This conversation with Anna Tolchikova begins with Belarus, childhood, language, exile, and the memory of leaving a country after the events of 2020. From there, the discussion moves toward Ukraine, Portugal, Iran, war, fear, and the difference between witnessing suffering from a distance and feeling it when the country under threat is tied to one’s own family, memories, language, and inner world.
As the conversation develops, Belarus and Iran become two different entry points into a wider reflection on power. The discussion moves from authoritarianism and political repression toward totalitarian control, religious rule, oligarchic power, and the way regimes justify violence through the language of security, religion, democracy, survival, or destiny.
The conversation eventually reaches a deeper moral question: what is the value underneath democracy, freedom, and political systems? The discussion turns toward suffering and empathy. Human beings often try to reduce suffering for their own group while increasing it for others. This is the seesaw of suffering: the mechanism through which nations, regimes, religions, and ideologies protect “us” by dehumanizing “them.”
Episodes related to the two-volume Neurophilosophy:
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References:
Delshad Tehrani, A. (2026). Endmachtgefüge: Metaphysical fascism and the architecture of terminal power. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19326881
