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DESCRIPTION:\nThe evening begins with an optional social hour and pot luck supper at 
 6:30 pm,\nfollowed by the film at 7:30 pm, followed by a discussion at the 
 end of the film.\n\nTHE TRAP\nby Adam Curtis\nEpisode One:  Fuck You 
 Buddy!\n\nIn this first episode, Adam Curtis examines the rise of game 
 theory during the Cold War and the way in which its mathematical models of 
 human behavior filter into economic thought.  This episode traces the 
 development of game theory with particular reference to the work of John 
 Nash who believed that all humans are inherently suspicious and selfish 
 creatures that stratagized constantly.  Using this as his first premise, 
 Nash constructed logically consistent and mathematically verifiable models, 
 for which he won the most prestigious prize in economics.  He invented 
 system games reflecting his beliefs about human behavior, including one he 
 called “Fuck You Buddy” in which the only way to win was to betray your 
 playing partner.  These games were internally coherent and worked correctly 
 as long as the players obeyed the ground rules that they should behave 
 selfishly and outwit their opponents.\n\nWhat was not known at the time was 
 that Nash was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and, as a result, was 
 deeply suspicious of everyone around him — including his colleagues — 
 and was convinced that many were involved in conspiracies against him.  It 
 was this mistaken belief that led to his view of people as a whole that 
 formed the basis for his theories.\n\nA separate strand in the documentary 
 is the work of R. D. Laing, whose work in psychiatry led him to model 
 familial interactions using game theory.  His conclusion was that humans 
 are inherently selfish, shrewd, and spontaneously generate stratagems 
 during everyday interactions.  Laing’s theories became more developed 
 when he concluded that some forms of mental illness were merely artificial 
 labels, used by the state to suppress individual suffering.  This belief 
 became a staple tenet of counterculture during the 1960s.\n\nThese theories 
 tended to support the beliefs of what were then fringe economists such as 
 Friedrich von Hayek whose economic models left no room for altruism, but 
 depended purely on self-interest, leading to the formation of public choice 
 theory.  James M. Buchanan proposes that organizations employ managers 
 motivated only by money.\n\nAs the 1960s became the 1970s, the theories of 
 Laing and the models of Nash began to converge, producing a widespread 
 popular belief that the state (a surrogate family) was purely and simply a 
 mechanism of social control which calculatedly kept power out of the hands 
 of the public.  Adam Curtis shows that it was this belief that allowed the 
 theories of Hayek to look credible, and underpinned the free-market beliefs 
 of Margaret Thatcher who sincerely believed that by dismantling as much of 
 the British state as possible a form of social equilibrium would be 
 reached.  This was a return to Nash’s work, in which he proved 
 mathematically that if everyone was pursuing their own interests, a stable, 
 yet perpetually dynamic, society could result.\n\nThe episode ends with the 
 suggestion that this mathematically modeled society is run on data — 
 performance targets, quotas, statistics — and that it’s these figures 
 combined with the exaggerated belief in human selfishness that has created 
 “a cage” for Western humans.  The precise nature of the “cage” is 
 to be discussed in the next episode.\n\nWheelchair accessible around the 
 corner at  411  28th  Street\n\n$5 donations are accepted\n\n\n 
 https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2010/01/03/18634171.php
SUMMARY:The Trap: Episode One
LOCATION:Humanist Hall\n390  27th  Street\nmidtown Oakland, between Telegraph and 
 Broadway\nhttp://www.HumanistHall.org \n
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2010/01/03/18634171.php
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