All language subtitles for Cant.Get.You.Out.of.My.Head.S01E01

We are living through strange days.

Across Britain, Europe and America,

societies have become split
and polarised,

not just in politics,
but across the whole culture.

There is anger at the inequality
and the ever-growing corruption

and a widespread distrust
of the elites.

Yet, at the same time,
there is a paralysis,

a sense that no-one knows
how to escape from this.

Even in America, where there is now
hope with the new president,

there are also fears that,
despite the growing crisis,

the system will just return
to normal.

This paralysis is also fuelled
by a technology, driven by the aim

of giving you today another version
of what you had yesterday...

..and never a different tomorrow.

These films are a history
of how we got to this place

and why both those in power, and we,
find it so difficult to move on.

They will trace different forces

across the world
that have led to now,

not just in the West,
but in China and Russia as well.

And they are told
in a different way.

They are an emotional history
of what went on inside the heads

of all kinds of people.

Because in the age of
the individual,

what you felt and what you wanted
and what you dreamed of

were going to become
the driving force across the world.

And to understand the present,
you have to go back and see

what happened when those hopes
and dreams and uncertainties

inside people's minds met
the much older forces of power.

Often power that was decaying

and desperate to keep
its ascendancy.

These strange days
did not just happen -

we, and those in power,
created them together.

YELLING

# Each day I walk along
this lonely street

# Trying to find

# Find a future

# New pair of shoes are on my feet

# Cos fashion is my only culture

# Nothing ever change

# Oh, no

# Nothing ever change

# I'm just living in a life
without meaning

# I walk and walk

# Do nothing

# I'm just living in a life
without feeling

# I talk and talk

# Say nothing

# Nothing ever change

# Oh, no

# Nothing ever change. #

SONG FADES OUT

In the late 1950s, as the British
Empire was falling apart,

there was a growing sense
that something was badly wrong

under the surface.

It was a feeling of unease,
that despite all the reforms

after the Second World War
and the welfare state,

the old forms of power
had not gone away.

And neither had the violence
and the corruption

that had always been a part of
that power.

The court opens with
the traditional reading of names

and the wide experience available
to the bank as apparent.

Mr Cobbold, Mr Minors,

Sir Charles Hambro...

Senior director...

The bankers in the City of London

had been at the very heart of
the Empire.

In 1958, two of the most powerful
of them,

Lord Kindersley
and William Keswick,

were accused of using
insider information

to make millions for themselves.

..Lord Kindersley...

Chairman of Rolls-Royce,
merchant banker.

..Mr Keswick...

Hudson's Bay Company
and Far Eastern merchant.

The evidence against them
was very strong.

But when Keswick was shown
the evidence, he dismissed it

with a phrase
that became notorious.

"It is difficult," he said,

"to remember conversations one has
whilst shooting on a grouse moor."

A government inquiry said
the two men were obviously innocent.

At the same time, reports had
started to come back

from one of the last parts of
the Empire - Kenya -

that seemed to show that those
in charge had gone out of control.

They had been fighting a liberation
movement called the Mau Mau.

The report said that hundreds
of thousands of Kenyans had been put

into special camps,
where they were going to be

psychologically adjusted.

The British were trying
to manipulate

what their chief psychologist
called the "African mind".

But what then happened in the camps
turned into a frenzied madness.

The British used mass torture
and killing

as they desperately tried
to hold on to power.

The government in London
denied all the accusations,

but the rumours of
violence and horror continued.

ORGAN MUSIC PLAYS

But what had also not gone away
was the fear and hatred

inside the minds of many
of the British of the "others",

the people the British
had ruled over

who were now coming to what
they had been told was the homeland.

Now, listen carefully
to this Indian's conversation

with a white barber when he entered
a saloon with a BBC radio microphone

in his pocket.

BARBER: No!
INDIAN MAN: What's the matter?

No!

Is there anything wrong?

Yes! What is it?
I said no.

But I'd like to know
what is the matter. I'm closed.

There's another half an hour...
Well, I'm closed now.

But you didn't put the closed sign
outside on the window, did you?

Will you clear off?

Look, if you give me any reason why,
what is the matter,

then I shall go if you tell me...

I've told you - I'm closed!

You're not closed.

You're not...
You're not closed yet.

Well, I am - to you.

Those who came from
the Empire to Britain

were shocked by the strange country
they found.

Michael de Freitas had come
from Trinidad.

He had grown up with a picture of
a strong and confident homeland

at the centre of the Empire.

Instead, what he found was,
what seemed to him,

a sad and frightened country.

You must remember that,
that when we came to this country,

we were not travelling to
a foreign country.

We were taught, I was taught
when I was a young man,

that my country, Trinidad,
was an extension of this one.

We were weaned on the concept
of the Empire.

When I was a young boy,
I stood in 90 degrees of sun

day after day and sang
all kinds of silly things

like God Save The Queen,
Land of Hope and Glory,

"Britannia rule the waves",

with the greatest of fervour
and believed every word of it.

To come here and discover that
not only wasn't I not travelling

to the capital of the whole thing,
which we were led to believe was so,

but in actual fact,
we weren't wanted

has been a very shattering blow.

Many people in this country
who think that we are very hateful

are so wrong.

You see, this is the great mystery.

When you came here, you say
you found you weren't wanted.

Why, then, did you stay?

