Opinion: How's the "End of History" working out for ya?
- Cassandra is Tired
- Mar 23
- 14 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
TL;DR
In 1989, Francis Fukuyama declared liberal democracy the endpoint of human political development. He was spectacularly wrong about everything except for one prediction: history did, in fact, end for him and his class. Thirty-five years later, parents who followed every rule in the playbook are raising children through the wreckage of the system those rules were designed to protect.
This post is about how that happened, who benefitted, and why the "Godfathers of AI" are running the same playbook in front of our faces (which are attached non-stop to the screens their algorithms power).
In 1989, Dr. Francis Fukuyama, Harvard-educated political scientist and noted human nature misunderstander, suggested we had "solved" humanity through liberal democracy and western free-market capitalism. In his book, published three years later, he called it "The End of History and the Last Man."
Borrowing from Alexandre Kojève's interpretation of Hegel, Fukuyama declared that with the fall of the Berlin Wall, we'd reached liberal democracy's final boss. No more competing ideologies! No more wars (well, none that got in the way of must-see TV)! No need to feel bad about exploiting the rest of the non-western world! Just a slow march toward global prosperity and McDonald's on the corner of every former Soviet republic.
How that hit Canadians
Up here in the north, Fukuyama's thesis propelled a seductive mirage built on American movies, rapid-fire punditry and the media-stoked fear about what would happen if another world war broke out (this time with more nuclear!) Growing up during this period, I learned we could avoid all that silliness if everyone followed the rules. These were the rules:
Excel in school
Go to university
Get a good job
Work hard
Keep hustling
Marry the right person
Procreate
Be a good neighbour/friend/community member
Be grateful
Read all the self-help books
ABO (Always Be Optimizin').
If you kept at it, you were guaranteed a certain outcome. The Other is the real enemy. Any failure to prosper was yours alone.
TORONTO CONTEXT
In Toronto, specifically, this programming found its way into the children of first and second-generation immigrants. The city was in the midst of a construction boom and the middle class was strong. A genuinely multicultural GTA made it easy to believe diversity was not merely decorative. The real estate market rewarded anyone who got in before 2010 so insanely well, it began to look like proof of concept instead of luck. For a period of time, it appeared as though the rules were real.
Now, this is all LOL funny in 2026, but back in the 90s – before Al Gore's internet spawned the social media dragnets that accelerated civilizational collapse – many of us were easier to fool.
Structural racism was carefully tucked under the petticoats of multiculturalism, our civic infrastructures, like public health and education, were functioning reasonably well, and enough people were advancing to prove meritocracy was real. So, many of us programmed our reality to this structure.
There were a few problems, though.
Hegel never had to do school pickup
Fukuyama's entire premise relies on a Hegelian dialectic that treats Western liberal democracy as the resolution of all political contradictions. It’s a supremely Eurocentric view that ignores cyclical patterns, non-Western political traditions and the possibility that liberal democracy itself contains unresolved contradictions. It was a thesis that could have only been cooked up in boiling Atwater.
His argument conveniently brushes off the fact that history is cyclical, volatile and unpredictable in its complexities. From his position as stenographer of the global elite, Fukuyama was now comfortable enough to ignore that no matter how many business casual suits you dress it in, human nature is tribal, contradictory, self-serving and susceptible to cultish violence.
The End of History framework kept people striving to reach the top, goalposts constantly shifting, so most regular folks were too busy hustling to recognize they were being exploited, or do anything about the fact that a planet with finite resources could not sustain deregulated expansion beyond a few generations.
The Fukuyama hall pass
As soon as Fukuyama declared that history was "over," he made it a lot harder for anyone who saw through it to argue otherwise. Although his thesis didn’t create neoliberalism – Reagan and Thatcher tagteamed that one at the behest of their overlords – it actually did something far worse: He made it seem inevitable.
If "profits over people" was the thing that would save humanity, anyone who tried to warn of its dangers could be framed as anti-historical. Why do you hate a better world for everyone? It was now "immoral" or "communist" to suggest that this model, which had lifted so many out of poverty, was perhaps a deliberate house of cards.
It also gave neoliberalism's architects a hall pass to gut social safety nets. If this was the "final" form of society, then any adjustment was a potential threat. Privatizing public infrastructure, turning housing into a speculative asset class, transforming markets into Ponzi schemes for sociopaths who liked math – these were no longer choices, they were "inevitabilities." The free market was bound to collapse within a generation or two, but those who benefitted the most now had the peer-reviewed studies to silence their critics.
