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OWL HOOTS

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When I see you alone

I see what's in your mind

You want me, yes, you do

You don't need to tell me

I know you love me most

No-one else take my place

You need me, yes, you do

Forever and ever

We are in love, baby love child

I take you so high
groovy love child

Give me a kiss, baby love child

Do it again... #

Ayn Rand, 225-1, take two.

BEEPING

Who are you, Ayn Rand?
When I say that,

I would like to know
just a little bit.

You have an accent which is...
Russian. Russian.

You were born in Russia? Yes.

Came here... Oh, about 30 years ago.

And whence did this philosophy
of yours come?

Er...out of my own mind.

With the sole acknowledgement of
a debt to Aristotle,

who is the only philosopher
that ever influenced me.

Uh-huh. I devised the rest of
my philosophy myself.

Ayn Rand had left Russia
in the 1920s

and gone to live in California.

By chance, she met the film director
Cecil B DeMille,

who gave her a job
as an extra on his epic films.

All right now, give me everything
you've got, you people!

Ready now? Speed, 957.
Places, everybody, this is a take!

Clear the set! Camera!

Then DeMille gave her a screenplay
to write called The Skyscraper.

Rand hated the characters
and the plot,

but the idea
was going to make her famous.

She started to write
her own stories,

and in 1943 she published a novel
called The Fountainhead.

Its hero is an architect
called Howard Roark who refuses

to compromise in his vision of how
to build a skyscraper in New York.

It was a bestseller,
and was made into a film.

Ayn Rand used Roark
to express her philosophy,

that she called objectivism.

Human beings, Rand said,
were alone in the universe.

They must free themselves
of all forms of political and religious control

and live their lives guided
only by their selfish desires.

If they did this,
they would become heroic figures.

I am primarily the creator
of a new code of morality

which has so far
been believed impossible,

namely a morality not based on
arbitrary edict, mystical or social.

I hold that if man wants to
live on earth,

his highest moral purpose is
the achievement of his own happiness,

and that he must not
force other people

nor accept their right to force him,

that each must man must live
as an end in himself,

and follow his own
rational self-interest.

May I interrupt now? You may.

In the 1950s,
Rand moved to New York.

She lived next to her
favourite skyscraper, the Empire State Building.

Rand's ideas were seen as
mad and dangerous.

Selfishness and greed had led
to the financial chaos

and the Depression of the 1930s.

The job of politics
was to manage and control

the selfish desires
of the individual.

But Rand continued to write,

and a small group of followers
began to form round her

who believed in her vision
of another kind of world,

where everyone was free.

I was 19 when I met Ayn.

I was very idealistic,

and she appealed to everything
that was idealistic in me.

We are heroic,
we can know the world,

we can tame nature,
we can achieve our goals.

We can do what we want.

What does it matter that
we're alone? Who do we need?

Why do we need anyone?

We have ourselves.

And that was enough?
And that was...for sure enough, yes.

Definitely enough.

Even at 19, I knew, "I'm not going
to meet anyone else like this.

"This is once in a lifetime."

Rand had died in 1981,
but by the start of the 1990s

her novels had become a phenomenon
in America.

A Library of Congress survey showed
that one of them, Atlas Shrugged,

was now the second most influential
book in the country.

The first was the Bible.

And the group most inspired by her

were the new entrepreneurs
of Silicon Valley,

including some of the most powerful,
like Larry Ellison of Oracle.

Many of them named their companies
and even their children after Rand and her novels.

They set up reading groups
to spread her ideas.

But above all, they saw themselves
as Randian heroes.

I really felt like an Ayn Rand hero!

I really did
feel like an Ayn Rand hero.

I was one. I didn't just
feel like one, I was one!

I was building the products.

I was thinking independently,
I was...being rational.

I was taking pride in what I did.

Those are Ayn Rand
heroes' characteristics - I was an Ayn Rand hero.

I wasn't in the book,
but I was an Ayn Rand hero.

Just to give you an example, my...

my six-year-old boy,
his middle name is Rand,

and I was talking to someone
in...a classmate's dad,

and we were talking about Ayn Rand
and this interview, and he said,

"Oh, I'm a huge Ayn Rand fan, in
fact my girl's middle name is Ayn."

And it's funny
when you see people, you see companies all the time

called Fountainhead
or the Galt Group, and you see

little evidence that Ayn Rand
has heavily influenced people.

Many of the people here in Silicon
Valley were greatly inspired by Ayn Rand.

Entrepreneurs who were
building computers,

entrepreneurs in biotech,
entrepreneurs in software, in internet, networking.

Many here were...were inspired by
Ayn Rand. It presented a vision.

It presented a vision of
a...morally exciting enterprise,

a morally glorious project.

But the project was about more
than just the entrepreneurs being Randian heroes,

because an idea was emerging
in California

that said that
the new computer technologies

could turn everyone
into heroic individuals.

It was a vision of a society
where the old forms of political control would be unnecessary

because computer networks
could create order in society without central control.

This had never happened before,

because at the heart of of
western political thought

had always been a fear that
if you allowed individuals too much freedom, you would get anarchy.

But ever since the 1970s,
computer utopians in California

believed that if human beings
were linked by webs of computers,

then together they could create
their own kind of order.

It was a cybernetic dream which said
that the feedback of information

between all the individuals
connected as nodes in the network

would work to create
a self-stabilising system.

The world would be stable,
yet everyone would be heroic Randian beings,

completely free
to follow their desires.

Now, in the 1990s,
the technologies had been built,

and in 1991 a leading computer
engineer from California

gave a dramatic demonstration.

He was called Loren Carpenter.

He invited hundreds of people
to a large shed.

On each seat was a small paddle,

and in front of them
was a giant screen.

We told them nothing for a while.
We just left the things on the seats,

and people would pick this up and
look at it and say, "What's that?"

And then somebody noticed that
there's little red and green dots up there on the screen,

and this is red and green, so maybe
that has something to do with that.

It would be that. "OK, there I am."

And when that happened,
the room erupted.

Just totally spontaneous,
we didn't say anything.

Carpenter then began an experiment.

He projected the early
computer game Pong.

Each half of the audience
jointly controlled the bat

on their side of the screen.

If an individual held up
red on their paddle,

a computer sensor picked it up and
the bat on the screen went down.

If they held up green, it went up.

But they had to operate it together.

When the game is being played and
the ball is going back and forth,

if it's down here
and it's headed that way,

some people are going to have to
show red

to keep it from going
all the way to the top.

If everybody just showed green,
it would slam up to the top and the ball would miss.

So something happened
in that group of people,

where some decided to show green
and some decided to show red

to cause it to stop
in the right place.

And we had no idea what did that.

All right! Red, red, red, red, red!

Oh, baby! Oh, yeah!

Red!

Carpenter believed that what he had
created was a model of a society

where there was no hierarchy,

where everyone made their own
decisions without guidance.

Yet because they were linked by
the machines,

out of it came a stability
and an order.

So they're all acting as individuals,

because each one of them can decide
what they're going to do.

They have total freedom about what to
decide to do, but there's an order.

There's an order that emerges
that gives them a kind of

an amoeba-like effect,
where they surge and then they play.

It was kind of
in the nature of an experiment.

I wanted to see, if no hierarchy
existed at all, what would happen.

And what did happen?

They formed a... A kind of a...
A subconscious consensus.

Out of these kinds of ideas

came what was called
the Californian ideology.

It was an odd fusion of
radical individualism

and utopian theories
about computer systems,

and an international priesthood
rose up to promote it.

What united them was was a vision

that the world
was now one interconnected system,

that nation states were irrelevant

and politicians should not
try and control the system,

they should let it free
to create a new kind of democracy.

All the mechanisms
that we are creating

are connecting everything
to everything else.

They let the individual
do their thing.

The internet, as it spreads,
is going to

radically accelerate that process of
network formation -

a different kind of
global governance.

Really, the fundamental evolution
of the global system

in the post-Cold War era.

And people, as consumers,
have moved into the 21st century -

new citizens, networkers
who'll reshape the world.

You have citizens forming
networks, global, you know, the planetary consciousness.

They are absolutely liberating
for the individual.

The power has shifted
to the citizens,

and the government
must be a facilitator.

They should not, in the traditional
sense, control and regulate.

But at this very moment,
a new President of the United States

was elected
who believed the opposite.

He was convinced that
he could use political power

in its traditional way, to
transform the world for the better.

You have to realise
that Alan Greenspan

was and is a brilliant mind, doing
brilliant things in the real world,

but in his twenties, he's sitting
with me in New York in our apartment,

in my apartment, and telling me
that he cannot say for a certainty

that he exists, and he cannot say for
a certainty that I, Nathaniel, exist.

And he cannot say for a certainty
that this conversation exists.

That aside, he's got lots of opinions
about everything, how the economy works, how the world works,

but he denies the possibility
of being certain about anything.

Even, and this, of course,
is reductio ad absurdum,

even he cannot be certain
that he exists.

So my challenge became
to persuade him

that he can be certain
that he exists.

Alan Greenspan
believed in a philosophy called logical positivism.

It was an extreme form
of rationality that questioned everything

and used logic
to reach absurd conclusions.

To try and save him from this,

Nathaniel Branden
introduced Greenspan to Ayn Rand.

Branden and his wife Barbara

were the leaders of the small group
that had formed around Ayn Rand.

They jokingly called themselves
the Collective,

and they met in Rand's apartment
every Saturday night

to read the latest section of
the novel that she was writing, called Atlas Shrugged.

Nathaniel liked him,
Ayn did not like him at all.

Nathaniel did,
and began discussing ideas with him.

And every Saturday night,
the Collective gathered to read what Ayn had written,

to read in manuscript what Ayn had
written of Atlas Shrugged that week,

and finally Nathaniel persuaded Ayn
to include Alan in that.

And he loved the book, and he was...

He became a loyal member
of the Collective.

Atlas Shrugged is set in
a science-fiction world,

but one which is very similar
to 1950s America.

In it, Ayn Rand attacks head-on
the idea of altruism,

the care of others, as an
organising principle for society.

In the story, the government
and the state control everything.

But one by one, the creative
individuals in America -

the industrialists,
the inventors and the artists -

are all mysteriously disappearing.

They have gone on strike,

and they hide out
in a remote mountain valley as America falls apart.

At the end of the book,
they reappear,

and set out to build Rand's vision
of the world to come,

a world in which politics
has disappeared

and is based instead on what she
called "the virtues of selfishness."

The critics hated it.

And let me start by
quoting from a review

of this novel, Atlas Shrugged,
that appeared in Newsweek.

It said that you are out to destroy

almost every edifice in the
contemporary American way of life -

our Judeo-Christian religion,

our modified
government-regulated capitalism,

our rule by the majority will.

Are these accurate criticisms?
Er, yes.

I'm challenging
the moral code of altruism,

the precept that man's moral duty
is to live for others,

that man must sacrifice himself
to others.

I say that man is entitled
to his own happiness,

and that he must achieve it himself,

and nor should he wish to sacrifice
himself for the happiness of others.

I hold that man
should have self-esteem.

'Atlas Shrugged was the great
disappointment of her life.'

What hurt her terribly
was that when it came out,

not a single person
whom she considered a peer

stood up publicly

to say what an achievement
that book was.

Not one. Nobody.

Vicious, horrible criticisms.

She felt very alienated,

and this small group around her,
the Collective,

were the only people
she had admitted to, in effect, her private world,

the world that
she wasn't alienated from.

Alan Greenspan remained
fiercely loyal to Ayn Rand.

He married another member
of the Collective, a painter called Joan Mitchell.

Together, they and the other
members of the group saw themselves

as models for a new kind of world
that they were convinced was coming.

We thought of ourselves

as being instigators of
a revolution that was coming,

and, uh...

we were so enthusiastic about what
a difference it was going to make

to the world, and we were there,
and we were in on it,

and we hoped we were contributing,
even, to it.

And what would that revolution
lead to?

Oh, totally free society.

At the end of 1992, Alan Greenspan
went to see President Clinton.

It was a few days after
Clinton had been elected,

and what Greenspan said
in that conversation

was the beginning of a revolution.

By now, Greenspan was
the head of the US Federal Reserve,

and what he told Clinton

was that his election promises
of social reform were impossible.

The government deficit was so large,
Greenspan said,

that if he borrowed any more
to pay for his political programme,

then interest rates would go up
and damage growth.

But, Greenspan said,
there was a radical alternative.

Clinton should do the very opposite.
Cut government spending,

then interest rates would go down
and the markets would boom.

Greenspan's idea was simple.

Clinton should let the markets
transform America, not politics.

He said later that he was surprised
that Clinton agreed with him.

I had hoped to invest in your future
without asking more of you,

and I worked harder than I've ever
worked in my life to meet that goal.

But I can't, because the deficit
has increased so much.

There will be many more budget cuts.

This is the beginning, not the end.

The house has already embarked
on that course. There will be more.

