TimStr

Watch Adam Curtis' documentaries to understand the social matrix

4 posts in this topic

I highly recommend watching the documentaries that Adam Curtis did for the BBC to get a very high level view about the history of the last 70 years and ultimately how our present situation of power, society and the social understanding of truth came into existence. I also love that he worked with a lot of archive footage to help you really get a feeling for the time he is talking about. He paints a very big picture, relating individual events and people and paradigms of entire countries and civilisations.

The are a must watch if you want to understand the social matrix. Start with HyperNormalisation (watch if you want to understand how Trump happened), The Century of The Self and Can’t Get You Out of My Head (all free on his website):

https://thoughtmaybe.com/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head/
 

While you watch pay attention to how individuals' understanding of power shapes their view of the world and how their view of the world shapes their individual understanding of power.

Also: @Leo Gura Can you please make an episode about power and how it correlates between ego and social matrix?

Edited by TimStr

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Be wary of taking everything Curtis asserts in his documentaries as indisputable fact using his high accentuated seemingly rational, objective sounding British authoritative voice, and not something viewed and informed through a certain interpretative lens of his (rationalism, individualism, liberalism etc.) of the world in general and world history from his POV. ZeroBooks channel on YouTube did a great video exposing some of the limitations of Curtises docs and their assertions about world history and politics, it's not long:

 


''society is culpable in not providing free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.” ― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables'

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@Fleetinglife

Great share!

I think Curtis is actually very nuanced in the way he portrays his theories. He never offers a specific interpretation to be taken factual, yet he still is able to tie a great ammount of historical events together into a narrative, that questions the mainstream one. That narrative is definitely shaped by his own position. But I feel he is aware, that it's not about the specics of the narrative but about the questioning.

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What I find so intresting it the meta-point, that is being made here.

Collecitve narrative is a thing of the social matrix. We can try to escape it individually but it takes way more to change it on the collective level. Or to open us as a social collective up for the possibility, that we are all just imagining together.

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