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Home » Is Democracy Dying? – Dave Troy (Transcript)

Is Democracy Dying? – Dave Troy (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of investigative journalist Dave Troy’s talk titled “Is Democracy Dying?” at TEDxBerlin, August 4, 2025.  

Listen to the audio version here:

The Failed Promise of Post-Cold War Democracy

DAVE TROY: So after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent end of the Cold War, many experts predicted that democracy would flourish and spread, and that Soviet authoritarianism was an aberration. Well, we’ve had 35 years now to run this natural experiment and to ask whether or not that was actually true, and we’re now in a position where we can ask the question, is democracy spreading?

And unfortunately, the answer to this question is not really. Over the last several decades, democracy has faced many, many headwinds, and in fact, today, there are fewer democracies, and the quality of the democracies that exist is lower, and 39% of the Earth’s population lives under authoritarian rule, and many countries, including the United States and several countries in Europe, are now rated as flawed democracies.

So I’ve been spending the last 10 years of my life trying to figure out the answer to why this is happening, why didn’t democracy spread, and what can we do to help it to spread?

The Historical Roots of Anti-Democratic Movements

So it turns out, if you look under the surface, there are a lot of anti-democratic movements that are very old, some of which go back a century or more, and there’s a lot of individual people that have been behind these movements. In Russia, there’s a guy named Ivan Ilyin, who was at the turn of the century and described a kind of a monarchist approach to government, Oswald Spengler, who wrote the book “The Decline of the West,” was a German mathematician, and really called for an alliance between the extreme left and the extreme right to take over any kind of flourishing of democracy that might take place.

These movements, these two men specifically, had adherence later in the 20th century to people like Francis Parker Yockey, who wrote a book called “Imperium” about this, Julius Evola, an Italian theorist, and then they had acolytes like Willis Cardo in the United States, and then subsequently other folks like Alexander Dugin, who was a prominent Russian geopolitical theorist, and Steve Bannon, an American political theorist, who have been both really networking together these very illiberal movements around the globe.

In addition to that, there’s also another strain of kind of what you might call neo-reactionary monarchist, network state. Sometimes people call this libertarian exit. This was started largely by a guy named Nick Land, who provided kind of a theoretical framework. He was a philosopher out of the UK. This work was picked up by Curtis Yarvin. Another guy named Balaji Sreenivasan, who launched the network state movement out of Silicon Valley, picked up on their works and kind of operationalized it, along with another guy named Patrick Friedman, and then, of course, you’re familiar probably with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, who have applied money and other resources to help operationalize and fund these activities.

The Noosphere: An Esoteric Theory Shaping Policy

Now there’s also some more esoteric ideas that many Westerners are just not familiar with at all, and this stuff was stuff that I had to learn from scratch and was a bit of a surprise to me. How many of you have ever heard of the noosphere? Okay. You’re my friend, though, so almost nobody’s heard of the noosphere, but a few of you have.

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This was kind of an obscure theory that was dreamed up by two scientists, one Vladimir Vernadsky, who was a Russian-Ukrainian scientist, and then also Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was a French-American theologian and scientist. What they theorized was that the Earth would go through three phases, the first phase being the geosphere, which is just rocks and water and the elements, and then the biosphere, which would mark the emergence of life, so plants and animals, and then a third phase called the noosphere, which would mark the emergence of a collective consciousness or intelligence that would actually envelop the Earth physically, and it would be perhaps tumultuous change, but it would be a signal point for a complete transition and transformation of the Earth and our inhabitants on Earth.

So this idea became very influential in both the United States and in Russia, but particularly in Russia and has become a big part of Russian culture, and in fact, today, Vladimir Putin’s chief of staff is a guy named Anton Vaino, and his claim to fame is that he invented a nooscope to monitor our transition into the noosphere, which is a little crazy. Okay.

Russian Mystical Traditions and Modern Policy

So there’s another esoteric tradition that underlies a lot of Russian policy right now, and you can trace this back to a Russian mystic and artist named Nicholas Roerich, and he basically took elements of theosophy and Gnosticism to develop a prophecy about the future organization of the world that was very similar to the noosphere concept. The only thing is that it would require anybody that doesn’t go along with this plan to either be marginalized or eliminated, so it’s kind of not great.

But Mikhail Gorbachev, right around the same time that the Berlin Wall fell, was using the Roerich idea, he called it, as the basis for perestroika and glasnost, and a lot of people don’t know that, but these ideas very much underlie a lot of what’s happening now with Vladimir Putin and Russia and Russia’s policy towards the West.

Reflexive Control: Russia’s Information Warfare Strategy

You see this also reflected in this doctrine called reflexive control. This is a sample of a paper from 1986 talking about the Russian idea of reflexive control, and don’t worry about trying to make too much sense of the specifics there, but the main idea here is that it’s Hegelian dialectics, Marxian dialectics, and the idea of Hegelian synthesis that we actually heard somebody talk about earlier today, taking a thesis and an antithesis to try to drive towards some evolution point, some synthesis that would move things forward.

And this has been adopted as official policy by Russia towards the West for the last several decades, and what they kind of try to do is to pit an artificially constructed idea of the left against an artificially constructed idea of the right, and then drive towards some synthesis that produces a controlled output that gets them what they want out of the West.