If our national debt were
stacked in thousand dollar bills,

the stack would
reach 267 miles into space.

As Greenspan had predicted,
a boom began.

And as share prices rose higher
and higher, a belief started to grow

that this time,
the boom would be different.

It wouldn't run out of control.

And the reason was the computers.

The computers allowed the banks to
create complex mathematical models

that could predict the risk of
making any loan or investment.

This had enormous implications,

because if a risk
could be predicted,

then it could be balanced
by hedging against it.

For the banks and the hedge funds,
this was like a new world.

For, in the chaos and
the volatility of the markets,

the computers had -
for the first time ever - created stability.

It allowed banks to lend money
to millions of people

they would never
have touched in the past.

At the same time, the internet
and other computer networks

allowed businesses to respond to
each others' needs instantaneously -

and to the consumers' desires.

It was the cybernetic feedback

predicted by the Californian
ideologists.

And a belief arose
that America had now entered into a new age of stability.

It was called the New Economy.

Whether they came from Silicon Valley
or from Washington,

from academia or from Wall Street,
there were a number of

leading individuals who basically
articulated a body of thought

now known fondly as
"the New Economy".

It was based on the premise of
a dramatic and permanent increase

in the rate of productivity growth,

sparked by new information
technologies that would let this thing go on forever.

'This is manna from heaven -

'this is the candy
that politicians only dream of.

'You don't have to do anything - '

you just push a button and presto!

You've got a brand new economy
that creates jobs and prosperity.

It's the rising tide
that lifts any and all boats,

even if there's no water
in the ocean.

But Alan Greenspan was worried.

Every morning in his bath,
he read page after page of data

about what was really
happening in the factories and businesses of America.

What puzzled him was that
the figures showed that, actually,

there was hardly any increase
in productivity,

yet reported profits
kept on going up.

There was something wrong.

And in 1996, Greenspan
made a speech that warned that the market might be overvalued.

That a dangerous speculative
bubble was being created.

Early December of 1996,
Alan Greenspan warned

that the US stock market

may be in a period of
irrational exuberance,

and you would have thought
the world had come to an end.

Politicians attacked him
from the left, from the right,

mainstream was upset with him,
Wall Street was upset with him.

And at that point, there was
a very unfortunate turn of events,

because he knuckled under
to political pressure.

He changed his mind.

Greenspan decided he was wrong.

That the computers were increasing
productivity in ways that were so new his data couldn't see it.

And he went to see President Clinton
to tell him the good news.

It really was a New Economy.

Greenspan described it to Clinton
as like discovering a new planet.

There's a monkey on my back

Makes me talk like that

There's a monkey on my back

Makes me talk like that

There's a monkey on my back

Makes me act like that

There's a monkey on my back

Makes me talk like that... #

(MUSIC DROWNS SPEECH)

The boom continued,

and Time magazine described
how a sense of lethargy

and quietness
came over the White House.

It was as if the President
didn't have anything to do.

There's a monkey on my back

Makes me act like that

There's a monkey on my back

Makes me act like that

There's a monkey on my back... #

This was a woman who was very
powerful in a great many ways,

who was mentally more powerful
than anyone she met,

who was more determined,
who was more hardworking

than anyone she met.

What she would have loved

would be to find a man
who was stronger than she.

She would have loved to meet
someone who was smarter than she,

braver than she, a greater genius.
She never met him.

But she longed for him
all her life.

And I think this accounts for
her sexual psychology.

In the 1940s, Ayn Rand had married
an actor called Frank O'Connor.

But now, faced with
the hostility to her ideas,

Rand turned to the leading member of
the collective, Nathaniel Branden.

She told him that she had
fallen in love with him,

and, despite the fact
that he was married to Barbara -

another member of the collective -

Rand told him that
the only rational course

was for Nathaniel
to have an affair with her.

Ov...I don't think...

I must be failing to make
a certain point clear to you, sir.

Ayn Rand thought that
she was being rational

about anything or everything
that she did.

So it would never occur to me to ask,

"Did Ayn Rand think she was being
rational about that?"

She would say, if she were here,
I can feel her,

she would say, "Why, yes,
do you think I would do something

"if I didn't think it was rational?"

In your book, you talk about love

as if it were
a business deal of some kind.

Isn't the essence of love
that it is above self-interest?

In love, the currency is virtue.

You love people not for
what you do to or for them,

or what they do for you.

You love them for their values,
their virtues,

which they have achieved
in their own character.

You don't love causelessly.

You don't love everybody
indiscriminately.

You love only those who deserve it.

And then if a man is weak,
or a woman is weak,

then she, he is beyond love?

He certainly does not deserve it.

She was attempting to portray it,

that affair between them,

as totally rationally justified.

She said it was nobody's business,

and we were sworn to
absolute secrecy,

but she said since they were
such unusual people,

it was inevitable that they feel
what they felt -

that there could be
no objection to an affair.

I also felt... I was very aware

of how little Ayn Rand had
had in her life from the outside,

from other people.

And I thought, OK,
if I could press a button,

and make Ayn romantically happy,

would I do it?
And I thought, yes, I would.

That's altruism. >

I know. I know.

It was. I'm not proud of saying yes,
but I said yes.

Well, this is the second floor.

And this is one of my favourite
parts of the house.

This is a beautiful,
central corridor up here.

Must be a bear keeping
this carpet clean, huh?

Well, the main things that...
(VOICE FADES)

LEONARD COHEN:
..You can spend the night beside her

And you know that she's half crazy

But that's why you
want to be there

And she feeds you tea and oranges

That come all the way from China

And just when you mean to tell her

That you have no love to give her

Then she gets you on her wavelength

And she lets the river answer

That you've always been her lover

And you want to travel with her

And you want to travel blind

And you know she will trust you

For you've touched her perfect body

With your mind... #

'First time I ever
looked into his eyes,

'I saw somebody totally different
than I had expected to see.

'And that's the person
I fell in love with.'

And you want to travel with him

And you want to travel blind

And you think
maybe you'll trust him

For he's touched your perfect body
with his mind. #

By 1997, the American boom
was reshaping the whole world.

Economists and bankers
who saw the world as one giant economic system

now dominated
the American government.

They believed that the way
to achieve global economic stability

was for nations
to open themselves up

to the free flow of capital.

And the laboratory that they had
created for this experiment

was South East Asia.

Under American pressure,

countries like
South Korea and Thailand

had given up all restrictions
and Western capital flooded in.

It helped fuel what was called
"The Asian Miracle".

But a group within the White House
were worried that

much of the Western money
was going to fund

a giant speculative bubble
in property.

And when the boom collapsed,
the money would flee,

leaving the countries like Thailand
and South Korea decimated.

The group were led by the economist
Joseph Stiglitz.

The Council of Economic Advisers
was very worried

about these short-term
speculative capital flows

because while the countries benefit
a little bit when the money comes in,

when the money goes out,
the countries are devastated.

So, it was not
in the interest of Korea.

And it was not in the interest
of the US.

It was in the interest of
a very small group of people

who make their money from
these short-term capital flows.

Bankers, and hedge funds.

It was a very small group
in whose interest it was.

The Council of Economic Advisors
decided to warn the President.

They wanted to persuade him to
stop some of the more excessive

short-term speculation
in the Asian countries.

But they came face to face

with the Secretary of the Treasury,
Robert Rubin.

Rubin had previously
run Goldman Sachs and under his leadership

the bank had created
many of the computer models that underpinned the boom.

Rubin had a revolutionary vision
of a world system

completely open to the free flow
of capital.

Joseph Stiglitz, who headed
the Council of Economic Advisers,

was convinced that the Treasury

was stopping the warnings
reaching the President.

He believed that Rubin and
the Treasury had effectively become

agents of the financial world
embedded in the heart of government.

Treasury had close connections
with the financial markets.

The Secretary of the Treasury

had come from
the largest investment bank,

and went afterwards into
the largest commercial bank.

These are the people with whom
the US Treasury naturally interacts.

To Wall Street, we were threatening
a bursting of the bubble.

To Wall Street,
we were threatening their profits.

The Treasury worked extremely hard

to make sure the President
never got to consider the issues.

Making sure that perspectives of
the Council of Economic Advisors...

Which was you?
Yes. ..Never reached the president.

So they kept your arguments from
the President? Effectively, yes.

What some people
were beginning to see

was that the computer networks
and the global systems

that they had created
hadn't distributed power.

They had just shifted it,

and, if anything,
concentrated it in new forms.

And some of the computer utopians
from Silicon Valley

were also beginning to realise
that the World Wide Web

was not a new kind of democracy,
but something far more complicated

where power was exercised
over the individual in new and surprising ways.

Carmen Hermosillo had been
one of the earliest believers

in the new communities
of cyberspace.

Her online name was Humdog
and she lived on the West Coast.

But then she lost faith,
and she posted an attack

which caused a sensation online.

"It is fashionable to suggest",
she wrote,

"that cyberspace is some island
of the blessed

"where people are free to indulge
and express their individuality.

"This is not true. I have seen many
people spill out their emotions,

"their guts online,
and I did so myself,

"until I began to see that
I had commodified myself.

"Commodification means that
you turn something into a product

"which has a money value.

"In the 19th century,
commodities were made in factories

"by workers
who were mostly exploited.

"But I created my interior thoughts
as commodities for the corporations

"that owned the board I was
posting to, like CompuServe or AOL,

"and that commodity
was then sold on

"to other consumer entities
as entertainment."

"Cyberspace", she wrote,
"is a black hole.

"It absorbs energy and personality

"and then re-presents
it as an emotional spectacle.

"It is done by businesses

"that commodify human interaction
and emotion.

"And we are getting lost
in the spectacle."

She wore blue velvet

Bluer than velvet
was the night... #

'The navy blue dress. My cousin
is a genetic whatchamacallit.

'He said if she has preserved
a pinprick size of crusted semen,

'they can match the DNA.'

In 1997, Bill Clinton

made it clear to Monica Lewinsky
that their love affair was over.

Hurt and bewildered,
Lewinsky poured out her feelings

to her colleague Linda Tripp -
who had become her friend.

But in September of that year,
Linda Tripp

secretly began to
record their phone conversations.

At the very same time,
on the other side of the world,

the property bubble
in South East Asia finally burst.

Two enormous crises
were about to engulf the world.

One would strip the last remnants
of power from Bill Clinton.

The other would bring the global
economic system to its knees.

The dream of a stable world
was about to be assaulted

by the two uncontrollable forces
of love and power.

The Asian crisis began in Thailand.

Hundreds of thousands of offices
and apartments had been built.

But no-one wanted them.

As the developers went bust
and defaulted on their loans,

Western investors panicked

and rushed to take their money
out of the country.

The panic began to spread,
first to South Korea.

Housewives queued
to give their spare dollars

to the government
to rescue the country.

But it wasn't enough.

Teams from the IMF flew in

and they offered billions
of dollars in loans

to stabilise the economies.
But there was a price.

The IMF said that the reason
the crisis had happened

was because the Asian economies
weren't Western enough.

In return for the loans,

they would have to turn themselves
into models of the free market.

This meant cutting
government spending

and getting rid of corruption
and nepotism in the ruling elites.

CHANTING

Then the crisis got worse.
It spread to Indonesia.

Indonesia was ruled by
President Suharto.

He was an autocrat surrounded
by a corrupt clique of advisers and family members.

He refused to do
what the IMF wanted.

So the IMF turned to
the US Secretary of the Treasury, Robert Rubin.

Our objective was not to reform
the country for the sake of reform.

The problem the international
community faced was that both

the international markets

and the domestic holders of capital
were very quickly losing confidence

in the Indonesian regime.

By that time, it was our view

that if President Suharto was
going to re-establish confidence,

he had to deal with corruption.

That was something
he was unwilling to do.

Robert Rubin and the US Treasury

were determined to force Suharto
to their will.

In an atmosphere of growing panic
in Washington,

Rubin's team began to argue
that the overthrow of Suharto

might be the only way
to solve the crisis.

President Clinton
was now increasingly enmeshed

in the crisis over Monica Lewinsky,

and enormous political power
was passing to Rubin

and his Treasury team.

They, and not the State Department,

were now running
America's foreign policy.

And everything was judged by
whether it was a threat

to the global economic system.

There is no question that
the Treasury Secretary,

in this case, me, got involved
in sensitive issues

that went way beyond
what Treasury Secretaries ordinarily got involved in.

But the reason was that
there was real risk

that if Indonesia had chaos,
political chaos I'm talking about,

that could spread, threatening
the interest of the global economy.

In January 1998, Suharto gave in
and signed the IMF agreement,

watched over by the head of the IMF,
Michel Camdessus.

Indonesia received a massive loan
to stabilise the economy.

For a moment it worked. But then
the strangest thing happened.

Indonesian's currency has collapsed,
losing 80% of its value

and the economy is in ruins.

With riots and looting
breaking out across the country,

there are fears that
it's now on the brink of anarchy.

