Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt

©Martin Burckhardt / leonardo.ai

This is a translation of a conversation which was being held in German.

Martin Burckhardt: Your book The Identity Trap reminded me a little of Susan Neumann's last book, with whom I had a long conversation about on Ex nihilo. Her book, like yours, deals with an ideology commonly referred to as Woke, which sees itself as the progressive conscience of a toxic, patriarchal, and racist society. In the new German edition of your Identity Trap, there's a foreword discussing the events of October 7. You write: When it comes to Hamas' sadistic killing spree, however, it seems as if tactics about the danger of micro-aggressions can flow seamlessly into jubilant speeches about macro-aggressions. What can explain this remarkable indifference to the atrocities committed by Hamas? It makes me wonder how your book, as a kind of ideological critique, would have turned out if you had started it after October 7.

Yascha Mounk: Similarly, my book shows the history of the emergence and triumph of a new ideology that's fundamentally changed what it means to be on the left today. An ideology that isn't universalist or humanist but says we're profoundly shaped by which identity group we're born into. Many of the emerging themes I described in my book can help explain why there was this considerable indifference in parts of the intellectual, artistic, and scientific milieu towards the Hamas terrorist attack because their worldview is a very Manichean one, which divides the world into whites and people of colour, into colonizers and those colonized. This view implies that we must think intersectionally, meaning that every good environmentalist and every good anti-racist must also be on the side of the Palestinians. Of course, the world and the Middle East are much more complicated than that. I have massive sorrow for the civilian victims on both sides. There are, of course, countless civilian victims on the Palestinian side – but writing off the Israelis as white colonialists, the majority of whom are from the Middle East and don’t have a skin color any whiter than most Palestinians, who’ve been expelled from these middle countries such as Iraq and Iran and Morocco and have nowhere else to go – that’s a simplistic worldview that stems from the Identity Synthesis characterizing our age of identity. If the book had been written after October 7th, I’d have said this more explicitly by including these events and not just in the foreword. But I think the book itself would have been very similar.

MB: Would you have imagined at a young age that one day you’d even think about such questions, as a teenager in the hedonistic Munich of the early 90s? YM: I don’t think I was particularly hedonistic as a teenager beyond loving to play soccer and occasionally drinking a wheat beer or eating a veal sausage, which seemed pretty normal. So perhaps I wouldn't have been surprised to find myself thinking about such things. I suppose what would have shocked me is how alienated I've become from this new version of the left because I grew up in a very left-wing family. My grandparents were communists for a long time, having served time in the 1920s and 30s for their beliefs and ultimately expelled by the Polish communist regime in 1968, partly for anti-Semitic reasons, before becoming social democrats. So, I joined the SPD at the age of 13. For me, the left's core was always a kind of universalism. At that time in Germany, just today, even though the AFD is more extreme, it was the right saying immigration is a danger to the country – that mixing different cultures is something that must be guarded against, that we must preserve German cultural purity from global influences. And it was the left organizing multicultural festivals, perhaps in a somewhat clichéd way, saying, ‘We're happy welcoming the cultural influences of people coming from all over the world into our country.’ At the time, we thought people from different cultures could communicate and get along with each other – that we could converse with everyone as we became stronger through our differences. But it's different today because it's precisely these left-wing milieus saying, ‘No, when you look at keywords such as cultural appropriation, if someone who comes from another mainstream culture inspired by African clothing, Turkish cuisine, or other wonderful cultural products and conditions from all over the world, perhaps it's something problematic we should be wary of it.’ So, while I've stuck to the same values, it’s some of the left that hasn’t, and it’s strange to me that it’s not these issues that I think about but more how I’ve curiously become alienated from parts of the new left. MB: So you're not explicitly describing Woke thinking here, just as you generally - and I like this very much - refrain from prematurely belittling your research subject, especially on moral grounds. So let's start by asking what, in terms of your biographical experience, made you want to write this particular book? YM: There are two reasons. The first is that having worked in the USA for several years as a professor, I've experienced the influence of this ideology. I started noticing five to ten years ago how many students were no longer comfortable debating specific topics and that they were becoming afraid of expressing opinions someone might consider problematic...how they were increasingly defining themselves through their identity – often through race; how Americans use this term as what they considered the correct prism for understanding the world in general. For a while, numerous fanatics were fully infected by this ideology and wanted to impose it on others, but since then, I've noticed less fanaticism. I think it’s because this ideology’s permeated the American Educational system to such an extent that younger Americans now see these ideas as natural from having a