The Tucker Carlson Encounter: Alexander Dugin

Tucker Carlson: Alexander Dugin is a 62-year-old Russian academic philosopher. He's spent his life in Moscow. He was an anti-Soviet dissident as a young man, and now he is famous the world over in the English language press anyway, as "Putin's brain." But he is not a political figure here in Russia. He is once again a philosopher, and his ideas are deeply offensive to some people. In August of 2022, his only daughter was murdered in Moscow when a car bomb killed her. U.S. intelligence says she was murdered by the Ukrainian government. And we take that at face value. But what's interesting is that, once again, Alexander Dugin is not a military leader. He's not a close daily advisor to Vladimir Putin. He is a writer who writes about big ideas. And for this, his books have been banned by the Biden administration in the United States. You cannot buy them on Amazon. Banning books in the United States because the ideas inside are too dangerous. He is often described again in the English language press as "far right." We'll let you assess, but we wanted to talk to him about some of his ideas, these ideas that are so dangerous that his only daughter was murdered over them, and his books banned in the United States. And so we're happy to have him join us now. Mr. Dugin, thank you very much.

Alexander Dugin: Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. And welcome to Moscow.

Tucker Carlson: Of course. Thank you. So we were talking off camera. Actually, we were having a conversation that we were not going to film. Just interested to meet you. But what you said was so interesting, that we got a couple of cameras and put this together. And my question to you is, what do you think is happening in the English language countries? And I said, all of them: The United States, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia all at once decided to turn - seemed to - turn against themselves with this great turmoil. And some of the behavior seem very self-destructive. And where do you think, as an observer, that comes from?

Alexander Dugin: So I could just suggest, express my reading of that. It demands a little patience. So I think that everything started with individualism. So individualism, that was a wrong understanding of the human nature, of the nature of man. When you identify individualism with the man, with the human nature, you cut all their relations to everything else. So you have a very special idea of the subject, philosophical subject as individual, and everything started in the Anglo-Saxon World with Protestant reform and with Nominalism before that, nominalist atitude that there are no ideas, only things, only individual things. So individual, it was the key and is still the key concept that was put in the center of a liberal ideology and liberalism as, in my reading, it is a kind of historical and cultural and political and philosophical process of liberation, of individual of any kind of collective identify, collective or that transcends individual, and that started with refuse of Catholic Church as collective identify of empire, Western empire as collective identify, after that, it was a revolt against a nationalist state as collective identify in favor of a purely civil Society, after that war, there was a big fight of the 20th century between liberalism and communism and fascism, and liberalism has won once more, and after the fall of the Soviet Union there was only liberalism, and Francis Fukuyama has pointed out correctly that there are no more ideologies except of liberialism, and liberalism, that was liberation of these individuals from any kind of collective identify. There were only two collective identities to liberate from Gender Identify, because it is collective identify, you are man or a woman collectively. So you couldn't be alone, so a liberation from gender, and that has led to transgenders, to LGBT and new form of sexual individualism, so sex is something optional, and that was not just deviation of liberalism, that was necessary elements of implementation and the vector of this liberal ideology, and the last step that is not yet totally made is liberation from human identity, humanity optional, and now we are choosing of you in the West, you are choosing the sex, you want, as you want and the last step in this process of liberalism, implementation of liberalism will mean precisely the human optional, so you can choose your individual identify to be human, not to be human, That has a name Transhumanism, post-humanism, Singularity, Artificial Intelligence, Klaus Schwab or Kurzweil or Harati, they openly declare that it is inevitable future of humanity, so we arrive to the historical terminal station that we finally five centuries ago, we have embarked on this train and now we are arriving at the last station. So that is my reading, and when all the elements, all the phases of that, you cut the tradition with the past. So you are no more Protestant, You are a Secular atheist materialist, you are no more national state, that served the liberal to liberate from empire, and now, a national state becomes its turn obstacle, you are liberating from national state finally, Family is destroyed in favor of this individualism and the last things, the sex that is already almost overcome, sex optional and in gender politics there is only one step to arrive to the ends of this process of liberation, of liberalim, that is the abandoned human identify as something prescribed. So to be free from, to be human, to have the possibility to choose to be or not to be human, and that is the political ideological agenda of tomorrow. That is why, how i see Anglo-Saxon world that you have asked of, I think that it is just, avant-garde, one word of this process because this started with, Anglo-Saxons, Empiricism, Nominalism, Protestatism and now you are ahead as the Anglo-Saxon more dewatered to liberalism than any other European.

Tucker Carlson: So what you're describing is clearly happening and it's horrifying. But it's not the definition of liberalism I have in mind when I describe myself, as what we say the United States is a classical liberal. So you think of liberalism as individual freedom and choice from slavery. Right? So the options as we conceive them, as I was growing up, were the individual who can follow his conscience, say what he thinks, defend himself against the state versus the statism, the totalitarianism embodied in the government that you fought against: the Soviet government. And I think most Americans think of it that way. What's the difference?

Alexander Dugin: Very interesting question. I think that the problem is in two definitions of liberalism. There is old liberalism, classical liberalism. And new liberalism. So classical liberalism was in favor of democracy. Democracy understood as the power of majority of consensus, of individual freedom. That should be combined somehow with the freedom of other. And now we have totally the next station already. Next phase: new liberalism. Now it is not about the rule of majority, but it is about the rule of minorities. It is not about individual freedom, but it is about wokism. So you should be so individualistic that you should criticize not only the state, but individual, the old understanding of individual. So you need now - you are invited to liberate yourself from individuality to go further in that direction. So I have spoken with Fukuyama, Francis Fukuyama on TV. And he has said before, democracy has meant the rule of majority. And now it is about the rule of minorities against majority, because majority could choose Hitler or Putin. So we need to be very careful with majority, and majority should be taken under control and minorities should rule over majority. It is not democracy, it is already totalitarianism. And now we are not about defense of the individual of freedom, but about prescription to be woke, to be modern, to be progressive. It is not your right to be or not to be progressive. It is your duty to be progressive, to follow this agenda. So you are free to be a left liberal. You are no more free enough to be a right liberal. You should be a left liberal. And that is a kind of duty. It is prescription. So liberalism fought during its history against any kind of prescription. And now it at its turn became totalitarian, prescriptive, not free as it was.

