Ex nihilo - Podcast English

Wie ist es möglich, dass eine Gesellschaft in den Niedergang abgleitet? Nun muss man es nicht gleich mit Otto von Bismarck halten, dem ein bitterböses Bonmot über die Logik des Niedergangs zugeschrieben wird (»Die erste Generation schafft Vermögen, die zweite verwaltet Vermögen, die dritte studiert Kunstgeschichte«). Man sollte vielmehr vorsichtig erwägen, dass man es hier mit einem großen Rätsel zu tun hat.Zu diesem Rätsel fand der junge Altphilologe David Engels auf einem Umweg. Auf eine Reihe von Themenvorschlägen antwortete sein Doktorvater mit der trockenen Bemerkung: »Aber wollten Sie nicht immer mal eine Dissertation über das römische Vorzeichenwesen schreiben?« Der geneigte Leser mag dabei, sofern er kein geschulter Altphilologe ist, an die heiligen Hühner denken, die vor der Seeschlacht bei Drepana das Futter verweigerten. Der Feldherr Publius Claudius Pulcher ließ sie kurzerhand über Bord werfen: Wenn sie nicht fressen wollten, sollten sie eben trinken. Die Schlacht ging verloren.Auf Engels’ Liste hatte dieses Thema nicht gestanden. Dass er, heute Präsident der Oswald Spengler Society, sich ihm dann auf gut 800 Seiten genähert hat, hat selbst etwas von einem Omen. Denn so wurde er für die abergläubischen, unbewussten Seiten einer Epoche sensibilisiert. Und weil er zudem ein kritischer Zeitgenosse ist, erschien ihm der langsame Niedergang der römischen Republik und ihr Abrutschen in den Autoritarismus wie ein Menetekel unserer Gegenwart.Mag der Spenglersche Blick auch tiefe Wahrheiten über Dekadenzphänomene zutage fördern, so führte er Engels doch ebenso die Grenzen dieser Kulturkritik vor Augen. Ausgerechnet die Künstliche Intelligenz, dieser »Pygmalion par excellence«, wie er schreibt, lässt ihn an der Zyklizität des Geschichtlichen zweifeln. Umso drängender stellt sich die Frage, wie und warum man sich just in dem Maße, in dem man die Kontrolle über das Geschehen verliert, in Autoritarismus und Totalitätsphantasien flüchtet. Ist das Autoritäre bloß ein Symptom des Verfalls? Oder ist es der verzweifelte Versuch, ein Geschehen zu bannen, das sich längst jeder Steuerung entzieht?David Engels ist ein belgischer Althistoriker und Publizist. Er lehrte Römische Geschichte an der Freien Universität Brüssel (ULB), arbeitete als Chefanalyst am Instytut Zachodni in Posen und lehrt heute am Katholischen Institut für Höhere Studien (ICES) in La Roche-sur-Yon. Daneben ist er als Herausgeber tätig, betreibt einen YouTube-Kanal und schreibt den Substack »memoria mundi«.David Engels hat (u.a.) publiziert:Themenverwandt Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

There is nothing better than when a difficult topic dissolves into light-hearted banter, leaving you accidentally face-to-face with a true comédie humaine. And, despite the somber subject matter, our conversation with Sabrina Joy Stevens was marked by a wonderful lightness. Now, having survived several apocalypses in quick succession, one begins to harbor deep doubts about the meaning of political activism. That’s why, after more than two decades in the Outrage Industry, Sabrina Joy Stevens turned her back on Groupthink Inc. in 2020. Then again, this period has provided her with a veritable treasure trove of experiences. Anyone wishing to understand the fascinoma of woken thinking – and, by extension, the mystery of how our political discourse has slipped into the realm of Moral Economics – will find such insider knowledge worth its weight in gold. If the road to hell, as one wise thinker has observed, is paved with good intentions, introspection reveals that these lofty goals often serve as little more than a veneer, beneath which entirely different motivations lie. On the one hand, there is the downright addictive dopamine rush that sets in when a petition just posted online grows into a viral campaign; on the other, there is the fantasy of self-empowerment, almost obsessively fixated on bringing down a supposed wrongdoer. Viewing this Erotic Resentment through the lens of individuated psychology reveals that Wokistan’s political activism is inextricably linked to the rise of the Smartphone, Social Media and the triumph of the Attention Economy. In any case, being trapped in one’s own echo chamber amounts to declaring war on reality itself.Since starting her Leaving Groupthink Inc. Substack, Sabrina Joy Stevens has been working as a speaker and strategy consultant, helping her clients to navigate the complexities of the Moral Economy. Her work and commitment have been widely recognized in various media outlets, including The Boston Globe, MSNBC, TIME.com, Education Week, and The Hill.Related Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

