Global Empowerment Meeting (GEM18), April 17-18, 2018

Keynote Session: The Road to Unfreedom: How our Intuitive Sense of Us and Them Makes us Vulnerable to Tyranny

The world seems to be in a path of de-democratization. But this is not the first but the third time this happens. What can be learned from previous experiences? What are the connections between today’s authoritarianism and those of the past? Does democracy require shared factuality -a shared understanding of the facts of objective reality within epistemic communities - and is this now being challenged? Are these epistemic communities breaking down? If so, what are the fault lines of that breakdown? Are new technologies making us more vulnerable to psychological manipulation relative to the propaganda of previous decades? And how does this manipulation work?

Speaker: Timothy Snyder, Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and Permanent Fellow at the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna