Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Francis Fukuyama Called Me Out

All Episodes

Previous Next

Aug. 11, 2025 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

19:14

Francis Fukuyama Called Me Out

Well, here's my response. Get Islander #4 now: https://shop.lotuseaters.com/

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	I follow liberal theorist Francis Fukuyama on Twitter, and so it was to my pleasant surprise when I saw that he had tweeted out an article that was critical of me, and used my avatar as the emblematic example of James Lindsay's lazy and anti-intellectual smear, woke right.
	As many of you will know, I have referenced Fukuyama's work in my videos several times, as I actually enjoyed The End of History and The Last Man.
	Even if its central thesis is flawed, there is still good work in it, and I consider myself something of a fan and critic of Fukuyama.
	And he was not the only liberal to tweet this article out.
	These dwindling intellectual dinosaurs attempted to circle the wagons, posting this article to one another and warning their fellow brontosaurs to watch out!
	The woke right was coming.
	I replied to each that yes, hello, the article is about me and I'm happy to answer your questions.
	However, none of them had any questions.
	The only response I received was from David Bernstein, who said, I am sure there is a very interesting discussion to be had, but this idea that writers must speak directly to their subjects and by implication not critique them in writing is um silly.
	If you have a critique of how this article misrepresented your views, we are listening.
	Well, I'm glad you're listening, David, and here is my response.
	I didn't say or even imply that you must do anything of the sort.
	I volunteered my time to help you understand my position because you clearly do not.
	Instead, I received a spiky defensive reaction.
	Oh no, the enemy has found us.
	We are not ready.
	Rather than engaging in any kind of discourse, these fossilized liberals are attempting to draw a line of demarcation around themselves, decrying opponents as woke as to create an impassable rift against their non-woke position.
	This neither addresses nor resolves any of my critiques of liberalism, and is instead an attempt to wall themselves off from any further discussion.
	This was a remarkable show of weakness from the liberals.
	To talk about someone, but not to them, shows that one is, fundamentally, deeply unsure of one's own position in relation to theirs.
	And it didn't used to be this way.
	In Islander 4, Dave Green's article relates his fond memories of a man called Gus, who ran a coffee shop in California, in which he hosted a Socratic forum to discuss philosophy.
	These discussions would be anarchic, but edifying, and Green reminisces about how enjoyable his time in that coffee shop was.
	The reason it could exist was because Gus represented an archetype of a fundamentally social man who was intellectually curious and interested in the development of ideas.
	Indeed, the substance of Dave's article is to lament the passing of men such as Gus.
	As a man and archetype, Gus had many flaws, but he was intellectually humble, pro-social, and fundamentally Faustian in that he wanted to go beyond the next frontier.
	He wanted to explore, develop, and conquer.
	He was, in essence, interested in progress as we might traditionally have conceived of it.
	Now, however, our herd of liberal brontosaurs are stampeding away from a perceived tyrannosaur on the horizon.
	For them, progress is something that has already happened.
	We have arrived at the end of history, and it is everything they conceived of it to be.
	For our liberal dinosaurs, liberalism itself is a closed system.
	The conclusions were drawn long ago from premises even more ancient.
	Now, there is naught on which to ponder but further reasons to congratulate themselves on their own success.
	As such, they retreat into ivory towers and reassuringly pat one another on the back.
	We were right all along, they say, despite the hordes of angry barbarians swarming the gates.
	If this is the consequence of your universal philosophy of man and history, then you must own it.
	Was your intellectual retreat the purposeful intent of your liberal philosophising, or did you make a mistake somewhere along the way?
	Let's turn our attention to the substance of the article at hand, which was written by Jonathan Rauch, a Brookings Institute senior fellow and contributor to The Atlantic, and he uses me as the thumbnail to draw attention.
	Rauch begins by summarising James Lindsay's desperate attempt to salvage the MAGA movement for liberalism, but Rauch appears to concede that this simply can't be accomplished.
	He says, The MAGA right has strange and sinister qualities which look nothing like the traditional religious wing of conservatism familiar from the era of William F. Buckley or the anti-government libertarian conservatism of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.
	Its anarchic rejection of truth, its Nietzschean embrace of power as self-justifying, its unashamed anti-liberalism and its glee in transgressing boundaries and giving offence are something new on the right.
	An embrace of postmodernism which until recently was the exclusive property of the illiberal left.
	Our herd of brontosaurs have managed to create a caricature of not only postmodernism, but also the MAGA movement and also their own relation to the left as well, whilst at the same time smoothly smuggling in the assumption that there is nothing truth-bearing or truth-seeking outside of liberalism itself.
	Ironic given their retreat from the Socratic dialogue that they used to so proudly proclaim to use to find truth.
	I suppose they must have found it sometime in the late 1980s when history ended and are just happy to stay there, ruminating in their eternal correctness.
	It is not accurate to say that the postmodern right rejects truth, has no concern for morality, or has even truly embraced postmodernism.
