Timothy Snyder: "The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America"

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I want the introduction to go on and on. It was lovely. Thank you very much for being here. You helped me alleviate some of the problems. concerns that I am about to share with you and by being here you are already participating in some of the things that I would like to defend, so before I begin I want to thank you for coming and not looking at a screen while participating in a conversation and I mean everything heart, thank you so I don't know if you're going to applaud me at the end or not but I'll start by applauding thank you cultures in return I have 25 minutes.

I'm going to share with you what I think is most important. What I think is most important is to try to understand the strangeness of it all, to try to understand how we can be where we are now because the problem is not just a trend, of course. We can all see a trend. We know that for the last 10 or 12 years around the world democracy has not been advancing but going backwards. We know that, by very important measures, public opinion polls, democracy is less important in our own countries than it was before, but this is not simply a trend, it is also what we are experiencing, it is also a series of surprises. of the strange UNA heimlich the things that not only we did not expect but that we could not have expected because Donald Trump's elections are very strange, it is an idea that did not fit in people's minds in the very recent past;

The departure of Britain, a major member of the European Union, is an idea that would have seemed strange not long ago and beneath these events are stranger events. fictions still now occupy a large part of the space in political discussion, fictions that are neither small nor big, they are no longer the big lie of the 1930s, but they are not the small lies that people tell every day, or they are medium-sized lies. Obama was born in Africa as a Muslim Russia shot down a Polish plane with the president on board Russia did not shoot down the mh17 truth medium lies I just said three that fundamentally affect political discourse in important countries Hillary Clinton is a pimp who sells sex with children, a third of the American population when surveyed believed that, if true, these are lies that do not construct a vision of the world, but are fictions that change the character of the political conversation and help change the character of politics itself and what is. this globalization in which we are participating certainly things are globalized globalization itself does not lead at all towards progress understanding enlightenment the Internet certainly does not lead towards progress understanding enlightenment not on its own terms these last twelve years when the penetration of the Internet has spread to the majority of the world's population it has been a total disaster for democracy and human rights around the world and that is not a coincidence, so we are in a globalization, but globalization is, in many ways, dark in the way I would like to think about this. from time to time, later, with the help of Shalini, it is in terms of what comes before politics, how we experience life, what are the things that are in our mind and that come to us before we start thinking in politics, for me and maybe it's because I'm a historian.

I will recognize that one of these very important things is time. How do we think about time? I think what is happening to us is that we are changing from one idea of ​​time to another and I would like to take a moment. to try to explain this idea because the ideas of time are so important that they all encompass, we live within them and they affect how we see outside, they are like a bubble or a filter, they determine what we see and what we do. We don't see what we think is possible and what we think is not possible and when these ideas of time are broken then we are at a kind of tipping point which I think is where we now find ourselves with an idea of ​​time that has been very Powerful in the West for the last 25 or 30 years is what I would call the politics of inevitability, the cyclical one politics, the politics of inevitability, the notion that time is a line leading from the present to the future, We know what's going to happen. see below everything is progress the good things we have now would only have more in the future everything good can be measured and let us give you measurements to tell you how despite appearances everything willturn out well in the end these are the politics of inevitability the facts will be edited to ensure there is a happy ending we know there will be a happy ending there are no alternatives to that this idea is broken and it is breaking now it is breaking at different times and places It's breaking people's minds for different reasons, but it's breaking, it's breaking all over the West, it's breaking in the globalized Midwest of the United States, it's breaking ready in Russia, it's breaking before our eyes and when breaks it tends to give way to another idea of ​​time which I call the politics of eternity a great comet the politics of eternity says that time is not a line to the future it is a cycle the same thing happens over and over again and really only one thing has happened to us because in the politics of eternity, everything depends on us, only one thing has happened to us and that is our status as victims, the outsiders come again and again posing a physical and, in fact, sexual threat , and that is the only thing we should think about when identifying ourselves.

In this same way of seeing the world, not only is there no progress, there is no future at all, the future disappears from the screen, politicians and governments stop talking about the future, instead they talk about the way things happen over and over again. and again everything is no progress everything is defense the future does not exist what matters now is not what you can quantify it is how you feel or how I can make you feel or how the Internet can make you feel or how a president who hits you over and over again with Twitter can make you feel the way the politics of eternity works is that it combines ideas about threats returning from the past to a historical cycle with a postmodern technological cycle that makes it very difficult for you to think because you are regularly hit over and over again with the idea. that you should be free, that you should be afraid, that you should be anxious, have you noticed how often the word Fear appears now in journalism, on the Internet, in conversations with your friends.

Why is it exactly like this? When I say lack of freedom I mean something new, I mean the change from inevitability to eternity, what we see on the surface is the collapse of democracies, the span of government of the law establishes the emergence of new forms of authoritarianism , but what I'm trying to worry about here is what's going on underneath. Let me try to be clear by giving you an example. This is an example that you are going to like because this is the part where I criticize the United States of America, so you already like it and I haven't even started, but don't worry, I will come back to you, so what is the policy? of eternity in the United States?

The United States says that communism has come to an end, history has come to an end, therefore, it has come to an end. There are no alternatives. Capitalism will bring democracy. There is nothing that any of us as individuals as citizens have to do. Wall Street has become Marxist. The economy. determines politics, we know the political future because we know the economic present, well, what actually happened in the United States over the course of the last 20 years is that we became institutionally a less democratic country, socially we became a much more unequal and we became a country where after the shock of 2008 it became very difficult for people or for many of my fellow citizens to think that the future was yet to come or to think that the future was going to be better than the present and of course we know What comes next, we know that the America of 2016 is a country that is institutionally less democratic, socially more unequal, it is also a country where the average citizen spends 11 hours a day in front of a screen, it is also a country where a significant proportion of the population She's addicted to opioids, which is another way of living Time as a cycle, if you're addicted to anything and drugs like heroin, in particular, life as a cycle over and over and over again, and I mentioned it not because Coincidentally, the sinkhole is strong, the strongest predictor of a vote for Donald Trump in the United States was living in an area where there is a public health crisis involving opioids, so that's America as it really is.

The interesting thing about the 2016 election is the synergy, and I choose the word carefully, synergy with Russia, it's very important that Americans don't look at Russia and say "oh, that's a foreign, distant land that's completely different from us and they attacked us, sure they attacked us, but why was the attack successful? And this is something strange, it doesn't happen every four years, at least not." So far, that Russia can correctly elect the president of the United States, this is something new, it is something that Americans have a hard time understanding, it is exactly the kind of brute facts, a reality about which one would certainly prefer to wish one's hopes up, but However, it is clearly the case that it is not just the case that Russia intervened, but that the Russian Federation defeated the United States of America in a cyber war in 2016 and was able to elect our president, so now how could it will that happen?

There is a logic to this and the logic is "It's not just that there are men in Moscow who very carefully exploited modern technology, although that is true and technically they deserve an enormous amount of respect. Which is also true. I said technically, no I said epically, the Ukrainian contingent frowns, what, what, but also. What's interesting here is to think about this in terms of the shift from the politics of eternity to politics, but that's not the politics of inevitability to politics. of eternity. The interesting thing about Russia is that Russia came first to the politics of eternity, it got its first The idea that the market would have to bring democracy obviously fails in Russia on the night that Russia builds a kind of regime that depends on fossil fuels, the extraction of profits from fossil fuels, the centralization of those profits and it becomes a new type of authoritarianism in this new type of authoritarianism the future is impossible for three reasons: first, if you are a regime selling natural gas and oil, you won't be very fond of talking about climate change and those of us who do think about the future tend to think about climate change.

