Can't Get You Out of My Head 1x1

1. We are living through strange days.

2. Across Britain, Europe and America,

3. societies have become split and polarised,

4. not just in politics, but across the whole culture.

5. There is anger at the inequality and the ever-growing corruption

6. and a widespread distrust of the elites.

7. Yet, at the same time, there is a paralysis,

8. a sense that no-one knows how to escape from this.

9. Even in America, where there is now hope with the new president,

10. there are also fears that, despite the growing crisis,

11. the system will just return to normal.

12. This paralysis is also fuelled by a technology, driven by the aim

13. of giving you today another version of what you had yesterday...

14. .. and never a different tomorrow.

15. These films are a history of how we got to this place

16. and why both those in power, and we, find it so difficult to move on.

17. They will trace different forces

18. across the world that have led to now,

19. not just in the West, but in China and Russia as well.

20. And they are told in a different way.

21. They are an emotional history of what went on inside the heads

22. of all kinds of people.

23. Because in the age of the individual,

24. what you felt and what you wanted and what you dreamed of

25. were going to become the driving force across the world.

26. And to understand the present, you have to go back and see

27. what happened when those hopes and dreams and uncertainties

28. inside people's minds met the much older forces of power.

29. Often power that was decaying

30. and desperate to keep its ascendancy.

31. These strange days did not just happen -

32. we, and those in power, created them together.

33. YELLING

34. SONG FADES OUT

35. In the late 1950s, as the British Empire was falling apart,

36. there was a growing sense that something was badly wrong

37. under the surface.

38. It was a feeling of unease, that despite all the reforms

39. after the Second World War and the welfare state,

40. the old forms of power had not gone away.

41. And neither had the violence and the corruption

42. that had always been a part of that power.

43. The court opens with the traditional reading of names

44. and the wide experience available to the bank as apparent.

45. Mr Cobbold, Mr Minors,

46. Sir Charles Hambro...

47. Senior director...

48. The bankers in the City of London

49. had been at the very heart of the Empire.

50. In 1958, two of the most powerful of them,

51. Lord Kindersley and William Keswick,

52. were accused of using insider information

53. to make millions for themselves.

54. .. Lord Kindersley...

55. Chairman of Rolls-Royce, merchant banker.

56. ..Mr Keswick...

57. Hudson's Bay Company and Far Eastern merchant.

58. The evidence against them was very strong.

59. But when Keswick was shown the evidence, he dismissed it

60. with a phrase that became notorious.

61. "It is difficult," he said,

62. "to remember conversations one has whilst shooting on a grouse moor."

63. A government inquiry said the two men were obviously innocent.

64. At the same time, reports had started to come back

65. from one of the last parts of the Empire - Kenya -

66. that seemed to show that those in charge had gone out of control.

67. They had been fighting a liberation movement called the Mau Mau.

68. The report said that hundreds of thousands of Kenyans had been put

69. into special camps, where they were going to be

70. psychologically adjusted.

71. The British were trying to manipulate

72. what their chief psychologist called the "African mind".

73. But what then happened in the camps turned into a frenzied madness.

74. The British used mass torture and killing

75. as they desperately tried to hold on to power.

76. The government in London denied all the accusations,

77. but the rumours of violence and horror continued.

78. But what had also not gone away was the fear and hatred

79. inside the minds of many of the British of the "others",

80. the people the British had ruled over

81. who were now coming to what they had been told was the homeland.

82. Now, listen carefully to this Indian's conversation

83. with a white barber when he entered a saloon with a BBC radio microphone

84. in his pocket.

85. No! What's the matter?

86. No!

87. Is there anything wrong?

88. Yes! What is it? I said no.

89. But I'd like to know what is the matter. I'm closed.

90. There's another half an hour... Well, I'm closed now.

91. But you didn't put the closed sign outside on the window, did you?

92. Will you clear off?

93. Look, if you give me any reason why, what is the matter,

94. then I shall go if you tell me...

95. I've told you - I'm closed!

96. You're not closed.

97. You're not... You're not closed yet.

98. Well, I am - to you.

99. Those who came from the Empire to Britain

100. were shocked by the strange country they found.

101. Michael de Freitas had come from Trinidad.

102. He had grown up with a picture of a strong and confident homeland

103. at the centre of the Empire.

104. Instead, what he found was, what seemed to him,

105. a sad and frightened country.

106. You must remember that, that when we came to this country,

107. we were not travelling to a foreign country.

108. We were taught, I was taught when I was a young man,

109. that my country, Trinidad, was an extension of this one.

110. We were weaned on the concept of the Empire.

111. When I was a young boy, I stood in 90 degrees of sun

112. day after day and sang all kinds of silly things

113. like God Save The Queen, Land of Hope and Glory,

114. "Britannia rule the waves",

115. with the greatest of fervour and believed every word of it.

116. To come here and discover that not only wasn't I not travelling

117. to the capital of the whole thing, which we were led to believe was so,

118. but in actual fact, we weren't wanted

119. has been a very shattering blow.

120. Many people in this country who think that we are very hateful

121. are so wrong.

122. You see, this is the great mystery.

123. When you came here, you say you found you weren't wanted.

124. Why, then, did you stay?

125. Why did you choose to stay here?

126. This was the heartland of the whole thing

127. and one hoped against hope that what one saw was not right.

128. Song for Zula by Phosphorescent

129. Mao Zedong's wife was going mad.

130. She was called Jiang Qing.

131. She lived alone, surrounded by pet monkeys

132. and nurses, who she was convinced were conspiring against her.

133. Those in charge of the revolution in China

134. had completely marginalised her.

135. She was too dangerous, they thought, to be allowed anywhere

136. near her husband or power.

137. They had even sent her to Moscow to be locked in a sanatorium

138. with real and imagined illnesses.

139. But now Jiang Qing's husband was facing disaster.

140. The revolution had led to horror.

141. 30 million people had died from starvation

142. in the past three years.

143. The other leaders wanted to get rid of him.

144. And suddenly, he called for her.

145. Jiang Qing was an extraordinary person.

146. She believed in nothing except the power of her will to shape reality.

147. SHE SINGS

148. She had begun as an actor in films in Shanghai in the 1930s.

149. The other actors looked down at her for her driving ambition.

150. She liked to be on the top, always.

151. She's a very ambitious woman and she liked to be top

152. and she plays with the, you know,

153. with all the directors, cameramen,

154. make them... make them, you know, pay attention, you see,

155. and the interest in her

156. so she can have a better part of the film.

157. THEY SPEAK CHINESE

158. She married a quite famous writer called Tang Na

159. and after married, she doesn't feel

160. very satisfied by her husband

161. because her husband is not the very, very strong man.

162. And she left him and he jumped to the river,

163. and then the water was very cold, so he jump up again, you see?

164. So... You mean he tried to commit suicide?

165. Yes, he's trying to commit... commit suicide.

166. After the suicide attempt,

167. Jiang Qing wrote a long letter to her husband.

168. It said she was leaving him

169. and also explained why with an extraordinary openness.

170. There were powerful forces inside her, she said,

171. that kept driving her towards fame and power

172. and it was only those forces that held her together psychologically.

173. "Nothing must hold them back."

174. It ended, "What matters is that you remember me

175. "as a woman who never caves in before anyone

176. "and who will never bear to be treated as inferior to men."

177. But Jiang Qing failed to become a star.

178. The men who ran the studios scorned her ambition.

179. Her most famous part was as a supporting actor in a film

180. called Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain.

181. HOWLING

182. The star of the film was called Li Lili.

183. Jiang Qing was convinced that Li

184. was trying to upstage her all the time

185. and she became the focus of all Jiang Qing's anger

186. over her treatment by the Shanghai establishment.

187. Hua Yang De Nian Hua by Zhou Xuan

188. Bitter and disillusioned, Jiang Qing left Shanghai

189. and travelled to join the communist resistance

190. on a remote mountain in Yan'an.

191. The camp was an intense, exciting place

192. and many of the young revolutionaries had affairs.

193. Sex was called "undisciplined guerrilla warfare".

194. But when Jiang Qing started an affair with the leader, Mao Zedong,

195. that was different.

196. She was scorned by the other revolutionaries

197. as a social-climbing upstart.

198. Then it got worse.

199. Mao announced that he was going to divorce his wife

200. and marry Jiang Qing.

201. The other communist leaders were horrified.

202. They saw Jiang Qing as a dangerous, destructive force

203. because she was driven by a fierce radical individualism

204. that threatened their collective dream.

205. In the communist structure, everyone was part of a unit.

206. She insisted, "I am a unit of one."

207. No-one could work out what to do.

208. They even went and asked Stalin in Moscow for his advice.

209. He said, "Let them marry.

210. "But Jiang Qing must sign a document promising to refrain

211. "from political activity for 30 years."

212. BELL TOLLS

213. She signed, but she was furious with the men who now controlled her.

214. They even tracked down and destroyed prints of her old films

215. because they didn't fit with the image of Mao's wife.

216. Her fury grew.

217. Jiang Wing wanted power on her own behalf,

218. as an individual.

219. And she wanted revenge.

220. Now, 20 years later, in 1959, Mao was facing disaster

221. and he was calling for her.

222. GUNSHOT, GIRL SCREAMS

223. You're dead, you're dead!

224. In America, the idea of individualism

225. had become central to the politics of the Cold War...

226. What are you, bulletproof?

227. Get out from behind that tree.

228. .. because it was what defined the United States

229. against the collective ideology of Russia.

230. At the heart of it was the picture of a strong, confident individual

231. living an independent life in the new giant suburbs

232. outside the old cities.

233. My gun won't shoot that far.

234. But there was a weakness,

235. because the people in the suburbs were alone.

236. And in their isolation, away from the old communities,

237. they started to become fearful and lost.

238. Out of these fears came a paranoia

239. that was fuelled by groups on the extreme right,

240. like the John Birch Society.

241. .. and to the republic, for which it stands,

242. one nation under God, indivisible...

243. They said that the American government had been taken over

244. by hidden groups, controlled by the communists.

245. And at the end of the 1950s, a theory spread like wildfire

246. through the suburbs that President Eisenhower himself

247. had really been put into power by the communists.

248. "He is a dedicated, conscious agent of the Russians,"

249. the head of the John Birch Society said.

250. "That conclusion is based on detailed evidence so extensive

251. "that it is beyond any reasonable doubt."

252. But this paranoia was not a new thing.

253. An influential political scientist called Richard Hofstadter

254. published an article that caused a sensation.

