 There is a terrible slander being perpetrated against liberalism and democracy. And not by you, not by you, but by many people. And the slander is that liberalism and democracy is essentially shallow and procedural and legalistic and soulless, and soulless in some way. I deny this completely based on my understanding of liberal thinking and of my experience in a liberal society. I regard liberal democracy as one of the supreme achievements of the human spirit and nothing less than that. At that level, liberal democracy is not procedural. It comes with a portrait of the human being, of the person, which is a portrait that includes the person's nobility and dignity and rights and most important of all, the person's complexity. Liberalism is the worldview that recognizes that we live in many realms, that we are compound beings, that we are animals and angels, both. And that we cannot be, our identity cannot be reduced, cannot be reduced to any one of those realms. So I am a religious man, but I am a liberal. I study metaphysics. I've studied metaphysics my whole life, but I am a liberal. I believe that the soul exists, but I am a liberal. I do not believe that science can account for everything in human life, but I am a liberal. And I do not believe that everything I need to know about my life and nature can be seen with the human eye. When you were still involved with what is called national bolshevism, you claimed that it is a worldview that is built on the total and radical negation of the individual and his centrality. So then again, what's your problem with the individual? So first of all, if we, for example, we are working, we are dealing with liberty and the Western understanding of what is freedom, what is individual, what is man, what is right, what is subject of freedom. If we change a little bit the context, for example, if we're coming for Russia, and we have one special Russian word that is called swaboda. Swaboda, that is freedom in Russia. But what does it mean? It means identity. So to be identical to itself, it's something completely, to be close. It is we group swaboda. It is not a Western understanding of the essence of the freedom. So if we change the context of one civilization, Western civilization to the other, we immediately discover the shift of meaning of the basic values, of basic names. For example, for us, man doesn't represent individual. Why we are against individualism? Because individual is the path and the whole for us is the people. That is holistic attitude of Russian tradition. For example, for us, the people, it's much more important than individual. Individual is not the man. So we have different anthropology, holistic anthropology that explains our tsarist orthodox experience as well as communists. But in the first place, it will be interesting to know that in Western political philosophy, we have holistic conceptions of the group. We have communitarian conceptions of the group. We have anti-liberal notions of the community and the society. But secondly, who cares? Nothing is right because it's, nothing is wrong because it's Western and nothing is right because it's Russian. Who cares where it comes from? The question is whether the concept that you're presenting can be philosophically justified and shown to be politically fair. That it has some justice attached to it. I mean, I can give you Hebrew words for freedom. That mean entirely different things. Who cares? The important question is whether or not we agree that human beings are and should be free and what should be the relationship of free individuals to the group and what should be the relationship of political power to the relation between the individual and the group? And you propose something universal. No, no, no. Would you acknowledge that there is something universal? No, there is nothing universal. And my vision and my opinion, there is nothing universal. All depends on the historical context, on the society, on civilization. I don't believe in unique civilization. I believe in many civilizations. But you name the Western civilization and liberalism in the West as the only... No, one of these civilizations, there could be Islamic civilization with completely different understanding of the freedom, of the human, of the individual, of the right, of the death and life, as well as Russian civilization, Chinese civilization. And the problem is now the West is experiencing problem with this universalism because there are five empires who knew understanding with what is the man, what is the right, what is the freedom. I do not subscribe to that paradigm that was presented this morning about the five evil empire. I also think that the malice that is arising that is affecting enlightenment and freedom is actually also breeding deeply in Europe and we must acknowledge that, that the biggest threat to the Enlightenment project is the right wing and the rise of fascism within Europe itself and in America and the notion of populists as well, the rise of populism. So let's not use that five evil empire as an example to try to justify something that I think there is a sort of a basic concept of an understanding as a human being, whatever geography may be, that I know when I am free to think when I am free to express the thought and when I am free to move about. And if you're trying to tell me that that is subject to geography and subject to a certain historical boundaries, then I have a big problem with that. Yes, but I'm a follower of Franz Boas and cultural anthropology that affirms that any society archaic or civilized has its own system and set of values and they are incomparable. There is nothing universal. But that's a very narrow