sandra Paul agreed...
..but she found that he also insisted
that she should stop her modelling career
and remain in the country while he went to their house in London.
Then eventually, Robin wanted to be in London more.
And...
He didn't really want the routine so much.
He wanted to be going out to parties on his own,
..erm...
..this meant that he had to share his life,
and he was beginning to want to be...
..just a little independent.
Do you mean he was getting bored with you?
Yes, probably,
because I used to want to know what he'd been doing or where he'd been
and he didn't want to say, and so we'd have a row.
But just because I was wanting to know about his life
and he thought that I shouldn't have to know everything about his life.
I felt that when you were married that you should share things
and you should have a right, really, to know what your husband was doing.
Even if he was to make it up,
he should take the trouble to make something up to tell you
so you could put it out of your mind.
Michael de Freitas was now working for a notorious landlord
Rachman owned hundreds of flats and decaying houses in Notting Hill,
which he rented out to prostitutes and immigrants.
De Freitas's job was to be Rachman's enforcer,
often using threats and violence,
including breaking in and wrecking the flats.
When we came back in the night, we see everything outside.
All the floor mashed up.
All the wardrobe, all the chair, all the table,
all the clothes on the floor, dirty.
He took my brother's tools and mashed up all the floor.
Pulled up all the lights.
No water.
I say, "Well, well, well, well."
Michael de Freitas was fascinated by his new employer
because Peter Rachman was far more than just the brutal gangster
that he was portrayed as.
He had lived an extraordinary life.
He had been born in Lvov, on the border of Ukraine and Poland.
Then the Nazis invaded
and Rachman was arrested and forcibly sterilised
because he was Jewish.
But he managed to escape.
He fled into Russia, but was captured again,
this time by the Russians,
who sent him to the labour camps in Siberia,
where he watched people survive by killing each other
and then eating the human flesh.
But then the Nazis invaded Russia
and suddenly, Rachman became Russia's ally.
He was sent off to fight with the Free Polish Army.
And he ended up, after the war, in London,
stateless and a complete outsider.
That horror meant that Rachman judged nobody.
For him, the differences between right and wrong
were luxuries for the privileged.
In the face of horror, everyone was the same,
focused entirely on survival.
But the English judged him.
He was hated with an overwhelming disgust as the face of evil.
De Freitas believed that this revealed something
We start with the story of a man,
let me say straight away a sordid story
that some of you may well not want the younger children to hear.
This is Peter Rachman,
one of Britain's big-time 20th-century racketeers.
On the surface, there was the overt racism against the immigrants
that Rachman was bringing into Notting Hill.
A large number of people in Notting Hill
are trying to mix the two races, are trying to bring about
a coffee-coloured mulatto population in Britain,
and I regard it as no disgrace for the White Defence League
to come on the scene and stand up for white interests.
But de Freitas saw something deeper.
Rachman's property empire was a brutal and violent one,
but it was doing something that polite English society
completely refused to do.
He was giving people on the very margins of society -
prostitutes and black immigrants - somewhere to live.
His empire shone a harsh light on the hypocrisy of the nice people
at the top of English society,
who would never think of themselves as racist
but wanted nothing to do with the people he was moving
into Notting Hill.
And they hated him for it.
This was captured in an interview that the BBC did
with the local upmarket journalists in Notting Hill
about the day Rachman visited their offices.
What struck me about him
was his extraordinary sense of being so evil.
This was a really evil man.
We'd heard a lot about Rachman -
and finally, here he was, sitting in this room.
Kind of gravelly type of voice,
a sort of...almost a diseased voice, if you like,
the kind of thing which went...
SPEAKS IN HIGH-PITCH: "Oh, what do you want to see me for?
"I mean, I've done nothing."
De Freitas decided that there was a fear in England that went far deeper
than just the working-class racism...
..that behind the polite veneer of the middle classes,
there was a hard ruthlessness and a suspicion of others.
De Freitas gave it a name.
He called it Englishism.
It came, he said, from both an anger and a melancholy
at the loss of their empire.
Then Peter Rachman died of a heart attack,
and Michael de Freitas suddenly found
that he was the new face of evil.
Mr de Freitas?
Why will you not take the rent from this man here?
I don't own the property.
But your name's on the rent book. Is it?
Well, you know it is. We can probably show it to you.
Come here, Mr de Freitas, cos I need to know the facts about this.
Why will you not take his rent from him?
Jiang Qing came in secret to Mount Lushan to meet Mao Zedong,
where he was confronting the other revolutionaries.
She was determined to stop them from overthrowing Mao.
Many of them were the men who had forced her
into her strange, isolated life
and she hated them.
Jiang Qing was also convinced that these men
weren't really revolutionaries.
They were actually ghosts from the past who, without realising it,
were destroying the revolution
because their minds were still possessed by the patterns of thought
of the old, decaying and corrupt empire
that had ruled China for 300 years.
Mao pretended to give in to the demands
of the other revolutionaries,
but he told Jiang Qing to go to Shanghai
and to prepare quietly for a new kind of revolution -
one that would sweep the opposition away.
Jiang Qing returned to where she had started -
the studios of Shanghai.
But now she was in control.
And the new revolution was going to be driven by HER self-expression
and HER imagination that had been stifled back then.
The unit of one was going to take over the revolution
and reshape the minds of the Chinese people.
Because she could control the people's minds,
she could control their images, she was...
She became, er... She became the mistress of the arts
and of propaganda and culture.
She does have great personal charm.
It's a severe charm.
It's the charm of being able to do what she wanted
and to say what she wanted to
in a society where most people say what they're expected to say,
most people express the current political line.
Her daring to reflect upon the past,
to speak extensively about herself
and to make judgments of all sorts was extraordinary.
And she's a woman of many parts
so, needless to say, her relationship to the Chairman
was always the trump card.
Jiang Qing began by taking old Chinese operas and reworked them
so they became dramatic melodramas about the need to struggle
against the evil forces still hidden in Chinese society.
CALLS IN MANDARIN
GUNSHOT, MUSIC CRESCENDOES
Hate was a key word in the script.
"And never forget," she told the heroine,
"that beauty is less important than will and power."
SHE SINGS IN MANDARIN
Jiang Qing's real aim was to turn the whole of China itself
into a giant melodrama,
to work millions of people up into an intense frenzy
that would have the power to smash through the old corrupt ideas
that were still lodged in people's heads
and break through to a new kind of society.
But at the same time,
Jiang Qing herself was driven by old hatreds from her own past.
And she was also going to turn that frenzy
into a crusade of revenge against her old enemies...
..including Li Lili,
who had upstaged her in Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain.
ORCHESTRAL CRESCENDO BUILDS
Living quietly in New York, completely forgotten,
was an Irish woman called Ethel Boole
who personified the very opposite of what Jiang Qing believed -
because Boole thought that the way to change the world
was to give yourself up to the force of revolution,
to surrender your individual self and your identity
to the dream of a better future for others.
At the end of the 19th century,
It told a powerful romantic story of a young girl
who sacrificed everything for revolution.
She then married a Polish revolutionary
called Wilfrid Voynich,
and in the 1920s, they went to live in New York,
where he worked as an antiquarian book-seller
and Ethel Boole forgot about revolution.
But in 1959, when the Bolshoi Ballet came to New York,
the dancers were astonished to find that she was alive
and they rushed to visit her
because Ethel Boole, without her realising it,
had become a hero of the Russian Revolution.
She discovered that her novel
had inspired millions of young revolutionaries in the 1920s
to rise up and fight for the revolution,
inspired by the idea of surrendering themselves
to a grand historic cause.
had carried The Gadfly in their backpacks
Now, Boole was living alone.
and it was written in a language no-one has been able to decipher.
But one ballerina in the Bolshoi group
didn't go to visit Ethel Boole.
She was called Maya Plisetskaya.
She was the most famous ballerina in the world
and she hated the communist system.
Plisetskaya's father had been executed by firing squad
during the purges of the 1930s.
Her mother had been sent to a prison in the wastes of Siberia.
As she became famous, she was watched all the time
by agents from the KGB.
She couldn't trust anyone.
Everyone around her had been told to inform on her.
And she hated what she called "the men with sweaty faces,"
the party bosses who leered at her as she danced.
In private, Maya Plisetskaya wrote out her own manifesto.
"I don't know about other people," she wrote, "I'll say it for myself.
"I don't want to be a slave.
"I don't want people whom I don't know to decide my fate.
"I don't want a leash on my neck.
"I don't want a cage, even if it is a platinum one.
"I don't want to be rejected or branded.
"I don't want to hide what I am thinking.
"I don't want to bow my head,
"and I won't do it.
"That's not what I was born for."
Both Plisetskaya and Jiang Qing were part of the new individualism
that was rising up everywhere...
..while Ethel Boole's collective vision was dying.
It would offer a dream of liberation and freedom for the new individuals.
But it would end by controlling them.
would guide that revolution was Ethel Boole's father.
Boole had been a deeply religious man.
And one afternoon in the 1840s,
as he walked across a field near Doncaster,
Boole suddenly saw how you could use mathematics
to unlock the mysterious processes of human thought.