grade-school indoctrination of them, meaning that today there's less fanaticism as they simply see the world this way because of their teacher’s indoctrination. Of course, they're certainly open to other ideas, but their underlying assumption consists of the basic categories of Identity Synthesis ingrained into them at an early age. At the same time, I should probably also share something personal: I was born, raised, and lived in Germany until I went to university in England when I was 18. And although I'm of Jewish descent, religion has never really been an important factor for me. But in Germany, it’s always made me feel a little alienated – especially in the 1980s and 90s, when the German relationship to its past and, therefore, of course, to Jews was such a big part of the German search for identity and its self-image – meaning many people didn't treat me as an average person, but as a Jew. These weren’t necessarily negative experiences of anti-Semitism but were, more often than not, “positive” ones that were a kind of Philo-Semitism of people trying to prove their regret for their ancestral past or how much they loved me because of my ethnicity. I always found it very uncomfortable because it made it harder for me to feel like a true equal. Despite all good intentions, it alienated me from people. And then, when I was in the USA --- MB: Were you happy about that? YM: Initially, I was glad. But then, as this ideology and ideas became more and more influential, I was suddenly no longer a representative of the victim group but, as a white man, a representative of the perpetrator group. And then I was expected to treat representatives or members of the so-called victim group the same way as I’d sometimes been treated as a child and teenager in Germany, which I hadn't liked at all. So I didn't want to treat others like that…perhaps that’s one of the reasons for my fundamental resistance to these forms of mutual treatment. MB: I'm a bit older than you – and my theoretical thinking began with the amazement and astonishment I experienced when I saw the historical time rift we were experiencing with digitalisation when computers first arrived on the scene. Looking back, culturally, I was grasping the computer as a Universal Machine, as the idea that universalism was being built into a global social operating system. If I'd been told in the early 90s that people would suddenly become obsessively obsessed with their identity, it would have seemed like this gigantic cultural conflict with our actual task of embracing this new Operating System. Of course, that's a big paradox. While we’ve adopted this networked form of cosmopolitanism in our daily lives, as they used to say, ‘the World has become one big Village.’ Yet the opposite has happened – the villages have become the world, particularly as a phantom pain inflated and enlarged into the absurd. YM: Absolutely, in two respects. So firstly, the hope in the 90s was saying: ‘It's too expensive for me to talk to someone in Africa, India, or China.' Consequently, people sought out those as similar to themselves as possible. They banded into smaller identity groups, saying, ‘What's crucial to me is this niche identity that defines who I am; that's what defines my political thinking.' This was the astonishing surprise that led to identity groups becoming so relevant. And, of course, at the same time, the world becomes a village in the sense that we suddenly know everything about everyone. Just as we could peep into our neighbors' windows in a small village, now we can spy on each other on the Internet. In general, I prefer the big city to the village because I think the village has countless mechanisms that encourage homogeneity, that encourage fear of risk, and that encourage sameness of thought. And this, of course, is also the case with our social media in the 21st century. MB: I live in Berlin, and it's wonderful to go out on the street and hang out with consumers in complete anonymity…it’s absolutely wonderful! And you use this concept for characterizing your subject matter: the idea of Identity Synthesis. If we remember that a term like identity politics is something of a contradictio in adiecto, it makes perfect sense. It says nothing other than that we're dealing with a construct here. This, in turn, leads us to conclude that the identity isn't self-explanatory but that a socially acceptable avatar is being constructed. And wouldn't this suggest that this notion of Identity Synthesis is evidence of a deep insecurity of identity? This is what Christopher Lasch already noted in the 1970s in his Culture of Narcissism. YM: That's very interesting. Yes, of course, it's often the case that if I have a natural identity, then I don't need to prove it. I don't always have to point to it or necessarily need to refer to it. And it's at the moment when we're feeling a bit insecure about our own identity that this temptation arises to really make it the center of our self and our social position. I think that's plausible. MB: One point that made me wonder about your metaphor of the trap is my doubt that society has maneuvered itself into a trap with Identity Synthesis but allows itself to be baited instead. The strange thing here is that there's no tangible authority, no puppet master who could have laid the bait. If a lure had indeed been laid out, it would have been much more autogenous or, as a thinker from the 1920s aptly remarked, if desire is the father of thought, then it is the mother of illusion. But what's the desire that finds its phantasmatic redemption in synthesizing identity? What is in it that people seek? YM: Well, the trap metaphor is a beautiful thought to me for essentially three reasons. A trap is something with a lure that draws people into it – and it can trap good, righteous, intelligent people, so there’s nothing inherently shameful about falling into such a trap – and yet, the trap naturally undermines the