Linsi McGoy Reviewer Reviewer 1 I now have the honor to introduce our keynote speaker, Linsi McGoy, and I'm reading off this paper so that I don't get the details wrong. So, ignorance is bad, information is good, knowledge is power and the way out of political despair is always education. There is no shortage of empty buzzwords regarding the unequivocally negative role rhetoric assigns to ignorance as well as its positive counterpart knowledge. When we dreamt up the outline of the theoretical program of this festival, now called the School of Ignorance, we knew that we wanted to not only inquire the indeed oftentimes negative consequences of conscious withholding of knowledge, for example in a political context, but simultaneously challenge assumptions about these notions as well. When looking for a speaker that is competent at talking about both of these aspects, ignorance as a malignant political tool, as well as the danger of ignoring the inherent ambiguity of the term itself, we knew we had to make Lindsay McGaughy's talk our keynote. I don't know whether it sounds flattering to call someone a luminary of ignorance but for lack of a better term, Lyns McGoy who teaches at the University of Essex could be seen as such. Not only did she present the concepts of deliberate ignorance and the role it plays in global politics to a wider audience with her 2019 book The Unknowers. She also served as the editor for the Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies which appeared in 2022. Yeah, as I understood it, she will talk about economy and the threat to our democracy. Thank you. It's an honor for me to be here today at this festival with you all. I was told that the first keynote speaker who they booked before me dropped out at short notice and frankly I find such honesty and directness. Can you hear me if I do like this? I don't know if this one's on. Can you hear me if I speak like this? I don't know if this one's on. Can you hear me if I speak like this? You can hear me at the back? Okay. I find that directness really, really refreshing and I was very, very happy to have a chance to spend a couple of days with you all here at the festival. I'm gonna speak, I prepared a talk that's around 35 to 40 minutes and some of it doesn't actually talk directly about ignorance but it does touch on people who are sometimes labeled as ignorant because of their voting preferences and that's some field work I've been doing recently across the United States often with people who who do vote for Trump for example who did in the last couple elections or in our planning to vote for him again. And sometimes those folks are written off as so-called deplorables. And though I do lean left myself, I think it's a really, really nasty thing and a problematic way to describe a group of people. So I want to talk about why we shouldn't necessarily be ignorant of some of the economic concerns that are causing them to vote in certain ways. And we can see some of those voting decisions also play out when it comes to different European nations where different types of economic anxieties are increasingly leading people to support more extreme right parties. And I think as a sociologist, we need to know why. So I'll talk about some recent field work that I've been doing across the United States and then I'm going to talk about the problems with how economics sometimes portrays the economy and then I'm going to talk about this last point on reciprocism versus socialism and capitalism and I'm speaking for around 35 to 40 minutes and I know it's hot so I'll try to go quickly but I've got a lot of ground to cover so once again here are the themes I'll be touching on in the talk and I work as both a social theorist and a sociologist who does empirical work mostly interviewing people to understand their lives and how they see the world and one of the reasons I'm really happy to be here today with you, thank you to that previous keynote speaker who dropped out before me, but I'm happy to be here because it's the first chance, I've had a chance to talk with an audience about this recent fieldwork I've been doing across the US. So it's a new project interviewing Americans from a wide range of backgrounds, from low income to rich, from all different ethnicities, about their nation and how they see the future and how they understand the growing political divide in their country. I'm Canadian, so my accent is similar, but I'm not an American. And I'm interested in what you think about this new work, and I'm looking forward to the Q&A. The travel route I'm taking across America, that's awesome, thank you. This is helpful for me but did I need that because people aren't hearing me well in the back I just want to check in with folks. Can you broadly hear me? Okay great. So the route I'm taking it expands and sort of follows a route taken by a very famous Frenchman over 200 years ago when he set sail from France with his close friend, Gustave de Beaumont, to study the recently established Republic in America. And I'm referring to Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote a classic book called Democracy in America. Are people broadly familiar, I'm just wondering, with that book, Democracy in America, written by a figure named Tofil. No problem, that gives me a chance to not bore you when I talk about some of the themes that he touched on, okay? Thank you for that. And I want to also spend some time on