	Liberalism has no monopoly on truth.
	Indeed, what liberalism asserts about the world, historically and metaphysically, had been categorically disproven by the end of the first half of the 20th century.
	There was no state of nature.
	There is no universal blank slate pre-social man, and there is no world without metaphysics.
	Liberalism itself is a normative fiction, a story about mankind, which has no resemblance to the actuality of mankind, and through this fiction it attempts to remodel the universe according to a set of materialistic values which are destructive to the actual moral substance of human life, and this has become the source of all of the problems from which our liberal brontosauruses are currently in retreat.
	The problem that the modern liberal is forced to contend with is that postmodern philosophy happened whether they like it or not, and the observations it raised are valid.
	Moreover, the call is coming from within the house.
	These people come out of the liberal tradition.
	They are your children and you are going to own them.
	Let's take a few examples from some of our favourite Frankfurters.
	Let's begin with Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment.
	The primary critique that they level is that modernity itself has disenchanted the world through its own mythology.
	Enlightenment thereby becomes a conceptual tool which imposes a mass standardization of human culture through the tyrannical use of instrumental reason, a kind of reasoning which can only understand that which may be calculated.
	Outside of this, all other aspects of the human condition are slowly degraded into non-existence, and the freedom to live outside of this paradigm is ended.
	From this point, Herbert Marcuse, another Frankfurter, sets out a compelling thesis in One Dimensional Man that the liberal concept of progress is flattening out the human experience into one vast totalitarian administrative state and the society that it governs.
	The end product of liberalism is not the liberation of man from his fellow man, which itself is a bonker's plan, but instead a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behaviour in a total society which comprises a closed universe of thought, in which there is no distinction between man and man.
	This universalization and standardization inhibits transcendence, creativity.
	It renders history itself as the enemy of the present, and the very knowledge of one's own past to be subversive.
	As Marcuse summarizes it, the purpose of the liberal project was the amelioration of the human condition.
	This is the liberal ideal.
	But the one-dimensional society, in the act of attempting to accomplish this goal, instead traps humanity in a prison it cannot even detect.
	There is of course much more to it than what I'm summarizing here, but from what the Frankfurters prophesied in the 20th century, we can see all around us with the vast bureaucratic administrative states of the West and the East, desperate to bring everything within their compass and compel whole populations to live within tightly prescribed and monitored boundaries.
	Nothing about modernity truly screams liberation, and yet this is all, in its entirety, the end point of liberal progress.
	Fukuyama himself praises the EU in his book rather than the US because he sees it as being more in line with liberal ideology because this was its purpose all along.
	What can the liberals say to all of this?
	Nothing.
	Because the more liberal a state becomes, the more it comes to resemble a bureaucratic WEF-style technocracy.
	The liberals have no answer to this because it was their philosophy itself that caused it.
	Let's now turn to what the Brontosaurs have to say about me.
	Quote, In a recent video, Carl Benjamin, a British right-wing YouTuber and commentator who goes by the online pseudonym Sargon of Akkad, explicitly acknowledges the woke right's debt to postmodernists.
	The problem with the woke left wasn't the woke part, it was the left part, he said.
	The woke right are very much on the right.
	They're just postmodern.
	They are living in the postmodern era.
	We are living with the consequences of what the postmodern left did in the 20th century, and they, the woke right, have decided, well, I think if this can be used to win, why can't we use it to win?
	And the liberals' only answer is, well, we won't have a liberal society at the end of that, and the woke right say, deal.
	Mostly, as Benjamin's statement implicitly acknowledges, the postmodern right emerged less from direct philosophical influences than from cultural osmosis and observation of the far left's success.
	I am of course correct here, and Rauch admits it.
	The right lived through the postmodernization of society, as done by the left, under the auspices of the liberals and accepted by them.
	The liberal dinosaurs can complain about intersectionality, wokeness as they call it, all they like, but they are hamstrung by the fact that intersectionality is fundamentally a liberal project.
	The purpose of intersectionality is to identify those points of oppression which act upon each individual so they might be liberated from them using the correct social formulation via the therapeutic managerial state.
	Use the correct pronouns, ensure that one doesn't have an inappropriate racial descriptor, everything enforced with a prohibition on hate speech, vindicating everything the Frankfurter's predicted about the future of the liberal state, but to what end?
	To pursue the liberal dream of continually liberating each individual from society itself for the ultimate end of ameliorating the human condition.
	Intersectionality is merely the tool that is used to identify the points of contact.
	As Raulch observes in his article, recall that postmodernism in its initial and purer form, before it committed itself to a suite of left-wing causes, had no inherent political valence.
