Where Are We Going? The Idea of the Future

[Music] Hello, my name is David Ronsumman and this is Past Present Future, the History of Ideas podcast. Today it's the first of a two-part conversation in our series "Where Are We Going?" which looks at some of the biggest questions and this is maybe about the biggest question of all. I'm talking to the political scientist and writer Ivan Krastek, one of the most prolific and interesting commentators on the contemporary political imagination. And we're discussing the idea of the future. How do we conceive it? How do we imagine it? What do we do if we don't believe in it anymore? The first of two conversations about the past, present and future of the idea of the future. [Music] As you will hear, Ivan Krustek was in Vienna when we recorded this conversation. I'm in Cambridge, England. Ivan spent some of his time in Vienna, some in Sofia in Bulgaria, he is Bulgarian. This is a wide-ranging conversation. It touches on and alludes to a lot of different things. I'm hoping that most of them will be familiar to most people. But one name that comes up at the end may not be familiar, may be hard to catch. Is that of Alexander Alexander Kojev, a very interesting and unusual 20th century Russian-born French philosopher, who was part of the inspiration for Fukuyama's idea of the end of history. Kojev was also interesting and unusual for a philosopher and that he was also pretty much a full-time civil servant, a French civil servant. And he devoted much of his career to laying the groundwork for the creation of the European Union, which was one version of his understanding of the end of history. So the name that you'll hear at the end is that of Alexander Kojev, here's the conversation. Ivan, we're going to be talking about the history of the idea of the future, which sounds often to people like a slightly weird thing, but the future has a history, but of course it does. Partly because human beings haven't always framed how they understand the present through an idea of the future. It's probably quite a recent phenomenon. Do you think, basically, it's a distinctly modern idea? It's actually one of the ways we should think about what modernity is. Modernity is the moment when human beings thought the present needs to be interpreted through our idea of what's coming next. People admire you not distinguishing between our interests of what is going to happen tomorrow. And this is kind of eternal interest. You go to the Oracle, you're asking and you go for a fortune teller, and you hope that you're going to know, but this is not the future. And from this point of view, the idea of the future is based on something different than the idea that there is a tomorrow, which is different than today. And like traditional societies in which the idea of society was very much based on analogy with men. You grow, you age, you die, you're reborn, and you have this cyclical idea of history, so both past and future are things that are twins. Because they're coming, they're going, you're much more think in terms of rice and fold than a day of the future. And then comes modernity, and modernity defies the future very differently. First future is time which is radically different from our own time. In a strange way, this is a time that you cannot be sure that you can grasp from the perspective of today. Secondly, the future is open. We don't know how this is going to look like because it very much depends on how we're going to act on this. And so it will inform this is very important. Future is a project. So in a certain way, future is this next very different time. And very different societies that we want to build. And as a result of it, future is a different project. And this project can go in a very different directions. But all of them share this idea of future as different from the past. It is open, this is unknown, and it very much depends what we want and how we are going to act. I will leave from this point of view, a future is particularly modern concept. And the very idea of modernity is based on the fact that this is a temporal regime, which is very much centered on the idea of the future. As you say, in pre-modern understandings of how time works, past and future as you put it at twins, you can't really separate them out. And they mirror each other in various ways and you think about your descendants and your ancestors as having a very symbiotic relationship. And you are, you may be in the flow of time, but these two things balance each other out. And as you've just said, the modern conception assumes a break. The future is different. But there is also this idea of progress. So that even though it's not mirroring the past, there is a direction of travel. The past flows through the present to a future. And you can track it as a kind of progress. Also a distinctly modern idea. Do you think modern conceptions of the future and the idea of progress are necessarily bound together? Are there modern conceptions of the future which are not progressive? It is interesting because when it comes to technology, the idea of a progress is not contested. And from this point of view, before we have the idea of the historical cycle, now the time is perceived as an error that goes from the past to the future. But Rosal was probably one of those who very early on asking the question, is the technological progress also the moral progress? And then you are going to end up with two very different positions, one saying that the more technologies developed, the more modern our modern life is, the more progressive our life is. The better our societies are. But then you have this very strong nostalgia for the primitive. And you can see both on the left and on the right. On the left, this is very much connected to the idea of equality. Today, the idea that in these primitive societies, we were much more equal, which will be for private property, before family, before state. But then on the right, you have the idea of community and tradition. And as a result of it, while progress is perceived as very much progressing in terms of consumption, or terms of industrial development, it could be seen as destroying communities, making people much more, only much more happy. So yes, we have the idea of progress being very important, but future does not need to be a moral progress. And this is why the different projects of the future are very much focusing on this. And from a different value perspective. Is then the danger in a way of these modern conceptions of the future that the idea of technological progress feels like it's baked in. In some sense, it's baked in. Of course, we're going to come on to the ways in which that then becomes dystopian. But certainly in modernity, for most of its history, the idea that technological progress means more goods, more opportunities, greater comforts. That feels part of