See how the Trump Administration is plundering the US Treasury and running the government like an MLM? And they're not even bothering to hide it anymore? And they're PROUD OF IT? This was always the endgame. It's just upsetting to see people as gross and stupid as these cretins come out the "winners" while we remain hogtied by the same laws.
The Godfathers of AI would like an NLP-generated word
The insidiousness of the Fukuyama playbook is how it's been amplified through technology. If it was destructive on a mostly localized level back in the 90s, social media and AI have now allowed it to hit everyone, everywhere, all at once.
The most recent beneficiaries are the "Godfathers of AI" - specifically Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, who are suddenly sounding the alarm on the potential end of humanity as a direct result of the foundational work they pioneered and from which they both profited enormously. Bengio has even come out with a new venture for his late-career humanitarianism and, naturally, the rebrand has been a big success. (At least Third Musketeer, Yann LeCun, doesn't pretend to give a shit. In this type of twisted morality, his consistency makes him less gross).
The structure is identical, straight out of the Tony Blair School for Reputation Laundering: build the thing, promote the thing as good for humanity, reap all the rewards (mostly financial, social capital, access to power), wait for the inevitable destructive consequences, then pivot to social prophet (a for-profit prophet, of course).
In an era of academic blacklisting, their survival is notable. The people whose work got them cancelled are having a harder time collecting speaking fees, winning prestigious awards and spinning endless start-ups.
Solipsism is bad for futurists
If you're going to declare something a civilizational endgame, it helps to understand human nature. Fukuyama, who spent his life jetting around the world for prestigious conferences, produced a prolific body of scholarship and continues to be employed by Stanford, convinced us human beings just want comfort, consumerism and convenience.
Liberal democracy, he argued, would satisfy the human need for recognition through voting, legal equality (LOL) and an endless number of things now available to buy. It would ensure the middle class would be content to work their soulless, cubicled, fluorescent-lit 9-5s, as long as they could narcotize themselves with screens and shopping. Purpose for me, not for thee.
Well, whoops!
It turns out, when you take away people's sense of meaning, agency and community, shit gets ugly real fast. Some of them radicalize and join cults, like the extremist religious groups, manosphere, tradwife and spiritual grifts, and fascist political movements we see today.
They vote for grotesque charlatans like Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi and Orban, who promise to restore meaning through nationalism, grievance and violence. They transfer the emptiness at the heart of neoliberal “freedom” onto a chaotic, amorphous blob of violence that tears down anything progressive in its path. And when you gather enough of these people into a centrifugal force, you get 2026.
Everything that's happening now can be directly mapped to the policies and structures put in place in the 70s and 80s and codified by people like Fukuyama. He and his ilk benefitted from the trust people still had in academia and institutions to provide the invisibility cloak for the bad actors who broke the whole thing before our eyes, then used the cloak as toilet paper.
The reality cheque
So Fukuyama was totally discredited and embarrassed and faced a bunch of consequences, right? RIGHT?
No, silly. Consequences are for the unprotected and the single head selected to roll for the whole diseased body. To this day, Fukuyama remains the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, which is an actual thing on earth and not a Veep punchline. He still gets op-ed space contradicting himself. He’s at major academic conferences, collecting speaking fees for his views on the state of democracy. When Iraq turned into the disaster it was always going to be, he got to say, “My bad!” and go out for dinner.
And when liberal democracy began to implode, he starting writing books about institutional decay, as though he hadn’t provided the intellectual cover for gutting those institutions. He claimed his argument was just too nuanced for us dumb-dumbs to understand. He even claimed his theory was correct, it’s just that pesky reality that got in the way. How very Scooby Doo villain of him.
Fukuyama has been protected because he served the right kind of power, and because he got lucky. He told the right people exactly what they wanted to hear at the right time: that their system was the final answer, that their wealth was not only justified, but their cosmic due for being smarter, more special and therefore more deserving than most, and that history itself was their vindication. Most importantly, he managed to sidestep chance that his head would be the one selected to roll.
Wait a minute –
I want to acknowledge that, in the most perverse possible reading, Fukuyama was correct. History did end. But it only ended for him and his particular bracket of the global professional class. He removed any ideological uncertainty to enrich himself. He picked the “winning team,” secured his tenure and has been insulated from the consequences of his thesis every since.
So, while those of us raised under his ideology unravel the wreckage of our programming through expensive therapy and self-optimization, paralyzed about what to do next within the structures we inherited, Fukuyama enjoys the excellent health of someone in America who can afford to work into his 70s. The next chapter won’t personally affect him at all. His nepo-babies are fine. His retirement funds are secure. He’ll keep publishing, getting invited to conferences and being told by his bubble that he’s a brilliant thinker who has achieved important things.
