Putin, Xi and Iran's leaders are loyal to no one but themselves, which is why they cannot unite – philosopher Lene Rachel Andersen
Lene Rachel Andersen is a Danish philosopher, author and economist. She has written more than a dozen books, including The Nordic Secret, a widely acclaimed European bestseller in the fields of social philosophy and cultural evolution.
Her work focuses on democracy, education, culture and the future of humanity in an era of technological transformation. In recent years, Andersen has devoted much of her work to exploring how democracies can remain resilient in times of global crises, as well as developing new approaches to education that help people not only acquire knowledge but also cultivate their own values and sense of responsibility.
During a visit to Lviv, she spoke with Ukrainska Pravda about Russia's war against Ukraine, why Russia poses a threat not only to Ukrainians but to the democratic world as a whole, the future of Europe, why modern education is losing its ability to shape individuals, the impact of artificial intelligence on society and why the complexity of the modern world requires new ways of thinking.
This article is produced in partnership with Lviv Media Forum 2026 and features a speaker from this year's conference.
Out of date education systems
We all grew up in the modern world in the presence of postmodernism, which tried to deconstruct everything. There is a generation of younger people who grew up with smartphones and the internet – the so-called digital natives. But our institutions, our school systems, our legislation – all the frameworks around our lives are still analogue. They are still part of the 20th century. They were conceived in the 20th century, if not the 19th century. And the education that we get – the knowledge that we have in order to navigate the world that we're in – is from the 20th century. We have all been equipped with a worldview and understanding of the world that is tuned for around the year 1995. And that's where we are. A completely different kind of world, and things are changing extremely fast.
And we're still trying to not only navigate it with a worldview and understanding of the world from 30, 40, 100 years ago, but also to regulate it, coexist with it and legislate for it with these old ways of understanding the world.
And therefore we're coming up with insufficient answers to the problems that we're facing, as a civilisation, and as a species.
Bildung and education
Bildung [the German word meaning self-realisation] is a learning for life and becoming fully human in the process and becoming everything that you, specifically you, or specifically I, or anybody else – that unique thing that you hold inside you, how can that come out and flourish?
One of the ways that I describe bildung now is that there's two kinds of knowledge. One is the transferable kind of knowledge which is how many grams to a kilo? Or what is the correct French grammar or something like that. So it's academic content but it can also be practical content. And I can transfer that and I can test whether the transfer has taken place.
And then there's a non-transferable kind of knowledge, which is life experience. Falling in love, becoming a mother, buying a car and being screwed by the car dealer. All that stuff that goes into life. I can tell other people about it. I don't have children, so I can't tell anybody about that, but if somebody has children and they tell me about it, I cannot identify with it. I can listen, but I can't feel what it's like.
But if we've both had the same experience, like falling in love, and I say, "I met this wonderful man. I just can't concentrate. I work and it feels like I can't focus on anything," you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. There's a resonance. These two kinds of knowledge, and your struggle with making it yours and getting as much of it as possible, both the life experience and the transferable knowledge, that is Bildung and making it your own.
If I were just a normal teacher, it would just focus on the transferable kind of knowledge. Usually, there would be a test at the end of the course, and then we'll figure out how much of the knowledge has been transferred.
But if I'm a Bildung teacher, I would see each individual in the classroom and try to figure out what it is inside this particular kid or young adult that needs to be challenged, appreciated, have more of the same thing? Where is the talent? Where do I see the light in their eyes? Where do I see them? Do I hand them a book or hand them a task and they won't stop?"
And then, when I've found that light – hopefully in all of them, but it's easier with some than others – that is when I can start challenging them and saying, "But you could also read this, or have you thought about trying this thing?"
Or if it's somebody who just wants to play music and doesn't want to learn maths, you can bring in Aristotle and how he figured out that if you have a string and you make it swing, it makes the sound. If you have half the length of the string, the tone goes up one octave. This is maths. So now you can connect maths and music. The whole class can benefit from this, and you can have this child who loves to play the instrument show it on a violin.
This takes a different approach to education, but it also makes education what most teachers went into education to do, because they want to see that light in the eyes of the students. And of course, the challenge is that if you have more than 24 kids in the classroom, it becomes impossible. And you will just narrow down the goal of what can be achieved to simply transferring knowledge.