the story. Moral progress is much more contested, and then somewhere between the two is political progress. Political progress, which has an economic, technological component, and it clearly also has a moral component. It sometimes feels like the history of modernity is actually the collapsing of these things together in the political space where I think you're implying we need to separate them out. There is also one thing about thinking about the future as a project. Who is thinking about this and project for whom? I remember in Bulgaria, it was 1980s. I was totally fascinated by the problem of utopias, but particularly by one issue. And this was why in Thomas Morse utopia, this perfect society that we're talking about, the inhabitants of this perfect society were not Christians. Thomas Morse was a very devoted Christian thinker. How it happened? That in this kind of a perfect society, they were not Christians. And then we're thinking a lot, and of course part of the answers that I was trying to present to myself could be wrong. But the story of trying to think about the future is quite often, you think not only about your own future, but the future of others. And from this point of view, Thomas Morse utopia very much was written in the moment when the great geographical discoveries won the way. And suddenly, you have the idea to experiment. What is the best society? And you cannot experiment with other Christians. The only way to experiment basically is the people on the other side of the ocean, which was just discovered and with which you can try and check what is working. What is not working? What is a good society? What is not a good society? So in mind, this double nature of utopia, this is the best society, but for whom? And who have the right to experiment with whom? It's critically important also about this moral ambiguity, because the moment you decide that your project is not simply a technological progress, but also moral progress. That gives you the possibility to do things, which otherwise people are not going to allow you to do on them. And you're going to do things. two people who are alive now, for the sake of people who are not yet alive. And this is critically important because these other people can be people living in different geographies like in the time of the geographical discoveries, but it could be also people living in the future time. So we are doing this for the next generations, and particularly the communist utopia was very much a sacrifice for the next generations. From this point of view, one of the interesting thinkers in this is a very strange and marginal Russian religious philosophers from the 18th and 19th century Nikolai Fyodorov, who basically wrote a book on the common task and he said, "Listen, if the future society is this perfect socialist society and the next generations, I'm going to live in this perfect society, what about the past generation? Is it something not a huge inequality that we are building a great society for the future generations? But what about the past? And then he comes with his utopian vision that the major task of every person is to resurrect his parents. And the technology should help us to do this. And he really was so much involved in thinking about this, that he starts to say that they are going to be too many people in the world, so we should be able to go to another planet. And some of his followers invested so much into this, that paradoxically, the beginning of the Soviet space program comes from one of the followers, a Fyodorov who basically was very much kind of bothered of the fact that when we're going to resurrect the dead, we should go to other places. So from this point of view, this religious idea that we are going to be alive at one at the same time on the judgment day, and the idea that we need this progress society, which is morally perfect for everybody, this is also the clash between generations, the clash between Geo-Rufis, and I do believe this is so strongly embedded in the political contradictions of modernity. Because there is that other, in some ways, more secular version of that argument, which is about discounting the future, and the anxiety that many, quote-unquote, "progressives" have, which is that we are prioritising the present over the future. So for instance, we are squandering the resources of the planet and not thinking about future generations. And the argument there is, to what extent can we discount the value of their lives relative to the value of people who are existing today? It's almost like the mirror of that argument. One version of it is, we're going to resurrect our parents and our grandparents, and we need a planet to live with them on. The other is, we are so selfish, we're not progressive enough, we're so selfish that we think our needs are more important than the needs of people who might be born in 100 years time. And the idea of the future is the thing that animates both of those arguments. You don't worry about those things if you're not thinking the present has to be defined in terms of the future, but if you are thinking like that, it can go both ways. You worry that you're being selfish relative to the people who are dead, and you worry you're being selfish relative to the people who aren't born yet. Our idea of the future means that it's society different than all. So theoretically, for us, it's going to be impossible to experience what it means to live in a society like this, because it could be transformative experience. They're going to be people different than us. They're going to have a different political preferences. They're going probably to have a different moral preferences, but at the same time, we try to construct a life as if, allowing them to be the architects of what is happening today. And I totally, the disc kind of a present regulated by the future or on the other side, present regulated by the past also creates a certain type of a crisis of the very idea of the present moment in which we're living. The Bulgarian novelist, Giorgi Spodinov who got a book or price some years ago, has a short story which is called Blind Isher. And Blind Isher is a story of a girl who was born with a very particular defect. Her left eye can see only the past, and her right eye can see only the future. So when she was meeting somebody, and particularly when she went into the romantic age to try to look for a partner, she will sing either a child that the present person was, on old man that he is going to be. And she was struggling so much with this that at the end of the story, she decided to get blind. Believing that being blind makes it easier for her to leave. And actually from this point of view, this focusing on the future, focusing on the past makes it really very difficult to experience the present as a distinct time. Do you think this is pushing that line of thought