The second reason is that if you are a kleptocracy there is no social mobility for the average Russian. Social mobility is very difficult and for that reason there is no future either. The third reason is the problem of succession. Nobody in Russia knows what will happen after mr. Putin dies and that phrase is unpronounceable in Russia, right, it's impossible to think about those things that way, plus there is no future, so what do you do? What you do is turn the politics of eternity not just into domestic policy, you turn it into foreign policy. politics if your citizens don't trust you to provide legal institutions and predictability, you don't promise that you're going to do that, what you do is say that's how the world works, laws are a joke, democracy is a joke, it doesn't exist . something like truth is a smart enough strategy at the national level that what becomes really interesting is when you export it to the United States of America or when you export it to the European Union.

What is happening in America in 2016 is that the Russians adopted our own trends. they took the path we were going anyway our own shift towards the politics of eternity and accelerated it they played with inequalities they played with our racism they found ways to teach us that what we really needed was not a politician of eternity which, of course, is what mr. Trump is making America great again. The way he rules is by instructing us that all we have on a day to day basis are physical and sexual threats and what we must do is fear that the way he rules on a day to day basis is technically through an internet presence that It makes people emotional or outraged, but in any case it is so emotional that it is very difficult to have a normal political conversation.

That's the part you can enjoy, the part about how America does things wrong, that we're sitting on. The owners of the world's largest contiguous democracies are sitting in the middle of the largest sin economy in the history of the world. These are all very good things and I congratulate them, however, the Europeans also have a policy of inevitability and just like Americans have trouble seeing their politics as inevitability, even though it's obvious to you, right? Europeans have trouble seeing their politics as inevitability, so I'm going to explain it very quickly. Here is the European policy of inevitability.

Europeans tell themselves the fable of the wise nation. It is the fable of the wise nation the fable of the wise nation says that European history is long our nations are old in the 20th century our nations learned one important thing and that is that war is bad and that is why we decided to cooperate and form a Union European. It is a beautiful story and like almost everything you learn in school, except in my children's school, which I would like to say is excellent, like almost everything you learn in school about history, that is completely false, everything which is false about European nations.

They are not old. There is practically no history of European nation states. The true trajectory of European history is from Empire to integration. The nation-state is an artifact precisely of the education of children. It never happened. It is the kind of thing that people think of. gets into your head when you're too young to resist and then it's still right and this has very important implications because this politics of inevitability teaches you that the nation-state is there, we can count on it to make good decisions and it will be there for us as the Americans. politics of inevitability that delegates responsibility to the market this delegates responsibility to the nation to the nation state to another abstraction in some ways it is a more dangerous abstraction because you have never had it but because you think you have had it in all your debates about the European Union are completely warped and meaningless, take brexit for example, both sides of the brexit debate claim to assume that there is something called Great Britain, but when exactly was that there was a British Empire which, like all European empires, began to lose wars and then? joined a European integration project that is its story that is Germany's story Germany lost its great colonial war in Eastern Europe and then started an integration project Netherlands Belgium France lost the colonial wars and then found its home in Europe and the history of Europe you talking to yourselves about the nation-state is a way of not talking about the Empire it is a way of not having history it is a way of telling yourselves that the nation-state will always be there for you, But why is Brexit not a retreat to a comfortable British home?

There is no such thing. Ruxin is a leap into the unknown and for this reason it is not surprising that this very intelligent Russian foreign policy that I spoke about pushed Brexit very powerful and, as with the US election, the academic consensus is increasingly moving towards the view that tweets, BOTS, RT and other forms of Russian intervention in Britain could well have made a difference, but Be that as it may, what one sees is a general pattern of what Russia does within its country. The European Union is the same as it does within the United States: it finds the trends that push towards eternity and simply pushes them a little, whether it is financially supporting Oona plenitude in France, whether it is supporting days off in Germany. whether it's bringing together the far right from all over Europe in all these ways, what Russia does is push this trend, but from a turn from inevitability to eternity and that's why I'm so glad that next year will be the year of Ukrainian culture in Austria I am sure that some of you have started to think what I am going to do in the year 2019 and this is the answer.

It's the year of Ukrainian culture in Austria next year, no one knows exactly what the events are. I'm going to be right, but I think there's something here, aside from the jokes, that's extremely important. In fact, I am personally very happy that Chancellor Quartz has decided that this will be the year of Ukrainian culture because it is in Ukraine in a during the war in Ukraine in 2014 and 2015, everything I said should have been clear. What happened in Ukraine in 2014 in 2015 was that we all missed the most important things we could have learned. What was really at stake in Ukraine was a movement. of people who believed that the oligarchy could be defeated, that the rule of law was a good thing, and that the purpose of the European Union is to strengthen the state;

Those were the protesters on the Maidan and they were sensible and in their political conclusions I believe they are correct. How much of that were we talking about in 2014, in 2015, very few of us were talking about that stuff? What we did was we allowed ourselves to drift and from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity we told ourselves that nothing could really be going wrong, I mean sure a European country invaded another European country and the next his territory, something that was never supposed to happen, but we told ourselvesourselves that nothing really happened, how do we do it?

We accept eternity, how do we feel good? Do you find yourself saying that these are distant ethnic cultures? Do you find yourself thinking it's a conflict about a faraway country that I know little about? Did you look at maps in the press that had lines dividing the east and west of Ukraine? Did you think for a second that this conflict was about language, right, if this conflict was about language then the United States wouldn't exist because I speak English and Austria wouldn't exist because you speak German the conflict was about Europe and the rule of law and all of our key oligarchy and then in the end about the truth and we failed that test as the West failed that test we failed to see what was in front of us and we invited more of that therefore what happened in Ukraine happened to us later to us and I want to say that not metaphorically I did it is very specifically the things that Russia did in Ukraine and then did to us the leader, the head of state, who totally denies the factual reality, which seems strange when mr.

Putin did it we have already gotten used to mr. Trump making the medium lies that take up space in the public sphere, surrounding each fact with five or ten fictions so that it stagnates and does not survive, or perhaps most importantly, the use of the Internet to appeal to his own. political and indeed psychological predispositions, so that you cannot think sensibly about politics and Ukraine at work in this way, if you are on the left, you were told that the Ukrainian government was Nazi, if you are on the right, and Me, this is by chance it's my right hand man I don't want to say anything about you sir personally if you were from the right the extreme right they told you that the government of Ukraine were Jews it doesn't matter that those two things contradict each other because the people who use the Internet here They have no contact with the people who use the Internet here, that is what Europeans were told and many prominent and influential and educated Europeans and Americans repeated that that is exactly what happened in the American presidential election African Americans were instructed by websites Russians were very cleverly designed not to vote with the logic that Hillary Clinton was racist, while American racists were instructed to vote with the logic that Hillary Clinton loved black people.

