This is the full transcription of podcast 'Hidden Forces'.
Why Did the Future Arrive First in Russia Peter Pomerantsev.done #Podcast #Transcription #ReadAlong #KnowledgeUnlocked
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This is the full transcription of podcast 'Hidden Forces'.
Why Did the Future Arrive First in Russia Peter Pomerantsev.done #Podcast #Transcription #ReadAlong #KnowledgeUnlocked
he goes in. And he secures power over the main TV channels and the oligarchs he gets rid of are the ones that control TV. So Berezovsky, Gysinski, before he goes for the ones that control oil and gas. So he prioritizes media control. And the journey to securing media control is really at the top of his securing of authoritarian power. And, you know, we could say that since 1213, the internet also plays a big role. But really up to then, it's really all about TV. And really quite rapidly, he secures central control over TV. You know, first, all the big channels come under him, some smaller channels are left to their own devices. And slowly, all of that is collected into a fairly centralized system. So, you know, they prioritize it. They on a deeper level, what their spin doctors talk about is that they felt very weak in the 1990s. And to compensate for that weakness, they had to create the aura of power, even though the state was very weak. And the way you do that through TV, you're (15/57)
my guest conversations, as well as the all new intelligence reports, which are the cliff notes of the Hidden Forces podcast, formatted for easy reading of episode highlights with answers to key questions, quotes from reference material and links to all relevant information, books, articles, etc. used by me to prepare for each and every conversation, along with my takeaways from every episode. And with all of that out of the way, please enjoy this deeply enlightening conversation with my guest, Peter Pamarantsev. Peter Pamarantsev, welcome to Hidden Forces. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to have you on, Peter. The reason I asked you to come on the podcast is because I want to see if you can help me and my listeners answer a question that I first heard you pose in a lecture or it might have been an interview you gave, but which you also ask in your second book on propaganda, which is, why did the future, i.e. the world we're living in today in Western society, why did that (5/57)
that sense, that's the Esquistle very relevant to understand it all. Just the ideological bit and the kind of stuff of democracy about debates and reason, evidence that's all gone. And I think you see some of that here as well. You have these kind of political movements, which obviously they're tied to in America, problems about race and all that kind of stuff, because that's the sort of history that we live in here. But their essence is just expressed through pure belonging, almost sometimes almost without ideology. I mean, is Trump right? Is he left? Well, I mean, we can't really tell anymore. It's just this need for certain types of authority figures and a certain type of experience of, you know, I'd say pseudo community. So that's kind of what we're left. And again, I'm certainly not the only people to notice this that as ideology and the politics of ideology goes away, everything becomes about identity in and of itself. And I think we have to think a lot more about what is (43/57)
ways, quite literally in online communities with the example of like GameStop or some of these cryptocurrencies, people looking for communities and fusing them with financial markets, also with the election of Donald Trump and increasingly Rand Paul and Anthony Fauci, and everything becomes increasingly a drama, everything becomes increasingly a form of entertainment. So actually, this, one, love your thoughts on that. And then I want to ask that question when maybe we'll move this to the second half of our conversation and I'll ask it, we'll keep it for there, but when did you first begin to see some of the characteristics of this sort of post-Soviet Russian culture emerge in the West? So, well, the revolutionary year of 2016 is obviously the one that is the inflection point. Both Trump and Brexit happening, but we already saw elements of it on the fringes. But without a doubt, the Trump moment is huge. Then you see the emergence of Duterte in the Philippines, who's 2015, very, very (49/57)
What's up, everybody? My name is Dmitri Kofinas, and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and to learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in this week's episode is Peter Pomerotsev, a Soviet-born British journalist and former TV producer who has written two extraordinary books, which together have done more to help me understand the predicament in which we find ourselves today with respect to our relationship to truth, identity, and meaning. Then probably anything else I've read since starting this podcast, and that's saying a lot because I've read a lot of books and articles and listened to a lot of podcasts trying to figure out what it is that's really happening to us. What is it that's responsible for this creeping sense of unreality, where so many of the things that we've taken for granted no longer seem to work and where people feel (1/57)
increasingly paranoid about everything, myself included, I feel this way. And I've come to the view that what's responsible is a breakdown in shared belief systems, that what's happened is that the stories that we tell ourselves about each other and about who we are in a deeply communal sense are breaking down. Not only are they breaking down, but they no longer work, and they've been shown in many instances to be frauds. Whether we're talking about the lip service, paid to democracy and human rights, as justifications for wars of aggression and occupation, or the idea that somehow trillions of dollars can be conjured out of thin air to support asset prices, but that somehow we have to go on pretending that it's really about supporting the economy and that we really do live in a free market capitalist system. I invited Peter onto the podcast today because he wrote about this world years ago, during his time living and working in Russia. And not long after the publication of his book (2/57)