possibly to its logical conclusion? But do you think that because the future doesn't exist, it does not exist in the present, as you said. We can't live in the future because by the time we're there, it's the present. And as you mentioned, utopian thinking in modern thought, starting with Thomas Moore, is the idea of a place that doesn't exist. So it could be a kind of geographical conception, it's on the other side of the world, but it can also be a futurist conception that there is actually something inherently utopian or dystopian about all of our modern thinking. And as soon as we embark on the project to define the present in terms of the future, since the future doesn't exist, QED, even if we think we're realists, even if we think we're pragmatists, even if we think we're social democrat progressives who don't have fantastical Marxist ideas, we are still at some level all of us utopians. Because listen, in the traditional society, and of course this was very much based on the idea of change was taking place in the societies, we believe that our parents were not very different than us. This way we never had the feeling that we cannot understand them. And we don't believe that our children are very different than us, so we don't believe that we can also advise them all the time what to do. And then the change starts to accelerate, and suddenly boss your parents and your children becoming difficult to understand for you, totally not transparent for you, they start to look like a different species. And I do believe that this kind of utopian nature of modernity, it is not coming at every single model, but we're experiencing it now more than it was experienced before. And modernity basically is revealing many of the contradiction and hidden assumptions on which it was based. That idea of how we can't understand our parents, can't understand our children, being itself a historical phenomenon, we just did an episode about Annie Ann's "The Years", which seems to me to be the definitive, it's not a fiction, it's a sort of auto-fiction, but autobiographical fictional account of that experience, but dates it, and it dates it in the 1950s and the early 1960s, of France in which that continuity existed, and suddenly the future just crashed in in about 1954, in the form of consumer goods, it arrived in the form of consumer goods, to talk around the dinner table at the Sunday lunches with the family had been in the late 1940s all anchored in history, shared experiences of the war, the First World War, the Paris Commune, the revolution, and within a decade all the talk was about a new television set and new car, and suddenly the generational ties were broken for better and for worse, you can be nostalgic for that or you can think of it as a liberation, it was a liberation, but nonetheless, it happened at a very particular moment in time. There was this new region crime series called "Before In Us", and I don't believe it's a particularly great movie, but I to believe this is a particularly interesting hypothesis, so imagine that there are boats arriving on the new region coast, but there are not people coming from a different place, but new regions coming from a different times, they are weak in coming and they are 19th century in the regions coming and so on, so suddenly I double the fact that in the 1950s and we can see it more and more now, you have the feeling that our society is populated by people who are different in a different time regions, and they are living in one in the same house and they have a totally different experience of time, and this is by the way very much seen today in politics, one of the things when we talk about fragmentation, one of the major fragmentation is fragmentation of time. If you're listening, for example, to President Trump, he speaks in weeks, anything that he's going basically to do, or basically his planning is going to happen in two weeks or three weeks, suddenly the historical times can collapse to the individual life of one person, very powerful person. You go on the other side to the Russian President Putin and he's going to go to the ninth century archives to decide to invade Ukraine or not, and as the job goes, the only person that he consulted was Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible and Tegaterina the Great, it's suddenly living in centuries. I took a lift at exactly because our idea of present, past and future have been so destabilized by this acceleration, that this type of a different temporal regime starts to coexist, it might be in a very kind of a dangerous way. We are not inhibiting the same time. One of the other distinctive features of the Trump version of that politics is that because he changes his mind so often, so the last month has been a good example of this. In Russia, relation to the Iran War. Yesterday he said they were going to do a deal. Today he says I'm going to bomb them to the Stone Age. Tomorrow he says they're going to do a deal again. What that means is that yesterday is suddenly a long time ago. So the future has shrunk much closer to our immediate time horizon. But you push yesterday, which traditionally in modern understanding, yesterday is quite recent. You are quite closely connected to yesterday. But not in Trump world. It's as though that constant chopping and changing about what he said yesterday. That was yesterday. Today is today. Means that yesterday might as well be the 19th century. And you cannot remember it. When you're going to destroy it, you cannot remember it. And this should be opposed to, for example, what the Soviet regime was doing. Soviet regime in order, basically, to keep a certain line to the future should rewrite the past all the time. The famous kind of remaking the photographs to getting trotsky out of the photos of the leaders of the revolution because the idea is that nothing is accidental. And everything is very much pre-designed. And the past goes to the future directly. So future has a very certain past. So if you want to reach the future, you should rewrite the past all the time. And now suddenly, not simply that there is no kind of a long-term future and everything is reversible, but also because of it, there is no past. You cannot remember the yesterday. If everything is changing so fast. So from this point of view, this kind of a changing experience of time, particularly time in politics, is one of the most important characteristics of the period in which we are living. So when people talk about the revolution, normally they talk about the end goal, where you want to go. But in a strange way, the revolution to a great extent is the change of pace, of change. And what you are seeing now is the speed is overwhelming in the age of Trump. So the speed is so overwhelming that direction does not matter. I'm always skeptical of people who want to say of Trump that he's created an