Muslims were instructed not to vote. on the logic that Hillary Clinton didn't like Muslims, meanwhile conservatives were motivated to vote on the logic that she loved Muslims, how could that happen? These things contradict each other because the way the Internet works these people and these people did not have any contact with each other, so what can we do with all this if I am right and we are standing or rather sitting and some kind of transition ? Sitting is important, right, this is more couch fascism than fascism, if I'm right that we are standing or sitting going through a transition from inevitability to eternity, what can we do?

The first thing I think we can do is recognize what inevitability and eternity have in common people we know we've seen this we've experienced it people you know who've done this certainly people I know I've done this. I don't know how many of you are familiar with the UNESCO rhino game, but the feeling of the friends you have who think they could never take that position and then they do it and then they stay with that position. Until they are unrecognizable, other people go from inevitability to Eternity and finally you do too. It is all around us, how is it possible that you can go from one to another?

Well, deep down they have things in common, one of the things they have in common is that they both eliminate history. If you think progress is inevitable, you don't really need the facts. If you believe doom is inevitable, you don't need the facts either. The common thing is that they both eliminate moral responsibility if the future is going to be better no matter what we do, then none of us have to worry if the enemy comes, no matter what we do, none of us have to worry. We are concerned and we don't have to ask what is right and wrong in politics because of course we are innocent and therefore good and they are coming for us and therefore evil.

So what can we do? How can this be stopped? How can we get out? I have three very quick ideas. The first is history itself. The idea that time moves forward seems like a very modest proposal to me, but I would like to ask that we agree that time moves forward. I would like us to ask each other to agree. that unpredictable things happen I would like to ask that we agree that if we understand the structures that surround us that puts us in a position to make decisions that could then make a difference, that is what history is about and in that sense I fear history has than to be political thought because inevitability and eternity are displacing history inevitability displaces history in the name of statistics and certainty about the future eternity displaces history in the name of memory in the name of that which makes us to us and to those we are. the name of what gives us victimhood and certainty, memory displaces history, the second thing that would put pressure here in Europe is, and this has to do with history, integration.

I'm not going to tell you what kind of European Union you have to be. I'm just going to point out that if you like Austria or Britain or France, it also makes sense to like Europe because those things have never really existed without Europe allowing Europe to fade away is allowing the state to fade away. let's discard the whole debate in Europe, since I see that Europe is historically backward and the states support each other; That's the lesson of history, if you get rid of Europe, what you have to be prepared for is to go back to the Empire, good luck, the third thing that I think is very important is factuality, factuality, factuality in the sense of the local news.

It's very easy to fill all this space with fiction, nonsense, and Internet memes. I won't do it waving my hands, you don't have to look. the ceiling, but believe me, it is extremely easy to do, what we have to be able to do is conquer 1% of the public space and locally reported investigative journalism only 1% and I think that would be enough. The reason for this is that there are two reasons: the first is that factuality is what allows us to defend ourselves from spectacle. Factuality is what Russia, the US and the UK are missing. Correct factuality is what allows countries to defend themselves.

There is a reason why LF exists and that reason is that at one time countries understood that sovereignty depended on having some type of public media. I'm afraid informational sovereignty now I'm going to sound very conservative for a moment informational sovereignty is extremely important to the existence of Nash now if you have no idea and you can't follow what your children are doing on those screens there may not be a nation and there may be There are no people who are capable of following truthful arguments and by the way, you are watching Now on the screens I can see the reflection in your glasses and it is super disturbing.

Well, the last thing. Ah, now I'll say something that sounds very naive. We have to believe in the truth. That's not the same as being sure what you say all the time, but the search for truth is a very different ethical and political stance than the stance that says I don't know, everything is an opinion as soon as you say I don't know, everything is an opinion, what you really are. saying it's hooray for authoritarianism I wish there were other wise young people, but that's the way it is if you say everything is an opinion, I don't know, that means the people who know best how to do it will run you over and destroy you.

Appeal to your emotional inclinations and psychological weaknesses. If you don't believe in the truth, you will lose and your country will lose and your friends will lose the show, that's what's happening around us and then the latest and me. will close here is equality equality another old-fashioned idea it is not a coincidence that Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States are the places where the political surprises have arrived first it is not a coincidence because inequality is not only unpleasant inequality is It makes it difficult for people to be together in a democracy or not, if you have a billion dollars and I have a dollar, the truth is it is not enough for you and it is too much for me if you have a billion dollars and I have them and I have a dollar, we have absolutely There is nothing to talk about and if you have a billion dollars and I have a dollar, you can shape the Internet around me and it is very possible that you will.

Inequality is not primarily about money. Inequality is about people believing they belong to the same society with facts. but also with the future because with inequality comes eternity in a very direct way, when people do not believe that they have a future as individuals or as families, they are much more vulnerable to political ideas that say the same thing happens over and over again. time. Again and again, these traditional ideas, if we can take them seriously and seriously, can help us deal with the postmodern problems that we have around us and I insist that there are things we can do and I insist that it is important that we try to understand. where we are, if we see where we are, then we can start taking the first steps and it's not just about defense, it's not enough to contain this, it has to be about creation, right?

I will say about democracy, but Gandhi said about Western civilization. It would be a wonderful thing and we are just at the beginning and that is the optimistic note: the 21st century could be the century of democracy because we have not had one yet. Thank you, yes, thank you very much, thank you very much, please take. a well heathering seat thanks to Professor Snyder is not his own interior and infotrac Tov attempt windy are investigating a heartbreak talking to a beloved environment of Kumar but remains in the middle of the director of this Institute draft information television Shalini Randy area vanden Viet before the exit wounds of the Puna being national Nahum Parvati I European official word Z in Washington DC she had sociology in social anthropology students var and the newspaper University the University of Oxford and in Berlin and the friend University nikita tyunin in Budapest in Yuri, etc., the world professor does not infuse sociology in Graduate in social anthropology from the Institute of International and Development Studies in games Santa Maya 2015 is the quasi-painterly intuition: wetland restoration obtained from Dean Dean Thomas, director of Odyssey in this evm on the island VIN in erosion Sabbath pftt Shalini and the team of area mittens and wobbly serum and the entwicklung raged in the civil case political air axis suit Olivia: according to NGO advice, the blows are wounds and some display of poison and the tizen of the park ordered centrally or in some districts normally, all the turn licked a star under the realism of Steve, from where if we designed we had Abba in the sending where, if the apprentice Alice plans to arm Viet with a movement of the fans of Jesus Republicans through the director England, the area and separate a steak from all the momentum of the country of Professor buna Snyder Co, give me some water, thank you, you want a moment, so let me.

Start by trying to understand your own journey with the book The Road to Unfreedom. I think you chart your own trajectory from a well-known historian of totalitarianism, the author of Bloodlines and Black Earth, to a political activist and political commentator whose book on tyranny was a global bestseller Bloodlines, of course, I'm very happy to say which was written in Vienna at the IWM, so we can claim some ownership of the book, and in Bloodlands you highlighted the importance of central and eastern Europe to 20th century history. 19th century Europe, something you have again emphasized very strongly today about tyranny, was its response to Trump's election or other unexpected electoral success, and you argued that Americans should get rid of a mentality of exceptionalism that if the mentality that said that this can't happen to us, it has happened to us.