describing that experience, he began to notice that some of the things that he wrote about, the cynicism, the sense of surreality, the nostalgia, and what he described as an aggressive apathy, were also showing up in Western countries. And he began to ask himself a question which, to this day, whenever I say it, it makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Why did the future arrive first in Russia? And that's the central question that has preoccupied me ever since I heard him say it, and which forms the foundation for today's conversation. Because as you will hear, some of the same forces that were operational in the late Soviet Union and in early post-Soviet Russia are at work in Western societies today. And if we want to understand what the future might look like when trust in institutions has completely deteriorated, when grounding notions of identity and meaning have all been disappeared, when any independent standard of truth has become so elusive that people are willing to (3/57)
believe in anything, and the only thing left to unify us is raw and unbridled power, then we would be wise to not only understand the path that Russia has followed in the last several decades, but to do everything in our power to avoid following it any further. Because it leads to only one place, and that is a repressive society that uses the language and institutions of democratic capitalism for authoritarian ends. For both existing subscribers and anyone new to the podcast, we've moved our premium subscription off of Patreon and onto Supercast, which you can now access directly through the Hidden Forces website at hiddenforces.io and get immediate access to the second half of my conversation with Peter and every other guest in a single unified episode, which will be delivered directly to your podcast app of choice every week or whenever we publish anything new. Subscribers to our Super Nerd Tier will also have access to the human transcriptions of both the first and second parts of (4/57)
future arrive first in Russia? And for those who haven't read your books, that question may not make sense immediately, but I promise that it will shortly. But before we delve into answering that or trying to answer it, I'd love for you to give me a sense of who you are, your background, and your connection to Russian society insofar as it's relevant to today's conversation. Sure. So the story is actually my second book, which is partly a mix of family memoir and kind of analysis of contemporary propaganda. So I was one in Kiev, actually, in 77. And when I was nine months old, my parents were who were they were being arrested a lot for sort of essentially giving out copies of censored books, which sounds absurd today, but that carried a sense of around sort of seven years, but giving out copies of books by Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn, talking about sort of hand-printed copies that people gave to each other. And there was a time when a lot of kind of dissidents would be exiled rather than (6/57)
put into prison and camps or other people that were often given the option. The policy was trying to get rid of minor kind of troublesome elements. And so they were exiled and really accidentally, after a period of wandering around Europe, sort of politically homeless, they ended up in London because my father got a job at the BBC World Service. So I grew up accidentally British. And then I went back to the former Soviet Union, but to Russia, to Moscow, after university. I went to film school there, worked in think tanks there, and then interested in them, as you can already tell, both in policy and in arts and storytelling, kind of at the same time as I continued to be, and ended up working in Russian entertainment TV in the kind of the first draft of the Putin era when Russia was still pretending to be a democracy. So I came to Moscow in 2001, right after September the 11th, I remember it very well, because hardly anybody was in the plane, people were scared to fly. And then I was at (7/57)
film school and, you know, working on British documentaries about Russia until around 2006, and then 2006, 2010, stroke 11 was when I actually worked inside the Russian entertainment industry. And I mean, my great ambition was to make kind of feature films, but like all people who dreamt of making all featured documentaries, I ended up making factual entertainment shows, reality shows. It was a very exciting time in Russian entertainment, because a lot of these kind of Western formats, like the Apprentices, for example, or Love Island, or Stand Up Comedy, or sitcoms, were coming to Russia for the first time. And it was a time of kind of quite broad cultural experimentation, which was both an elite art and an entertainment. But yeah, my first book was about that world, but also seeing this new kind of authoritarian regime take hold that was really modeled in some ways on reality shows and entertainment, but certainly tried to be entertaining as well as oppressive, and that was really (8/57)
invested in TV as its main medium, but also in a weird way as it saw itself as a TV show. It didn't just use TV, it saw its own exercise of power as a sort of reality show, which definitely seemed to anticipate reality show hosts becoming president of the US. So in that sense, they seem to have kind of clicked on to some sort of truth that we all live in now. So yeah, but I left Russia in 2011 for many reasons, but partly because it was, you know, the turn towards dictatorship was already apparent, even though it was actually still the Medvedev era. So Russia was still playing nice, and officially, it was still moving towards the West, but everybody on the ground could tell that things were going really dark. People were starting to leave. Now it's obviously just an out and out dictatorship. And yeah, and I kind of like moved away from TV back towards policy, and have ended up kind of gravitating towards academia, I ended up working at the London School of Economics. Now I work at (9/57)