Orwellian world because it is particularly Orwellian. But there is the celebrated line from 1984, which was inspired by exactly what you say, the classic Soviet technique of erasing people from the photographs. Winston Smith's job in 1984 is to rewrite yesterday's newspapers because we were at war with this entity and now we're at war with this entity. And the famous line is, who controls the past, controls the future, who controls the present, controls the past. And that does feel to me quite Trumpian. But do know it's interesting because I do believe with Trump, there is something which goes deeper. I'm Bulgarian. We are famous for having probably the highest number of fortune tellers per capita. And one of the interesting story when you basically go and talk to these fortune tellers is that they're telling you something about the future because they believe that they are not seeing the past, the present, that the future is very much distinct. In a certain way, they see the future as something that has already happened, for her the future is already the past. And I had the feeling that there is something particularly about Trump in which the stingsions between past present in the future is not very strong for him. Something that he said, or he wanted to say, something that he said yesterday, or something that he's planning to say tomorrow, all of this the whole time is consumed without being divided in these three pieces that are so important for modernity. And I thought this is really interesting because he's not interested in his predecessors. And in my view, he's not interested in his successors. All this idea that he wants to create almost an onarchic regime, it's not him. He believes that we have our lifetime and our lifetime is going to be longer and we're probably going to become immortal. And this is the other thing that I do believe is dramatically changing how I do have time. We talk about politics, which about acceleration and political developments. But in my view, on anthropological level, something very important happened in the last 20 years, not in the 19th, 50th, but already in the 21st century. On one level, you have all this Silicon Valley crowd who start to believe that people in the videos could be immortal. And they're starting to live as these being their major goal. And this immortality is physical. It's immortality of the body, through technology, it's not immortality of the soul. And on the other side, many things that have been our major devices to fight our own mortality, suddenly losing meaning. Nations are not perceived particularly if you have small nation as being immortal. So you cannot believe that if you're going to die for the nation, you're going to be remembered in hungry theaters. There are too many books being published to believe that if you're going to write a great book, you're going to manage to fight your own mortality. Religion is not what it used to be. So from this point of view, the collapse of the idea of the mortal human. And on the other side, the collapse of the idea of the immortal collected is something that also in my view, dramatically affect the way experienced time and the way we do politics. So I'm going to come on and talk about some of the implications of that because there's all sorts of things that might come out of that. And we're also living through an astonishing demographic change. The age profile is shifted to. I want to come back to that. But just to connect it to Trump and then to the history that we were talking about, democracy depends on separating out past, present and future, representative democracy. I think pure democracy is a very present-centered thing. The Athenians would vote and then tomorrow they would change their mind. But representative democracy has a structure in which the relationship between past, present and future is really crucial. Because it turns on elections and elections presuppose both an accountability for the past and a prospectus for the future. All elections have that aspect to them, to aspects in one. And we can never quite decide which one we're doing. Are we judging them for how they have behaved over the past four years or in Britain one year or even shorter in Bulgaria, I think even shorter than that. But there is a timeframe. Are we judging them for what they did? Or are we judging them for what they're promising? And then the relationship between those two things is a question of judgment for us. Maybe we think we will forgive them for what they did because they're promising us something better or on the other hand we won't. If you collapse them in the Trump style and it's not just him but that version of politics, do you think there is something fundamentally undemocratic about that? Again, I'm wary of that thing of just saying you Trump is a threat to democracy, Trump is the end of this, is the end of that. But in these terms, if past, present and future collapse into the present, both accountability and future promises cease to have meaning. And from this point of view, I do believe that democracy is a very interesting political regime because it managed to reconcile the old idea of the cyclical time with the electoral cycles and the idea of the progressive time with the idea of an open future in which you basically take it for granted and which you are going to have different regimes. So the cyclical time is very important because it allows politicians, political parties to believe that they have more than one lives. You can lose their elections and you're not losing everything. You can come back and this is very important because this is the major incentives for you not to try to stay in power forever even when you have the feeling that people are not very much on your side. But on the other side, this idea that future is open, that we can make mistakes, that we can improve our mistakes, that we can self-corrects. It's very important for the way democracy works because it means that disappointment with the certain government should not be disappointment with democracy. And from this point of view, I always have believed that democracy has won from the mental advantage with respect to the authoritarian regime is that democracy has a mechanism to deal with individual dissatisfaction while the authoritarian regimes do not have this. And that comes what you're talking about, the night of elections. And on the night of elections, I walk back, I walk ahead, I made a judgment. This is the night of elections when I'm voting is the moment in which I'm not simply staying in the present, but for me the present is very much related to the past and to the future. But then something important happened and Trump is important, but Trump, in my view, is just the result of something much more deeper. We don't believe any more that the future is open. And we don't believe that the future is open because