This never happened here, and instead you argue that the contemporary United States should look at itself through the lens of its eight-century abstract history, using as a lens both the experience of National Socialism and Stalinism, and of course , also the resistance to these that his new book offers. insight diagnosis you are is a story of the present it is an attempt to define the nature of where we are today and how the hell we got here and why if I had to summarize the central argument in one sentence and I quote you They say the path to freedom is the passage from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity and the code and the argument is that in the liberal euphoria after 1989 that announced the end of history on the one hand and the triumph of the market on the other.

On the other hand, in a sense it also made politics as we knew it superfluous by proclaiming, in the words of Reagan and Thatcher, but there is no alternative, this insistence on the absence of political options in the face of market fundamentalism and the inevitablerise of democracy, in any case. that you called the politics of inevitability or you juxtapose it in the book with what you call the politics of eternity that you consider not only to follow but also to be caused by the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity, if I understand you correctly, It is the return of an authoritarian identity politics centered on the nation represented by Putin's Russia, but not only there and that is something I will come to in a moment that is marked by both a politics of resentment and a politics of victimhood. what I was saying, but the first thing I would like to discuss With you you called them two types of politics of time and I had the feeling that they are two politics or rather two temptations of timelessness and the question for me is why you choose to frame your argument on the neoliberal capitalism and populist identity politics in terms of eternity and inevitability, well, first of all it has to do with where I found myself in a particular place in time.

I was reading Hamlet in the fall of 2016 and I had this very interesting moment with my own students at Yale where he asked me after Trump's election, could you please, Professor Snyder, tell us what you really think? Which, of course, was not appropriate in the context of a class on Eastern Europe, although it must be said that in the spring of 2016, when I finished my class on Eastern Europe, I said that you are going to hear a lot more about this man, Paul Manafort, which turned out to be true, it's very true that things that were very familiar to Russians and Ukrainians have slowly become familiar. for us, but I was in this position of wanting to be able to explain what I thought, but I wanted to give the students a way to think about it that allowed them to simultaneously engage and step back to believe that they could. do something without feeling overwhelmed and what when I looked at them when I looked at these kids who literally knew nothing but Obama, I mean, there's a problem with not knowing anything but Obama.

He's so nice and seemed like he was just going to take care of it. of everything and that we really didn't have any more problems and look how wonderful we were because we had reached the end of the trajectory and we had elected a black president imagine children who had grown up with eight years of Obama and couldn't I don't remember anything else, these were them , so I was trying to work them into the story and the idea of ​​inevitability started as my gentle criticism of Obama, my gentle criticism of the Clintons, my gentle criticism of the, um, the slightly complacent.

American idea that everything was going in the right direction, we just needed to shake things up a little. My gentle criticism of the fact that we did not react to 2008 - because of the 2008 financial crisis in a more dramatic way - in 2008 we should have bailed out the newspapers we should have bailed out the newspapers in 2008 we bailed out the banks and we were still bailing them out we should bailing out the newspapers in 2008 would have cost nothing and we didn't do it and I would be in a better world, but I was creative in 2008. Funnily enough, it wasn't like the 1930s.

The 1930s were full of good and bad ideas about what to do with the Great Depression after 2008. We had no ideas except to give many. of money to Wall Street, which I admit, is not an idea? It's just not the only possible idea one could have. It's a beautiful example in itself of the politics of inevitability, right? and when I tried to explain it not at my home university but at a university up north and this rivalry won't make sense to you, but it's Harvard. I was lecturing on these ideas to kids at Harvard and one of them in the back looked at his watch and I said, "Okay, why are you looking at your watch?" He said well because a famous Wall Street investment bank is about to start its recruiting party and I said, okay, that helps me explain the politics of inevitability in the politics of eternity before Trump was elected, you thought I was going to go work on Wall Street because everything was going to be great now you think you were going to go work on Wall Street because everything was going to be terrible anyway and they were like, yeah, that's where it all started, trying to explain to a young generation that we have raised without history, right? this as one of the many failures of my generation we raised them without history now we have to tell them oh and by the way z balloons and Zig few and Isaac Achtung to Isaac by the way oh by the way That's where it started as a way of trying to get them to think about history, but I didn't see that, as you say, the ways we escape history or forming these bubbles of timelessness around us, that's how it started, so if Getting back to the point of history, populism is not new, we have had populism before, we have known many waves of populism and you coin a very interesting term to distinguish Trump's populism from others and call it sato populism and your argument here. is that while populism normally seeks to gain maximum benefit for the masses, Trump's version of populism seeks to cause maximum pain to the masses and the puzzle here is why and how the sale of populism works and what makes it so successful particularly in the U.S.

So it's a wonderful question because I think one of the things we have to do when we think about 21st century authoritarianism is ask ourselves what is old and what is new and there is no clear answer to that: no. It's the 1930s, but also not totally different from the 1930s, there are some obvious similarities, like the thinkers of the 1930s are being brought from Russia to America and in all the countries in between there are some obvious similarities with the 1930s in the sense of a return to an us-and-them politics, but there are also some obvious fascist differences one of us to take to the streets mr.

Putin really doesn't like people going out, mr. Trump doesn't really like people going out on the streets, or what he likes to do is pretend that there were a lot of people on the streets, but that's not the same thing at all, right, the fascist wanted real people on the streets, Sir. . Trump wants fake people on the street and there is an important difference: right-wing fascism was about the big lie, fascism was about the overwhelming lie that reshaped all reality around you, what we have now is the big lie medium, this is about throwing fictions at you, which is big enough to confuse and divert the political discussion, they don't give you a world view, but they may confirm the things you already think with fear and now I'm going to try to address the question , another thing that quickly is not what.

Fascism did it and I'm going to connect this to populism in a second. Another thing that fascism did that we should remember is that it promised wealth transfers, right? National Socialism promised wealth transfers, it promised wealth transfers from Jews to non-Jews, but it promised wealth transfers, it promised redistribution and it kept that promise before and during a horrible World War, that's a different thing from right-wing populists, it also promised transfers of wealth, I mean, a characteristic of populism is the idea that there is a kind of elite that has too much and then there is a kind of people that has too little and the idea of ​​politics will be to make a transfer: notice that the characters main characters in this story don't do what they do.

Opposite the right I want to say that Russia is the most unequal country in the world right now. The United States is one of the few countries that can possibly compete and we are moving, we are moving in that direction, sir. Trump talked about building a wall, but he's not actually building a real wall. He talked about building

road

s, but he's not building real

road

s. In reality, a new welfare state is not being created before our eyes and in this way it is not like fascism. The opposite of what Mr. Trump does it and this is what I mean by populism saito, he is sadly trying to keep the pain going and he is succeeding, he is doing nothing to reduce wealth inequalities, they are obviously getting worse, the opioid crisis is not coming to an end Well, America is getting worse statistically, 20 veterans of the United States Armed Forces still commit suicide every day and the suicide rate is even higher among other constituencies that voted for Mr.

Trump likes farmers, the suicide rate among American farmers is catastrophic the way it works the logic is that if you are mr. Trump, you came to power and you stay in power by giving false explanations about people's pain, for that type of politics to work you need two things, you need false explanations and you need pain, well, I'm going to return to the question of whether I think that the American soil is particularly fertile for such a policy and if that is the case right now, you may want to address it now because the question is that this type of populism does not work everywhere, for example in India, populism seems very different, so I think there may be something specific about the United States of America that we need to explain here.