goals that someone has…if you fall into the trap, then you can't achieve what you hoped for. I believe that, in this case, all three facts are true. So, what's the lure of Identity Synthesis? It’s that we have real injustices in our societies, such as racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia – of which Identity Synthesis claims to be the best, most radical, most uncompromising way of combating these injustices – which is enticing for the many people who also share my political values. And yet, this bait is ultimately a trap because instead of building a more harmonious society where we can have greater solidarity with each other and better understand each other, the long-term result is a society characterized by a zero-sum game between different ethnic and religious groups competing for whatever recognition they get from society, and whatever resources they get from the state. And that's why this ideology won’t build a fairer society. It will eventually lead to a society where the historical majority has even more privileges and dominates, making it deeply counterproductive. Now, it is true that perhaps a flaw in this metaphor is that nobody is setting its bait. I'm sure there's certainly not someone here who's deliberately letting people fall into the trap. But of course, there are the intellectuals who have built out this ideology, often from sincere motives, that have unwittingly constructed its lure over decades. So, while it’s true that the matter of trap and its bait implies someone having laid its lure... And there is perhaps no equivalent for that. MB: If I were you, I'd simply use the terms Phantom Pain and Phantom Lust: Phantom pain actually confronts me with a loss. In other words, the old logic of somewheres and anywheres as described by Paul Mason. Globalization is an unbelievable imposition, an insane, even narcissistic humiliation – and it puts an end to this wandering ego as it's forced into a form of cosmopolitanism, which ultimately breaks down certain cultural lines. As an exemplary, when I asked my Pakistani students, who, naturally had smartphones and were all well-informed about all the cool tools available in the world of 3D modeling: 'Would you swap your smartphone for a dumbphone?' Their response: ‘Are you crazy, why would I want a dumbphone? No thank-you...I want to keep my smartphone!' But, of course, you have to pay an entry ticket for it. And the Entréebillet price is very steep. Couldn't it be that this Identity Question has become so expensive precisely because, basically, people in society aren't prepared to pay for this confrontation of historical upheaval? I'd say that digitalization has shaken our identity beyond belief by imposing a cosmopolitanism on people who don't quite understand themselves as of yet. And that, of course, kills the idea of an individual having self-identity. You pay for your smartphone and everything that accompanies it with your own culture. You have to somehow give up something in exchange for this cosmopolitanism. So it makes sense to me that people, especially when they are shaken, experience a phantom pain - something disappears that’s no longer there - that they actually enter into a magical conjuration spell of this lost good. And I think Identity Politics precisely has this function. YM: That's very interesting. But I think there are sociological reasons to view this explanation with skepticism. The fact is that the people who are most affected by this transformation aren't necessarily those who pay the most homage to identity synthesis. This town in Northern England, which once was dominated by coal mining, isn’t anymore and is now searching for a reinvention. These aren’t necessarily the people who are now relying on these new identities; on the contrary, it’s the more educated castes that live in the trendier districts of the big cities. So I think there's a new search for a sub-national identity among people who might not have had such a strong sense of identity and once would have described themselves as citizens of the world, saying: 'I have to define myself by the color of my skin, by my sexual orientation, by my gender.' And I think this stems from a broader development in which the fundamental values of society have changed. There is a nice model, for instance, where we first had a sense of honor in the 18th century in aristocratic circles: ‘If you insult or hurt me in any way, then in cases of doubt, I demand satisfaction in the form of a duel with a sword.’ Then we had a culture of dignity for a long time when if you said: 'You stink,’ I’d no longer have to defend my honor with clashing swords. Instead, I’d say: 'I am not affected by your insults. It doesn't affect my honor or dignity; I will just ignore it.' And now we have a culture of victim status, where you gain a position partly by placing yourself in a marginalized victim group. And I think that's a huge psychological burden for a lot of very privileged people. They might be wealthy white women who are doing very well but don’t want to be seen in this new status system as being privileged and, therefore, having a lower status, so they look for something to make them appear as part of this trendy new group of invented victims. That would explain why the more privileged caste is defining themselves so strongly through these identity groups. I note an interesting observation in my book: In the US, there are many multi-ethnic institutions where people get along reasonably well. At McDonald’s, for example, there are white, black, and Latino employees who, by and large, get along quite well. While on the Harvard campus, they say we can't communicate. I believe this is partly because the people who work at McDonald's have genuine concerns and problems. In contrast, people on the Harvard campus have more leisure time to be angry about being at the bottom of this new status system and are searching for ways to move up