Why did you choose to stay here?

This was the heartland of
the whole thing

and one hoped against hope
that what one saw was not right.

MUSIC: Song for Zula
by Phosphorescent

# Some say love is a burning thing

# That it makes a fiery ring

# Oh, but I know love
as a fading thing

# Just as fickle as a feather
in a stream

# See, honey, I saw love

# You see it came to me

# It puts its face up to my face
so I could see

# Yeah, then I saw love disfigure me

# Into something
I am not recognising

# See the cage, it called

# I said, "Come on in"

# I will not open myself up
this way... #

Mao Zedong's wife was going mad.

She was called Jiang Qing.

She lived alone,
surrounded by pet monkeys

and nurses, who she was convinced
were conspiring against her.

Those in charge of the revolution
in China

had completely marginalised her.

She was too dangerous, they thought,
to be allowed anywhere

near her husband or power.

They had even sent her to Moscow
to be locked in a sanatorium

with real and imagined illnesses.

But now Jiang Qing's husband
was facing disaster.

The revolution had led to horror.

30 million people had died
from starvation

in the past three years.

The other leaders wanted
to get rid of him.

And suddenly, he called for her.

CALMING MUSIC PLAYS

Jiang Qing was
an extraordinary person.

She believed in nothing except the
power of her will to shape reality.

SHE SINGS

She had begun as an actor in films
in Shanghai in the 1930s.

The other actors looked down at her
for her driving ambition.

SHE GROANS

She liked to be
on the top, always.

She's a very ambitious woman
and she liked to be top

and she plays with
the, you know,

with all the directors, cameramen,

make them...make them, you know,
pay attention, you see,

and the interest in her

so she can have a better part
of the film.

THEY SPEAK CHINESE

She married a quite famous writer
called Tang Na

and after married,
she doesn't feel

very satisfied by her husband

because her husband is not
the very, very strong man.

And she left him
and he jumped to the river,

and then the water was very cold,
so he jump up again, you see?

So... You mean he tried
to commit suicide?

Yes, he's trying to
commit...commit suicide.

After the suicide attempt,

Jiang Qing wrote a long letter
to her husband.

It said she was leaving him

and also explained why
with an extraordinary openness.

There were powerful forces
inside her, she said,

that kept driving her
towards fame and power

and it was only those forces that
held her together psychologically.

"Nothing must hold them back."

It ended, "What matters is that
you remember me

"as a woman who never caves in
before anyone

"and who will never bear to be
treated as inferior to men."

But Jiang Qing failed to
become a star.

The men who ran the studios
scorned her ambition.

Her most famous part was
as a supporting actor in a film

called Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain.

HOWLING

The star of the film was called
Li Lili.

THEY SCREAM

Jiang Qing was convinced that Li

was trying to upstage her
all the time

and she became the focus
of all Jiang Qing's anger

over her treatment by
the Shanghai establishment.

MUSIC: Hua Yang De Nian Hua
by Zhou Xuan

Bitter and disillusioned,
Jiang Qing left Shanghai

and travelled to join
the communist resistance

on a remote mountain in Yan'an.

The camp was an intense,
exciting place

and many of the young
revolutionaries had affairs.

Sex was called
"undisciplined guerrilla warfare".

But when Jiang Qing started an
affair with the leader, Mao Zedong,

that was different.

She was scorned by
the other revolutionaries

as a social-climbing upstart.

Then it got worse.

Mao announced that he was
going to divorce his wife

and marry Jiang Qing.

The other communist leaders
were horrified.

They saw Jiang Qing as a dangerous,
destructive force

because she was driven by
a fierce radical individualism

that threatened
their collective dream.

In the communist structure,
everyone was part of a unit.

She insisted, "I am a unit of one."

No-one could work out what to do.

They even went and asked Stalin
in Moscow for his advice.

He said, "Let them marry.

"But Jiang Qing must sign a document
promising to refrain

"from political activity
for 30 years."

BELL TOLLS

She signed, but she was furious
with the men who now controlled her.

They even tracked down and destroyed
prints of her old films

because they didn't fit
with the image of Mao's wife.

Her fury grew.

Jiang Wing wanted power
on her own behalf,

as an individual.

And she wanted revenge.

Now, 20 years later,
in 1959, Mao was facing disaster

and he was calling for her.

GUNSHOT, GIRL SCREAMS

GUNSHOT

GUNSHOT

BOY: You're dead, you're dead!

In America, the idea
of individualism

had become central to
the politics of the Cold War...

MAN: What are you, bulletproof?

Get out from behind that tree.

..because it was what defined
the United States

against the collective ideology
of Russia.

At the heart of it was the picture
of a strong, confident individual

living an independent life
in the new giant suburbs

outside the old cities.

My gun won't shoot that far.

GUNSHOT

But there was a weakness,

because the people
in the suburbs were alone.

And in their isolation,
away from the old communities,

they started to become fearful
and lost.

Out of these fears came a paranoia

that was fuelled by groups
on the extreme right,

like the John Birch Society.

ALL: ..and to the republic,
for which it stands,

one nation under God, indivisible...

They said that the American
government had been taken over

by hidden groups,
controlled by the communists.

And at the end of the 1950s,
a theory spread like wildfire

through the suburbs that
President Eisenhower himself

had really been put into power
by the communists.