suddenly, for important groups of our society, if certain decisions are not going to be taken today, tomorrow is going to be too late. If you are climate activists, you believe that if certain decisions are not going to be taken today, if you're going to come to power in 10 years, it doesn't matter anymore, because basically the life on earth is going to die. And if you aren't going to be the migration activists, you believe that if you're not going to reverse the trend now, in 10 years it's going to be too late. And this kind of a change of time in my view is very much responsible for the polarizing nation of our democracies. So in a certain way, it's not simply that people has different priorities, or for most important, the fears of the fact that the future is foreclosed. push them to do something in my view very important, dramatically increase the intensity of politics. And I totally thought Tukfil was very good at this, because Tukfil noticed something that in my view very few people had noticed. Democracy you represent on the night of the elections, interest, emotions, values, the one thing that you don't represent is intensity. I could care a lot, and you could do not care, Paul Savasquez won votes. And our votes are equally powerful. And from this point of view, this is very much did dramatizing certain things. And this did dramatization in my view is very important part of democracy. And now when the future is for closed, this intensity is pushing for representation. And this is why suddenly the politics is reduced democratic politics to the clash of different things, which is brilliant. There's a great chapter in Tukfil's Democracy in America, which is just called the election, in which he just describes the arc of an American election. This is in the 1830s, but it's completely familiar. And the arc of it is rising hysteria essentially, as the election approaches, everybody decides that everything depends on this election. And the newspapers are full of passion and vitriol and hyperbolic claims. It's all or nothing. Every election is the most important election of our lifetimes. And then the day after the election, everyone goes, "Hmm, what was that all about?" And on they go. And the difference with our politics is that run up to the election feels completely familiar. I can't remember how many American presidential elections I've been told are the most important election in anyone's lifetime. But that sense of catharsis that it dissipates, that's the thing that doesn't seem still to be present in our democracy. That as you say for the people for whom the intensity means genuinely, this could be the last election, not because elections will be abolished, but because we'll never get our chance to correct for what's happened. The day after the election, it's almost more intense. So Brexit was the classic case in Britain. The morning after the election was in some ways more intense than the morning before, which is not how it's meant to work in top billion terms. In top billion terms, the morning after is when sanity is restored. And the morning after Brexit is when you could feel in the air that we were in for a crazy decade. But this is very interesting because this is very much about our idea of the future. If the future is perceived as genuinely open, you basically see democracy as the art of postponing. OK, I want to achieve this. It probably is very sad that it's not going to happen in my generation. But this is going to happen in the next generation and this is the most important. But I told him, this is the moment when the utopia thinking became dystopia thinking. And when suddenly this kind of projects were very much replaced by projections. Because this is the difference between the projects of modernity, the communist projects or fascist projects or any other projects, they go in this future, they are talking about what kind of society they want to build. But they are not exactly telling you when exactly it's going to happen. Horseshoff is the only one who said that 1980 is the moment Soviet Union will become a communist country. But basically nobody took him very literally. So now it's totally different. The idea is that the future cannot be taken for granted anymore. You have all these dystopian fears which are different for different groups of society. And this is why the nature of the election is dramatically changing. If I'm losing this election, I'm losing everything. And this living in projections is very important because unlike the projects, projections have perceived as objective reality as a trap. For example, this is a projections what is going to be the average temperature on Earth in 50 years. There is a projections of what is going to be the size of the population of the Earth, so about certain country and probably their projections of what is going to be the demographic composition of these societies. And I totally doubt that this shift from project to projections is also what is dramatically changing our view for the future, plus the market is doing something interesting. Before the future was very much kind of a collective project. Then suddenly the future was also very much individual project and in the 1950s what you were talking about suddenly because our individual projects became so different. It was so difficult to talk to each other. But now when we talk about the future, we are mostly talking about the futures of the stocks. And we can basically trade that. Trading in futures is very popular on the market. So in a certain way the only thing that has a future and kind of a future that we can value in very particular moments as certain shares of certain companies. In Annie Annos the years it's very interesting because the 1950s to 60s are this transition from a version of French life in which historical memories shape the present to a version of French life in which the consumer future shapes the present. But it co-exist in her telling through 1968-1981 with a lot of democratic hope these moments where it felt like the French people could shape their own future. The events of 1968 metron's first election in 1981 that sense that the future was open. And in her telling that closed and I think she almost describes it as happening in the late 90s watching the news on TV and suddenly noticing that ideas have been replaced by statistics. And this is France. So there were a lot of ideas on TV. The intellectuals had multiple platforms in which to talk about their ideas of the future. And as a French intellectual herself, suddenly noticing what she describes as this completely new phenomenon which is the news became news of statistical projections of the future. And that that was a post 1989 or 1991 or possibly even post 2000 phenomenon. But it shifted the meaning of democracy because suddenly the consumerism was not bound up with ideas of democratic hope but it