Ilya Kukulin

This interdisciplinary project analyzes contemporary illiberal political trends as manifestations of a new wave of "great simplification"—a collective belief that complex problems require simple, decisive solutions, accompanied by a broader denial of the complexity of the world and the value of complex thought. This affective simplification fuels political polarization and sustains regimes of post-truth politics, in which the pursuit of truth becomes less important than emotionally charged sense of belonging to a political community. Drawing parallels with the crisis of the 1930s, when many European societies embraced authoritarian regimes amid similar anxieties about social complexity, the study examines how new media technologies and contemporary patterns of political mobilization simultaneously generate fragmented "opinion bubbles" and create new opportunities for targeted propaganda. The research combines historical psychology, anthropology, and sociology to investigate "heterochrony"—the coexistence of groups operating within different historical temporalities—across Russia, Belarus, the United States, Turkey, and Germany. Through the analysis of social media discourse, interviews with cultural actors, and the study of resistance movements, the project explores both the mechanisms that drive illiberal oversimplification and the cultural, psychological, and political forms of resistance that emerge in response to it. The study seeks to identify pathways beyond post-truth politics through practices of dialogue, mutual recognition, empathy across irreducible differences, and new forms of reappropriating the difficult experience of contemporary traumatic events.