If you’d asked if the market for urban singles looking to date might be organized simply with the swipe of a finger in 2010, most people would disbelievingly have shaken their heads—and with great conviction. But just how much the World has changed since then is evident from a look at the numbers alone. More than half of American couples who married in 2024 met on a dating app. Naturally, this shift has serious implications, one of which is evident in the observation that a decisive bottleneck for young men lies in their inability to make a lasting impression in a photograph. Consequently, what is ominously labeled the Attention Economy has become a highly personal, even intimate matter—an issue that, for Orion Taraban, a San Francisco-based psychologist who treats young men, isn’t merely a daily practice but has led him to understand the Dating Market as a form of Economy.Orion Taraban is a truly unusual figure in his field, having specialized in coaching a large cohort of young men in the art of having a successful and fulfilling life—and sharing his insights with a large audience through his highly successful PsycHacks YouTube channel. And because he’s a product of his time, Taraban isn’t just available for personal conversations—he can also be experienced as an Avatar—an AI entity that carries his voice and thoughts and can serve his clients 24/7.Orion Taraban has publishedRelated Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

When the remarkable anthropologist Mary Douglas observed that a civilization begins where someone cannot be held responsible for misdeeds committed in the dreams of others, we can conclude, by extension, that a culture begins its decline when it succumbs to phantastical enemy stereotypes. The current Free Speech crisis we’re witnessing is symptomatic of this decline. And having enacted blasphemy laws in the name of diversity—Great Britain stands out in particular. This brought our attention to Ben Jones, who, as Director of the Free Speech Union, deals daily with cases where an overreaching State punishes unwelcome expressions of opinion in a manner reminiscent of George Orwell’s Thoughtcrimes.Dr. Ben Jones is the Case Management Director at the Free Speech Union, founded in 2020 by Toby Young. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Warwick after completing his dissertation titled The Lived Experiences of Ex-Muslims in Great Britain. His interest in issues of Freedom of Speech began when he was elected President and Chair of the Exeter Union Debate Society, which was originally founded in 1893 at the University of Exeter. His book, Island of Strangers, was published in 2026Bewn Jones has publishedRelated Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

Es ist unübersehbar, dass die heutige Gesellschaft in eine tiefe Identitätskrise hineingerutscht ist. Mag sich dies im bürgerlichen Lager als diffuses Unbehagen an der digitalen Moderne artikulieren, spricht der flagrante Terrorismus eine unmissverständliche Sprache. Aber weil die politischen Beobachter dies an politische Ideologien zu knüpfen bestrebt sind, wird leicht übersehen, dass man es im wesentlichen mit einem Jugendphänomen zu tun hat. Denn zwei Drittel der Terrorverdächtigen haben, weil jünger als achtzehn Jahre, noch nicht einmal die Strafmündigkeit erreicht. Der Politikwissenschaftler Florian Hartleb, dessen Räsonnement mit der Frage des Populismus begann, wurde auf dieses Phänomen aufmerksam, als er im Jahr 2016 zum Gutachter des Terrorismusfalls am Münchner Olympia Einkaufszentrum bestallt wurde. Dies war für ihn insoweit erhellend, als dieser Fall die überkommenen Deutungsschemata außer Kraft setzte: Denn der Mörder, der mit Hilfe eines gefälschten Facebook-Accounts (der eine attraktive junge Frau zeigte) neun Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund in eine Mac Donalds-Filiale gelockt und getötet hatte, war selbst ein Deutsch-Iraner, der, um nicht mit den verachteten Türken verwechselt werden, sich den Namen David zugelegt hatte und sich in rassistischen Überlegenheitsphantasien entging. Es war das Aktenstudium dieses psychologisch verwickelten Falls, der Florian Hartleb tiefer in die Frage einsteigen ließ und ihn mit einem weitgehend unverstandenen Phänomen konfrontierte: dem jugendlichen Terrorismus,Florain Hartleb, der als Politikwissenschaftler verschiedene Professuren innehatte, lehrt seit 2025 internationale Beziehungen an der Modul Universität Wien. Er schaut zudem auf eine wechselvolle Karriere im politischen Betrieb zurück, im Bundestag, beim Bundesverband der mittelständischen Wirtschaft, sowie in der Konrad Adenauer- und der Bertelsmann-Stiftung. Zudem war als Forschungsdirektor beim Europäischen Forschungsinstitut für Terrorismusbekämpfung und Konfliktprävention (EICTP) tätig.Florian Hartleb hat veröffentlichtThemenverwandt Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

