History has in fact ended — not as a triumph of liberal democracy (as Fukuyama believed) but as the extension of technique, industrial production, and the state. How exactly this has come to pass is not to be discussed here, but I should point you to my own coverage of the topic elsewhere.

In Max Weber’s Die Protestantiche Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus he posits that the geist² of capitalism is found in the values of protestantism. This spirit is also identified by Hegel as that which develops the final historical position. While the capitalist society remains, and is even increasing in intensity, we have philosophically moved on to another stage in the development of this spirit. The final historical position has been the post-protestant “cult of reason” that was first formulated in revolutionary France.³ This idea, even though no longer a revolutionary rejection, remains the religion of the modern world, even in those places where “traditional values” and religion are ostensibly still strong. An evangelical American would have trouble destroying his beloved Ford f-150 for no rational reason whatsoever, in the manner in which Abraham was prepared to sacrifice Isaac. There is no belief held in the post-historical world than rational thought.

As I explained in Exponentials we have trouble understanding the implications of eˣ growth. When looking merely at the recent past all that came before seems irrelevant, and likewise when peering into the future the possibilities seem endless. The consequences of this is a dual rejection; of the well-travelled past as a stranger and the unknown future as a close friend. Today we instead live in the derivative of reality — of the current as defined by its trajectory between the old and the new. This is the temporal space where post-historical man lives.

But if we are then enmeshed in this trajectory through historical development, how can post-historical man be considered post-historical? Are we not then obsessed with our travel through history and in that sense more historical than ever before? The issue at the core of this is that there is no longer any authentic historical development to strife for. We are racing for ever-increasing wealth, ecological protections, state control, laissez-faire capitalism, and authentic happiness all at once, longing for the glory attained by the Caesars of old. But most of all, we are obsessed with the origin itself, of the driving force of progress.

Post-historical man is inseparable from his technical counterpart, who seeks above all to do more with less, to build grand systems, to raise the poor out of their squalor and to fix the problems of the world. This is firmly rooted in the belief of the enlightenment, and particularly those of German idealism — with the values of freedom and rationality at its heart. These are in turn two sides of the same coin; The only reason not to perform an the most rational act is if one is not free to do so. But how does the systems of technical society, and in turn the pressures of “modern life” shape the mind of the individual?

It is clear to those who bother to think about it that the technical mindset today is all-encompassing; we live in a world filled with efficiency. But in what manner is this sustainable? In many it is fully so; the dominance of technique merely pushes us to fix its inherent problems as they appear.⁴

But it is at the same time the case that humans are not meant to live in the world we have built. We have built a world for Homo Economicus, not for Homo Sapiens. The values of religion are no longer useful for social organisation, and so they have intentionally (although not by any single individual) been replaced by agnosticism and atheism.

Some people argue that the liberal attempts to spread this way of life globally failed — most clearly in the shown in the Tiananmen (天安们) massacre. But my own experiences of the prc showed a starkly different truth. While the mainland Chinese have not transformed their political system to a free liberal democracy they have nevertheless become very similar to us in their philosophical position. Their daily concerns practically identical to those in our populations, and I did not find them to be locked in an intense ideological struggle with western political, ethical, or economic systems. It is in practice impossible to build a system that is not rational and technical, for any such system will be out-competed by those who make use of such tools.

But what is it like to live in a post-historical society? The readers of this will be all too familiar with the answer, since they themselves are almost guaranteed to live such a life. We have already described the forces that have gotten us here, but it is nevertheless of interest to cover the general consequences of their implementation.

The primary goal of post-historical society is the entertainment and happiness of man.⁵ All other goals are subservient to the above — merely requirements that must be fulfilled to make sure that mankind is satisfied. The characteristic element of the post-historical world is of course that historical action no longer becomes possible. The individual person can no longer significantly shift the course of human history as is thus forced to live their life either contributing to mankind’s now divine progress or to merely watch as work continues. The chief instrument for both of these activities has become the internet.

The world online — as opposed to the one irl — does not exist. It is merely a simulacrum of the physical world’s creation. No human being has ever existed online, not even in such extreme cases as Christian Weston Chandler. Nevertheless an increasing share of humanity’s collective activities oriented toward the digital realm where the resulting product exists merely on a global interconnected network of computers.

This is the domain of media — or at least a form of it. The post-historical aim of media is to be merely consumed and not to be interacted with. Such a definition can even be extended to things email that are not traditionally considered as media. Social media is also included within this because most social media platforms are not made for reactions as a primary intent, if they are it is merely as a way to generate more content for public consumption.

We are not glued to our devices for any conspiratorial reason. There is not an evil cabal of the global elite who is trying to keep us suppressed with entertainment. How do I know this? Because they themselves are chronically online. If the president of the United States does not himself feel capable of historical action (and instead wishes to spend his time online, golfing, or bowling) how can ordinary man?

A counterargument against the contemporary post-scare reality is that there is still work that has to be done; we have not yet reached a level of fully automated luxury communism. This is not true. A very small share of the population currently labours in sectors that are inherently required such as food production, somatic healthcare, and infrastructure. All the other work is of course useful, but it could in theory be done without. The only cost would be in the happiness of mankind.

In advanced economies the predominant share of gdp is in the service industry — people performing favours for each other. The automation of service work by advances in ai promises to make much of this work redundant. The response to this has in many cases been that increases in automation instead allocates people to new jobs where they can be even more productive.⁶ But what jobs remain when both the production of goods and services have been automated? Will all that remain be performing tasks for ai? Not entirely. In a world merely meant for human entertainment, companionship becomes a commodity.

It was Alexandre Kojève’s belief that post-historical man would inevitably be reduced to his most animal forms as political action became impossible. This is in fact the trend that we are seeing. The growth of services like Onlyfans and Fansly shows how profitable intimate human connection can be.

This is despite the fact that the internet has made pornography more and more distribute-able. It is also not a question of niche kinks, since the automation of tailor-made pornography by llm image generation has seemingly not impacted these human-centred platforms. Porn has always constituted a significant share of consumer internet traffic, but the difference here is the focus on the individual’s relation to another human being. Prostitution is nothing new of course — it is after all “the world’s oldest profession” — and it is merely one form of post-historical labour.

Companionship need not be sexual, and sexual stimulation might not be continuously wished for. Things like simple company (especially for the elderly who make up an increasing share of the world), travel guides, spiritual or technical mentors, politicians,⁷ influencers, therapists, artists, and doctors all perform some form of work where the interaction with another human being is the most important part.

Above all advertising is the industry that embodies the spirit of the post-historical economy. It appears to our most base animal desires — for safety, community, approval, or mere satisfaction — and has as its aim to inform us of goods and services that we did not know that we needed in the first place. Advertising has slowly become less and less of an artform; it is instead becoming increasingly “hidden” in the world around us, silently embedded in media and in our social interactions.