"He is a dedicated, conscious agent
of the Russians,"

the head of
the John Birch Society said.

"That conclusion is based on
detailed evidence so extensive

"that it is beyond
any reasonable doubt."

But this paranoia was not
a new thing.

An influential political scientist
called Richard Hofstadter

published an article
that caused a sensation.

He said that there had always
been a dark paranoia

built into America
from the very start.

The first settlers had come
from Europe to America

to flee from the corruption of power
in the Old World.

But although they had got away
from the old power,

they hadn't got away from
their suspicious minds,

and alone, out in the vast
wilderness of the new America,

that led them to imagining dark,
hidden conspiracies

in their own government,
far away in Washington.

One of the first of these,
in the early 19th century,

said that a secret group
from Europe,

called the Bavarian Illuminati,

were running a giant conspiracy
in America

to destroy the new democracy.

In reality, the Illuminati
had been a utopian movement

who wanted to replace religion
with reason.

But instead, they now became
the first of a series

of frightening suspicions
that fed off the isolation

of the settlers in the New World.

"The paranoia in the suburbs,"
Hofstadter said,

"is just part of a much larger
darkness

"built into the very structure
of America itself

"that was feeding, yet again,

"on people's separateness
and isolation."

But in the same suburbs,
there was a new movement rising up

that was going to confront
and challenge these fears.

It was driven by a radical
individualism that said

that you as an individual can shape
the world the way you want it to be,

not accept what the dark fears
tell you it is.

It would be one of
the main foundations

of the counterculture movement

that was going to spread throughout
the West.

But now, it was just beginning,

born out of odd moments across
the suburbs of California.

One night, Kerry Thornley
went with his friend Greg Hill

to a bowling alley.

They started to discuss reality.

Thornley insisted that there was
a fixed order to the universe,

but Greg said that the universe
was chaos and it was human thought

that projected an order
onto the chaos.

Sitting around in a bowling alley
in 1958, to be exact,

somewhere in the vicinity
of Whittier, California,

and we were discussing philosophy

and we were talking
about order and chaos.

Greg's theory was that order
was projected on the universe,

that it didn't exist at all,

that it was a creation
of the human mind,

that order was entirely
in perception and had nothing to do

with what was going on out there
in a completely chaotic universe.

Thornley was inspired by this, and
together he and Greg Hill decided

to set up a movement dedicated
to the idea of chaos.

They called it Discordianism.

Underlying it was the belief
that individuals had the power

inside themselves to bring order
and meaning to the chaos,

not the old systems of power
that created the fear and suspicion.

But then an extraordinary
coincidence happened

that was going to lead Thornley back
towards that darkness in America.

Thornley was sent to do service
with the Marines,

and at the camp,
he met another recruit

who seemed to embody the figure of
the free, independent individual

he so admired because he refused
to bow to the power of the officers.

He was called Lee Harvey Oswald...

..and they became close friends.

Thornley had read the novels
of Ayn Rand

and he decided he was going to write
a novel

with Oswald as the central figure,
a hero of this new age.

But then, suddenly, Oswald defected
to the Soviet Union

and things became very strange.

It seemed that the reality outside

was even more chaotic
than he had imagined.

It was really a weird experience
for me

because I was writing this novel
based on Oswald.

When Oswald defected to the Soviet
Union, I decided to write a novel

about a Marine who becomes
disenchanted with the US

and goes to the Soviet Union,

and so it was like the hero...
And I didn't like Kennedy.

I was extremely anti-Kennedy myself
because I was so much into Ayn Rand,

laissez faire capitalism,
objectivism,

and Kennedy was the arch villain
of our...

..of our movement at that time.

And it was like the hero of my novel
jumped up off the pages of my book

and shot the President,
and it was...it was...

It was very weird.

MUSIC: Air
by The Incredible String Band

# Breathing

# All creatures are

# Brighter than that brightest star

# You are by far

# You come right inside of me

# Close as you can be

# You kiss my blood

# And my blood kiss me... #

Although the British Empire was now
finally collapsing

and the last colonies being given
their independence,

in the homeland, England, the old
structure of power remained intact.

And not only in the institutions,

but inside people's heads as well.

The old attitudes of power
were still deeply embedded

in the minds of the establishment
who dominated the country.

Those in charge demanded obedience,

not just from those they governed
or employed,

but also from their wives.

They expected them to submit too.

And again. Fine.
CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS

Sandra Paul had grown up in Africa
and the Far East.

Her father had been a doctor
in the Royal Air Force.

She came back to England
and became a successful model.

Just take that knee
a little wider here.

Good.

Then she met Robin Douglas-Home.

He was at the heart
of the ruling class.

His uncle had been Prime Minister.

She was incredibly beautiful.

She had a tremendous
quality of innocence.

And, erm...

She was, I thought,
a vulnerable creature

in a highly suspect world,

the world of models and fashion,

which I despised then,

and I despise even more now.

Erm... And so, in a sense,
maybe I was trying to rescue her

from what I thought
was going to be a decline

in her character due to her career.

Can you take that leg, that knee
a little wider out that way?

Sort of, really...
That's right.

But she was earning considerably
more than you were

and, presumably, this money was
useful in setting up your home,

so I suppose you could hardly
be resentful about it.

I was earning
considerably less, yes.

