The Resentment Challenge
Francis Fukuyama is now revisiting his important 1992 thesis in The End of History and the Last Man, a treatment of GWF Hegel’s dialectical analysis of the mechanics of world history.
In 1992 Fukuyama argued the world would inevitably turn to liberal democracy to manage its government because there would never be a generally acceptable alternative. He turned to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind (1807) to illustrate the point.
In Hegel’s scenario, the First Man recognizes the abiding freedom of will in his rival, sees that this freedom threatens his own and feels compelled to challenge a fight to the death. The fight results in society, with one of the rivals deciding he prefers subjugation to death, which seems likely to be filled with self-caused terrors, and the distinction between master and slave is drawn.
The master/slave dialectic is carried into history through conquest and empire, landlordism and serfdom, capitalism and revolution and, according to Fukuyama, can only finish with liberalism and governmental consent as the only legitimate solution achievable by rational social practice. Fukuyama then acknowledges this final result of history is likely to become somewhat boring for its inheritors.
The third decade of the twenty-first century, however, has witnessed a vigorous pushback against this social history. Government actors who resent the leading-edge status of the Western societies, which long ago adopted liberal politics and capitalism and thus enjoy an insurmountable leg up on everyone else, now want to push an alternative, and the alternative is finding resonance even within these leading societies themselves because not all of their members enjoy all of its leading-edge privileges.
Fukuyama’s 1992 thesis ignored the politics of resentment, which in the Russian case is a politics of nihilism, in China a politics of grievance and cultural pride and in Iran something comparably negative, likewise based in the dignities of longstanding practice. None of these politics contain any coherent positivism, no philosophical self-justification, no inspiring model for humanity as a whole, but Fukuyama currently sees that positivism deficit, which at this writing threatens an actual World War, as an important, untreated challenge to his thesis.
We believe there exists a further and more important alternative to Fukuyama’s thesis, the alternative whereby a godly form of science learns to explore and socially to guide consciousness or subjectivity as such, and we propose to investigate that alternative here. The trajectory whereby this investigation seems likely to affect social and political organization writ large seems unlikely to be discerned for some time, but we think a good and safe start can be made by studying and exhibiting real instances of the subconscious, basic and universal unit of society: the perfect conversation.