Keeping AI away from areas of human creativity
I mean it's ironic that so much of time people spend using AI is spent on doing exactly the things that make us happy, like making art, making music, doing graphic design, telling stories – and we are letting AI take it away from us.
I just translated my book The Nordic Secret into Danish. I wrote it in English 10 years ago.
And when I started talking about doing it in Danish, one of my colleagues said "But you can get AI to translate that." I said "No, I can't." "Yes, you can! It's going to be so quick – you'll save so much time." And I was like "No, I can't." And just to humour him, I actually took some pages and let one of the AIs translate them. And it's interesting, because every sentence was there, but it had completely lost its spirit.
It had lost my voice. It had lost everything that was my part in that book. And that was me in that text. That weird thing between the lines. And I realised that this applies to pretty much everything that we ask these AIs to do, if it's any kind of intellectual or mental work.
If it's digging more sophisticated holes in the ground or something like that, it's not going to take anything away from us. But if it is any kind of work that has the slightest kind of creativity in it, it is going to turn that wonderful, exciting creative work – like writing for instance – into a really tedious, awful piece of work, only leavings us with the fact checking and controlling that it hasn't been delusional and written something that is wrong.
That's what I found from looking at an AI translation of a couple of pages of my book. It just became this really, really awful task that I had to do and all the joy of writing it had completely disappeared. And so I think the same thing is going to happen with music and painting and photography once you have an AI that can do the work for you.
Yes, we're just going to realise "No, I'm just going to get sick and tired of the one thing that made me really happy and I'm not happy anymore." So, I think there is going to be some kind of protest, riot, obstruction against AI pretty soon because people don't want it. It's really just the tech giants who do.
The disastrous goal of education today
I think there is so much more that we need to know today than anybody needed to know 20 years ago, and so much more than 50 years ago. My dad went to school for seven year, and then he left to take up an apprenticeship and got a job after that. Whereas today we all need around 20 years of education sooner or later, and then we need to upgrade it.
So things have changed. But we've done particularly one disastrous thing, which is that we wanted to make education more efficient. We want to create a more productive workforce.
And so we got rid of all the cultural heritage that gives us a symbolic language and that allows us to struggle with the stress, with love, with hate, with conflict, with despair, all the nasty stuff that is part of life, and part of death too for that matter.
There are generations before us that have struggled with all of this, and authors have written about this in fictitious form, where you can resonate with and mirror yourself in the characters. The result is emotional maturation. One of the great things about literature is that if it's well written, you identify with the characters.
You can have a completely different experience to what you have in your own life and feel that you are there, inside the story. I mean you can be a prison guard in a death camp or you can be a single woman travelling the globe, or any kind of character. If it's well written, you are that character as you're reading. Which means that you experience emotions that you might not experience otherwise.
When I went to high school, we studied the old Greek tragedy Medea. I've forgotten the storyline except that she ended up hating her husband so much that she killed their two sons and chopped them up into small pieces, and then she dumped the pieces in the water so that the husband could sail after her and gather all the pieces of his sons.
When you're 17, 18, 19 years old and you read that, you think "What a completely nutcase woman!" And then when you go through a breakup or a divorce, it's like I understand exactly why she did what she did.
If I had never read Medea, I wouldn't have known that story, but when I did at some point go through a break-up, although I don't have any children, so there was nobody to chop up, and I don't think I would have done it if I had, I can actually identify with that sense of wanting to find a way to get through to this person who just doesn't want to understand. And that's what art can do.
And if we take that away from children and young people, when they end up in a situation later in life with these big life crises and big stories and moral challenges, they don't have that mirror.
They may think that they are the first person in history ever to have this weird emotion of whether it's love or hate, or despair, or frustration, or something. And it really helps to know that there is a play there, there is a novel there, there is a song there. Somebody else went through this and just nailed it in a song. So yes, we're taking that away from people, and I think that's a disaster.
Education's impact on choices in war
In war, you are constantly facing impossible choices, and you're bound to make decisions that go against your moral values.
If you make one choice, some people die. If you make the opposite choice, other people die. So, you are in an impossible situation. And whatever you choose is going to stay with you after that.
I think those of us who haven't been in that situation cannot say what that is like. But if you're facing life or death decisions, it is going to be larger than you are. I think we're not used to talking about that because we think that we're in control. We've given ourselves the impression that we're in control, and sometimes we're not. And that is also part of being human.