these other points. So now I'll turn to the fieldwork that I'm doing in the U.S. Boring Wikipedia slide you might have all seen when you were in elementary school, so sorry to bore you with this basic map again, but for those who haven't been to the States or aren't familiar with it, essentially I'm retracing parts of the journey that Tocqueville and Beaumont took when they traveled. Would this be sacrilegious? This really helps me. You guys don't mind sacrilege, I gather here, I hope, because I don't know where to put that paper and still have the ability to move the slides forward. In essence, what's different between the study that I'm taking and these famous, not so famous because maybe people have forgotten them after 200 years and we just bore political students, study students with their names, but 200 years ago, when they visited the United States, this area by Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, that was then the Western frontier. So the nation was much smaller then. Only 24 states were in the Union. And today we have over, the Americans have over double that number. And so I am traveling to more places territorially than they visited. I'll be visiting places like Nevada and Arizona in the southwest, places like Oregon and Montana in the northwest. And so far I've gone to states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Tennessee, Wisconsin, and Mississippi. And I've done 65 interviews so far and I'm hoping to broadly quadruple that when I'm finished. And I don't drive a car so I often go by Greyhound or I'll stay with Airbnb owners who take pity on me and offer to give me a lift to the next town over for money or whatnot or just for kind, by virtue of their wanting to be kind. And they taught to me a lot. And so that's part of my interview base, people I meet through some of my travels. And all of the places I've gone to so far are so-called red states, where they tend to vote Republican and they support Trump and a couple are swing states like Wisconsin and Minnesota. So rather than being the strict territorial replication of the regions that Tocqueville visited, my main aim is to explore the sociological themes that he touched on in his work. He wanted to understand what role does religion play in the nation. Does it undermine democracy or does it strengthen it? How large a problem is tyranny of the majority, where a shared culture leads people to conform to a dominant viewpoint. He saw the problem as a type of cultural despotism, where people are free in theory and practice, including by law, to vote differently than their family and community. But in practice, cultural norms incline people to fall in line with dominant opinions and conform to a sort of groupthink. He put it this way, to quote, I know of no country where there is, in general, less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America. And if I've offended any Americans in the room, it's really not my intent at all. He had a lot of very nice things to say about the nation too. Indeed, the visit largely changed his mind about what he saw as the superiority of democracy over more autocratic systems. And he spent most of his life persuading his own very posh very aristocratic family and community back in France about this point he was interested in how political leads treat less powerful groups he was a critic of US slavery and the brutal oppression of native groups. And this relates to his overarching question, given that so many groups in the nation at the time were treated as subhuman and were not allowed into the democratic franchise at that time. His question was, is the nation truly a democracy? Does the people's will truly dictate decision-making? And if so, can such a system survive in the future? So he was very interested in whether different types of despotism would take root in the country. And he discusses the concept of despotism constantly in his writing. And I think it's a very important word. And we can and we should use it today, as he did, to discuss different types of economic tyranny and oligarchy. I really I don't think my colleague will mind but we'll find out. I think we should use the same words today economic despotism when we try to look at the problem of rule by the wealthy in the United States and other nations across the world today. So this leads me to a second core difference, which is the fact that the U.S. is an economic and military superpower today in a way that it wasn't 200 years ago when Europe was far more dominant in global decision-making than America was at that time. If its democracy topples, authoritarianism threatens to root even more deeply than it is already rooted across the world, a rooting that's often come about with America's support. Okay, so there are paradoxes here. Yes, its democracy is fledging and hopefully will survive, but it has at all time, in other ways, through its foreign policy helped at times to overrule the will of elected leaders in other nations. It's a paradox. I'm trying to understand these paradox and not perpetuate the ignoring of them that sometimes happens in the academy, for example. And many Americans I've interviewed essentially fear tyranny taking hold domestically. I'm finding a lot of despair about the future, which is different than what Tocqueville found at a time when pride in the first modern democracy was fierce and largely undampened by anxiety. He describes it, and this is the