Steven Bartlett

How do we measure it?

And so on.

What if you suddenly found yourself waking up one morning in a society where free speech was bad?

You know, where it wasn't, you didn't automatically assume that it was good.

We also have an assumption that there is some kind of meritocracy in our societies, right?

That if you try hard and work hard and maybe you're lucky and study, then you can be successful.

What if you found yourself suddenly in a society where that wasn't true and actually the only way to get ahead was to have a cousin in the ruling party?

Being able to imagine that and think about it is important for understanding this bigger issue of democratic decline.

Like, what's the change of our system that we're trying to avoid?

And what does it feel like to people who experience that?

This has been a subject of a lot of my books.

So that book, Iron Curtain, is about it.

I've written a lot about Ukraine and what happened when the Russians occupied eastern Ukraine.

They did this thing.

They did regime change.

They changed the rules of the society.

I think we don't reflect enough about what are the deep rules of the societies we live in and what we would lose if we lost them.

So then you don't believe in inevitability.

Yeah.

I mean, human nature is like we know how it works.