Indonesia's exchange rate
crashed disastrously

and the economy went into freefall.

But Indonesia was not alone.

In every country
that the IMF bailed out,

like Thailand and South Korea,

for a moment there was stability,

and then the exchange rate
collapsed.

Rubin's critics in
the White House began to argue

that there was another agenda
also at work in the bail-outs -

that part of their real function
was to rescue the western investors,

not the countries.

Billions of dollars were paid
into the Asian banks by the IMF,

but many of those same dollars
were immediately used

to pay off western investors

who wanted to get their money
out of the country.

And once that had happened,
the economy crashed.

It was another illustration
that the interest

of the financial community

dominated over other interests.

By providing mega-billion-dollar
loans,

the IMF was bailing out
the Western investors

and leaving the taxpayers
in the countries further in debt,

because they had to repay the IMF.

The effect of the cuts was
devastating throughout the region.

In Indonesia,
government subsidies were removed,

as instructed by
the Western bankers.

Prices soared, and within months,

in a country of 200 million people,

15% of the male workforce
lost their jobs.

Economic output fell by 14%.

As Robert Rubin had wanted,
Suharto was forced from power,

but at a very high price.

The economy now lay in ruins

and ethnic and religious strife
began.

The same thing happened
in Thailand and South Korea.

Millions and millions of people
fell back into the poverty

that they thought
they had escaped forever.

By the middle of 1998,
the Asian economies had collapsed.

It was the most catastrophic
economic disaster

suffered by any countries
since the depression of the 1930s.

Many people cannot have the money,

don't have the money.

Millions of people are unemployed.

They don't have jobs, education.

Education and hospitals
are expensive.

Everything's expensive
for the common people.

If Monica Lewinsky says that while
you were in the Oval Office area,

you touched her breast,
would she be lying?

Bill Clinton had become President
with the vision

of using political power
to transform America.

But he had been persuaded
to give away that power

to the financial markets,

with the promise that this time

they would create
a new kind of stability,

a new kind of democracy,

free of the corruption
of elite politics.

But it was now becoming clear
that in reality,

America's political power had just
been transferred to another elite -

the financiers and Wall Street.

And when faced by a crisis,

they had simply used that power
to rescue themselves.

In the process, far
from creating stability,

their actions were
leading to a chaotic

and far more unstable world.

To the leaders of
the Asian countries,

this was just as much
a corruption of power

as anything their governments
were guilty of.

Power corrupts.

As much as government
can become corrupt

when invested with absolute power,

markets also can become corrupt

when equally absolutely powerful.

We are seeing the effect
of that absolute power today.

The impoverishment and misery
of millions of people

and their eventual slavery.

What did you tell your
cabinet, Mr President?

Ask him.
Are you considering...?

Do you think it went well?

Are you considering resignation,
Mr President?

OK, I don't know
if you saw that.

Did you see that look on his face?
Great, great.

Come in.

I love you, Rourke.

Would it please you to hear
that I've lived in torture all these months,

hoping never to find you again

and wishing to give my life
just to see once more?

But you knew that, of course.

That's what you wanted me
to live through.

Yes.

Why don't you laugh
at me now? You won.

I've no pride left to stop me.

I love you without dignity,
without regret.

I came to tell you this

and to tell you that
you'll never see me again.

By now, I've had
a lot of time to think.

I'm four, five years older

and I realise I've made
a terrible, terrible mistake.

But the trouble is, I've become
very, very important to Ayn.

She tells me,
"You are my lifeline to reality.

"I don't know how I would
have survived without you.

"You started the
Nathanial Brandon Institute."

That's how the philosophical
movement of Ayn Rand got launched,

was by this institute I created.

So my idol is telling me every day...

..I'm her lifeline to reality.

I don't know what to do.
I didn't know what to do.

And then...

..a young woman comes to
my lectures and I meet her

and I fall in love with her.

And now the situation
has got even worse.

She then launched into
a tirade against him

that was so shocking,

accusing him of utter irrationality,

of betraying objectivism,
betraying her.

It went on and on indefinitely.

And it ended with her saying...

.."If he had an ounce
of morality left,

"he would be impotent
for the next 10 years."

And then slapped him
across the face three times

and said "Get out."

He got out.

And that was the end.

And ultimately, it ended
an absolute disaster for everybody.

Ayn Rand's anger and despair

destroyed the small, perfect world
that she had built around her.

The Collective was torn apart
by the revelation of her affair

and by her violent
reaction at her betrayal.

And by the early 1970s,
Ayn Rand was left almost alone.

She still lived in her apartment
by the Empire State Building

and she took up stamp collecting.

One of the few people who remained
loyal to her was Alan Greenspan,

who worked in New York as an
economic consultant to Wall Street.

It's feasible in the way
in which it stays down

and does not merely drop
and bounce around

and have within it,
in a sense, an unstable future.

In 1974, President Ford
made Greenspan the chairman

of his Council of Economic
Advisers in Washington.

It was the beginning of
Greenspan's rise to power.

Rand was left alone in New York,

but she wasn't lonely, she said.

In her philosophy,
all you needed was yourself,

because you were the world.

I kind of think of this
whole thing as ongoing,

that there is an eternity,

and that we are going
to be a part of that eternity

that we aren't just
corpses in graves when we die.

But we aren't corpses in graves,
we are not there.

Don't you understand that
when this life is finished,

you're not there to say, "Oh, how
terrible that I'm a corpse"?

No. Well, this is true.
It's finished.

And what I've always thought

was a sentence from
some Greek philosopher,

I don't unfortunately
remember who it was.

I read it at 16 and
it's affected me all my life.

"I will not die.
It's the world that will end."

And that's absolutely true.

Oh, my God!

The attack on the World Trade Center

was an assault by political
Islamism on American power,

and on what the Islamists believed
was the destructive force

that drove that power,
radical individualism.

When the World Trade Center
towers collapsed,

everyone knew that
everything had changed.

But then it didn't.

The system returned to normal.

And the heroic individual
who did this,

and who bent history to his will,
was Alan Greenspan.

And he became the most
powerful man in the world.

As we struggle to make
sense of our profound loss

and its immediate
consequences for the economy,

we must not lose sight
of our longer-run prospects,

which have not been significantly
diminished by these terrible events.

But it started badly.

A week after the attacks,
the American markets opened again.

Dealers waited to see
what would happen.

Our heroes will now
open the marketplace.

The green button.

It was a disaster.

Immediately, the market suffered the
largest fall ever in its history.

Two weeks later,
the Enron scandal was revealed.

And it quickly became clear

that it was only one example
of a vast corporate fraud.

Since the early '90s, many major
corporations had faked profits

and hidden their debts,

helped by some of the
major accounting firms.

It seemed as if the American
economy might collapse.

Greenspan took action.

He dramatically cut interest
rates again and again.

His aim was simple,

to encourage American consumers
to borrow and spend.

They and their desires were
going to be the machine

that stabilised the system.

Huw, today's rate cut
is the culmination

of an extraordinary few
days for central banks.

It's all part of a
concerted global effort

to bolster consumer confidence

and make sure those consumers
carry on spending money

because that is what's keeping
economies afloat at the moment.

It was an enormous risk.

By cutting the rates
to almost zero,

Greenspan was unleashing a flood
of cheap money into the economy,

and in the past this had always led

to inflation and
dangerous instability.

But this time it didn't.

A vast consumer boom began,

bigger than anything
ever before in history.

But there was no inflation.

Everything remained stable.

It seemed that the system
could manage itself

without direct political control.

But it was an illusion.

The reason for the extraordinary
boom was the very opposite.

It happened because of a giant
exercise of political power

by an elite thousands of miles
away on the other side of the world.

HE SPEAKS IN CHINESE

The Asian countries, led by China,

had decided that never again

would they put themselves
at the mercy

of America and its
financial elites,

as had happened two years before.

So the Chinese Politburo
created a system to manage America.

They deliberately held their
currency's exchange rate at a low level.

This meant that their
exports were cheap,

and Chinese goods
flooded into America.

And to pay for them,

American dollars flooded into China.

But instead of spending
the money on their population,

the Chinese leaders immediately
lent the money back to America,

by buying government bonds.

It was a perfect system of
cheap goods and cheap money

flowing into America, all
controlled by the Chinese Politburo.

And it was this that
created the stability.

From it came an orgy of lending
by the banks to the poorest

and least credit-worthy
borrowers in the US.

It was a mirror image of
what the West had done

in East Asia in the 1990s,

and just like then,

out of it came
a vast property bubble.

"It is as if over a trillion
dollars has been recycled"

wrote one economist, "to a third
world developing economy

"that exists within
America's own borders."

The Chinese money had led
America into a dream world,

but the reason that so few bankers
and politicians questioned it

was because of their
faith in computers.

They were convinced
that it was the computers

that had brought the
stability to the system.

The machines created mathematical
models that parcelled out the loans,

and then hedged and balanced
them so that there was no risk.

But then, in 2008,
that dream collapsed.

Alan Greenspan's
vision of a new planet,

and Gordon Brown's promise
of no more boom and bust

were revealed to be fantasies

built on a wave
of financial speculation.

That speculation had happened

because those running the financial
sectors in America and Britain

had promised that they could create
a new kind of market democracy

that would be stable.

But again and again,
it had led to the opposite,

chaos and instability
around the world.

And now, finally, that had happened
in the very heart of the west.

But yet again, just as in south
east Asia ten years before,

those running the financial sector
now mobilised political power

to rescue themselves
and protect their supremacy.

They asked the politicians
to bail them out,

and they agreed.

And again, just as
in south east Asia,

the price is being paid by the
ordinary people of the countries.

And we are now living through
a very strange moment.

We know that the idea of
market stability has failed,

but we cannot imagine
any alternative.

The original promise
of the Californian Ideology

was that the computers
would liberate us

from all the old forms
of political control

and we would become Randian heroes
in control of our own destiny.

Instead, today we feel the opposite,

that we are helpless components
in a global system,

a system that is controlled
by a rigid logic

that we are powerless
to challenge or to change.

MUSIC: "Baby Love Child"
by Pizzicato Five

When I see you, my love

I see what's in your mind

You own me, yes you do

You don't need to tell me

I know you love me most

No-one else take my place

You need me, yes you do

For ever and ever

We are in love

Baby love child

I take you so high

Groovy love child

Give me a kiss

Baby love child

Do it again...

In the mass democracies of the West,
a new ideology has risen up.

We have come to believe that
the old hierarchies of power

can be replaced
by self-organising networks.

From internet utopianism,
to the global economic system,

and above all,
the ecosystems of the natural world.

Today we dream of systems that can
balance and stabilise themselves

without the intervention
of authoritarian power.

But in reality,
this is the dream of the machines.

It reflects how they are organised.

It has nothing to do with nature,

and as a model for human society
and for politics,

it is wholly inadequate in the face
of the powerful, dynamic forces

that really dominate
the world today.

This is the story of the rise of the
dream of the self-organising system

and the strange machine fantasy
of nature that underpins it.

CMOL is...

..is a... In a sense
it's a high-level language.

Very, very close to machine language,
time-coded machine language.

VOICE FADES OUT UNDER STATELY MUSIC

At the end of the First World War,

a young biologist called Arthur
Tansley had a frightening dream.

He dreamt he was in
an African village.

The natives
started to come towards him.

Then his wife appeared.

He picked up a rifle, aimed it
at her, and pulled the trigger.

Tansley wanted to know
what the dream meant,

so he started to study
the ideas of Sigmund Freud,

and he became fascinated.

In 1922, he even went to Vienna
to be analysed by Freud himself.

What caught Tansley's imagination

was an obscure part of
Freud's theory

that said the human brain
was actually an electrical machine.

That the sense data that came in
through the eyes and ears

created bursts of energy that flowed
around networks inside the brain,

just like electrical circuits.

Tansley was fascinated by this,
and he made an extraordinary conceptual leap.

He decided that he could take
this model of the mind

and apply it
to the whole of the natural world.

He became convinced that
underneath the complexity of nature were systems,

vast interconnected circuits
that linked all animals and plants,

through which energy flowed.

He invented a name for them.

He called them ecosystems.

Tansley's idea of the mind
was that of a network.

So you have energy going through
tubes into a new explosion,

a new explosion.
What would create this explosion

would be sense perception.

So these energy tubes would go out
in the modern mechanism of the mind,

creating a network,
a system within the mind.

Now this he would transfer,
one-to-one, almost,

into his description
of the natural environment,

in which energy between species
and among the species

would constitute a system,
an ecosystem,

of energy flowing between
these different species.

So the grasshopper eating the grass
will then be energy transforming through the tube

into the dune where the beetle
would do his or her job.

A very mechanical idea.

It's very mechanical indeed.

But Tansley went much further.

He said that if these
ecosystems were disturbed,

they would always try and return to
an original balanced state.

Which meant that they had
the ability to regulate and stabilise themselves.

