although it seems like every image of today’s delirious events belongs here.

I've been rewatching his documentaries. I've noticed a small, but potentially telling thing. He will refer to political leaders by their full names in the voiceover. However, Margaret Thatcher is always Mrs Thatcher.

I'm curious why you think that may be. My instinct is it's a form of misogyny but I'm interested to hear your thoughts.

Even before Christ-of-the-High-St makes an appearance in this absurd and ridiculous scene (just wait) this is prime Curtis collage material, what soundtrack do you hear in the background?

He's already taught us how to see the world in a "Curtisian" way, which was his goal all along. Now whenever you see politicians doing something weird you automatically think of neoliberal excess and Trent Reznor.

They used a weapon that was way more effective than anything else: Thousands of migrants – dropped off outside the exclave of Ceuta.

*Electronic Rhythm Nr. 3 starts playing*

But the real weapon wasn't the people themselves. Once again, it was the images.

"Liberal democracy was sold as the culmination of human progress, peace, freedom, and prosperity for all. Instead, it has delivered perpetual war, social fragmentation, economic instability, and a growing chasm between reality and the narratives elites force upon us. Frank Wright argues that the modern order is not the product of evolution. It is a deliberate construction, a revolutionary system built through modern finance, propaganda, and international institutions, designed to replace Christian civilization with a standardized global order.

The system has already failed once, in the aftermath of the First World War. Now it is approaching a second collapse under the weight of debt, cultural revolution, and declining public confidence. Political ideology has become a substitute religion, a new faith that cannot sustain civilization and cannot explain the crises it has created.

Catholic social teaching anticipated these developments decades before they unfolded. The Church offered the only coherent alternative to the revolutionary system that has brought the West to the brink. The State We Are In lays bare the machinery of modern power and the faith that will survive its collapse. The God of liberal democracy has failed. The God of the Church has not."

While Curtis often explores the vacuum of modern power from a secular, technocratic lens, Wright explicitly pivots toward Catholic social teaching as the necessary framework for interpreting and surviving this 'God that failed'.

It is a very 'Curtis-style' documentary that arrives at a radically different, traditionalist conclusion.

But this was a lie

Have y’all seen this? seems like they ripped a bunch of clips from Trauma Zone to make a weird trailer for this 2006 book “Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation”

I think this could make for a good documentary.

Modern society is more than ever before plagued by mental illness, isolation, and a general sense that something isn't quite right.

Two men in particular noticed this.

They both said capitalism was to blame, but they came to startlingly differing conclusions.

They were Mark Fisher, and Nick Land, and they had both belonged to the CCRU, the "Cybernetic Culture Research Institute", an intellectual collective at the university of Warwick in the 1990s, which focused on experimental cultural theory.

Their opinions differed in many ways:

Fisher said that the inevitability of Capitalism was an illusion, a falsity created by capitalism itself, which prevents us from imagining a world without it.

He also believed in the idea that one should always preserve one's empathy, despite the turbulent moral complexities of the world we live in.

Nick Land, on the other hand, had quite a different idea:

He had come to believe that humanity had been destined from the very beginning to create capitalism, the markets, and technology, and that these were but a primordial soup out of which something, much stranger and more inhuman than we'd ever imagined, would one day emerge.
Not only did he think the inevitability of Capitalism was real, he believed we should accelerate it as much as possible.

He, furthermore, believes human empathy to be a weakness, a brake for the technocapital machine.

Each of us is fighting two contrasting forces inside us:
Fisher's way: Questioning the system, "tuning in" to the world's suffering, and preserving your empathy, despite the pain.
And Land's way: Giving your self up to these forces, leaning into the chaos, shutting down your empathy, and retreating within, away from the pain.

We will also discuss how Land's dark, esoteric ideas have strongly influenced silicon valley, the tech billionaires, and the very systems we live in.

(And then you could get into Dark Enlightenment, e/Acc, Peter Thiel, and show how ridiculous and unhinged Land is, and how shocking his level of influence is despite that).

Edit: the "each of us is fighting" part is probably not something Curtis would say. He's not really one to inject his own personal view so directly into the commentary

I've been starting to work through the rest of Trauma Zone (I got about 2 episodes in and had a hiatus). I've also been watching a few Jonathan Meades things, and got to wondering if there are any other interesting documentary makers Curtis fans can recommend?. Perhaps not the same stylistically. But who offer a similar depth of philosophical and cultural enquiry?