Why Did the Future Arrive First in Russia? | Peter Pomerantsev

Hidden Forces

Demetri Kofinas

Business, Government

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 24 January 2022

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In Episode 229 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Peter Pomerantsev, a Soviet-born British journalist, former TV producer, and author about the break-down in belief systems and shared mythologies that we are experiencing in the West and why this has left so many people feeling increasingly cynical about the world and indifferent towards the future.

Peter was early in his diagnosis, having first experienced this phenomenon during his time living and working in Russia. It was not long after that experience and the publication of his first book "Nothing is True, But Everything Is Possible" that he began to notice some of the things that he wrote about in that book—the cynicism, the sense of surreality, the nostalgia, and what he described as an "aggressive apathy"—showing up in Western countries. And he began to ask himself the question, "Why did the future arrive first in Russia?"

This is the question that we seek to answer in today's episode, because 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. 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 but disappeared, when any independent standard of truth has become so elusive that people are willing to 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. It leads to only one place and that is a postmodern, repressive society that uses the language and institutions of democratic capitalism for authoritarian ends.

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Episode Recorded on 01/14/2022

Transcript

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0:00.0	What's up everybody? My name is Dmitri Kofinas and you're listening to Hidden Forces,
0:06.0	a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives
0:14.0	and to learn how to think critically, but the systems of power shaping our world.
0:19.0	My guest in this week's episode is Peter Pomerotsov, a Soviet-born British journalist and former TV producer
0:26.0	who has written two extraordinary books which together have done more to help me understand the predicament
0:32.0	in which we find ourselves today with respect to our relationship to truth, identity and meaning.
0:38.0	Then probably anything else I've read since starting this podcast and that's saying a lot
0:43.0	because I've read a lot of books and articles and listened to a lot of podcasts
0:47.0	trying to figure out what it is that's really happening to us.
0:51.0	What is it that's responsible for this creeping sense of unreality?
0:56.0	Where so many of the things we've taken for granted no longer seem to work
1:00.0	and where people feel increasingly paranoid about everything.
1:04.0	Myself included, I feel this way.
1:06.0	And I've come to the view that what's responsible is a breakdown in shared belief systems.
1:11.0	That what's happened is that the stories that we tell ourselves about each other
1:15.0	and about who we are in a deeply communal sense are breaking down.
1:20.0	Not only are they breaking down, but they no longer work and they've been shown in many instances to be frauds.
1:27.0	Whether we're talking about the lip service, paid democracy and human rights
1:31.0	as justifications for wars of aggression and occupation,
1:35.0	or the idea that somehow trillions of dollars can be conjured out of thin air to support asset prices
1:41.0	but that somehow we have to go on pretending that it's really about supporting the economy
1:46.0	and that we really do live in a free market capitalist system.
	...

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