People living in the Western democracies know that those in power do not know what they’re doing, but due to their inability to envision an alternative future, nothing changes, said the British journalist and director, Adam Curtis, a guest on the Sunday’s Philosophical Theatre debate in Zagreb.
Curtis is an award-winning documentary film-maker whose work, which he describes as journalism, explores the subjects of geopolitics, power and its workings in society, psychology, and the effect of new technologies on the societal structures.
“Those in power know that we are aware they do not know what to do,” Curtis said during a discussion on his latest documentary, “Hypernormalisation” (2016), which talks about a “fake world” built from the 1970s onwards by corporations, governments and financiers.
The term “hypernormalisation” was coined by the Russian historian and Berkeley professor of anthropology, Alexei Jurchak, who, in his book about the last two decades of the Soviet Russia, wrote that the political system in the country was so successful in self-deception and spreading propaganda that nobody could have imagined a different order until it happened.
“Everybody knew that the plan was absurd, and those implementing it absolutely corrupt, but people, due to their lack of vision, accepted it as normal – hypernormal”, said Crutis, and added that we lived in a similar situation today.
“There is no one today in a position of power who has an alternative vision of the future, including China,” he said.
He said that, in spite of the crisis, we should not desire the collapse of the “stuck” western democracies, and named the two possible directions – a technocratic totalitarianism, similar to the current situation in China, or a revival of the democracy, which calls for the return of politics as a noble and moral profession.
“This could happen,” he said, adding that “the politicians today have power, but they don’t know how to use it.”
The Philosophical Theatre is part of the Croatian National Theatre (HNK) programme, established in 2014 by the Croatian author and philosopher Srecko Horvat. Through monthly debates, it aims to re-establish the theatre as a place of free discourse and the exchange of ideas, not only on the subjects of philosophy and the arts, but politics, sociology, and other global issues. Many distinguished philosophers, authors, and artists were guests at the debates, including Terry Eagleton, Slavoj Zizek, Thomas Piketty, and Julija Kristeva.
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