Last man

I guess there was two sort of positions that I was laying out that are a little bit difficult to relate.

So I guess one, as background, one thing that I claimed was that our concept of humanity is very close to Nietzsche's Last Man right now.

This is this kind of one version of that claim about this toxic egalitarianism that has kind of taken root in our culture.

is that we sort of imagine ourselves as this hungry, incurious kind of being that just needs to be protected.

And what I proposed in my view, which is like, Again, there's two different sort of things going on here.

One is just the empirical claims about the nature of humanity and the nature of cooperation and power in society.

The thing that I proposed, though, was that we should deliberately try to find some kind of moral kinship with... on a basis other than the like last man mutual apeness that is going to be sort of flexibly able to incorporate AI agents into that, but then also potentially walk back the sort of like overly egalitarian commitments of current humanitarian ideology.

Which is separate from the empirical claims about what I think is going on with the concept of humanity in sort of cosmic history.

Francis Fukuyama's first book, published back in nineteen ninety-two, is exactly that.

In the aftermath of the Cold War with the West triumphant, his book was entitled The End of History and the Last Man.

His much subsequently misunderstood and ridiculed argument, at least when it comes to the four words that everyone remembers, the end of history, was not that nothing of interest or consequence would now happen, but that the idea that liberal democracy was an unimprovable system of government, that that had been settled, he argued, once and for all.

Well, now the 73-year-old political philosopher, one of the most famous public intellectuals in the world, has published a new book pu-picking up on the widely ignored second bit of that famous title, the bit about The Last Man.

His new book is called In the Realm of the Last Man.

When he came into the News Hour studio, I asked him what he meant by that.

The original book really had two parts.

That's the ideal state that we're moving towards.