It was part of what Tansley called
The Great Universal Law of Equilibrium.

All these systems, he wrote,
are constantly tending towards positions of balance or equilibrium.

The idea that there was an
underlying balance of nature

went back thousands of years
in Western culture.

But it had always been a dream,
a vision of a hidden natural order.

What Tansley was saying was that
this might be scientifically true.

That from the English countryside
to the jungles of Africa,

there was an underlying mechanism
that regulated nature as if it were a machine.

But it was only a hypothesis.

No-one knew
how the ecosystem worked.

The answer would not come from
the study of nature

but from a new kind of machine -
the computer.

LILTING BAROQUE-STYLE PIANO PLAYS

Jay Forrester studied electrical
engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

where he became one of the
early innovators in computers.

And in the 1950s, he built
America's early warning system.

It was a global network
of radar installations,

all linked to giant computers
in the United States.

Its aim was to create
a stable balance in the nuclear stand-off of the Cold War.

Forrester was convinced that
the whole world, not just nature,

was composed of systems.

He believed that by building
his own man-made system, the early warning network,

he had identified how
all systems stabilised themselves.

It was through a mechanism
called feedback.

What Forrester meant by this
was that every action we take

has consequences
that feed through the system

and then return to shape our future
behaviour in ways we cannot see.

But the computers could.

They had the power to analyse the
true consequences of human actions -

what Forrester called
feedback loops.

Most people

think of action as,

"Here's a problem,
I'll take action, and I'll solve it."

Straight line.

But that's not the system
in which we live.

There is a problem, we take action,
it may change things,

it gives us a new environment
for taking the next action and changing things.

And so we live in these networks

of feedback loops,

that are controlling us and
those things that we interact with.

So we're just part of a system?

We're just part of a system.

That is anathema to many people

because they like to think of us
as people, as independent,

but basically they are driven
in most of their actions by feedback loops,

which means physical systems,
electrical systems, social systems,

political systems, biological
systems, internal medicine, medical systems of the body.

They are all fundamentally
networks of feedback loops.

Forrester was one of the leaders of
an ambitious new scientific movement called cybernetics.

Cybernetics said that everything,

from human brains to cities
and even entire societies,

could be seen as systems
regulated and governed by feedback.

It fascinated both biologists
and physicists

because it seemed to offer
a new insight into how order is maintained in the world.

It also had powerful implications
for human beings.

Because cybernetics
saw human beings not as individuals

in charge of their own destiny,
but as components in systems.

At its heart, cybernetics was
a computer's-eye view of the world,

and from that perspective,
there was no difference between human beings and machines.

They were just nodes in networks,

acting and reacting
to flows of information.

One of the leading cybernetic
theorists called Norbert Wiener

laid this out clearly in a book that
became the bible of the movement.

He called it
Control And Communication In The Animal And The Machine.

If, as Norbert Wiener
and his team decided,

you can actually
link the behaviour of machines

and the behaviour of fleshy humans
through mathematical formulae,

and if you can model and predict
those formulae using computers,

then you end up in a world where
humans and machines seem to be one.

They can glimpse the
deep cybernetic truth,

one in which natural,
mechanical and social systems are seen as one another.

Humans linked together
in a man-machines system.

We are all now part of
a universal system linked together by information.

And cybernetics transformed
the idea of the ecosystem

because it seemed to explain how
ecosystems stabilised themselves.

They did it through feedback.

It would lead ecology to rise up

and become one of the dominant
sciences of the 20th century.

The key figures
were two American ecologists.

They were brothers called
Howard and Eugene Odum.

Howard Odum took cybernetics

and used it as a tool to analyse
the underlying structure of nature.

In the 1950s he travelled the world,
collecting data from ponds in North Carolina,

to a tropical rainforest
in Guatemala,

and a coral reef in the Pacific.

In each case, he reduced
the bewildering complexity of nature to cybernetic networks.

The ecosystems were drawn out as
electrical circuits

with feedback loops that showed
how energy flowed round the system

between all the animals
and the plants.

Odum even built
real electrical circuits to represent the environments

and he used them to adjust the
feedback levels in the system.

Odum really believed that you could
actually make a model of that system

and monitor and watch
how all the parts were working.

You could decide
when you had to intervene,

when it was...when the feedbacks
weren't sufficient,

so that they come back
to some equilibrium, some stable functioning.

When I visited him in the middle '80s

and we started talking about
his own history,

he went beside his desk
and he pulled out

one of these electrical
circuit boards from the middle '50s.

Howard Odum's brother Eugene
then took these ideas,

and he used them to define
a powerful vision of nature

that still dominates
our imaginations today.

He wrote a book called
The Fundamentals Of Ecology that became the Bible of the science.

It portrayed the whole planet as
a network of interlinked ecosystems.

And Tansley's machine hypothesis
became a scientific certainty.

But to make their theory work,

what the Odum brothers had done
was distort the scientific method.

They had taken a metaphor, that
the ecosystem worked like a machine.

But then, instead of looking
at the data they had gathered from the natural world

and trying to find out
if this was true,

the Odum brothers did the opposite.

They simplified the data
to an extraordinary degree.

They took the complexity and the
variability of the natural world

and they pared it down
so it would fit with the equations and the circuits they had drawn.

As they did this,
it stopped being a metaphor

and became what seemed to be
a scientific description of reality.

One of Howard Odum's assistants
later wrote

that what they were really doing
was creating a machine-like fantasy of stability.

Driven by the desire for prestige,
he said,

biological reality disappeared.

Organisms were expected to act
mechanically, in predicable ways.

Animals became robots,

and the ideas were never presented
as hypotheses to be tested.

When I first went into ecology,
we really did believe that nature

had to have a fixed stability,
it had to be stable.

That's what we were taught,

the miraculous thing about nature was
it was stable against all these problems.

So we believed
there was a balance of nature.

The balance of nature idea
comes from two things.

Ancient Western mythology
and religious beliefs,

and also from the machine age.

The actual mathematics that came out
of it was mathematics of machinery.

Nature should have that
same kind of mechanical steady state,

which would fit in with
this balance of nature idea,

that if you left nature alone,
it would run like a perfectly-oiled piston engine.

This fusion of cybernetics and
ecology was going to lead to far more than just a new idea of nature,

for out of it was about to come
a new organising principle for human society as well.

It would be a vision
of a new kind of world,

one without the authoritarian
exercise of power, and the old political hierarchies.

A vision that was different
from past ideologies,

because it mirrored
how order was created in nature.

The man behind it
was a utopian visionary

who had worked as an engineer
in the US military.

He was called Buckminster Fuller.

"I will make my life an experiment,"
he said,

"to search for the principles
that govern the universe."

Fuller had invented
a radically new kind of structure

that was based on the underlying
system of order in nature.

It was called a geodesic dome.

It was very simple
but incredibly strong.

Giant geodesic domes were built
to house the radar installations

for America's early warning system
in the Arctic.

These are what we call
geodesic radons.

They are designed to protect very
powerful and important apparatus

from the great storms of nature.

We think of structures
as being something very powerful,

but these are very delicate.

Yet they've been through about
10 years

of the most formidable conditions
in the Arctic

that any structures
have ever had to stand.

But I'm not a...a dome salesman,

I'm an explorer in structures.

I'm interested in the
fundamental principles by which nature holds her shapes together.

Fuller's geodesic domes
imitated the idea of the ecosystem.

Each tiny strut was weak,

but when thousands were joined
to form a giant interconnecting web,

they became strong and stable.

Fuller believed that this principle
of copying nature could be applied

not just to structures,
but to creating new systems to manage societies.

But in order to do this,
Fuller realised that there would have to be a conceptual shift

in the way human beings
saw their position in the world.

Instead of seeing themselves
as members of nations or classes or hierarchies of power,

people should instead see themselves
as equal members of a global system.

To persuade them, Fuller
used the image of the spacecraft

that NASA had built
to take Americans to the moon.

NASA had employed ecologists

to help design a closed system
for the astronauts inside the cabin.

It was constantly monitored
by computers to keep it in perfect balance.

And in 1964, Fuller wrote a
manifesto

called The Operating Manual
For Spaceship Earth.

It said that the world should be
seen as one giant spaceship

and that all human beings should
try and manage that global system

so it was kept in a perfect balance,

just like the tiny cabin
of the spacecraft.

He would say in his lectures, like,

"You guys wonder what it's like to be
an astronaut. Well, I can tell you.

"You are an astronaut.

"We're all astronauts
on board Spaceship Earth."

So here's the image of the Earth
suddenly being like a spaceship,

like a closed ecosystem,
in which we live in strict balance.

Notice that suddenly
you are not in the centre any more.

The spaceship is in the centre.

Meaning that you start de-emphasising
the importance of the individual human being

because you're concerned about
the welfare of the system,

not the individual.

There was a threat, though,
to this new vision, Fuller said.

It was politicians,

because politicians believed that
they could control the system.

And that always led to
struggles for power,

and out of that came wars.

Instead, the system
should be allowed to find its own natural order

and there would be no need for
hierarchies and power any longer.

If man is going to stay on board
our Spaceship Earth,

it can't be done by politics
because politics is so inadequate.

It cannot be commanded by politics
because a politician doesn't know about such a thing.

He has to go on what have you, which
is the kind of design he now has.

All he can do is give you war.

And Fuller's ideas caught the
imagination of a generation

who had become disillusioned
with politics.

The counterculture had emerged
after the student movement

had failed to change
the structure of power in America.

Between 1967 and 1971,

over half a million Americans
left the cities

and set out to create thousands
of experimental communities.

It was one of the biggest migrations
in American history.

They used Buckminster Fuller's
geodesic domes to build their new homes,

but more than that,
they adopted his cybernetic ideas as their organising principle.

The communes deliberately had no
hierarchy of control or authority.

Instead, the central idea was that
everyone should see themselves as part of a system,

a distributed network
that could stabilise itself

just like the ecosystems in nature.

In one of the most influential
communes called Synergia,

this cybernetic theory
was called ecotechnics.

We were trying to create a society
based on understanding ecosystems.

A society of inter-relationship
and balance.

A man-machine biological system
working in combination.

That was sort of our ideal
with what we called ecotechnics.

The idea of the ecotechnics is simply
that you are a part of the system,

in which there would be
less if not no hierarchy at all.

In the communes, anything that
smacked of politics was forbidden.

No coalitions or alliances with
others in the group were permitted.

Instead, individuals dealt with each
other one-to-one in group sessions

in which they told each other how
they were feeling about each other.

I don't know if I want you
to reach me.

Because I'm afraid.

I'd like you to try to reach me.

I don't know that
I'd like you to reach me.

They remained free individuals,
yet at the same time

through this system of feedback,
the group would be stable.

We didn't use the word system,

but we very much thought of
the whole group, of ourselves,

as all connected.

There was a group sense,
there was a group feeling.

That was our whole purpose,
was to be...

fully connected to each other
and to have this group sense

of the organism of many who act as
one. That's part of what it meant.

Switch.

Switch.

Switch, switch, switch, switch.

'It would be like a dance where we're
creating a new kind of society,

'freeing each person
to be fully themselves in the group,

'but we are all affecting each other
at all times,

'like an organism of many
who act as one.'

And there was another group
of visionaries in California

who believed the communes
were only a prototype

for a self-organising society
built on a global scale.

They were the engineers who
were inventing the new computer technologies on the west coast.

The way they were going to develop
these technologies

would be shaped by this vision
of a natural order that combined humans and machines.

At the end of 1968,

a group of computer pioneers
took a conscious decision.

They would give up
developing large mainframes.

Instead, they would create
a way of linking small personal computers in networks.

..when I get introduced.

The fact that I'm going to come to
you mostly through this medium here

for the rest of the show...

In a dramatic demonstration,
they showed how this could be done.

It included all the necessary
elements, even the computer mouse.

..the devices that I'm using.

I use three,
and they're not all centred.

You have a pointing device called
a mouse,

a standard keyboard,
and special key set we have here.

Now, computer,
do the automatic switching that will bring in a camera.

Hi, Bill. That's great.

Now we're connected. Audio. You can
see my work, you can point at it.

I can see your face and we can talk.

These pioneers believed that
in the future,

computer networks would allow you
to create the very kind of society

that was being developed in
the communes but on a global scale.

Everyone could be free
as individuals, no longer dominated

by old hierarchies,
or controlled politically.

Instead, they would be linked
together in a global system

that would find
its own natural order.

It would do it through the feedback
of information

between millions of people
on their personal computers.

The demonstration was filmed by
one of the prophets of this vision.

He was a leader of the commune
movement called Stewart Brand.

They felt like computers
had liberated them

and they were going to use
computers.

They were going to enable computers
to liberate society,

civilisation, every-damn-body.

I can have file control and I've
already accepted file referencing.

'Their computers would
save the world. These guys would make sure they could.

'It was going to be a power to
the people in a very direct sense.'