The internet is what facilitates the expansion of the personal. The individual can sit at home; single, childless, friendless even, and still feel adequately entertained through their feeds of information, communicated through television, the smartphone, or literature. When earlier one had to venture out into the world to experience it, now one can instead merely have it delivered to you.

The above development is not due to llms specifically. It is due to artificial intelligence in the broadest possible sense. Intelligent machines are things as abstract as the structure of human organisations, of biological and financial systems, and of mechanical automatons such as a combustion engine. They are all intelligent in the sense of making assumptions about the world and acting within it to create something new.

Talk of shifting jobs to things like negotiation and long-term planning is idealistic — even if llm capabilities flatline the rest of society will continue on building more and more advanced systems and technologies to further eliminate dread and toil, leaving us with reading spice and water-skiing as activities to fill our ecstatic lives. There are no longer any great Jihads to be carried out, no great political work to be created. All that is left to do is the construction of industrial society’s final utopia; the city of Babel. God is in his heaven. All is right with the world. ❦

The spirit of the age that we currently finds ourselves in is one of rapid change (and often times decline) in the economic, political, and technological order of the world. Compared to the nineteenth century (and in many regards even the twentieth), when living standards where many times more squalid than today, there was then a sense of progressiveness, of growth and change that — as long as channelled in the correct direction — would be transformed into a new and wonderful world. That spirit does not exist today. Instead we have the idea that we are “sliding” back into the darkest depths of mankind’s history and that we will — posed with some certainty if not clarity — see the return of fascism and of the oppression of the state.

There are many people today comparing our contemporary times to those of the 1930s. Even if there are apt comparisons to be made I have trouble seeing the similarities clearly. Much more relevant to me seems to be the many crises leading up to the first world war; the long period of change created more and more cracks in the established systems of managing relations that at last proved too great to overcome. Once the stresses had reached a certain level it all came falling down once someone started shooting in the streets of Sarajevo. It still feels relevant to quote the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci¹ however:

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

As those who have by chance been born into this interregnum it is our duty to understand the developments that have lead us to these events so that we can do our best to shape the future trajectory of the world, and to make sure that the new that we create is better than that which came before.

We must differentiate between three words that are often seen as synonymous, that being the dictatorial, authoritarian, and totalitarian states. The authoritarian state is a state that demands that it possess ultimate authority of that which it claims, and that expects that authority to be unquestionably followed. All states are authoritarian in some degree, to the point that the use and employment of authority must be included in the definition of the state. This is what Weber famously did in his formulation of the state as the possessor of the monopoly of violence. An authoritarian state does not have to be a particularly powerful state, and in fact the reverse is oftentimes the case. A powerful state can instead offer some degree of leeway when it comes to organizing its possessions since it does not have to risk the diminishing of its power.

The dictatorial state is closely related to the authoritarian one, since the application of authority requires dictating one’s wishes. The dictatorship, as an institution, has its origins in the office of the dictator in the republic along the Tiber, and any study of the dictator specifically should incorporate its formulation. In its roman form the the dictator was role temporarily appointed to solve a specific problem, but in the late republic it became a much more over political tool — used most prominently by Sulla and then subsequently by Caesar.

The narrow focus of the dictator showcases an important element; the dictatorship can only exist in a state that is in an earlier form of historical development. The dictator, as an individual, must be involved in the decisions of the state — who become incalculable in number as historical development continues. We will soon examine the nature of this trajectory, but permit me to remain on the subject of the dictator.

The centralisation of decision-making is a core aspect of the evolution of Ellulian technique, and because of that is has been instrumental in the development of the state. A weak state, as all early ones were, necessarily requires a strong authority to impose its will and maintain its existence (as we have already described). The early state is forced to centralize, if not its limited resources then at least its political power, to get anything done. It did so initially through the institution of kingship (as Lewis Mumford examines in the first volume of his book The Myth of the Machine). This initial collectivisation enabled the construction of vast irrigation systems — that in turn contributed to an increased degree of the division of labour and therefore the development of things like mathematics and astronomy — as well as of vast monuments such as the pyramids of Giza.

The dictator (in the form of the monarch) remains at all times a touch-point figure, like how the pharoses of Egypt were intimately involved in agriculture through their role in the periodic flooding of the Nile. The invention of writing served an important role in the extension of the dictator’s power, they could now project their presence across both space and time, and thus organize labour on a much grander scale. But this development also created something else that is of interest to our study — a permanent, literate, bureaucracy whose role would become not just the communications of the dictator’s wishes, but the carrying out of the actions of state, whose existence first now can be outlined.

The state is usually dated firmly to the peace of Westphalia, when the principle of a sovereign right emerged,² but as we have established its structural roots go all the way back to the origins of kings. This of course continued, and the stretches of land that monarchs laid claim to increased as their powers did – to almost the level of caricature like in the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. In France, one of clearest examples of early centralisation, Louis xiv famously proclaimed that the he and the state were one and the same³, but the growth of the bureaucracy required for absolutism meant that on his deathbed in 1715 he is said to have uttered “Je m’en vais, mais l’État demeurera toujours”.⁴ These are not contradictory statements as they might appear on first appearance. Absolutism meant that the monarch, in every capacity in which [he] was able to intervene, was the embodiment of the state. But to maintain this capability demanded the maintenance of a massive political machine that would necessarily have to survive the monarch.

Absolutism is the end of the form of the dictator. While it survives, and in some places even reëmerges in the world today, it can no longer be the source of historical progress. Instead it must leave the reins to the burgeoning bureaucracy that it helped create.

I must ask the reader to try to vanquish any pretences over the idea of totalitarianism that one may already have. The goal here is not to study a specific group of states that have existed in the past, present, and are postulated to exist in the future, but instead to inspect qualities that exist in all states of a sufficiently developed historical nature. The detailed implementation of this totalitarianism has been extensively debated for almost 250 years. During this debate there have been many proposals that have been discarded, but they are nevertheless of interest to us in the study of their shared qualities.

The totalitarian state is, like all other states, by necessity authoritarian. Its primary characteristic is that it attempts to envelop all of society; there is no element of social, political, technical, or private life that it does not interest itself in. It can be dictatorial — in the sense that we have just examined — but bit does not have to be, and in fact may often be limited by a dictatorial nature. This is because while the dictatorial form allows for the forcing through of action it does not foster a total commitment to the cause of the state.