Johns Hopkins University, studying propaganda, studying the weird coming together of media and policy, both about Russia, but really across the world, and kind of thinking what media can do, how do we create TV and other types of media that are actually good for democracy? That kind of ended up being the question I sort of asked myself. So we know what the other side are up to. But, you know, we have a lot of assumptions about how media is meant to help democracy, but how do you tell stories, or how do you create shows that are good for democracy? And I can't say I've solved that, but that's kind of the big question that I explore these days. So you said that when you arrived in Russia, it was kind of the first draft of the Putin era, which was an interesting choice of words, given the fact that you also said it later when you were describing television that, in a sense that the Russian state saw itself through television, where you described sound a lot like a hall of mirrors. What (10/57)
role does television, and did it then and does it play now, in Russian culture and Russian society? And to that point, would you have the views that you have today, or the depth of understanding that you have today, not just as a result of the fact that you were an expat, but how instrumental was it that you were actually working inside of the machinery of television? I mean, look, there's other people who've written very, very good analyses of Russian propaganda without working in the television industry. So Arkady Ostrofsky's brilliant The Invention of Russia covers the 1990s, and the role that media and TV played in securing this new model of power. Andrew Wilson has written a great book called Virtual Politics, all about that as well. So it clearly didn't have to to write about this. I suppose it gave me a sense of the texture and the sense of the characters, and a sense of the kind of attitude of your regular TV workers who actually start this, and who are kind of like the sort of (11/57)
the media soldiers in the middle of it. So I never worked on political shows, because I wouldn't as a foreigner, to be frank, but also as an individually, maybe I wouldn't as well, given my background. But I certainly saw a lot of people who were making news shows and current affairs shows and documentaries supported the regime. And I'd go drinking with them, or I sit in an edit suite with them, or, you know, I'd have an editor on my show that just got off working from a piece of state propaganda. So I talked to them all the time, without writing a book, just they were just the people I knew, and the people I hung out with. So I got to know their attitudes, and their worldviews were kind of, you know, very important, because they're the sort of people that kind of reflected and both reinforced the kind of governing attitudes of the country. So I suppose that was a big added value. But in terms of the regime, and it's actually to TV, you've got to go back to the 1990s, when you have (12/57)
this chaotic period in Russian politics, democratic in a kind of, you know, chaos theory of democracy. And around 96, when Yeltsin, who's the president at that time, is really on the ropes, very famously, all the oligarchs unite behind him to stop the communists from getting into power. And they unite behind him and put their resources in, and the main thing they do is capture TV. Before that TV is used in a very chaotic way. You know, there are other forms that were more important to the Soviet regime. The Soviet regime was very invested in propaganda. But, you know, TV was pretty lame, basically. But they realized that, look, this is a moment where you could take advantage of TV, and they all the main TV channels which are controlled by oligarchs get behind Yeltsin and play an important role in securing his victory. And what is a sort of genuine vote at that point? Then in 1999, Putin is a nobody. He has a rating of, you know, I think it was like below 10%, when he's made Prime (13/57)
Minister by Yeltsin. And he's transformed into a vote winner via a huge TV campaign and a kind of a war in Chechnya, which is kind of a made for TV war in the sense that he is made into a war leader on TV. And he's completely aware of that. He's very aware that he's a no one. And that it's the power of television that has given him this aura, this charisma, which nobody thought he had. He's not a Chavez. He's never gone on the streets to rabble rouse. You know, he's not a populist in that sort of bottom up way. It's all created through TV. And he's completely aware of that. And so kind of almost one of the first things he does in the early 2000s, even before he takes control of the oil industry, which becomes obviously his key lever, even before he takes control over all the security forces, the first thing he goes for to take over as TV. And it happens bit by bit. It happens, you know, quite, you know, lots of things happen as some of the he does it overnight. But that's the direction (14/57)
constantly reaffirming the central role of the Kremlin, you're doing show trials, you know, against oligarchs to show, haha, look, you know, we do have control. And so kind of informational dominance becomes a way to compensate for a sense of insecurity. I mean, now they pretty much have everything under wraps. But in the 90s and early 2000s, when oligarchs were very strong, when local governors were very strong, when, you know, security forces were very disorganized and redo the bidding of whoever would pay them the most rather than central power, you almost compensate for that by having, you know, hegemony over at the imagination. So that's another kind of deeper reason they invest in information dominance so much. I'm interested in exploring this reliance on storytelling. And also what it sounds like you're describing the aesthetics of power. And maybe something else, which we think about in Western capitalism as kind of fake it till you make it, sort of create the appearance of (16/57)