That was an early iteration
of the internet, and of Google and all of that.

This was a vast network,

that was self-correcting.

By the late 1960s, what had happened
was that our modern idea of nature,

the ecosystem, and cybernetic
theories about computers, had fused together.

Out of it had come an epic new
vision of how to manage the world

without the old corruption of power.

It was a vision that seemed to be
different

from all past political attempts
to change the world

because it was based on
the natural order.

In 1967, a young writer called
Richard Brautigan crystallised this.

One morning he walked through
the streets of San Francisco handing out a manifesto.

It described a future world
held in a balanced equilibrium

by the fusion
of nature and computers.

It was called All Watched Over
By Machines of Loving Grace.

'I like to think -

'and the sooner the better -
of a cybernetic meadow

'where mammals
and computers live together

'in mutually programming harmony
like pure water touching clear sky.

'I like to think -
right now, please -

'of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics,

'where deer stroll peacefully
past computers as if they were flowers with spinning blossoms.

'I like to think - it has to be -

'of a cybernetic ecology where we are
free of our labours

'and join back to nature, returned to
our mammal brothers and sisters

'and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.'

And then the world was hit by
a new kind of crisis.

It was a crisis
that could not be solved

by the old hierarchies of power
or by national governments.

As a result, the idea of the
world as a self-regulating system

was going to move to centre stage.

By the early 1970s,

it was clear that there was
a global environmental crisis.

But it was also clear that
politicians had no idea how to deal with it.

The crisis baffled them because
of its horrifying complexity.

It crossed national boundaries
and involved the whole of nature.

But then a man emerged who said
he knew how to save the world from this disaster.

He was the cybernetic scientist
who had built America's early warning system, Jay Forrester.

By now, Forrester had become
a powerful figure

because he used his computers
to build models of corporations

and even whole cities as systems.

Then Forrester became involved
with a think tank called the Club of Rome.

They were a group of international
businessmen and technocrats

who were trying to find a way of
solving the environmental crisis.

At a meeting in Switzerland,
Forrester told them that the only way to do this

was to look at the world
as an entire cybernetic system.

And he would build a model that
would do just that in his computer.

Our problem is the big problem.

Our problem is a hard one and you're
not dealing with the hard problem.

And that hard problem was?
The world.

So on the way back from Switzerland,

I sketched out

the first sketch of such a system,

which was this.

This is a picture
of that first sketch

of the world in terms of
population, resources,

capital investment in industry,

investment in agriculture, and the
accumulated pollution in the world.

All of these lines
here are the feedback loops,

the many feedback loops.

Those feedback loops are spread
all through the model,

as you can see, by the various lines
that are connecting things here.

Back in America, Forrester set up
a team of systems theorists.

They built a computer model
of the world.

The team designed it
as a giant cybernetic system

in which all known data
about population growth,

industrial production,
food and agriculture,

natural resources and pollution
were all fed in.

The team then ran the model
and what it predicted was an imminent global collapse.

And when you ran that model,
what did it show?

It showed that in all likelihood,

population would overshoot
the carrying capacity of the world,

and then you would have a collapse
of population back to a lower level,

and that the standard of living
would decline through all that period in a serious way.

The model based on current policies
lead essentially to disaster.

Disease, crowding, wars,
atomic bombs.

It was pessimistic, wasn't it?

Well, I considered myself
an optimist.

The Club of Rome then held a press
conference where they announced that

the computer had predicted that
the world was heading for disaster.

From a very large number
of computer runs

making various assumptions,

adopting various maxima and minima,

there is in fact a general forecast
of a breakdown of world society

in the first decades
of the next century.

We regard the MIT report

as an extraordinarily important
initial pioneering effort.

It's opening up
a great new field of research,

research in the world as a system.

The Club of Rome published a book
called The Limits To Growth,

which laid out
Forrester's world model and its frightening conclusions.

It was a bestseller,
and it transformed the debate about the environment.

Because Forrester's model offered
a way of conceptualising the problem

that seemed to be scientific
and therefore neutral.

His vision of the world
as one interconnected system

seemed to transcend politics
and the petty interests of nations.

Then in Stockholm in 1972,

the United Nations held a conference
for the first time ever

on the world environmental crisis.

The international bureaucrats
who ran it

turned to this idea of the world
as a system

to provide the conceptual framework.

The world needed to be managed
in a new non-political way

to avoid the threat
of global collapse.

This is the beginning of a debate.
Nobody's decided what the limits are.

One can question whether it's 2010
when we all collapse or 2050

when we all collapse, but what is
absolutely certain is,

you cannot run a planetary society

on the total irresponsible
sovereignty of 120 different governments. It simply can't be done.

Forrester's apocalyptic predictions
dominated the conference.

But he also said that his
computer model showed the only way of avoiding that disaster.

World governments, he said,
should give up on any idea of promoting continual growth.

Instead they should create a new
kind of steady state for the world.

Their job was now to hold the world
system in a balanced equilibrium

to avoid the collapse.

Forrester was arguing for
a fundamental shift in the role of politics and politicians.

They should give up
trying to change the world,

and instead,
the aim of politics should now be

to manage the existing system -
to hold it in equilibrium.

The idea of growth

is in contrast to the idea
of equilibrium,

where you're maintaining
a constant or equilibrium level

of population and enough industrial
activity to sustain that population,

which could lead to a much more
desirable steady state equilibrium,

a man-made equilibrium of our choice,

and live within
the boundaries set by the world,

by the Earth,
by the capacity of the Earth.

Which was a stable world?

Which would be a stable, ongoing one.

But large sections
of the environmental movement were opposed to this idea

and they held protests
outside the conference.

They said that the idea of
enforcing stability on the world was not neutral,

that the Limits To Growth model
was not being used to save the world but to control it.

Critics of Forrester's model
pointed out

that he had put in no feedback loops
for politics and political change.

The idea that in the future human
beings might adapt to the problems

by changing their values and goals,

and thus changing the whole system,
was absent.

Human beings were only present
in the model as mechanistic nodes.

It was a machine vision of the world

which could not imagine a future
where human beings, unlike machines,

would behave in ways
they hadn't before.

That led to only two choices.

You either preserve the existing
system in a steady state

or face catastrophe.

And this, the protestors argued,
suited those who wanted to maintain the status quo -

those in power.

This argument had happened before,
back in the 1930s,

at the very moment when
Britain's imperial power was waning.

In 1935, Arthur Tansley, who
invented the idea of the ecosystem,

accused one of the most powerful men
in the British Empire of abusing ecological ideas.

He was Field Marshal Smuts,
who was the autocratic ruler of South Africa.

Smuts used ecological ideas
to develop a philosophy he called holism.

Holism said that the whole world
was one giant organic system

in which everything
had its natural place.

So long as everyone stayed
in their proper place,

this global system would be stable.

Smuts had a vision
of a new global world order

where artificial distinctions
like nations would disappear,

and his model for this world system
was the British Empire.

And it would be managed by the white
European races

because that was their natural place
in the whole.

General Smuts
actually coined the word holism.

Every human being
would have its place within society,

every animal would have its place
in the environment,

and every other species -

grass, grasshoppers, you name it -

would have their place
in the environment,

struggling towards fulfilling their
wholeness in the greater whole.

'It is an order of nature
and an order of society which celebrates equilibrium.

'It's a static world,

'and holism became a tool to make
the British Empire more stable.'

The idea that ecosystem theories,
theories of equilibrium etc,

that these are neutral, is bogus.
They are highly politically charged.

What Smuts was doing showed
how easily scientific ideas about nature and natural equilibrium

could be used by those in power
to maintain the status quo.

Tansley hated this, and he publicly
accused Smuts of what he called

"the abuse
of vegetational concepts."

Now 40 years later, the protestors
in Stockholm were accusing Forrester of doing the same.

The real role of the
environmental movement, they said,

was not to hold the world stable
but to struggle to change it.

Because it was the greed of
the Western elites that was causing the environmental crisis.

The movement, they claimed,
was being hijacked

by right-wing think tanks
and Cold War technocrats

who were using the balance of nature
as a political trick.

The trick is claiming that
you have something as nature.

"In nature you have this balance

"and we need a society
to have the same balance."

And then...

it becomes unquestionable,
because you cannot change nature.

And thus you cannot change society,
because society should be the same as nature.

So it's a sort of
intellectual trick.

They needed this concept of the
balanced nature

to protect the elite
and to protect the system.

But the protests were in vain,

because Forrester's
cybernetic vision of the world as one interconnected system

now began to penetrate
deep into the public imagination.

What began to rise up in the 1970s
was the idea that we, and everything else on the planet,

are connected together
in complex webs and networks.

Out of that were now going to come
epic visions of connectivity,

like the Gaia theory, and utopian
ideas about the worldwide web and the global economic system.

Underlying this was
a profound shift.

What was beginning to disappear
was the enlightenment idea, that human beings

are separate from the rest of nature
and masters of their own destiny.

Instead, we began see ourselves
as components, cogs in a system,

and our duty was to help that system
maintain its natural balance.

It's quite clear the entire Earth has
to be treated as a spaceship,

run as a spaceship,
planned as a spaceship.

We're all part of the web of life
and the sooner man fully appreciates this, the better.

This image, our home, our Earth,
one people in one world.

What we've really got to do is manage
the entire planet as a single system.

Well, ecology
is the balance of nature.

It's the relationship between me,
the plants and animals, and the world in general.

Now the problem is totally global,
which is going to mean running the entire planet as a single system.

Without upsetting the natural
balances that are there.

Ecology, yes.
That's what I'm talking about.

TAPE SLOWS DOWN

What made this systems idea
so powerful

was that it didn't seem
to be based on a political ideology.

It was a scientific idea
of organisation that mirrored the natural world.

But at precisely this moment
in the mid-1970s, the science that supported the idea fell apart.

The fatal flaw
in the theory of the self-regulating ecosystem was exposed.

A new generation of ecologists
began to produce empirical evidence

that showed that ecosystems
did not tend towards stability,

that the very opposite was true,

that nature, far from seeking
equilibrium, was always in a state of dynamic and unpredictable change.

Ecologists really thought that
we were dealing with a stable world.

You didn't question it.

It was just like the air. You didn't?
You didn't question it at all.

Now the really remarkable thing is
when people began to find out that

that might have some chinks in it,
that that might not be right,

people were really almost
viscerally upset.

Ecologists, many ecologists,
were almost viscerally upset

because it offended that very
comfortable idea that nature was stable.

HOWLING

Ecologists began to revisit
environments that were supposed to be models of stability.

One ecologist called Daniel Botkin
travelled to a remote island in the Great Lakes called Ile Royale.

In theory, the populations of
moose and wolves were supposed to live in a stable balance.

But when Botkin researched the
history of the two populations,

he discovered that in reality
they were constantly changing.

In theory, the wolves
controlled the moose,

and the moose and the wolves
and vegetation all lived together

in this miraculous system.

We went out
to try to figure out how could this beautiful system be steady?

Once I got out there
and started to look at the historic information about it,

it was all about changes -
everything was always changing, it wasn't what it was supposed to be.

When you looked at the populations
of the moose and wolves, you saw nothing but change.

They just fluctuated.

You can still say, "Maybe they're
on their way to a steady state,"

but then you can go back and look
at the history of the vegetation.

Trees will tell us their own story
and the soil with its pollen tells you more of the story,

so you can reconstruct centuries
of history from forests.

When you looked at that,
you saw nothing but change.

As a result of this, ecology started
to look at the history of ecosystems

and what they discovered
began to undermine the very foundations of the science.

The theory said that when
ecosystems were disturbed by storms or fires or floods,

they would always try to return
to their original balanced state.

But study after study showed that
the very opposite was true,

that after the disturbances, the
plants and animals would recombine in radically different ways.

The history of nature
was full of radical dislocations and unpredictable change.

There was no stable pattern.

Big wind storms,

hurricanes,

tornadoes,

fires.

You get a disturbance, the forest
doesn't come back the way it was.

Disturbance comes along

and it resets the system
to something new.

What we were doing was to challenge
the basic assumptions of ecology,

that the balance of nature
was something that guided ecological systems.

But even as this was happening,
a huge experiment began that aimed to prove convincingly

how stability
was maintained in ecosystems.

An ecologist called George Van Dyne
set out to create a computer model

of the grasslands that
stretched across Colorado.

All the animals, insects, plants
and the systems that linked them

were going to be recreated
inside a computer.

Van Dyne wanted to finally show
how feedback worked in nature.

What George Van Dyne really wanted
to do was take this universe

that you see in front of you,
this grassland landscape,

and be able to
represent it in the computer, to have a virtual grassland.

It's an act of substantial arrogance
to say that I think that I can devise a virtual ecosystem

and capture it inside this computer,
I think. That's a good... It was a great idea.

Van Dyne hired dozens of researchers
to begin collecting data

on everything that lived
in the grasslands AND what was underneath in the soil.