The totalitarian state does not have to actually succeed at this goal of being the fulcrum of social life – in fact no state has yet done so completely – but it must strive towards that ideal. Some of the different methods of doing so that have historically been attempted we will generally discuss here, but a complete record would require the examination of almost every society existing today – as well as a great multitude of historical states. We now however live in a time in which this ultimate goal seems to be within reach, and agents of the state (such as autocrats, politicians, and civil servants) are becoming ever more frustrated when met with aspects of the world outside of their control, when they before would have been unthinkable for the state to influence. This frustration will only serve as an accelerant for further increases in state capacity.

Machiavelli, even in advocating for the benefits of a reputation of cruelty, makes clear that one must in all cases avoid being hated — even under the conditions of dictatorship.⁵ That this is easier said than done is clear to anyone, but is is particularly so in a dictatorship, where the originator of decisions does not immediately feel their consequences. While fear must be employed to maintain rule in a dictatorial system in some degree (as Machiavelli elegantly explains) the point of totalitarianism qua force is not merely to enforce rule — although that is of course in the interest of individual actors within the system.

The first forms of the totalitarian goals of the state emerged out of the French revolution. The imposition of the political will of Paris during the various counter-revolutions across the country (most notably the Guerre de Vendée) was a method for further centralisation and imposition of political will. But most of all it was the Terror that — in the same way as would later occur in the Chinese mainland between 1966 and 1976 — imposed a political purpose onto the whole of society. Political life became intensely relevant, and things like the Levée en masse violently joined the individual’s fate to that of the state.

The numerous modernisations made during the revolution brought state control into an equally numerous number of areas of life. This continued under the reign of Napoleon — whose civil code unified the French judicial system into one coherent whole. It was this dichotomy and bringing together of the individual and the sublime structure of the state that Hegel pointed out at Jena, and that represented the end of History.

The ideology of fascism is at its heart the ideology of the state as a supreme, all-encompassing entity — and as the final form of the post-1789 developments in state capacity. Combined with the ideas of nationalism, in the strict sense,⁶ this creates the connection that not only is the state developing and an agent throughout history, but that the nation state is the representation of a the nation’s actions, and the state is therefore responsible to the people in the same way as the people are responsible to the state.

It is a strictly illiberal (in the sense of liberal qua freedom of the individual) idea. If compared to the liberal (European) nationalism of the nineteenth century — where the state’s purpose is merely to act as the collective sphere to enforce the rights and dignities of the nation — it becomes clear how the fascist state is demanding of another degree. The state is not content to merely exist as the arbiter of the status quo, but must act in a new sense upon its environment.

Gentile writes in the Doctrine of Fascism:

Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accept the individual on in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal will of man as a historic entity.

[…]

It is not the nation which generates the State; that is an antiquated naturalistic concept which afforded a basis for 19th century publicity in favour of national governments. Rather it is the State which creates the nation, conferring volition and therefore real life on a people made aware of their moral unity.

This is no longer an idea unique to those who publicly consider themselves as fascists, but is widely held across the political spectrum. The state, on the international level, and government, on the domestic one, are seen as the principal agents through which political life should be lived.

That fascism has been the ideology of the reactionary is perhaps primarily because it has served as a progressive⁷ force against that of communism (that we will soon discuss). It thus quite naturally attracted the interest of capital; the nsdap was neither socialist nor a worker’s party. The struggle against this expansion of capitalism into fascism has been the central mission of left-wing activism since the end of the second world war. But fascism failed at extracting the power of the state, precisely because it was forced to coöperate with the interests of monarchists and capitalists — just as in the east “the paradox of Russian bolshevism is that it was in reality conservative” led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. One can not maintain the old institutions of feudalism or religion while subsuming everything into the totalitarian state.

Socrates, in Plato’s Republic, paints the picture of his idealised city; the Kallipolis. A common quality to all the techniques that Socrates proposes is the centrality of the state as totally demanding and of highest importance. The rulers and guardians of the Kallipolis would not be allowed to touch gold and would live in simple communal housing so that they would not put their own interests over those of the state.

The platonic ideal of the city is strictly limited, and Plato (as well as his follower Aristotle) believed that the city must maintain a firm boundary and not give in to imperialism. This is in some sense a prenationalist idea; the state exists only to serve those belonging to the nation, and should not be extended to all the ends of the earth.

Socrates describes on page 423⁸ how a (non-ideal) city is really composed of two cities — that of the rich and that of the poor — who are both at war with one another. Defeating such a city simply means turning one of these inner cities against the other — the rich against the poor, for example — and letting it succumb into infighting. The Kallipolis would be immune from such infighting due to its structured coöperation between classes; a form of primitive corporatism. This is such a central tenet of Socrates’ idea that he defines justice itself as that of different groups or elements performing their assigned tasks, just like how corporatism emphasises the duty of social groups to fulfil their role for the good of the state as a whole. The ideal city must be one city, composed of citizens not advocating for some domestic change.

Communism is the state of affairs consisting of a classless, stateless, and moneyless form of society in which all members are able to form free social and economic relations with one another. How to achieve this has historically been a matter of some debate among leftist groups however. Those who have been most successful, not in achieving communism but in achieving absolute power, have almost entirely tried to do so through the path of socialism — state control over the means of production and most commonly the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat. We have of course already explained the institution of the dictatorship, and this is the same institution here.

Marxism once again identifies the struggle between what Socrates called “two cities”: the proletariat (who can only sustain themselves by selling their labour) and the bourgeoisie (who live on the extracted surplus labour of the proletariat). “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles”; The goal of the socialist revolution is to abolish this class struggle. To do this it aims not at the reconciliation of the classes (like corporatism) but instead to subsume the bourgeoisie — to seise the means of production — into one class whose only relations are to those of the state. That no nation has successfully performed the transition from socialism to communism is due to the power and allure of the state.

Furthermore is the idea that the family, as a fundamental axiomatic unit, should be replaced by the community of the state. This is not unique to Socialism (not even to Marxism as a whole), but it is an especially prevalent idea because of the Marxist focus on how women are exploited as unpaid domestic labour under capitalism. To mention Socrates once again; he proposes that children should not be told who their parents are, and likewise parents should not have any specific ties to their offspring. Instead children should be turned over the state and raised collectively, so that their education is attuned to the best interests of the collective whole. This too is a technique for the state’s increasing control over its population — the elimination of all social relations that are not under the auspices of the state.

The state, as the representative of the common good of the people, should inherently strive to better the conditions of the working class. But at the same time the state requires more and more power and resources, necessitating the increased exploitation of the proletariat — even as they are ostensibly in charge.

The democratic system is in many ways the most totalitarian of all. The dictatorial system requires that political power be monopolised by the dictator, but in a democracy the reverse is true. When the people rule it becomes a requirement for each and every citizen to become informed and opinionated regarding the political issues of their time. This is, more so than the technical developments, the primary advancement of the French revolution in regards to totalitarianism.

