Could you ever imagine in the 1970s or even decades after that one day, the so-called civilized world, in the 21st century, would face such atrocities? Isn’t it surprising that every day, every moment, we witness the massacre of innocent children, women, and men, the destruction of their homes and livelihood, yet we do nothing to stop it
Isn’t it astonishing that international organizations, world leaders, human rights groups, civil society leaders, and the heads of religions and ethnic groups, despite seeing these images and reports which has been captured and documented every moment by journalists’ cameras and ordinary people cellphones broadcasting to billions of people, take no meaningful action? And nothing has been changed?
Isn’t it strange that, in broad daylight, the leaders of so-called civilized nations openly set timelines and make threats to destroy other lands and kill innocent people?
After the collapse of socialism, the well-known American philosopher Francis Fukuyama claimed that we had reached the “end of history.” He titled his book The End of History and the Last Man, asserting that humanity had entered a new era—the beginning of an endless liberal democracy, a period that was supposed to ultimately lead to the realization of freedom and rationality. This was the “end of history” he derived from Alexandre Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of history.
But it seems that not only has socialism come to an end, but the promised liberal democracies of Fukuyama have also reached their demise, one after another, descending into fascism. What did not come to pass, contrary to his expectations, was freedom or the realization of Hegelian rationality. Instead, perhaps we can truly say that it is humanity itself that has reached its end.
If witnessing all these crimes before our very eyes does not signify the death of humanity, then what does?
Are these atrocities and disasters signs of the fulfillment of Hegel’s philosophy of freedom and rationality? Or do they reveal a darker truth, that capital and power have ultimately sacrificed human conscience and the very essence of it that distinguishes humans from other creatures in the wild—our humanity—at the expence of profit and the greed of a few monstrous individuals? Unchecked capitalism and boundless profiteering have ultimately destroyed both freedom and rationality.
It is no coincidence that, contrary to Plato’s vision of a government ruled by philosophers and wise men, today, mindless billionaires have taken the reins of power.
Perhaps the presence of these senseless billionaires at the helm of governments is itself the clearest symbol of the death of humanity in modern societies
Reza Fani Yazdi