Fukuyama, ochlocracy and the end of history that never came

The end of history never came: ochlocracy did

The end of history thesis has aged badly. That announcement that liberal democracy and positivist rationalism would rule the world unchallenged has run into three blows: an invasion on Europe's doorstep, Western democracies decaying from within, and an artificial intelligence arriving like Columbus in America. Only this time, we are the indigenous people.

The diagnosis begins in academic terms. Francis Fukuyama, of Japanese descent and then an official within the US apparatus, argued that history had entered a permanent settlement: liberal globalization had lifted billions out of poverty and kept the peace among nations committed to those values. Public debate, governed by reason, would maintain the status quo without major upheavals. The irony is that he wrote this at a time when academia had spent two decades steeped in postmodern relativism, according to the most critical reading of the man.

The invasion of Ukraine and the end of liberal force

The first sign that the paradigm does not hold is Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Not because of the challenge itself, but because of the lukewarm response of the international order to an aggression on Europe's doorstep. The force that once crushed distant backwaters — Iraq, Afghanistan, rightly or not — is no longer operational. 9/11 was not the problem: it was the forceful response that proved the paradigm was still alive. What is cracking today is the ability of liberal nations to impose their will when the aggressor is an empire with an arsenal.

From democracy to ochlocracy: Spain, the US and the EU

The second blow is internal. Western democracies are beginning to be supplanted by outright ochlocracy, the term Polybius coined more than two millennia ago to describe democracy's degeneration into mob rule. Spain, the US and the EU stand as examples of this drift: states that cease to be functional and become corrupt extractive sects, incapable of managing the complexity of an advanced society. The word, rescued from oblivion, has been enough on its own to justify the entire conversation.

AI as Columbus's arrival: we are the indigenous people

The third front is technological. The emergence of artificial intelligence is equivalent to Christopher Columbus's arrival in America, with one unpleasant difference: this time we are the indigenous people. For centuries we have watched technical pogre with the satisfaction of owners of our creations; now we build machines capable of performing intellectual activities that were once exclusively human. Some play the matter down by saying that language models merely seek the optimal solution among prior information. Producing new knowledge, understanding it, and being aware of that understanding are three distinct problems, and confusing them leads to hasty conclusions. Underestimation, at this point, can have catastrophic consequences.

---

The Roman Empire lasted a thousand years, and no one imagined it could disappear. It fell from attrition. History did not stop then, nor does it seem willing to stop now: it is accelerating. If the liberal paradigm survives, it will do so with scars no one today knows how to measure. And with the certainty that no well-furnished living room is safe from the elements.