last slightly unfair, this is a map of red versus blue states in the nation. You see the ones that vote Trump versus are likely to vote for the new candidate Harris. He said it essentially he found perpetual self applause when he traveled through the United States, and he said that because of this tendency to triumphalism, there were, as I've quoted here, certain truths Americans can only learn from strangers. But the America I'm traveling is not the same America. I'm founding much more doubt, nostalgia, and wistful recollection of what felt like safer, more peaceful times, especially for the white majority, which is dangerous because it's leading people to long quite dangerously for those earlier times, which to them means Trump trusting in a figure like Trump who claims to put America first. The fact that it is already first in the world and has been for a long time strikes many Americans, especially those on stagnating very low incomes, as not the case. They genuinely feel let down, left behind and abandoned to global forces. They see alienating and frightening and I want to spend time exploring this perception, exploring their fear, because I want to look at the rationality behind their emotions instead of just dismissing or ignoring it, which often tends to happen. And to do so, it's important to stress this key paradox about America's superpower status today. When much of the wealth does not trickle down, and people don't feel any stability from the nation's imperial power, then resentment grows. And I think, again, it's necessary to treat that resentment as a legitimate feeling rather than just dismiss it. So yes, in many ways, America is the largest empire. The head of the World Bank is always an American citizen. It's the world's reserve currency. And citizens of other nations are forced to hang, whether we it or not on its military decisions. That's why as well as interviewing Americans I'm also carrying out interviews with people particularly affected by US power. For example I interviewed a Polish sociologist I spoke with earlier this year for about an hour interview, recording it with his permission. And he said he and his wife would sometimes pull their children into bed with them each night to sleep through the night because of the fears of the nuclear apocalypse impending potentially as Russia's encroachment grew into Ukraine. For people in this region, it's a very real threat. And Trump goes on about pulling out of NATO unless Europe pays its fair share. He's always knocking Europe. Doesn't want to look in his own backyard for some of the problems there. And therefore, that's just one reason. The fact that his military decisions affect how people live in this region, in your region, as well as other areas throughout Europe. It's why other people hang on the results of the coming election almost as closely as Americans sometimes do. But in America themselves, people don't realize this. They feel that America has slipped from a position of power, and they like Trump because he promises to place the nation ahead in their view. So they might be aware that the nation is in some ways number one in terms of national wealth, but they haven't felt the positive effects of that for a long time. And this disconnect has sociological implications. And as I talk about some of these folks, I'll give some photos to give a sense of the terrain and what I see is the beauty of the region and the people I meet. So I like that there's a sort of directness to the American attitude as well as the Austrian one. I love it when they said we need a keynote please just come you know. Be honest with people and it helps. And this guy is voting Trump he made sure to wear his Trump 2024 hat when he met me and he's wearing a shirt that's showing a rat and a rat's bare ass and the slogan on it says I don't give a rat's ass. And I said, did you wear it especially for the interview? He said, no, no. I reach and get what's ever first in the cupboard or the drawer, he said, in the morning. And this woman beside me on her horse, she's 69 years old. on her horse. She's 69 years old, and she and another friend took me out for a ride after helping me to saddle up, and I haven't been on a horse in 20 years. And we rode past a herd of fenced buffalo from a neighboring bison farm, which made me quite nervous, especially because we have no helmets on. And I didn't want to be a wimp and say, can I have a helmet? But really, I really did want a helmet. So there's a sort of cowboy clamoring for freedom that is palpable everywhere I go. And there's also a desire for closeness to nature even in the most urbanized of places. This is a lovely front yard. It happens to be in a very low-income area of Youngstown, Ohio, a region that's lost over 60% of its population since the 1950s due to steel mill closures, and these are plastic deer. What people can't see or live with in the wild, they replicate in their art and their commodities in the symbols they display, hungering for a sense of communion with other animals. The people I speak with, they're very proud of their nation, and I have a lot of respect for that. I've really come to love many of the people who I'm so lucky to meet in these travels. But it's true that national pride often comes from ignoring the ways that one's nation is complicit in harm to other regions. When it comes to foreign policy, for example, they tend to believe propaganda, which claims