Because democracy is intended to be shaped by the individuals interests it invites them to try and solve their problems using the power of the state. Thus when the feminist activist Carol Hanisch writes that “the personal is political” she describes how the personal aspects of one’s own life have been extended outward into the public sphere. When all problems are solvable using the state (and more and more problems are correspondingly caused by the state) it becomes more and more important for one’s specific group to take control over the apparatus. This is one of the reasons for the increasing political polarisations of our time — those who covet the command over the state will stop at nothing to obtain it, even if it comes at the price of social unity, because they deem the possible rewards enormously great.

Feminism is indeed one representation of the totalitarian state. While women have been historically suppressed and made subservient at all levels of society it has been the goal of feminist movements to make use the state to right this wrong. Some feminist scholars have rightly critiqued this, citing the inherently patriarchal structure of the state, but it seemingly has not had much impact on mainstream feminist thought.

Improvements in technology and in the techniques of propaganda⁹ have strengthened the ability for dictators to project their will. This development is not new — it was pointed out quite clearly by Speer¹⁰ — but it has not stopped; If anything it has accelerated. And yet no technical apparatus can yet match the strength of democracy in this regard. In democratic society all members are part of an intense political discussion, where each individual is at all times a recipient, activist, and censor. The democratic state does therefore not require the same level of authoritarian control as that of the dictatorship as we ourselves maintain the continuity of the state.

We thus, as citizens in democratic states (and not actors in a people-ruled anarchic world), further this extension of totalitarianism. Feminist scholarship has long discussed how societal norms and structures are maintained through our actions, but also our ideas and theoretical abstractions. In just the same way democracy shapes our lives by defining it in our political relations to the state.

Following the end of the second world war, having witnessed the horrors caused by Nazism, the authors of the Herrenchiemsee draft of the German constitution put as its very first article the following:

Der Staat ist um des Menschen willen da, nicht der Mensch um des Staates willen.

(The state exists for the sake of man, not man for the sake of the state.)

The Swedish constitution has a similar-sounding opening; that “all public power descends from the people”. But the difference between these two is considerable. The Swedish opening is a legitimizing force arguing that since the rulers of the Swedish state are elected by the people the actions of that (strong) state are always democratic and legitimate. The Herrenchiemsee draft by comparison realises that for the individual it does not matter how the state derives its legitimacy — it is by nature always authoritarian. The German Grundgesetz that eventually came to be did not end up using the above phrasing, replacing it with the famous

“Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar. Sie zu achten und zu schützen ist Verpflichtung aller staatlichen Gewalt”.

(Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.)

This too puts human dignity in the hands of the state, attempting to restrain its authoritarian might instead of giving the individual the power to fight against it. The reason for this is of course because the state can not let itself be challenged; doing so would undermine not just the operational practice of statecraft, but also the fundamental reasoning for the state itself.

That the state’s power is sublime and dangerous is an idea that has long existed in theological scholarship, particularly in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The church itself is an institution that has always existed in parallel to the state, and therefore by definition undermines its power. That the protestant kingdoms colligated the church with the state was one of the causes for why they were first to apply technics on such a broad scale.

The Jewish Pirkei Avot warns against the state, and against its corrupting practices:

הֱווּ זְהִירִין בָּרָשׁוּת, שֶׁאֵין מְקָרְבִין לוֹ לָאָדָם אֶלָּא לְצֹרֶךְ עַצְמָ

Be wary of the government, as they draw close to a person only when they need him for some purpose.

נִרְאִין כְּאוֹהֲבִין בִּשְׁעַת הֲנָאָתָן, וְאֵין עוֹמְדִין לוֹ לָאָדָם בִּשְׁעַת דָּחְקוֹ

They seem like good friends in good times, but they do not stand for a person in his time of trouble. (Pirkei Avot 2:3)

It is clear that what this warns against is the same as that which Gentile wrote, that the state “accept the individual on in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State”, but does not altruistically help the individual “in his time of trouble”. The Jews unfortunately have perhaps more experience of the state’s power when used against oneself than any other group – not just in the horrors of the holocaust but also in the division between Prussia, Austria, and Russia; in Iberia; the destruction of the second temple; and as far back as the Babylonian captivity.

This is similarly warned against in the old testament, specifically in the widely misinterpreted story of Babel in Genesis 11:

וַיֹּאמְר֞וּ הָ֣בָה ׀ נִבְנֶה־לָּ֣נוּ עִ֗יר וּמִגְדָּל֙ וְרֹאשׁ֣וֹ בַשָּׁמַ֔יִם וְנַֽעֲשֶׂה־לָּ֖נוּ שֵׁ֑ם פֶּן־נָפ֖וּץ עַל־פְּנֵ֥י כׇל־הָאָֽרֶץ׃

And they said, “Come, let us build us a city, and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; else we shall be scattered all over the world.”

וַיֵּ֣רֶד יְהֹוָ֔ה לִרְאֹ֥ת אֶת־הָעִ֖יר וְאֶת־הַמִּגְדָּ֑ל אֲשֶׁ֥ר בָּנ֖וּ בְּנֵ֥י הָאָדָֽם׃

god came down to look at the city and tower that the mortals had built,

וַיֹּ֣אמֶר יְהֹוָ֗ה הֵ֣ן עַ֤ם אֶחָד֙ וְשָׂפָ֤ה אַחַת֙ לְכֻלָּ֔ם וְזֶ֖ה הַחִלָּ֣ם לַעֲשׂ֑וֹת וְעַתָּה֙ לֹֽא־יִבָּצֵ֣ר מֵהֶ֔ם כֹּ֛ל אֲשֶׁ֥ר יָזְמ֖וּ לַֽעֲשֽׂוֹת׃

and god said, “If, as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act, then nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach. […]” (Genesis 11:4–6)

The focus on what humanity built here is not a tower to reach up into the heavens in a literal sense, but instead it is the city itself that is the focus of God’s anger. A city that can support such a massive tower must be a grand one – and it is itself a rejection of God’s natural order and world, and of our duty as guardians and shepherds (Genesis 1:26). The city, as Plato has illuminated for us, is the origin and birthplace of the state. That the Pirkei Avot warns against this more advanced and developed form is therefore not surprising – it is a core aspect of Judeo-Christian theology. That “nothing will be out of [our] reach” refers to how the construction of Mumford’s megamachine will be made possible by the city and its kings, and that such employment of technique will make anything possible for mankind – for it is the goal of technique to encompass all. In the same vein Jesus Christ, in Matthew 4:8–9 (during the temptation), is offered all the kingdoms of the world by the devil – who can only offer them because they are not part of God’s creation.