I think you're right and I, in this grand scheme of eternity to inevitability, are you verifying my suicide claims? Alright? Well, you're right, I think the general scheme of eternity to inevitability is meant to encompass many countries at the same time. One of the things that is very important to me is that we see ourselves going through things together, so I try very hard to learn from Russians. I have probably learned more from the Russians in the last five years than from anyone else except the Ukrainians, in anticipation of what was going to happen in my own country.

I think it's very important for Europeans not to look at the British or the Americans and say, well, that can only happen to English-speaking people, so it's important to me that we see all of this as variations on a theme, that It is what I think it is, but the variations are significant. The way you go from the eternity of inevitability to eternity is different in America; It is the people most convinced that they do not need help from the government who are the most vulnerable and that has to do with our own version of nationalism;

Precisely those veterans and those farmers are the people who think that the government can't do anything for me and that makes them vulnerable, so I agree with you, I agree with you, there is a specific way in which our inevitability changes to our eternity, another historical point. What I want to continue with you is that your book tells the story of a change of course. The story you tell is the decades of the 1990s and 2000s, it is a decade in which we sought to export models, ideas and practices from Western European institutions to Eastern institutions. and Central Europe liberal democracy capitalism rule of law or civil society everything that we thought was important was transplanted successfully or less successfully to Eastern Europe 2010 the tide seems to turn because what you show in your book is that the ideas, the practices and influence flow in reverse, from east to west, successfully manipulates electoral politics and election results in the US, while Russian interventions aim to divide the EU with their support for populist parties in anti-EU right, the question for me is what are the structural factors underlying this kind of reversal because the puzzle for me is why the Russian model of economy or society should be attractive to anyone outside of Russia.

I think it's probably not even attractive to everyone in Russia, except the big enigma. To me it is what constitutes their appeal to anyone in a Western democracy, what makes it so easy to import those ideas. Thank you, that's a wonderful question. I think there are some sources of direct attraction, but I agree with the premise of the question, that's not the true one. explanation, but I will mention some of the things that people find sympathetic in Russia. Russia is genuinely popular with some Europeans and some Americans who believe in ideas such as white supremacy. American white supremacists really see mr.

Putin as the leader of a white supremacist movement, if anything is known about the demographic structure of Russia or even the ethnic makeup of the Russian leadership, it is a strange sight, but from a distance people really like him, certainly many Americans and I think a number of Europeans are also attracted to the Russian politics of sexual anxiety, particularly the Russian argument that homosexuality is a plague, a form of corruption, something that is destroying the West, etc., that idea actually It was formed with the help of some American evangelicals and it is an idea that Amaris some Americans and some Europeans find attractive, but I think its most profound things are the first is the technique and the second is the adaptation of an old, let's say, Soviet weapon to a new postmodern. world, then the technique is distrust, taking distrust and using it as a weapon in the world, how does it work?

How do you govern from distrust? And this is one of the things that I think is genuinely new and important in the 21st century. We really hadn't had governments before that said like the government does nowAmerican or part of it and the Russian government now, we have never had governments before that said yes, we sure lie to them all the time, that is new in the history of governance. As far as I know, I mean we've had two capacities so far: governments that say we tell the truth or governments that say we tell the truth sometimes, but the exuberant acceptance of this kind of extreme relativism that says not only am I not telling the truth truth at this point, but no one has ever told the truth properly, which then comes with a knowing wink that says, but of course, you know we all know that we're all smart people here, we know that nothing is really true, right?

TRUE? It is a historic development in Russia that is simply moving faster than elsewhere. It is a historic development in which local news disappears. Hugely important local news disappears. People began to talk not about news and journalists, but about the media. People have more difficulties. time to distinguish the far media from conspiracy theories and things that they would like to believe anyway, right, and then with the turn of the Russian government led by a man named Vladislav Surkov, they say well, yes, you distrust us, that is correct and you should also distrust the British. and the Americans in the European Union, then they should distrust the law, democracy and institutions and they should simply distrust anything that turns out to be a way of governing because you can say that in Russia things are like that, but in the United States They are like that. and in Britain and in Europe as well and that explains a lot of the success of Russian foreign policy because a lot of what the Russians have, Russia doesn't do what the Soviet Union does, it doesn't say that we have a model for the future. completely erases discussion of the future by encouraging people to get angry at each other in the present, largely based on claims that aren't true, which is why I brought up the idea in 2016 that Hillary Clinton is a pedophile pimp who sells sex with children. from the basement of a pizzeria in Washington DC okay, I'm not going to ask how many of you believe that, I mean, you know, I guess there's about half and half in this room, but we'll repeat that about a third of the American population believes that in a certain moment why they believed that they believe that because at the moment it was revealed that mr.

Trump had been recorded saying that it was legitimate to sexually assault women at that particular time. The Russian Federation then downloaded a series of emails that, with the help of American conspiracy theorists, were turned into a story about how Hillary Clinton was selling sex with children at those same times. They are things that would not work in the world we know, but they work now, they work in a world where many Americans do not believe in authorities, where they believe in things that confirm their previous political, emotional or psychological disposition, so it is in Para For this to work you don't have to look at Russia and say it's a wonderful country, in fact you don't have to know what Russia was at all, you don't have any experience with Russia and then there's one more technical issue.

One point I'm going to make to secret war fans, so there is a long tradition in Russia.Federation, what happens inside Russia, that the Russians were always better than the Wescotts, actually, there are many things and many of the words are Russian, like disinformation, provocation and active measures, those are all originally Russian terms and there is a reason for that. These go back to the Imperial Russian Secret Service, go through the entire history of the Soviet Union and reach us. What I am going to focus on are active measures. Active measures mean that I find some vulnerability in you and use it to get you to do something that is not in your interest, like elect Donald Trump, for example.

I find in you the dispositions, weaknesses and vulnerabilities that will lead you to do something that goes against your own interests and you don't know it. It's me right now before the Internet that was really difficult active measures were difficult you had to have personal contact maybe you wrote a letter well it was difficult to take active measures thanks to the Internet active measures are extremely easy Russian secret services are doing the same which they did very well in the Soviet Union, but we have opened a channel in the West and especially in the United States to our own hearts and minds.

The way the Internet works now is basically a giant invitation to say, "Oh, you're a smart foreign power with a history of using active measures, why not get right into the back of my brain? This is how the Internet works." Advice I would like to take up two points of what you just said and, in fact, I would like to choose I refer to two concepts that you have used in your book a completely new political vocabulary emerges to describe our times. I want to return to two points that you just mentioned. One is a term that you use in the book and I think it is a very appropriate term to describe a very particular dimension of the sexualization of politics that you just referred to and that is that you use the term sexual geopolitics and it's an intriguing term because I think it's able to describe a lot of different types of sexualized discourse in politics today and I think it would be interesting to hear from you about that, so when I was in Ohio, the American provincial state where I'm from.

In the fall of 2016, I spent a few days driving through a couple of counties in Ohio and passed. I counted them every day. I passed ninety-two signs, this is the time of the presidential election and 90 of them were Trump for President and there were two of them that were about Hillary Clinton and they both said Clinton for Prison. I know there's something deep going on there. What is it about us or some of us that we find attractive to think not only that she should lose but that she should be in prison? What Russia did in the 2016 election was they hired a man in Florida to drive a van with a cage in the back with someone dressed as Hillary Clinton in the cage with their hands on the bars rattling the cage.

