Adam Curtis‘s documentary “The Trap – What Happened To Our Dream Of Freedom?“, shown on BBC2 last Sunday, presented the thinking person’s conspiracy theory.  Think Don DeLillo rather than Dan Bown. So rather than arguing that Opus Dei covered up Mary Magdalene’s male drag act or sputtering that the Carlyle Group masterminded 9/11, Curtis suavely contends that the greed and anomie that characterize today’s “developed” societies are rooted in the intellectual games played in Cold War think-tanks, specifically the ever-sinister RAND corporation.

Game theory, pioneered by mathematician John Nash (of A Beautiful Mind and Nobel Prize fame), viewed people as essentially selfish actors whose sole motivation was gaining advantage over their opponents (i.e. everybody else on the planet). This alluringly Strangelovian concept was co-opted by economists and psychologists (principally the borderline charlatan R.D. Laing) to demonstrate that society and, on a micro level, the family were simply battlefields on which foes fought ceaselessly for the upper hand.

Or so Curtis says.

But throughout the slightly dizzying exposition, in which minatory electronica supplements some wonderfully esoteric archive footage, a mild voice (not quite as literal, one hopes, as the ones that spoke to John Nash) murmurs, “Well, that’s pushing it bit.” Because, despite the superficial cohesion of Curtis’s syllogisms, their fallacious starting point, it seems to me, is common to all conspiracy theories–the idea that a group of men in a room planned the future we are now living.

Still, it beats watching You’re A Star…