255. He said that there had always been a dark paranoia

256. built into America from the very start.

257. The first settlers had come from Europe to America

258. to flee from the corruption of power in the Old World.

259. But although they had got away from the old power,

260. they hadn't got away from their suspicious minds,

261. and alone, out in the vast wilderness of the new America,

262. that led them to imagining dark, hidden conspiracies

263. in their own government, far away in Washington.

264. One of the first of these, in the early 19th century,

265. said that a secret group from Europe,

266. called the Bavarian Illuminati,

267. were running a giant conspiracy in America

268. to destroy the new democracy.

269. In reality, the Illuminati had been a utopian movement

270. who wanted to replace religion with reason.

271. But instead, they now became the first of a series

272. of frightening suspicions that fed off the isolation

273. of the settlers in the New World.

274. "The paranoia in the suburbs," Hofstadter said,

275. "is just part of a much larger darkness

276. "built into the very structure of America itself

277. "that was feeding, yet again,

278. "on people's separateness and isolation."

279. But in the same suburbs, there was a new movement rising up

280. that was going to confront and challenge these fears.

281. It was driven by a radical individualism that said

282. that you as an individual can shape the world the way you want it to be,

283. not accept what the dark fears tell you it is.

284. It would be one of the main foundations

285. of the counterculture movement

286. that was going to spread throughout the West.

287. But now, it was just beginning,

288. born out of odd moments across the suburbs of California.

289. One night, Kerry Thornley went with his friend Greg Hill

290. to a bowling alley.

291. They started to discuss reality.

292. Thornley insisted that there was a fixed order to the universe,

293. but Greg said that the universe was chaos and it was human thought

294. that projected an order onto the chaos.

295. Sitting around in a bowling alley in 1958, to be exact,

296. somewhere in the vicinity of Whittier, California,

297. and we were discussing philosophy

298. and we were talking about order and chaos.

299. Greg's theory was that order was projected on the universe,

300. that it didn't exist at all,

301. that it was a creation of the human mind,

302. that order was entirely in perception and had nothing to do

303. with what was going on out there in a completely chaotic universe.

304. Thornley was inspired by this, and together he and Greg Hill decided

305. to set up a movement dedicated to the idea of chaos.

306. They called it Discordianism.

307. Underlying it was the belief that individuals had the power

308. inside themselves to bring order and meaning to the chaos,

309. not the old systems of power that created the fear and suspicion.

310. But then an extraordinary coincidence happened

311. that was going to lead Thornley back towards that darkness in America.

312. Thornley was sent to do service with the Marines,

313. and at the camp, he met another recruit

314. who seemed to embody the figure of the free, independent individual

315. he so admired because he refused to bow to the power of the officers.

316. He was called Lee Harvey Oswald...

317. .. and they became close friends.

318. Thornley had read the novels of Ayn Rand

319. and he decided he was going to write a novel

320. with Oswald as the central figure, a hero of this new age.

321. But then, suddenly, Oswald defected to the Soviet Union

322. and things became very strange.

323. It seemed that the reality outside

324. was even more chaotic than he had imagined.

325. It was really a weird experience for me

326. because I was writing this novel based on Oswald.

327. When Oswald defected to the Soviet Union, I decided to write a novel

328. about a Marine who becomes disenchanted with the US

329. and goes to the Soviet Union,

330. and so it was like the hero... And I didn't like Kennedy.

331. I was extremely anti-Kennedy myself because I was so much into Ayn Rand,

332. laissez faire capitalism, objectivism,

333. and Kennedy was the arch villain of our...

334. .. of our movement at that time.

335. And it was like the hero of my novel jumped up off the pages of my book

336. and shot the President, and it was... it was...

337. It was very weird.

338. Air by The Incredible String Band

339. Although the British Empire was now finally collapsing

340. and the last colonies being given their independence,

341. in the homeland, England, the old structure of power remained intact.

342. And not only in the institutions,

343. but inside people's heads as well.

344. The old attitudes of power were still deeply embedded

345. in the minds of the establishment who dominated the country.

346. Those in charge demanded obedience,

347. not just from those they governed or employed,

348. but also from their wives.

349. They expected them to submit too.

350. And again. Fine.

351. CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS

352. Sandra Paul had grown up in Africa and the Far East.

353. Her father had been a doctor in the Royal Air Force.

354. She came back to England and became a successful model.

355. Just take that knee a little wider here.

356. Good.

357. Then she met Robin Douglas-Home.

358. He was at the heart of the ruling class.

359. His uncle had been Prime Minister.

360. She was incredibly beautiful.

361. She had a tremendous quality of innocence.

362. And, erm...

363. She was, I thought, a vulnerable creature

364. in a highly suspect world,

365. the world of models and fashion,

366. which I despised then,

367. and I despise even more now.

368. Erm... And so, in a sense, maybe I was trying to rescue her

369. from what I thought was going to be a decline

370. in her character due to her career.

371. Can you take that leg, that knee a little wider out that way?

372. Sort of, really... That's right.

373. But she was earning considerably more than you were

374. and, presumably, this money was useful in setting up your home,

375. so I suppose you could hardly be resentful about it.

376. I was earning considerably less, yes.

377. They married, and Robin Douglas-Home insisted

378. that they went to live in the country.