Why was he so attractive? Because? people like that, why were there bumper stickers in Ohio and all over the country that said Trump? Why is it not enough to be against a political opponent? Why should she be treated as a sexual object that should be denigrated at the same time? What is happening to masculinity that someone like mr. Trump can be the example of a successful man because this is what happens with mr. Trump, who is actually very comparable to the fascists of the 1930s, is a kind of winner-loser, he has never wanted anything except to be able to govern the country well, think of Himmler, think of Hitler, in fact these are not people who have succeeded in nothing except to run the country mr.

Trump is not a successful businessman. I hope that no one here in Austria is under the illusion that he has money because he doesn't. He is currently traveling the world looking for dictators who will give him something, but in reality he has no money, he has hundreds of millions. of dollars of documented debts does not have documented wealth at least that has shown us well um is a winner loser is a winner loser is someone who can tell people that maybe things have not gone well for you, but I have a magic formula I have blonde hair I have the gold name on the building I have just the thing that will turn you from a loser to a winner Of course he wouldn't use those words something is wrong with masculinity you are right something is happening deep within the change of inevitability to the eternity that has to do with masculinity something is happening when men can feel so threatened by the idea of ​​Mexican rapists that mr.

You know, he talked about Trump or when men can feel so threatened by the idea of ​​a gay international, so not everyone I know watched Russian TV as obsessively as I did in the fall of 2013, but I'll tell you, I'll save myself the trouble of finding all the reruns on the POV channel in the fall of 2013, when Ukrainian students began demonstrating in the name of a closer relationship with the European Union, the first trope that Russian television chose for them was that They were all gay and their leaders were gay and the European Union was gay and if Ukraine ever joined the European Union they would all be gay and I'm not exaggerating, I'm actually underestimating it because a lot of it was a lot more colorful than that and I would give F F Serious problems if I described it in detail, so something is happening here and it is an interesting effect, I mean, if you look at Mr.

Putin and mr. Trump together, they are both people who have a kind of exaggerated and underrated masculinity at the same time, there is something exaggerated about well, sir. Trump never takes his shirt off, you know, for good reason, but there's something exaggerated about masculinity at the same time, there's something fearful and scared and threatened about masculinity at the same time. I haven't answered your question. I'm trying to formulate something, though, let me move on to the second concept, which has something to do with the way you've been describing Russian foreign policy and I think it's a very, very interesting concept that you put forward and call it strategic relativism and You used it briefly before and I think it might be important to understand what kind of strategy you are describing in Russian politics when you talk about Russian interventions as part of something you call strategic relativism.

Okay, you know I'm going to do that, but first let me address masculinity again because there's something interesting about globalization and it turns out that it's our fears and our anxieties that are generic the idea of ​​the idea was that it was supposed to. To be generic, we were all supposed to be enlightened in the same direction, but what we discover, at least sometimes like now, is that it is our anxieties that are generic, so the fear of gay marriage turns out to have a lot of resonance in much of the world, the Muslim world, the American Christian world, the Russian Orthodox world and parts of the European Union, that is a very generic fear, the fear of migration turns out to have a lot to see, regardless of whether they are immigrants or not many and these are generic, this is the ironic thing because they make us feel like part of a community, but in reality they are the least specific types of fears, fears of physical and sexual violation are the The least specific things about us are the most basic things about us, they don't define us at all as nations or societies, they are totally generic and I say this in the context of geopolitics because they are things you can try. if you are a

russia

n programmer in st.

Petersburg, working for the internet research agency, you don't have to know anything about real American racial politics for a lot of white Americans to be excited about black people, you don't because a lot of it is just generic, so that's the thing . I wanted to add about geopolitics, sorry, something that was the following. I got carried away, no, no, just tell me it was a strategic question, oh yes, I can go to migration, which yes, of course, I think so because on migration, you know, while I was reading the book I had a question that I wanted to make you and which was the following: the argument to be presented is that the politics of eternity works by manufacturing a crisis or multiple crises that have then been instrumentalized to mobilize emotions around these panics.

The question I had was whether migration is a manufactured crisis and, if so, is it manufactured by the Russians? Yeah, so I'm going to try to match the question that I forgot with a question that you just asked, so let's think about how you characterized the Obama administration. Russia, which I think was quite wrong both analytically and diplomatically, what the Obama administration said about Russia was that it was a regional power, which I think is not true and is insulting and false and is kind of self-deprecating. You are delusional if you are an American, because if they are a regional power, why can they choose who will be the next president after Obama?

But what Obama had in mind is what I call the politics of inevitability. You know, people look at Russia. and they say that AHA is simply a country that does not export anything except raw materials, they do not invent anything, they have low economic growth rates, therefore they do not matter, because we all know that politics is determined by economics. Street Marxists, but in fact, the way the world works, you can have political reach without economics because you can use the techniques that are now available in the dark globalized world we live in, i.e. the Internet and also, to some extent , television, to spread generic fears. and you can do it tactically.

Is migration real or is it a provoked crisis? Obviously it's both and it's a very good example of how the politics of eternity works. Of course there are Mexicans in the United States. Of course it is true that migration rates. of Mexicans were higher than what peopleexpected in the last three decades, of course, it is also true that there is a war in Syria and that that war in Syria, as well as the instability in North Africa, as well as general poverty and, fundamentally, the climate change underlying all of it. Of course, it is true that those things lead to the migration of real people and substantial numbers to the European Union;

However, then the question arises of what is done about it and how it is dealt with, and all Russia does is take people and try to manipulate them. towards the reaction of those people or outsiders and their sexual threats, so Russia's most direct intervention in European migration policy is the decision to bomb many civilians in Syria, which causes more migration to Europe two weeks after Angela Merkel said we will accept half a million refugees the Russian Federation begins bombing Syrian civilians thus creating more refugees it can be judged to be a coincidence I think it is unlikely that the second direct way in which Russia intervenes in the migration debate in Europe is invent or exacerbate situations in which people are sexually afraid of immigrants, the example of this is January 2016 in Germany, where a non-existent case of Muslim gang rape was used to mobilize Soviet Germans, post-Soviet Germans, Russian Germans, as well as a good part of the German public.

The general opinion against immigrants and, above all, against Chancellor Angela Merkel, something that did not happen was spread in the media and mobilized real people on a fairly massive scale. This was the Lisa F affair, so of course there were actually immigrants in Berlin. at that time, but the particular event did not take place, this was one of those medium-sized lies, so I think migration is in the middle, right, I think it is not surprising, it is not surprising and one has to be realistic and can do it. We cannot expect every society to be able to accept an unlimited amount of new developments and, at the same time, we must be aware that our way of thinking about immigrants can be very easily manipulated if a presidential candidate refers to Mexican rapists as sr. .

Trump did that very quickly affects the way people think about Mexicans, if the president of the United States decides that he is going to have a special office where you denounce your Mexican neighbors, which is lovely, he does that a lot more likely for Americans. think that Mexicans commit crimes although in reality they are, they are only half as likely to commit crimes as people born in the United States, a statistic that no one ever believes to be correct is a bit like the statistic that the great, the most foreign important criminals in Austria, does everyone know it?