Considering the lack of shame or conscience required for him to even leave his house anymore, I’m sure he’ll twist this into some form of validation from the peasant class.
Parenting with faulty wiring
Where does that leave us parents left holding the bag – of both the literal and diaper variety? Those of us who have not been publicly wrong enough on a civilizational scale to lock down tenured positions at elite universities?
It's great that we can now see this clearly, and that plausible deniability is harder. Parents with full-time jobs are no longer making ends meet, and the future of many “good” jobs is under threat of automation. Home ownership, considered the only secure investment for decades, is now out of reach for those who didn’t get in on time, while properties are simultaneously tanking in value. Gentle parenting was supposed to prevent bullying, but anyone with a child over the age of 6 knows how well that worked out. Will there even be a livable planet for them anyway?
I have two graduate degrees and a full-time job with benefits and I can no longer cover the bills part of my monthly expenses, let alone anything fun or discretionary. I need to now search for a second income stream or I'll have to start living on debt by the summer, which means my daughter is at risk of neglect from all the extra time I'll be working and we will become housing insecure after two missed payments. I'd managed to survive the pandemic as a single mom with a good job and a kid who was able to pull through, and that should have been enough. I "followed all the rules."
And I'm still in a better situation than many. So, while those who followed all the rules contend with the fact that we were duped, and that the achievable outcome had way more to do with luck or, in some cases, a lack of conscience, there’s this whole issue that we don't have a fucking clue how to raise our kids anymore.
The hardest part of cognitive dissonance is recognizing exactly what’s going on, yet being too hardwired to completely reject it.
Yet we’re so programmed to compete for a hypothetical future that presumes continuity, we can't even jump off the hamster wheel long enough to learn survivalist skills in case we have to buy land in the Yukon before our kids graduate.
TORONTO CONTEXT: THE MATH HAS STOPPED MATHING
The city we were told to hustle our way into now requires a household income that would have seemed like a punchline in 1995 just to rent a two-bedroom in a neighbourhood with a functional school. The same public infrastructure our parents pointed to as proof the system worked — transit, libraries, community centres, the school board — is being quietly stripped for parts while we’re distracted trying to pay for it. The city we built our identity around is now effectively a hedge fund with a skyline.
The contradiction of knowing all this and still filling out school registration forms, still attending curriculum nights, still optimizing for a future we’re not sure exists is the specific psychic weight of parenting in 2026. We can’t fully commit to the old framework because we know it’s broken, and we can’t fully abandon it because our kids still need to eat. So we hover in this weird liminal space, hedge-parenting our way through a civilizational transition with no handbook, mainlining cortisol and pretending the birthday party planning still matters.
In this moment, it feels overwhelming.
Rewriting a "Beginning of History" starts with parents who also care about other people's children
The one historical pattern we can actually count on is that humans tend to come together as a group when our immediate survival is at risk. Not the fake pandemic kind, where we could still stay home and dissociate; the real, rebuilding from complete wreckage kind that requires people to feel their individual safety is at risk if they don’t work with the group for the benefit of the group.
The people who have been fighting to prevent it from coming to this have provided a great deal of information about what to do when it hits. A playbook, if you like. It starts with real-life, in-person, consistent and physical community that stops filtering for socially programmed nonsense, like status and vibes. And it has nothing to do with being "left" or "right" because those labels, in their most recent historical sense, no longer have any meaning.
It would have been nice if we listened to these people before our kids had to suffer the consequences, but we’re here now, and I’d like to believe, as a non-human-nature academic expert, that we’ll pull it together for them at the bottom, where life actually takes place.
Download the Parenting While Rome Burns playbook on "How to build the village we were supposed to have."
FURTHER READING
Joseph Stiglitz, "How Neoliberalism Failed, and What a Better Society Could Look Like." The Roosevelt Institute
Ed Finn, "How to fight neoliberalism without giving way to despair." CCPA
Chris Fleming, "The End of History: Francis Fukuyama's controversial idea explained." The Conversation
Chris Murphy, "How Neoliberalism Cuts off Community." The American Prospect
Nicole Negowetti, "Navigating Collapse Together: Toward Regenerative Public Life." Resilience.org
Nicola Luksic, "AI must foster 'maternal instincts' or we risk extinction, warns Geoffrey Hinton." CBC
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What was Fukuyama's "End of History" thesis and why does it matter now?
In 1989, Francis Fukuyama argued that with the fall of the Berlin Wall, humanity had reached the endpoint of ideological evolution — liberal democracy and free-market capitalism had won, permanently. There was no longer any serious ideological competition.
