IMO, Fukuyama is one of the greatest living thinkers of our time. He understood that profit maximizing alone would never satisfy us and that identity politics is inevitable—long before it was cool to talk about “identity”
https://twitter.com/wil_da_beast630/status/1445990440365330432
The End of History makes clear in non technical terminology why Hegel and not Locke is the only route to securing liberal democracy. Nobody said it was easy.
His agonistic view of politics as being about “recognition” is spot on, and is embraced on both right and left.
Anytime a person on Twitter says “I will die on this hill” they are paying tribute to Hegel’s Master Slave dialectic.
Why fight over dumb things of little consequence? Why fight in a purely signaling way? Wouldn’t it be better to just keep calm and carry on? A: Twitter fights cater to our thymos.
Fukuyama anticipates why social media is not going away even as everyone loves to hate on it. It’s the medium for the human need for “prestige battles.”
Fukuyama doesn’t say liberal democracy always wins in each case or that it isn’t fragile.
He says the promise of liberal democracy is the only hope we have (to date) of taming the human need for megalothymia (ego based status seeking).
Unlike monks who say we should kill the ego, Fukuyama says that the best we can do is find ways to mediate the struggle between egos. By and large we have.
If you are reading this, there’s a good chance that you would rather exchange harsh words than come to actual blows with someone you dislike or disagree with. That’s good. But we haven’t come to this place from nowhere.
Hegel and Fukuyama would have been ok with LARPing, seeing it as an improvement on actual fights to the death. An intimidating selfie is still preferable to a duel.
For more on Hegel, check out my threadapalooza:
https://mobile.twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1372687239755468805
For a thread on Hegel’s great critic —Carl Schmitt— stay tuned.
If, as @brianportnoy says, “wealth is funded contentment,” Fukuyama shows us why we can’t simply buy or vote our way out of discontent.
Prosperous countries are not wealthy in the expansive sense if they can’t solve the problem of discontent arising from status disparity.
Prosperous countries are not wealthy in the expansive sense if they can’t solve the problem of discontent arising from status disparity.
The moral of this thread’s popularity is that people prefer short threads to long ones. But if you have the patience, here’s my library of mega threads (19 so far) on my favorite thinkers:
https://mobile.twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1372675033336778755
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