DAVID FLEMING
We thought it was a concert. It was the prototype of a repeatable mechanism for global obedience — scripted by Richard Curtis, rehearsed by Bono and Geldof, and perfected through Comic Relief, the SDGs, and Net Zero. Forty years later, we’re still clapping on command.
For forty years we have lived inside a script. It began with famine, shifted to poverty, and now consumes the planet itself. The faces are familiar: Geldof shouting, Bono sermonising, Emma Thompson emoting, Blair posturing, Gates funding. But the true author is Richard Curtis.
He is the man who scripted Live Aid’s emotional cadence, institutionalised Comic Relief, stage-managed the Make Poverty History / G8 debt drop narrative, branded the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and now pipes climate guilt into schools and finance through Project Everyone, The World’s Largest Lesson, and Make My Money Matter.
Geldof and Bono supplied the noise; Curtis supplied the method—a method that turned crisis into a repeatable mechanism for global obedience, paving the way for technocracy: the permanent rule of global targets, algorithms, and unelected managers over nations, cultures, and communities.
Act I — 1984: The Bait
In 1984, BBC News broadcast famine footage from Ethiopia. The pictures were unbearable: skeletal children, mothers holding lifeless babies, whole villages wasting away. In the pre-digital age, with only three television channels, what the BBC showed reached almost everyone.
Bob Geldof moved quickly. With Midge Ure, he recorded Do They Know It’s Christmas? The lyrics were clumsy, but the message was direct: while you eat your turkey, they are dying — and if you don’t give, you have to live with yourself.
The bait was set. A generation learned a new reflex: when a celebrity declares a moral emergency, you obey.
Act II — 1985: The Prototype of Manipulation
On 13 July 1985, Live Aid became the biggest broadcast in history. Wembley shook with Queen’s set. Phil Collins flew Concorde to play both London and Philadelphia. Two billion people watched.
But the true innovation wasn’t musical. It was editorial.
Between the rock anthems, the broadcast cut to famine footage. The most searing montage showed emaciated Ethiopian children set to Drive by The Cars. For millions, it was the most haunting television moment of their lives. The montage broke people down. And then Geldof, eyes blazing, snapped: “Give us your f*ing money.”
The sequence was unmistakable: spectacle → suffering → guilt → giving.
Richard Curtis was among those scripting the day. Already known for Blackadder and Not the Nine O’Clock News, he helped pace the blend of comedy, music, and appeals. We don’t know if he personally picked Drive, but the fingerprints match his later style: perfectly timed sentiment and humour, designed to lower resistance.
The Guardian later called Curtis “damnably effective… like a human button” for mass emotion. That “button” was pressed first at Live Aid. The result wasn’t just money. It was the prototype of manipulation: a repeatable obedience sequence hiding in plain sight.
Act III — From One Day to a Machine
Curtis then turned a single event into a ritual. In 1985 he co-founded Comic Relief with Lenny Henry. Every cycle followed the same arc: laugh at sketches, cry at films of starving children, donate. For British kids, it became a rite of passage: wear the red nose, bring a pound to school, watch the “serious bit,” feel the guilt, give.
The New Statesman later described Curtis’s style as sentimental, rooted in “nostalgia and middle-class comfort.” But sentiment was never harmless: it was a delivery mechanism. Ritualised guilt became part of British cultural DNA.
Meanwhile Bono professionalised the frontman role. Jubilee 2000 made debt a global cause; Bono found himself welcomed at the White House and Vatican. Geldof kept his bark. Blair saw the potential for leadership-by-pledge.
By 2000, the UN had codified the pattern with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)—targets as morality, pledges as politics. The bait was still famine and poverty, but the switch was already forming: government pledges replacing the pound in your pocket, and the first steps toward global management by targets.
Act IV — 2005: The Stage-Managed Victory
By 2005, the machine was perfected. Make Poverty History blanketed Britain in white wristbands. The chorus assembled: Geldof, Bono, Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry. Richard Curtis was central again, scripting the campaign’s tone and narrative.
