All power in the world works not just through force or by laws – but also by getting inside people’s heads and shaping how they see the world. This is true even in the modern age of individualism. The lives of these characters – all featured in my series Can’t Get You Out of My Head – show, in very different ways, what happened to power in the age of the individual. Some wanted to uproot the old forms of power; some wanted to release the inner power locked inside everyone; while others wanted to find new ways of managing the millions of new, self-directing individuals. But all of them found that power was still there, working inside their heads, often in very strange ways they had not expected …
Michael de Freitas and Stokely Carmichael are two boys in Trinidad at the end of the 1950s. They grow up singing Land of Hope and Glory. De Freitas goes to England and becomes a gangster with the slum landlord Peter Rachman. He believes that melancholy over the loss of empire has possessed the minds of the British. He becomes a revolutionary. Carmichael, meanwhile, goes to America and becomes one of the founders of the Black Panthers. He believes that changing the law is not enough; the racism has burrowed deep in the minds of millions of Americans. The only solution is to take power. He gives it a name: Black Power.
Ethel Boole is the Irish revolutionary who goes to Russia to join the revolutionaries. She writes a novel called The Gadfly. It inspires millions of Russian and Chinese to rise up to fight to create a new world. In the 1920s she heads to New York and inherits a strange manuscript written in a language no one can understand: The Voynich Manuscript. Her father, though, is one of the creators of the revolution of our present age. He is George Boole, who invents Boolean Logic – a way of describing what goes on in people’s minds mathematically. It is the concept behind algorithms. His great-great-grandson – Geoffrey Hinton – now works in artificial intelligence at Google. Another of her relatives in the late 19th century puts forward the idea of being able to see the fourth dimension, which inspires a lot of the work of Alan Moore.
Jiang Qing is the scorned actor who rises up to marry Mao Zedong. She creates the Cultural Revolution. Its aim is to free the minds of millions of Chinese people from the ghosts of the past. But her mind has also been scarred by the experiences of the past – and she uses the cultural revolution to set out on a personal crusade of revenge. Fifty years later, Bo Xilai tries to bring back those dreams of Jiang Qing, and give meaning and purpose to a China that he sees as having been taken over by emptiness and “ultra-corruption”. But then he is accused of massive corruption, violence and torture, and his wife of murdering an Englishman – Neil Heywood. In the biggest city in the world: Chongqing.
Julia Grant grows up near Blackpool in the 1970s. She comes to London – and realises that she wants to live as a woman. She is part of a shift that will sweep through modern society that says that true freedom doesn’t come any longer from changing the world – but changing yourself – to become who you know inside you really are. At the start of the 1980s, Julia sets out to take on the medical establishment. An anonymous psychologist behind the camera in the TV documentary A Change of Sex wants to stop her. Julia has extraordinary courage – and decides she will stand up to him and what he represents about an old uncaring society in Britain.
Afeni Shakur wants to create a revolution in America. She defends herself at her trial in 1970 – and exposes an extraordinary plot by the FBI to infiltrate the Black Panthers and help plan potential bombings in New York. Her son Tupac wants to recreate the politics of the Black Panthers – but through self-expression. He then finds himself trapped in the sealed world of modern culture. A world where you can act out being a radical, but outside nothing changes. Self-expression makes you feel powerful – but in reality you are alone – and the power of collective action disappears.
Kerry Thornley and Greg Hill create Operation Mindfuck to parody conspiracy theories. They tell the world that the Illuminati are behind the chaos spreading through America in the 1960s. The godfather of modern conspiracy theories, Jim Garrison, comes to believe that Thornley isn’t who he says he is; that really he helped kill President Kennedy, and was using Operation Mindfuck to hide that truth. In the end, Thornley even begins to doubt himself..
Edward Limonov is expelled from the Soviet Union in the 1970s and ends up in New York as part of the punk scene. He writes a novel with himself as the hero – revealing what he says is the true hidden America behind the rhetoric of freedom and democracy. Then Limonov comes back to liberated Russia in the 1990s and forms a party to take on the corrupting force of western money. It is a fusion of communism and fascism. One of its first members – the musician Egor Letov – is a brave and radical figure who led the political punk movement in Russia in the 1980s and was sent to a mental hospital.
Arthur Sackler promotes valium in the 1960s and 1970s to deal with the anxieties in the age of the individual: the feelings of uncertainty and fear that are sweeping through the new suburbs. In 1978 the president’s wife, Betty Ford, announces on TV from the White House that she has become addicted to valium. The company Sackler sets up with his brothers then goes on to create the opioid oxycontin – which ravages America, especially in the industrial towns where the factories have closed – and also funds a number of the major cultural institutions in the western world.
Bernard Kouchner is the founder of Médecins Sans Frontières – and one of the ideologists of the idea in the 1980s of One World and humanitarian intervention. Tony Blair takes that idea, of a world composed of millions of innocent individuals who need to be rescued from evil tyrants, and fuses it with American military power. Which then mutates into a strange form, culminating in the invasion of Iraq.
Abu Zubaydah is an Islamist fighter in Afghanistan in the 1990s. He gets a piece of shrapnel lodged in his brain that wrecks his sense of identity. So he writes a diary to himself in the future, filled with fragments of experience to try to reconstruct himself. Then, 10 years later, the CIA find the diary. They believe that it means Zubaydah has a hidden other self inside him – which knows the secrets of al-Qaida – so they turn to psychology to try to force that hidden reality out of him.
Dominic Cummings, in the late 1990s, comes to believe that the whole system of politics in the west has become corrupted. He believes in a new way of running the world – through what is called complexity theory. The man who inspires him in that is a famous physicist, Murray Gell-Mann, who discovers the fundamental building blocks of the universe: quarks. Cummings wants to use Brexit to start a new way of running Britain through complexity theory..
BF Skinner is the behavioural psychologist who, in the 1970s – as the age of individualism rises up – predicts that the whole idea of individual freedom will just be a passing moment in history. Soon, he says, science will find a way of gathering enough data on all human beings so those in charge can predict their behaviour – and alter it with rewards. At that point, what people feel inside them will become irrelevant: only their observed behaviour matters. And he uses pigeons to show how this could be done.
Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World is available on BBC iPlayer from Thursday 11 February