success and then sort of become successful through that process of having created the perception in the minds of other people. That's a very nice parallel. I hadn't thought about that, but that's not a bad parallel. That's not bad. So describe for me and my listeners what it is that we're talking about here, what it is that you describe in your first book through your experience of living and working in Russia. What is the sort of cultural manifestation that we're describing? And then what I would like to do is try to understand its origins, its progression from the end of communist Russia, because interestingly enough to get to ahead of ourselves, I did another episode with my friend Simon Mihailovich, who emigrated to the United States in the 1970s. And he sees the beginning of this unraveling actually in the period of destilization, but then really accelerating with Perestroika and then through into the early 1990s. What is it that you experienced that you write about that we're (17/57)
trying to get our arms around today in this conversation? Well, look, again, we're talking about phase one Putinism. So now we're on a different model. So, but it's a very important one to understand because it's one that's been imitated by a lot of people by Viktor Orban in Hungary, by Vucic in Serbia, by Erdogan in Turkey. And when we think about nightmare scenarios of the US, which I think is still nightmare scenarios, but there's the scenarios, we're talking about Putin phase one. And Putin phase one is something that was nicknamed managed democracy, which is still the veneer of democracy, but actually underneath it's becoming a dictatorship. Now it's just an open dictatorship. Again, aesthetics, the aesthetics of democracy. It's interesting. Again, I just want to point this out, aesthetics plays a really powerful role, I think in your book and in this conversation. And I think it says actually very interesting. I think when we look at politics, we always lead towards sort of a lot (18/57)
of explanations based on self interest or based on power. I think aesthetics and psychology, psychoanalysis might be interesting additions to how we think about these things. We've definitely started talking about psychoanalysis a lot more in America. We still don't a lot in geopolitics. But anyway, coming back to Putin, so the idea was to have the veneer of democracy, but actually still controlled. So if you were to switch on a Russian channel in 2007, eight, you would see actually a very lively debate show between different political parties in a way much more intense than an American one, much more kind of Jerry Springer like, you know, with a lot of rowing and shouting. But all those parties were actually to a greater or lesser extent either created or controlled by the Kremlin. Real opposition were already being forced out and would soon just be not allowed on TV altogether. That ends up being nebarnly. But before that, that's lots of stages. And the idea was to reflect different (19/57)
bits of society. So everybody felt represented. But to make sure that none of them could ever really compete with Putin. So the overall point of this reality show was there is no alternative to Putin. But you had your crazy communists who were meant to kind of soak up some of the resentment of pensioners. But everybody else was meant to look at them and go, oh, my God, they're crazy old commies. And then there was the really far right guy, Zyrunovsky, who was created by the Kremlin literally, who would play the role of like the crazy far right Steve Bannonny kind of character. And he would get, by the way, like 17% of the vote. But most people go, oh, my God, he's crazy. And he would say outrageous things, crazy things that part of the population would like, but anybody normal will go, whoa, he's mad. And then you had a kind of liberals who were always a little bit effete and a bit kind of, you know, very un-Russian. And they would, you know, get their 6% of the kind of liberal elite (20/57)
votes. But it was very clear that they didn't represent real Russia. They weren't real men. They were, you know, they were nerds. And, you know, they clearly didn't reflect normal Russians. Interesting. Real men also something really to sit on a bit and to think about in the course of this conversation, this notion of masculinity. Oh, yeah, that obviously plays a huge role, almost to kind of a camp sort of way with Putin's photographs of him being so virile and riding horses and going around bare-chested. And so you were meant to look at that and go, wow, Putin is just so much better compared to all of this. And there is no real alternative to him. But we do have some sort of debates. They don't want politics to be boring. It's not meant to be fun. You know, there were stories around these parties and these characters and they were all, you know, these fun debates and, you know, you got to vent a lot of spleen. Though ultimately, when it came to any big decisions, all these parties (21/57)
were completely loyal. So they came to sort of arresting an oligarch, they'd all be on board. So that was the model. I suppose the twist to give to all of this was that this was done quite openly. So it was openly telegraphed that all these parties are loyal and controlled and part of the Kremlin. So this is a very, very interesting layering of messages. Yes, we do have some freedom, but actually it's all controlled and don't you get any ideas. So Koav, who was the kind of guy who was running all of this, who was kind of in charge of media policy and in charge of running the so-called parliament, would leak photos of his own office with, you know, telephones to all these party leaders, making it very clear that he was in charge. And then it's kind of hard to, sometimes I find it hard to grasp for, for Westerners. This wasn't about conning people. This was about saying, this is a game. These are the rules of the game. These are the limits of the game. And then on an even more subtle (22/57)
