This post is the 26th...

I had a really good lecture yesterday. It was about Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama has one of those arguments that a lot of people know the jist of, (all history is the struggle of opposing ideas > the ideas that emerge following the struggle are always better than the original ideas before the struggle > today, there is no set of (universal) ideas that can challenge Western Liberal Democracy > therefore, Western Liberal Democracy is the perfect idea, and all societies in the world shall transitition into it until > we reach the End of History). But its actually a lot more nuanced than that.

Fukuyama's argument is often used as a strawman, people hear that he is a self-confessed Neo-Conservative and instantly assume that his End of History-talk is nothing but Yankee bragging, saying to the world 'look, Every-Opposing-Idea! We whooped your ass!' Not so. Fukuyama himself is quite pessimistic about the oncoming era of post-history, he says that while events will continue to happen, they will become increasingly trivialised, and as will our reaction to them, for instance, think back to see if you can remember any of the faces on the people killed two years ago on 7th July... now see if you can remember the face of Madeleine McCann... indeed, challenge yourself to forget the face of Madeleine McCann, you probably never will. Fukuyama predicts that one by one the people in this world who actually give a shit about anything will drop dead, and we'll live in a world of uniform ideology and maddening triviality, he nearly jokes at the end of his argument that World War Three will probably be caused by Boredom.

However, I think there is one major flaw in this prediction. Basically, the view of history Fukuyama uses is borrowed from Friedrich Hegel. Hegel came up with the idea of history as a dialectic between competing ideas, (that the industrial revolution was in effect the idea-set of rural-based feudalism being challenged by the idea-set of urban-based capitalism, for instance), but, he said, it wasn't a case that there was ever an idea that completely won, whenever one set of ideas competes with another it can't help but absorb the best bits from the defeated idea, (kinda like Highlander... or maybe Pokémon...), and so new ideas were always syntheses of old, dominant ideas, and newer, dissenting ideas.

Except in the case of Prussia, Hegel said Prussianly. Or 'Hegel Prussianed', if you prefer. Hegel said that the ideology of the Kingdom of Prussia had borrowed from the best bits of German Oligarchism and French Radical Republicanism, and had in fact become the perfect ideology, through which all men could know freedom, if they only embraced it. He, like Fukuyama a century later, had decided that his system had acheived perfection - and that the End of History had occurred... in 1850... Of course, Prussian ideas subsided into the ideology of pan-Germanism, which in turn was overthrown, and had its tennets incorporated into Weimar Republicanism, which was then absorbed into a breed of Genocidal Fascism, which was then challenged and defeated on either side by Internationalist Capitalism and Stalinist Socialism, which then wriggled and jiggled and squiggled and came out eventually as Modern Germany, a state with an ideology that still somewhat resembles what Hegel described at the ultimate ideology, but that also contained scores of other ideas... so, Hegel, remember what they say about the counting of unhatched chickens.

But if Fukuyama is as wrong as Hegel, where does that leave us? Does it mean that we too are destined to eventually embrace a synthesis of our own ideology, and those ideologies that oppose and despise us? What on Earth could the West have to learn from the al-Qaedas of the world!? But then... Hegel probably thought much the same thing...

Al-Qaeda aside, there are many other forces in this world that are constructively anti-Western. Perhaps what we have to learn from those who oppose us is... well, opposition. Westerners have become what Nietzsche described as the Letztemanns, the Last Men, beings concerned with nothing but their own immediate desires, heartless and passionless, a race destined to either whither away into nothingness or else be devoured by the Supermen.

I would argue that there are Supermen in this world. And they live in the South and in the East, in the regions of the world were globalisation and capitalism have not yet created a prosperity stable enough to allow people to grow soft and apathetic. In the worst places in the world hide people who care enough about things to die for them, and to kill for them.

And thus, Tom unvails his master-argument in favour of large-scale immigration: the West NEEDS to be challenged. Not just on the international, high-political stage, (most people on the street couldn't give a shit about that), no, to really rekindle the fire of hatred (constructive hatred, that is) in people's hearts, the challenge must be in our faces all the time. Now, I'm NOT saying every hateful fanatic in the world is a decent person, on the contrary, most of them are fairly monstrous people, but they have what we need. The West, in my view, stands at a crossroads, on one side, there is the path of the Letztemanns, the path to boredom, apathy, and an ignomious demise, on the other side, is the rocky path of rebirth, the path where we fully embrace those who hate us, learn to hate them back and ultimately pull ourselves back up into real life!