was bound up with ideas of economic fatalism. This is very important because from this point of the 1989 is an interesting moment because for me not that you understand what is going on is interesting to try to see how we're we're transmitted from the idea of the end of history to the idea of the end of times. And from this point of view, if you're basically rereading for Quiaum, I might be able to slightly misinterpret it because he was read as being totally true and full list. And this is not true. To be honest, in 1989, 1992 in the West, there was not much of a true and full list. There was a shock. Something can expect it happened. And of course, on one level, when your enemy is defeated, you like it, but the other, it was such a surprise that you don't believe that you understand any more what is happening. And it's interesting when you see when the article of Quiaum was written before the book, it was the spring of 1989. When you read the article, you're going to see that he does not assume that Soviet Union is going to disintegrate. He does not assume that borders are going to be changed. For his, the major argument was no revolution is possible anymore. That's it. For him, there was no universalist alternative. And then when he looks at this consumer world, he was not particularly happy. This was kind of a postheroic world. And for him, the only important question was, are people who are basically succeeding the heroes of the consumer world are going to be happy enough of being the heroes of the consumer world? And to remember on the last page of the book, the end of history of the last man, a strange individual emerges and his name is Donald Trump. And basically the question that Quiaum is asking is, are people in him fine with the fact that they're kind of a business celebrities? Or are they going to work for something more? And I think this is an interesting story because this idea of the idea of history means that the future has arrived. And particularly for his, the European, I have experienced this first camp suddenly future from a place in time became a place in geography. The future of Poland was Germany. And this is why if you want to leave to the future, you can wait while your country is going to join European Union or you can go dramatically to the European Union. You cannot imagine that during the Bolshevik revolution, Trotsky will go on a fellowship to Oxford. But many of the people who very much identified with the 1989 revolution, this is exactly what they did because what revolutionaries always want is to live in the future. And if basically living in the future means moving to the West, let's do it. So this kind of idea of the arrival of the future in 1989 was the first disappearance of the future. And then suddenly, in the last decade we ended up with the idea there is no future, the only thing that we see is kind of a dystopian scenarios which are arrival in each other. The other thing that I remember about Fucki Amher's book, The End of History, the book, not the article because as you say the article, which is in itself is a very interesting piece of writing because it anticipates various events. But they're not bland, peaceful events. It anticipates dramatic happenings in the Middle East. It anticipates the possibility of a coup in the Soviet Union. Doesn't look like the end of history, but the book, which is three years later, it has sections in it about the places that Fukuyama think embody a version of the future. And there are two in particular, the European Union is one and Japan is the other. And he sees these two, not the United States. He sees these two as a version of the future that might be awaiting us, which is a future in which nothing happens essentially, because these two societies, he thought, might just get stuck in the sense that things might happen. And I think it's actually quite prophetic about Japan, more than it is about the European Union. The Japanese bubble burst, Japan that seemed to be the future in one sense. Now all those books that were written at the end of the 80s in America, the Japanese are coming, they're buying up Hollywood, they're buying up New York to 21st century is going to be the Japanese century. Fukuyama didn't think that, I think. But he did believe that even if the bubble burst, Japan, it's such a comfortable society, it's an aging society, it's a stable society. It might just carry on almost unchanging. Now, it's not unchanging technological terms, but in political terms, cultural terms. And the word I think he would use for it is that it was a bit boring, that prospect of the future. But the European Union was his other example of this. The European Union, I think, hasn't quite played out in that way. But it was a possible future in which not nothing happens, but as you say, revolution is impossible. Consumers and carries on, it's merry way. The stakes are much lower. But even there, even in the Japanese and the European case, the implication is, some people will not be happy with this. Doesn't need to be Donald Trump. Some people will think, this is not what it means to be human, because to be human is to project yourself forward in a different way, to glory, to risk, to hazard, upside and downside. And in some ways, I think the book, the end of history, surprisingly, is actually quite prophetic. And listen, on this also, Kozhyev was very, very. Kozhyev was extremely prophetic, because he didn't like society that he's talking about. And by the way, he didn't like the society that he was building, working for the European project as being a high bureaucrat in the French government, because according to him, paradoxically, the end of history is the return to a kind of animal world, in which humans are not ready to sacrifice their life anymore for anything. And this problem of consumer society is really interesting, because one of the interesting things about humanity and human destiny was this drive for glory is destructive and could be self-destructive, but it was very distinctive. There was this beautiful writings about why we like so much, Iliada, because the humans, of course, are just a toys in the hands of their old Greek gods, but at the same time, the humans have one thing that not gods have, and this is their brave, and they're brave because they can sacrifice their lives. They can die for something, and the immortal gods cannot die, and because of it, they cannot be brave, they cannot be courageous. And I had the feeling that this idea of stability, it's interesting because culture was very much kind of fascinated with Japan, because he said they managed to ritualize in the way, the idea of sacrifice. So while they have a totally consumer society, they still pretend that they're keeping something like this former heroic tradition. And I find this very, very important because like you, I have the feeling that