They married, and
Robin Douglas-Home insisted

that they went to live
in the country.

Sandra Paul agreed...

..but she found that
he also insisted

that she should stop
her modelling career

and remain in the country while
he went to their house in London.

Then eventually, Robin wanted
to be in London more.

And...

He didn't really want the routine
so much.

He wanted to be going out to parties
on his own,

and when he realised that
if he was in London

and I would be in London too...

..erm...

..this meant that he had to share
his life,

and he was beginning to want
to be...

..just a little independent.

Do you mean he was getting bored
with you?

Yes, probably,

because I used to want to know what
he'd been doing or where he'd been

and he didn't want to say,
and so we'd have a row.

But just because I was wanting
to know about his life

and he thought that I shouldn't have
to know everything about his life.

I felt that when you were married
that you should share things

and you should have a right, really,
to know what your husband was doing.

Even if he was to make it up,

he should take the trouble
to make something up to tell you

so you could put it
out of your mind.

Michael de Freitas was now working
for a notorious landlord

in Notting Hill called
Peter Rachman.

Rachman owned hundreds of flats
and decaying houses in Notting Hill,

which he rented out to prostitutes
and immigrants.

De Freitas's job was
to be Rachman's enforcer,

often using threats and violence,

including breaking in
and wrecking the flats.

When we came back in the night,
we see everything outside.

All the floor mashed up.

All the wardrobe, all the chair,
all the table,

all the clothes on the floor, dirty.

He took my brother's tools
and mashed up all the floor.

Pulled up all the lights.

No water.

I say, "Well, well, well, well."

Michael de Freitas was fascinated
by his new employer

because Peter Rachman was far more
than just the brutal gangster

that he was portrayed as.

He had lived an extraordinary life.

He had been born in Lvov,
on the border of Ukraine and Poland.

Then the Nazis invaded

and Rachman was arrested
and forcibly sterilised

because he was Jewish.

But he managed to escape.

He fled into Russia,
but was captured again,

this time by the Russians,

who sent him to the labour camps
in Siberia,

where he watched people survive
by killing each other

and then eating the human flesh.

But then the Nazis invaded Russia

and suddenly, Rachman became
Russia's ally.

He was sent off to fight
with the Free Polish Army.

And he ended up, after the war,
in London,

stateless and a complete outsider.

That horror meant that Rachman
judged nobody.

For him, the differences between
right and wrong

were luxuries for the privileged.

In the face of horror,
everyone was the same,

focused entirely on survival.

But the English judged him.

He was hated with an overwhelming
disgust as the face of evil.

De Freitas believed that
this revealed something

that was hidden in English society.

We start with the story of a man,

let me say straight away
a sordid story

that some of you may well not want
the younger children to hear.

This is Peter Rachman,

one of Britain's big-time
20th-century racketeers.

On the surface, there was the overt
racism against the immigrants

that Rachman was bringing
into Notting Hill.

A large number of people
in Notting Hill

are trying to mix the two races,
are trying to bring about

a coffee-coloured mulatto population
in Britain,

and I regard it as no disgrace
for the White Defence League

to come on the scene and stand up
for white interests.

But de Freitas
saw something deeper.

Rachman's property empire
was a brutal and violent one,

but it was doing something
that polite English society

completely refused to do.

He was giving people on
the very margins of society -

prostitutes and black immigrants -
somewhere to live.

His empire shone a harsh light
on the hypocrisy of the nice people

at the top of English society,

who would never think of themselves
as racist

but wanted nothing to do with
the people he was moving

into Notting Hill.

And they hated him for it.

This was captured in an interview
that the BBC did

with the local upmarket journalists
in Notting Hill

about the day Rachman
visited their offices.

What struck me about him

was his extraordinary sense
of being so evil.

This was a really evil man.

We'd heard a lot about Rachman -

and finally, here he was,
sitting in this room.

But I don't think any of us
were prepared to see

such a grotesque individual.

Kind of gravelly type of voice,

a sort of...almost a diseased voice,
if you like,

the kind of thing which went...

SPEAKS IN HIGH-PITCH: "Oh, what do
you want to see me for?

"I mean, I've done nothing."

De Freitas decided that there was a
fear in England that went far deeper

than just the
working-class racism...

..that behind the polite veneer
of the middle classes,

there was a hard ruthlessness
and a suspicion of others.

De Freitas gave it a name.

He called it Englishism.

It came, he said, from both an anger
and a melancholy

at the loss of their empire.

Then Peter Rachman died
of a heart attack,

and Michael de Freitas
suddenly found

that he was the new face of evil.

Mr de Freitas?

Why will you not take the rent
from this man here?

I don't own the property.

But your name's on the rent book.
Is it?

Well, you know it is.
We can probably show it to you.

Come here, Mr de Freitas, cos I need
to know the facts about this.

Why will you not take his rent
from him?

INAUDIBLE

Jiang Qing came in secret
to Mount Lushan to meet Mao Zedong,

where he was confronting
the other revolutionaries.

She was determined to stop them
from overthrowing Mao.

Many of them were the men who had
forced her

into her strange, isolated life

and she hated them.

Jiang Qing was also convinced
that these men

weren't really revolutionaries.

They were actually ghosts from
the past who, without realising it,

were destroying the revolution

because their minds were still
possessed by the patterns of thought

of the old, decaying
and corrupt empire

that had ruled China for 300 years.

