Self & Society

An International Journal for Humanistic Psychology

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Tweeting while Rome burns

Hank Earl

To cite this article: Hank Earl (2017) Tweeting while Rome burns, Self & Society, 45:1, 94-97,
DOI: 10.1080/03060497.2017.1290457

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Published online: 03 Apr 2017.

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 94 BOOK REVIEWS

A powerful book – much needed and not to be overlooked: by therapists, clients and the
wider world.

Jane Barclay
Psychotherapist
[Link]@[Link]
© 2017, Jane Barclay
[Link]

Tweeting while Rome burns

Hyper Normalisation – A film by Adam Curtis, 166 mins, 2016, Jaye/Gorel, BBC iPlayer,
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[Link]

The world is going to hell in a filter bubble – or at least those parts of it mesmerized by the
internet and, especially, social media. We are tweeting while Rome burns. Meanwhile, the
rest of the world – where reality takes place – harbours ‘festering’ and ‘mutating’ forces,
arising from the West’s simplistic foreign policies, which, for several decades, have focused
on God-blessed America and her allies ridding the planet – or the Middle East at least – of
despots. After which democracy will naturally flourish.
Except, of course, it doesn’t. And Iraq and many of the ‘Arab Spring’ countries are in chaotic
turmoil, riven by the proliferation of ‘the poor man’s nuclear bomb’: suicide bombers, who mul-
tiplied after theological sleight of hand transformed forbidden suicide into sanctified
martyrdom.
And no one, apart presumably from those organizing and executing these acts of incendiary
insurrection, has any ‘vision of a different or better future’.
It is with these damning words that Adam Curtis’s latest mega-documentary ‘HyperNorma-
lisation’ begins, echoing the closing sentiments of his last, ‘Bitter Lake’: ‘What is needed is a new
story, and one that we can believe in’.
‘HyperNormalisation’ is a bad trip of a film, and having ingested 166 minutes of Sandoz-
quality, pure ADAM C, there is no coming down: things are not getting better, despite what
Yuval Noah Harari says in his 2011 book Sapiens, where the reduction in international
warfare and famine is highlighted. The only way is not up. The art of politics has largely
been abandoned: ‘the end of a dream that politics could change the world’. And it is true
that politicians who actually believe in change – Jeremy Corbyn springs to mind – are often
viewed as dangerous. So ‘managed outcomes’ are all that can be expected. Trying to minimize
risk in the face of environmental disasters, climate change and war conducted on a small and
individual scale through suicide bombing. How can peace negotiations take place when the
populace is too frightened to venture out in the streets, asks Curtis of the Israel-Palestine
situation.
It all seems to have started in 1975, when Henry Kissinger was seeking to establish balance
in the interconnected system he perceived the world to be, thereby enabling a truly global
society. At the same time, Hafiz al Assad – the father of the current Syrian leader – was
seeking to develop stability in the Middle East, to enable the Arab world to stand up to the
West. He saw that Palestinian refugees must be allowed to return to their homeland to establish
 SELF & SOCIETY 95

