The Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens (I mentioned him in my recent diatribe about drug policy) was on TV last night, presenting a short documentary entitled Cameron; Toff at the Top.

Hitchens argues that David Cameron, leader of the Conservative party in Britain, is little more than an opportunistic showman, a Blair-wannabe, who believes in nothing and who will say anything if it furthers his quest to become the next prime minister.

Hitchens holds views that I strongly oppose. Political differences aside, however, I find his dissections of politicians like Blair and Cameron entertainingly effective (his obsession with the shadowy "liberal elite" notwithstanding). He skewered Michael Gove several times in Toff at the Top, letting Gove verbally squirm and wriggle in his denials of Cameron's inconsistency.

I have a grudging admiration for Hitchens's individuality, too. He’s well-aware of how unfashionable and unpopular his "moral and cultural conservatism" is. He's unapologetic, though, because he really believes in his puritanical vision. Hitchens is neither a stupid or ignorant man; I guess that religious faith alone subverts his reason and informs his ideology. I almost envy his apparent conviction at times. At least, unlike Dave Cameron, he believes in something beyond his own narrow self-interest.

Hitchens is also right about one important issue: the death of choice in politics.

In Britain we have three main political parties that are practically indistinguishable from each other. The ideological differences between them, if such differences even exist, are minimal. They each fight over the same speck of centre-ground, and the resulting choice we're left with is over which leader has the best personality/looks - or maybe which colour badge we like best. Tens of thousands of voters, on both the left and right, are left without any meaningful representation in Parliament.

The reasons behind our current situation, including the slow death of democracy, are explored by Adam Curtis in The Trap: What Happened to our Dreams of Freedom? I mentioned this excellent and thought-provoking series a while ago.

In the West, a utopian vision called market democracy has risen up to replace the old idea that we can use politics to change society and make a better world.

In the new prevailing vision, free markets do a better job of giving free individuals what they truly want; so… the market is a superior democratic system to democracy itself.

This strange ideal is built upon a simplistic economic model of human beings as perfectly rational and almost robotic businessmen who'll act only to further their own material self-interest.

The economic model of human behaviour can be traced back to (among other influences) game theory, a system developed to deal with the terrifying uncertainties of the Cold War. It was later developed by the genius John Nash to encompass all human interactions. The Nash equilibrium showed, logically, how a society based entirely upon the self-seeking of free individuals need not break down into chaos. Instead it would create stability and order. In fact, altruism was unpredictable and more likely to lead to dangerous outcomes.

Yet Nash, having recovered from paranoid schizophrenia, now says that game theory principles might be unsound because they overemphasize computer-like rationality and pure selfishness. This realization, he says, has been his enlightenment.

He is not alone. Studies have shown that only two groups of people conform to the game theory model of behaviour in all experimental situations:

Economists… and psychopaths.

Curtis also discusses the theories of Isaiah Berlin, a tremendously influential thinker who has done more than most to underpin our current conceptions of freedom.

At Oxford University in 1958, Berlin gave a lecture that he called Two Concepts of Liberty. In the lecture, Berlin argued that there are two distinct kinds of freedom. He termed these "positive liberty" and "negative liberty".

Positive liberty stems from idealistic dreams of creating a better world, usually through politics and/or revolution. It is a dream of transforming people and freeing them from themselves, making them into better human beings. Often, in this worldview, people are seen as having become passive zombies, trapped in a narrow and false idea of freedom by the pressures and norms of bourgeois society. But we can break free from this false idea and change society for the better.

Negative liberty, by contrast, is nothing more than the freedom of individuals to acquire whatever they want without restraint. This concept of freedom deliberately avoids any higher ideals of how society should be ordered, even on questions of social equality.

Berlin believed that positive liberty would always lead inexorably to tyranny and horror - witness Stalin's Russia and Pol Pot's Cambodia.

In all such revolutionary/utopian visions it is the leaders who define the ideal kind of society and ideal free individual. The masses, unaware of the true nature of freedom, have to be shown how to be free, and coerced to be free if necessary.

If you think that you have one final answer that will lead all of humanity into true freedom and bliss, no sacrifice will be too great in order to achieve it, even if it means killing millions of people. The temptation will always be there to force people to be free.

When Pol Pot tried to construct his utopia, he began by simply slaughtering the whole of bourgeois society. In his visionary fervour he killed hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps as many as a million, mostly the middle-classes and intellectuals who might possibly dissent against his strict vision. To put this in perspective, it is sometimes estimated that he oversaw the killing of a third of the entire population of Cambodia.

Negative liberty, alternatively, might be a narrow and empty kind of freedom but it is always safer than Positive Liberty, according to the theory.

As a word of caution, Isaiah Berlin warned that people advocating negative liberty must never come to believe that it is a final answer, because this would again lead to coercion and force, the worst aspects of positive liberty.

Half a century later…

Negative liberty has come to triumph in the West, and we are now trapped in its narrow and limiting worldview… and yet Berlin’s cautionary warnings have gone unheeded.

We now have the strangest of all worlds. Men like George Bush apply revolutionary methods and military power for the spreading of negative liberty. Britain's and America's crusade to "spread freedom" negates the main virtue of negative liberty: that it is supposed to be safer than positive liberty, not leading to coercion or force. America has become the very thing that negative liberty was meant to prevent.

Meanwhile, market democracy has not led to any kind of utopia. It has led to corruption on an enormous scale and severe inequality.

Most of the world's wealth is held by a tiny 1% of the population. But in the poorest sections of our global society we see a deadly rise of child slavery, extreme poverty and even death from malnutrition and preventable diseases. The attitude of the ultra-rich 1% mirrors the attitude of Marie Antoinette before the French Revolution.

We now have the worst aspects of both positive liberty and negative liberty. We have a narrow and unfulfilling version of freedom that has led to drastic inequality and increasingly controlling systems of conformity. We are becoming passive zombies, consumers, who only exist for the purpose of buying things to keep the rich in bathtubs to fill with money. And now this mutant idea of freedom has itself become a utopian ideal, and we are actually starting to force others to accept it, invading any country we deem to lack sufficient freedom.

As for the staggeringly obscene levels social injustice that have arisen, the very tenets of negative liberty and market democracy prevent us from using politics in an idealistic way to create a fairer world.

As Adam Curtis concludes: "If we ever want to escape from this limited worldview, we will have to rediscover the progressive, positive ideas of freedom, and realize that Isaiah Berlin was wrong. Not all attempts to change the world for the better lead to tyranny."