Welcome to Jacobin Radio, I'm Susie Wiseman Radio.

I'm Susie Wiseman and this is a special episode of Jacobin Radio today. We have just one guest

the British award-winning documentarian Adam Curtis. He's with us to talk

about his new film hyper--normalization, and his view that the left must

present a compelling alternative vision of the future. Welcome to Jacobin Radio, I'm Susie Weisman. I'm Susie Weisman. Very pleased to have

Adam Curtis with us. He's an award-winning documentary filmmaker, a journalist. He's won six

BAFTA for his films. Many of you have seen them and he works for

the BBC in London. His really acclaimed films include The Century of the Self, the Power of Nightmare,

Others as well, but we're here to talk about his new film,

Hyper-normalization.

And in all of Adam's films, he goes back

into the recent past with incredible footage to tell stories that lead the

viewer to look again at the present day and try to make sense of it. I'm going to

have Adam explain how he does that. Well thank you Adam for joining us. Maybe we should just start by asking you what hyper-normalization means.

Well it was a term, I found it in a book a really good book by a Russian writer called Alexi Euchach

who was describing what it was like to live in the Soviet Union in the 1980s just before it all fell apart.

And he described very well the strange mood of that time, which is that everyone in the Soviet Union knew that it wasn't really working, they knew that the people

who ran the system, what was called the plan, didn't believe in it any longer, they knew the

politicians didn't believe in it any longer, they knew the managers were corrupt and were looting the system.

So everyone knew that it wasn't really working, but because there was no alternative,

no one could imagine any alternative. They just accepted this as normal.

And Yerchek invented this term for it, which he called it hyper-normalization, which is, it's normal, but you know it's not quite right and I thought I'm not saying in

...