Was Fukuyama right?
A few days ago I read the recently published memoirs of Francis Fukuyama. In the book, Fukuyama talks about his career from government to academia, about his direct mentors like Allan Bloom or indirect ones like Leo Strauss, about the break with his neoconservative friends, about his hobbies, which range from building furniture to assembling robots. It is one of the best manuals for anyone who aspires to be a public intellectual, combining relevance with depth.
Fukuyama is known for his famous book on the end of History. The concept has been caricatured to this day, however, as he says –and I agree– few people read his book beyond the title. Fukuyama took the concept of History from Hegel, passing through the interpretation of the Franco-Russian Kojève, and stated that the historical process had stopped in the face of the lack of alternatives to modern egalitarianism, the strongest expression of which was liberal democracy. But in his book he also warned that the world of the end of History could be deeply depressing, a society without ambition and energy, a purgatory of the "last men" that Nietzsche spoke of. He also predicted that, as we humans are, new forces would likely revolt against this eternal liberal apathy and set History in motion once again.
When I bought Fukuyama’s autobiography, I expected great debates and anecdotes about foreign policy, but the fundamental heart of his book is about human nature and the limits that liberal democracy has to satisfy it. One of Fukuyama’s fundamental criticisms is against the “Homo economicus” model from which modern economics and liberalism start. The human being is rational and seeks to fulfill their material desires. But, warns Fukuyama, they also seek something more. As Plato said, the human being is also driven by thymos, the desire to be recognized as equal or superior by others. This is what liberals or Marxists often forget: economy or formal rights are not everything. There is a human impulse that goes beyond all that.
The impulse of thymos explains both the irrational decisions, contrary to pragmatism, of United States voters choosing Trump as president, and of the Hong Kong protesters a few years ago facing a battle doomed to failure against China. It also explains Russia's revanchist desires to return to being an expansionist world power, instead of seeking to be a medium-sized, stable, and prosperous country; or Beijing's irrepressible desires to “reunify” with Taiwan, a tiny territory over which a third world war could break out. thymos is neither good nor bad, explains Fukuyama, but rather a human impulse, which explains the aggressive behavior of powers, the rise of populism, or the heroism of protesters seeking the fall of autocratic regimes.
The thymos has set History in motion once again: liberal democracy has not been able to provide a satisfactory answer to it. But, as Fukuyama hints, neither can supposed alternatives like the Chinese model. The world that awaits us is the return of the earthquakes that have always shaken History.
