00:00The end of history was not my phrase. It was a phrase of the German philosopher Hegel
00:04who understood history with a capital H the way we understand today something like modernization
00:10or development. And so the idea is that human societies evolve over time and they evolve in
00:17a progressive fashion. And so the question was, in which direction were they evolving? And that's
00:23the end. It's end in the sense of goal or termination point. So the question of the end
00:28of history was what kind of society emerges at the end of this long evolutionary process.
00:35Now, for about 150 years, the Marxists took Hegel's concept of history and said the end
00:41of history is going to be communism. By the late 1980s, after Gorbachev and Piri Stryka,
00:48it seemed to me that they were never going to make it, that communism was really off the table.
00:53And therefore, if there was an end of history, it was a stage just before you got to communism
00:58which was what the communists called bourgeois, you know, democracy and a market economy and
01:05capitalism. And so for me, that was the resting point that we seem to be arriving at. What they
01:13didn't understand in the title, and I guess this is my fault for picking these words, but it was the
01:19end of history and the last man. The philosopher Nietzsche was the one that talked about the last man
01:26because he hated the idea of there being an end of history because for him, the victory of English
01:33liberalism would be a boring, flat world where nobody had aspirations. Everybody was fed, clothed,
01:40happy, but content in that happiness, just like a cow, you know, grazing in the field.
01:46And he said...
01:47They're pretty happy.
01:48Yeah, well, they are happy, but for Nietzsche...
01:50For a man.
01:51For a human, I don't, yeah.
01:53Human beings, you know, had a pride that shouldn't be satisfied just by, you know, peace and contentment,
02:00that you should want something more, you should want to dominate and so forth. And I think that's
02:05the unhappiness that I was talking about back then in that part of the book. And I think that's
02:11what's driving a lot of the extremism in the world today.
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