The Germans, of course, are right. The Germans are sorry. Are there German diplomats in the room? So it's like the actual stats don't have to line up. Is it like that or is it a real problem? Yes. Does it matter enormously how it turns in our minds and particularly whether it turns toward a physical and sexual threat? Yes, Tim, I want to get you away from Russia for a moment if you'll allow me, oh yeah, I mean, what about the rest of Russia? The current world from where I look at the world from one of the places where I look at the world from is India and for many people in South Asia, Southeast Asia, China would be the center of attention if they were thinking about geopolitical issues. ambitions were thinking about a power that is intervening in many overtly covert ways, has very, very strong economic power but also authoritarian regimes, a regime that would probably be a much greater challenge to democracy in the region than Russia in games of meddling, for example.

What The question is why China is so absent in your book China is absent because it is because it is everywhere China is everywhere in this argument if we look at geopolitics from a sober Russian point of view and I'm sorry, I'm going to talk from Russia to We talk about China, but if we look at geopolitics from a sober Russian point of view or from a traditional geopolitical point of view, there is no threat from Europe. Europe is not going to invade Russia and take precious raw materials from it. There is no threat from the United States. we are not going to invade and take precious raw materials from Russia, we have a lot of precious raw materials, there is no threat in the traditional sense from Europe and the United States, in the traditional sense of course there is a massive threat from China, China has a very long border with the Russian Federation China is not self-sufficient in food Russia will become an increasingly important food producer as global warming continues China is not self-sufficient in water water is something that is in good quantity in Siberia China is not self-sufficient - enough energy, there is a lot of natural gas just north of the Russian Federation, if you look at this from a very traditional geopolitical point of view, there is no reason why Russia should worry about Europe and United States, but there are many reasons to be worried about China and that's why in the book China is in the background because China is in some ways more important than everything else.

All these things that we are describing are in a way like the warm-up act for the Chinese. power because if you were Russia and you were sober, the last thing you would want to do is alienate yourself and be weak in the West because your own position of power depends on being able to lean between the West and China, weakening the West is actually the last thing. you should do a levy to help the entire left of American politics for the next 50 years is not what you should do if you are thinking long term and you have to deal with China, so what is sort of happening with this stuff?

What worries the Americans, the Russians and the Europeans so much is a kind of sideshow, is that Russia turns away from its own strategic problem, which is China, and gets involved in a war that it can win, this is what makes it possible play with the United States on the Internet we have no control and we don't care if your English is good. Try playing with China on the Internet. You need them. You would need a group of Chinese speakers. Which you don't have. You would need. To be able to get through Chinese barriers, something you can't do, you would have to exploit their social networks, which work in a completely different way.

It can't be done, it's a lot more fun, and I use the word carefully, it's a lot more fun. messing with Europe and the United States it's a lot more fun messing with open societies where you can get a quick result and feel like you've done something, but I agree with you, China is at the bottom, as I would characterize it if if you look at the whole northern hemisphere, it would be something like this: Americans and Europeans thought they had a model, but this model is collapsing around them. The Russians know that they don't have a model, but they also know how to make the American in the European model collapse more quickly.

The Chinese have a system, but they don't consider it a model for other people. That's how I see it, so if you ask who is winning from all this, China is definitely winning. all this and you know and I completely agree with you, China is perfecting itself, so to speak, off stage or on the sidelines of all this drama, it is perfecting another type of authoritarian system. Yes, so I want to press you on another aspect of your argument. about the politics of eternity and the politics of inevitability you see the chronological and causal relationship between the two and that is also the title of your book is the path to

unfreedom

leads from one to the other what would happen if I told you?

If you look at India, you look at Turkey, you look at many countries that are exhibiting a hybrid mix of boats right now. We didn't move from one to the other, we have them both simultaneously but in different types of combinations and that probably needs a different perspective. kind of explanation that you have partially provided in the book. Yes, I completely agree with that. What I try to do in the book is explain a very specific problem, that's why all of us - Secured democracies, in the sense of the right of the northern hemisphere, America, Europe, why did they do it?

Why are those democracies threatened when we didn't expect them to be? Why is that happening and why is it happening again in the northern hemisphere on this type of liner? space Why does Russia have much more influence than we think? Why do events in Russia and Ukraine so amazingly predict events in the United States in the European Union? I'm trying to explain how the influence influences, as you said before the The total inclination was from west to east, now that inclination is from east to west and why, and the idea of ​​inevitability and eternity has helped me with that because if you look at the US, you can get a pretty clear idea of ​​an inevitability if you look at the e, you'll get another idea of ​​inevitability, both of which open up before you, you know if you'll pardon the term?

Both create their own contradictions and open themselves to financial crises and external interventions, in the case of the US, creating inequality. which invites eternity as a form of politics, so I'm trying to explain that specific, but I agree with you that it doesn't have to be so clear, you can have eternity and inevitability at the same time, you can have a leader, you can having a leader like in India who uses both simultaneously, they are not mutually exclusive and in fact in the cases I am talking about what you will find is that there is a core. of inevitability somewhere and that is what makes eternity possible, so Russia and Trump are possible because of totally unregulated capitalism.

There is a I agree with you, it is a hodgepodge and in non-European cases, I think you see. That clearly allows me to direct my last two questions to something that may be a little more hopeful and that is what you call the politics of the possible in your book, you say that the book emphasizes that it aims to recover the present for what you call historical time and then you say and therefore it aims to recover historical time for politics and I think it would be good to try to understand a little more with you before I get to my final question: what is the role that you think it plays or could play the history? on revitalizing politics on engaging with the issues of our times yes, thank you, that's a wonderful question, let me start with why one of the reasons why I think democracy is a good thing because, you know, I mean a of the things that are The interesting thing about the current moment is that now we must defend democracy, we cannot simply say that it is the only alternative, it clearly is not and we cannot say that it defends itself because it clearly does not, we have to defend it and yes Let's make the case that we have to have arguments that convince ourselves and that convince others, which means that this could be a moment of great interest in public culture and I hope it is, but let me start with an argument in favor of democracy which is a democracy creates time democracy creates time if you have not done it, if you are in an authoritarian situation and you are governed by someone who is going to die and you do not know what is going to happen next, you do not think about the future you are not encouraged to think about the future instead you prefer to think if you like that your leader will be timeless that he is somehow outside of time this is what the fascists explicitly said the leader comes from outside of history and breaks the Rule of time unifies us into a myth that is eternal, so don't worry about the fact that he's going to die at some point.

Democracy helps us solve the basic problem of politics, which is how to keep your state on track. future, this is actually very important if you are in an Aryan system Thorat, it's not just that you don't know what happens when the leader dies for the government, you don't know what happens when the leader dies for the state like In general, Russian leaders are very concerned about their own borders and their own state and they share that anxiety with the rest of us and these are the consequences that we feel if you have a democracy. Time moves forward because what democracy does is allow.

Voting for one person blames them for their own mistakes and then voting for someone else the next time, that creates time in periods of one year, two years, and four years, and that in the creation of time is incredibly important for freedom. human because If you can't think about a political future, you can't think about a human future, an individual future or a family future, so this brings me to what I think is so important about history, history reminds us that the time moves. forward that it always has and that if we choose ideas like inevitability the idea will ruin our progress or like eternity the idea that only all we have are cycles of doom we are making decisions within history we are choosing those ideas we are choosing By accepting those ideas we are deciding that we do not want to be as free as we might otherwise be.