we are misreading for Koyama. This idea of the arrival of the post-heroic societies was perceived first as good news and not so good news, as a troubling news. And now we are seeing part of it and this kind of return to the idea of glory in its different kind of embodiment is something that we are dealing with. I want to go back to what you said about the essential feature of democracy when it's working is the belief that you can essentially correct for the mistakes of the present. And that you always get a second chance. Democracy is the politics of second chances. One of the other things that Tokville said is, "Democracies make more mistakes than other systems of government, and they correct more mistakes than other systems of government. They aren't the system that doesn't make mistakes. But the mistakes happen on much shorter time horizons because there's always an opportunity to correct." So one way in which democracy imagines the future is the future is the place where you correct for the mistakes of the present. And elections are absolutely geared around that. We get rid of this lot because they screwed up and we hope that this lot does better. But also related to what we're talking about, the other thing that underpins, certainly I think, post-second world war, late 20th century democracy, is the idea of steady progress. So it's two things that might have changed here. As you say, the foreclosing of the future makes the idea that we have time to correct harder to believe. So there's a panic around elections. Maybe they'll win this one and it will be quote unquote the last election. But no one really believes in the idea of steady progress anymore. So that earlier version of the French story that I was describing, it was late Trant Glorieur. It was the years of steadiest growth in Europe, in its history. China went through something similar after 1990, from 45 to 75 in France. You absolutely could believe that next year, there would be more stuff in the shops and you would be slightly better off and that your kids would be better off than you. So it feels to me like two things have become unglued from the idea of democracy, not just the time to correct, but also, as you were suggesting, the projections are not towards progress. Many of the projections are towards something else. And I almost feel that it's the combination of those two things that is so destabilizing. It's almost, democracy might be able to survive losing one or the other. But even in steady economic progress, it might not matter so much this election, even if you think time is short, or if you don't believe in steady economic progress, but you believe that there is time for you to come back and do your thing. It's the loss of both of them that is so destabilizing. And do you know, it's something interesting happening with how you experience time in this type of democracy and crisis. On one level, everything is happening very fast. On the other, you have the feeling that nothing really is important for you is happening. You are changing governments in Bulgaria. We're doing this quite a lot. For example, for the last five years, we have seven or eight parliamentary elections. And everything you're changing can nothing you're changing. And this story that, if there is a change, these changes are not driven by you. And this is about projection, by the way, this is about technologies. And if now we talk about AI as kind of doing things for us and beyond us. People have the feeling, and this is why also they don't believe that you are politically represented it, because political representation always is very much, do you have the feeling that you're living in the same time? Do you have the feeling what we really representing, in my view, is not interest or value solely, we're representing experiences. And here, for me, following your major argument, because I agree with you that there was this both dimension of change of the idea of the future, very important is how we start to compare life. Normally, you compare life to your parents. And paradoxically, when basically modernity in 50, 60, 70s started to speed up, we started to compare our lives to our kids, and our kids were going to do better. And the first thing happened, for example, already 15 years ago, when talking about France, French student went on this protest. And if in 1968, they were shouting, I don't want to live like my parents. Now they said, no, I want to live like my parents. Apart from ranting us, I want pensions to be preserved. I want the pensions, I want everything that they had been enjoying. And in my view, this is very important. And then suddenly also, because of social media, you start to make a comparisons not so much in the frame of your own society, but you start to compare with everywhere. I want to live like, basically, the most powerful and the richest people in the world. Why I don't have this? Why I don't have that? And even the idea of the social mobility is changing dramatically. I'm always going to remember, in 1980s, they had this global value surveys. And there was this question about happiness. And Kenia's on nature, I don't remember which of the tenacious, was as happy as West Germans. There was no correlation between economic development and happiness. 20 years later, there was as happy as the edge of GDP is going to predict. And one of the major reason is what has happened in this 20 years is that suddenly, Africans got a TV screen. They see how others are living. And they're not comparing their life anymore with their parents. An African doctor has all reasons to compare their life with the life of doctors in a much more prosperous countries. And I don't believe this change of comparison is critically important of how also global is going. We're talking a lot about kind of movements of ideas, movement of capital and so on, but it's also a kind of movement of comparisons. You suddenly start to compare yourself to somebody you will never go into compare yourself 20 years ago. Just to finish this part of the conversation because we're going to go on and talk about the future of the future. But can I ask you about your personal experience of that, the Ivan Krustek version of the Annie Erno story, growing up in Bulgaria because after all, you must have lived through a version of it, both access to how other people lived, and then through the late 1980s into the 1990s, the political transformation, which was initially experienced as a shock, creating a very different way of thinking about the future. Did you experience those two things as shocks in a sense? Can you remember the experience of as it were seeing how other people lived and it changing how you thought about time and the future? Can you remember what was your experience of the post-1989 shock? For sure, and listen, I was in a kind of a very privileged position because I was 25 