Steven Bartlett

Yes.

What would it feel like to live in a very different kind of society?

How would you feel living in a place where suddenly the values shifted?

They were different.

For better or for worse.

We think, for example, free speech is a value.

And we've been arguing about it here.

What does it mean?

What's hate speech?

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.