The sadness of being "the last human"; Restoring Fukuyama's dignity from the charge of optimism/living in the shadow of liberal democracy and the "residual human" outbreak

For years, Francis Fukuyama was known as a naïve optimist. Now he wants to reveal the truth...Fukuyama never promised us that we would be happy and be happy...What Fukuyama has identified is a human problem: the blinker that separates utopia from dystopia. We got what we always wanted, but it's not enough and it never will be. Fukuyama, always an analyst

Andisheh Group: Editing, Correction and Editing: Forozan Asif Nakhai: This article examines Francis Fukuyama's new autobiography (In the Realm of the Last Man) and removes the accusation of "naive optimism" from his theory of the end of history (an article published in The Atlantic on September 9, 2026 and translated by artificial intelligence). Gal Beckerman shows that Fukuyama still sees liberal democracy as the only and best possible answer to the human need for "recognition" (thymus), but warns that living at this end of history has made people bored and bored. The modern man, aligned with Nietzsche's "remaining man", fights for himself in the absence of great dangers and heroic battles; An uprising that has manifested itself from student protests to populist and far-right uprisings. The article concludes that the main problem of the current order is not economic instability, but the inability to "equally distribute respect" and quench this unruly thirst. Gal Beckerman is one of the authors of the Atlantic magazine and the author of the latest book "How to be a protester". Read this article below:

If we want to be fair to the countless readers who thought otherwise, his famous book in 1992, "The End of History and the Last Man", had an aura of utopia in it; A book that announced a post-Cold War world in which liberal democracy has won over competing political systems and everyone can sit back and toast the end of all conflicts and struggles. Fukuyama says the poor guy still gets asked every week by "several people" if he's willing to rewrite (or exonerate) that book. However, Fukuyama insists today that if you read the book to the last page—and indeed to the final five chapters—you would never expect peace. His more modest and sober prediction is precisely in the initial essay that led to the writing of the book: "The end of the history of the era will be very sad."

Fukuyama has published a new autobiography, Into the Realm of the Last Man, in which he hopes to shake off the fame and stigma he clearly can't stand. She is not an optimistic naïve (Pollyanna) and never has been. By "the end of history" he meant—and still believes—that we have reached the best possible world among possible worlds. But being "the last human" and living in this end point, was always depicted as an unstable and unstable situation. Fukuyama borrowed this concept from the dark and complex mind of Friedrich Nietzsche; Someone who uses this expression to describe a person who has passed out from boredom and boredom; Someone who lives in a society where there is nothing left to risk his life for.

In the Realm of the Last Man: A Biography by Francis Fukuyama

What appeared as a secondary and alarming thought in his previous book is now the focus of attention for Fukuyama. He wrote the book "The End of History" during the time of pride and drunkenness of the Americans, that is, when the Berlin Wall turned into a pile of rubble; But the events of the past three decades—9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Donald Trump—have created a different narrative. Fukuyama knows this. His defensiveness prevents him from fully acknowledging the extent to which he has been forced to retreat from his earlier passionate and laudatory views, but he now speaks of liberal democracy—this apparently blissful end-state—in a much more bleak tone. This situation now looks like a dark and scary dead end in the middle of the night; Where the street light is broken, a scary tension fills the atmosphere and there is no way forward.

As a mere biography, I have to say this book is disappointing. Fukuyama loses his enthusiasm for telling his life story around page 60. Fascinating and revealing memoirs are all included in the first pages; For example, as a young foreign policy analyst, she repeatedly failed the CIA's lie detector test because the question of whether she had ever had sex with a man completely confused her (she is quick to tell us that she had not). He writes about his father; A committed liberal sociologist who never stopped criticizing Fukuyama's once-conservative political views (after all, he had worked for Ronald Reagan and the Rand Institute) and said he had been "brainwashed" by others. As these more intimate and personal imperatives subside, any causal link between Fukuyama's personal background and his evolving thought also disappears. His grandparents were Japanese immigrants who spent World War II in an internment camp; But this is only briefly mentioned, which left me wondering if the stories they told him made him more aware of the vulnerabilities of a pluralistic society.

