The Trap - What happened to our dream of Freedom?

I've recently watched the Trap by Adam Curtis. Unfortunately I was unable to watch it when it was released on television since, at the time, I had numerous deadlines looming but thanks to Youtube and the Internet, I've since watched it about three times.

The Trap is Adam Curtis' attempt to discover what has happened to concepts of freedom in the West and how a narrow and limited view of human beings as selfish, self-maximising individuals within a competitive environment was formed. During the Cold War, Curtis argues, such a view may have had a purpose and meaning, however since then it has lost these, resulting in a negative understanding of freedom which offers no hope, meaning or purpose. In addition, based on this perception of human beings, man/woman's true nature emerges, "the one-ups and the one-downs" begin to emerge, widening the gap between the poor and the rich. Politicans and beureaucrats are not immune to these selfish impulses and in fact propagate them. Finally, a drive to privatise, lessen govenrment interference in the markets and the raising of the markets as a means of practising unfettered democracy and giving people what they want, has resulted in a society where the incredibly wealthy are a minority surrounded by the incredibly poor and subjugated. Curtis points out that those who had perceived the initial understandings of negative freedoms (such as Isiaiah Berlin) as a counter and protection against the totalitarian and often violently energetic positive freedom, failed to predict that their own system would itself succumb to the very same faults. Thus, American and British experiments at "forcing people to be free" have produced a world where freedom and liberty to do what one wants has resulted in a "trap" rather than the freedom sought.

It took a few viewings and a couple of hours of debating with my good friend who has a blackbelt in Philosophy, for me to realise that at the root of this, Adam Curtis is actually denouncing the Western liberal democratic ideology and the economic democracy it has spawned. Essentially these ideologies are bankrupt and ruinous, whose failure at the heart of which lies a narrow conception of man that is indeed self maximising and selfish. I'll leave the conclusion from Adam Curtis to those of you who wish to watch it, it is available on Google Movies and is in three parts. Now I am going to try to track down this man and meet him..