The anthropologist Alexei Yurchak, in his 2005 book, “Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation,” argues that, during the final days of Russian communism, the Soviet system had been so successful at propagandizing itself, at restricting the consideration of possible alternatives, that no one within Russian society, be they politicians or journalists, academics or citizens, could conceive of anything but the status quo until it was far too late to avoid the collapse of the old order. The system was unsustainable; this was obvious to anyone waiting in line for bread or gasoline, to anyone fighting in Afghanistan or working in the halls of the Kremlin. But in official, public life, such thoughts went unexpressed. The end of the Soviet Union was, among Russians, both unsurprising and unforeseen. Yurchak coined the term “hypernormalization” to describe this process—an entropic acceptance and false belief in a clearly broken polity and the myths that undergird it.

The British documentarian Adam Curtis has borrowed the term for the title of his newest film,“HyperNormalisation,” which was released in mid-October via BBC’s iPlayer and has already been widely pirated on YouTube. The title suggests that the West has reached a similar moment of mass delusion. “As this fake world grew, all of us went along with it because the simplicity was reassuring,” Curtis’s insistent voice-over tells us toward the beginning of his long documentary, which he also wrote and edited. In the trailer for the film, we hear Emmylou Harris’s “Till I Gain Control Again” play over various shots of troubling world events and smiling statesmen. White lines of text appear intermittently that read, “We live in a world where the powerful deceive us. We know they lie, they know we know they lie, they don’t care. We say we care, but we do nothing. And nothing ever changes. It’s normal. Welcome to the post-truth world.”

“HyperNormalisation” spends nearly three hours telling us how we got to such a troubling moment in world history. From Donald Trump’s emergence as a celebrity business tycoon (despite his inability to keep his casinos afloat) to the Reagan Administration’s invention of Muammar Qaddafi as a global supervillain in order to avoid confrontation with a newly radicalized Syria, the film finds moment after moment where lies have become codified and accepted, where Western leaders have refused hard choices, ceded authority to global finance, and built simplistic, patently false narratives to steer the public away from the uncertainty and ambivalence of our times. That most of us have accepted these tall tales has had, according to Curtis, unintended and often terrifying consequences.

After nearly four decades making television and the occasional theatrical feature, Curtis has settled into his role as British state broadcasting’s grand maestro of Internet-bound, all-archival, contrarian agitprop, including 2015’s “Bitter Lake,” 2011’s “All Watched Over by Machines of Love and Grace,” 2009’s “It Felt Like a Kiss,” and 2002’s “The Century of the Self,” to name a few. His films posit that the official history of the twentieth century—told to us by statesmen and newsreaders, amplified by the mainstream media in all its technologically enhanced forms—is the work of “managers of perception,” people who avoid telling the public the uncomfortable and complicated truths about the world in order to retain power within a status quo that isn’t ever quite what it seems to be.

Curtis doesn’t just blame élite political operators for this state of affairs, however; we have arrived at such a point because, well, most of us prefer it this way. The world is too complex and frightening to endure otherwise. Instead, we watch as “things come and go in the news cycle like waves of fever,” as Curtis says on his BBC blog, “The Medium and the Message.” Much of the material found in this film was presented in long posts on his blog, often supported by startling footage posted from the BBC archives, where Curtis often spends hours a day fast-forwarding through material that may or may not end up in his movies.

“HyperNormalisation” would like us to think that politicians no longer dream of changing the world, cowed by the sheer chaos of its contemporary design. All they can do is manage the thinly veiled control that financial services, tech, and energy companies lord over all of us. Our leaders offer narratives of good and evil, or of limitless possibility, that seem increasingly hollow. Curtis reveals a postmodern counterhistory that begins in both New York City and Damascus in 1975. New York, embroiled in a debt crisis as its middle-class tax base is evaporated by white flight, starts to cede authority to its lenders. Fearing for the security of their loans, the banks, via a new committee Curtis contends was dominated by their leadership, the Municipal Assistance Corporation, set out to control the city’s finances, resulting in the first wave of banker-mandated austerity to greet a major American city as thousands of teachers, police officers, and firefighters are sacked.

Meanwhile, the refusal of Henry Kissinger to address the growing Palestinian refugee crisis in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan rankles the Syrian head of state, Hafez al-Assad. Kissinger, in Curtis’s view, feared a united Arab world, thinking it would throw off the Western-dominated balance of power that he sought to protect more than anything. Assad saw such Arab unity, amid individual state sovereignty, as the only path to peace, and was enraged when Kissinger, employing his doctrine of “Constructive Ambiguity,” encouraged Egypt to sign a separate peace agreement with Israel from the one he told Assad he had been pursuing—a region-wide peace deal that would include Palestinian repatriation. “In reality, the Palestinians were ignored,” Curtis narrates toward the end of the sequence. “They were irrelevant to the structural balance of the global system.”

Enraged, Assad told Kissinger that what he had done would, in Curtis’s telling, “release demons hidden under the surface of the Arab world.” Assad’s belief that he would be able to transform the Arab world began to fade. After the 1982 Lebanon War, Assad simply wanted the Americans out. In Curtis’s view, the Syrian leader pioneered the use of suicide bombing against Americans (previously taboo in the Muslim world, where taking one’s own life is heretical) after partnering with Ayatollah Khomeini, in Iran, who developed the tactic among his followers to consolidate his own tenuous grip on power. While suicide bombing spreads, in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, from Iran to Hezbollah, from Hezbollah to Hamas, and from Hamas to nearly every corner of the Middle East, the Reagan Administration retreats into fantasy, blaming the wrong countries for terrorism while funding dubious players in the fight against its enemies—players who will later turn against us in disastrous ways.

On the domestic front, an increasingly adrift American left refuses to take up the mantle of collective resistance against banker-led austerity. An individualized leftish radicalism, toothless and coy, rises up in the arts and academia. This is personified in Curtis’s telling by Patti Smith, whom he shows riding around New York admiring graffiti and signs of decay. Standing by a movie theatre, she recalls seeing people staring for hours at tiny movie-preview screens because “they don’t have enough dough but it’s some entertainment, you know.” Jane Fonda, who gave up socialism and started making workout videos, gets a jab, too, while thirty years later the Occupy movement fizzles, not because of a coördinated crackdown by the federal government in cahoots with local police forces but because it can’t clearly articulate alternatives to the corrupt status quo.