Episode 2 – Arpad Szakolczai: «Our rationality is not reasonable!»

Collegium Conversations – der Wissenspodcast des St.Gallen Collegium · Dec 2, 2025 · 1h 5m · transcript

What does it mean to be free – in an age of artificial intelligence, total transparency, and the permanent carnival of modern life? Political anthropologist Arpad Szakolczai explores the cultural roots of our understanding of freedom in this conversation with Wolfram Eilenberger – from the Greek ideas of autonomia, autarkia, and eleutheria to the paradoxes of technology and modernity.

Szakolczai sees our world in a state of “permanent carnival”: everything becomes spectacle, stage, and simulation of freedom, while we increasingly become slaves to technology. And an economy in which escaping…