Tucker Carlson: And do you believe that was inevitable, that process? That was always going to happen?

Alexander Dugin: I think that... I perceive here a kind of logic. So a kind of logic that is not just a reversion or deviation. You start with one thing. You want to liberate individual when you arrive at the point when it is possible, it is realized. So you need to go further. And you start to liberate ourselves from this time from old understanding of individual in favor of more progressive concepts. So you could not stop here. That is my vision. So if you say "Oh, I prefer old liberalism," they would say, the progressives, they would say, it is not about old liberalism. It is about fascism. You are defender of traditionalism, conservatism, fascism. So stop here. Either be progressive liberal or you are done, or we will cancel you. That is what we we observe.

Tucker Carlson: Well, it's certainly what we're living. And to see self-described liberals ban your book, which is not a manual for bomb making or invading Ukraine. You know, these are philosophical works. It tells you that it's not, of course it's not liberal in any sense. I wonder though, when you reach the point when the individual can no longer liberate himself from anything, when he's just not even human. What's the next step after that?

Alexander Dugin: That is described in the pictures, American pictures, films, in many ways. So I think that, you know that all the science fictions, almost all of the 19th century were realized in the reality in the 20s. So there is nothing more realistic than science fiction. And if you consider, Matrix or Terminator, you have so many more or less coinciding version of the future, the future with the post-human or human optional situation or artificial intelligence. Hollywood has made many, many, many films. I think they portray correctly reality of the close future. So, for example, if we consider the man, the human nature as a kind of rational animals. So you could now with our technology, you could produce them, so you could create, rational animals or combine them or construct them and artificial intelligence, strong artificial intelligence, network plus huge database. It is a kind of king of the world I would say that could not only manipulate, but create realities because the realities are just images, just sensations, just feelings. So I think that post-humanist futurism is a kind of not only realistical description of a very possible and probable future, but as well, a kind of political manifest. So that is kind of wishful thinking. And the fact that you have no bright traditional future described in the films. I don't know any movie of the future and the West made about return the traditional life, the prosperity, the families with many children and everything is quite in the shadow, quite black. So if you're used to paint everything black in the future especially, so this black future once arrives and I think that is, the fact, the same fact that we have, we have no other option. Either Matrix or Artificial Intelligence or something or Terminator. So the choice is already outside of the limits of humanity. And that is not just fantasy I think. That is a kind of political project. And it is easy to imagine because we have seen the films, they follow more or less close this, this progressive, I would say agenda.

Tucker Carlson: So I've asked you no questions about Russia or Russian politics and I'm not going to because I think it's so interesting to see your perspective on countries that you don't live in because, you know, we do gain insight, I think, from the view of outsiders. My last question to you is how do you explain this phenomenon I have noticed where for over 70 years, a group of people in the West and the United States, liberals, effectively defended the Soviet system and Stalinism, and many participated, personally participated in Stalinism, spied for Stalin, supported him in our media. In in the year 2000 - and they loved Boris Yeltsin because he was drunk. But in the year 2000, the leadership of this country changed and Russia became their main enemy. So after 80 odd years of defending Russia, they hated Russia. What was that? Why the change?

Alexander Dugin: I think that, first of all, Putin is a traditional leader. So Putin, when he came to power from the very beginning, he started to extract our country, the Russia, from the global influence. So he started to contradict the global progressive agenda. And these people who supported the Soviet Union, there were progressives and there are now progressives. So they have felt that now they were dealing with someone who doesn't share these progressives agenda and who tried with success to restore traditional values, sovereignty of the state, Christianity, traditional family. That wasn't evident from the beginning, from outside. But when Putin insisted more and more on this traditional agenda, I would say, on the particularity and spirituality of the Russian civilization as some special type of world region that had and has now, of very little similarities with the progressives, the progressive ideals. So I think that they have discovered, they have identified, in Putin, precisely what Putin is. So he is a kind of leader, political leader defending traditional values. So only recently, one year ago, Putin has made a decree of the political defense of traditional values. That was a turning point, I would say. But, observers from the progressive camp in the West, I think they have understood that from the beginning of his rule correctly. So, this hatred is not just casual, something casual or some mood. It is not.

Tucker Carlson:It's not casual. It's very serious.

Alexander Dugin: It's metaphysical. So if you, if your main task and main goal is to destroy traditional values, traditional family, traditional states, traditional relations, traditional beliefs and someone with the nuclear weapon - that is not smallest, the last but not least, argument - someone with a nuclear weapon to stand strong defending traditional values you are going to abolish. I think they have some basis for this Russiaphobia and the hatred for Putin. So, it is not just by the chance. It is not some irrational change from Soviet affinity to Russiaphobia. It's something deeper I would say. That's my guess.

Tucker Carlson: It's clearly something, it's clearly something deeper. We felt it was important for your ideas to get an airing in English in the United States, simply because we believe in the open airing of ideas. I guess we're liberals that way. So we're grateful that you took the time, Mr. Dugin. Thanks.

Alexander Dugin: Thank you very much.

Source: https://tuckercarlson.com/