somehow. MB: This proves that this form of identity is a social sculpture, a construct, which is an interesting point. The most peculiar thing about Identity Synthesis is that it suddenly moves these positions into the center of attention that would have been entirely marginal a decade ago, and that even highly wealthy institutions, associations, and universities surrender to it without complaint. You could understand this if you were dealing with the promise of a great future. But in reality, entering into this thing is accompanied by a public display of self-flagellation. Why this neg-identity? Why this disruption of your own self-image? YM: I’ve written about why Identity Synthesis is such a powerful lure in the book. How many well-meaning people have fallen for this ideology and the mechanisms that have enabled them to exert incredible power, even in institutions? What I call the short march through the institutions and social media's role in this phenomenon. But there is an underlying question I think is also essential. And it has to do with why the values of the liberal democratic basic order, universalism, and humanism aren't being defended – why so many leaders of institutions fail to stand up for their values. I find this particularly glaring in the USA, where so many people somehow fail to take a risk for something they believe in. This is where I think that, as Universalists, we need to look at ourselves and see why we've been paying lip service to these values for decades without really feeling them or accepting them as guiding our lives. And I certainly notice some differences in this area. I think Germany is a little better off than the USA; while France may have different challenges, it is perhaps a little better off than Germany. MB: That doesn't quite explain, shall we say, the willingness with which an institution like the Royal Society surrendered overnight to a Twitter mob in 2015. It's one of those stories where there are these bizarre moments when you say: How can it be that the scapegoat of the Middle Ages has suddenly returned? I had a conversation with Robert Pfaller, an Austrian philosopher, about shame. And he offhandedly said that certain things are shameful, which I can certainly understand. These are things that I - deeply influenced by universalism - couldn't have imagined in the 80s and 90s, that this kind of bellicosity would arise and that people would give in so readily. YM: But I think my answer helps to explain that because what's here is that the world has become a village, and then there's this pressure from social media which makes you feel like you have to do something by acting immediately. And this instinct to act before thinking about condemning someone, without first knowing the circumstances, is all the stronger if you don't have a foundation of values that point in the other direction. What amazes me is that in recent years almost every leader of virtually every institution does precisely what seems to minimize risk – and what makes it least likely that he or she will lose his or her job. No matter where the values are. And that has something to do with not having a counterweight or a social elite that says we stand for these values that give us meaning and perhaps identity. And we're willing to take a risk for these values. MB: You have gone to quite a lot of trouble in your book – which I think is absolutely appropriate - to follow the traces of Identity Synthesis. There is a line starting from Michel Foucault's social Dispositif, the idea that power is linked less to people than institutions, discourses, and intellectual entities. What the early Foucault, still under the influence of Ernst Cassirer, called the Code of Representation. He later explained this with the image of the Panopticon as a surveillance apparatus that virtually understands the members of society as prisoners whose steps are monitored, but which, because the surveillance apparatus inscribes itself into their innermost being, leads them to monitor themselves. This is probably one of the darkest images of society imaginable. Explain to me: how is it possible – once again as a child's question – that a society that’s given itself over to a cheerfully hedonistic anything-goes attitude may have risen to such an extensive sinister self-image? YM: Yes, that is one of the strange staircase jokes of history; how is it that a hedonistic Munich turns into this kind of mutual self-surveillance? It's also a question directed at Michel Foucault's influence on the intellectual world. Because Foucault saw the Panopticon as the greatest danger to society, he didn't want to live in a society where we're constantly being watched, where we're like prisoners in such a prison, where we have to be afraid of always being seen and therefore driven to discipline ourselves before the guard has even done so. And yet, for me, Foucault stands at the beginning of an intellectual tradition that, through some twists and turns, ultimately created this intellectual superstructure that’s led us to doing precisely this in society today – that we monitor each other on Twitter, where someone could offensively misunderstand any word or could serve as a potential cause for a shitstorm. That is indeed surprising. And I think here, Foucault would take a very negative, critical view of the ideology he helped inspire. He’d probably believe that his ideas ultimately helped create the very world he was worried about for good reasons. But of course, Foucault is not alone in this. It is not uncommon in the history of intellectual and political thought for the ideas of an exciting and sophisticated theorist to ultimately inspire institutions that the theorist himself would have found objectionable. MB: But it's a fascinating novelty, isn’t it? And that's why the image of the Panopticon is also interesting because it was, and is, taken by the Woke ideology as an image of the state system– from the top