“I’ve been shouted at by sort of nice, sweet liberal people at dinner parties, saying, ‘Well, I’ve read the Mueller report…’ Within the bandwidth it leads to that madness. It is madness. It’s sort of dying away now, but they went mad. And this goes back to my thing about ‘What have we just been through?’ A really odd time. And then we come out of it, and we press buttons to try and make things better, and none of them work. It makes me think, what’s the solution to that?”
What is the solution, in a world where we have lost faith in the organising myths of our society, but there is no obvious successor ideology? Perhaps the clearest insight into Curtis’s own sense of political futures can be drawn from the concluding sequence of 2021’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head, whose psychedelic bricolage of themes from 20th-century history provided an alternative cultural hinterland to the angry populisms of the 2010s. In it, Curtis ends on the suggestion that not just the West but also its autocratic rivals China and Russia are “exhausted, empty of any new ideas”, and that “all of them have corruption that is burrowing deeper into their institutions, corruption that the politicians seem powerless to stop”. Yet the series ends on a surprisingly optimistic note, concluding with the famous quote from the anarchist anthropologist and political theorist that “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently”.
Graeber “was a really, really interesting person”, Curtis told me, “because he wasn’t just an anarchist, he was a bit like Murray Bookchin. They’re the anarchists that [PKK leader Abdullah] Ocalan knew, he was sort of almost a libertarian socialist, which is a thing that I’m really fascinated by, because I do think that individualism isn’t going to go back into the box. But if you want to change the world, you’ve got to come together in some kind of way, because that’s the only way you’re ever going to be powerful. Because if you’re on your own, it’s lonely, frightening, and you’re not powerful. And no one’s managed to square that circle. And I’ve always thought libertarian socialism is sort of trying to get to that point. And I really, really liked the quote I used, which is that actually, we made this society, it’s not like it came out of nothing, it was just imposed on us, and that does mean we can remake it if we want to.”
And yet, Curtis’s films make clear we are locked in an iron cage of ideology, enforced by increasingly shrill and hysterical political taboos, where any attempt at exploring alternative futures is cast as a one-way journey to the horrors of the 20th century. We are trapped in a failing system, whose morbid symptoms become ever more grotesque, yet in which popular attempts to correct its failing course are pathologised as merely the devious machinations of shadowy elites, who have hypnotised the dull-witted masses to do their bidding for them. Yes, things are bad, say the defenders of the current order as it collapses around them, but the only alternatives are far worse.
“What I’m so fascinated by in our time,” Curtis tells me, “is the ideology, and I think it’s okay to call it an ideology, that prevents us doing that. It’s a really interesting ideology, because it isn’t like other older ideologies, which would say ‘No, this is fantastic, this is the dream world’ — which is what they did in the Soviet Union, right up to the end. In this society, the press, the think tanks, all the wonks, have this sort of view that ‘We know it’s crap. We know it’s not ideal, we know it’s not wonderful. We know there’s corruption, but we can’t do anything about it. We know there’s injustice, we know there are inequalities, but we can’t do anything about that. But you’ve got to accept it. Because the rest is so horrible. The rest is much worse.’
“And what they mean by that is the alternatives are terrifying. They’re like the terrifying autocracy that Vladimir Putin has created in Russia. They’re like the technocratic, brutal surveillance system that Xi Jinping is running in China, or even worse and darker than that, there is radical modern Islamism, which you see in Iran, and also, if you take the New York Times as your Bible, the terrible fascism that Donald Trump and his followers are going to bring to America.
“What I find so fascinating about now is that all those things have proven to be much more fragile, much weaker than the established view said. Putin would seem to be a transitional figure in a yet fully collapsing empire, who probably will lose power in some way or another. I have a friend in China, whose parents are quite high up in the Communist Party. They are quite frightened about what’s happening in the protests. They know there’s a real problem. And also, that there is an enormous amount of debt in China, far more than we had in 2008. Iran… I think what might happen in Iran in the future might be extraordinarily important.
“And quite frankly, despite all the efforts of the New York Times, Donald Trump is beginning to be seen as what he probably was — as some weird grifter, who managed to occupy a space that we’d left open, because we were attending to something else, and just occupied that space and touched on something in America.”
For Curtis, it seems, the looming failures of the West’s rival autocracies, for all that they are held up by liberals as justification for preserving our own failing system, and by some radical conservatives as models to be emulated, open up a strange and unlikely moment of possibility. At the other end of the present global crisis, perhaps, lies the opportunity to finally transcend the long 20th century. Things may seem bad, but a better future may already be straining to be born.
“They’re all fading away,” he says, “which makes me — I mean, this is a really weird thing to say at this present moment in time — quite optimistic, because it’s like the way is open now to actually start thinking in quite a radical way… and that actually, maybe that’s the kind of journalism we should be doing.”
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