William Boisvert

In Agency, the psychologist explores how beliefs about controlling one’s destiny have shaped history. You argue that, like individuals, civilizations can have more or less agency. How does that affect them? When a culture’s ideology emphasizes individual or collective human agency, that’s when you get objective progress. But for much of history, agency was believed to reside with the gods or the state, not individuals. That’s when you get stagnation or regression. What’s the evidence for that?

Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... In Depraved, the Cardiff University philosophy professor examines art that shocks, provokes, or offends. The book analyzes video games with heavy doses of sex and violence. Do they encourage people to commit the crimes they depict? There is no real proof that we are impelled to criminal action by these games. Many creators defend their glamorization of violence by saying it’s just fiction, not reality, and that people can separate the two.

Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... The journalist’s The Descent explores the bleak national psychology behind Russia’s long decline into authoritarianism. You left Russia in 2022 after living there for 25 years. You witnessed a lot of change. It was another country in the 1990s. There was the war in Chechnya and massive corruption, but Yeltsin’s administration didn’t control the flow of information. There were satirical shows about Yeltsin on TV.