”What the Crows experienced was the collapse of their lifeworld. The traditional Crow way of life was structured around two cardinal virtues: being a warrior and being a hunter. Waging battles against rival nations and engaging in seasonal buffalo hunts were the supreme purposes of Crow existence and gave meaning to every other activity, down to the smallest gestures of everyday life. Everything was oriented toward them. “Nothing happened,” then, meant that once the telos of Crow life had disappeared, any subsequent happenings had already lost their purpose and become meaningless. In such a situation, Lear observes, “the concepts with which [one] would otherwise have understood [oneself] … have gone out of existence.” An invisible cultural scaffolding supporting a form of life and a way of being in the world has collapsed. Suddenly, the world no longer offers a solid backdrop to our existence and to our aspirations. It is as if there had been in Plenty Coups’s life “a moment when history came to an end.”

——

I feel like this partially explains why people in democracies have become so drawn to “voting for chaos” and fantasizing about the apocalypse. They cannot contextualize a history, and sense a lack of telos, in the current state of the world. Waiting in the antechamber of history feels unbearable.

Fukuyama's end of history seems pretty laughable. The idea that things would happen and that these things might change our lives our life, but that these wouldn't matter because . . . liberal democracy? I'm not sayin that our age isn't one of ennui and seeming uneventfulness, but rather this is our distorted perception.

How does someone write an article like this without mentioning Spengler?

Would love a TDLR on these articles tbh, no disrespect to the author. The beauty of philosophy is the near infinite discussional depth to almost any statement and I haven't got time to read 6k words, consider it intellectually and then form a comment. Give us the short version.

I think it is more than just distorted perception. Violence just is not a part of the average man's life anymore. Maybe Israelis, and even then, it is only the threat of violence. Ukraine is an aberration. I think the modern instruments of war preclude humans from engaging in violence in a culturally meaningful way. You could think of a handgun as a nuclear weapon at a personal scale. It's incompatible with the style of warfare that humans engaged in for the majority of their history. To say nothing of nuclear weapons! And it's very, very hard to imagine going back to less fatal forms of warfare. Your opponent would just bring a gun to the knife fight.
Then we have the monopoly on the use of force by the state. Non military citizens have to content themselves with violent ideation, of which we have many forms.

His views seem to be a product of at least two things. First, the inability of neoliberal capitalism to see what's going on around it. Second is more particularly historic, namely post Cold War ascendancy. This lead to the hubris of nrocons believing they could easily remake the world however they wanted. It also shows in the easy, and absurd, conflation of capitalism with democracy, which are obviously not the same. His book says more about the US in that area than anything to be taken seriously.

I just read that excerpt from Capitalist Realism I think

Artsy article but it doenst give an answer. But it’s truly classy; good woek

Worth pointing out that Fukuyama himself has long since repudiated the idea.

Fukuyama has retracted his original thesis, stating something like "history has resumed with 9/11". The sheer hubris needed to think that the neoliberal world order is the end of all things. Lol. It's nothing but a failure of imagination which is why Russia's invasion of Ukraine shook the West so badly.

One has to live a life of extreme privilege to think like this.....l am sure a poor person in Africa or India has a lot to look forward to by the simple act of focussing on obtaining a better life for his progeny.

Spengler wouldn't have agreed, even if there are some parallels to his theory of 'civilizational' obsolescence. His point was never that history itself reaches a conclusion - almost the opposite.

Rather narcissistic take. Sounds more like projecting than anything based on evidence

Hogwash the whole way down. Hogwash filled with ridiculous conflations, colonial apologia, and a dearth of imagination - an ironic self report if I’ve ever seen one.