379. Sandra Paul agreed...

380. .. but she found that he also insisted

381. that she should stop her modelling career

382. and remain in the country while he went to their house in London.

383. Then eventually, Robin wanted to be in London more.

384. And...

385. He didn't really want the routine so much.

386. He wanted to be going out to parties on his own,

387. and when he realised that if he was in London

388. and I would be in London too...

389. .. erm...

390. .. this meant that he had to share his life,

391. and he was beginning to want to be...

392. .. just a little independent.

393. Do you mean he was getting bored with you?

394. Yes, probably,

395. because I used to want to know what he'd been doing or where he'd been

396. and he didn't want to say, and so we'd have a row.

397. But just because I was wanting to know about his life

398. and he thought that I shouldn't have to know everything about his life.

399. I felt that when you were married that you should share things

400. and you should have a right, really, to know what your husband was doing.

401. Even if he was to make it up,

402. he should take the trouble to make something up to tell you

403. so you could put it out of your mind.

404. Michael de Freitas was now working for a notorious landlord

405. in Notting Hill called Peter Rachman.

406. Rachman owned hundreds of flats and decaying houses in Notting Hill,

407. which he rented out to prostitutes and immigrants.

408. De Freitas's job was to be Rachman's enforcer,

409. often using threats and violence,

410. including breaking in and wrecking the flats.

411. When we came back in the night, we see everything outside.

412. All the floor mashed up.

413. All the wardrobe, all the chair, all the table,

414. all the clothes on the floor, dirty.

415. He took my brother's tools and mashed up all the floor.

416. Pulled up all the lights.

417. No water.

418. I say, "Well, well, well, well."

419. Michael de Freitas was fascinated by his new employer

420. because Peter Rachman was far more than just the brutal gangster

421. that he was portrayed as.

422. He had lived an extraordinary life.

423. He had been born in Lvov, on the border of Ukraine and Poland.

424. Then the Nazis invaded

425. and Rachman was arrested and forcibly sterilised

426. because he was Jewish.

427. But he managed to escape.

428. He fled into Russia, but was captured again,

429. this time by the Russians,

430. who sent him to the labour camps in Siberia,

431. where he watched people survive by killing each other

432. and then eating the human flesh.

433. But then the Nazis invaded Russia

434. and suddenly, Rachman became Russia's ally.

435. He was sent off to fight with the Free Polish Army.

436. And he ended up, after the war, in London,

437. stateless and a complete outsider.

438. That horror meant that Rachman judged nobody.

439. For him, the differences between right and wrong

440. were luxuries for the privileged.

441. In the face of horror, everyone was the same,

442. focused entirely on survival.

443. But the English judged him.

444. He was hated with an overwhelming disgust as the face of evil.

445. De Freitas believed that this revealed something

446. that was hidden in English society.

447. We start with the story of a man,

448. let me say straight away a sordid story

449. that some of you may well not want the younger children to hear.

450. This is Peter Rachman,

451. one of Britain's big-time 20th-century racketeers.

452. On the surface, there was the overt racism against the immigrants

453. that Rachman was bringing into Notting Hill.

454. A large number of people in Notting Hill

455. are trying to mix the two races, are trying to bring about

456. a coffee-coloured mulatto population in Britain,

457. and I regard it as no disgrace for the White Defence League

458. to come on the scene and stand up for white interests.

459. But de Freitas saw something deeper.

460. Rachman's property empire was a brutal and violent one,

461. but it was doing something that polite English society

462. completely refused to do.

463. He was giving people on the very margins of society -

464. prostitutes and black immigrants - somewhere to live.

465. His empire shone a harsh light on the hypocrisy of the nice people

466. at the top of English society,

467. who would never think of themselves as racist

468. but wanted nothing to do with the people he was moving

469. into Notting Hill.

470. And they hated him for it.

471. This was captured in an interview that the BBC did

472. with the local upmarket journalists in Notting Hill

473. about the day Rachman visited their offices.

474. What struck me about him

475. was his extraordinary sense of being so evil.

476. This was a really evil man.

477. We'd heard a lot about Rachman -

478. and finally, here he was, sitting in this room.

479. But I don't think any of us were prepared to see

480. such a grotesque individual.

481. Kind of gravelly type of voice,

482. a sort of... almost a diseased voice, if you like,

483. the kind of thing which went...

484. "Oh, what do you want to see me for?

485. "I mean, I've done nothing."

486. De Freitas decided that there was a fear in England that went far deeper

487. than just the working-class racism...

488. .. that behind the polite veneer of the middle classes,

489. there was a hard ruthlessness and a suspicion of others.

490. De Freitas gave it a name.

491. He called it Englishism.

492. It came, he said, from both an anger and a melancholy

493. at the loss of their empire.

494. Then Peter Rachman died of a heart attack,

495. and Michael de Freitas suddenly found

496. that he was the new face of evil.

497. Mr de Freitas?

498. Why will you not take the rent from this man here?

499. I don't own the property.

500. But your name's on the rent book. Is it?

501. Well, you know it is. We can probably show it to you.

502. Come here, Mr de Freitas, cos I need to know the facts about this.

503. Why will you not take his rent from him?

504. INAUDIBLE

505. Jiang Qing came in secret to Mount Lushan to meet Mao Zedong,

506. where he was confronting the other revolutionaries.