They built a machine that travelled
across hundreds of square miles,

hoovering up insects
and small mammals.

These were then opened up
to find out what they had eaten.

Other researchers followed larger
animals to find out in minute detail what they were eating.

We had a graduate student who would
follow the pronghorn, the antelope.

He could walk along beside him
and watch what they ate.

Every time they took a bite
of his plant, he would record on his tape recorder,

"One bite of blue grama,
one bite of sphaeralcea."

Two bites of artemisia,
three inches tall without flower.

Two more bites of artemisia.
Six bites of kosha without flower.

Three bites of blue grama,
two inches tall without flower.

Sometimes they would take a bite.
He couldn't tell what it was,

so he would stop, open the animal's
mouth, reach in, pull it out,

look at it, put it back and go on.

And they put a hole
in the side of the bison

where you could reach in and sample
what the bison had been eating, look at it under a microscope.

Then you'd weigh each
little separate pile and you'd enter it in a data sheet.

We'd give it to Dave
who was the data manager

and he would get one
of his minions to punch it on an IBM card, an 80 column IBM card,

and that would be read
into the computer and stored on magnetic tape.

Let's take a look at the reading
cycle and see how we're doing.

George Van Dyne then used
all the data to construct a vast, intricate model

that simulated how all the different
elements of the system - the plants and animals - interacted.

Every species had its own sub-model
that then was linked through feedback loops

to other species
and their sub-models.

This grasshopper sub-model tells us
what's going on with grasshoppers. There's predators down here.

At this point,
it's just an unspecified thing.

What that means is that there
was another sub-model

for birds, for small mammals
and other potential predators of grasshoppers.

So there was another
sub-model that was simulating the populations of, let's say,

lark buntings all the time,
which is one of the predators on the grasshoppers.

That sub-model then feeds
that information to this sub-model,

which uses Sam's equation
to predict the death rate of grasshopper eggs for that day.

But when George Van Dyne ran
the model, what happened seemed to make no sense.

No stable underlying
pattern emerged.

Van Dyne was convinced that all
the model needed was more data

and he worked feverishly, sometimes
all night, putting more and more information into the computer model.

But in fact, he was just
making the problem worse.

The ecosystem theory had worked for
previous ecologists because they had ruthlessly simplified nature.

What Van Dyne was really doing
with his mountains of data

was recreating the real
chaotic instability of nature inside his computer.

In 1981, Van Dyne died
of a heart attack at the age of 48 and the project was closed down.

The collapse of his experiment
marked the end of the systems theory

which had driven the science
of ecology for 50 years,

the theory that somewhere in nature
is an ultimate order, a balanced equilibrium.

The balance of nature is an illusion
and we hold on to it

so tightly in our culture.

That is completely counter to
what contemporary ecology tells us.

Contemporary ecology says that we
live in a very dynamic world.

We have to replace that assumption
of the balance of nature.

You have to discard the myth.

The scientific basis
had fallen away,

but the idealistic vision of
the self-organising system continued to grow.

The reason
was that in an age of mass democracy where the individual was sacrosanct

and politics discredited and
distrusted, it offered the promise of a new egalitarian world order.

SHOUTING AND YELLING

So this is the situation here,
incredible scenes.

Parliament in the hands of
these opposition supporters.

The MPs fled so quickly that they
even left their papers behind.

In the early part of this century,
the idea of the self-organising network re-emerged

in what seemed to be
its original radical form.

Beginning in 2003,
a wave of spontaneous revolution swept through Asia and Europe.

In each case, hundreds of thousands
of people flooded into the capitals

of Georgia, the Ukraine
and Kyrgyzstan

and they forced the old
corrupt leaders from power.

In all these cases,
no-one seemed to be in charge.

But then, journalists discovered
that the internet had played a key role.

It had brought millions of people
together to create revolutions that had no guiding ideology

except a desire for
self-determination and for freedom.

Tonight, well, I feel really sort
of powerful and happy.

We did what we wanted.
This is our freedom.

Now, computer,
do the automatic switching that will bring in a camera.

Hi, Bill.

That's great. Now we're connected.

It seemed to be the triumph
of the vision that had begun

with the computer utopians
in California in the 1960s.

They had dreamt of a time when
interconnected webs of computers

would allow individuals to create
new non-hierarchical societies,

just like in the commune
experiments, but on a global scale.

Now that dream seemed
to be really coming true.

In 2009, Twitter and Facebook
appeared to play a key role in organising the protests in Iran.

There was a lot of excitement
in the ability of individuals in Iran

to connect with a global audience
and with their peers inside Iran

to build a political consciousness
in support of democracy.

It represents the emergence of a
completely new information ecosystem.

But in all the revolutions,
that new sense of freedom lasted only for a moment.

In the Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych,
the man who was ousted, is back in power

and has started to dismantle
democratic institutions.

In Kyrgyzstan,
the new president fled because of accusations of corruption

and the country is torn apart
by ethnic clashes.

And Georgia has now fallen in
the world index of press freedom.

At the time of the revolution,
it was 73rd.

It is now 99th.

What had been forgotten in
the optimism about the revolutions

was what had really happened
in the original experiments in the communes.

They all failed.

Most lasted no more
than three years, some for less than six months.

And what tore them all apart
was the very thing that was supposed to have been banished - power.

The commune members
discovered that some people were more free than others.

Strong personalities came to
dominate the weaker members of the group,

but the rules
of the self-organising system

refused to allow any organised
opposition to this oppression.

The original idea was
very positive indeed.

It was to create
an egalitarian society

in which everyone would both be free
to be themselves

and also be able to contribute to the
group in a really positive way.

But the very rules that kind of set
up this egalitarian group

resulted in the opposite
of the dream.

They resulted in creating
a hierarchical structure

in which some could be
dominant over others

because everyone is not equally
powerful in their voice against one other person.

In the communes, what were supposed
to be systems of negotiations

between equal individuals
often turned into vicious bullying.

In practice, these would be
20 and 30 minute hazing sessions

that were, um...quite awful
to experience

and usually were met by silence
with the rest of one's peers,

so there wasn't any, "Hey, lay off.
He's an OK guy," or anything like that.

There were no supportive comments.

The rule was "travel in your
own country", which means "shut up, listen and observe".

There was fear, actually,

because the people who were more
dominating and had more power could make you ...

There was anger.

There was constantly a background
of fear in the house.

It was like a virus running
in the background, so that... like Spyware.

You know it's there, but you
don't know how to get rid of it.

The failure of the commune movement
and the fate of the revolutions

show the limitations of
the self-organising model.

It cannot deal with the central
dynamic forces of human society - politics and power.

The hippies took up the idea of
a network society because they were disillusioned with politics.

They believed that this alternative
way of ordering the world was good

because it was based
on the underlying order of nature.

But this was a fantasy.

In reality, what they adopted
was an idea taken from the cold and logical world of the machines.

Now, in our age, we are all
disillusioned with politics

and this machine organising
principle has risen up to become the ideology of our age.

But what we are discovering
is that if we see ourselves as components in a system,

that it is very difficult
to change the world.

It is a very good way of
organising things, even rebellions,

but it offers no ideas
about what comes next.

And just like in the communes,
it leaves us helpless in the face of those already in power in the world.

Next week's programme will show how
we have reconciled ourselves to this voluntary sacrifice of power

by coming to believe
that WE are nothing more than machines ourselves.

This programme contains scenes which
some viewers may find disturbing

When I see you alone

I see what's in your mind

You love me, yes, you do

You don't need to tell me

I know you love me most

No-one else take my place

You need me, yes, you do

Forever and ever

We are in love, baby love child

I take you so high,
groovy love child

Give me a kiss, baby love child

Do it again.

At the beginning of 2000, one of
the world's most famous scientists

flew from London to the Congo.

He was a British biologist
called Bill Hamilton.

Hamilton went to Kisangani.

Once upon a time,
it had been called Stanleyville.

Now it was one of the most
dangerous places on Earth.

GUNFIRE

It was full of armed militias,
all killing each other

to get their hands on precious
minerals in mines around Kisangani.

One of the most precious was a
mineral called Columbite Tantalite,

otherwise known as Coltan.
It was an essential component

in all new digital machines -
mobiles, laptops and games consoles.

And its price around
the world was soaring.

Part of this was due to the coming
launch of Sony's PlayStation 2.

PlayStation 2. Because of demand
in the United States and Japan,

it's thought some of our kids
could miss out this Christmas.

But Hamilton didn't care
about any of this.

He ignored the war going on around
him because he was convinced that

human beings were killing each other
in a completely different way.

He believed that AIDS
had been caused 50 years before

by experiments carried out
by American scientists

in the jungle around Kisangani.

And to prove this, he had come
to collect chimpanzee faeces.

Surrounded by the fighting, Hamilton
doggedly collected the chimp excrement from the forest floor.

But then, one day,
he caught malaria.

He refused to take anti-malaria
pills and instead took an aspirin.

But the aspirin lodged in his gut
and caused a haemorrhage...

..that killed him.

But even as he died,
Hamilton knew he would live forever.

Because he had shown that
human beings are really just self-replicating machines,

like computers, whose function is
to transmit a vital code across time

that will live throughout eternity.

Meanwhile, the chimp faeces
waited at Nairobi airport for someone to come and claim it.

And everyone got
their mobile upgrades,

their new laptops
and their PlayStation 2.

CHEERING

I close my eyes

Then I drift away

Into the magic night

I softly say

A silent prayer

Like dreamers do

Then I fall asleep to dream

My dreams of you

In dreams

I walk

With you

In dreams

I talk to you

In dreams you're mine

All of the time

We're together in dreams...

And here in the lower house
of the Congo Parliament,

the Members of Parliament
here are discussing,

have met to discuss whether Mr
Kasavubu or Mr Lumumba's government

is the authority in the Congo.

Their procedure is extremely chaotic.

Over probably about
two thirds of them are here.

And they're waiting, I think,
to hear Mr Lumumba speak.

And that's Mr Lumumba, sitting second
from the left, among his ministers.

For almost 80 years,
the Congo had been ruled by Belgium.

But in 1960, it became independent.

Its first Prime Minister
was Patrice Lumumba.

He held out an heroic vision
of a new independent Africa.

But the country was completely
unprepared for self-government.

Within weeks
it collapsed into chaos.

The Congo was central
to the modern world

because hidden in its forests were
an extraordinary range of minerals.

The uranium for the atom bombs
exploded over Japan

came from the Congo, while
its vast reserves of copper were

crucial for the new electronic
systems and computers

that ran the Cold War.

And the old colonial towns now
became battlegrounds where rebels

and soldiers loyal to Lumumba fought
for control of the precious mines.

It's an incredible atmosphere here
at night in Elisabethville.

It's the atmosphere
of a wartime air-raid, in some ways.

Yet there's no blackout.

The aerial attacks by the canons of
the Canberras are done in daylight.

Some of the shops,
most of them no longer operating,

keep their window lights on.

Another mortar bomb falls nearby.

The Americans were worried
that Lumumba would ally with the Soviet Union.

So they and the Belgians
helped to organise a coup.

Lumumba was kidnapped
by rebels from the mining areas.

He was taken into the forests of the
Eastern Congo where he was killed

and his body dissolved in acid.

The country collapsed
into violence and terror.

It would lead to the rise of one
of Africa's most corrupt dictators,

Mobutu Sese Seko.

But, amidst the chaos,
the western mining companies carried on their operations unhindered.

Above all, the giant Union Miniere.

A spokesman for Union Miniere is at
this moment presenting his report to the shareholders.

We have seen more than
500,000 people butchered,

mutilated, raped
and torn limb from limb.

Only this week we've read
of massacres in Stanleyville,

of mass shooting down and of unarmed
women and children being murdered.

Of the burning alive of 60 men, tied
together and soaked in petroleum.

Through all these events,
your directors and I

have asked ourselves
only one question -

to what extent will the operations
of YOUR company be affected?

We are pleased to record that
the events of this particular week,

taking place as they did in
Stanleyville province, over 1,000 miles from the main seat

of OUR mining operations, need not
in any way directly concern us.

Bill Hamilton was a solitary man.

In the early '60s
he lived alone in London,

obsessively studying
Darwin's theory of evolution.

Hamilton saw the world
through the prism of Darwin's ideas.

He believed that everything
could be explained by the desperate

struggle of all living things
to survive and pass on their genes to the next generation.

But as he watched the behaviour
of teeming masses of ants,

he realised that
there was a problem.

Why did some of them
offer themselves up

to the jaws of predators
in an apparently selfless sacrifice

to protect the rest of the group?

And why did some humans
behave in the same way?

What was in it for them?

Hamilton was convinced
that human behaviour

could be explained genetically.

But to prove this, he knew he had
to explain the puzzle of altruism.

He went to Waterloo Station.
He sat for hours on the platforms,

staring at other human beings
and thinking.

Hamilton would sit there
'in Waterloo Station in the evenings, a lonely man, looking at people.'

