Adam Curtis’s HyperNormalisation (available on BBC iPlayer) is an ingenious attempt to explain everything. From Damascus to Washington, via Brexit Britain, our world appears to be in chaos. That is because life is complicated and defies good management. But politicians try. They fail. And ultimately, says Curtis, the people have rejected them because the stories they tell no longer reflect the realities of their lives. “Hyper-normalisation” is a Soviet-era term. It describes a society so used to living a lie that the lie becomes normal and normality becomes a fantasy. The reality, argues Curtis, is that superpower control and the state lost their authority in the 1970s. Since then, banks and corporations have largely been in control. Attempts by politicians to pretend that they still matter have led to terrible mistakes, such as the Iraq War. Curtis doesn’t say that the West is to blame for everything, rather that it has made everything a little bit worse – while its people have distracted themselves with individualism and recreation.