507. She was determined to stop them from overthrowing Mao.

508. Many of them were the men who had forced her

509. into her strange, isolated life

510. and she hated them.

511. Jiang Qing was also convinced that these men

512. weren't really revolutionaries.

513. They were actually ghosts from the past who, without realising it,

514. were destroying the revolution

515. because their minds were still possessed by the patterns of thought

516. of the old, decaying and corrupt empire

517. that had ruled China for 300 years.

518. Mao pretended to give in to the demands

519. of the other revolutionaries,

520. but he told Jiang Qing to go to Shanghai

521. and to prepare quietly for a new kind of revolution -

522. one that would sweep the opposition away.

523. Jiang Qing returned to where she had started -

524. the studios of Shanghai.

525. But now she was in control.

526. And the new revolution was going to be driven by HER self-expression

527. and HER imagination that had been stifled back then.

528. The unit of one was going to take over the revolution

529. and reshape the minds of the Chinese people.

530. Because she could control the people's minds,

531. she could control their images, she was...

532. She became, er... She became the mistress of the arts

533. and of propaganda and culture.

534. She does have great personal charm.

535. It's a severe charm.

536. It's the charm of being able to do what she wanted

537. and to say what she wanted to

538. in a society where most people say what they're expected to say,

539. most people express the current political line.

540. Her daring to reflect upon the past,

541. to speak extensively about herself

542. and to make judgments of all sorts was extraordinary.

543. And she's a woman of many parts

544. so, needless to say, her relationship to the Chairman

545. was always the trump card.

546. Jiang Qing began by taking old Chinese operas and reworked them

547. so they became dramatic melodramas about the need to struggle

548. against the evil forces still hidden in Chinese society.

549. CALLS IN MANDARIN

550. GUNSHOT, MUSIC CRESCENDOES

551. Hate was a key word in the script.

552. "It must be shouted," she said,

553. "as if it was a grenade that you were hurling at the enemy."

554. "And never forget," she told the heroine,

555. "that beauty is less important than will and power."

556. SHE SINGS IN MANDARIN

557. But the operas were just the start.

558. Jiang Qing's real aim was to turn the whole of China itself

559. into a giant melodrama,

560. to work millions of people up into an intense frenzy

561. that would have the power to smash through the old corrupt ideas

562. that were still lodged in people's heads

563. and break through to a new kind of society.

564. But at the same time,

565. Jiang Qing herself was driven by old hatreds from her own past.

566. And she was also going to turn that frenzy

567. into a crusade of revenge against her old enemies...

568. .. including Li Lili,

569. who had upstaged her in Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain.

570. ORCHESTRAL CRESCENDO BUILDS

571. Living quietly in New York, completely forgotten,

572. was an Irish woman called Ethel Boole

573. who personified the very opposite of what Jiang Qing believed -

574. because Boole thought that the way to change the world

575. was to give yourself up to the force of revolution,

576. to surrender your individual self and your identity

577. to the dream of a better future for others.

578. At the end of the 19th century,

579. Ethel Boole had gone to Russia as a young girl

580. and become involved with the revolutionaries in St Petersburg.

581. And she wrote a novel called The Gadfly.

582. It told a powerful romantic story of a young girl

583. who sacrificed everything for revolution.

584. She then married a Polish revolutionary

585. called Wilfrid Voynich,

586. and in the 1920s, they went to live in New York,

587. where he worked as an antiquarian book-seller

588. and Ethel Boole forgot about revolution.

589. But in 1959, when the Bolshoi Ballet came to New York,

590. the dancers were astonished to find that she was alive

591. and they rushed to visit her

592. because Ethel Boole, without her realising it,

593. had become a hero of the Russian Revolution.

594. She discovered that her novel

595. had inspired millions of young revolutionaries in the 1920s

596. to rise up and fight for the revolution,

597. inspired by the idea of surrendering themselves

598. to a grand historic cause.

599. Then, the same had happened in China.

600. Again, millions of young revolutionaries

601. had carried The Gadfly in their backpacks

602. as they fought to create a new kind of future.

603. Now, Boole was living alone.

604. And she had inherited a mysterious book from her husband.

605. It was called the Voynich manuscript,

606. and it was written in a language no-one has been able to decipher.

607. But one ballerina in the Bolshoi group

608. didn't go to visit Ethel Boole.

609. She was called Maya Plisetskaya.

610. She was the most famous ballerina in the world

611. and she hated the communist system.

612. Plisetskaya's father had been executed by firing squad

613. during the purges of the 1930s.

614. Her mother had been sent to a prison in the wastes of Siberia.

615. As she became famous, she was watched all the time

616. by agents from the KGB.

617. She couldn't trust anyone.

618. Everyone around her had been told to inform on her.

619. And she hated what she called "the men with sweaty faces,"

620. the party bosses who leered at her as she danced.

621. In private, Maya Plisetskaya wrote out her own manifesto.

622. "I don't know about other people," she wrote, "I'll say it for myself.

623. "I don't want to be a slave.

624. "I don't want people whom I don't know to decide my fate.

625. "I don't want a leash on my neck.

626. "I don't want a cage, even if it is a platinum one.

627. "I don't want to be rejected or branded.

628. "I don't want to hide what I am thinking.

629. "I don't want to bow my head,

630. "and I won't do it.