There are those words whose effects are so powerful that many using them are unaware they are standing before an idealized reflection of themselves. Undoubtedly, the word Liberalism falls into this category. Everyone using it thinks they know what it means, but if you take a closer look, you realize you’re dealing with a Protean entity that eludes understanding precisely to the extent that you try to grasp it. Historian Helena Rosenblatt, who had previously studied 18th- and 19th- century French thinkers, such as Rousseau and Benjamin Constant, but also the Parisian Salon of Madame de Staël, was asked by her publisher to write a history of Liberalism. Upon embarking on this task, she discovered the concept was not as evident as it seemed, and to elude becoming lost in the labyrinth of grand ideas, she did something highly unusual: namely, she looked into the word itself and found that Liberalism didn’t appear on the political scene until 1813. Tracing its conceptual origins back to Cicero, she found that liberalitas refers to a free Roman citizen’s civic virtue of behaving liberally toward one another by giving and receiving to promote the common good. But because this points not only to a class-based privilege but also to a gender–based one, she notes with wonderful self-irony that when applied to women, it meant something entirely different: »Being a liberal woman wasn’t something women aspired to.«What emerges from our conversation is that Liberalism is a Protean entity whose meaning has fluctuated radically over the centuries. From Roman civic duty to the Enlightenment’s tolerance to today’s polarized debates—each era has produced its own liberal precursors. And while today’s discourses, in their rhetorical exuberance, are quick to proclaim a post-Liberal Age, The Lost History of Liberalism serves as a kind of admonition, or rather, a reminder of just how much we owe to this desire for freedom.Helena Rosenblatt is a Swedish historian specializing in intellectual history. She is currently a Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and a member of the Board of Editors for both the Tocqueville Review and Global Intellectual History Review. Dr. Rosenblatt is currently researching and writing a biography on the life of Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein.Helena Rosenblatt has publishedRelated Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

If, precisely to the extent that the field of education has championed lofty principles, a decline in education has set in, the question arises: Where did this come from? Psychologist Peter Gray, for whom the question of learning has become his life’s work (and who, for many years, wrote his widely read Freedom to Learn column in Psychology Today), recalls his school days in the 1950s, especially the great deal of freedom he had. No homework in Elementary School, no lugging materials back and forth between home and classroom—once you were outside, you were outside and free to play. And in our conversation, this seemingly trivial detail becomes the litmus test, revealing a fundamental shift: School is no longer a confined space but a totalizing system permeating every aspect of children’s lives.Guided by his own son’s school experience, Peter Gray has spent decades researching how children learn when they are allowed to—in Hunter-Gatherer societies, where teaching is taboo, and at the Sudbury Valley School, where there are no curricula or grades, only radical autonomy. His thesis: Conventional schools have degenerated into disciplinary institutions that hit the most successful students the hardest. The rates of anxiety and depression do not merely reflect the parental pressure weighing on students; even more serious is how misguided ideals of perfection go hand in hand with the loss of free play—and thus the very sphere where creativity and critical thinking are fostered.Peter Gray worked for many years as a research professor at Boston College. While his research initially focused on the brains and hormonal balance of mice, the issue of Education and Learning became a cause close to his heart. Author of a widely used introductory text on Psychology (now in its 8th edition), he’s also written numerous texts on how children learn. His Psychology Today column made him an influential voice for the Alliance of Self-Directed Education. Peter Gray has published (selection) Related Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