The same symbols that were used in algebra
could be used to describe what went on inside people's heads
as they followed a train of thought,
expressing all the twists and turns in simple binary form.
And in 1854, Boole wrote a book that caused a sensation.
It was called An Investigation of the Laws of Thought.
Its aim - to investigate the fundamental laws
of those operations of the mind by which reasoning is performed.
Boole showed how even abstract concepts like virtue and passion
could be put into equations,
and then the symbols used to follow a pattern of thought
to its conclusion.
into the truth of the human mind.
But there were those who doubted this.
The philosopher Bertrand Russell was astonished
by the brilliance of Boole's mathematics,
but he didn't believe that what Boole had discovered
was anything to do with human thought.
"Human beings," Russell said, "do not think like that."
What Boole was really doing was something else.
Throughout the British Empire, science had played a powerful role
which has been wiped and forgotten today.
Its job had been to create abstract systems,
to catalogue and order the chaotic reality
that the British ruled over,
to turn it into something that could be managed and controlled.
It ranged from making maps of what was called the dark interior
to cataloguing millions of species of animals and insects,
and studying and categorising different human types.
And what Boole was doing was the next step in that process.
He was taking the chaotic reality of human thought
the human mind,
so it could be managed and controlled.
But in the 19th century, no-one could see any way
of using the system that Boole had created
and it languished and was quietly forgotten
when the British Empire began to collapse.
One day, Sandra Paul discovered her husband having sex
in the back of a car with the Marchioness of Londonderry.
She told Robin Douglas-Home that she wanted a divorce,
but he refused...
..so she said that she would seek a petition for cruelty.
It meant that many of the details of their marriage
and the struggles between them would be made public.
And he couldn't bear the thought of going through a divorce,
so he refused to give me a divorce.
He blamed me for...
..dragging the whole thing out in...
Erm... Well, I don't think he blamed me coherently.
I... Well, I don't think I was unfair
because it was the only thing I could do,
and I did think that it was hopeless for us to stay in a separated state,
hopeless for me.
I was being selfish. I wanted to be free.
Erm... You had to be fairly ruthless.
Yes, I had to be ruthless in order to be free.
And she insisted on continuing
with this petition for cruelty.
Now, when I received the petition for cruelty,
I can only describe one's feelings to you as if,
you know, a small bomb had gone off inside your head.
Because, erm...
..it chapterised the marriage almost day by day...
..and incidentally, letter by letter, roneoed...
..in the most unpleasant and vicious terms...
..with me as the aggressor and the cruel one.
Five years of one's life...
..say, 70% of which were very happy,
reduced to a great wad of foolscap,
Your letters from the moment you'd met,
her letters to her mother,
her mother's letters to me.
It was all right, you felt, to be regarded as an adulterer,
but you couldn't bear to be regarded as cruel?
I couldn't bear her to...to...
..put a...a...
..a kind of tombstone on...
For men like Robin Douglas-Home, the expectation of power
had been deeply embedded inside their minds,
but as the world had changed around them and real power ebbed away,
they were left with a terrible melancholy
that in some would turn to despair.
MUSIC: Sag Mir Wo Die Blumen Sind by Marlene Dietrich
# Sag mir wo die Blumen sind
# Wo sind sie geblieben?
# Sag mir wo die Blumen sind
# Was ist geschehen?
# Sag mir wo die Blumen sind
# Madchen pfluckten sie geschwind
# Wann wird man je verstehen?
# Sag mir wo die Madchen sind
# Wo sind sie geblieben?
# Sag mir wo die Madchen sind
# Was ist geschehen?
# Sag mir wo die Madchen sind
# Manner nahmen sie geschwind
# Sag mir wo die Manner sind
# Wo sind sie geblieben?
# Sag mir wo die Manner sind
# Was ist geschehen?
# Sag mir wo die Manner sind
# Zogen fort, der Krieg beginnt
# Wann wird man je verstehen?
# Wann wird man je verstehen? #
Kerry Thornley had left California
and gone to live in New Orleans, where he worked in a bar.
The movement that he and his friend Greg Hill had started -
Discordianism - was beginning to grow,
spreading by word of mouth.
Like much of the new counterculture, it was against all politics.
It distrusted all the old systems of power - left and right -
because they were just trying to force you
into their version of reality.
Thornley also published his novel
with Lee Harvey Oswald as the central figure.
It was called The Idle Warriors.
But New Orleans was also the city where Lee Harvey Oswald had lived
before the Kennedy assassination.