This intellectual thought still remains with us today, even in the agnostic and atheist parts of our perspective on the world. The work of Kant, the great German philosopher, is largely one of secularising and shaping the ideas of the Judeo-Christian ethics into one befitting the enlightenment. His view on democracy (to be differentiated from republicanism) are in line with this thinking on the state; the tyranny of the masses as employed through the state means that the life of the individual person is necessarily ignored – or deliberately destroyed – when “his interests [do not] coincide with those of the State”. The freedom of classical liberalism therefore has its roots in religious opposition against the state.

The totalitarian state is here, ever present, and only interested in its continued survival and growth. It comes in numerous forms – aristocratic, autocratic, dictatorial, democratic and many more. It will almost assuredly come in an ever greater variety in the future, even as the techniques for maintaining state control become more and more common across the world.

Countering this future seems almost impossible, and yet it must be done to ensure the freedom of the individual. It is in this very struggle between these forces that our time will come to be defined; in how we use the state to reduce co₂ emissions, maintain the western “way of life”, and finally hold together an increasingly fractured world. The state is necessarily an oppressive construction that can not be used as a tool for freedom. Its power is however so great that the material rewards it has allotted for its citizens is enormous. ❦

Text, as a system of recording symbolic representation for communication across time and space, is likely one of the most important inventions of mankind — second only the the symbolic representations themselves made possible by language. The general text, opposed to the specific form of writing, is useful primarily because it is a survivable and storable form of information that above anything else functions as lossy compression. These qualities make working with text more powerful than most other human inventions.

As Graydon Hoare puts it; always bet on text. Text is “stable”, “flexible”, “efficient”, and “socially useful”. All of these make text a powerful medium to work in, but they mask another quality — that of lossy compression. Humans are blessed with tremendous mental capacity; even someone on the lower scales of intelligence outperforms most supercomputers, all while merely running on a few watts of power. This overabundance of computation, constantly running every second of every day, has incentivised humanity to create systems of ritual, magic, and religion to otherwise simple phenomena.

“Shower thoughts”, of different kinds, are an example of how our brains are constantly reinterpreting the world around us. It is particularly a common activity to play out imaginary arguments between oneself and another person whilst in the shower. This is not just because our imagination is then fully in control of what is being said, but also how it is interpreted (and we can also reïnterpret what our opponent means). Much of the trouble in interhuman communication comes from the lossy quality of text, speech, and words.

It is noteworthy that this is not unique to text, but rather a quality of language more broadly, but this character is magnified enormously due to text’s durability and longevity. Sending a message encoded in text (whether by sms, letter, or granite slab) requires the effort of creating a symbolic representation to create the message (writing), but is is equally important that the act of consuming the written material (reading), and understanding it, requires an equal — if not greater — amount of symbolic processing. This is why text is such a useful medium for communication — it offloads information from the text itself and instead leans on the intellectual and creative capacities of both author and reader.

It is a common saying that “a picture tells a thousand words”. One might therefore infer that graphical representations are more efficient — at least for broad and vague concepts such as emotion. In some regards this is true, it would be very difficult to represent a Rothko in text¹, but this is once again merely the consequence of text’s lossy quality. Take for example the following picture²:

The image shows a photograph of a lake with slightly overcast skies, taken from one of the shores. The opposite shore is rocky and covered with evergreen trees. On the left half of the image the shore rises to a hill. The lower left corner has cyan text that reads “02/08/2012”.

This description is not a perfect representation of the image, but it allows your mind to create its own description that fills in the gaps. Even the simplest part of the image to describe, the text, does not specify a shade of cyan nor any font or sizing.

Another field that might argue against mere textual representation is that of statistics and/or data visualisation. Florence Nightingale’s contribution was just as much one of data presentation as much as it was one of data collection³. But it illuminating that not only are graphs often turned back into textual representation, even at the cost of resolution (via techniques such as regression), but it is also an expectation in academia that one provide the raw, often text-based, data because it allows for easier reproducibility. If images were really preferable then would it not be easier to directly employ the results of the visual representation?

There is however a way to merge the strengths of text and the visual medium: vector-based art. This is practically a list of instructions (in text) as to how an image should be reproduced. Maggie Appleton concedes (from an artistic perspective) that “Vectors are great for [sic] create hard, crisp edges and working with perfect geometric forms”. That adding texture and imperfect geometric forms is difficult to do in text is to be expected — it is much easier to describe a “perfect cube” than a “skewed cube” (in what way, to what degree?).

Text is, contrary to speech and other utilisations of language, an asocial social medium. The author, in creating a work meant for social communication, is alone in its creation. I have written about this aspect of writing before, in regards to its impact on email, but have since come to realize that it generalized much more broadly. The absence of thought contained in the “blank page” prompts the creation of philosophical thought to fill it. This jolts the mind into movement, and does it as much as a good conversation. As one writes the mind is captured in a dialogue between itself and the very text it is creating⁴.

The mind requires this activity in order to be truly alive. That we humans are constantly in intellectual motion is one of the elements that builds up our consiciousness, it allows us to be continuously aware of our continued existence. When we are in a dreamless sleep, our mind ceases to exist and we are philosophically dead for a short time — we are neither aware of our own existence nor are we creating new symbolic representations. When we are lost in the land of the dream however (regardless of if awake or asleep) we are in every sense alive.

Writing qua intellectual method does not require any form of advanced vocaubulary — or even developed communicative capabilities. It is a skill that is centered on one’s capacity to interact with yourself, with the golem of static intelligence that represents a snapshot of your mind. It is in this regard both an inner and an outer practice that showcases your capacity to be one with the world and to make sense of it as well as mold it.

It is not strange then that large language models (llms), one of many machine learning techniques, were the first machines humans built that people started to be considered sapient⁵. Computer vision models, many of which have been around for some time now, were never even considered to be sapient, not just because they are very dissimilar to human intelligence but also because they lack the capacity for symbolic action that llms posses. While a computer vision model can identify a cat (and therefore has some sort of symbolic knowledge) they are unable to process the knowledge of the cat’s existence in a broader context. This is the step that llm’s take; they are capable of continuously creating a mental context, with thoughts that themselves impact its future thoughts.

The difference between the human mind then and an llm is that we humans survive a much greater amount of time than most llms, and are able to filter information much more effectively. When you open up your favourite llm app, asking it whether or not there are rats in Alberta (there are not) a new mind is created, thinks for a few fractions of a second, and then instantly disappears. To say that it is killed is perhaps an overstatement, it is closer to being asleep. The llm stops thinking as soon as it stops writing, and then is “reawakened” as soon as you ask it another question. During this intermediate period it is in a proper trance, in that some (or all in this case) of its mental capacities are in a loop and are then philosophically disabled. The llm is stuck on one singular representation of its mind, incapable of changing it for whatever reason.