What this was enabling him to do

was, at some level, look at humans
as though they were another species.

As though they were ants
and he was not part of this.

So, although his concern
very much is with humans,

at some level he's able to take
the emotion out, if you like.

He's looking for patterns,
he's looking for ways

to make sense of all these people
that he sees around him.

The lovers that he sees
kissing and then parting,

the person he sees
dashing to the train.

Even the person who approaches him
to go off to the public lavatory.

These are all different individuals.

He is of their species,
but he's not of their species.

Then, at the end of 1963,

Hamilton suddenly realised
what he was actually looking at.

He looked through the skin and bone
and saw something inside that was

much more powerful and important
than our individual identities -

our coded genes.

And when he looked at the world
from the genes' point of view

he saw that human beings
were just temporary carriers

that allowed the genes
to pass on copies of themselves and live forever.

Hamilton was no longer
thinking like a human being.

He was thinking like a gene.

And genes were not like people.

They were like machines,
tiny, calculating engines

that could work out
the mathematically best outcome.

And that explained altruism.
A gene would destroy itself if,

by doing that, it would let more
related copies of itself survive.

I think that he really felt
that he was seeing a pattern

to the way the world works
that others weren't seeing.

This is how he really
truly functioned as a man,

almost from a different planet,
looking at humankind.

Absolutely convinced
that there was some force,

hidden from the rest of us, which
motivated them, which drove them.

We are now on our way
to the country of the giants.

Behind this tremendous barrier
of volcanic mountains, there lived

a most mysterious people,
a race of seven-foot giants.

Climbing again towards
the mysterious summit, now hidden in the clouds.

Well above the great trees,
a region seldom touched by sunshine.

Enchanted woods
full of ferns and moss.

It looks like the home
of fairies and goblins. But there is no life here.

Through these woods, an icy wind,
laden with fog and sleet,

ever blows.

The hills of Rwanda.

In the 1930s an intrepid Belgian,
Armand Denis, made films that told the western world about Africa.

But in Rwanda,
he helped to create a myth that would have terrifying consequences.

It said that the Tutsis
were a noble and intelligent race who had originally come from Egypt.

And that the Hutus were a separate
race of ignorant peasants.

A rich land discovered no-one knows
how long ago by tall, majestic men

who came from the north - perhaps
all the way from ancient Egypt -

to preserve here the civilisation
and beauty of another age.

The court dancers.

When the giants arrived
in Rwanda, they found it already thickly settled.

But so great was the superiority
of these tall people from the north that, although outnumbered 1,000

to one, they established complete
domination over the mountain tribes which inhabited the region.

The blacks became their slaves.

But how superior their flowing
rhythm, compared with the crude shuffles of the forest tribes.

In reality, there was no evidence
for this at all.

The Tutsis were a ruling elite,
but the two groups had always shared

the same land and did not see
each other as separate races

and many Hutus shared equally
in government.

But the Belgians
who ran Rwanda took the myth

and used it ruthlessly.

They brought in scientists
to prove it biologically.

They measured skulls and said
that the Tutsis had larger brains

and so were the natural rulers.

They then made each group
carry racial identity cards

and created a segregated system
in which the Tutsis ruled

the Hutus with a brutal arrogance,

encouraged by their Belgian masters.

But then, at the end of the 1950s,
the Belgians decided

to give independence to Rwanda
and a terrible thing happened.

These are there few film fragments
that record the events.

They show hundreds
of Tutsis sheltering

from the onslaught
of a massacre by the Hutus.

But the massacres had begun
for the strangest of reasons.

As independence approached,

liberals high up in the Belgian
colonial administration

had encouraged the Hutus to rebel
against their Tutsi overlords.

They had done this because they felt
guilty about their imperial past.

They believed the right thing to do
now was to promote self-government,

to make amends and help the Hutus
become free individuals.

But because the Hutus
had been taught that the Tutsis

were an alien race,
the rebellion quickly turned

into an orgy of revenge
which the Belgians couldn't stop.

The myth that they had created
had run out of control.

Today, we received more news

and more evidence of the horrible
events going on in central Africa.

This time it concerns Rwanda.

It became independent
when Belgian control

was suddenly withdrawn in 1962.

For years, a minority tribe,
the Watutsi,

had been supported by the Belgians
as the local rulers,

although they represented
only 15% of the population.

In 1959, Belgium switched her support
to the majority tribe, the Bahutu,

who later seized
on the independence of the country

as a chance of revenge.

No-one knows how many Watutsi
they've slaughtered.

Now, this lady took part in getting
together this fragment of film

which is the only film record
of any of the horrors of which people

have been talking
from the Rwanda territory.

What we are looking at now
is a mission where a large number

of the Watutsi people took shelter.

Where all of these people,
at whom we're looking -

they look happy enough on your film
now - where they in fact all safe?

No, they weren't safe at all.

It doesn't matter if they were men,
women or children.

They killed everyone who was Tutsi.

6,000 of them fished out
of one of the rivers.

One department, 10,000.

That's like one county
in this country. 10,000 dead.

10,000 dead, yes.

Are you sure that these stories
are true of the massacre?

There's no doubt about this.
There's no doubt about this.

Have you any idea how many of the
Watutsi have been killed altogether?

Altogether,
it's very difficult to estimate

because all this was organised

and supposed to be unknown, you see.

In 1967, a strange and brilliant man
came to London from America.

He was called George Price.

By chance, in a library,

Price discovered a scientific paper
written by Bill Hamilton

It was full of equations that show
that human goodness and altruism

were really survival strategies
devised by our genes.

It had been ignored
by the scientific establishment.

As Price looked at the equations, he
had a sudden shock of recognition.

He realised that
what he was looking at

was a description of machines
he already understood -

computers.

Price had worked originally as
a chemist on the Manhattan Project,

but then in the 1950s, he had
gone to IBM, where he helped design

the graphics
for early mainframe computers.

Price was an obsessive rationalist

and in his spare time, he became
a freelance science journalist

and he specialised in attacking the
myths and superstitions in society.

Because he believed that rationality
could explain everything.

It was something that Daddy
would do. He would, um...

you know, take a subject...

He was always attacking sacred cows
in society and he would take

a subject and just explore it
in a very rational way.

And things other scientists,
you know, wouldn't deal with,

he would just explore,

and was quite fearless
in his scientific endeavours.

He would go where
most people wouldn't.

Above all, Price loved the cold
logic of mathematics and computers.

He believed that computers
gave scientists like him

a new power to analyse the world
in a completely rational way.

He wrote an article proposing
that America could mathematically

measure unhappiness levels
among populations in the world.

This would allow them to spot
where communism might take root

and so prevent it.

Price's ideas were
part of a powerful belief

that had grown up in the electronic
laboratories of the Cold War -

that computers could be
the salvation of humanity.

The godfather of this belief
was the man who had done more

than anyone to create
the modern digital computer,

the mathematician John Von Neumann,
who had also built the H-bomb.

Johnny von Neumann
enjoyed thinking...

..in the clear and complete manner
of mathematicians,

in every field.

This also explains his effectiveness

in connection
with computing machines.

Because computing machines
apply logical processes to fields,

not only mathematics, but to others
as yet untouched by the logical part.

And it is very significant
that this revolution,

the revolution
of the electronic brains,

was practically initiated
by Jonny Von Neumann.

And when, in 1967, Price found
William Hamilton's paper,

he realised that what Hamilton had
discovered was a new rational way

of looking at human beings
and their behaviour.

They were simply soft machines,
controlled by on-board computers.

Price took Hamilton's mathematics
and developed it.

But as he did so,

he realised that the equations
also worked in reverse.

That it was not just logical
to be good,

it was also logical to be spiteful.

It made sense to kill yourself,

if in the process you also killed
people distantly related to you

and allowed those
closely related to survive.

Price's mathematics explained
murder, warfare and even genocide

as possibly rational strategies

for the genes
controlling your behaviour.

Well, because it meant that you could
have genes that were...

evolved that were coded for...

murdering people.

Such a gene, even if it was bad
for the possessor of the gene,

as long as it was worse for distantly
related people, it could evolve

and we might be genetically
programmed to be murderers.

This was actually
what George had been wondering

and he sort of proved that in
a mathematical sense, it could exist.

It grew out of Hamilton's theory
because Hamilton had seen

that you could harm yourself
as long as you helped your relatives.

But this was different, you could
harm yourself as long as it harmed

distantly-related people
that we had...genetic ways

of recognising our closer relatives
and our more distant relatives

and we were programmed to hate
and kill our more distant relatives.

These are the implications
of the theory.

Then who would that help?

The gene, only the gene.

It's the gene's-eye point of view,
it would really only help the genes.

The genes would grow
in the population. That's what this was all about.

Price showed his equations
to Hamilton.

Hamilton was fascinated and together
they developed their theory.

It would become known
as the Selfish Gene.

They also became close friends.

What Price had done was
an incredible piece of mathematics.

As Von Neumann had predicted,
what Price has also done

was bring rationality
and a clear logic of mathematics

into a new field,
into the heart of being human.

But with the strangest
of consequences.

20 years before,
as computers were being developed,

Von Neumann had dreamt of the future
where machines would be able

to replicate themselves.

He had written out a description
of what would be needed

for what he called self-reproducing
automata to be invented.

The extraordinary breakthrough
that Price and Hamilton had made

was to discover
that self-reproducing automata

didn't have to be invented.

They were already here,
they were us.

The equation has had
enormous implications

because if everything we did,
whether good or bad,

was actually a rational strategy
computed by the codes inside us,

then religion with
its moral guidance was irrelevant.

And it demolished the Enlightenment
idea that human beings

were above the rest of nature.

In reality, we were no different
from all the other animals.

All this had a very strange effect
on George Price,

the convinced rationalist.

He decided that the discovery
was so powerful,

it must have been a gift from God.

But he feels that this breakthrough
could only have been given

to him by...

..God.

What breakthrough?

Well, discovering, like,
what he quantified altruism.

He felt that he was...
when he looked at something

and he was able to see it
in such a simple way...

He felt that...

..he felt it had been a gift

and the only way he could interpret
that was because of a gift of God.

But the equations actually
showed God did not exist.

Hmm, that is a dichotomy.

At the same time on the top
of a mountain in the eastern Congo,

another American was setting out
to prove that human beings

were far closer to other animals
than they imagined.

She was Diane Fossey and she spent
her days alone, watching gorillas.

Fossey's aim was to show how
connected we were to the gorillas.

She was part of a movement
among biologists to prove

Darwin's theory of evolution,
not just through fossils,

but by observing
the behaviour of the primates.

They wanted to show
that gorillas and chimps

were not just blind brutes
but complex animals,

intimately connected to us.

But just as Fossey began her work,
the human world below

began to descend into chaos, driven
by the forces of politics and power.

INDISTINCT CONVERSATION

This is the Congo.

This is the hottest place
in the capital of the Congo,

Kinshasa, tonight,
the nightclub St Helier.

I'm able to report that the jungle
bunnies at least are friendly.

MUSIC PLAYS

But this also is the Congo today.

Yet once more, the terrified
and injured men and women,

white and black,
are brought back in distress

by plane to the Congolese capital,
from the centre of the northeast,

Kisangani, the former Stanleyville.

In 1967,
a new war broke out in the Congo.

White mercenaries who supported
a rival of President Mobutu

were leading a rebellion.

Their aim was to create a separate
state out of the mineral-rich area

in the eastern part of the country.

Behind the scenes, they were
being supported by the western mining conglomerates.

But the rebellion
turned into horror.

As the mercenaries
fought their way into the town

of Bukavu on the Rwandan border,

they tortured and killed their
prisoners with extreme brutality.

You say you wanted to make them
suffer, how did you make them suffer?

Well, in the company we were
in, we took no prisoners.

If they did take one,

I had the pleasure of handling him.

And it was my pleasure.

What sort of things did you do?

I used to make them
torture stick a...

Stick a hot bayonet through him.

Stick him on
hot coals and cover him with mud.

Make the mud cake around it.

And just crack the mud off and stick
a red hot bandit into a human body

and make him walk with that.

Did you feel differently because
you were doing this to black men?

Could you have done it
as easily to a white man?

No, I don't think so.

Why? I just never had the
experience of killing a white man.

A black man is like an animal to me.

But then Mobutu's
forces counterattacked

and destroyed the rebellion.

The mercenaries either fled or
were captured, and then disappeared.

The mercenaries behaviour had
enraged the Congolese soldiers,

and they unleashed their
hatred on the Europeans.

And then in a raging temper with
all things and people European,

they went back into the town,

and they started smashing up
the European houses,

pillaging, looting and killing.

And then the Congolese
soldiers found Dian Fossey

watching the gorillas
on the mountain.

The soldiers detained her and took
her down to a military camp where she was imprisoned for two weeks.

What happened during
that time is uncertain.

Fossey told some people
that she gang-raped by the soldiers.