that America is the world's benevolent policeman and that it's the world's global savior of other nations through things like aid spending. I hear time and time again in my interviews comments like, you know, we can't go on only helping the rest of the world. Sometimes you have to help yourself. you know, we can't go on only helping the rest of the world. Sometimes you have to help yourself. And so they're not informed of the way that the US and other Western nations, like my own nation, Canada, and like European nations, our own neocolonial policies, drain wealth from poorer regions. Or the ways that the American military is used to defend its economic supremacy at the expense of other suffering regions, such as Palestine, a victim today of the sharp side of American empire in its support of Israel, with a lot of support too from Europe, Britain, my own home nation of Canada. So I am complicit in Western military bullying, and so are other people here, even if we don't like it, but we are not all complicit with the same degree of power and I want to spend some time on this point it relates to my second overarching theme of my talk today which is the problem of mainstream economics and how economists and other elite groups tend to depict national wealth take Take a measure like GDP. Yes, the GDP of America is the largest in the world. But it's not the wealthiest country when ranked by income per person. It's eighth, falling behind Luxembourg and Switzerland, Qatar, Norway. Austria is around 14th currently. You beat Germany by three. So I'm sure you're all feeling really rich, right? Maybe some people, but with rising costs of living, growing inflation and austerity policies across most wealthy nations today, few people feel economically secure. And this sociologically is a problem that's well known and openly acknowledged, but also ignored in different ways by both the right and the left. And I want to spend some time talking about this paradox, the paradox of the open secret of our predatory wealth draining economy, which funnels resources to the rich at the expense of most people globally today. Let's talk about a basic problem like GDP. Can you hear me if it's held? It's better this way. Okay, thank you. Let's talk about GDP or even that more granular. Okay, just give me a heads up if you can't get it. Thank you. Thank you. So let's look at GDP or even that more granular level statistic, GDP per capita. It says nothing about the internal distribution of wealth in any nation. So the figure is something that I call a cruel statistic. It's not inaccurate, but in ways that's even worse, because the fact of its partial truthfulness makes it hard to challenge its limited explanatory utility. So it's a cruel fact for the poor, but for the rich, GDP is a great metric, because it lets the rich extol themselves as wealth creators. When a nation's GDP is high, they can say their billions help to create that wealth, but the rub is they're keeping most of it from themselves. And the people I meet on low incomes, they sense the very problem, but they have comparably fewer statistical tools to represent their own pain. They worry, therefore, knowing they live in rich nations like your own, like my own, like the US, they worry that they come across like whiners or ingrates when they admit how much they are struggling. Outside the nation, there's very little sympathy for low-income Americans across the left and the right. I mean, I lean very left myself personally, but I find the left is quite myopic when it comes to this problem. The British left will say, oh, Americans on average are so much wealthier than, say, a child born in Ghana or Bolivia. And that is true, but it's not a particularly useful or empathetic point to relate to pensioners. I meet in America scraping by on very little social security, struggling to buy groceries because there's been a 20% increase in groceries over the past three years. meet in America scraping by on very little Social Security, struggling to buy groceries because there's been a 20% increase in groceries over the past three years. We need better statistics. And it's hard to see your nation as wealthy when you don't share in it. And you have few means at your disposal to command more power over your own daily working lives. And many people I meet work very hard, and still they can't get ahead. And this deserves empathy and political realism, because economic despair breeds violence. Time and again, polling data in the U.S. shows that the economy is the number one issue that people go to the polls on. And every four years people get disappointed because nothing's improving whether you vote for the Dems or the Republicans. There's been a 40-year decline in living standards and both parties have a logical incentive to minimize this reality so that they can portray themselves as the better guardians of the economy. Trump will say, under me, the stock market was up. Hallelujah. Harris will say, and Biden have said, we've got unemployment down. Hallelujah. Okay? But those metrics, too, are also cruel facts. Because stock market gains are not trickling down. It's really the opposite. A bull market tends to make asset prices for big-ticket items because stock market gains are not trickling down. It's really the opposite. A bull market tends to make asset prices for big ticket items like houses and car go up. So stock market gains can cause more pain for the