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A teaching joke from the legal world captures an important lesson: Sometimes the reward for an achievement is simply a bigger helping of the same challenge.

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Paddy O’Connell speaks to Professor Francis Fukuyama about the threats to liberal democracies around the world.

He is best-known for his 1992 book ‘The End of History and the Last Man’. He argued that the end of the Cold War, marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, represented the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution, and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

But three decades on, Western liberal democracy appears to be struggling to adapt to the many challenges of the 21st century. Amid geopolitical instability, its future does not appear as universal as Fukuyama once proposed, even in the US.

Presenter: Paddy O’Connell

Get in touch with us on email [email protected] and use the hashtag #TheInterviewBBC on social media.

(Image: Professor Francis Fukuyama. Photo by Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images)

Robert Jay Lifton, who died on September 4, 2025 at the age of 99., was a psychiatrist and author who studied the psychological causes and effects of wars and political violence. In the 1960s, he was part of a group that applied psychology and psychoanalysis to the study of history. By the 1980s and 1990s, he’d began exploring the survivors of atrocities and war in such books as The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, and moved on to the study of cults and what he called “totalism,” a term for the characteristics of ideological movements and organizations that desire total control over human behavior and thought. At the time of his death, he’d written or co-authored 23 books.

On November, 2, 1999, Richard A. Lupoff and Richard Wolinsky had the opportunity to speak with Robert Jay Lifton about his book, Destroying the World To Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism, which focuses on the Japanese Cult that released sarin nerve bas into the Tokyo Subway System. While the interview serves as a time capsule for pre-9/11 America and the world, it also gives insight into the present day and how we’e gotten from there to here.

Regarding Donald Trump, in Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry, published in 2019, Dr, Lifton wrote this:

“Donald Trump is a special kind of cultist. He is in no way totalistic—his beliefs can be remarkably fluid—nor is he the leader of a sealed-off cultic community. Rather, his cultism is inseparable from his solipsistic reality.A considerable portion of his base can be understood as cultist, as followers of a guru who is teacher, guide, and master. From my studies of cults and cultlike behavior, I recognize this aspect of Trump’s relationship to his followers, Trump does not directly express an apocalyptic narrative, but his presence has an apocalyptic aura. He tells us that, as not only a “genius” but a “very stable genius,” he alone can “fix” the terrible problems of our society. To be sure these are bizarre expressions of his extreme grandiosity, but also of a man who would be a savior to a disintegrating world.”

This interview was digitized, remastered and edited in September 2025 by Richard Wolinsky and is heard in its entirety for the first time.

The post Robert Jay Lifton (1926-2025) on Cults and Apocalyptic Violence appeared first on KPFA.

In November 2012, we staged the first in a new series of My Life in Poetry events at the Scottish Poetry Library. My Life in Poetry invites guests to reflect upon their lives through the lens of their favourite poems.

Award-winning novelist Candia McWilliam did the SPL the great honour of accepting its invitation to take part. For 30 minutes, she discusses-with enviable lucidity-her favourite poems, which includes verse by Shakespeare, George Herbert, Robert Browning and Emily Dickinson.

Bryan Washington reads his story “Voyagers!,” from the September 15, 2025, issue of the magazine. A winner of the International Dylan Thomas Prize and the Young Lions Fiction Award, among others, Washington is the author of three books of fiction, including “Memorial” and “Family Meal.” A new novel, “Palaver,” will be published later this year.

Today’s episode is the first in a three-part conversation with philosopher and writer Lea Ypi about the idea of dignity and its role in the history of ideas and in the story of our lives. What is the difference between dignity and dignitas? How does our conception of dignity shape the ways that we think about death? And why is Kant so important for showing what the idea of dignity is capable of?

Out tomorrow on PPF+: Part 2 of this conversation, in which David and Lea explore the role of dignity in human rights and in identity politics and ask how much it matters that our politics has become so undignified. To get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening sign up now to PPF+ https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus

Lea Ypi’s new book is Indignity: A Life Reimagined – get it wherever you get your books. ⁠https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/458930/indignity-by-ypi-lea/9780241661925⁠

Tickets are available now for a special recording of PPF Live at the Cheltenham Literature Festival on Wednesday 15th October: Who Rules The World? Trump, Tech and the Fight for the Future. David will be talking to writer, philosopher and ex-politician Bruno Macaes plus a special guest to be announced about where the power really lies. Get your tickets now ⁠https://www.cheltenhamfestivals.org/events/who-rules-the-world-trump-tech-and-the-fight-for-the-future⁠

Next time: Lea Ypi talks about her remarkable new book Indignity: A Life Reimagined

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Pope Leo XIV has been deeply influenced by St. Augustine, and so, the fourth century titan of Western thought has re-entered the global conversation. IDEAS Producer Seán Foley reaches out to Canadian scholars who have read St. Augustine closely to determine what it is about how Augustine’s thought and character might shape the Catholic Church in these times.

A conversation about crystals and their mysterious quantum powers with Dr. Aaron Breidenbach. Songs in this episode: “From the Beginning” by Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and “Crystalised” by The xx.

On Point news analyst Jack Beatty on President Trump’s marathon cabinet meeting, how his cabinet addresses him, and what that says about his presidency.