	It's not true that it has no inherent political valence, but the inherent political valence it has is within the liberal paradigm, so it looks like it could be apolitical from a liberal's perspective.
	But he's really admitting that I'm correct.
	Postmodernism isn't itself the problem, because it is just a lens which highlights certain aspects of society.
	The problem comes from the teleology of liberalism which provides the normative demands.
	The problem isn't the woke part, it's the left part, Rausch admits.
	Indeed, liberalism was the original woke movement, highlighting intersecting classes of society and identifying the oppression contained therein.
	The only difference between old school liberalism and intersectionality is in the scope of the target.
	They've gone from the entire class to each individual within each class.
	The problem our liberal dinosaurs have is that their philosophy has evolved, and this evolution happened after they had found an equilibrium in which they were content.
	Well, too bad, I'm afraid.
	At this point, the right is willing to sacrifice liberalism for two basic reasons.
	The first is the fundamental untruths upon which liberalism is founded.
	The second is the end of history that acting upon those untruths will inevitably bring about.
	We have learned from the liberal project that the end of history is not a desirable place to be, nor is it sustainable.
	As I examined in my documentary The Death of Man, I conclude that C.S. Lewis is correct in that the nature of man can be changed by the environment which precedes him, leading to the last men at the end of history having no agency over themselves or their own environment.
	If Fukuyama wasn't wading through the Cretaceous swamps of his dotage, he might have picked up on the central floor with his thesis in the end of history and the last man, and that is that mankind is not a constant.
	The reason Fukuyama and his herd believed that the future of liberalism was a continual wiggish rise into a glorious future of technological and sociological grandeur is because of the compounding nature of science.
	Science, Fukuyama holds, never goes backwards.
	Progress only has one direction, and it's up.
	Science can only get better as more knowledge is added to its canon.
	Let us ignore for a moment that we haven't sent a man to the moon in half a century, for some reason, and consider the assumption that lies beneath this.
	Fukuyama considers man to be his own equal in all places and all times because Fukuyama is a liberal and his view of man is fundamentally ahistorical.
	The thing is, we know this isn't true.
	We know, from science, ironically, that we are not the physical equals of our grandfathers.
	We can see from the metrics that men are less manly than they were before.
	We can chart the decline of IQ in the West, and if the newest generations are any indication, we are looking at future generations who will be severely cognitively impaired because of what technological progress has done to their reading comprehension and attention spans.
	There is no reason to think that in only a few generations hence, that the kind of people we produced then will even be able to comprehend the science that we have accrued now, let alone build upon it.
	Aha, but what about AI?
	The liberal might cry.
	But even then they are admitting that things have gotten away from us, and that Lewis's prophecy is the only avenue which they have left to travel.
	Will they not be satisfied until the whole human race is babied out of existence by machines of loving grace who would ensure that our diminishing power over ourselves or the future leaves us as the future fellahin of a technological dystopia we don't even recognize as a dystopia.
	Rauch, Fukuyama and the rest of the bronzeauruses can continue to blandly assert that the woke right is like the woke left in that it doesn't care about truth.
	But there are higher truths that liberalism itself seeks to render invisible because it has no answer for them.
	What can Fukuyama say to people who mock him with the return of history?
	Nothing substantive, of course.
	And it's not to say that Fukuyama is even wrong on this point.
	If everything had continued as the liberals of the late 90s assumed that they would, we would indeed be living in a post-national world where the thymos of the people was not connected to their collective sense of belonging, but those assumptions did not pan out.
	The thymotic far right is on the rise everywhere because we do not wish to give up our nations nor the history that they contain within them.
	We will not become Felahin, the historyless people whose entire purpose revolves around the satisfaction of their animalistic desires.
	Instead, we will carry the burden of our history within us and pass it on to our children, and the liberal dinosaurs will go extinct because their old-fashioned philosophy has nothing truthful to say about the present moment.
	They can complain that we aren't prepared to go back onto the liberal buckle-ite plantation, but those days are done.
	That ship has sailed.
	The asteroid has arrived and it is wiping them out.
	We can see what the liberals plan for the future is because we are living through it in the present.
	Despite what Steven Pinker, Fraser Nelson, and all of the other relics Frozen and Amber have to say about it, the world is not at all getting better.
	Indeed, it is palpably worse, and everyone can see it when they walk outside of their front doors.
	Liberalism is the only philosophy to blame for this state of affairs because it has had no rival for the last 30 years.
	So swallow your medicine and get ready for change, because the liberal has one last invisible truth that they have to face before we finally turn them into fossils.
	You did this to us, and we are not going to forgive you for it.
	If you would like to learn more about the cutting edge of right-wing philosophy, you can order Islander 4 through the link in the description.
	This edition is about this very subject, the Felahin, the men at the end of history, and everything you need to know about it.

▲