SacredFacts: The Power of Ideas

Thanks to Dan Hill for pointing me to the site of Errol Morris, US documentary maker. There I found this transcript of a discussion between him and British documentary maker Adam Curtis.
Morris, of course, directed The Fog of War - an extended interview with former US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara. Curtis directed the series, The Power of Nightmares. There's common ground - both deal with the danger of false ideas becoming accepted wisdom. In The Fog of War, McNamara talks about the Tonkin Gulf incident where they wrongly thought US ships were under attack and it led to the escalation of the Vietnam war. As McNamara says in the film:

'We were wrong, but we had in our minds a mindset that led to that action and it carried such heavy costs. ...We see incorrectly or we see only half the story at times. We see what we want to believe. Belief and seeing — they are both often wrong.”

In Power of Nightmares, Curtis suggests we have misunderstood the nature of the modern terrorist threat:

“Look, you do face a terrorist threat, as is obvious from the attacks on America and more recently on my country. But you're looking in the wrong place. You’ve created this sort of phantom enemy, which is a disorganized network. When in fact what you're actually facing is an idea that springs up all over the place. You've created a notional enemy that’s driving you mad looking for it, when in fact, it’s something else entirely. And that's when I went back and tried to explain the ideas. I thought that was much more important for people to understand. Because when something that doesn’t exist becomes perceived wisdom, people tend to go slightly bonkers."

Whether you agree with it or not, it's a fascinating discussion between two brilliant documentary makers ranging across the Second World War, Cuba, Vietnam and Iraq. As Morris concludes,