- Born
- Birth nameKevin Adam Curtis
- Adam Curtis was born on May 26, 1955 in Dartford, Kent, England, UK. He is a director and producer, known for The Power of Nightmares (2004), Pandora's Box (1992) and HyperNormalisation (2016).
- [on ideas and consequences] Well, a lot of people go on about how I'm a leftist, but I'm not really, because I believe that ideas have consequences. And why I like people like Weber [German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920)] is because they are challenging what I see as that crude left-wing vulgar Marxism that says that everything happens because of economic forces within society, that we are just surfing, our ideas are just expressions-froth on the deep currents of history, which is really driven by economics. I've never believed that. Of course, economic forces have a great effect on us. But actually, people's ideas have enormous consequences. And to be honest, if you had to reduce what I do, I spend my whole time just looking at how ideas have consequences, not necessarily what the promoters of them intended, because I think that's a really big thing in our time. I came into writing and describing and filming the world at the very moment that those old left-wing certainties were beginning to collapse, certainties that said somehow progress and modernity were on a inevitable path towards a particular destination in history. But it was also equally obvious to me the right-wing reaction-where you just bring a market force in to create a form of stability that goes nowhere-was equally not going to work. And I became interested in examining how ideas have led us to this position in ways that those who had the ideas didn't really intend. People like Weber who were, in a sense, conservative sociologists of the late nineteenth century were looking at the consequences of rationality. At how scientific ideas were used by those in power in modern society-and what the consequences then were. I think this is still incredibly important to look at today. And above all Weber's writings about bureaucracy. One of things I'm fascinated by at the moment is the rise of managerial theory. It works in absurd, comic ways. It leads to the police being told that they have a certain quota of criminals they have to catch, so if they can't catch them, they go and make them up. These are very comic, silly things that I would have done on a program like That's Life!, but they're also expressions of something that Weber wrote about back in nineteenth century which he called the "iron cage," about how rationality, when applied to social situations to try and control and manage societies, would often lead to absurd outcomes. Now, my brain can encompass both those things, the sort of silly "talking dogs" ideas of what bureaucracy leads to, but also intellectual theories about it. And I think the connections between them are very, very interesting. That's what inspires me. [2012]
- [on 'false' ideas and reality] You get trapped by this. Trapped by a false idea. That's what I was trying to describe in The Power of Nightmares (2004). Once you get trapped by your imagination, you think the worst and therefore you have to plan for the worst. It becomes a self-fulfilling thing. [2005]
- [on German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920)] The person I love best in the whole world is a sociologist from the late 19th century named Max Weber who believed that ideas have consequences. People have experiences out of which they form ideas. And those ideas have an effect on the world. [Curtis referring to The Power of Nightmares (2004)] It is true that a man listening to music back in 1949 had an experience that became one of the rivulets that ran into his formation of an idea. And that idea, in a very strange way, led people to do destroy the World Trade Center. Now, of course, that's the construction and maybe people prefer to believe that history is much more complicated. Which, of course, it is. But the construction has a truth to it. It shows dramatically how particular experiences form particular ideas with particular consequences. Even though it doesn't actually ever work out the way the person who had the idea intended. It's perverse, but it's also a way of dramatizing to people how ideas work, how history works - in a different way from all those boring history programs on American television that try to explain the world to you. [2005]
- [on society and individualism] Exactly - the moods move through society. It's something we're often unaware of these days because we're so obsessed by our own experience, that the mood we feel is probably common to a lot of other people at this point in time. I would refer to sociologists like Durkheim [Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)], who, back in the late nineteenth century, told us something that we forget these days, which is that we're actually very similar to each other. And a lot of what we think comes from inside of us actually comes from outside. [2012]
- [on history] History is a series of unintended consequences resulting from confused actions, some of which are committed by people who may think they're taking part in a conspiracy, but it never works out the way they intended. [2005]
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