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)
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