Mao pretended to give in
to the demands

of the other revolutionaries,

but he told Jiang Qing
to go to Shanghai

and to prepare quietly
for a new kind of revolution -

one that would sweep
the opposition away.

Jiang Qing returned to where
she had started -

the studios of Shanghai.

But now she was in control.

And the new revolution was going to
be driven by HER self-expression

and HER imagination
that had been stifled back then.

The unit of one was going to
take over the revolution

and reshape the minds
of the Chinese people.

Because she could control
the people's minds,

she could control their images,
she was...

She became, er... She became
the mistress of the arts

and of propaganda and culture.

She does have great personal charm.

It's a severe charm.

It's the charm of being able to do
what she wanted

and to say what she wanted to

in a society where most people
say what they're expected to say,

most people express
the current political line.

Her daring to reflect upon the past,

to speak extensively about herself

and to make judgments of all sorts
was extraordinary.

And she's a woman of many parts

so, needless to say,
her relationship to the Chairman

was always the trump card.

Jiang Qing began by taking old
Chinese operas and reworked them

so they became dramatic melodramas
about the need to struggle

against the evil forces
still hidden in Chinese society.

CALLS IN MANDARIN

GUNSHOT, MUSIC CRESCENDOES

Hate was a key word in the script.

"It must be shouted," she said,

"as if it was a grenade that
you were hurling at the enemy."

"And never forget,"
she told the heroine,

"that beauty is less important
than will and power."

SHE SINGS IN MANDARIN

But the operas were just the start.

Jiang Qing's real aim was to turn
the whole of China itself

into a giant melodrama,

to work millions of people up
into an intense frenzy

that would have the power to smash
through the old corrupt ideas

that were still lodged
in people's heads

and break through
to a new kind of society.

But at the same time,

Jiang Qing herself was driven by
old hatreds from her own past.

And she was also going to
turn that frenzy

into a crusade of revenge against
her old enemies...

..including Li Lili,

who had upstaged her in
Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain.

ORCHESTRAL CRESCENDO BUILDS

Living quietly in New York,
completely forgotten,

was an Irish woman
called Ethel Boole

who personified the very opposite
of what Jiang Qing believed -

because Boole thought that
the way to change the world

was to give yourself up to the force
of revolution,

to surrender your individual self
and your identity

to the dream of a better future
for others.

At the end of the 19th century,

Ethel Boole had gone to Russia
as a young girl

and become involved with the
revolutionaries in St Petersburg.

And she wrote a novel called
The Gadfly.

It told a powerful romantic story
of a young girl

who sacrificed everything
for revolution.

She then married
a Polish revolutionary

called Wilfrid Voynich,

and in the 1920s, they went to live
in New York,

where he worked as
an antiquarian book-seller

and Ethel Boole
forgot about revolution.

But in 1959, when the Bolshoi Ballet
came to New York,

the dancers were astonished
to find that she was alive

and they rushed to visit her

because Ethel Boole,
without her realising it,

had become a hero
of the Russian Revolution.

She discovered that her novel

had inspired millions of
young revolutionaries in the 1920s

to rise up and fight
for the revolution,

inspired by the idea
of surrendering themselves

to a grand historic cause.

Then, the same had happened
in China.

Again, millions of
young revolutionaries

had carried The Gadfly
in their backpacks

as they fought to create
a new kind of future.

Now, Boole was living alone.

And she had inherited
a mysterious book from her husband.

It was called
the Voynich manuscript,

and it was written in a language
no-one has been able to decipher.

But one ballerina
in the Bolshoi group

didn't go to visit Ethel Boole.

She was called Maya Plisetskaya.

She was the most famous ballerina
in the world

and she hated the communist system.

Plisetskaya's father had been
executed by firing squad

during the purges of the 1930s.

Her mother had been sent to a prison
in the wastes of Siberia.

As she became famous, she was
watched all the time

by agents from the KGB.

She couldn't trust anyone.

Everyone around her had been told
to inform on her.

And she hated what she called
"the men with sweaty faces,"

the party bosses who leered at her
as she danced.

In private, Maya Plisetskaya
wrote out her own manifesto.

"I don't know about other people,"
she wrote, "I'll say it for myself.

"I don't want to be a slave.

"I don't want people whom
I don't know to decide my fate.

"I don't want a leash on my neck.

"I don't want a cage,
even if it is a platinum one.

"I don't want to be rejected
or branded.

"I don't want to hide
what I am thinking.

"I don't want to bow my head,

"and I won't do it.

"That's not what I was born for."

Both Plisetskaya and Jiang Qing
were part of the new individualism

that was rising up everywhere...

..while Ethel Boole's
collective vision was dying.

But at the same time,
a new revolution was about to begin.

It would offer a dream of liberation
and freedom for the new individuals.

But it would end
by controlling them.

And in a strange twist,
the person whose ideas

would guide that revolution
was Ethel Boole's father.

He was a mathematician from the
19th century called George Boole.

Boole had been
a deeply religious man.

And one afternoon in the 1840s,

as he walked across a field
near Doncaster,

a thought had flashed into his head

that he believed
was a religious vision.

Boole suddenly saw how you could
use mathematics

to unlock the mysterious processes
of human thought.

