before i start, something funny about this book
a polisci friend came over to visit my school, and when i told him he was reading this book
he burst out in laughter
and honestly now that i've finished it i can see why he had that reaction
yknow when looking through my discord messages for the quotes that i sent
i just realized just how many hot takes this man has
like it's not even funny
some of these aren't hot takes, they just sound unhinged out of context. i thought it worthy to include them in this section anyways
[W]hile China continues to be a dictatorship, the regime has lost control of significant parts of society.
live winnie the pooh reaction
Yet the monumental failure of Marxism as a basis for real-world societies- plainly evident 140 years after The Communist Manifesto
no yeah i'm starting to see why this book was recommended by a (generally perceived as) right-wing columnist
These new, democratically elected leaders started from the premise that underdevelopment was not due to the inherent inequities of capitalism, but rather to the insufficient degree of capitalism that had been practiced in their countries in the past.
...what?
"hm, digging straight down seems to have resulted in me dying in lava. perhaps i should just dig down faster!" what a stupid take
The persistence of war and military competition among nations is thus, paradoxically, a great unifier of nations.
senator armstrong ahh take
Since the term “capitalism” has acquired so many pejorative connotations over the years, it has recently become a fashion to speak of “free-market economics” instead.
the United States spent much more than it produced through a series of mounting budget deficits, constraining future economic growth and the choices of future generations in order to maintain a high level of present consumption
this is like the one good take i found in this book
“it is the very nature of politics to compel the actor on the political scene to use ideologies to disguise the immediate goal of his action,” which was always power.
i'm 90% sure this matches with a quote said by obrien in 1984. not a good look, francis. not at all.
And they crave sex because it- well, feels good.
A Universal History need not justify every tyrannical regime and every war
this quote doesn't seem too bad, until you realize a couple pages later he states that
A true Universal History of mankind would have to be able to explain […] the discontinuous and unexpected [evolutionary trends]
i...what? you just said you don't have to justify that crap only to turn around and say, "well, actually..."???
this isn't even the only time he says nonsense stuff! take a gander at this quote:
There are, nonetheless, several fallacies about culture and democracy that should be avoided. The first is the notion that cultural factors constitute sufficient conditions for the establishment of democracy.
and then the later quote:
The second […] is to view cultural factors as necessary conditions for the establishment of democracy.
yeah, sure, P and Q are events, but one doesn't lead to the other or vice versa. absolutely amazing! wonderful!
we can deduce a grand total of 0 BITS OF INFORMATION from this assertion!
democratic capitalist societies were markedly un-warlike and anti-imperialistic
ok for the other takes i guess it could have been justified by the context they were made in
but i'm pretty sure that anyone who's taken one minute of a history course knows that england did do some colonizing back then. even america, for christ's sake! does the entirety of southeast asia just not exist to fukuyama or something???
the truth is that [capitalist societies] are far more egalitarian in their social effects than the agricultural societies they replaced.
i can't even provide any commentary on this just look at it
But in a democracy we are fundamentally averse to saying that a certain person, or way of life, or activity, is better and more worthwhile than another.
bro's got too much brainrot from the self-esteem movement ong
he knows that this isn't what that movement was about, right??
A liberal democracy that could fight a short and decisive war every generation or so [...] would be far healthier and more satisfied than one that experienced nothing but continuous peace.
"war is good, actually"
ok grandpa let's get you to bed
do people actually use these words in real life?
actually what am i even saying, if they were used irl then i would probably know what they mean
The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama is one of the social commentaries of all time. At best, it's a fun book to laugh at with your friends and at worst promotes an extremely outdated worldview. But really, who can blame it for being outdated? For god's sake, it was written right when the Cold War ended!
There's a lot of takes in this book that would rub anyone the wrong way, and then there are others that are simply disproved by virtue of living in 2024. You've already seen plenty of the first kind, but I thought one of them deserved special attention:
The real injury that is done to poor or homeless people is less to their physical well-being than to their dignity.
I wonder if Fukuyama has ever met someone less well-off than him. Someone on the streets of LA or San Francisco most certainly is not worried about their dignity. They're probably instead preoccupied with where they're going to get food, where they're going to sleep for the next night, and perhaps, if they're a drug addict, where they're going to get their next fix. Among the list of priorities a homeless person has, "dignity" is probably near the end of the list, along with "get a Spotify subscription" and "read the works of Francis Fukuyama".
Speaking of this dignity, my man has an odd obsession with framing all of human society through the lens of this supposedly natural desire for it. He calls it a lot of things: thymos, the desire for recognition, "vainglory," but the point is he thinks an inherent desire for man is the desires of other people. He spends an inordinate amount of time yapping about this, seemingly without any real direction, before linking it- this time rather coherently- with how the various methods of government satisfy or fail to satisfy it. I'm just not so sure about this desire for recognition. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is literally a thing, and I believe that as long as you keep a large majority of your population sated and entertained, there isn't much to worry about, besides possibly invasion of other nations. Or maybe he's just projecting, I don't know.
There's nothing really wrong with the content, justification, or morals of the second kind of take that I mentioned. They aren't angering as much as they are funny, and unfortunately Fukuyama's central take of the book- that all countries will generally move towards being liberal capitalist democracies- is one of those. In case you've been living under a rock, Russia trying to invade Ukraine, and Xi Jinping, our glorious pooh-bear leader of the Chinese nation, is screwing over his own country's tech giants and bringing China's population under a level of control reminiscent of goddamned Chairman Mao. And of course, who can ignore the elephant in the room that is Donald Trump? The man is actively trying to destroy the foundations of democracy in what is arguably one of the most democratic countries in the world. We'll see if he and his goons succeed in 2024, but for now I think it's not too wrong to say that the entire world is witnessing a slide back into an era of strongmen and authoritarianism.
One odd commonality I found between this book and the one I just read, Bobos in Paradise, was the same lament of the supposed loss of community that has occurred in places like America. The two authors link this to different reasons. Brooks thinks this is because of the new upper class, while Fukuyama links it to the philosophy behind the liberal democratic way of governing. Either way, though, both link this to people not wanting to commit themselves to any specific group, thus resulting in the loss of communities such as churches or other "exclusive" groups. Not really sure what it is with these right-leaning writers bemoaning the loss of these communities. Perhaps they're trying to explain the polarization or fracturing of the current democratic societies, but I'm pretty sure that people in these endangered "communities" all would have the same political beliefs. In a church, the population is probably 102% Republican with a 2% margin of error.
Credit where it is due, Fukuyama uses extremely detailed and through arguments in his chapters. In many instances, I felt like I was reading a mathematical proof on AoPs instead of a social commentary. His proof skills peaked near the start of the book when he proved that history must be directional. Though it did have some questionable takes (such as the one about war being a unifier), I closed many chapters thoroughly convinced of what he was arguing. As long as one accepted his (sometimes suspicious) premises, it was hard to argue with his logic. Of course, as you saw earlier, sometimes he just goes off the rails with his logic, but I did only find two instances of this in a book of 300 pages, so that should be fine.
final rating: 5/10, 3 points for having takes so bad they're funny and additional 2 for nice proofs sometimes