Because the second volume of The Psychology of the Machine series is set to be released in a few days, we sat down for a brief workshop to discuss why such an undertaking is necessary and the potential gap that must be bridged along the way. In a curious way, the story leads back to the suppressed childhood questions of our history, which we encounter today in ghostly form as social puzzles that are difficult to decipher, if not even as a form of collective psychological inflation. When Nietzsche said that madness is rare in individuals, »but the rule among groups, parties, peoples, and eras,« this implies that people may, without realizing it, work themselves up into a form of collective delusion. And this disorder becomes all the more serious in that it can confront us not only in the form of an economy but also as a supposed reality principle. Deciphering this collective unconscious is the purpose of the Psychology of the Machine, which is an attempt to gain clarity regarding the prevailing Gesellschaftstriebwerk, or our Social Drive Mechanism. Strangely enough, this brings back that conceptual figure which Freud had relegated to the private boudoir with his superego, but originally, in Johann Christian August Heinroth’s Textbook on Disorders of Mental Life, was held to have a collective significance he’d termed the Über-Uns—as that shared fate affecting us all, whether it comes in the form of populism, artificial intelligence, or whatever else.Weil in ein paar Tagen der zweite Band der Psychologie der Maschine herauskommen wird, haben wir uns hingesetzt und ein kleines Werkstattgespräch durchgeführt, das zum einen die Frage behandelt, warum ein solches Unterfangen nötig ist, zum anderen, was das Potenzialgefälle ist, das dabei überwunden werden muss. Auf eine kuriose Weise führt die Geschichte zu den ausgeblendeten Kinderfragen unserer Geschichte zurück, die uns heute, in gespenstischer Form, als schwer entzifferbare Gesellschaftsrätsel, wenn nicht überhaupt als eine Form der kollektiven psychischen Inflation begegnen. Wenn Nietzsche gesagt hat, dass der Irrsinn bei Einzelnen etwas Seltenes ist, »aber bei Gruppen, Parteien, Völkern, Zeiten die Regel«, so impliziert dies, dass es Zeiten geben mag, die sich, ohne sich darüber im Klaren zu sein, in eine Form der kollektiven Verblendung hineinsteigern können. Und diese Störung ist umso gravierender, als sie uns in Gestalt einer Ökonomie und damit als vermeintliches ›Realitätsprinzip‹ gegenübertreten kann. Dieses kollektive Unbewusste zu entziffern ist der Sinn der Psychologie der Maschine, der Versuch mithin, sich über das obwaltende Gesellschaftstriebwerk Klarheit zu verschaffen. Auf eine kuriose Weise ist damit eine Gedankenfigur reaktiviert, die Freud mit seinem Über-Ich ins Boudoir des Privaten verlagert hat, die aber ursprünglich, in Johann Christian August Heinroths Lehrbuch der Störungen des Seelenlebens, als Über-Uns eine kollektive Bedeutung besaß – als jenes gemeinsame Schicksal, das uns allen widerfährt, mag es nun als Populismus, als Künstliche Intelligenz oder als was auch immer daherkommen.Related Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

As the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, a seemingly endless summer of globalization began—thirty golden years in which the only question worth asking was how to stimulate demand. But what happens when the world turns on its own axis and the problem is no longer finding consumers, but actually producing anything at all? David Baverez, a financial strategist who has spent the past decade observing China from Hong Kong, argues that 2022 marks precisely such a rupture: not only the return of geopolitical conflicts but also a fundamental shift from a peace economy to a war economy—an economy measured not by GDP per capita, but by who controls the supply bottlenecks. The question is whether Europe, caught between American financial hegemony and Chinese dominance in production, still has anything to offer—or whether the freedom to think is already a luxury of the past. Despite the somber topic, the conversation with David Baverez was laced with lightheartedness, due in no small part to Baverez’s exceptionally witty way of bringing big issues down to earth and driving the point home.David Baverez is a forward-thinking French private investor and author who sometimes describes himself as a Business Angel/Demon on his Medium page. After spending 15 years between London and Boston — including a decade at Fidelity Investments managing European and Global Equity funds — he co-founded KDA Capital with Krishnan Sadasivam in 2005, returning all funds to investors at the end of 2010 in an early and contrarian bet against European sovereign debt. He has since lived in Hong Kong as a private investor and author who has written on the emergence of the New China on global economics, including Welcome to the War Economy! He is also a columnist for various media outlets, including L’Opinion, Les Echos, and Sans doute.David Baverez has publishedRelated Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

There’s a certain irony in how the American Dream—that grand promise of merit-based advancement—has begun devouring its own children. In 2011, Jacob Savage arrived in Hollywood with modest expectations: a Princeton degree, solid writing skills, and a reasonable hope of landing a mid-level television writer’s job. But what he found was a system that had quietly rewritten its own rules. When he submitted a pilot episode that a TV studio executive liked enough to invite him into the writers’ room, that same executive ultimately decided that having another white person on the team wasn’t appropriate. »I was told very specifically on several occasions that the reason was because of things I couldn’t change about myself.« Paradoxically, it was primarily older white men who enforced such corporate policies. What led Savage to view this fate not as a personal failure but as the lot of an entire lost generation was a weekend trip with old friends who, like him, had completed Ivy League educations but, with one exception, had all found themselves in precarious jobs. This made him write essay, The Lost Generation in Compact magazine, which was widerly read and brought him to our attention. In it, Savage goes a step further, backing up the logic of the closed door with hard statistical data that reveals how DEI policy ultimately amounts to systematic discrimination against young white men:»But nothing explains the New Media story quite like Vox, whose explainers dominated 2010s discourse and whose internal demographics capture the decade’s professional shift. Back in 2013, when Ezra Klein came under fire for his startup’s lack of diversity, Vox Media was 82 percent male and 88 percent white. By 2022, the company was just 37 percent male and 59 percent white, and by 2025, leadership was 73 percent female.«Jacob Savage, who laconically describes himself as a suburban dad from Los Angeles, spends his time selling concert tickets when he’s not taking care of his two sons. His article on The Lost Generation has earned him significant media coverage across various podcasts and newspapers. He also runs the Substack Jacob Savage.Related Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe