Can't Get You Out of My Head

In America, in the 1950s, there was a famous exhibition called

The Family of Man.

It put forward a new way of seeing the world as an alternative

to the horrors of Nazism and communism.

It showed hundreds of photographs of individuals

from all around the world.

The message was simple -

we are all one world...

..and at the centre of that world is the individual self.

The man who helped design it was a refugee from Germany

called Herbert Bayer.

He saw it as a new kind of propaganda.

Instead of being overwhelmed by dramatic stories created

by those in power, the individual would make their own story

out of the photographs.

Bayer made a diagram to show his idea.

At the centre is the giant eye of the individual self,

surrounded by a mass of images.

It was a utopian vision of the self

selecting and arranging the fragments of images

into their own story,

and so becoming strong enough to withstand tyranny.

Confident individuals in control of their own world.

# Parents are the same No matter time nor place

# They don't understand that us kids are going to make some mistakes

# So to you other kids all across the land

# There's no need to argue

# Parents just don't understand

# You should have seen this girl's bodily dimensions

# I honked my horn just to get her attention

# She said was that for me? I said yeah

# She said why?

# I was like come on and take a ride with a hell of a guy... #

On the surface, Tupac Shakur was part of the age of the individual.

He believed deeply in the idea of self-expression.

But he was also one of the few in the 1980s who still believed

in the power of grand stories to move people,

and to inspire them to change the world.

His mother, Afeni, had been a Black Panther

and she still believed in the idea of revolution in America.

Tupac later said, "The phrase Black Power had been like a lullaby

"when I was a kid. My mother, she would tell me these stories

"of things she did or saw,

"and it made me feel part of something.

"She always raised me to think

"I was the black prince of the revolution."

What Afeni taught him was that the world most Americans lived in,

both white and black, was an unreal fairyland

that concealed the harsh reality of the power

that controlled their lives.

We're not being taught to deal with the world as it is.

We're being taught to deal with this fairyland,

which we're not even living in any more.

It is... It's sad because I'm telling you

and it should not be me telling you.

It should be common knowledge.

Aren't they wondering why death rates are going up,

and suicide is going up and drug abuse? Aren't they wondering?

Don't they understand that more people are...?

I mean, more kids are being handed crack

than are being handed diplomas.

I mean... I mean, it's like, you know, those little things

they have for the mice where they go round the circle and there's

little blocks for it and everything? Well, society is like that.

They'll let you go as far as you want.

But as soon as you start asking too many questions

and you're ready to change - boom.

By the 1980s, it was clear that the promises

of the civil rights movement had not been kept in America.

The idealism of black politics fell away.

And the communities divided into gangs,

that then turned on each other.

The shooting started about in, what, '76? Yeah.

1976.

You know, they stopped fighting. They just started shooting.

You know, it was something new to me, you know.

We used to fight all the time.

The next minute, I'm running from gunshots.

So, I said to myself, "Say, man, we're going to start doing

"what they're doing."

You know? Same thing they do to us, we do to them.

Do or die, stay in the house.

You know, fight or stay in the house.

So, I weren't gon' stay in the house for nobody.

Then crack swept through the black communities in America

and Afeni Shakur finally gave up.

She became addicted to crack.

And Tupac found himself alone.

At the end of the 1980s, he moved to California.

It was supposed to be

one of the most integrated parts of the country,

but one night, Tupac went to a party

and he realised that white racism was re-emerging even there.

There was a fight at the party.

And I was like, "What happened?" He said, "The skinheads came

"and told... Called the black people 'niggers' and made them...

"Said they had to leave. And of course, there was a fight."

I was like, "Oh, my God."

So we were sitting there... They went home, we were sitting there,

talking and everything, and my friend's just like,

"This couldn't happen in the '60s.

"You know, let's figure out what to do with it."

He was just like, "I know, we'll start the Black Panthers again."

So, we started the Black Panthers,

but we're doing it more to fit our views, you know?

Less violent and more silent.

You know, more knowledge.

Tupac Shakur set out to reawaken the radicalism of the Panthers...

..and to do it, he was going to use himself as the central character.

# I hear Brenda's got a baby

# But Brenda's barely got a brain

# A damn shame

# The girl can hardly spell her name

# That's not our problem That's up to Brenda's family

# Well, let me show you how it affects our whole community

# Now Brenda never really knew her mom

# And her dad was a junkie

# Putting death into his arms

# It's sad cos I bet Brenda doesn't even know

# Just cos you're in the ghetto doesn't mean you can't grow

# She wrapped the baby up and threw him in a trash heap

# She tried to sell crack but ended up getting robbed

# So she sees sex as a way of leaving hell

# So she really can't complain

# Prostitute found slain

# And Brenda's her name

# She's got a baby. #

But there was another country that was also like a fairy-tale land...

..Saudi Arabia.

Ever since the 1970s, billions of dollars had flooded

in from the West.

This vast wave of money had created a dream-like society,

run by an elite, where no-one paid any tax.

But there were those in Saudi Arabia

who saw another, much more sinister reality underneath this facade.

Abu Zubaydah had been born in Saudi Arabia,

but he was not a Saudi.

His family were Palestinian, and he quickly discovered

that if you were not a part of the Saudi elite, you were nothing.

He and his family were looked down on and scorned.

In the 1980s, Zubaydah grew more and more angry and lonely.

He began to write a special diary

into which he poured out his feelings.

It was special because it was written to be read

by just one person in the future -

himself in the year 2000.

The diary is full of a growing fury about how Saudi Arabia

had been taken over and corrupted

by the vast wealth that had come into the society.

He describes how everyone around him, including his friends,

were false and treacherous.

"They pretend to be pious, but really they have no values.

"The money has created a society where nobody believes in anything

"and nothing can be trusted."

Zubaydah tried to lose himself in music.

The singer he loved most was Chris de Burgh

and his songs like the Lady In Red.

But then at the end of the 1980s,

Zubaydah discovered the ideas of jihad.

At that point, modern Islamism was sweeping through the Arab world.

The attraction of jihad was that by losing yourself

in the struggle, you could free yourself from the emptiness

and the nihilism that the Western money was bringing into societies

like Saudi Arabia.

Lady In Red by Chris De Burgh

Abu Zubaydah travelled to the town of Peshawar on the Afghan border

to lose himself in the new revolutionary struggle

that was going to remake the Arab world and him.

# I've never seen you looking so lovely as you did tonight

# I've never seen you shine so bright

# Mm-mm-mm

# I've never seen so many men ask you if you wanted to dance

# They're looking for a little romance

# Given half a chance

# I have never seen that dress you're wearing

# Or the highlights in your hair that catch your eyes

# I have been blind

# The lady in red... #

EXPLOSIONS

Both Abu Zubaydah and Tupac Shakur, in their different ways,

are part of something that had begun 200 years before

with the French Revolution.

It was the idea that through revolution, you could break

through to a new kind of world,

something beyond the corrupt reality of this one.

But at this same moment, a completely new way

of seeing the world was rising up in America.

It said that all attempts to change the world through revolution

would always fail

because the world was too complicated for anyone

to be able to predict the consequences of their actions.

It came from engineers and scientists who were using computers

to model the way the world behaved.

If it's between the modus in relation to the advice...

It will not match this data in time.

The simulation would determine long it took the signal...

They saw the world as a series of complex systems.

Populations of animals, flocks of birds,

whole human societies and even global weather patterns

were all complex systems that you could recreate