down. You could say that today’s self-surveillance isn't the big brother. Instead, it's the many little brothers who are networked through social media and, through the scaling capacity of the networks, can and have assumed incredible political power. It’s an entirely new form of totalitarianism from below, a grassroots totalitarianism. That's new, isn't it? YM: This is indeed new, although, of course, Foucault already had this in mind. In the image of the Panopticon, it is a guard – that is, someone who is part of a hierarchy – who makes us discipline ourselves. But in general, he rethought the concept of power where it doesn't flow from the top down, from the legislator to the police to the individual citizen who is then disciplined – but from everyone to everyone, which means that today, our conversation constitutes a discourse and is, therefore, an expression of power. And in this respect, this idea that we reprimand each other from little brother to little brother, so to speak, is already predetermined. In a completely different tradition that I’m closer to, I’d say John Stuart Mills also recognized this. Because when he wrote about freedom of speech, he was writing about the state censor who throws someone in prison for saying something offensive. But at the same time, he also noted the tyranny of society is ultimately much more frightening and problematic precisely because its presence is so ubiquitous. He recognized that early on, in Victorian England, people were more afraid of expressing themselves in a way that deviated from the mainstream than the policeman who might knock on the door and throw them in jail. So, in that respect, I think it's an older phenomenon that’s become much more robust thanks to social media and its much greater power. MB: In Foucault's work – and I absolutely agree with your analysis – you naturally find this form of anonymized, mindless power, which is present in every phase of society, in discourses and the like. For this reason, you can also ultimately make up these constructions that the social system is, as such, toxic, patriarchal, and oppressive in all kinds of ways. Nevertheless, I find this architectural question so interesting because we have totalitarianism from below. That is something else. It's suddenly an assumption of power that doesn't come from the institution. When you discussed the short march through the institutions, this is a form of deinstitutionalization, where the '68ers marched their entire generation through the institutions. Today, you simply press a button, and a Twitter feed is sent out into the world, which, I'd say, is a short circuit, an intellectual short circuit at that. And that's the next phenomenon that I find interesting. You could almost see Angela Merkel as a patron saint of this thinking, with an incredible lack of foresight: 'Governing by sight!' So, society isn't giving the next generation a prospectus that you could say would last a generation or a view that might last 30 years. Instead, we have these short circuits that are fundamentally incredible losses of our time horizon, which brings up tribalistically good feelings, so to speak, while letting this ethic of responsibility, which used to be an essential concept, fly out of the window, doesn't it? YM: That's interesting, as I hadn't thought about it that way. Part of the mechanism, which may be a slightly different idea, is that we only see ourselves as abstractions. That's the case on Twitter, where we don't see someone as a whole human being with good and bad sides, with family and friends and so on, but as a representative of a political opinion or a political point of view. And if this political view does not correspond to ours, then you can violently destroy this person. That's part of it. And, of course, we saw it in the summer of 2020, when many American institutions tore themselves apart, during which a considerable number of people were thrown out of their jobs under absurd circumstances based on allegations they had somehow made racist remarks or were somehow problematic. And that, of course, was partly a reaction to the terrible murder of George Floyd. But it was no coincidence it was in the middle of the pandemic when people weren't sitting together in flesh and blood in the conference room, reading each other's body language, seeing each other as physically real people, but just on a little box on Zoom: as an abstraction. And then, of course, it's easier to say that this person is a terrible, dangerous, bigoted danger that must now be eliminated. MB: Yes, if taken as a game character, your idea of this strategic essentialism, which you attribute to Kimberly Crenshaw, makes perfect sense. If it's to my advantage to belong to a marginalized group, that's what I do. And then I believe society owes me compensation or reparation. Structurally, this amounts to something observable in American universities: the falsification of identity. People pretend to be members of a minority, leading to bizarre situations where pretendians occupy the chairs of Indigenous Studies, while understandably, the genuinely indigenous people bitterly complain about it. Structurally, you could speak of a counterfeit coinage or perhaps consult a term that C.G. Jung emitted, of a psychic inflation. In other words, in fantasy worlds, you give yourself a grandeur and an identity you don't actually possess. YM: I find two very interesting things about this phenomenon. The first is it shows that, once again, we're in a new cultural phase that isn't about honor or dignity but about victim status. Because why should white people pretend to be black in the USA? Why should people turn themselves into pretendians, pretending to have this indigenous ancestry? Of course, there continues to be discrimination against African Americans in the USA. Of course, the life of the average indigenous American isn't very good. But in certain privileged milieus, there's a