History helps us see those things as ideas. It helps us understand them and therefore helps us orient our lives around them. It also helps us, it helps us toescape them, but the other thing history does is remind us of that, and this is what I personally find so valuable. History reminds us that people who are smarter than us have faced greater difficulties. before and lo and behold they wrote about this and we can read what they wrote and whether it is Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and its media policy which in many ways is similar to ours or whether it is early fascism and the idea of ​​the myth of the leader who comes from outside of time, there are things in the 20th century that, although they are not exactly like the current people who lived them, wrote things and this is what I find so remarkable, not for themselves, they wrote them for us, but we do not believe in history. , we do not have that right if we do not see ourselves connected to all that, we do not have that and the last thing I would say about history is that history gives you, it makes you possible. what I call in the book the politics of responsibility, if you have history, you have a sense of structure, which means that you know that there are limits, but if you have history, you also have a sense of agency, that is, if the structure seen does not it's just about Seeing limitations, once you see a structure, you also see how you can move within it.

Correct scene structure is a precondition. Understand your own power, your own responsibility. Once you have done so, it is up to you to decide whether you are free or not. In this way I believe that history can do a lot for us. The other thing I love about history is that we are all historians. I am not going to claim that we are all physicists. My brother is a physicist. I know that not all of us are physicists. I am not going to claim that we are all doctors. Know? That's the kind of thing that mr.

Trump would say but I will say that we are all historians we all live in history we all make judgments about the past we all use primary sources we are just better and worse historians I want us to be a little better historians I think that would make a big difference my last question I just want to come back to it what you said about the policy of accountability because the question I asked myself while listening to you was what kind of institutions do we need to think? What kind of institutions do we need? redesign if we want a politics of responsibility as an alternative to both the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity, how do you think political virtues could be recovered in an era of politics as contaminated by the Internet as you have described in the book mm-hmm so I think that's a very important question and it's the question I'm trying to write about right now: how we not only play defense but how we think about something new.

I think that is the essential thing. It asks in two ways: it is the essential question because it is the question that we have learned not to ask, one of the things that draws most attention at the present moment and I am also talking to all of you, young people, one of the things that What is most striking at the present moment is the almost complete void of normativity, the almost complete void of ideas about what good is, the shame we feel almost when talking about good moral relativism that accompanies epistemic relativism again. stand up here and tell you what is good, but I'm going to suggest that some things are good and some things are better than others and that we really can't do without an ethical sensitivity and we practically can't do without an ethical sensitivity. sensitivity because without ethics you cannot think about the future, without ethics you are trapped in a greedy skill or you are trapped in eternity because inevitability and eternity are machines that produce ethics for you inevitability says that there will be progress, there will be more of the good things we have now so they don't have to ask what's good.

Eternity says that they are only victims of those outsiders, therefore, they are good. So, if you are good because you are innocent, you don't have to ask what is good, but to think about a better and more democratic future you have to commit to what What do you think would be a good thing and I and this is the second thing: it's amazing given the incredible wealth that we have collectively given to the incredible technology that we have, we are living in a world that was not anticipated by most of the science fiction of the 20th century, given how incredibly impoverished our country is.

The discussion about what to do with that wealth and that technology is actually, in part, a problem of wealth and its concentration, because what happens when wealth is highly concentrated is that you have to listen to billionaires and their ideas about the future. , which are things like, let's go to Mars, let's build an island in the Pacific, these are not good ideas, people, what I'm trying to say, these ideas are not going to work well, but they take up a lot of space in the culture because we have to hear. to the billionaires and we have to say oh yeah, that's very reasonable what you say about Mars because my university could really use some of their money, right, we have to do it, and technology is also moving us away from the norm.

Because you see, the time we spend on the Internet is time that usually takes us back to our psychological dispositions and away from the part of our mind that thinks about what is good. This is happening. There is a problem where cutting machines make it very difficult. that we think about what is good because they make it very easy for us to feel what feels right to us, which is a completely different animal, so both wealth and machines make it harder for us to think about the future, so I have I have some ideas , TRUE? I'm only going to mention, I'm not going to mention one, which is the production of factuality.

I think it is something that we simply cannot do without, it is very easy to fill what the Russians very well call the information space with lies and illusions with fantasies about masculinity or about threats. It's so easy to take a day and spend it in front of a screen. These things are very easy. The Western or what I should say Anglo-Saxon politician. The thinking that has always been said from Milton to Mill to the present is that as long as there are enough things in the information space, truth will always emerge. That is horrible and empirically incorrect.

That is not true. It is right for the truth to emerge. The facts have to be produced and the people who produce facts are investigative journalists, so countries that care about democracy and also countries that care about preserving their own sovereignty will have to find ways to invest in the production of factuality and I mean that limit in In a very simple sense, it is understandable that people believe in facts when it comes to other people they know, when they do not know journalists, the media becomes an abstraction and does not trust them, and that's perfectly understandable, by the way, and that's why I was very serious when I said in 2008 that we should have bailed out the newspapers, it would have been so easy and so cheap in the United States.

We bailed out the newspapers and we didn't, but it's not too late. If we want to have democracy in the census we're talking about, we have to be able to fill some of this space with new data every day, not with retweets. not sharing things that someone in some other country invented, but real people who work producing things and the idea of ​​production, I think, is increasingly important as we move away from a world of physical production, as we are moving away from a world of physical production in a world of symbolic production, we have to think a lot at the beginning about what kinds of symbols we want to produce.

My argument would be very simple: we should produce symbols that convey everyday factual realities that help people make sense of their lives. their own lives, if they have that, I think democracy will then make more sense to them. Thank you very much for this extensive conversation tomorrow afternoon at the IWM. I would like to invite everyone, but I don't think we can accommodate everyone. Unfortunately, but that is our theme, the power and powerlessness of the media, and that will be the next event at the V&A humanities festival organized by the IWM together with Time for Talk and the Veen museum.

I would like to thank the organizers here tonight very much for inviting us here as the Wine for lism and I would like to give the order to leave animal. Thank you very much Professor Snyder for his inspiring lectures. Thanks Phil, thanks to the sentinels in Turkish for the electoral England in the area, but in The lazy Indians are ahead ordering Vivian to soften by becoming the slates leha Hayden Hayden Antonin an Odom esmad a Kurdish rebel historical antiques Adam from home, that is, kill Suzanne Alice Krauss 50 of ITA and Viacom and Antonin for profit until they can see that it is infiltrating and VDV Napoleon and the auditors of the humanities festival kinetically boss some death row firefighters of the pericardium and the infrared head of the same dish as Professor Snyder Vietnam can attend a dozen and can tear off badges and was becoming a better infrared deflation, can make her lazy and uncertainty of the uncoupled good some had to joke about this as maintaining the innocent legs incredible better a fortune devar frontal games if the ears of gloves Anand better na Christine to release the salty melody where Timothy Snyder industry specialist dislike d 'Ivory Head and in Lang a shaken attempt and cat pahala for Lima Peru in Busan, then Velde is the Austin foo of Austin foo plane there is of Aksum if he thanks and his common fist soo-hyun when Timothy Snyder's Nakamura chicken coop goes hard on the vision of the coin, a mushroom man acts st.

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