The end of history

What Hacker News says

1. tarboreusOct 2021
   Also, read the book instead of responding to the title. If you want a response to the idea of the end of history, read the end of The End of History.
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2. paimapiOct 2026
   I seriously doubt anything but political calculus about midterms and the sinking polling numbers for Republicans along with kickbacks from private military contracts towards certain connected members of the inner-circle went into the decision matrix for starting this war. It was never about whether or not it made sense - Fukuyama's The End of History has long been totally irrelevant, a little cherry on top of the neoliberal promise of global peace.
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3. nostrademonsMar 2026
   It's interesting that this article is funded by Francis Fukuyama, who famously wrote the "The End of History" [1] in 1992, which argued that the rules-based liberal democratic world order had won and there was no more need for geopolitical realism. This article represents a complete repudiation of his past beliefs, and basically an admission that he was wrong.

   Anyway, just as how Fukuyama was right for ~20 years and then very, very wrong, I suspect this essay is too. The U.S. mapped out all the game theory around nuclear war in the 50s and 60s. If you have too many states with nuclear weapons, nuclear war becomes inevitable, just like if you have too many firms in a market a price war becomes inevitable. That's why the U.S. and other nuclear powers have put so much effort into nuclear non-proliferation. North Korea may have been right in the short-term national interest sense to pursue and continue its nuclear weapons program, but the end result here is that most of humanity is going to die in a nuclear war, and we won't have such things as states and nations afterwards.

   [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...

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4. crossbodyFeb 2026
   The concept of the "end of the exponential" sounds like a tech version of Fukuyama's much mocked "End of History". Amodei seems to think we’ll solve all the "useful" problems and then hit a ceiling of utility.

   But if you’ve read David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity, Amodei’s view looks like a mistake. Knowledge creation is unbounded. Solving diseases/coding shouldn't result in a plateau, but rather unlock totally new, "better" problems we can't even conceive of yet.

   It's the begining of Inifinity, no end in sight!

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5. hagbard_cMar 2025
   > Europe ... saw lasting peace [in] the second half of the 20th century.

   Which happens to coincide with the lifetime of the majority of Europeans. War was mostly something which happened to other countries, in other places - not in 'civilised' Europe, surely?

   So yes, I am being serious - deadly serious. Most European countries neglected national defence after the fall of the Soviet Union in the expectation that Fukuyama was right when he claimed we were at 'The end of History' [1]. There is a good Swedish term for this condition: fredsskadad which translates to 'peace-damaged', the opposite of 'war-damaged'. It is the condition of a people who have gotten so used to peace being the norm that they assume that everyone everywhere else also considers peace to be the goal and thus no longer need to consider the possibility of ending up in a conflict.

   [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57981.The_End_of_History...

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6. alexissantosFeb 2025
   Millennials, I'd argue. During the 90s, culture at large painted a picture of stability and progress, all made possible by democracy. See Francis Fukuyama's The End of History for the kind of tone that permeated the time.

   As we Millenials have gotten older, we too have seen through the veil and realized the system isn't perfect. More importantly, perhaps, we've seen the wide range of ways people react to this imperfect system. Some have chosen to undermine its very foundations to get their way, leaving many to wonder what we're left with if -- to loosely quote Whose Line Is It Anyway -- the rules are made up and the points don't matter.

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