Like Coyote and the Road Runner!

Pandora's box (1992)
(6 episodes documentary by Adam Curtis)

In the Greek mythology, Pandora's Box is said to be the wedding present given by Zeus to Pandora. There was strict instruction to keep it locked and the key was given to her husband, Epimetheus for safe keeping. Curiosity took the better of her. She stole the key when Epimetheus was asleep to unleash all the evils of the world. She quickly shut it but it was too late. When she and her husband opened it later, all the evils were out in world but they was still... HOPE!
In the same vein, it looks like all the manoeuvres done by man to improve mankind turns out to be a double edged sword. Like the contents of the Pandora's Box, all the evil effects of the scheme is unleashed but there is always hope.

#01 The Engineer's Plot. 
After the Czar is toppled, the Bolsheviks and the bourgeois engineers (the skilled engineers working with the Czar) thought the best way to liberate Russia is to use rational scientific methods. They wanted to makes its people science savvy and modern. And on went their plans. Engineering courses bloomed. Industrialization blossomed. Feeling that the politicians were left out in the rat race, the bourgeois engineers were arrested and executed.
The communists continued emphasizing on engineering, churning scientists who conformed to their agenda. America's achievement was emulated to the level of madness. They even created a copy cat American town (Gary in Indiana) in Siberia (Magnitogorsk), complete with metal trees!
Their plan succeeded. The USSR was technically advanced in the 50s and 60s. Then the central control started controlling nitty gritty things like quota of arrests, number of movies and novels, things started taking a downturn. The country could control people's needs and desires anymore. They could no longer sell the same design of toothbrush over the years. The mass production of shoes, for example, was already out of fashion by the time it hit the stores.
By 1978, the whole economy had collapsed.
"What had begun as a grand moral attempt to build a rational society ended by creating a bizarre, bewildering existence for millions of Soviet people".

#02 To The Brink of Eternity

The Cold War had begun. Suddenly, in 1957 USSR boasts of launch of a space capsule and later manned by a dog 'Luca'. The Americans became envy green and breath revenge. The paranoia of Russian domination and American annihilation became a national obsession. RAND (Research ANd Development) corporation became the think thank to put things in order. The scientists and strategists thought rational scientific theories and game theory could defeat the Russians. The mongering fear drew Americans into a frenzy. Strategies were thought how their enemies would think so that they could be one step ahead.
Unfortunately, time and time again the strategies were proven wrong. During the Cuba missile crisis in 1962, Kennedy took the non conventional approach. Rather than calculating the enemy's plan of action and dealing appropriately through scientific theories proposed by RAND, he just called  Khrushchev by threatening to blow Soviet to smithereens if a single bomb was to land in US soil and it worked.
During the Vietnam war, all the calculated mathematical analyses to hurt the Communists the most proved zielisch. It only brought more casualties and they lost the war. The proponents of scientific theories admitted at the end that even though situations are predictable, man and their reactions are irrational and  unpredictable. The scientists' vision remains science fantasy.

#03 The League of Gentlemen
This episode is a sort of a class for novice in the concept of world economics. It covers an era when Great  Britain started becoming not so great and started a path of economic deterioration. All the king's horses and all the king's men could not put the Empire together again!
One government after another tried to mend the fractured British economy as more and more of their colonies gained independence and their own citizens became unemployed. The value of the British pounds also plummeted. Keynesian theory of economics went out of the window when the Government control of monetary policies headed no where . Then emerged economists and politicians who thought they could use modern scientific methods to nurse the economy back to health. Some smart alecs thought they had a fool proof system for that. Friedman suggested a free market with minimal control and won a Nobel prize for it. After many failed approaches and riots amongst the people, Mrs Thatcher's reduction of interest rate seem to stimulate the British economy in the 80s.
At the end of the day, the experts agree that scientific theories and manoeuvres can only avert of economic disaster, not stimulate one. One economist even suggested that the motive behind all these plans is keep the working class always poor so as to ensure a constant supply of  'reserve army of labour'!