peace between Israel and the Arab world. Kissinger, in turn, worried about the growth of Arab
power, and saw that dividing them would prevent this, deeming the Palestinian dilemma irre-
levant, but concealing this through double-dealing and ‘constructive ambiguity’.
Assad was furious when he discovered this, warning Kissinger that he had released
‘demons’. He retreated, licking his wounds and nursing a brutal and vengeful mindset.
In the same year, in New York, the banks refused to bail out the indebted city, until City Hall
caved in, allowing all but one place on the board of governors to be filled by bankers who
promptly imposed a regime of austerity, sacking public employees – teachers, cops – in vast
numbers. The era of political negotiation was over. This, of course, was the advent of what
was to become Reaganomics, Thatcherism in the UK, monetarism internationally. The logic
of the market would prevail.
Patti Smith and other radicals of the time moved away from identifying with political move-
ments, and towards individual expression, seeking instead to ‘change people’s heads’. The
revolution was deferred and money crept in, in the form of Donald Trump who, given
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massive tax breaks by the city, bought up derelict buildings to convert them into luxury apart-
ments. New York was to become a city for the rich.
Alongside monetarism, the inauguration of former Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan as US
president heralded a new simplicity in American foreign policy: ‘God has placed the destiny
of afflicted mankind into the hands of the United States. God bless America’.
US forces duly entered Beirut as peacekeepers following the massacre, by a Christian-Leba-
nese faction abetted by Israeli troops’ passive consent, of thousands of Palestinian refugees in
camps in Sabra. However, Assad was convinced of a different reality to this presence, and in
alliance with Ayatollah Khomeini, the policy of suicide bombing was initiated, individuals
destroying themselves to promote Islamic revolution, in an ultimate act of penitence exceeding
self-flagellation. In the Iran-Iraq conflict, schoolchildren were bussed out to walk through Iraqi
minefields, and hallowed as martyrs with fountains spurting blood-red water.
The suicide bomber is described by Curtis as an unstoppable human weapon. And indeed,
they prevailed when Reagan felt obliged to withdraw his troops after US Marine barracks were
targeted by suicide bombers acting for Hezbollah – Iranians under Syrian control – killing 241
soldiers in 1983. The US was paralysed by the complexity of what it faced in the Middle East.
A solution of sorts emerged in the shape of Colonel Gaddafi, who was repeatedly framed by
US intelligence as the villain of the piece, a ‘fake terrorist mastermind’: a role with which
Gaddafi was only too happy to collude in his bid for global fame. This was in the face of rebut-
tals by other intelligence agencies, who repeatedly stressed that Syria was the culprit. Even
after doubts were raised by the American ‘intelligence community’, Libya, identified as a
‘rogue state’, was bombed in 1986. This avoided the complexities of going after Syria, as
Gaddafi was rejected by other Arab leaders, who saw him as ‘mad’.
So. Pause for breath. Because there are other strands that Curtis has woven in by this point:
the decay and demise of the Soviet Union and the rise of computers, and what science fiction
writer William Gibson dubbed ‘cyberspace’ in his 1984 novel Neuromancer.
The title ‘HyperNormalisation’ derives from the last days of Soviet empire, Curtis tells us,
when the fabric of the state has become a hollow façade proclaiming that all is as it should
be: we swoon over an ice-skating tournament where first prize appears to be a gleaming
Lada (an East German car of notorious unreliability). And the proletariat complies with this pre-
tence … who can blame them when all that awaited them post-Perestroika was the chaos of
kleptocracy and oligarchs ago-go, presiding over a collapsed economy, suffering like an asth-
matic awaiting the annunciation of Vlad the Inhaler, the first of the neo-nostalgic ‘strong man’
leaders, trusted to recreate a better future in the image of a better past, in whose wake follow
 96 BOOK REVIEWS

‘celebrity tycoon’ Donald Trump in the US, and the UK’s bid for autonomy from the EU – if we
can successfully waive the rules, we can once again rule the waves.
There are two rays of light in the general gloom, and the first of these is the story of Eliza, a
computer program developed between 1964 and 1966 at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Labora-
tory by Joseph Weizenbaum, modelled on Carl Rogers’ person-centred approach to psy-
chotherapy, somewhat crassly described by Curtis as ‘famous for repeating back to his
patients what they’d just said’. The footage of Eliza in action immediately reveals there’s
more to it than that, including expressions of sympathy. Eliza was a great success among
staff at the laboratory, who found succour in their interfaces with her/it. Instead of drawing
inspiration from this, Curtis casts doubt on its value, and identifies it as a foundation stone
in the edifice of the filter bubbles that immerse us now – like, Matrix-lite – as we surrender
to algorhythms confirming our ‘favourites’ and, like birds of a feather, or latter-day Sun/Mail/
Times/Guardian readers, seek reflections and reinforcements of our cherished beliefs.
I’m surprised that Curtis omits to mention the theory of the Spectacle, a means of distraction
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controlled and promoted by capitalism/the state, propounded by Situationist Guy Debord,