level to say, look, democracy is actually always controlled. We have democracy, but it's really controlled by our own deep state, so to speak. And it's the same over there in America. They do have democracy, but it's controlled by a deep state or in Britain, it's actually all controlled. So this is the package. And sort of saying that the alternative was the 1990s, which was chaos. Do you want that? Of course you don't. So always bouncing off like, you know, that democracy was just chaos. This is what it is. You know, this is sort of command and control democracy. And, you know, we can have some fun with it. You know, there's some color. Elections are definitely not up for it, but you can go and say some crazy stuff. You can even criticize bits of the, maybe not Putin, you can criticize the government. You don't criticize Putin, who's sort of almost above politics, but you can have a go with the government. You're allowed to do that. So there are some bets, you know, there's ways to (23/57)
express dissent. But please know that actually at the end of the day, it's limited. Is the distinction that you just can't speak too truthfully, that you can't break the third wall? Is that the real distinction that it's okay to dissent? Just don't really use language from the world as it is, from reality. You have to continue to play act in this larger sort of masquerade. Is that the distinction? Exactly, exactly. So I think you've really put your finger on it there. And when we think about power, it's getting people to play along, which shows you have power. And by people playing along, you kind of weirdly break them. And people by agreeing to play along, people become part of it and sort of commit it to it. And I think if we think about power and dictatorial power, it's getting people to play along, which is the secret, because actually only so much your repressive organs can do. There's only so many people you can arrest. So it's getting people to play along, which is the key. It (24/57)
was also in the Soviet period. And so it was interesting. So when I was there, if you wanted to speak the full truth, you weren't at that moment usually killed. You were just off TV. Yeah. And being on TV was being relevant. So there were opposition people like Boris Nemtsov, who was on TV for a long time. And then he started to go too far. And then there were just blacklists. There were blacklists of people who cannot get on TV. And Nemtsov eventually got into those lists. And people sort of think about, talk about the real opposition, which meant not being on TV, which meant being irrelevant. So you weren't killed for it at that point. You weren't put in prison for it. You were just made irrelevant. You were not in the reality show. You weren't in the Big Brother House. Instead of like Orwellian Big Brother is the Big Brother House. If you want to be in the Big Brother House, you've got to play along. And you're right. And that's what I try to get at in my book. It's not a top down (25/57)
system of coercion. It's a way of getting everybody playing along, which in a very subtle way breaks you, because you become part of it. And there's actually been a lot of anthropology about this. I'm not the first person to notice this. There's been very good anthropology about this, about the Assad regime, for example, in Syria, the first father. So I'm certainly not the first person to tweak this. But my book is in many ways about what it's like living in that, I suppose. So I actually want to pull a quote from your book. I have so many quotes on this rundown. I have quotes from both, this is not propaganda and from Nothing is True and Everything is Possible. This quote speaks to what you were describing just a moment earlier. Let's see where I want to start to pull it from. But even when you know the whole justification for the president's war is fabricated, even when you fathom that the reason is to create a new political technology to keep the president all powerful and forget (26/57)
about the melting economy, even when you know and understand this, the lies are told so often on Ostankino that after a while you find yourself nodding, because it's hard to get your head around the idea that they are all lying quite as much and quite so brazenly and all the time. And at some level, you feel that if Ostankino can lie so much and get away with it, doesn't that mean that they have real power, a power to define what is true and what isn't, and wouldn't you do better just to nod anyway? Now, this speaks to two things. One, it speaks directly to what you were describing before, which is that in a sense, the power to define reality is a power that's so awesome that it instills in the listener or in the viewer, at the very least a healthy sense of fear, fear of going against a power that's so powerful that it has the capacity to define what's real. But it also speaks to something else, which is really what I want to get to and draw it from you, which is what were the (27/57)
conditions that made this possible? What sort of vacuum existed? How did Russian society find itself in such a vacuum, a cultural vacuum, for lack of a better term or a sort of state of nihilism, where a regime like this and stories like this could emerge and try to compete as the dominant narratives of society? First of all, there's a big historical legacy in a certain way that Soviet Union did this as well. So we are talking about a lot of historical conditioning and a lot of people understanding the kind of the gospels of the Soviet Union were nonsense, but having to repeat them and understand that they are a way of communicating power. We're talking about propaganda theory, this idea of propaganda as messaging as in trying to convince people. There's also propaganda as signaling. It's a signal. This is what we say is the truth and if you want to survive, you better not. So it's not about persuasion, it's kind of like communicating power. But would you say that it was that (28/57)
distinction was always equal or did it begin where more people were convinced and over time it just became the signal for power? In other words, the form of propaganda and did people's conviction in the story deteriorate over the course of the USSR's history so much so that by the time of the collapse in the 1990s, there was a sense that like again to the title of your book, nothing is true and everything is possible. So I think we can look, we can go all the way back to the start and look at sort of peaks and crests in this. If we're talking about the period that I'm kind of bay concerned with, which is the Cold War period and post-war period, there was probably a moment in the 1960s where there was a real hope for socialism with a human face. There was a certain amount of optimism. There was real economic progress and there was a certain amount of liberalization and a certain amount of reformers, especially in the culture sections, which might make you think that it was possible. By (29/57)