The climax was the Live 8 concerts, timed precisely to coincide with the G8 summit at Gleneagles. Leaders pledged to cancel $40 billion of debt for 18 poor countries. The press hailed it as “historic.” Geldof crowed: “Job done, basically.”
But the deal had already been hammered out by G8 finance ministers weeks earlier. The concerts didn’t cause it—they covered it. And the cancellation came with strings: structural adjustment policies, privatisation, liberalisation. Old controls under new branding. Within a decade, debt crises were back.
The G8 “victory” was a textbook stage-managed concession: pre-planned, theatrically timed, used to reinforce the obedience reflex. Crisis → chorus → pledge → applause → silence.
And something deeper shifted. For the first time, governments pledging to surrender sovereignty — binding national policy to global economic dictates — was presented as the very pinnacle of politics. Not feeding the hungry, not solving problems, but handing decision-making to external systems became the new measure of statesmanship.
Act V — 2015: The Switch
Thirty years after Live Aid, the script replayed at full power:
- January, Davos: Bono still preaching. Now joined by Bill Gates, billionaire philanthropist as saviour-in-chief. “Climate Action” forums tied the chorus to elite finance.
- September, New York: Launch of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Seventeen icons in a rainbow wheel. Richard Curtis’s Project Everyone branded them, ran the media blitz, and pumped the goals into schools via The World’s Largest Lesson. Designer Jakob Trollbäck later admitted Curtis asked him to make the goals “popular” and “accessible”—in other words, marketing for obedience.
- December, Paris: COP21 signed the Paris Agreement. Climate pledges were locked in.
This was the switch. In 1984, the guilt was personal: you must give your pound. By 2005, the guilt had been outsourced: governments must pledge your money. By 2015, it was complete: the highest act of politics was redefined as governments pledging away national sovereignty, cultural continuity, and economic independence to global technocratic targets.
The SDGs and Paris Agreement weren’t charity drives; they were contracts binding entire nations to permanent management by unelected systems. Technocracy had arrived through the back door of charity.
Act VI — The Catechism of Targets
Curtis’s particular genius is branding obedience as virtue:
- Comic Relief turned compassion into ritual.
- Project Everyone turned UN goals into a rainbow wheel of unquestionable morality.
- World’s Largest Lesson turned global pledges into school homework.
- Make My Money Matter turned pensions into a moral test.
Each move repeats the sequence: spectacle → guilt → pledge → applause. But the pledges no longer concern famine aid or school charity. They now bind governments to technocratic governance: Net Zero, ESG scores, surveillance, digital currencies, and beyond.
Act VII — Pebble on the Beach
To us, this feels monumental. It has lasted forty years, touched possibly billions of lives, shaped schools, politics, and culture. It feels normal because we grew up inside it.
To those behind it, it is nothing more than a cog in a very massive machine. Just one pebble on the beach in a project that spans centuries: the gradual construction of global technocracy.
A system where nations are hollowed out, cultures erased, communities managed, and humans reduced to programmable units under permanent targets. What feels like the whole world to us is, for them, a minor operation. Forty years is nothing when your horizon is centuries.
Closing
Richard Curtis is the author. Geldof, Bono, Blair, Thompson, Gates and the rest are the chorus. Together they perfected the bait-and-switch: training us with famine guilt — give or they die — and switching us into climate obedience — governments must pledge your sovereignty, culture, and future to global technocracy, or civilisation will collapse.
Forty years of campaigns haven’t ended poverty or saved the climate. But they have succeeded in normalising technocratic control.
That is the true switch. And it has created a repeatable mechanism for global obedience to technocracy.
I will not clap again.
I choose human continuity.
This article (Forget Queen: The Star of Live Aid Was Richard Curtis’s Bait-and-Switch on Civilisation) was created and published by David Fleming and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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