But to others she denied this.

But then she tricked the
soldiers and managed to escape.

And fled across the border.

But Fossey was still determined to
live with the gorillas, and within

weeks she created another camp
high up on another mountain.

"It is," she wrote, "as if I have
finally discovered paradise."

It was in Rwanda.

Fossey now retreated
from almost al human company.

She spent all her
time with the gorillas.

And to get closer to them,
she tried to behave like them.

To make the gorilla feel more
at ease, I imitated their feeding

activities by making the same type
of noise that they make

when they obtain a leaf or a stalk.

And since they've heard a sound like
this all their lives, to hear it from

a human couldn't help but
pacify them in some ways.

Fossey became obsessed by
protecting the gorillas.

She tried to create a world
where they would be perfectly safe,

not just from poachers,
but all human beings.

She patrolled the forest,
destroying the snares

that the local people
had set to catch small antelopes

because they might
hurt the gorillas.

And she began to
terrorise the local people.

She kidnapped them,
spat on them and hit them.

And sprayed them with tear gas.

She also put on a mask
and told them

that she was
casting black magic spells.

Fossey would never have
called the Africans animals

because she loved animals.

But she was following the tradition
of so many westerners in Africa.

Maltreating Africans in the
interest of a higher western ideal.

And the local people
began to hate her.

In 1973, George Price
decided to devote his life

to helping the homeless of London.

As a result of the equations he had
developed, Price had been given a

job in the genetics laboratory
of the University of London.

But he had also
converted to Christianity.

And he had done so
in an extreme way.

Price decided that he was going
to follow the teachings of Christ

as if they were an exact code.

He set out to help the
poor and destitute to give them all his worldly goods.

He also walked the streets,
offering the homeless a place to stay in his flat near Oxford Circus.

He was extraordinary.
He was like a saint, really.

He would give anyone
who needed anything anything he had.

I mean, at the end,
he would be in the park and if someone needed his shoes

he literally took off his
shoes and gave them his shoes.

He was barefoot in the park.

Give me a hand when I've crossed the
way. Give me a shoulder to cry on.

And then he started to take them
into his flat, which was very nice,

but they started stealing
from him like crazy.

I don't even think at one point
he had a warm coat,

that he'd given it
away to an alcoholic.

There was no artifice.

If he was going to be a Christian,

then he was
going to be a complete Christian

and he was going to give away all
his possessions to the needy.

And really help people.

William Hamilton became
desperately worried about Price.

He was convinced that his religious
belief was a mad superstition, and pleaded with Price to give up

trying to help the homeless
and do more work on genetics.

But others believed that Price had
been so shocked by the implication

of his and Hamilton's theory

that he was in some desperate
personal way trying to disprove it.

I think it's too easy to dismiss him
as insane, which many people want to.

He was taking control of

his genetic destiny.

He was sort of transcending his
genetic destiny in those actions.

In what way? Well, he was just
proving the theory because

he was giving everything to genetic
strangers and helping those by...

By helping them, he was in
no way serving the interests

of his genes.

He wasn't looking
for genetic relatives.

It was anyone at all he would help.

Of course, he was right.
This is the way we should be, but that's another point.

It's an important point.

What do you mean?

Well, I mean this theory that
we only help our relatives has a sort of bankruptcy in it.

You know, it's like we're all
going to go down unless we sort of

realise there's a larger community.

It really shouldn't rely
on the extent to which we share genes with others,

and yet we may be programmed
to feel that it does.

There is more meaning
and mutual understanding

in exchanging a glance with a gorilla

than any other animal I know.

We're so similar.

Their sight, their hearing, their
sense of smell are so similar to ours

that we see the world in the same way
as they do.

And so if ever
there was a possibility of

escaping the human condition
and living imaginatively...

..in another

creatures' world, it must

be with the gorilla.

David Attenborough's encounter

with the gorillas had been
filmed at Dian Fossey's camp.

But what the film did not
reveal was that a few days

before the local people had killed
Digit, Fossey's favourite gorilla.

It was a part of their
ongoing struggle with her.

This was November 5th.

"I've come to realise
that the direction I took in April of 1973 was quite wrong.

"I persistently, time and again,

"rejected attractive young
women I might have come to love

"to make myself the servant
or slave of down-and-outs

"and old people whom I did not love.

"The money and help that I
gave probably did mostly harm rather than good.

"I believe that the Hound
of Heaven right now

"is starting to close in on me.

"Daddy."

It's like...

What is the Hound of Heaven?

The Hound of Heaven is a poem
written in 1893 by Francis Thomson.

He had been an opium addict
and a vagrant in London.

The poem says that however much
we think we are free individuals,

we are, in reality,
always running from God

and he will pursue us till
the end, and possess our souls.

It is a powerful assertion
of the limits of free will.

He cut his carotid artery
with nail scissors.

It was in this... this deserted
tenement, a squatters' tenement.

He was all alone,
and he bled to death.

And yet there's a sort of purity
to it that's very... George.

I mean, you know,
he didn't take pills

and there was a sort of full
consciousness of it as he went out.

We're talking about free agency, he
really - who kills himself that way?

Honestly - wouldn't we all take
pills if we were going to do it?

He decided to cut his carotid artery
with scissors.

To me, that's very striking
and horrifying but graphic.

It was just an act of... of pure,
free will, wasn't it?

That really was what it was.

So genes or no genes, God or no God,
this was certainly...

his genes wouldn't have
told him to kill himself,

and God didn't, he just did it.

The only people at George Price's
funeral were Bill Hamilton,

one other biologist and a few
of the homeless Price had helped.

But his and Hamilton's theory
was about to be taken up

and transformed into one of the most
defining concepts of our age.

A young biologist called
Richard Dawkins -

who had himself been
a computer programmer -

took their equations

and, through vivid language,
captured the public imagination

with a new way of looking at humans.

Our old romantic idea of free will,
he said, is grossly exaggerated.

And most of our actions are actually
controlled by the logic

of the onboard computers
buried deep within us.

We are simply machines playing
tiny roles in a vast strategic game

played by competing computer codes
over centuries.

I was wanting to conjure up
in the mind of the reader

the image of the organism,
including ourselves,

as a machine for passing on genes.
I wanted to shift the focus

away from the idea of the organism
as being the agent in life

to the immortal replicator,
which is the gene.

Cos that was the logic
of natural selection -

that is the logic of
natural selection.

It's the selfish gene,
but not the selfish individual.

DNA. Exactly analagous to the
binary digits of some computer code,

unravelling like a reel of magnetic
tape on some giant computer.

But at the heart of this supremely
rational mathematical theory,

there was a paradox.

William Hamilton, George Price

and Richard Dawkins had
reinvented the immortal soul -

a part within us
that would survive our own death,

and whose eternal life was
far more significant

than our own temporary
and limited existence.

But the soul was now a computer code
that made no distinction

between good and evil.

The DNA in you is a coded description
of ancient worlds

in which your ancestors lived.

DNA is the wisdom
out of the old days.

And I mean very old days indeed.

We are the descendents
of a tiny elite

of successful ancestors.

We are walking archives
of the African Pliocene.

Walking repositories of wisdom
out of the old days.

In 1994, the ruling Hutu
government in Rwanda set out

to exterminate the Tutsi minority.

Most western reports described it

as the sudden re-emergence
of incomprehensible tribal hatreds.

The New York Times said it was
"an uncontrollable spasm

"of lawlessness and terror,
in a failed African state

"with a centuries' old
history of tribal warfare".

But this wasn't true.

The Germans were just repeating
the old imperial fantasy

which said that the Tutsis and Hutus
were ancient rival races.

In reality, the massacres
were the horrifying result

of the Belgians' policy
of divide and rule

that they had begun less than 100
years before in Rwanda.

It was this policy that had led
to the vicious modern civil war

that began the moment
the Belgians left in 1959,

and had now culminated in genocide.

In the colonial era, the Belgians
had deliberately exaggerated

and distorted the divisions
between the Hutus and the Tutsis.

And the identity cards that
the Belgians had created,

that divided the two groups
biologically,

now became passports
to life or death.

TRANSLATION:

But then the west
got involved again.

And, as it would turn out,

with equally devastating
consequences.

The Tutsis fought back,

and the country descended
into violent chaos.

Thousands of Rwandans
fled across the border into Zaire.

Huge refugee camps were set up.

Western aid agencies flooded in
to help the innocent victims.

But almost immediately,
they found what they were also doing

was protecting the perpetrators
of the genocide.

The Hutu assasins were hiding
amongst the civilians in the camps.

When people crossed the border,
we knew very well among them

there were murderers, people we were
helping every time we give out food,

every time we give health services.

We know that among the people
we're helping there are murderers.

So the Tutsis invaded the camps
to take their revenge.

In response,
President Mobutu sent his troops to try and stop the fighting.

But they just
joined in the looting,

and Mobutu fell from power.

At the same time,
the consumer boom in the west

was fuelling commodity
prices throughout the world.

And the Congo's minerals become
even more valuable.

Everyone piled in.
Troops arrived from Zimbabwe...

from Angola...

from Uganda, Chad, Namibia
and Libya.

They all said they had come
to stop the fighting,

but actually they were all trying to

get their hands on
the precious treasure.

And behind them were
western companies,

and us, all demanding
our new consumer goods and toys.

In all, four and a half million
people died in this war

between 1998 and 2003.

And into the midst of all this
came Bill Hamilton.

Hamilton was by now one of the most
famous scientists in the world.

He was given the highest honours
by the scientific establishment.

But his theories had led him
into a very dark place.

He had written a series of books
called Narrow Roads Of Gene Land.

In them, Hamilton followed
the logic of natural selection

to its extreme conclusion.

The idea that we should use
western science and medicine to

prolong the lives of those who would
otherwise die, he said, was wrong.

It would allow the genetically
inferior to survive,

and so would weaken society.

Nothing should be allowed to
interfere with

the strategy of the genes.

He believed that some people are
genetically inferior to others,

that it's certainly possible,
thanks to modern medicine,

thanks to modern social policies,
not only to keep these people alive,

but to help them to flourish and,
more importantly,

to help them reproduce, and
he thought that this is a bad thing.

And he thought that we should stand
against this slide into degeneration.

Because if you didn't stand
against it, what would happen?

Because he felt
if we don't stand against it,

the human species is
going to degenerate.

Then, Hamilton heard a story
from a journalist.

The journalist believed that
the AIDS virus had been

accidentally created by American
scientists in the Congo in the 1950s

when they were testing
a polio vaccine.

The Americans had set up
a laboratory to make the vaccine

by growing it in the cells
of chimpanzees.

And the journalist's theory said
that by doing this,

the vaccine had become mixed with
the chimp version of HIV,

which then entered human beings
when they took the vaccine.

Hamilton was fascinated.

He was convinced that the scientific
establishment were trying to

suppress the evidence because
it was a challenge to the idea that

modern medicine was
always beneficial.

The medical profession
and the scientific background to it

doesn't like the idea that
this might have been a human mistake.

My fear is that it's going to become
harder and harder to investigate

this type of hypothesis
that has big implications

for what I would call big science,
because people are going to be

afraid of it
for reasons of litigation,

for reasons of losing their grant.

Hamilton decided to break
the conspiracy of silence.

So he set out for the Congo.

He was going to track down the local
chimpanzees, study their viruses

and prove that modern medicine,
in trying to save lives,

had inadvertently caused the death
of over 20 million people.

Hamilton's journey was a vivid
expression of what had happened

at the end of the 20th century
to the western dream

of transforming the world
for the better.

The logic of his scientific theory
had led him to a small ruined town

in the eastern Congo.

He walked through the chaos,
murder and looting,

looking for evidence that

western medicine was
dangerous and misguided.

While all around him,
the horrific consequences

of the Rwanda massacres were
being played out.

Consequences created not just
by western imperialism and greed,

but also by the best
and noblest of liberal ideals.

Because it was liberals in
the Belgian administration who had

first encouraged the Hutus to
rise up against the Tutsi elites.

And it was the aid camps set up
in the wake of the massacres

that had complicated the conflict

and helped to spread
the violence into the Congo.

Then, Hamilton died,
by the freak accident

of the aspirin lodged in his gut,
that then caused a haemorrhage.

His theory about the origin of AIDS
in the vaccination programmes

of the 1950s turned out
to be completely untrue.

Subsequent research has shown that
it had no factual foundation.

But Hamilton's ideas remain
powerfully influential

in our society. Above all,
the idea that human beings are

helpless chunks of hardware
controlled by software programmes

written in their genetic codes.

And the question is,
have we embraced that idea

because it is a comfort in a world
where everything we do,

either good or bad, seems to have
terrible unforeseen consequences?

We know that it was our actions
that have helped to cause the horror

still unfolding in the Congo.

Yet we have no idea
what to do about it.

So instead, we have embraced
a fatalistic philosophy of us

as helpless computing machines
to both excuse and explain

our political failure
to change the world.