average consumer. And employment being down is not much to celebrate when full-time and overtime jobs don't furnish any secure standard of living. And until recently, this problem wasn't even much discussed. The issue of inequality and predatory behavior by tech barons and stock market super lords wasn't really a hot issue until two major things happened. First the financial crash of 2008 exposed the instability of the global capitalist system and then secondly heterodox economists like Thomas Piketty, the French thinker, began to shift opinions by pointing out that inequality was and is a growing political problem. So sure, people made this point before him, but he found a language to be heard, often using the weapons of statistics from economics against itself in innovative new ways and drawing on new data sources. I'm coming to sort of the final third of my talk. I hope I've got 10 more minutes. Is that okay? Great. I'm not really talking much about interest. I think I kept the organizers ignorant of the fact that I wanted to talk about my new project. So you get me in at the last minute. That's, you know, that's what happens. And we can come back to the Q&A, but I'm using you guys for some new stuff, because tomorrow you'll learn more about ignorance from Sonia and Matthias as well. And they're the real experts working on it right now, because I've turned to this new project where I get to ride a horse. I mean, what could you ask for but that? And so other heterodox thinkers, I'll put some of these names on the board because it's people whose work is starting to really help to develop this unknowing of earlier truths that masquerade as universal truths but are actually partial truths in the field of economics. And such heterodox thinkers include people like Isabel Weber, a German economist who has done important work on the need for price controls, and Marianne Mazzucato, who has done great work to eliminate the wastefulness and corruption that happens whenever the public sector is essentially captured by for-profit players. And details of this can be read in their best-selling books. But what I want to stress in my last ten minutes is that rather than their criticism being a new concern, their work actually returns to earlier thinkers like Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville, who are contrary to how they are often remembered today. They tend to be venerated more by the right than the left. But they are actually anti-capitalist in a lot of their thinking, if you read their work directly, rather than just rely on how it's sometimes discussed today. And to call them anti-capitalist is a slightly controversial remark, so I'll spend some time defending it now. In the era when they wrote, the 18th century in Smith's case, the late 18th century, and the early to mid-19th century in Tocqueville's, the word capitalism and capitalists were not much in common usage. So I call them anti-capitalism for one main reason, So I call them anti-capitalism for one main reason. Because they wrote extensively about the problem of industrial elites and merchant elites corrupting government policies to serve their own ends. And they called for government like restrictions on usury and excessive predatory loan making in Smith's case, and pro-labor regulations to help mitigate corporate threats to life in Tocqueville's case, tend to be voiced much more strongly by anti-capitalist activists in our day. Whereas it's the capitalists today who want the entitlements that Smith and Tocqueville scorned, Capitalists today who want the entitlements that Smith and Tocqueville scorned, the entitlement to keep driving prices high while keeping wages low, and to keep polluting the environment without facing penalty. A great democratic revolution is taking place in our midst, Tocqueville proclaims at the start of his classic book, Democracy in America. But one of the reasons he thought the experiment could fail, why democracy would fail, is the problem of wealth concentration and industrial exploitation of workers. To fight this problem, he offered new ideas, like giving workers an interest in the factory through schemes that could direct salaries to property ownership. He wanted progressive pro-poor inheritance laws. He wrote, what is most important for democracy is not that great fortunes should not exist. We can debate that, but he claimed that it's not the problem that they exist, it's the problems that they should not remain in the same hands. And that way, he said, there are rich men, but they do not form a class. They do form a class today. And that problem is a threat to the survival of the democratic rights and entitlements that we have today. I'm coming to my very last five minutes on reciprocism. But you don't have a slide. That's okay. I mean, I can just finish it. I think we also want to hear... We want to hear fuckhead, I was going to say. I know I do. So I was just happy to read out the last slide and call it a night until we get to say. I know I do. So I was just happy to read out the last slide and call it a night until we get to the main part of the night. But here we've got it thanks to people a lot more techie than me. So my promise, my last line. No, trust me. I don't know. Mike and I, my partners traveled with me here today. We were really excited to hear some art and see some art and hear some art. So let's get to that. But I want to get to my last point. I'll spend