And as a result, Thornley came to the notice of the man
who was going to be the main creator of the JFK conspiracy theory.
He was the district attorney of New Orleans,
called Jim Garrison.
Garrison said that Oswald had just been part of a giant conspiracy
that included the CIA, big business,
the news media and anti-Castro Cubans,
who, together, had killed the President.
There's no question about that.
There was a conspiracy.
A number of men were involved.
An apparatus which was lethal in nature...
..of which Lee Harvey, Harvey Oswald was a part,
assigned the role, essentially, as decoy.
Now, don't ask me what the organisation is because I can't say.
But the implication, clearly, is the Central Intelligence Agency,
your own security organisation in the United States.
It almost sounds like that, doesn't it?
I have no comment about that.
Jim Garrison believed that the modern democratic system in America
was just a facade,
that behind it was another secret system of power
that really controlled the country.
But you could never discover it through normal means
because it was so deeply hidden.
Garrison wrote a memo to his staff,
explaining how you could uncover this secret world.
He called it Time and Propinquity.
"You didn't bother with meaning or with logic," he said,
"because that will always be hidden."
Instead, you look for patterns,
strange coincidences and links that may seem to have no meaning
but are actually telltale signs on the surface
of the hidden system of power underneath.
This theory was going to have a very powerful effect in the future
because it would lead to a profound shift
in how many people understood the world,
because what it said was that in a dark world of hidden power,
you couldn't expect everything to make sense,
that it was pointless to try and understand the meaning
of why something happened,
because that would always be hidden from you.
What you looked for were the patterns.
And when Garrison read Kerry Thornley's novel,
he saw a pattern.
Not only had Thornley been in the Marines with Oswald
and written a novel about him, but he had come to live in the same city
And in 1967, Garrison accused Thornley
of being part of the conspiracy.
Thornley was furious.
He knew that Garrison was wrong...
..but he also hated the very idea of conspiracy theories.
He believed that they were one of the ways
those in power controlled you.
and that made you as an individual feel weak and powerless.
Suspicion, he believed, was just another form of control.
Thornley wanted to find ways to free people
from that kind of conditioning that held them back as individuals.
There are ways of deconditioning people,
and this is what I'm interested in.
I'm interested in finding some technique
all at once, to figure out exactly what that type of enlightenment is,
that type of liberation from authoritarian conditioning is,
and how to achieve it on a wholesale basis.
Thornley was right that most of what Garrison alleged
was complete fantasy.
Despite all the patterns,
he could produce no evidence of a hidden conspiracy.
But what Thornley didn't realise was that at the same time,
there was another very real conspiracy being run
by the American government,
and its aim was to try and do the very same thing
as he wanted to do.
The Central Intelligence Agency was trying to find ways
to wipe the past from people's minds,
to see if they could free them from the conditioning
that had been implanted there.
Psychologists working for the CIA had come to believe
that individuals were far weaker than they had believed...
The image of the human being that was being built up
at that particular time was that there was a great deal
of vulnerability in every human being
and that that vulnerability could be manipulated
to programme somebody to be something
that I wanted them to be
..that you could manipulate people in such a way
that they could be automatons, if you will,
for whatever your own purposes were.
This was the image that people thought was possible.
It was led by a psychiatrist called Ewen Cameron,
who worked in a hospital in Montreal called the Allan Memorial.
He took patients and, without telling them, experimented
to see if he could wipe what he called "the sick memories"
from their minds.
To do this, he used repeated electroshocks
and they gave me all of these electroconvulsive shock treatments
and megadoses of drugs and LSD and all of that.
And I have no memory of any of that -
nothing of that time at the Allan Memorial
or any of my life previous to that.
All gone. Wiped.
Some members of Discordianism were working at Playboy magazine,
and Thornley decided that he was going to use Playboy magazine
to start an experiment that would make people see how absurd
all conspiracy theories really were.
He called it Operation Mindfuck.
In 1969, he and Greg Hill began Operation Mindfuck
by placing a false letter in the Playboy letters page.
They put it between another letter
asking if gun fanatics had small penises
Thornley's fake letter asked whether all the political assassinations
in America were really being masterminded
by a single secret society,
and the society it named was the Illuminati.
It said that the Illuminati were behind all the chaos
and the fear that was now gripping America.
He and the other Discordians then proceeded to spread this idea
all across America through the counterculture,
in magazines and books and even in plays.
Thornley's aim was to try and break the spell of conspiracy theories
by making people see the absurdity of believing them,
and he had chosen the Illuminati for the experiment
because no-one could possibly believe
that an 18th-century organisation from Bavaria was really,
in the second half of the 20th century,
the secret rulers of the modern world.
