In an age where simplistic dross tends to fill our television schedules, the work of the film-maker Adam Curtis is a welcome tonic. Curtis’s documentaries aim to shake us out of various complacent assumptions that lie at the heart of contemporary society, and to look critically at the strange world that we have created or fallen into.

I first became aware of Curtis when I saw his three-part documentary, The Power of Nightmares. In that film, Curtis argued that the menace of Islamic terrorism was largely a mass-delusion, whipped up and encouraged in the aftermath of 9/11 by ambitious politicians who saw fear as a potent force to boost their own authority. Our growing fear and paranoia also afforded our leaders a new role. In a time when politicians had become little more than managers, they could now assume the part of being our protectors, defending us from sinister forces that only they could properly understand.

The documentary was well-researched and convincingly argued, but the main premise now seems discredited and wrong-headed. The threat of Islamic extremism is real and will likely be with us for generations, though I do agree with Curtis that seeking protection in our current political leaders is a complete folly, since their actions exacerbate the problem instead of diminishing it.

Whatever its failings, much within Curtis’s exhilarating thesis still stands up to scrutiny. For instance, he revealed key similarities in the thinking of Leo Strauss (the man who provided the philosophical basis for American neo-conservatism) and Sayyid Qutb (Osama bin Laden’s favourite philosopher, and a chief inspiration for modern militant Islamism). Both men saw human beings as basically savage creatures. Humans would only behave like people instead of beasts if properly controlled.

Qutb’s predictable solution for controlling humanity was extreme Islam and global Islamic revolution. A single world government based upon Islam would move us away from what he perceived as our baser natures, towards piety and repression.

The ideas of Leo Strauss and the neo-conservatives were somewhat more sophisticated and also very cynical.

In Strauss’s view, people should be conditioned to see the world in terms of a titanic struggle between forces of absolute Good and absolute Evil. The USA itself was to be recast as mythic force for pure Good, whereas Evil enemies could be made of whoever the emerging neo-conservatives decided to demonize at any given time.

Strauss also believed that people should be encouraged to embrace religion (Christianity, this time) as part of the new worldview. It is important to note that he only advocated this worldview for the mass consumption. The new elite themselves didn’t need to believe in the myths that everyone else did. Strauss believed in the “Platonic lie”, whereby it is morally acceptable for enlightened and noble leaders to tell lies to the barbaric and unenlightened masses, as a way to control them.

To create a sense of shared purpose and to keep people cowed by fear, Strauss believed that it was important for America to always have menacing enemies for the public to be preoccupied with. Global struggles were to be portrayed as struggles between the supernatural forces of Good and Evil, as seen through the prism of Christian supernaturalism. For pragmatists like Strauss and his neo-con disciples, Christianity wasn’t necessarily true; it was simply a useful tool for controlling people, to stop them degenerating into savage beasts. Strauss was both a pragmatist and a deeply pessimistic cynic.

The aims of Strauss and Qutb (consequently, the aims of the neo-conservatives and the radical Islamists) were convergent. The neo-cons built up Al Qaeda as a vast power, a convenient force of supernatural Evil to unite Americans against. This, in turn, helped the cause of the militant Islamists. By portraying Al Qaeda as a vastly powerful organization, and by creating a worldview of Christianity poised against the Evil of Islam, America helped to radicalize many Muslims and drive them into the arms of the Islamist terrorist groups. And, the more successful Al Qaeda became in the execution of its atrocities, the more the neo-cons could use this for their own propaganda.

So, the neo-cons and Al Qaeda were allies in creating a world saturated in fear and the idea of a cosmic clash of Good and Evil. To Muslims, the Christian infidels are the Evil power. To the Christians, the great Evil is the Muslims.

The destructive theories of Qutb and Strauss were based upon a paranoid view of human beings. In the eyes of Qutb and Strauss, humans were barely-suppressed monsters who needed to be controlled and dominated for their own good. Otherwise, society would collapse in bloody chaos as humans reverted to the savage beasts behind the veneer of civilization.