three minutes on it. So we know democracy is not compatible with this level of wealth concentration. The question is, will reforms come about peacefully or violently? Another open-ended question is whether we have sufficient language to encompass new forms of pro-equality economic management. And I think, and I'm coming to my final points, I think one of the problems that's thwarting new ideas from emerging is this tendency, our attachment to treating capitalism and socialism as binary opposites. We need new concepts. We need a whole new vocabulary. And I'd like to conclude by suggesting one concept and then asking what you think your own concepts are. What are they and what should they be? What do you think we should call it? The new forms of economic democracy that are necessary to prevent oligarchs from controlling our lives entirely. Terms like socialism and capitalism are helpful and important and I'm not trying to deny that. People have died in defense of them and their lives deserve commemoration. But that's no reason, there is no reason, why we have to restrict our imagination to the horizons of earlier mostly dead thinkers who could not have known the problems that we face in the present and the future, at least not entirely. And a concept which I favor is something called reciprocism. I define it as essentially, it's based on reciprocity, but it extends the notion. And I define it as recognition that interdependent need is holy. Now, I'm not going to start preaching. I already loved the verse from Galatians we heard earlier, so I won't give you any more. We heard it in the wonderful performance. But I do think this definition of reciprocism as recognition that interdependent need is holy is fair to use at a festival described as the church of ignorance. By saying that interdependent need is holy, I mean holy in the broadest sense of that which is exalted as righteous. I treat this usage, I borrow it from the French thinker Emile Durkheim who defined religion not as something that is necessarily characterized by belief in a supernatural deity, but rather he defined it simply as any moral community bounded by their shared subscription to a set of agreed beliefs about morality and behavior. So if you agree with me that the world's richest men and women can't and shouldn't dictate what laws you must obey, how long you must work for, or what food is available to buy or to form yourself, then you and I share a similar morality on the matter of our economic interdependency. If you think that rich men should not be able to curl up your worlds and all your relationships into little balls and juggle them for entertainment, then you are walking with me in a shared pasture, a pasture that we must protect. Because I do think people like Elon Musk are doing that now. He is juggling with us all on the platform formerly known as Twitter, and we are simply jesters in his court. He is benefiting from our need to feel connected to each other. He realizes that our need for connection is something sacred, and he's banking on us not seeing that. If you agree that your life doesn't belong to Elon Musk, then you have already joined me in reciprocated communion. I saved my gum. I thought I'd have it here on stage. Thank you. I thought I'd have it here on stage. I had no idea the performance, I'd never met you before, I didn't know it would mention communion, but I thought that was really beautiful, and so I thought I'd save that with thanks. And as I take that, I think that we have responsibilities to check with each other about how we're all doing and to hold in check the way that others monopolize the means of communication. Reciprocism is just a word I like. Anyone is welcome to it. You will create your own words too, and I'm curious what they are. We can coin new language and new ideas fit for the enormity of the task and the struggles we are on the precipice of. Why? Because the only thing that is certain in life is that not all knowledge is already with us, and by daring to unknow, the miracle of new thinking is born. Amen. Amen. Okay, we now have roughly 10 more minutes for some questions. Do we have a second wireless microphone by the way? Yeah, okay. Okay, could you answer second wireless microphone by the way? Yeah, okay. Blah blah. Yeah, okay. Could you answer with this microphone? And I use this one for questions. Great, perfect, thanks. Okay, do we have any questions? Yeah, let's see. Thank you very much for your beautiful agnostic sermon, I would say. I have a quick question. Thank you very much for your beautiful agnostic sermon, I would say. I have a quick question. Before that, I love your research because it seems like the most beautiful way to do a road trip through the US. And my question is about GDP. I'm not an economist, so is there any alternative ways, statistical ways of evaluating not only the richness of a country, but also looking at the dark side of it? Yeah, that's a really good point. There's something called the Gini coefficient, which essentially is a ratio that tries to measure, essentially, inequality in a nation. And it gets it down to a ratio which shows like the higher it is basically the worse inequality is and the lower it is the better it is the more equal as society is so they do have these other statistics and they're in use and there's a lot of economists who are essentially heterodox economists which is a term for those trying to challenge the