#4 Goodbye Mrs. Ant

In the 1940s, man thought that science had an answer to all of his problems. When the automobile engine started 'knocking' scientists told to add lead to his petrol. For refrigeration, he found CFCs. And when tried to mass produce DDT to control vector borne disease and save his crop for insects, he realized that perhaps, science is not the answer of everything.

There was a time when DDT was a saviour. It increased produce from the land and successfully treated man of louse which spread scrub typhus by directly spraying DDT on the skin. Some even ingested DDT powder to show its safety!

Slowly, suburbanites started noticing floating fish and dead robins. People started questioning the need to tamper with the equilibrium of nature. A successful trial outlawing DDT was started and it was shown that it can stored in brain of a newborn! Ecology, a new field in the 70s became the fashion statement. Darwin's philosophical outlook to maintain nature rather than modify it to the whims of a species was the mantra of the day.

"I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can." 

#5 Black Power

This episode shows how the building of a mammoth damned dam changed a country. It shows how a honest ambition to transform a nation to an industrialized nation meets failures along the way initiated by people with self interest. Some people have branded Kwame Nkrumah as just another corrupt megalomaniac despot from Africa while others call him a nationalist.
In the 50s, the British planned to build a dam over Volta river to smelt and generate hydroelectricity for Gold Coast (old name of Ghana). Nkrumah, a young politician, joined the bandwagon to claim independence from British. After Independence, he had big dreams for his new country through the dam with the help of his ex-colonial masters.
After the Suez crisis in 1956, the British lost interest in building the dam, fearing that the project might be nationalized once it is off the ground. A chance visit to the US by a cabinet minister brought in the US government and Kaiser Aluminium. Bargaining over bargaining met many resistance. The cocoa price took a plunge adding woes to their plan and economy. Corruption was also setting in as investors wanted to invest in the new country. The new country's economy was in tatters.
A state visit by Leonid Breznev pulled Ghana into the clutches of the Cold War. A military coup orchestrated by CIA sent Nkrumah into exile. Series of coups ensued.
The dam was finally completed before Nkrumah's departure but it failed to realise the benefits that it was supposed to provide to the people. Citizen living just miles from the dam which generated hydro-electricity were living without water and power.
The power (electricity) which was supposed to give people power (freedom) failed because of the people in power (control).

#5 A is for Atom
This episode shows how politicians and businessmen hijacked an idea which man knew very little about, packed with lies and half-truths to hoodwink the general public. The scientists and engineers just stood and watched while they promised the stars and created a need for something they were not capable of supplying.
After much advancement in nuclear sciences, 1945 was the year they realized the annihilatory property of atomic bombs. Like a redemption of their sin to mankind, scientists try to develop peaceful uses of nuclear energy. It was successfully used to power a submarine. The politicians got excited. They and the business vultures literally armed the scientists to design mammoth nuclear reactors without concern about the safety aspect. Frankly, the scientists themselves were ignorant of many of properties and hazard of the use of radioactive substance in reactor core.
The Russians were pioneer in building large reactors in the 50s but they realized that it was not cost effective. The return on investment was extremely slow. The Americans, with their General Electric and Westinghouse, succeeded where the Russians failed. The British joined the bandwagon with much fanfare but went into problems within a year when there was contamination and polluted their milk chain!
Concerns were voiced by scientists and engineers regarding the need for safety measures in the reactors but they were kept away from public knowledge. On the Russian side, Brezhnev and his corrupt regime steamrolled the building of new larger reactors, taking shortcuts and cutting corners on safety aspect. Everyone was told that a mishap in a nuclear was extremely rare till mishaps occurred in Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986).
Nobody knew what to expect and how to control a nuclear meltdown! It started a public display of discontentment and resentment.
Perhaps, rather than just following the technological aspect of science to develop a field, we should also concentrate on moral-centred development of a technology rather hide under the cloak of the conniving businessmen and politicians....

Looks like the human race is doomed to fail. Every angle of the achievement is hijacked by their own kind and be a stumbling block of their success. Like the Coyote who comes up with a new gadget every time to catch the elusive Road Runner, all his efforts just blows up in his face, every time.....Peeeetttt....Peeeetttt......