Can't Get You Out of My Head - Part 1: Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain

We are living through strange days. Across Britain, Europe and America societies have become split and polarised. There is anger at the inequality and the ever growing corruption - and a widespread distrust of the elites. Into this has come the pandemic that has brutally dramatised those divisions. But despite the chaos, there is a paralysis - a sense that no one knows how to escape from this. Can’t Get You Out of My Head tells how we got to this place. And why both those in power - and we - find it so difficult to move on. At its heart is the strange story of what happened when people’s inner feelings got mixed up with power in the age of individualism. How the hopes and dreams and uncertainties inside people's minds met the decaying forces of old power in Britain, America, Russia and China. What resulted was a block not just in the society - but also inside our own heads - that stops us imagining anything else than this.

This episode surveys cultural events leading up to the 1960s revolutions: the failure of the British to shed their feelings of supremacy in the wake of the fall of the British Empire, the political crisis in China in the wake of the Great Leap Forward, the beginnings of Discordianism and the rise of conspiracy thinking in the United States. The common theme tying the episode together is the rise of individualism, which while driven by desires for emancipation can be controlled. The title of the episode is taken from the Chinese film Blood on Wolf Mountain, in which Jiang Qing, credited as Lan Ping, appeared.