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Adam Curtis uncovers the secrets of Helmand

Heroin, hippies and hero engineers

Waking the technocratic ghost

In the 1950s engineering was key. By 1990 the idea of nation building had been abandoned. You had shock treatment in Russia, but that was economic reform.

That was the idea that if you get rid of institutions the state has imposed on people then as individuals they will create a harmonious market network, we see what happened with that. It sort of re-emerged later the liberation of Afghanistan in 2001.

As the political dream of a moral intervention became mired in the horrors of an insurgency, the ghost of this idea of a technocratic ideal re-emerged. Their argument is that politics always messes up - if only we follow the principles of engineering models, of feedback, and get this down in the right place, and move people around, the system will approach.

The idea that politics corrupts people fundamentally. It's fundamentally a set of conservative ideas, with a pessimistic view of human nature. Whatever the desires of people they will always be corrupted by people in power.

So you need principles that are beyond corruption. Rostow is the absolute epitome of that. But because it tries to apply engineering principles to what is really an area of politics, it always collapses because it's so rigid. It doesn't understand power.

It has a very reduced idea of what humans are, their autonomous choices don't matter. Nice line in Anton's Hume piece last year - "The phrase 'hearts and minds' admits that people feel and think, but implies that what matters is to ascertain which feelings and thoughts affect them most strongly" - which is focus group politics.

Yes, absolutely. Rostow is a classic example of someone who starts with a set of principles, and he ends up supporting one of the most corrupt regimes in the world, and building what are in any terms concentration camps [that] "collect citizens for their own protection and re-educate them".

So how have we found ourselves supporting an increasingly corrupt government that cares little for democratic processes? And they tell us "it's on track". ®

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