The same symbols that were used
in algebra

could be used to describe what
went on inside people's heads

as they followed a train of thought,

expressing all the twists and turns
in simple binary form.

If this, then that.

If that, then not this.

And in 1854, Boole wrote a book
that caused a sensation.

It was called An Investigation
of the Laws of Thought.

Its aim - to investigate
the fundamental laws

of those operations of the mind
by which reasoning is performed.

Boole showed how even abstract
concepts like virtue and passion

could be put into equations,

and then the symbols used
to follow a pattern of thought

to its conclusion.

Boole was driven by
an almost messianic belief

that he had been allowed
a glimpse by God

into the truth of the human mind.

But there were those
who doubted this.

The philosopher Bertrand Russell
was astonished

by the brilliance
of Boole's mathematics,

but he didn't believe that what
Boole had discovered

was anything to do
with human thought.

"Human beings," Russell said,
"do not think like that."

What Boole was really doing
was something else.

Throughout the British Empire,
science had played a powerful role

which has been wiped
and forgotten today.

Its job had been to create
abstract systems,

to catalogue and order
the chaotic reality

that the British ruled over,

to turn it into something that could
be managed and controlled.

It ranged from making maps of
what was called the dark interior

to cataloguing millions of species
of animals and insects,

and studying and categorising
different human types.

And what Boole was doing
was the next step in that process.

He was taking the chaotic reality
of human thought

and making a simplified,
rational map

of that other dark interior,

the human mind,

so it could be managed
and controlled.

But in the 19th century,
no-one could see any way

of using the system
that Boole had created

and it languished
and was quietly forgotten

when the British Empire
began to collapse.

One day, Sandra Paul discovered
her husband having sex

in the back of a car
with the Marchioness of Londonderry.

It was the final straw

and she decided the marriage
would have to end.

She told Robin Douglas-Home
that she wanted a divorce,

but he refused...

..so she said that she would seek
a petition for cruelty.

It meant that many of the details
of their marriage

and the struggles between them
would be made public.

And he couldn't bear the thought
of going through a divorce,

so he refused to give me a divorce.

He blamed me for...

..dragging the whole thing out in...

Erm... Well, I don't think
he blamed me coherently.

He just blamed me
because I divorced him

and he couldn't understand that
there wasn't any other way.

I... Well, I don't think
I was unfair

because it was the only thing
I could do,

and I did think that it was hopeless
for us to stay in a separated state,

hopeless for me.

I was being selfish.
I wanted to be free.

Erm... You had to be
fairly ruthless.

Yes, I had to be ruthless
in order to be free.

And she insisted on continuing

with this petition for cruelty.

Now, when I received the petition
for cruelty,

I can only describe one's feelings
to you as if,

you know, a small bomb had gone off
inside your head.

Because, erm...

..it chapterised the marriage
almost day by day...

..and incidentally,
letter by letter, roneoed...

..in the most unpleasant
and vicious terms...

..with me as the aggressor
and the cruel one.

Five years of one's life...

..say, 70% of which were very happy,

reduced to a great wad of foolscap,

typed out by leering little clerks

in solicitors' offices.

Your letters from the moment
you'd met,

typed out, roneoed -

your letters to your mother,

her letters to her mother,

her mother's letters to me.

It was all right, you felt,
to be regarded as an adulterer,

but you couldn't bear to be
regarded as cruel?

I couldn't bear her to...to...

..put a...a...

..a kind of tombstone on...

..this marriage reading in the way
that that petition read.

For men like Robin Douglas-Home,
the expectation of power

had been deeply embedded
inside their minds,

but as the world had changed around
them and real power ebbed away,

they were left
with a terrible melancholy

that in some would turn to despair.

A year after the filming, Robin
Douglas-Home committed suicide.

HE PLAYS PIANO

MUSIC: Sag Mir Wo Die Blumen Sind
by Marlene Dietrich

# Sag mir wo die Blumen sind

# Wo sind sie geblieben?

# Sag mir wo die Blumen sind

# Was ist geschehen?

# Sag mir wo die Blumen sind

# Madchen pfluckten sie geschwind

# Wann wird man je verstehen?

# Wann wird man je verstehen?

# Sag mir wo die Madchen sind

# Wo sind sie geblieben?

# Sag mir wo die Madchen sind

# Was ist geschehen?

# Sag mir wo die Madchen sind

# Manner nahmen sie geschwind

# Wann wird man je verstehen?

# Wann wird man je verstehen?

# Sag mir wo die Manner sind

# Wo sind sie geblieben?

# Sag mir wo die Manner sind

# Was ist geschehen?

# Sag mir wo die Manner sind

# Zogen fort, der Krieg beginnt

# Wann wird man je verstehen?

# Wann wird man je verstehen? #

Kerry Thornley had left California

and gone to live in New Orleans,
where he worked in a bar.

The movement that he and his friend
Greg Hill had started -

Discordianism -
was beginning to grow,

spreading by word of mouth.

Like much of the new counterculture,
it was against all politics.

It distrusted all the old systems
of power - left and right -

because they were just trying
to force you

into their version of reality.

Thornley also published his novel

with Lee Harvey Oswald
as the central figure.

It was called The Idle Warriors.

But New Orleans was also the city
where Lee Harvey Oswald had lived

before the Kennedy assassination.

And as a result, Thornley
came to the notice of the man

who was going to be the main creator
of the JFK conspiracy theory.