Sometimes you just make horrible, horrible, horrible, disastrous decisions. That is also part of being human. The question is: how do you find some kind of forgiveness either from yourself or from others? And I think that if you are conscious about your life choices and your values, and what is important to you, you are less likely to be caught off guard when you come to face really hard choices. But you will eventually face choices where you have no previous knowledge, in an area you have never given thought to, and you just have to make the choice in the moment. And that is terrible.
I think the one thing that's helpful to say about Ukraine's case is that Ukraine has absolutely no guilt in the situation it finds itself in. You're put in a situation by somebody else where you are faced with choices you never asked to have as a country and as individuals. Somebody else decided to take actions which have resulted in you being in your current situation. And you can only do your best, to the best of your knowledge and to the best of intentions.
But the more that you have considered what it means to be human as you grow up, the easier it is to be confident in your moral values, and to ask questions like "What is it that I'm fighting for? What am I standing up for?"
And part of what you're fighting for is freedom for your children and for their being in Ukraine. And one of the really remarkable things about humans is our ability to self-sacrifice. And all civilisations build on that one way or the other. The Soviet Union had a really bad habit of telling people what they should sacrifice themselves for.
The whole point of self-sacrifice is that you yourself find out what you want to sacrifice yourself for. And that's the difference between a totalitarian society and a free society – you are free.
Totalitarian systems just tell you what to self-sacrifice for and they have a tendency to phrase it as if it's something you do want to do because they don't even want to admit that they're just creeps who want power. So, there are some existential choices that each one of us can only ask ourselves about. We can discuss it with others but eventually you are alone with that choice.
On the perception of freedom
A lot of Europeans just see this war as a Ukrainian-Russian problem. A lot of Americans definitely do too. But there are also a lot of people who see it as a global problem, or at least a European problem. These people do see what Russia and Putin are up to, and that they just can't stop themselves because they would lose face if they were to stop, and that their whole sense of self would fall apart if they lost face.
Of course being faced with life or death decisions pushes you to a limit where you haven't been pushed to before. I've never been at war. So I have no idea what that is like. I don't wish to ever be in that situation. I want this war to stop. I want Russia to start behaving like a normal country.
Somebody has to take this on because we can't have a violent, nuclear, authoritarian colonising failed state that just tries to cover up its own mistakes and shortcomings by attacking others.
The good thing about Putin and Xi and mullahs and Iran is that they're all completely disloyal to anybody except themselves, which means they cannot collaborate. They can trade, but there is no loyalty among them. Which we actually do have in the West. We do have that in the EU. Well, not with the US at the moment. But Trump is not all of America.
There are all these people in the US who still are loyal to NATO. So that's part of democracies and a world of people, and you can actually build institutions and loyalty and collaboration and you can have each other's back. So I say that's part of the good news. But we're not smart about this.
So I will say two things that give me hope with regard to Ukraine. One is that Russia will collapse, one way or the other. What is that going to look like? It might be a disaster or it might be a situation where Russia becomes even weaker and we have a window of opportunity. The other thing is that once this war is over, all Europeans are going to go to Ukraine for vacation because it's like "We've heard so much about Ukraine." There are so many people who are so impressed with Ukraine. There's such a strong sense of identification. I'm here in Lviv for the first time. It's beautiful, it's amazing.
There's tons of interesting stuff in Kyiv as well. There are all these places that we've heard about on television. There's so much going on. People are so impressed with your drone industry, with your clever solutions to so many things. To be Ukrainian is actually very, very cool right now.
So, I think that as soon as the war is over, at first you'll see the backpackers. And then, you'll see the middle classes. Your food is excellent, your hotels are excellent. I can use my computer, it plugs right away, I don't need an adapter. You're already set up to be part of the EU. And these are many little things. I also discussed the number plates on your cars. They only have the letters that work in both the Latin and the Cyrillic alphabet. Who came up with that? That's brilliant. So we're looking at Ukraine and it's like "Okay, as soon as this war thing is over, we need to go there. We need to find out who these people are because we didn't pay attention to the Ukrainians before, but we do now." So, there's hope.
Alina Poliakova, UP
Edited by Shoël Stadlen