It was clearly ridiculous.
Dr Cameron's experiments were a disaster.
His brutal techniques succeeded only
in wiping the minds of those he experimented on.
He then found he could put nothing back.
He totally failed to implant any new memories
or any new ways of seeing the world.
His patients found themselves in a world
that had no meaning any longer.
When I was discharged from the Allan Memorial,
I felt like a...
..like an alien from another world visiting this world.
I knew I was different
and I didn't know how to become like everybody else.
And it was a very lonely, scary place to be.
"This is your husband."
What? What's "husband?"
What's "making love?"
In the world of individualism that was about to come,
psychology was going to play a powerful role
because it said it could help to change
what was inside people's minds.
But what Cameron and the CIA had done
showed, in a dramatic and extreme way, the weakness of this.
They had assumed that most of what people felt came from within them,
and to make them happier,
you just had to alter what was inside their brains.
What was forgotten was the other view -
that what shapes how people feel is the society around them...
..above all, the structure of power that not only controls their lives,
but also how they feel.
And if you want to change the way people feel,
you have to find a way to change that, too.
Memory is wrapped in what society has decided
we should feel like.
"You should cry at funerals."
I found myself not crying at a funeral
and I felt just fine.
And I thought, "Gee, there's something the matter with me.
"I'm not crying. I should cry.
"Everybody else is crying."
But... But there wasn't that...
..that need to.
MUSIC: Recharge & Revolt by The Raveonettes
CROWD SHOUTING
MUSIC CONTINUES
# With a hole in my head
# I looked for you
# My desire to leave with you I just can't constrain
# I regret everything I've done so far
# When the pillars of love are blown apart
# I stumble through the rubble and decay
# When I'm terrified, I close my eyes... #
My old man died for this country!
Don't you dare say that to me!
Michael de Freitas decided that he was going to become a revolutionary.
He was going to challenge and expose the corrupt old structures of power
that he believed still haunted and controlled
the minds of the English people, even though their empire was gone.
I can't live in this system.
I don't like it, I don't want it.
I want to destroy everything down to the ground, the lot, ashes.
That's what I want.
MUSIC: Overture (For Other Halfs) by Brian McBride
All three -
Jiang Qing, Michael de Freitas and Kerry Thornley -
knew that their struggle was with the forces
from the old power of the past
that they believed were still lodged in people's minds.
But at the same time, quietly rising up was a new system
that seemed as if it would never have to face that struggle -
because it would be completely free of the past.
The laws of human thought that George Boole had created
had become the central structure of all thinking machines, computers,
because it fitted perfectly with the binary switching system
inside them - either zero or one -
and it was used by the machines to create endless branching pathways
of binary logic called algorithms.
Out of that was going to come the dream of artificial intelligence,
machines that could think independently,
But back in the 1960s,
as the engineers began to build the first neural networks,
what they had forgotten was that the system of thought
they were creating inside the machines did have its own history,
that it had been born out of a time
when science had become deeply involved in questions
of power and control in the British Empire...
..that what lay behind the computer logic
was the aim of simplifying human thought,
which would finally allow you to colonise the last free outpost -
the human mind.
But unlike the old empires, where power was visible,
this power would be hidden in remote places, in the servers.
But something else from the past
would also find its way into those servers.
In the political and economic chaos of the early 1970s,
conspiracy theories were going to spread like wildfire
As they did, the fake conspiracies
about the Illuminati and the secret rulers of the world
that Kerry Thornley thought that no-one could ever believe
began to get mixed up with the true conspiracies like MKUltra.
And more and more people began to follow
not for logic or meaning any longer.
And when the internet was created, almost immediately,
those patterns of suspicion would move into the data
and multiply endlessly across the system.
And that dark paranoia, that 200 years before
had spread across the prairies and the mountains
among isolated settlers,
now spread across the virtual world,
among isolated individuals sitting alone in front of their screens...
..and suspicion and distrust crept back into what was going to be
MUSIC: Who Killed Bambi? by Sex Pistols
# You bravely faced the world
# Ready for anything
# I'm happy that you lived
# For your life is mine
# What have I except to cry?
# Beasts of the earth
# They gambolled in the glade
# Who killed Bambi?
# Murder, murder, murder
# Someone should be angry
# The crime of the century
# Who shot little Bambi?
# Never trust a hippy
# I love punky Bambi
# I'll kill to find the killer
# In the rotten roll army
# All the spikey punkers
# Believers in the ruins
# With one big shout, they all cry out
# Who killed Bambi? #
SHOUTING, GLASS SMASHING