new respect for every member of the victimized group. So if someone who hasn't personally experienced the actual structural injustices many black people and indigenous people have encountered over decades and centuries in the US but has a good college degree and wants to pursue an academic career, then suddenly it's to their advantage to pretend to be black or indigenous. And that reveals something very interesting and perverse about our society. The second thing I'd like to say is that, of course, it shows the incredible and discriminatory stereotyping of identity synthesis. There’s a very influential document in the USA many institutions use for internal training purposes, which is supposed to bear witness to the cultural signs of white supremacy. It claims that punctuality, for example, is a problematic sign of white culture, as is a love of the written word – which is purely racist. Claiming that Chinese people, for example, historically have no love of the written word is absurd. And to argue that only white people value punctuality comes from the stereotype of a right-wing German politician in the 1980s, now being presented as a tremendous progressive insight. It's the same with pretenders that pretend to be black. I'm thinking, for example, of Jessica Krug, a professor at George Washington University in the USA who pretended to be an Afro-Latina. And watching some of her performances, it was the dumbest xenophobic parody of how a black person or a person from Latin America appears. And that's precisely why her colleagues courted her as being particularly authentic and insightful. I don't think that says anything good about their worldview. MB: We're seeing the transition from a political to a moral economy. You also touch on this point when you write about the CEOs of large companies bowing to woke thinking just to look good to the outside world and maintain industrial peace. Do you believe that a return to liberalism will be the solution? Or shouldn't we get to the root of the problem and ask where this strange desire to create identities comes from? YM: First of all, there isn't a problem with wanting to create identities. And, of course, we're all shaped by our identity, which influences our worldview to a certain extent. I have no problem with any of that. That's why I'm not talking about identity politics as a problem, as such, because there have always been identity politicians, if you want to call them that, from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King, who have fought real injustices in very successful and courageous ways. The question is: 'What is our vision of a society that would do better? Have we historically managed to make progress? How have we made that progress? And in what ways can we hope to make further progress?' And here, it's evident to me that the Identity Synthesis view is fundamentally wrong. Because it says that the only purpose of universalist values is to close our eyes to how we have been discriminated against and how unjust society is. That's why we haven't made any progress at all. Society is as unjust today as it was 100 or 50, or 25 years ago. Thirdly, the way to build a better society is to ensure that we treat each other and the state treats us all in a way that always depends and will always depend on which group we belong to. My alternative to this is to say no; universalism can continue to serve. Of course, these liberal-democratic values have never been fully realized; there has always been discrimination. But when we have made progress, it's precisely because politicians like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King have said you must honor these values. When you talk about all men being born equal on the Fourth of July, you can't justify slavery at the same time. Martin Luther King said the bench of justice never honored the check they wrote to African Americans. But he didn't say, now tear up this check, but the bank must finally cash this check. And that, I believe, is the right way to make further progress. Liberalism, universalism, and the basic liberal-democratic order are not ideologies of the status quo. They are an incentive for how we can build a better society. And I would like to say one more thing. Remembering liberal democratic or liberal values may not be meaningful for most people. Most people may not even be able to articulate these values very well. But I believe these values are deeply rooted in Germany, France, the USA, and many other countries worldwide. It's when people are treated in an illiberal way when we stray too far from these values – that’s when people say, 'I can't quite articulate what bothers me about this, but it can't be like this.' That's not the way we should be steering our society. And there, I believe, is undoubtedly the reservoir of goodwill and support for these values that gives me great hope that we can ultimately successfully tackle Identity Synthesis. MB: If you were to write a little book for a child, say a science fiction novel set in the year 2050, what would be the things that you could give the child as a promise that there might be a cool, new society? YM: We're building a cool, new society that's much more diverse than it was in the past and in which people are much less discriminated against than they once were. And I think it'll lead to many incredible new scientific discoveries, cultural achievements, and experimentation. But for that to happen, we have to reject the idea that cultural appropriation is a problem, reject the notion that we can't understand one another when we stand at different intersections of identity, and so on. We have to...ultimately pay homage to these liberal, humanist values not only because I think they're a more realistic way to move forward but also because they offer a much more inspiring vision of what we aspire a society to be in the first place.

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