He was the district attorney
of New Orleans,

called Jim Garrison.

Garrison said that Oswald had just
been part of a giant conspiracy

that included the CIA, big business,

the news media
and anti-Castro Cubans,

who, together, had killed
the President.

There's no question about that.

There was a conspiracy.

A number of men were involved.

An apparatus which was lethal
in nature...

..of which Lee Harvey,
Harvey Oswald was a part,

assigned the role,
essentially, as decoy.

Now, don't ask me what the
organisation is because I can't say.

But the implication, clearly,
is the Central Intelligence Agency,

your own security organisation
in the United States.

It almost sounds like that,
doesn't it?

I have no comment about that.

Jim Garrison believed that the
modern democratic system in America

was just a facade,

that behind it was another
secret system of power

that really controlled the country.

But you could never discover it
through normal means

because it was so deeply hidden.

Garrison wrote a memo to his staff,

explaining how you could
uncover this secret world.

He called it Time and Propinquity.

"You didn't bother with meaning
or with logic," he said,

"because that will always
be hidden."

Instead, you look for patterns,

strange coincidences and links
that may seem to have no meaning

but are actually telltale signs
on the surface

of the hidden system
of power underneath.

This theory was going to have
a very powerful effect in the future

because it would lead
to a profound shift

in how many people
understood the world,

because what it said was that
in a dark world of hidden power,

you couldn't expect
everything to make sense,

that it was pointless to try
and understand the meaning

of why something happened,

because that would always be hidden
from you.

What you looked for
were the patterns.

And when Garrison read
Kerry Thornley's novel,

he saw a pattern.

Not only had Thornley been
in the Marines with Oswald

and written a novel about him, but
he had come to live in the same city

that Oswald had lived in
before the assassination.

And in 1967,
Garrison accused Thornley

of being part of the conspiracy.

Thornley was furious.

He knew that Garrison was wrong...

..but he also hated the very idea
of conspiracy theories.

He believed that they were
one of the ways

those in power controlled you.

Conspiracy theories made you believe
that there were hidden forces

that really controlled the world,

and that made you as an individual
feel weak and powerless.

Suspicion, he believed,
was just another form of control.

Thornley wanted to find ways
to free people

from that kind of conditioning
that held them back as individuals.

There are ways of
deconditioning people,

and this is what I'm interested in.

I'm interested in finding
some technique

by which great masses of people

can be broken out of their
authoritarian conditioning

all at once, to figure out exactly
what that type of enlightenment is,

that type of liberation from
authoritarian conditioning is,

and how to achieve it
on a wholesale basis.

Thornley was right that most of what
Garrison alleged

was complete fantasy.

Despite all the patterns,

he could produce no evidence
of a hidden conspiracy.

But what Thornley didn't realise
was that at the same time,

there was another very real
conspiracy being run

by the American government,

and its aim was to try and do
the very same thing

as he wanted to do.

The Central Intelligence Agency
was trying to find ways

to wipe the past from
people's minds,

to see if they could free them
from the conditioning

that had been implanted there.

Psychologists working for the CIA
had come to believe

that individuals were far weaker
than they had believed...

..and they wanted to see
if they could implant

new patterns of thought
in their minds.

The image of the human being
that was being built up

at that particular time
was that there was a great deal

of vulnerability
in every human being

and that that vulnerability
could be manipulated

to programme somebody
to be something

that I wanted them to be

and they didn't want to be...

..that you could manipulate people
in such a way

that they could be automatons,
if you will,

for whatever your own purposes were.

This was the image that people
thought was possible.

The CIA set up a secret project
called MKUltra.

It was led by a psychiatrist
called Ewen Cameron,

who worked in a hospital in Montreal
called the Allan Memorial.

He took patients and,
without telling them, experimented

to see if he could wipe what
he called "the sick memories"

from their minds.

To do this, he used
repeated electroshocks

and massive doses of LSD.

They shipped me up to what they
called the Sleep Room,

and they gave me all of these
electroconvulsive shock treatments

and megadoses of drugs and LSD
and all of that.

And I have no memory of
any of that -

nothing of that time
at the Allan Memorial

or any of my life previous to that.

All gone. Wiped.

Some members of Discordianism
were working at Playboy magazine,

and Thornley decided that he was
going to use Playboy magazine

to start an experiment that would
make people see how absurd

all conspiracy theories really were.

He called it Operation Mindfuck.

In 1969, he and Greg Hill began
Operation Mindfuck

by placing a false letter
in the Playboy letters page.

They put it between another letter

asking if gun fanatics
had small penises

and one from a man asking
about the physical danger

to his testicles from heavy petting.

Thornley's fake letter asked whether
all the political assassinations

in America were really
being masterminded

by a single secret society,

and the society it named
was the Illuminati.

It said that the Illuminati
were behind all the chaos

and the fear that was now
gripping America.

He and the other Discordians then
proceeded to spread this idea

all across America through
the counterculture,

in magazines and books
and even in plays.

Thornley's aim was to try and break
the spell of conspiracy theories

by making people see the absurdity
of believing them,

and he had chosen the Illuminati
for the experiment

because no-one could
possibly believe

that an 18th-century organisation
from Bavaria was really,

in the second half of
the 20th century,

the secret rulers
of the modern world.

It was clearly ridiculous.

