The Trap: What Happened To Our Dream of Freedom?

1. “F**k You Buddy”

2. “The Lonely Robot”

3. “We Will Force You To Be Free”

The Trap – What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom is a BBC documentary series by British filmmaker Adam Curtis, well known for other documentaries including The Century of the Self and The Power of Nightmares. It first aired on BBC Two in March 2007.

The series consists of three one-hour programmes which explore the concept and definition of freedom, specifically: “how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today’s idea of freedom.”

One of Curtis’s earlier works, the critically acclaimed The Power of Nightmares, explored the war on terrorism and The Trap uses the same style of a mixture of archive, interviews and Curtis’s own voiceover.

Curtis believes that if one steps back and looks at what freedom actually means for us today, it’s a strange and limited kind of freedom.

The West fought the Cold War for freedom and individual freedom is the dream of our age. It’s what our leaders promise to give us and defines how we think of ourselves.

And abroad, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the attempt to force freedom on to other people has led to bloody mayhem and the rise of an authoritarian anti-democratic Islamism.

This, in turn, has helped inspire terrorist attacks in Britain. In response, the government has dismantled long-standing laws that were designed to protect our freedom.

Curtis argues that we have forgotten other ideas of freedom. We are in a trap of our own making, a trap that controls us, deprives us of meaning, and causes death and chaos abroad. I’d say he was right.

See also:

The Power of Nightmares

The Century of the Self

Engineering of Consent - Extract from “The Century of the Self”. Story behind the coup d’etat which toppled elected president Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954.