"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven."
- Ecclesiastes 3:1.
"The future is only the past again, entered through another gate."
- Arthur Wing Pinero
Two books I read many years ago collided in my head yesterday when I sat down with Francis Fukuyama in London (thanks to Pi Capital). Fukuyama is 73 now, builds robots in his spare time, and told me he uses Claude Code, which is not what you expect from the man who announced the end of history before the Berlin Wall came down.
The Two Books
In February 1989, months before the Wall, a 36-year-old State Department official gave a lecture in Chicago that became the most argued-over essay of the decade. “What we may be witnessing,” Fukuyama wrote, “is not just the end of the Cold War… but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
He never meant events would stop. He meant the argument was over. Fascism had been tried and destroyed, communism tried and failed, and nobody had a better idea than liberal democracy plus markets.
If you are new to his work, you can read our discussion from December 2024.
Almost nobody read the essay’s last paragraph, and it is the one that matters now. “The end of history will be a very sad time,” he wrote. Struggle and idealism would be replaced by “economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems… the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.” There would be “neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.” And then: “Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.”
The 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, put a mechanism under the boredom. People are not only driven by comfort. They are driven by thymos, Plato’s word for the part of the soul that needs to be recognised, and they will trade comfort for dignity every time; that is why the middle classes of Korea and Taiwan, once rich, demanded the vote. But a society that gives everyone equal recognition and asks nothing heroic of anyone produces Nietzsche’s last man, who has “invented happiness” and blinks. “Might not fear of becoming contemptible ‘last men,’” Fukuyama asked, “lead to bloody prestige battles with modern weapons?” The danger, he wrote, came from “the most ambitious personalities” and whether they would settle for “metaphorical wars and symbolic victories.” He named “a developer like Donald Trump” as an example of that ambition safely parked in property. This week he told the New York Times: “I did not realize then that merely becoming rich would not be enough for him.”
Five years after Fukuyama’s book, in 1997, two Washington policy men published what read like a reply. William Strauss and Neil Howe’s The Fourth Turning argued that Anglo-American history moves in cycles of about 80 years, each with 4 seasons of roughly 20: a High of strong institutions, an Awakening that attacks them, an Unraveling in which they decay and individualism peaks, and a Crisis in which the old order dies and a new one is founded. “In a High, people want to belong; in an Awakening, to defy; in an Unraveling, to separate; in a Crisis, to gather.” They counted 6 previous Crises of roughly equal weight, from the Wars of the Roses to the Depression and the Second World War, and wrote: “Sometime around the year 2005, perhaps a few years before or after, America will enter the Fourth Turning.” The risk of catastrophe would be “very high.” “The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule.” And the line that put the book on a hundred thousand desks after 2008: “History is seasonal, and winter is coming.”
The critics called it astrology, and the Civil War, which lasted 5 years rather than 20, is a real hole in the table. But 2008 landed within 3 years of the forecast, and the book’s list of possible sparks, a government shutdown, a new virus with quarantines, Russia stirring on its old borders, reads oddly now.
Put the two books side by side and what stands out is how much they agree. Fukuyama’s post-historical mood of technical problems and consumer demands is Strauss and Howe’s Unraveling almost word for word. Their opening line, “America feels like it’s unraveling. Though we live in an era of relative peace and comfort, we have settled into a mood of pessimism about the long-term future,” could sit at the top of his last chapter. They saw the same country.
One said the boredom was the end. The other said it was the autumn.
"What experience and history teach is this, that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it."
- Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History.
The Convergence
In July 2023 Fukuyama reviewed Howe’s sequel, The Fourth Turning Is Here, for the New York Times. “If this all sounds a bit too neat, it is,” …. “Despite his cyclical scheme, Howe’s book represents an updated version of Whig history.” A cycle in which winter is always followed by spring, and the Crisis always founds better institutions, is a line drawn in a circle.
Three years later he describes a cycle: boredom, illiberal experiment, weariness, return. He has kept his central claim, that liberal democracy tied to a market economy still has no superior rival. But the shape he now draws is a cycle in which each generation forgets what illiberalism feels like and pays to relearn it.
Howe since has drifted the other way. His Crisis now starts in 2008, not 2005, and ends around 2033, not now, and his ending has moved from “glory or ruin” with the emphasis on glory to 3 routes, another crash, internal conflict or great-power war, with a worst case of “multiple cities destroyed, many millions killed.” That is a man who has noticed his circle does not close on its own.
So the cyclical theorist acquired a line, the linear theorist acquired a circle, but I don’t think either has noticed how close they now stand. What they share is a spiral: peace produces boredom, boredom produces revolt, revolt produces a crisis, and the crisis produces a re-founding or a ruin, with no guarantee about which.
Peter Turchin got to the same decade through overproduction of elites, which is thymos with a spreadsheet, and Ray Dalio through debt cycles that end with money re-founded. When that many people arrive at the same 10 years from different directions, you can ask what they are all looking at.
"Valour produces peace; peace, repose; repose, disorder; disorder, ruin; and likewise from ruin springs order; from order, valour; and from this, glory and good fortune."
- Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, Book V.
The Engine
As you strip the apparatus off both theories and look under the hood, they seem to run on one engine - and it isn’t economic.
Fukuyama’s is thymos. Strauss and Howe’s is the generational over-correction: children of the Unraveling, wrapped in cotton wool, grow into young adults who want teams and rules and someone in charge. “You can’t be a libertarian in a fourth turning,” Howe said in 2017, explaining why a man who promised to build things beat 16 Republicans who promised to cut them. The young men voting for strongmen across a dozen democracies are not asking for lower marginal tax rates. They are asking to matter.
Here is where both books meet something neither could have seen. AI is the science engine Fukuyama always said was open-ended, arriving as a shock to the recognition engine. The machine that cannot lay a cable or build a transformer can write the memo and review the contract, and what it displaces is exactly the class the long peace recognised most. Luke Gromen frames the coming white-collar Rust Belt as a credit problem, $10 trillion of consumer debt held by people under 50 who “took out a mortgage on a belief that AI wasn’t going to show up,” but listen to how he gets there: “People need their work for meaning.” The Midwest did not learn to code. That is a recognition crisis wearing a credit crisis’s clothes.
Fukuyama, for his part, told me the accelerationists have the arithmetic wrong. Projections of 20% growth ignore energy, minerals and the people needed to build things; the bottleneck is implementation in the physical world, not cognition.
That is the opportunity set.
"We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst."
- C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
"The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key."
- Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
What A Fourth Turning Does To Money
Every previous Crisis ended with money re-founded.
Hamilton wrote the dollar in the 1790s, the Union printed greenbacks in the 1860s, Roosevelt revalued gold in 1933 and Bretton Woods followed the war. This one’s re-founding is under way, using plumbing built for a world where history had ended. Fukuyama’s 1989 essay predicted “the growing ‘Common Marketization’ of international relations.” Set that against the Treasury Secretary last week, threatening to remove any bank that touches Iran from the dollar system, and then against his answer when asked why he threatens instead of acting: “Because I don’t want to blow up the global financial system.” That is the sentence in which the weapon became too dangerous to fire.
The exits are opening anyway. Since Russia’s reserves were frozen in 2022, gold has overtaken US Treasuries as a share of global central-bank reserves. Hedge funds now hold more Treasuries than China and Saudi Arabia combined. China stopped adding Treasuries in 2013, the world’s central banks on net in 2014, and now Japan and Canada, in Gromen’s phrase, are “doing what our adversary started doing 12 years ago.” Meanwhile interest plus entitlements has passed 105% of federal receipts, and the Treasury has to borrow $2 trillion a year in competition with hyperscalers who “would happily pay 8%.” The choice, as Gromen puts it, is whether to restructure the debt, the Boomers or the dollar, and no politician of any party will choose the Boomers.
What a Crisis rewards is what the resolution needs: what cannot be printed (gold, above all, now that central banks are the marginal buyer), what has to be built (power, grid, energy, defence, the physical stack, the things Fukuyama’s implementation bottleneck describes), and the physical over the paper.
What it punishes is duration, because the next recession raises long yields instead of lowering them, and the last era’s winners, which is uncomfortable.
The full arithmetic, and what neither theory can tell you, will be in next week’s paid Research Letter.
"How did you go bankrupt?" "Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly."
- Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926).
Agency
My take is that both books get read as prophecies and neither is one. Strauss and Howe end with advice, 7 verbs for individuals, rectify, converge, bond, gather, root, brace, hedge. That is the counsel of men who thought the season was fixed and the harvest was not. I first wrote about their book in 2019 and paired it, without quite knowing why, with David Brooks’s The Second Mountain, the climb from self to commitment. I was pairing the Fourth Turning with the answer to the last man.
Fukuyama ended our conversation on the thing he wanted me to take away.
He thinks populism keeps winning because governments stopped delivering what people can see, and that the answer is to deliver it, which is boring. And he said this, which I wrote down: “You’re not going to stop this movement unless you are mobilised, and you’re not going to be mobilised if you think the victory of the other side is inevitable.”
That is an argument against his own book’s fatalism and against Howe’s. A cycle is made of decisions. The 1930s resolved the way they did because particular people in particular rooms chose a New Deal over a Huey Long, and the cycle did not choose for them. The saeculum tells you the season. Thymos tells you the weather. Neither tells you what to plant.
"This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny."
- Franklin Roosevelt, Philadelphia, 1936
"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew."
- Lincoln, Annual Message to Congress, December 1862
After the collision of those two books I realised that both saw the same country but disagreed only about what boredom does. Each has walked toward the other since, and their meeting point is a downwards spiral with no fixed ending. The engine under both seems to be the need to be recognised, and AI is a recognition shock.
Fourth Turnings re-found money and institutions, and this one is doing so while the dollar network fights historical wars and the state that must write the new order is hollowed.
The solution seems to be to own what cannot be printed and what has to be built, but most importantly remember that cycles are made of decisions and you are in the room.
The long version, with the reserve data, the fiscal arithmetic and the opportunity set in full, will be in Curious Mind Research Letter No. 3.