631. "That's not what I was born for."

632. Both Plisetskaya and Jiang Qing were part of the new individualism

633. that was rising up everywhere...

634. .. while Ethel Boole's collective vision was dying.

635. But at the same time, a new revolution was about to begin.

636. It would offer a dream of liberation and freedom for the new individuals.

637. But it would end by controlling them.

638. And in a strange twist, the person whose ideas

639. would guide that revolution was Ethel Boole's father.

640. He was a mathematician from the 19th century called George Boole.

641. Boole had been a deeply religious man.

642. And one afternoon in the 1840s,

643. as he walked across a field near Doncaster,

644. a thought had flashed into his head

645. that he believed was a religious vision.

646. Boole suddenly saw how you could use mathematics

647. to unlock the mysterious processes of human thought.

648. The same symbols that were used in algebra

649. could be used to describe what went on inside people's heads

650. as they followed a train of thought,

651. expressing all the twists and turns in simple binary form.

652. If this, then that.

653. If that, then not this.

654. And in 1854, Boole wrote a book that caused a sensation.

655. It was called An Investigation of the Laws of Thought.

656. Its aim - to investigate the fundamental laws

657. of those operations of the mind by which reasoning is performed.

658. Boole showed how even abstract concepts like virtue and passion

659. could be put into equations,

660. and then the symbols used to follow a pattern of thought

661. to its conclusion.

662. Boole was driven by an almost messianic belief

663. that he had been allowed a glimpse by God

664. into the truth of the human mind.

665. But there were those who doubted this.

666. The philosopher Bertrand Russell was astonished

667. by the brilliance of Boole's mathematics,

668. but he didn't believe that what Boole had discovered

669. was anything to do with human thought.

670. "Human beings," Russell said, "do not think like that."

671. What Boole was really doing was something else.

672. Throughout the British Empire, science had played a powerful role

673. which has been wiped and forgotten today.

674. Its job had been to create abstract systems,

675. to catalogue and order the chaotic reality

676. that the British ruled over,

677. to turn it into something that could be managed and controlled.

678. It ranged from making maps of what was called the dark interior

679. to cataloguing millions of species of animals and insects,

680. and studying and categorising different human types.

681. And what Boole was doing was the next step in that process.

682. He was taking the chaotic reality of human thought

683. and making a simplified, rational map

684. of that other dark interior,

685. the human mind,

686. so it could be managed and controlled.

687. But in the 19th century, no-one could see any way

688. of using the system that Boole had created

689. and it languished and was quietly forgotten

690. when the British Empire began to collapse.

691. One day, Sandra Paul discovered her husband having sex

692. in the back of a car with the Marchioness of Londonderry.

693. It was the final straw

694. and she decided the marriage would have to end.

695. She told Robin Douglas-Home that she wanted a divorce,

696. but he refused...

697. ..so she said that she would seek a petition for cruelty.

698. It meant that many of the details of their marriage

699. and the struggles between them would be made public.

700. And he couldn't bear the thought of going through a divorce,

701. so he refused to give me a divorce.

702. He blamed me for...

703. .. dragging the whole thing out in...

704. Erm... Well, I don't think he blamed me coherently.

705. He just blamed me because I divorced him

706. and he couldn't understand that there wasn't any other way.

707. I... Well, I don't think I was unfair

708. because it was the only thing I could do,

709. and I did think that it was hopeless for us to stay in a separated state,

710. hopeless for me.

711. I was being selfish. I wanted to be free.

712. Erm... You had to be fairly ruthless.

713. Yes, I had to be ruthless in order to be free.

714. And she insisted on continuing

715. with this petition for cruelty.

716. Now, when I received the petition for cruelty,

717. I can only describe one's feelings to you as if,

718. you know, a small bomb had gone off inside your head.

719. Because, erm...

720. ..it chapterised the marriage almost day by day...

721. .. and incidentally, letter by letter, roneoed...

722. ..in the most unpleasant and vicious terms...

723. .. with me as the aggressor and the cruel one.

724. Five years of one's life...

725. .. say, 70% of which were very happy,

726. reduced to a great wad of foolscap,

727. typed out by leering little clerks

728. in solicitors' offices.

729. Your letters from the moment you'd met,

730. typed out, roneoed -

731. your letters to your mother,

732. her letters to her mother,

733. her mother's letters to me.

734. It was all right, you felt, to be regarded as an adulterer,

735. but you couldn't bear to be regarded as cruel?

736. I couldn't bear her to... to...

737. .. put a... a...

738. ..a kind of tombstone on...

739. .. this marriage reading in the way that that petition read.

740. For men like Robin Douglas-Home, the expectation of power

741. had been deeply embedded inside their minds,

742. but as the world had changed around them and real power ebbed away,

743. they were left with a terrible melancholy

744. that in some would turn to despair.

745. A year after the filming, Robin Douglas-Home committed suicide.

746. HE PLAYS PIANO

747. Sag Mir Wo Die Blumen Sind by Marlene Dietrich

748. Kerry Thornley had left California

749. and gone to live in New Orleans, where he worked in a bar.

750. The movement that he and his friend Greg Hill had started -

751. Discordianism - was beginning to grow,

752. spreading by word of mouth.

753. Like much of the new counterculture, it was against all politics.

754. It distrusted all the old systems of power - left and right -

755. because they were just trying to force you

756. into their version of reality.