the 1970s, it's clear that it's sort of the breaching of era, complete cynicism. By the way, the time it gets to the 80s and 90s, it's lost all its meaning. So I'm concerned with that bit. I mean, you could then go back to the 20s to the Stalin period. 20 people seem to believe it, but the Stalin period is just about power. So maybe this is a cycle, I don't, you know, we'd have to do a lot of kind of deep right for that. But in what I'm concerned with, which is that period, then I think that's the kind of arc. But coming back to what I was saying exactly about the Soviet one, the difference between the Soviet one and the Putin one is that because communism itself was meant to be a rational enlightenment philosophy, which was meant to respect evidence, it claimed to be scientific, you know, it claimed to be an enlightenment, the ultimate enlightenment experiment. A, there was a normative position that you could criticize it from. You could say, well, you've promised to give us socialist (30/57)
utopia, but you have not. And here's the evidence. And they would then try to produce other evidence, say, well, actually, we have, look at these statistics and the Soviet system had all these think tanks trying to prove the economy was working well. You know, it was quite bizarre. They came up with the idea that people weren't unemployed, they just had so much free time, that showed it was doing well. I mean, it was like, because it was a system which was meant to have values, you could attack it for that. You could say that you are creating a better society. Why are these people in prison? And because they signed up to various human rights norms, you could criticize them for that. The dissidents used to say that we're going to hold you accountable by your own laws. There were laws around freedoms in the Soviet Union, which were clearly ignored, but they were there. So because it was a coherent philosophy and an enlightenment philosophy, there was a normative standpoint that you could (31/57)
criticize it from. The difference with the picnic era is like, they don't believe in anything. They can be left wing, right wing, they can be nihilist, they can be idealistic, they can change, they can be completely situationist. I think nihilism actually is a coherent philosophy. I think that cynical, cynical, if you look at the kind of definitions of cynical, it means you can believe lots of things. It's not believing in nothing. It's like, belief is so thin that you can do this thing in the morning and this thing in the afternoon. That's the world that I lived in. That's interesting though. So what is the distinction between believing in anything and believing in nothing? So nihilism is still a coherent worldview. I mean, nihilists were 19th century, kind of like heart. I mean, there's Russian novels about nihilists, their belief in the blackness is a commitment. They make a commitment to their nihilism, like grunge fans or something. There's a philosophy there. This is about being (32/57)
a nihilist at one moment and then putting on a business suit and being a kind of liberal rationalist the next. There's a coherence to nihilism. Here, we're talking about just being different things. It's more a masquerade that you're constantly indulging in. I mean, there is an emotional logic there. There's a psychological logic there, which I think we couldn't try to sort of find. So I'm not saying there's nothing there in terms of an engine, but in terms of belief systems that you can translate into words and ideas and facts and debates, there isn't a stable one. And I'm always asked, what does Putin believe and what do Russians believe? And I'm like, if you're asking that question, you've understood nothing. The point is they can believe lots of things and none of them matter. And that's hard for, again, in a Western culture where we're brought up from school age to say, what do you think? Yeah. And to re-hardening our sense of self, it's very hard to understand a culture where the (33/57)
opposite is valued. And that was actually already embedded in the Soviet educational system, where nobody asks you what you thought. You were just meant to power it back Soviet dogma, whether you believed in it or not. So that was already there in the Soviet system, but it's kind of multiplied. And if anything, and what I try to get to in the book is what they would say that all your beliefs in the West are bullshit, what I would always hear from, and there are kind of elite because, you know, people who work in media, create media are sort of elites, was that you don't understand, Peter, they would tell me, all that stuff about human rights, all your stuff about a liberal world order that you've grown up with, it's bullshit. Your elites don't believe in it either. It reminds us of the Soviet Union, where they would parrot these things, but no one believed in it. And actually, below all this are just games, manipulation, and the same kind of, I think I call it culture as zero gravity (34/57)
in the book, that we have here. And you will find that out soon. And I remember listening to them going, oh, you just have, you know, you're, this is sour grapes. We have politicians who still believe in facts and ideas, they're corrupt, whatever, but they still believe in stuff. And I suppose the story of my second book is coming back to the West and going, Oh, my God, did they actually have a point? Because you just have this explosion of a lack of belief in anything and a very similar attitude towards facts. So I suppose that the symptom of this world view is that facts lose their meaning because facts become instrumentalized, all ideas are instrumentalized. They only, you know, they're not a thing in itself in this world. There's something to hit people with or confuse people with or intimidate people with, but they're not something that you kind of use to debate because there's nothing to debate about. Facts lose their meaning. And if anything, there's this kind of celebration of (35/57)
