[Symmetry]

People keep complaining about "The End of History" but never for good reasons. It predicted president Trump as the sort of "megalothymia" that that might come to power in the end of history! It's just about the lack of alternative credible opposing ideologies. I still found it an incredibly disappointing book but not for any of the reasons that everybody dumps on it for.

[fennecfoxen]

i don't get this perspective

> Brexit, Trump, and the social and economic decline, perceived or real, that led to them are the most obvious events that signaled our latest attempts to kick apart Eden.

like okay, those legit aren't great, but don't we face substantially bigger threats from, oh, IDK, Putin's Russia and what may yet be an ascendant China?? Maybe the way we approach these matters, as if sleepwalking, has as much to do with destruction we suffer as any overt impulses towards destruction.

(Also, the people kicking Eden apart usually aren't the most-comfortable ones, but the resentful ones a few rungs down.)

[Symmetry]

Fukayama's perspective is a very Hegelian one. Some countries might be threatened by wars with other countries but he contends the dominant paradigm of liberal democratic capitalism doesn't have any real contenders against it and so capital H History in that sense is over. Countries might not all embrace this framework but unless large numbers of people come to embrace Putanism or Xi Jinping thought then it isn't proving anything that Fukiyama wrong.

Now, I think that this is a terrible perspective to have so I didn't like the book at all. And I have other beefs with it. But the book was never claiming that countries wouldn't invade each other or that there wouldn't be terrorist attacks or that significant events like that wouldn't continue to happen.

[paulwilsondev]

exactly