mainstream but GDP becomes this convenient one metric that is held up as if to say, oh, if it's not growing as fast as people would like it to do, a country is struggling and needs to expedite measures that might boost GDP and that can involve things like quantitative easing where money is given to different groups, but they often tend to be in easing where money is given to different groups, but they often tend to be in groups who are powerful actors on the stock market, and that can help the stock market to grow, but it doesn't necessarily trickle down. So that's why GDP is a useful, popular way to encompass how well a country's doing, but it actually doesn't say enough about the internal distribution of wealth. So it veils as much as I think it reveals, people are trying to challenge it but a lot of powerful groups for them it's a useful metric so it stays in place thanks Lindsay this was really interesting and I think it's a pretty exciting project and I think especially in the beginning of your talk you touched upon a discomfort that I also have with social science and the humanities and the framings they use sometimes, especially when they talk about right-wing voters, for instance. And then they will use categories such as, I don't know, voter ignorance or the experts versus the ordinary people, quote unquote. So I wonder if we as scientists, social scientists, humanity scholars, also feed into a certain divide and polarization through these sorts of framing. And I have a second question. So I wondered also, because obviously a lot of what you said touches upon the issue of social class and in Austria this is not a category that is used at all I would say in public discourse and I wondered what role that plays in your research thank you, two great questions I mean that's where and I'm really happy that Sonia and Matthias Gross who are speaking will have a chance to talk a little bit about this growing field of ignorant studies, which is trying to look at the political economy of ignorance. knowledge and to contest the view that the most ignorant people in society are low and educated folks for example and that the most knowledgeable are people at the top of different forms of social stratification whether in government or academia or other well-paying professions for the most part and why we can test that is because education can often lead to sort of blind spots that you don't even realize you're aware of because you're treated as being at the highest top of whatever branch of society you've risen to. So few people are pointing out your ignorance to you. You might not even be aware of it yourself because you might be au fait with different latest models or thinking. But when you're stuck in a similar paradigm, you might treat challenges to that paradigm as just useless anomalies rather than seeing them as righteous problems that deserve recognition. And so that's why we say that often, sometimes the most wise people in society are rarely in academia. On your second question, I think it's a big problem. I think the left is paying important attention to many different marginalized groups for necessary reasons, because we see growing racism rising. We see the despicable treatment of migrants, for example, and in today's society, by virtue of the end of formal empires and citizens and new incomers returning to the metropoles like France, Britain, Austria, and elsewhere, returning migrants tend to come from colonized regions and tend to be of color. So often the terrible, despicable treatment of them is coded by color and people tend to strike out most unfortunately against people of color but we also see class prejudice in different ways too and so many white workers are also struggling and are also facing growing grocery bill rises and the problem of difficulty ever envisioning themselves as homeowners or having stability or a sense of any chance to pass on a legacy to their own children's and families and that's why I think some of the older ways of seeing these problems that tend to be become binary in opposition race versus class socialism versus capitalism we need to really try to collapse these monolithic ways of seeing different groups and recognize that struggling migrants of color, for example, have much more in common with white workers than they do with Elon Musk. But if the white worker doesn't have a language to make this point clearly, we shouldn't denigrate her or him and treat them as ignorant, even when they say ignorant things, because that doesn't reach that other beautiful point that I think came up in the performance earlier, the need for new forms of communion and faith and trust, even when you don't know the outcome of an experiment. So I think bringing class and a language of class back to the table as an important matter for people who want equality in a more harmonious society to be realized, that's what we need to do. We need to bring it back to the table and not set it in opposition to other ways that people are oppressed, like through race or gender or sexuality. I think we have time for one more question. Yes. Thanks so much from my side as well. I am trying to formulate the question because I feel like I experienced a kind of paradox in your keynote because you opened with the notion or the necessity of not being ignorant about the economic foundations of people voting right or turning to the right or actively participating in right-wing