757. Thornley also published his novel

758. with Lee Harvey Oswald as the central figure.

759. It was called The Idle Warriors.

760. But New Orleans was also the city where Lee Harvey Oswald had lived

761. before the Kennedy assassination.

762. And as a result, Thornley came to the notice of the man

763. who was going to be the main creator of the JFK conspiracy theory.

764. He was the district attorney of New Orleans,

765. called Jim Garrison.

766. Garrison said that Oswald had just been part of a giant conspiracy

767. that included the CIA, big business,

768. the news media and anti-Castro Cubans,

769. who, together, had killed the President.

770. There's no question about that.

771. There was a conspiracy.

772. A number of men were involved.

773. An apparatus which was lethal in nature...

774. .. of which Lee Harvey, Harvey Oswald was a part,

775. assigned the role, essentially, as decoy.

776. Now, don't ask me what the organisation is because I can't say.

777. But the implication, clearly, is the Central Intelligence Agency,

778. your own security organisation in the United States.

779. It almost sounds like that, doesn't it?

780. I have no comment about that.

781. Jim Garrison believed that the modern democratic system in America

782. was just a facade,

783. that behind it was another secret system of power

784. that really controlled the country.

785. But you could never discover it through normal means

786. because it was so deeply hidden.

787. Garrison wrote a memo to his staff,

788. explaining how you could uncover this secret world.

789. He called it Time and Propinquity.

790. "You didn't bother with meaning or with logic," he said,

791. "because that will always be hidden."

792. Instead, you look for patterns,

793. strange coincidences and links that may seem to have no meaning

794. but are actually telltale signs on the surface

795. of the hidden system of power underneath.

796. This theory was going to have a very powerful effect in the future

797. because it would lead to a profound shift

798. in how many people understood the world,

799. because what it said was that in a dark world of hidden power,

800. you couldn't expect everything to make sense,

801. that it was pointless to try and understand the meaning

802. of why something happened,

803. because that would always be hidden from you.

804. What you looked for were the patterns.

805. And when Garrison read Kerry Thornley's novel,

806. he saw a pattern.

807. Not only had Thornley been in the Marines with Oswald

808. and written a novel about him, but he had come to live in the same city

809. that Oswald had lived in before the assassination.

810. And in 1967, Garrison accused Thornley

811. of being part of the conspiracy.

812. Thornley was furious.

813. He knew that Garrison was wrong...

814. .. but he also hated the very idea of conspiracy theories.

815. He believed that they were one of the ways

816. those in power controlled you.

817. Conspiracy theories made you believe that there were hidden forces

818. that really controlled the world,

819. and that made you as an individual feel weak and powerless.

820. Suspicion, he believed, was just another form of control.

821. Thornley wanted to find ways to free people

822. from that kind of conditioning that held them back as individuals.

823. There are ways of deconditioning people,

824. and this is what I'm interested in.

825. I'm interested in finding some technique

826. by which great masses of people

827. can be broken out of their authoritarian conditioning

828. all at once, to figure out exactly what that type of enlightenment is,

829. that type of liberation from authoritarian conditioning is,

830. and how to achieve it on a wholesale basis.

831. Thornley was right that most of what Garrison alleged

832. was complete fantasy.

833. Despite all the patterns,

834. he could produce no evidence of a hidden conspiracy.

835. But what Thornley didn't realise was that at the same time,

836. there was another very real conspiracy being run

837. by the American government,

838. and its aim was to try and do the very same thing

839. as he wanted to do.

840. The Central Intelligence Agency was trying to find ways

841. to wipe the past from people's minds,

842. to see if they could free them from the conditioning

843. that had been implanted there.

844. Psychologists working for the CIA had come to believe

845. that individuals were far weaker than they had believed...

846. .. and they wanted to see if they could implant

847. new patterns of thought in their minds.

848. The image of the human being that was being built up

849. at that particular time was that there was a great deal

850. of vulnerability in every human being

851. and that that vulnerability could be manipulated

852. to programme somebody to be something

853. that I wanted them to be

854. and they didn't want to be...

855. .. that you could manipulate people in such a way

856. that they could be automatons, if you will,

857. for whatever your own purposes were.

858. This was the image that people thought was possible.

859. The CIA set up a secret project called MKUltra.

860. It was led by a psychiatrist called Ewen Cameron,

861. who worked in a hospital in Montreal called the Allan Memorial.

862. He took patients and, without telling them, experimented

863. to see if he could wipe what he called "the sick memories"

864. from their minds.

865. To do this, he used repeated electroshocks

866. and massive doses of LSD.

867. They shipped me up to what they called the Sleep Room,

868. and they gave me all of these electroconvulsive shock treatments

869. and megadoses of drugs and LSD and all of that.

870. And I have no memory of any of that -

871. nothing of that time at the Allan Memorial

872. or any of my life previous to that.

873. All gone. Wiped.

874. Some members of Discordianism were working at Playboy magazine,

875. and Thornley decided that he was going to use Playboy magazine

876. to start an experiment that would make people see how absurd

877. all conspiracy theories really were.

878. He called it Operation Mindfuck.

879. In 1969, he and Greg Hill began Operation Mindfuck

880. by placing a false letter in the Playboy letters page.