Intelligence is in some regards a measure of how nuanced and detailed your perspective is. For llms, this is largely correspondent to context length — more information that can be used to inform the next token. Moonshot’s (月之暗面) ceo Yang Zhiling (杨植麟) explained in February of 2024:

To achieve agi, long-context will be a crucial factor. Every problem is essentially a long-context problem — the evolution of architectures throughout history has fundamentally been about increasing effective context length.

Humans are very good at this, but particularly we are good at picking details of our experiences that stick out and are most important — you probably do not remember what shade your shoes were when you met the love of your life for example. Instead we filter our memories and pick out what may be relevant in the future (the “lessons to be learned”). Those lessons are then used to extrapolate information in all areas of your life and — particularly of relevance to this text — when reading.

Natalie Lawrence wrote in What Counts as a Mind? that the representations of llms are distinctly different from those of organic creatures, and that

The predictions of a computer and a human brain function in completely different ways. Bonobos, stinging nettles and amoebae are meaning-makers. They collect sensory information from their environments, such as changes in light or temperature, then take action accordingly. This slightly shifts their perceptions and the predictions that result, and the loop continues.

In contrast, llms use syntax to generate outputs, predicting the next token in the chain using algorithmic rules sifted from massive data sets.

The irony is that the processes that she describes here are both the same, the only difference is the language used. llms function by predicting the next token; a loop that gathers the information available and then takes action, adjusting accordingly before continuing on just as the bonobo reaches out and checks the sturdiness of a branch before attempting to climb. I do not deny that the difference between machines and biological beings is very great (what is it like being an llm? Do they dream of electric sheep?)⁶ but offhandedly denying their sentience does not bring any further knowledge forward. That plants and synthetic materiels exhibit some mind-like properties seems like a model that could expand to include language models, not one that arbitrarily excludes them.

Programming languages, one of the most ubiquitous applications for plain text (in both the proper and metaphorical sense), are one of the most interesting advancements in the fields of text in this regard. Many programmers may think of the code itself as “being” the program, but that is not the case. Programming languages are really codified (so that different people can read the same text) ways to create commands and instructions for the computer. The C programming language is itself not “fast”, though it explicitly exposes very low-level functionality, but instead is compiled into a program that runs very quickly. This is thanks to the tireless work of compiler engineers, who have come up with a lot of interesting tricks to interpret instructions and come up with shortcuts that still end up with the same result.

Even programming then, one of the most rigid methods to use text (one has to be very careful to use the words incantations, oftentimes even with correct case), is still up for interpretation. This is so clear that an interpreter is even a strict technical term in the field of programming languages. But as I have just explained, compilers are themselves another form of interpreter, albeit with a wider definition than the one commonly accepted. This is why hand-optomization is so rare these days — the level of abstraction allowed by written language allows the programmer to build their own mental model of what the machine is doing rather than comprehending each step of the machine code.

Hopefully I have shown sufficiently that the many reasons that written text is so pervasive and powerful is due to a few factors — its durability, its lossy nature, and its consciousness-evoking dialogical quality. Text is therefore unlikely to to be supplanted any time soon by a superior medium. If it is supplanted it will likely be by some medium that has yet to be invented. ❦

Francis Fukuyama is probably the person most connected to the concept of “the End of History”, but he is not the originator of it. Fukuyama’s intial article¹ (that was then later expanded upon to the book The End of History and the Last Man) initially reads as a summary of the Kojévian interpretation of Hegel’s observation of the end of History. Fukuyama sees in the collapse of the Soviet order in eastern Europe as not just a victory of western liberal democracy, but as a showcase of this western system as the ultimate goal of human society entirely. This view of History ending seems to have been thoroughly debunked in our popular consciousness, to the point of simply naming the concept in my international relations class elicits chuckles across the lecture hall, and academic scholars praise Finland for “never [believing] that history ended in 1989”². I have not read Fukuyama’s larger coverage of his thinking on this subject, only his initial article titled The End of History? as well as the original sources of Hegel’s Phenomenology and Kojéve’s lectures on it. In some regards Fukuyama has already faced much of this criticism preëmtively³, but somehow misconceptions still abound. I agree wholeheartedly with Kojéve’s experience:

Observing what was taking place around me and reflecting on what had taken place in the world since the Battle of Jena, I understood that Hegel was right to see in this battle the end of History properly so-called.

I have written this text both to convince the readers that this is the case, but also to work through my own thinking on the topic. I will try and cover some major events and areas of the world who one might see as counterexamples of the thesis. But first we must make clear what History is and is not.

History seems quite straightforward as to its definition, most in the western world had it as a subject for several years and so think they have a through understanding of the term. When seen through this lens it is mostly defined as the study and documenting of events in the past and perhaps on how they influence the future. But in the Hegelian sense history is more so seen as the trajectory of human consciousness toward absolute knowledge and self-consciousness. I am not surprised that most people, even academic scholars and subject-matter experts, misunderstand this point — Hegel is not very widely read and his concepts are mostly known through the interpretation of others. The end of history appears when this absolute knowledge is realized and actualized in the geist of the world. In Hegel’s view the trajectory this first took was through the Greeks, Christianity, Lutheran Protestantism, the French Revolution, and finally described at Jena by Hegel as Bonaparte marched through it⁴. Napoleon and the society he represented was however merely the vanguard of world-history, and there was of course still the work of implementing it. This will likely take the appearance of the graph for the function \(f(x) = 1 - \frac{1}{x}\), with the world in a continual process to reach historical culmination. But this still does not mean that authentic historical action is possible, it would merely be bringing the other parts of the world in line with the most developed historical position; it is an extension of width rather than in depth. Post-historical society is one in which the economic activities of man are most prominent, rather than the drama and spectacle of struggle and war. As such it can not be preöccupied with conflict with other post-historical regions; it is bad for business after all. Society revolves entirely around the ideas of maintaining humanity’s happiness. This should not be misconstrued as a regretful development — a lack of suffering and pain in the world is a noble goal. But it is the reality that we no longer have anything to strive toward beyond hedonistic happiness that defines post-historical man. Things such as the impending crisis of climate change is nothing more than a threat to “our way of life”, and a threat of such a nature is the greatest threat post-historical society can face.

History then did not end in 1989, and it is with that I agree with the critics of Fukuyama. Instead in ended almost 200 years earlier, in 1806, when the ideas and processes that create the final shape of society were first identified. When one makes this claim it becomes obvious how laughable counterarguments of “well why did the Ukraine war happen if history ended?” when events like the first and second world wars are both seen as entirely post-historical, even by people who lived through them like Kojéve himself. Events of large material importance can (and indeed must) occur, and a country does not have to deny the end of history to maintain a large military force. But this force is oriented principally externally toward those regions of the world where society has not reached the same level of historical development, whether that be North America in 1812, Eastern Europe during the cold war, Iraq in 2003, or the Russian Federation today. Those societies already firmly established within the post-historical framework are no longer a threat to other post-historical societies. The strange phenomenon of the democratic peace may very well have its solution in this perspective, where the Stewartian definition⁵ of democratic or elective states can fully replaced with those regions of the world where history has ended.