We get several chapters about how much he loves tech tools and woodworking and can build a computer from scratch. However, Fukuyama spends most of his time and energy summarizing the ideas that gave life to his work, producing a "highlights" album of his insights. This series of variable concepts helps to clarify the point to which extent the arrogance and show off characteristic of the "end of history" is absent from his works. The invasion of Iraq and the prolonged chaos that followed was a turning point. Fukuyama separated his account from his neoconservative friends and professors who had shaped his career up to that point. His first published work was in 1979 in Commentary, edited by Norman Podhortz, and he once praised Paul Wolfowitz, the architect of the Iraq War, as "one of the smartest people I've ever met." But after that war started in 2003, he stopped talking to them. He even found himself on a very uncomfortable and muted elevator ride with conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer.

In the late 2000s, Fukuyama called himself a "realistic Will Sonist". He is still an idealist about democracy, but he sees that democracy itself is not a magic bullet that can be sprinkled on randomly selected countries; Democracy is meaningless without institutions and a strong government to ensure the rule of law. His works over the past two decades have supported this point—notably his two-volume collection Political Order. In this biography, he writes, looking at the deadlocks of America in Iraq and Afghanistan: "Creating a modern and efficient government was a much more difficult mission than creating a democracy." Among the book's less appealing chapters are those in which he extols the value of an impartial and impersonal bureaucracy as vital to a well-functioning government, as opposed to one in which a leader hands off jobs to cronies and exploiters and enriches himself personally.

Fukuyama insists that liberal democracy will not be overthrown—mainly because no one has come up with a better idea. In response to the global rise of anti-liberal movements, many people across the political spectrum have blamed liberalism itself, portraying it as a crumbling system that must be torn down to its core. But as far as Fukuyama is concerned, any alternative vision is either already discredited or will lead to a worse world. He argues that the ultimate value of liberalism is that it satisfies basic human needs better than any other framework (though it still needs a lot of tweaking and reform).

He explains that we are defined by thymos—the desire for recognition and respect. Just as we need food to survive, we demand that our value be recognized. We want respect; And this can only be realized in a liberal society where all people are equal before the law. Although incidents may still occur, since the late 18th century, an increasing number of people have lived with a political system that at least has the capacity to satisfy everyone's "thymus"; And that's why we're done. The point, the beginning of the line.

But there's one problem: it's really boring here. As much as we crave the autonomy and dignity that comes with recognition, we are also drawn to the risk and struggle involved in achieving that recognition in the first place. Just because liberal democracies now satisfy the timothy motive (seeking respectability) does not mean that people are not still willing to die for it. As Fukuyama explains in this biography: "The peace and prosperity brought about by a liberal order based on equality of recognition is not enough for many people. They don't want to be recognized as equal to any other person on earth." Our horizons have become "flattened" and this has left us restless and angry.

This is sad. It's depressing to think that we can't wholeheartedly enjoy the fruits of liberal democracy and do the work of incrementally revamping it to make it work even better for the greatest number of people. Instead, as Fukuyama put it in his original essay, we "fight for the sake of fighting" because "we cannot imagine life in a world without fighting." Ultimately, this means turning against liberal democracy itself—inventing conspiracy theories to fuel our anger, glorify the powerful, and idealize deadly premodern practices and values—which is how Fukuyama understands the populist and antidemocratic insurgencies of the past decade.

If all this did not have serious explanatory value, it might seem pessimistic. Consider his critique of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses. Without ignoring the very real death and destruction in Gaza, Fukuyama says these students are basically bored: “What they want is a break from their hard-working but unheroic lives to get into those universities; To experience danger and risk in pursuit of a righteous cause that has never been a major part of their lives before. "They don't have a clear picture of what kind of society they want to live in in the future, more than the MAGA right (Trump supporters)." He believes that we have a lot of energy to destroy things, but liberal democracy is a logical problem that is already solved and cannot be left unsolved or reconfigured.

Fukuyama wants to be able to say "I told you so." And accordingly, his book reminds us that he really said it. But there is little consolation in this. What he identified is a human problem: the blinker that separates utopia from dystopia. We got what we always wanted, but it's not enough and it never will be. "We have the means to distribute resources a little more equitably, and we must commit to doing so," writes Fukuyama, the ever-transparent analyst. "What we lack is a way to distribute 'respect'." That desire for recognition will not be quenched, and that fact is the most dangerous thing for all of us.