HyperNormalisation

The Vanishing American Family by Scuba Z

EXPLOSION

We live in a strange time.

Extraordinary events keep happening

that undermine the stability of our world.

Suicide bombs, waves of refugees,

Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin,

even Brexit.

EXPLOSION

Yet those in control seem unable to deal with them,

and no-one has any vision

of a different or a better kind of future.

Something I Can Never Have by Nine Inch Nails

This film will tell the story of how we got to this strange place.

It is about how, over the past 40 years,

politicians, financiers and technological utopians,

rather than face up to the real complexities of the world,

retreated.

Instead, they constructed a simpler version of the world

in order to hang on to power.

And as this fake world grew, all of us went along with it,

because the simplicity was reassuring.

Even those who thought they were attacking the system -

the radicals, the artists, the musicians,

and our whole counterculture -

actually became part of the trickery,

because they, too, had retreated into the make-believe world,

which is why their opposition has no effect

and nothing ever changes.

The Vanishing American Family by Scuba Z

But this retreat into a dream world

allowed dark and destructive forces to fester and grow outside.

Forces that are now returning to pierce the fragile surface

of our carefully constructed fake world.

# In dreams

# I live... #

The story begins in two cities at the same moment in 1975.

One is New York.

The other is Damascus.

It was a moment when two ideas about how it might be possible

to run the world without politics first took hold.

In 1975, New York City was on the verge of collapse.

For 30 years, the politicians who ran the city

had borrowed more and more money from the banks

to pay for its growing services and welfare.

But in the early '70s, the middle classes fled from the city

and the taxes they paid disappeared with them.

So, the banks lent the city even more.

But then, they began to get worried about the size of the growing debt

and whether the city would ever be able to pay it back.

And then one day in 1975,

the banks just stopped.

The city held its regular meeting to issue bonds

in return for the loans, overseen by the city's financial controller.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.

Today, the city of New York is offering for competitive bidding

the sale of 260 million tax anticipation notes,

of which 100 million will mature on June 3rd, 1975.

The banks were supposed to turn up at 11am,

but it soon became clear that none of them were going to appear.

The meeting was rescheduled for 2pm

and the banks promised they would turn up.

The announcement on behalf of the controller is that the offer,

which we had expected to receive

and announce at two o'clock this afternoon,

is now expected at four o'clock.

Paul, does this mean that, so far, nobody wants those bonds?

We will be making a further announcement at four o'clock

and anything further that I could say now I think would not advance

the interest of the sale, which is now in progress.

Does this mean that you have not been able to sell them so far today?

We will have a further announcement at four o'clock.

What happened that day in New York marked a radical shift in power.

The banks insisted that in order to protect their loans

they should be allowed to take control of the city.

The city appealed to the President,

but he refused to help,

so a new committee was set up to manage the city's finances.

Out of nine members, eight of them were bankers.

It was the start of an extraordinary experiment

where the financial institutions took power away from the politicians

and started to run society themselves.

The city had no other option.

The bankers enforced what was called "austerity" on the city,

insisting that thousands of teachers, policemen

and firemen were sacked.

This was a new kind of politics.

The old politicians believed that crises were solved

through negotiation and deals.

The bankers had a completely different view.

They were just the representatives

of something that couldn't be negotiated with -

the logic of the market.

To them, there was no alternative to this system.

It should run society.

Just by shifting paper around,

these slobs can make $60 million, $65 million in a single transaction.

That would take care of all of the lay-offs in the city,

so it's reckless, it's cruel and it's a disgrace.

There would be a fair number of bankers, of course,

who'd say it's the unions who have been too greedy.

What would your reaction be to that? I guess they're right in a way.

If you can make $60 million on a single transaction,

and a worker makes $8,000, $9,000 a year, I suppose they're correct,

and as they go back to their little estates in Greenwich, Connecticut,

I want to wish them well, the slobs.

But the extraordinary thing was no-one opposed the bankers.

The radicals and the left-wingers who, ten years before,

had dreamt of changing America through revolution did nothing.

They had retreated

and were living in the abandoned buildings in Manhattan.

The singer Patti Smith later described the mood of disillusion

that had come over them.

"I could not identify

"with the political movements any longer," she said.

"All the manic activity in the streets.

"In trying to join them, I felt overwhelmed

"by yet another form of bureaucracy."

What she was describing was the rise of a new, powerful individualism

that could not fit with the idea of collective political action.

Instead, Patti Smith and many others

became a new kind of individual radical,

who watched the decaying city with a cool detachment.

They didn't try and change it.

They just experienced it.

Look at that. Isn't that cool?

I love that, where, like, kids write all over the walls.

That, to me, is neater than any art sometimes.

"Jose and Maria forever."

Oh, there's a lot of things, like, when you pass by big movie houses,

maybe we'll find one, but they have little movie screens,

where you can see clips of, like, Z, or something like that.

People watch it over and over.

I've seen people, I've checked them out. All day!

I've gone back and forth and they're still there

watching the credits of a movie, cos they don't have enough dough,

but it's some entertainment, you know?

Instead, radicals across America turned to art and music

as a means of expressing their criticism of society.

They believed that instead of trying to change the world outside

the new radicalism should try and change

what was inside people's heads,

and the way to do this was through self-expression,

not collective action.

U

V

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X

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Z

But some of the Left saw that something else was really going on -

that by detaching themselves and retreating into an ironic coolness,

a whole generation were beginning to lose touch

with the reality of power.

Shut up.

Shut up!

One of them wrote of that time,

"It was the mood of the era

"and the revolution was deferred indefinitely.

"And while we were dozing, the money crept in."

SOBBING

What's your date of birth, Larry?

But one of the people who did understand how to use this new power

was Donald Trump.

Trump realised that there was now no future

in building housing for ordinary people,

because all the government grants had gone.

But he saw there were other ways

to get vast amounts of money out of the state.

Trump started to buy up derelict buildings in New York

and he announced that he was going to transform them

into luxury hotels and apartments.

But in return, he negotiated the biggest tax break

in New York's history, worth $160 million.

The city had to agree because they were desperate,

and the banks, seeing a new opportunity,

also started to lend him money.

And Donald Trump began to transform New York into a city for the rich,

while he paid practically nothing.

At the very same time, in 1975,

there was a confrontation between two powerful men in Damascus,

the capital of Syria.

One was Henry Kissinger, the US Secretary of State.

The other was the President of Syria, Hafez al-Assad.

The battle between the two men

was going to have profound consequences for the world.

And like in New York, it was going to be a struggle

between the old idea of using politics to change the world

and a new idea that you could run the world as a stable system.

President Assad dominated Syria.

The country was full of giant images and statues that glorified him.

He was brutal and ruthless,

killing or imprisoning anyone he suspected of being a threat.

But Assad believed that the violence was for a purpose.

He wanted to find a way of uniting the Arab countries

and using that power to stand up to the West.

Four,

three,

two,

one.