Adam Curtis on the Cult and Culture of Individualism

Excerpt:

Alan Moore: ...We were actually discussing "What is counterculture?" and Spurrious Hix said something very interesting, he said, "Well of course, counter cultures always fail". And they do, but that is because they are always assimilated into the overall culture. And I suggested that perhaps a good strategy would be to make your counterculture so toxic, or so psychedelic, that having assimilated you, Society would be feeling really weird for several decades afterwards. It also occurred to me that there in some ways there is no counter culture. In some ways counterculture is a necessary organ of culture. It's the part of culture that can criticize culture, and that is the way that culture criticizes itself, and the culture renews itself. And if you artificially Stamp Out Counter Culture, which is I think kind of what happened in the '90s, if you kind of forbid Counter Culture what will happen is, culture will die. Because the Counter Culture was a necessary organ in its' body. And I don't think that there's anything in modern culture that suggest that that wasn't the case. That sort of we cut out an organ, we thought, oh it's just an appendix, it's no function we can throw this away. And look what's happened. So yeah, I think that Counter Culture is vital. And if you haven't got Counter Culture you haven't got culture.

Moderator: Adam, over to you on that, with your recent film Hypernormalization, you start off with what was quite a shocking point, to like, oh my God it's all Patto Smith's fault, when you started talking about how when artists started to De-politicize and focus on the individual. Where does that fit with your idea of counterculture and where we are now? Would say how were you going with that?

Adam Curtis: Well I have a of rather ambiguous attitude to the counterculture. I mean we're talking about the counterculture that grew up in the late 1960s. It came out of the failure of any leftwing politics to change the world, and what replaced it was this idea that you, as an individual, use culture, and your attitude to culture, and the way you can express yourself as a way of challenging the corrupt old politics. Inherent in that was the idea that you, as an individual, knew what was right. "You were authentic" was the phrase. Whereas the Man, the corrupt old politics, was fake. What that authenticity depended upon was you trusting your own instincts, not joining a party, being an individual, being yourself. And in the process, it was your own Truth. That's what you're expressing. I mean Patti Smith was one of the early ones. She got there very quickly. She expressed that idea very clearly. That's what culture could do. It could counter the old corrupt politics.

What I argue is that actually, that's become the Conformity of our time. I mean the central to mass consumer culture is the idea of expressing yourself through your clothes, through everything. I think it rescued consumer capitalism the idea of Counter Culture, and I think Alan's right, in a way it did it died in the '90s because it became the norm. I mean everyone. I mean it didn't do anything, didn't do what it was saying, but everyone was expressing themselves and being countercultural in a very absorbed way. What I think they're waiting for is a yearning for some kind of new counterculture that goes the next step. You're not going to put individualism back in the bottle. It's what we all believe in, it's what drives us. We're all, at heart, Libertarians really, but what we're yearing for is what we were just talking about earlier on, is some kind of story that can unite us all. Yet at the same time, allows us to feel that we are in control of our own destiny. That we're not told to do what the man used to tell us to do. And until someone does that, we're slightly lost.

So in a sense I think that the Counter Culture of the' 60s only went half the step. And it got absorbed, and it got used ruthlessly, and we're waiting for something else to come along. The danger in that is that we were one of the reasons why individualism was so attractive in the' 60s, is the generation before that said, "Don't believe in mythologies. Look what happens. You get fascism. You get Stalinism. You get totalitarianism." So every idea of individualism became very big. The brave thing to do now is to find a mythology and say, "Maybe it isn't going lead to Fascism. Maybe it could actually lead people towards a glorious new world where they feel free, yet they're working together."