sending a big middle finger up to factual language and a reveling in nonsense speech and a reveling in just saying the most absurd things and saying, that's kind of almost your kind of your badge of honor. And, you know, we see some of that in the West now, which was, you know, what kind of struggling to deal, how you deal with leaders who don't care if they're caught lying. That was one of the agonies for my liberal friends in Russia. You know, they really believed in holding truths of power. And they would produce this evidence about Putin's corruption or about, you know, the fact that the elections were rigged. And the Kremlin would go, So what? Yeah, we're lying. And that resonated with people. Most people in Russia said, Yes, so what? None of your ideals matter. Democracy was a nightmare or a sham. What is this evidence that you're producing? What does it mean? It means nothing. We live in a world of chaos and let's speak about it that way as well. And I remember so many of my (36/57)
friends just being like, you know, because they believed in democracy. And they were like, no, but here's the evidence. And it just didn't mean anything. And that was a very dizzying moment. But now I think we see it everywhere. What kind of what was used to it now, where the evidence has stopped meaning anything. So much to pick apart here or to reflect on. First, again, I want to pull a quote out from your book that actually speaks directly to what you said. This is not propaganda. Were you right? I returned to London because in my naivete, I wanted to live in a world where, quote, words have meaning, where every fact was not dismissed with triumphant cynicism, or as, quote, just PR or quote, information war. Here are the two sort of things I want to highlight. One is it seems that what you're describing is a society that feels as if it has gone through the apocalypse. And what it has discovered in the course of doing so is a deeper truth, which is that there really is no truth, that (37/57)
everything is relative, that nothing has underlying substance or meaning. And so that the truly enlightened people are the ones that understand that and in a sense believe in nothing, not in an ideological way, but truly deeply nothing. So that's one observation. And I also want to reflect on whether that's actually true or not, because you can approach that question from two different perspectives and both I think can carry some a lot of intellectual weight. And the second thing I want to sort of reflect on is a more practical question, which is what shattered that mythology? We don't have to necessarily try to extract that from the Soviet experience, because I think in some ways we tried to address it a bit and we talked about the Stalinization or Perestroika or the 1990s where communism collapsed and all of a sudden you had these overnight billionaires, you know, running around town with Maybachs, as you describe in the book, but maybe more to the point, what shattered this myth in (38/57)
the west? Because as you pointed out, your colleagues in Russia would say, you will discover this soon too. And this is the question, right? Have we discovered this? Is that what's happened here in the west that we discovered it at some point? And I would say in a sense we have, but then that brings us back to the deeper question, which is, did we discover a deeper underlying truth? Or in fact, have we in a sense deluded ourselves? And then further to the point, if in fact we discovered a deeper underlying truth that really there is no truth that we can discern, what does that say about our need for mythology? And can we erect myths and live by them knowing this deeper truth? Because this is the, this then brings us all the way back to some of the fundamental sort of foundational issues with the Enlightenment and the death of God. And our attempt to, in a sense, construct a society very much along the lines of communist Russia, highly scientific, but full of so many contradictions. And (39/57)
you sort of wonder, where does this leave us? So I said a lot, but I'm curious, I want to allow you to just reflect on what I said and respond however you want. And we'll see where it takes us. Yeah, look, there's so many issues here. So what happens when you realize that like the myth is hollow? I think there's different ways of reacting to it. So the working out of the communist in Russia, the communist myth was hollow. And the attempt at creating democracy in the early 90s was disastrous in so many ways. Ended up with people who believed in nothing. But doesn't mean that they were free. And here's a big paradox. And we see this all the time in the West with people who don't believe mainstream media. They're not free. They end up embracing conspiracy theories as a way to make sense of the world. So we still need a way to make sense of the world on some psychological level. So if it had led to real freedom, that would be interesting. But it didn't. If anything, the opposite, you go to (40/57)
a kind of, I want to try and describe in the book, was almost a medieval sort of psychology, where, you know, instead of the kind of mix of myth and reason that Enlightenment democracy had, you just have pure myth. And conspiratorial thinking replaces ideology as a way of... And in a sense, you fully invest yourself in the story that there is an all-powerful elite and that they control the world and that you certainly can't do anything about it. But in somehow, in your sort of recognition of that, that you somehow are exercising a level of freedom. If anything, you'll have completely helpless. So this is the paradox. In order to kind of be free, you need to trust at least a little bit. And we see that everywhere in the West and you see that in Russia as kind of dominant. And I think that even though the various messages the Kremlin can do, they can believe or not believe in them, the conspiratorial world view is genuine. I mean, that is... That's not a world view as in as like a (41/57)
