All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace - Adam Curtis

This is actually a series of three BBC documentaries.  It is actually a critical history of most, if not all, the important cultural, intellectual and social factors/powers/themes of the past 60 years.
Kind of disturbing, as I am personally familiar with most of what he examines...
The first one is called Love and Power, and looks at how computer logic coupled with the extreme rationalism (supposedly) of Ayn Rand's philosophy combine to distort our understanding of society, ourselves, and the world around us.  It traces the emergence of the model of the "machine" and how it has come to be applied to more and more areas of life.  The concept of systems and how it simplifies and distorts our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in.
A fascinating but complex film - ties in Silicon Valley with Buckminster Fuller, the commune movement and the 60's counterculture, the rise of Wall Street, the demise of the political class, the ties between the Federal Reserve and Wall Street - Curtis just hits on everything, even Richard Brautigan!  The concept of decentralized social order based on direct communication and crowd sourcing of social evolution, as currently embodied in the internet, formerly in the idea of communes.  How the disenchantment with politics, coupled with the Ayn Rand extreme individualism and the concept of materialism applied to people and society, has empowered business elites and left most of us in a position of powerlessness.  Our refusal to deal with issues of politics and power (and class) in our social discourse - the issue that seems to have scuppered commune movement - you can only wonder who's interest it is in to make such discussion and analysis socially unacceptable...

All told with many great clips from the BBC archives.  As a film in itself, cry creatively executed.

Brings back lots of memories of Sue and her friends, and other hippy types I hung out with when I was 16, 17, 18.

This concept of systems - yes, the systems Curtis looks at are false, simplified.  They are not, nor can be, the truth.  In line with that saying, "The menu is not the meal."  But this goes back to the idea that all systems in the end are false.  They are constructs of our intellect, therefore limited by who and what we are, what we know (R.D. Lang - our understanding is limited by what we don't know, and because we don't know what we don't know, there's not much we can do about it.  Which leads to Robert Andon Wilson's "Maybe Logic".)  Maybe the problem is in the wanting to find a system that explains everything, in the need to develop the overarching theory, the desire to eliminate contradiction, opacity and inconsistency.  The desire to Understand with a capital U - Dr. Faust.   The desire for certainty.  Any system contains within itself its own seeds of destruction - the phenomena it can't contain. Worship of reason leading to a kind of hubris leading to what is essentially a tragedy - many of the scientists Curtis looks at were pretty weird fucks...  Science as the new religion in the sense that it promotes and produces all the same evils and negative effects that grow out of dogmatic religion.