politics ended with the necessity of coming up with a new language in a way, which to me sounds very non-materialistic approach to overcoming whatever we understand as capital. And I feel like this is something that's especially in Austria, for example, but also in other countries, parties that are called the Communist Party, and they were always bashed by, especially media, for being still holding on to the term communist. And now they gain a lot of traction because they actually do fantastic politics where they have the space to do so. And many people find this more appealing than this kind of, maybe also very academic discourse about the name communist. I'm wondering about this kind of relationship. I mean, the first part of your question, if I understood rightly, I don't fully agree that idealistic discussions and philosophical discussions of idealism need to be juxtaposed against materialism. I think that's been, again, another false binary inheritance from the past, which isn't that useful to us. Because, I mean, to be blunt about it, I mean, if we want to get back into where roots and materialism rose for, like Marx trying to contest Hegel's focus on idealism by stressing that the economy precedes the different types of the more cerebral parts of the dialectic that Hegel was interested in. These guys were arguing this out in the early 19th century and we've still inherited this problematic binary between materialism and idealism. They are always linked. That was part of the dialectic. And I have some work I'm trying to develop which I think, I don't know why even, because it's not that new, I realize, on analytical trilecticism, I call it, trilecticism, in order to contest the binarism of the dialectic. But the dialectic itself wasn't even that binary. Hegel always talked in properties of three himself. So I think we need to get past this opposition between materialism and idealism. On your second point, I think what you're asking is a very radical point, and I think it needs to be said more. Do we need to relinquish sometimes our attachment to words like communism and socialism, given some of their baggage, given how they alienate people at times? And that's part of my concern. I think the answer is yes, but try to say that to people who might have lost people, you know, in various struggles of the past, or had family members who gave their lives for these types of fights, and it's very hard to convince groups. But both systems, ways of typifying how the economy is managed, and how states are run, have such horrendous bloody histories. If we're going to still use language like communism we have to confront and face the atrocities carried out in its name and not just deny that happened. And same with capitalism, we need to be realists about how many people have died for the gods of the market to be able to trample upon the rights of ordinary citizens. So we need new language but you made a good point that sometimes new language can mystify just as much as it clarifies. So we can't expect everyone to necessarily like our language or to learn it easily. And we can't denounce people if they don't use the right words, because that's what I think happens on the left a lot. Oh, they're just not, they don't have the latest buzzword or correct way of saying something. And I do think then what the right always accuses the left of, that we're engaged in cancel culture. I think that is true. Oh, you don't call yourself a communist? Get out of my meeting. Well, let's say you don't call yourself a communist? Stay and tell us why. If there are no more questions, okay, one more. Am I understanding it right that you are pointing out that there are different ideas attached to different words, like communism, that there are different ideas attached to different words, like communism, that there are in different social spheres different ideas of communism, and that we need somehow more sensitivity for the different terminologies that are in this very different social spheres. I think that's exactly what I'm saying. And that really relates to that excellent question just now. Because your point is really, should the material realities trump rhetorical discrepancies? And I think the answer is yes. And a better way of saying that is how you just put it. Should we be sensitive to people's different social worlds and how words like communism are used in those worlds and try to understand their worlds first, their local cultures, why they treat a word some way rather than us impressing upon them our usage of the word. If you're asking that, I fully agree. And I think that's a great point. Okay. One more? I just would love to read a novel you wrote about your journeys through America. I really love that one. Awesome. I still need the contract so I'm going to come back and try to brainstorm with you on that because I'd love you all to read it to things Yeah, I just wanted to mention that I tried to invite a person that has been living with hunters and gatherers for a longer time and he was here in the h5 and told us about his experience and Those people's, most hunters and gatherers do not use numbers they don't, sincerely they don't have numbers and they reject numbers because they open the door to some abstractions they don't want so talking about GDP, that's maybe one of these abuses they had in mind. I would love to get to know more about that and learn the person's name who you mentioned.