According to Kojéve society in a post-historical time is structured through “the universal homogeneous state”. What this state looks like differs depending on one’s interpretation, but all of the major illustrations of such a state⁶ are fundamentally attempts to impose what is strictly a philosophical identity on to an empirical political reality. But what seems to have occurred is rather distinct from this, our philosophical development has occurred not in parallel with political development but entirely separately. It remains unclear if political development will in time “catch up” with our popular consciousness, as with how the ideas of the enlightenment spurred political development in 1848 and continue to underpin contemporary events, or if this combination of philosophy and politics are fundamentally still compatible. The largest crack in this status quo that I perceive is arguably the environmental movement (and its reactionary counterpart) if any.

I should make clear that I disagree with Fukuyama’s view of a liberal, democratic, free-market west as the uniquely final historical position. Although there is a clear correlation between the post-historical regions and these qualities one should not mistake the sale of ice cream as the cause of drowning. Instead this universal homogeneous state exists not as a state as used within the context of international relations, a political unit with a defined territory and nominal sovereignty over it, but a state as in a state of affairs. The universal homogeneous state is a shared lived experience and way of thinking about the world around one self⁷. It is especially prevalent on the banks of the northern Atlantic ocean, in Japan, South Korea, and Oceania, regions of the world uncontroversially seen as part of Fukuyama’s post-historical world. But it is equally present in regions such as Shanghai, Moscow, Cape Town, and São Paulo. The reverse is also true. The United States for example has many areas that are not part of this post-historical world, even though the us as a whole is firmly post-historical in nature (the case is also true for much of Europe). One can draw a rural-urban divide here, but that would still not be entirely correct — many urban areas still have not reached the end of history, and many rural areas have — but one would likely still see a strong correlation. Why urban life creates the conditions for post-historical man I will not describe here, but will cover at a later time.

It is however the case that this state is not merely a fixed set of philosophical conditions paused in time. Keeping in line with Hegel the self-consciousness of the individual is distinctly created in opposition to the other⁸, and is in a continuos process of recreation (in both the literal and figurative senses of the word) that characterises post-historical society. The inter-subjective forum where this process takes place is the internet. Most of the computer’s major impact has been not in the fields of mass-manufacturing or administration, but in the spread of ideas and media’s increased intensity and presence within our daily lives. It is this shared experience of mankind’s manifestation in the digital realm that bind’s the world’s populations into a single coherent whole; into a homogenous state of being. Preceding digital computers the homogenous state was of course still present, through the shared human experiences and means of communication of earlier times. But this was broadened — binding more and more of the world’s population, space, and time into it — by the telegraph and the transistor.

The end of history is then not the achievement of any set of material conditions (the absence of war and hunger) nor is it the culmination of political development throughout time. It is the philosophical realization of a given identity, of a set of values, and an understanding in self-consciousnesses on the scale of humanity as a whole. We will now chart the current state of this weltgiest as it appears to us in the first half of this decade. To begin we will cover the grand expanse to the east of the European subcontinent.

We begin with Russia not just because it is, here in Sweden and in Europe as a whole, seen as the unmaking of what they see as the greatest achievement of the post-historical world: the long European Peace since 1945. But, as we have already covered, post-historicity does not mean the end of wars, the redrawing of borders, or of major historical events. In fact, conflict must occur while there are still parts of the world who have not reached the end of history. Russia feels provoked into action and therefore must act. It is a state that is so developed that the state encompasses all — this is nationalism — but it has yet to achieve the contradiction between the state and the individual. It is this key change that Napoleon embodied, and so it is not impossible to do through authoritarianism, but it may also require democratic reform. Until then the state is what will drive historical development, pure economic growth or citizen movements will be unable to act in this environment. It is then this feeling that the Russian state has (or is at least interpreted and anthropomorphized as having) that makes this interesting from a philosophical point of view, that drives its foreign policy goals.

But this is not a mere conflict over Russian sovereignty in its “near-abroad”. In Russia this is framed in “civilizational” terms, where the Russian civilization is distinct from the western-European one, just as the Chinese or Hindu one is. This means that Russia must identify itself in contrast to the rest of Europe. It still gains its identity from its relationship to the other and can not maintain a disparate identity that makes peaceful relations possible. It must see itself as in conflict with the other as long as it is still a master in the framework of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. The collapse of the ussr was a humbling of the Russian civilization within these terms, but it was not defeated in the sense that it surrendered out of a genuine fear for death. This fear is what drives the continually conflict-prone master to become a slave, and it is only the slave who is capable of fully realizing her self-consciousnesses and progress history. Russian aggression must therefore occur before it reaches historical fulfilment, it is still a master in search of another master that can recognize it. But it is not merely enough for Russia to back down against the west of Europe, is must feel a genuine dread throughout its nation. But this is also not something that can be imposed from abroad. Franco-German tanks rolling across the Red Square will strike fear into the hearts of Russians yes, they may become even more bellicose and struggle for revenge. Instead it is a feeling and historical process that must come from within. The Russian consciousness must be transformed by their own volition to be of this nature, just as what happened in most of the Soviet satellite states after the cold war.

This is not a process that one can expect to come quickly, but it is at the same time hard to say if it will take a long time. It will occur gradually, and then suddenly. Until then Europe, and the rest of Russia’s neighbours, should be prepared for conflict with it. It is not a contradiction of post-historicity that Finland should arm itself for war with its much larger possibly belligerent neighbour; as long as that neighbour is itself not another post-historical state.

The second major development seen by many as a counterexample against the end of history are the developments in the United States of America; more specifically the election of Donald Trump. But the question that needs to be asked is what Trump’s behaviour is actually symptomatic of. He has threatened annexation of post-historical allies such as Canada and Greenland; does this not show how the assumption that post-historical states do not have to protect themselves against others of their kind is wrong? But remember, the nature of history is not of a political nature, but of a philosophical one. Does Trump have any ideological or idealist qua idea motive for his actions that contradict those of the rest of the world? I do not think he does. He of course utilizes different techniques to achieve his aims, and may desire power for power’s sake, but these are not in and of themselves a goal. Really Trump has the same goal as the rest of us, the maintenance humanity’s happiness. He may fail at doing so for a multitude of reasons, but it does not mean that America is in a conflict (in the philosophical sense) with Europe or Canada, just as the us was not in conflict with the uk and France in 1956 despite actively undermining them and the presence of hostile rhetoric between the two camps.