definition. My friend, people are not plants. People have roots, but they are not only roots. They also have branches. And the branches grow very far from the roots. And one of the essential... But the roots grows as well. The roots, the roots can grow. I'm not interfering with the roots. I have spent my life deep in the study of my own tradition. I have no objection to roots. But there is such a thing as hyper-rassination. There is such a thing as too many roots and not enough branches. And one of the things we see about the human soul and if we see it anywhere, I might add, it's in Russian literature and in Russian poetry, is that the soul is mobile. The soul moves. The soul is opportunistic spiritually as it should be, it needs to be. It finds its nourishment wherever it is. This cult of origins and roots is an insult to the potentiality of the soul. Moreover, it is possible, it is possible to acquire, to feel love and loyalty for something that is not something that one has inherited. I'll give you an example I just read. I just read a very moving thing. You will recall that in Vietnam last week, our president, my president, for which I apologize to all of you, my president, my presidents told in Da Nang, he turned to the people at the G20 or whatever G it was and said, you should love home. He quoted the Wizard of Oz, right? You know, you go home, love your home, be with your home and so on. The same week he said that, a book appeared in the United States by a remarkable man called Kaiser Khan. Kaiser Khan is the Pakistani American who at the Democratic Convention pulled the constitution out of his pocket and at the end of this book, I read a sentence that stuck with me for this reason. It goes to what we're saying. He said, I am not an American patriot because I was born here. I am an American patriot because I was not born here. And he went on to explain that the characteristics of American life that make him patriotic, freedom, liberty, you pick anyone you want, were not the case in Pakistan, the country of his youth. And so what he managed to do was travel from one particularism to another and to base his patriotism on universal principles, on universal principles, because otherwise we would all be trapped within these bubbles of ours and we could not have a coherent conversation. The arguments that have just been made were made, I think, for the first time by Abraham Lincoln. We all vote for liberty, but by the same word, we don't mean the same thing. And then a century later, Aizahab Berlin says, he shocked other liberal theorists by claiming that human values are irredeemably diverse. And they come up with two headings, positive liberty, freedom to lead a prescribed form of life and negative freedom that I'm free to the degree to which no individual or group interferes with my liberty. So, and it seems to me that a lot of this distinction between positive and negative liberty is really at the core of what we're talking about, particularly what you have just been saying. It's negative because it opens the room, the space for everybody to make up his own mind about what they want to do, which way they want to go. And that's why people who do not believe the same values as we mostly believe in liberal democracies are perfectly free to exercise their own beliefs in even in our democracy, which is not the case the other way around. You could even go further. Let's say two or three kind words about liberty from. Liberty from religious persecution, I'm for it. Liberty from censorship, I'm for it. Liberty from compelled religious observance, I'm for it. Liberty from racial prejudice, I'm for it. There are all kinds. Liberty from is the beginning of liberty for and freedom is only the beginning of the story of human liberation. It's not the end. There are many, many things that can be done with freedom and many bad things can be done with freedom, including I'm sure some of the things you do every time you write a book. Just kidding. This is it. So, liberty from it has very concrete definition. Liberty from collective identity. All the history of liberalism is liberation from collective identity. That was from church, from religious identity, national identity, gender identity. It's now and tomorrow. But then why would you identify collective identity with coercion? I tell you that it's emancipation from coercion and that coercion is not the same thing as collective identity. God forbid, it should be the same thing as collective identity and that it's a very repressive and authoritarian conception of collective identity to insist that in order for collective identity to be authentic and uninterfered with, you cannot be in any way emancipated from. But emancipation from coercion of humankind is the last point of liberation. And now we are going the last step of this liberalism, liberation, going from having and sharing identity, human identity, with the next step will be the mission on cyborg. And that is cyborg, because we have lost all the links with collective identity, including in the gender, and the optional, gender optional, religion optional, nation optional, society optional, motherland optional. And after that, the last step, and that is the most serious challenge of liberalism, I think, that we experience now, the last step will be human optional. So you could be human, but you could choose not to be human because human is coercion. So humankind is a kind of collective identity, this obliged. So that is transhumanism that is instead, for example, now gender politics after that robot politics, because the robots are individuals and they should be as well recognized in their rights. This is dialectical unmaterialism.