years old in 1990. And in 1990, basically being young and speaking some English or what you believe is English was very important. And the most important thing that I remember was that suddenly time start running. On Friday, you cannot understand any more what you have been thinking on Monday. Now we are telling this story as a kind of a story of all people simply they want to go here and there. But people are changing they have used dramatically and not necessarily simply in a conformist way. One of the things of the acceleration of time is that it is not simply pushing you to think differently, it is changing you. In February 1990, if I remember was the first independent opinion Paul being done in Bulgaria, more than 70% of the Bulgarians claimed that they are ready to sacrifice their life for socialism, six months later majority of the Bulgarians or big plurality wanted to bend the Communist Party. You can say that all this is just two kinds of a conformist story but it is not. People suddenly are seeing the whole differently changing things differently, doing things differently. And this cannot be perceived as authentic scene from outside but seen from inside. This is what was happening. And then also this big change was creating such an openings and positions that were impossible. I was recently told a personal story of somebody which I found is really great in explaining best why these Germans are probably the most unhappy people of everybody of the former Eastern bloc. And the story was somebody was telling me the story of the current German ambassador in France. So as you know there was for several months non-Communist government being elected and the first and last three elections in GDR after the fall of the wall. And there was a person 27 year old coming from a Protestant family very much dissident and because he spoke French, the new government decided that he should be appointed the ambassador to France. And he went to France to become the ambassador to GDR but while probably he was traveling the country disappeared. So he had to go back and he went and started his career in the United Unified Germany's foreign ministry. So 35 years later he ends up as the German ambassador to France. And when he went to the president he gave him basically two documents one that he has from 35 years ago. And I find this very important because if he was in Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, and the European countries, Baltic Republics, most probably he was going to be an ambassador 27. He was going to be a minister in 35. There was a great generation opening for all of us. And in a certain way the problem with this first years of transition is that it was like you always betting on a number. There is no red or black. You either losing big or you are winning big because also many lives keep being destroyed. Many careers keep being destroyed. Many people were not in a position to benefit from the change. And I believe this kind of a moment of a dramatic change where life or changing, life strategies are changing and also the identity of the people are changing. This is things that when basically some process started in the United States, particularly after President Trump came back to power, I had the feeling that there was a difference between Eastern Europe and the West and Europe when we were working at the United States. In Western Europe, my sense was that people have been scared because they have the feeling that they don't understand what is going on. In Eastern Europe, to the way we were scared, we were scared because we had the feeling that we know what was going on. And you remember it in a way. We remember it simply. This was part of our personal experience. You were 25 in 1990. Can you remember as a child, as a teenager when you were at school, did you have a feeling that future was coming or did it come more or less out of the blue? Was the experience that you had say when you were 15 at school in Bulgaria under the old regime of a completely different relationship with the future to the one that you had when you were 25. When I was 15 in Bulgaria, I had the feeling that communism was as stable as nature. And any time you are projecting your own life, you are projecting this within the communist system. And this was going even when you were 18, when you were 20. Of course, we benefited from something very important. And this was that, and I now appreciate it much more than I could have appreciated back then, better to be a young person in a close society that is open-minded, then being a young person in an open society that is closing. After Gorbachev came to power in 1985, suddenly for our generation, and I was class entering university, every year something that was not possible yesterday was becoming possible. So we have been very much socialized in the university years of our life with the idea of great openness and possibilities. It could be real, it could be illusionary, but this was how you were there. But otherwise, to believe that in 15 years you are going to imagine that the regime is collapsing and so on, many people who are going to say that the regime is going to collapse, it was much more moral judgment, how they feel about it. Then the real hope that they were going to do it, and I know it's going to remember something by accident on the very night in which communist leader Todor Zhivkov basically resigned as the leader of the communist party. There was a famous restaurant in Soviet university where students and professors are meeting and talking and drinking, and at this night in the restaurant on the table in which I happened to be was also the person who just nine months later is going to become the first non-communist president of Bulgaria. So he was sitting on the table talking to friends and there was some younger people like me and he said, "Do you know what? I do believe that in your lifetime you are going to see the end of communism." It was November 1989, it was the 10th of November. At this point of view, even for somebody who was in opposition to his life, who was the president, who basically was going to become in opposition in a week, the collapse of the communism was still a very distant future. So this idea of the future being closed, being far away, was incredibly important. And so to believe that everybody knew that the regime is collapsing and so on, this is a reconstructious type of reconstructions that we normally do about many things in our life, but it is not basically at least how I remember most of the people experienced it. That was part one of a two-part conversation and next time I'm talking to Ivan about the future of the future. Where are we going with our ideas of the future and what are we going to do if we don't believe that the future really exists for us? Do join us for that. This has been Past, Present, Future. [BLANK_AUDIO]