It matters now because the thesis made dissent structurally harder. By framing the existing order as inevitable and final, it recast critique as anti-progress. This gave neoliberal policymakers the intellectual cover to gut public institutions, privatize housing, and dismantle social safety nets across multiple generations. The wreckage parents are currently navigating was built on that foundation and still being exploited in its most extreme form by the worst of humanity, who are taking advantage of the chaos they've caused to plunder the planet.
How did Fukuyama's thesis affect parents who "followed the rules"?
The "follow the rules" programming — school, university, good job, hustle, marriage, gratitude — was sold as a reliable path to security and prosperity. It was built on the assumption that the system Fukuyama declared permanent was also functional and fair.
For the Xennial and Gen X parents who followed it in Toronto and across Canada, the floor shifted after they'd already built their lives on its foundation. Housing became unaffordable after they'd committed to the city. Jobs became precarious after they'd specialized. The public infrastructure they'd relied on, schools, transit, healthcare, social security, began degrading after they'd organized their lives around it. The rules worked just long enough to make abandoning them feel too risky, then stopped working entirely, while making it an individual failure and selling the cure as a business venture.
What is the connection between Fukuyama and the rise of fascism and political extremism?
Fukuyama's thesis assumed that liberal democracy satisfied the human need for recognition — through voting, legal equality, and consumer choice. What it missed is that people also need meaning, agency, and community. When those are stripped away by decades of atomizing neoliberal policy, some people will follow anyone who offers to restore them — even through nationalism, grievance, and violence.
The radicalization pipeline that produced Trump, Bolsonaro, Orban and Modi isn't mysterious. It runs directly from the emptiness at the centre of a system that told people their worth was their productivity and their community was their consumer choices. Fukuyama's thesis provided the ideological scaffolding that made that system seem not just acceptable but inevitable.
What is the Hinton/Bengio parallel and why does it matter?
Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio — the "Godfathers of AI" — pioneered the foundational deep learning research that enabled modern AI systems, profited enormously from that work and are now publicly warning about existential risks from the technology they built. Bengio has further productized his concern through humanitarian initiatives. Hinton collects speaking fees for now "warning" about the systems he nurtured and encouraged.
The parallel to Fukuyama is a structural playbook: build the thing, collect the rewards, wait for the consequences to become undeniable, then pivot to prophet for a fee. In both cases the people most responsible for enabling the damage face no meaningful professional consequences, while remaining the most prominent voices in the conversation about what to do next. The people whose careers were ended for raising these concerns earlier are crushed and ex-communicated by the same mechanism.
What does "hedge-parenting" mean and why is it specific to 2026?
Hedge-parenting describes the specific paralysis of parents who can see the current system clearly, and who know the old framework is broken, but can't fully abandon it because their children still need to function within it.
It's specific to this moment because previous generations either didn't have the information to see the system's dysfunction clearly, or the dysfunction hadn't become this visible yet. We have both the awareness and the inability to act on it fully. That gap is the cognitive dissonance at the centre of parenting in 2026.
Is there actually a blueprint for what to do now?
Yes, and it's not new. Researchers and community organizers at institutions including the Roosevelt Institute, the CCPA and resilience.org have documented what works when systems fail. Physical, in-person, consistent community that prioritizes collective survival over individual optimization. It's not ideology-driven: the left/right distinction has largely ceased to be meaningful at the level of local community action. But it only works when people in the same place decide to show up for each other in a meaningful, authentic and consistent way.
The historical pattern is reliable: humans come together under genuine threat. The challenge is that the current collapse is slow-moving enough that the threat still feels abstract to those who are most insulated from it. Parents — particularly those already on the economic margins — tend to feel it first and most acutely, which is why community among parents is both the most necessary and the most systematically undermined thing right now.
Why does Fukuyama still have a job?
Because he's the type of useful idiot who gets insulated from consequences. Fukuyama served the right kind of power at the right time, told the people who controlled institutional resources exactly what they wanted to hear and secured his position before his thesis destroyed the world for everyone else. When his predictions failed, he reframed the failure as nuance. When the institutions he provided cover for began to decay, he wrote books about institutional decay. The system he helped build protects the people who built it. This isn't a cynical observation. It's the explanation for the behaviour we're seeing at all levels of government, finance and education. Understanding it is the first step to not being surprised the next time someone with institutional backing tells you the current arrangement is the only possible one.
Cassandra is Tired
Writer · Exhausted Toronto Parent
Angry research conducted in March 2026. This blog is the opinion of the author and reflects her personal opinion and lived experience unless otherwise cited. While linked sources were verified at the time of publication, the author cannot guarantee the ongoing accuracy of linked external content.
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