Can't Get You Out of My Head (2021) by Adam Curtis

we tell ourselves stories in order to live: order vs. chaos, individualism vs. collectivism, psychoanalysis, consumerism, alienation, terror, manipulation, violence, conspiracy, connectivity, surveillance, lies, the multilayered fractal incoherence of history

jiang qing - mao’s wife, ex actress, will driven individualistic ideology, helped start red guard, tried to take power with gang of four after mao’s death, suppressed by deng xiaoping and sentenced to death, hanged herself in prison in 1991

kerry thornley - discordianism, novel on lee harvey oswald, operation mindfuck w greg hill, perpetrated illuminati conspiracy theories, early randian, later realized the kennedy coincidences actually were part of a conspiracy

michael de freitas - immigrant from trinidad in london, works for slumlord, then becomes revolutionary michael x, started black house to pursue drug dealing and money laundering, returned to trinidad, killed his gf, and was executed by hanging

peter rachman - de freitas's boss, rents notting hill to blacks, immigrants, and sex workers

sandra - model in london, divorcing husband commits suicide

ethel boole - surrender individualism, gadfly author, daughter of george boole, boolean logic

plisetskaya - most famous ballerina, anti communist

huss madher - german left revolutionary, went to liberate palestine, became maoist, red army faction, beider-meinhof adjacent

harold - created “logical sequences” computer networks to determine where terrorists would attack in german cities, first successful application mass surveillance

afeni shakur - alice williams, harlem black panther

eckhart hesse - studied eye pupil reactions psychoanalytically

daniel carnaman - student of hesse, nobel prize for psychology, theory about chaos being greater than human brain can rationally digest

laurentz - climate/weather scientist related to a bomb research, determined that climate was unstable, fragile, not self correcting, project iceworm

arthur sackler - pharmacologist, developed valium, then oxycontin

eduard limonov - son of gulag cop in ukraine, became dissident, moved to moscow, poet in underground, married yelena, fascinated by victims of soviet criminal system, supports violence to escape constraints of soviet society, immigrated to brighton beach to start russian mafia, wrote anti capitalist novel ‘It’s Me Eddie,’ returned to russia, concerned about geopolitics in post soviet russia/europe, started national bolshevik party

alexander solhenitzyn - author of ‘the gulag archipelago,’ disillusioned by mass killings of sociopolitical revolution, posited that the on. way to escape horror is to stop trying to change the world and believe in nothing

harry caudil - lawyer for miners in appalachia, predicted chaos, committed suicide in 1990

deng xiaoping - anti-jiang qing/gang of four maoist og revolutionary, wrote “lady x” poem, propagandist, started rumor gang of four was cia, imprisoned jiang qing and seized power, wiped maoist ideals, introduced capitalism to “restore china’s power” + humiliate the west, believed tiananmen square protests were part of 150-yr western-incited conspiracy, d. 1997

betty ford - became addicted to valium. “to me it was beautiful and , but to my family i had begun to show signs of overmedication”

bernard kouchner - helped vietnamese refugees in south china sea when left/right wouldn’t, humanitarian for “borderless” world, went to afghanistan to support mujhadeen, became leader of “liberated” kosovo after uk/us intervention

julia grant - early out trans woman in britain, under psychiatric evaluation for gender reassignment, defied and got breast implants, then sex change surgery, but it was damaged

wei jingshieng - democracy wall, chinese dissident antifascist, imprisoned by deng xiaoping

bob geldof - british musician, started live aid to help ethiopians, realized it was being rerouted as a political war tactic to round up and eliminate rebels of the authoritarian govt

chai ling - student in china, attracted to maslow self actualization psychology of the self, joined student protest movement, vocal activist in tiananmen square, decided resistance was futile, expected violence, left

daniel kahneman - psychologist, 2 systems in human brain: conscious and unaware parts, behavior must be studied, ppl’s “conscious” understanding of themselves bypassed, ie “priming,” turned out to be harder to apply than they thought

majone - bypass politicians and national govts bc they are a threat to globalist stability, organized eu society into “non majoritarian institutions,” ie govts, banks, corporations

cecil sharp - worked to spread british nationalism thru promotion of idealized “folk” culture of the countryside

‘the immortal hour‘ - opera, another folk inspired work of nationalist propaganda, played at glastonbury festival in 1920s

‘birth of a nation‘ - iconography derives from novel ‘the clansman,’ which based its iconography on scottish folklore and writing of sir walter scott, who simply made it up

gertrude bell - went to baghdad to build up city after wwi, bombed rebels demanding self representation, then “invented” iraq and gave power to rural sheikhs

morgenthau - defended the “dual state” model, american exceptionalism, mid-20th century imperialism

mobuto - american-backed puppet dictator of congo

saddam hussein - rose to power alongside american backed puppet coup, given names to eliminate communists, had movie about his rise directed by director of ‘dr. no’

sheikh aburisha - american-backed tribal leader, “sons of iraq,” helped democratize iraq then turned against new govt. as isis

herbert bayer - creator of the family of man photo exhibition

tupac shakur - moved from ny to california after afeni got addicted to crack, wanted to reboot black panthers to uplift community, thug life is about fostering gang related anger to catalyze revolution against oppressive govt, arrested in 1994 for rape

abu zubaydah - palestinian in saudi arabia, wrote diary to himself in the future (year 2000), lost and poor found identity in jihad, after brain injury his memory became fragmented, just as jihad fragmented, fled to pakistan after 9/11 knowing intelligence would try to tie it to him, arrested by cia, who thought he was multi personality and wanted to unlock the terror secrets he hid inside, early bush era interrogation torture victim

murray gell-mann - helped invent complexity theory as alternative to chaos theory, computers analyze data to predict chaos and manage society

dominick cummings - supporter of applying complexity theory to take power from elites and give it back to the people, wanted brexit to pave way for move away from elite power

the princes(?) - corrupt directionless chinese leadership after deng xiaoping, pushed for and supported ganglord land grabs, which was easy bc communist party owned all land

bo jelai (sp?) - son of original maoist revolutionary, who was killed during cultural revolution, red guard who’d been in forced labor camp, became politician, led maoist rallies in opposition to new corrupted govt, mayor(?) of guiyang, essentially a high level gangster, he and his wife arrested, replaced by surveillance systems and good behavior credits for citizens

neil hayward - ex mi6 in beijing, involved in land grab stuff, found dead in chinese hotel, probably murdered by bo

jeffery hinton - great grandson of george boole, pioneer in neural networks, computer mimics human brain, an intelligence without coherent “story” narrative, vector reality -> data based patterns beyond human comprehension, which was then applied to banking and govt

walden 2 - scientific utopia, coincidental “model“ for new chinese surveillance society

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