Dr Cameron's experiments
were a disaster.

His brutal techniques succeeded only

in wiping the minds of those
he experimented on.

He then found he could put
nothing back.

He totally failed to implant
any new memories

or any new ways of seeing the world.

His patients found themselves
in a world

that had no meaning any longer.

When I was discharged
from the Allan Memorial,

I felt like a...

..like an alien from another world
visiting this world.

I knew I was different

and I didn't know how to become
like everybody else.

And it was a very lonely,
scary place to be.

"This is your husband."

What? What's "husband?"

What's "making love?"

In the world of individualism
that was about to come,

psychology was going to play
a powerful role

because it said it could help
to change

what was inside people's minds.

But what Cameron and the CIA
had done

showed, in a dramatic and extreme
way, the weakness of this.

They had assumed that most of what
people felt came from within them,

and to make them happier,

you just had to alter
what was inside their brains.

What was forgotten
was the other view -

that what shapes how people feel
is the society around them...

..above all, the structure of power
that not only controls their lives,

but also how they feel.

And if you want to change
the way people feel,

you have to find a way
to change that, too.

Memory is wrapped in what society
has decided

we should feel like.

"You should cry at funerals."

I found myself not crying
at a funeral

and I felt just fine.

And I thought, "Gee, there's
something the matter with me.

"I'm not crying. I should cry.

"Everybody else is crying."

But... But there wasn't that...

..that need to.

MUSIC: Recharge & Revolt
by The Raveonettes

CROWD SHOUTING

MUSIC CONTINUES

# With a hole in my head

# I looked for you

# Through the trenches of war

# The whole world through

# My desire to leave with you
I just can't constrain

# I regret everything
I've done so far

# When the pillars of love
are blown apart

# I stumble through the rubble
and decay

# When I'm terrified,
I close my eyes... #

My old man died for this country!

Don't you dare say that to me!

Michael de Freitas decided that he
was going to become a revolutionary.

He was going to challenge and expose
the corrupt old structures of power

that he believed still
haunted and controlled

the minds of the English people,
even though their empire was gone.

I can't live in this system.

I don't like it, I don't want it.

I want to destroy everything
down to the ground, the lot, ashes.

That's what I want.

MUSIC: Overture (For Other Halfs)
by Brian McBride

All three -

Jiang Qing, Michael de Freitas
and Kerry Thornley -

knew that their struggle
was with the forces

from the old power of the past

that they believed were still lodged
in people's minds.

But at the same time, quietly
rising up was a new system

that seemed as if it would never
have to face that struggle -

because it would be completely free
of the past.

The laws of human thought
that George Boole had created

had become the central structure of
all thinking machines, computers,

because it fitted perfectly with
the binary switching system

inside them - either zero or one -

and it was used by the machines
to create endless branching pathways

of binary logic called algorithms.

Out of that was going to come the
dream of artificial intelligence,

machines that could
think independently,

that could then order and manage
the world as a rational system,

not driven by the dangerous
ideologies of the past.

But back in the 1960s,

as the engineers began to build
the first neural networks,

what they had forgotten was that
the system of thought

they were creating inside the
machines did have its own history,

that it had been born out of a time

when science had become
deeply involved in questions

of power and control
in the British Empire...

..that what lay behind
the computer logic

was the aim of simplifying
human thought,

which would finally allow you
to colonise the last free outpost -

the human mind.

But unlike the old empires,
where power was visible,

this power would be hidden
in remote places, in the servers.

But something else from the past

would also find its way
into those servers.

In the political and economic chaos
of the early 1970s,

conspiracy theories were going to
spread like wildfire

through the counterculture.

As they did, the fake conspiracies

about the Illuminati and
the secret rulers of the world

that Kerry Thornley thought that
no-one could ever believe

began to get mixed up with
the true conspiracies like MKUltra.

And more and more people
began to follow

Jim Garrison's theory
of time and propinquity,

looking for patterns of
a hidden power in America,

not for logic or meaning any longer.

And when the internet was created,
almost immediately,

those patterns of suspicion
would move into the data

and multiply endlessly
across the system.

And that dark paranoia,
that 200 years before

had spread across the prairies
and the mountains

among isolated settlers,

now spread across the virtual world,

among isolated individuals sitting
alone in front of their screens...

..and suspicion and distrust
crept back into what was going to be

the new system of power.

MUSIC: Who Killed Bambi?
by Sex Pistols

# Gentle pretty thing

# Who only had one spring

# You bravely faced the world

# Ready for anything

# I'm happy that you lived

# For your life is mine

# What have I except to cry?

# Spirit never die!

# Birds of the air

# Beasts of the earth

# Overjoyed at Bambi's birth

# They gambolled in the glade

# Who killed Bambi?

# Who killed Bambi?

# Who killed Bambi?

# Who killed Bambi?

# Who killed Bambi?

# Who killed Bambi?

# Who killed Bambi?

# Who killed Bambi?

# Who killed Bambi?

# Murder, murder, murder

# Someone should be angry

# The crime of the century

# Who shot little Bambi?

# Never trust a hippy

# I love punky Bambi

# I'll kill to find the killer

# In the rotten roll army

# All the spikey punkers

# Believers in the ruins

# With one big shout,
they all cry out

# Who killed Bambi? #

SHOUTING, GLASS SMASHING