That society loses its way in phantasmata and ideological labyrinths may be attributable to the human-all-too-human – but it’s strange in a culture that declares science and objectivity its highest values. In this context, Wilfred Reilly’s work is enlightening in an old-fashioned sense: a political scientist undertakes the task of comparing and contrasting morality trends with the data and finds the results deeply troubling. As in the case of the Black Lives Matter movement, where the data found that incidents of brutal police violence were in the low double-digit range, while the general public was convinced it was an almost endemic behavior that’s been documented thousands of times. Doesn’t this raise several difficult-to-explain questions of cognitive dissonance? How are such contradictions even possible in a society that considers itself enlightened? What does this have to do with our present Attention Economy? How is it possible that a culture of victimization develops in the shadow of the moral economy? All of these questions are touched upon in conversation with Wilfred Reilly.

Wilfred Reilly teaches political science at Kentucky State University, and his books Hoax and Taboo are widely discussed in the American public.

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Since Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the country has been at war, with the rest of the world having registered this state of exception in horror, as one of the post-war foundations of order has started to slip. Wherever events come rushing in, it's not uncommon for the soberly detached, skeptical view of the social analyst to fall by the wayside. But this is precisely what drew our attention to Volodymyr Ishchenko, who, in his book Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War, links the events in Ukraine with the post-Soviet phenomenon of disintegration and decomposition. A point of reference he makes is Antonio Gramsci's conception of an Interregnum as that never-ending in-between spatiality in which ‘the old will not die and the new will not be born’ - an interim period in which those in power lack legitimacy, representing precisely an ideal breeding ground for Authoritarianism, Caesarism and even acts of aggression and violence of all kinds. What's so striking about his interpretation is that, gifted with this perspective, events in Ukraine are no longer seen as a special case but as a magnifying glass through which the crisis of representation that also afflicts the West is given a surprisingly new interpretation.

Volodymyr Ishchenko is a sociologist and research associate at the Institute for East European Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. He writes for The Guardian, Al Jazeera, New Left Review, and Jacobin, among others. Verso Books published his book Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War in 2024.

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Examining the question of how the Universal Machine represents an epistemic force - this chapter explores how a Machine Culture’s socioplastic nature inevitably subjects its societies to a certain order.

Long before Columbus sets off to cross the Atlantic, the European Middle Ages is already the New World that it will seek and find in America.

Speaker: Hopkins Stanley

Sound-Design: Martin Burckhardt

Music: Hopkins Stanley & Martin Burckhardt

From: The Philosophy of the Machine, translated by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt. (to be published)

To listen to previous chapters:

Philosophy of the Machine 11

Philosophy of the Machine 10

Philosophy of the Machine 9

Philosophy of the Machine 8

Philosophy of the Machine 7

Philosophy of the Machine 6

Philosophy of the Machine 5

Philosophy of the Machine 4

Philosophy of the Machine 3

Philosophy of the Machine 2

Philosophy of the Machine 1

Here is the Link to the German Publication by Matthes & Seitz