881. They put it between another letter

882. asking if gun fanatics had small penises

883. and one from a man asking about the physical danger

884. to his testicles from heavy petting.

885. Thornley's fake letter asked whether all the political assassinations

886. in America were really being masterminded

887. by a single secret society,

888. and the society it named was the Illuminati.

889. It said that the Illuminati were behind all the chaos

890. and the fear that was now gripping America.

891. He and the other Discordians then proceeded to spread this idea

892. all across America through the counterculture,

893. in magazines and books and even in plays.

894. Thornley's aim was to try and break the spell of conspiracy theories

895. by making people see the absurdity of believing them,

896. and he had chosen the Illuminati for the experiment

897. because no-one could possibly believe

898. that an 18th-century organisation from Bavaria was really,

899. in the second half of the 20th century,

900. the secret rulers of the modern world.

901. It was clearly ridiculous.

902. Dr Cameron's experiments were a disaster.

903. His brutal techniques succeeded only

904. in wiping the minds of those he experimented on.

905. He then found he could put nothing back.

906. He totally failed to implant any new memories

907. or any new ways of seeing the world.

908. His patients found themselves in a world

909. that had no meaning any longer.

910. When I was discharged from the Allan Memorial,

911. I felt like a...

912. ..like an alien from another world visiting this world.

913. I knew I was different

914. and I didn't know how to become like everybody else.

915. And it was a very lonely, scary place to be.

916. "This is your husband."

917. What? What's "husband?"

918. What's "making love?"

919. In the world of individualism that was about to come,

920. psychology was going to play a powerful role

921. because it said it could help to change

922. what was inside people's minds.

923. But what Cameron and the CIA had done

924. showed, in a dramatic and extreme way, the weakness of this.

925. They had assumed that most of what people felt came from within them,

926. and to make them happier,

927. you just had to alter what was inside their brains.

928. What was forgotten was the other view -

929. that what shapes how people feel is the society around them...

930. .. above all, the structure of power that not only controls their lives,

931. but also how they feel.

932. And if you want to change the way people feel,

933. you have to find a way to change that, too.

934. Memory is wrapped in what society has decided

935. we should feel like.

936. "You should cry at funerals."

937. I found myself not crying at a funeral

938. and I felt just fine.

939. And I thought, "Gee, there's something the matter with me.

940. "I'm not crying. I should cry.

941. "Everybody else is crying."

942. But... But there wasn't that...

943. .. that need to.

944. Recharge & Revolt by The Raveonettes

945. My old man died for this country!

946. Don't you dare say that to me!

947. Michael de Freitas decided that he was going to become a revolutionary.

948. He was going to challenge and expose the corrupt old structures of power

949. that he believed still haunted and controlled

950. the minds of the English people, even though their empire was gone.

951. I can't live in this system.

952. I don't like it, I don't want it.

953. I want to destroy everything down to the ground, the lot, ashes.

954. That's what I want.

955. Overture (For Other Halfs) by Brian McBride

956. All three -

957. Jiang Qing, Michael de Freitas and Kerry Thornley -

958. knew that their struggle was with the forces

959. from the old power of the past

960. that they believed were still lodged in people's minds.

961. But at the same time, quietly rising up was a new system

962. that seemed as if it would never have to face that struggle -

963. because it would be completely free of the past.

964. The laws of human thought that George Boole had created

965. had become the central structure of all thinking machines, computers,

966. because it fitted perfectly with the binary switching system

967. inside them - either zero or one -

968. and it was used by the machines to create endless branching pathways

969. of binary logic called algorithms.

970. Out of that was going to come the dream of artificial intelligence,

971. machines that could think independently,

972. that could then order and manage the world as a rational system,

973. not driven by the dangerous ideologies of the past.

974. But back in the 1960s,

975. as the engineers began to build the first neural networks,

976. what they had forgotten was that the system of thought

977. they were creating inside the machines did have its own history,

978. that it had been born out of a time

979. when science had become deeply involved in questions

980. of power and control in the British Empire...

981. .. that what lay behind the computer logic

982. was the aim of simplifying human thought,

983. which would finally allow you to colonise the last free outpost -

984. the human mind.

985. But unlike the old empires, where power was visible,

986. this power would be hidden in remote places, in the servers.

987. But something else from the past

988. would also find its way into those servers.

989. In the political and economic chaos of the early 1970s,

990. conspiracy theories were going to spread like wildfire

991. through the counterculture.

992. As they did, the fake conspiracies

993. about the Illuminati and the secret rulers of the world

994. that Kerry Thornley thought that no-one could ever believe

995. began to get mixed up with the true conspiracies like MKUltra.

996. And more and more people began to follow

997. Jim Garrison's theory of time and propinquity,

998. looking for patterns of a hidden power in America,

999. not for logic or meaning any longer.

1000. And when the internet was created, almost immediately,

1001. those patterns of suspicion would move into the data

1002. and multiply endlessly across the system.

1003. And that dark paranoia, that 200 years before

1004. had spread across the prairies and the mountains

1005. among isolated settlers,

1006. now spread across the virtual world,

1007. among isolated individuals sitting alone in front of their screens...

1008. .. and suspicion and distrust crept back into what was going to be

1009. the new system of power.

1010. Who Killed Bambi? by Sex Pistols

1011. SHOUTING, GLASS SMASHING