philosophy, that's like a psychological, you know, crutch, basically. And the need for identity is still there. And the need for fake community is still there. And all those things are still there. If anything, they've kind of been made naked. You just have the psychological pulsating needs now with no veneer of ideology or much less of a veneer of ideology. And I think you see the same here. When they came up trying to come up with a name for the Putin Youth Group, which was openly modeled on the Hitler-Yugand, they didn't call it young Komsomol or Hitler-Yugand or young whatever, they just called it Nashi. Us. So there's us and there's them. So the need to define yourself, or none of that goes away. The psychological underbelly, if anything, is revealed. So as long as there's nothing in freedom, there's just these psychological needs and fears and inability to make sense of the world. And, you know, the need for warped, sadomasochistic father figures, all that stuff is there. So in (42/57)
identity, and what is healthy identity and what is destructive identity. But, you know, Fukuyama's got a whole book about this, you know, about how ideology went away. So now you're just left with pure dynamics of belonging and what belong. And again, Russia got to that very, very early. This idea, they twig very early that Putin doesn't can't be ideological, because people don't believe in any ideologies. And also, like, he needs to cobble together a lot of other people. And so they come up with this idea of creating what they call the Putin's Coeblitions Tour, which is translated as the Putin majority, but it's much closer to what Trump refers to as the American people, the real people, the true people. It's this amorphous emotional thing that anybody can project themselves into, which is really defined by what it's not the enemies, the enemies of the states. First, it's the oligarchs, then it's the West, it can move around. So it really is about giving people that sense of belonging (44/57)
really outside of a, in a very kind of jello like emotional construct, which is constantly changing its kind of messages. But the emotional structure is very similar. Yeah, it's interesting because you also mentioned identity, which I think is the other half of this story. Because I think that what creates the vacuum is the destruction of both identity, a sort of sense of communal identity, and meaning, and its replacement with one thing, power, a sort of raw power that can define both identity and meaning and is foundational to both. Yeah, and I think that's pretty evident from Russian foreign policy. When in 2011-12 there's huge protests demanding reforms in Russia and concrete reforms and reforms which will end up loosening the power of the Kremlin, whoever's in there. Putin's response is to set off on a bunch of imperialist adventures, and they are all about that. Let's compensate because people do need meaning. Again, none of those things go away, by the way, even when you stop (45/57)
believing in ideologies, all those things about meaning, the fear of death, the needing to feel that you're something bigger than yourself, none of that goes away. Those raw things have to be satisfied. And when we talk about Putin's expansionism, that's what he's channeled that into. And I think the other fact that you'd invoke there is identity as a process of psychology and almost psychoanalytics. I think that plays a very big role as well. It's a weird pattern of an authority that humiliates you, like an abusive parent, which is very, very evident in Russia, every day when you live there, but also historically, and then you compensate the resentment to build up from that through an expansionism. So there's this weird social psychological dynamic going on as well, based around humiliation and aggression. So all those things that are happening, and yeah, and Putin's continued international adventures are to do with two things. One of them, again, is signaling. If I can go in and bomb (46/57)
Aleppo to Smith-A-Reeves, don't you dare doing anything at home. If I can push Biden around, just think what I'll do here to you at home. So there's definitely a messaging back. I'm big and scary internationally, they're alone at home. But also, without a doubt, it brings a certain amount of pleasure and fulfillment to ordinary Russians. And I'm not saying Russians want war. I don't think they do. I think there's a low threshold for self-sacrifice, but the going around swinging your genitals on the international stage does help people feel fulfilled and that they have, if not meaning, then some sort of satisfaction. This is so fascinating to me because you touched, again, just to wrap up the point about power. I think it's also so important for me to clarify what I mean when I talk about it, because in the absence of a belief system, it seems to me that the only thing that's left to hold society together is raw power. That human beings have the capacity to live in a society of millions (47/57)
of people, if they have shared beliefs, those things allow them to form expectations about people's behavior and their own behavior, et cetera. But absent that, you need the sort of Leviathan. And then the other point is interesting about entertainment because in a sense, it seems to me, in the world you describe in the book, and I want to also use this as an opportunity to begin to shift our attention towards the West, it seems that entertainment very much plays that role of quelling the inner-term oil of inspired by meaninglessness or just filling the void of the emptiness of everyday existence, that there's something to that, that it's central in that way. And I feel like we've seen that happen in the West. We've seen it happen in the stock market with the transformation of the stock market from something that actually performs a very basic utility function of reallocating capital to being actually increasingly a casino and a place in which to act out the dramas that begin in some (48/57)