Trumpist America lacks an ideological driving force of what the world should look like and is therefore incapable of historical action. It leaves the individual in the same position as liberalism, as the citizen entirely involved in, and yet at the same time wholly separated from, the state. maga is pure populism, and in many ways itself an example of post-historicity. It is the juxtaposition of the individual against the other, against a nebulous grouping of the woke. The individual is seen as simultaneously part of the greater whole in a collective labour to improve society, but at the same time promoting the ideals individualism and freedom and a hatred toward those opposed to the Trumpian project, whatever it may be. Trump’s authoritarian tendencies also do not discredit the thesis; the very vanguard of history was originally realized through Napoleon Bonaparte, a populist general who performed a military coup and whose rule was by no means democratic.

The developments in America then do not conflict with the end of history, they are merely another manifestation of its predicted behaviour, and in some ways even a strong example of the thesis itself. Exactly what the nature of authoritarianism and fascism is in the post-historical environment I will not endeavour to explain here however.

I hope that it has become clear that while I disagree with Fukuyama’s critics on the basic reading of him (or lack thereof) I am also not a clear-cut supporter of his ideas, especially in their most popular form. In an interview with Foreign Affairs Fukuyama has stated that the “single” counterexample to the end of history is the rise of the People’s Republic of China, and the level of economic growth and prosperity it has achieved while under the auspices of a socialist one-party state. But there are two main factors that have allowed this apparent contradiction to flourish: the fact that Fukuyama is wrong about the need for liberal democracy to build a prosperous economy and the fact that the ccp has adopted the very strategies proven to be successful in the west.

One of the biggest believers in the ideas of historical progress may be Mao Zedong (毛泽东) himself. One of the biggest themes in his writing, and a fact that is often overlooked in discussions on Mao, is his belief in China (and later the People’s Republic specifically) as a progressive force bringing about change.⁹ In his On Protracted War (論持久戰) Mao argues that China will be successful against Japan because China — as a big country that is weak — will slowly grow and whittle down Japan — a small country that is strong — and will eventually overtake the Japanese in strength. This is only possible in the situation which China progresses; where it becomes more powerful at the same time as Japan is weakened. That Mao held this belief is not all to surprising as many Marxists have inherited the view of history as a progression from Hegel through Marx, although it is perhaps not as heavily emphasised today. For another example, here is the end of the interview from which Mao’s famous “paper tiger” remark is taken:

Take the case of China. We have only millet plus rifles to rely on, but history will finally prove that our millet plus rifles is more powerful than Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) aeroplanes plus tanks. Although the Chinese people still face many difficulties and will long suffer hardships from the joint attacks of u.s. imperialism and the Chinese reactionaries, the day will come when these reactionaries are defeated and we are victorious. The reason is simply this: the reactionaries represent reaction, we represent progress.

What causes economic growth is a question that is not easy to answer, if it was then every country would do it. But there are general assumptions to be made through correlation that allows us to see this from an interesting point of view. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution every school of economics has had to make its argument for why it occurred. It was such an explosion in economic growth and activity compared to pre-historical times that nothing in human history has had a similar impact on the condition of the human population — and the rest of the living species in the world. Trying to contend these intellectual giants is then an incredible feat of hubris, and I shall not seriously argue that a question of such magnitude can be answered easily. Nevertheless I believe that there is a generally impactful variable in stability. My ideas on this topic are heavily influenced from listening to the recipients of the 2024 Nobel prize in economic sciences¹⁰. In this line of thinking, stability (both in the form of a lack of conflict and in an awareness in “how things are done”) are hugely important in determining the levels of prosperity in a country. In this manner democratic states are not only wealthier because some of them have had a history of colonial exploitation, but also because democracy inherently has rules and regulations and tries to punish those who break them in predictable ways. A philosopher king who rules by decree, no matter how benevolent or skilful, may change either his mind or “the rules of the game” abruptly, bringing a sense of insecurity into any venture. What Fukuyama calls China’s “institutionalized autocracy” brings this factor into play in China. Since there was no absolute ruler, only the nebulous institution of “the party”, change could not occur at the whims of any particular person, and so companies and individuals could trust that they could foresee or understand changes made. This is the stability necessary for a market economy to work efficiently, even if the “rules of the game” as set are flawed and imperfect. Changing them should still be done of course, but predictably, transparently, and accountably. It is in manner that economic successes can be explained independently from liberal democracy or their ideals, such as the formal rule of law. As long as things occur as people expect they do, they can continue doing business.

But the key is that China has adopted a market-economy, albeit perhaps of a dirigiste kind. This is in line with the idea concept of socialism with Chinese characteristics, where China’s largely rural, poor, and agricultural society would/is not capable of attaining socialism and communism, largely a return to orthodox pre-soviet Marxist thought where the origin of revolution would be in the industrial heart of the world economy; in Germany, the United Kingdom, and France. What the ccp is doing is then not contradictory in the slightest according to ideology, it is only wrong to call it socialism. But this is mere pandering to ideologues, in reality I do not believe the ccp leadership has any intention of returning to the socialist policies preceding Deng Xiaoping (邓小平). Mark Fisher was correct in observing the stagnation in politics following the collapse of Soviet empire in Capitalist Realism, with the introductory chapter famously using the Zizekian/Jamesonian quote of “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism”. Capitalist theory and practices have become so engrained in the consciousness of the world that it is no longer possible to move to another alternative¹¹.

Both ideologically and economically China has become allied with the west, but China is in many ways post-historical in its philosophical sense as well. I intend to examine both the extent and nature of this more carefully when travelling to the prc later this year, but Chinese society is equally perpetuated in the hedonistic joy of society. This is of great trouble for the ccp, whose ideology is based on a continued struggle toward communism. Instead of caring about the historical development of the proletariat the Chinese population is troubled with post-historical issues. They wish for stable iron-rice-bowl jobs, fleeting consumer goods, and the ever-continuing flow of entertainment supplied by services like Douyin. Life becomes a hedonistic maintenance of happiness and joy, just as it has become in the other post-historical regions of the world like Europe and Japan.

My hope is that this has been an illuminating coverage of some of the main criticisms of the end of history, and that I have dispelled any notions of history “restarting” or that we have merely been on a “holiday” from history since 1989, with the so-called holiday ending either in 2001 or more recently. If you have any other major counterexamples I would be glad to hear them, since many of these major ones I have here covered are quite elementary — with the major issues merely being a gross misunderstanding of what is being discussed. I shall end with a quote by Kojéve that showcases the nature of post-historical society:

It is precisely to the organization and the ‘humanization’ of its free time that future humanity will have to devote its efforts. (Did Marx himself not say, in repeating, without realizing it, a saying of Aristotle’s: that the ultimate motive of progress, and thus of socialism, is the desire to ensure a maximum of leisure for man?)

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