who, in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle cites the mass media as ‘its most glaring
superficial manifestation’. It seems to me that the mesmeric quality that Curtis attributes to
the Net and social media is merely the most recent manifestation in a chain of distracting
phenomena/ploys, going back at least to the ‘bread and circuses’ appeasements witheringly
described so by satirical poet Juvenal in ‘Satire X’ (circa 100 AD ). Where I thoroughly agree
with him is in the identification of the suicide bomber as a truly new and destabilizing
weapon. The phrase ‘I could be run over by a bus’ might be supplanted by ‘I could be
blown up by a suicide bomber’. Curtis remarks on criticism among Jihadists of the ramping
up of the suicide bomb approach utilized on 9/11, due to the devastating scale of the response
from the US and its coalition that it provoked. The rogue lorry has, of course, been added to this
arsenal in 2016, in Nice, and, very recently, Berlin.
I am also struck by the parallels between Curtis’s phrase ‘politics without vision’ and poet
and men’s leader Robert Bly’s evocation of ‘The Sibling Society’ in his 1996 book of the
same name, wherein he speaks of the demise of ‘vertical thought’, when ‘[a]dults regress
towards adolescence; and adolescents – seeing that – have no desire to become adults. Few
are able to imagine any genuine life coming from the vertical plane – tradition, religion, devo-
tion’. He also speaks of the change in the US press, from a culture of access to one of aggres-
sion, one with which we are perhaps even more familiar in the UK, and his fears that this
abandonment of verticality and concomitant respect for authority is a breeding ground for
demagoguery. Prescient stuff, it would seem.
Regarding Curtis’s style, I am reminded of the American artist Robert Rauschenberg, who I
suppose can be pigeon-holed as a proto-Pop Artist, and his innovation of the ‘combine’: mul-
tiple images, juxtaposing the light and the dark, the malign and the benign, the strange and the
familiar. Curtis’s use of imagery, impressive in its range of sources, leans towards the dark. At
one point he is clunkingly literal: when following the inter-title ‘The Old System was Dying’,
he shows a coffin being lowered into the ground. He also shows us torchlight in dark
woods, and I couldn’t help thinking that he was drawing an analogy between ‘The Blair
Witch Project’ and the ill-fated Blair-Bush project in Iraq.
Curtis’s use of music is similarly eclectic and often captivating. The film ends with the song
‘Standing Room Only’, sung by Barbara Mandrell, a country paean to escapism. Kraftwerk and
Shostakovich can also be heard.
And then there is Curtis’s voice, guiding us through the post-truth miasma. He doesn’t go
about it like Paul Newman’s character in ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’, screaming ‘Mendacity! Men-
dacity!’, but calmly and patiently walks us through it, perhaps more like Virgil escorting
 SELF & SOCIETY 97

Dante through the descending circles of Hell. His voice is authoritative and his arguments per-
suasive. My main caveat would be that he’s given us too much – too many strands – to digest.
But, of course, it’s on the BBC’s iPlayer, until 16 October 2017, and comes in five chapters, so
doesn’t have to be viewed in a single sitting. Nevertheless, even if I hadn’t been writing this
review, it’s difficult to watch without feeling obliged to take notes.
I mentioned two rays of light in the darkness. The second, and quite moving, ray is the
depiction of the ‘human amplifier’ created by the Occupy movement, by which whatever an
individual says is repeated in unison by all within earshot, so that the entire multitude can
share: ‘each person autonomous, but organized into a network’, as Curtis puts it.
I will leave the last words to Curtis, from his blog, writing about his film:

But there is another world outside. And the film shows dramatically how it is beginning to
pierce into an over-simplified bubble. Forces that politicians tried to forget and bury 40
years ago – that were then left to fester and mutate – but which are now turning on us
with a vengeful fury.
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Hank Earl
Men groups facilitator
hankdavidearl@[Link]
© 2017, Hank Earl
[Link]