The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of FreedomEpisodes Guide

BAFTA award-winning producer Adam Curtis argues that the traditional model of freedom was derived from ideas and techniques developed by nuclear strategists during the Cold War. He believes people have become trapped into thinking that there are no other forms of liberty, which can lead to political situations that cause death and chaos abroad.

Adam Curtis examines how politicians in the 1990s applied ideas based upon the freedom of the market to the whole of society. The assumption was that people act like simplified robots and were rational calculating machines whose behaviour can be predicted by numbers.

Adam Curtis examines the consequences of the attempts of Tony Blair and the Americans to enforce their version of liberty around the world, from Russia to Iraq. Their approach, he argues, was based on the assumption that their intervention would a inspire a new form of democracy and order to arise. Instead it ended up creating authoritarian nationalism in the former Soviet Union and anti-democratic Islamism in Iraq.