Now Adam Cutis turns to a related theme with a new three part documentary, The Trap. The first instalment went out yesterday on BBC 2.

In his new film, Curtis explores the idea of individual freedom. The spread of liberty and freedom is held to be the ultimate political aim of our age. But if we step back and look at what has resulted, Curtis argues, it is a strange kind of freedom. Everything that was meant to free us from bureaucracy and control has actually led to an increasingly controlling form of management, driven by numbers and targets. Old systems of control have simply been replaced by new and more insidious ones, and a government committed to creating freedom of choice in all areas has led us to a greater degree of inequality. What began as an effort to sweep aside old elites and class hierarchy, has done the opposite, creating another new hierarchy based upon wealth and privilege. What we have today, Curtis argues, is a very narrow and peculiar idea of freedom that was born out of the paranoia of the Cold War era.

Is he right? I’ll reserve judgement until I’ve seen the whole documentary. With the Power of Nightmares, Curtis had me convinced for a while that the Islamist threat was exaggerated, such is his ability to construct a compelling argument. But then we had the 7/7 London attacks and various other Islamic terrorist atrocities all over the world. My idealistic desire to doubt the scale of Islamic terror took a deserved blow.

Typically fascinating, the new documentary traces our ideas of freedom back to thinkers such as Friedrich von Hayek and the mathematical genius John Nash. The influence of Nash and his emphasis on the paranoid “Game Theory” particularly stands out. Game Theory was developed to deal with nuclear-warfare strategy during the Cold War era, and it encompassed the idea that safety and equilibrium could only be achieved if all “players” in the “game” behaved in a way that was both perfectly rational and perfectly selfish.

But thinkers like Nash later came to see Game Theory as a system that could be applied to the whole of society and all human interactions. If everyone behaved like a player in Game Theory, perfectly self-interested, isolated, constantly strategizing against everyone else, society would fall into a state of natural equilibrium, requiring little State or bureaucratic control.

If this all sounds a bit crazy, it might be worth bearing in mind that Nash, despite being a Nobel Prize winning genius, was severely mentally ill. He was a paranoid schizophrenic who heard voices in his head, thought that people around him were part of vast conspiracies, and thought that he was part of a secret organization that could save the world.

Yet despite all of this, Nash’s ideas became increasingly powerful and popular, influencing politicians, economists, and even psychiatrists. Game Theory and other related ideas were used to criticize bureaucracies and anyone claiming to be interested in the common good. All were self-serving hypocrisies, and they were attacked by both the Left and the Right of the political spectrum.

The new alternative vision was a vision of paramount individual freedom in place of all such bureaucracies, but the type of freedom on offer was based upon an extremely negative view of human beings. The underlying assumption is that all people are cold and calculating creatures who will only serve their own interests. There’s no altruism, and people must constantly watch and snoop and strategize against each other. In other words, we are people as seen by the paranoid schizophrenic John Nash.

Apparently the next part of Curtis’s documentary describes how we have been conditioned to behave like the vision of people dreamed up by men like John Nash, and how we have found ourselves trapped inside a narrow and empty world as a result of all this.

The world Curtis describes does have a ring of truth to it. If, like me, you find yourself disinterested in striving and plotting against others to acquire “must-have” items of material junk such as I-Pods and phones, the society we live in can seem vacuous. We labour and toil to create junk, then we create an entire industry called advertising to convince ourselves that we want this junk, then we get into debt from buying this junk, and we work and toil some more to pay off the debts, and then buy more junk, and again persuade ourselves that we want some more of this junk. Isn’t there something better we could be doing with our time?

I wonder… is there a way for us to break out of all of this vacuity and negativity and mutual distrust?

A return to the Sixties values of flower power and free love, perhaps? Or a society based upon humanism, intellectual striving, empathy and mutual respect? A society where you would buy a starving person some food before buying yourself a new car or a holiday to the Maldives?

Lead the way…