Who Is the Last Man?

Why Francis Fukuyama set the stage for understanding today's crisis of masculinity and testosterone

Welcome back to another instalment in my series expanding on themes in my new book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity.

Francis Fukuyama may be one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented thinkers in recent decades. In large part, this reflects his place as one of the first thinkers to grapple with the end of the Cold War as a world-historical event. But there’s a more mundane reason too. Few actually read what he wrote, but instead get their opinions about the man and his theories second- or even third-hand.

Fukuyama, they say, is that guy who thought history—events? time itself!?—came to an end with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the defeat of the Soviet Union in 1989.

With the end of communism, Fukuyama said, there would just be endless commerce, pleasure and elections every four or five years until the heat death of the universe, billions of years thence. Nothing of any real note would ever happen again.

Or something like that.

For many, Fukuyama is the literal embodiment of liberal hubris, of the triumphalism of the “unipolar moment,” when the US—briefly—stood alone as the world’s sole superpower.

Since the publication of The End of History and the Last Man in 1991, Francis Fukuyama may indeed have become that straw man, a kind of self-parody, but the book itself stands on its own merits, independent of its author.

The End of History and the Last Man remains one of the most subtle and persuasive accounts of the triumph of liberal democracy over communism. It’s called the End of History, because Fukuyama believed the evolution of political forms (“History” with a capital “H”) had been completed, and that no more functional system than liberal democracy could be hit upon, but he didn’t believe events or time had ended, or indeed that liberal democracies couldn’t backslide into autocracy or be destroyed from outside.

And yet the book also provides a dire warning about the inadequacies of liberal democracy, even as its strengths were most prominently on display.

Few others had the foresight, or the courage, to suggest liberal democracy’s victory might be a hollow one, but that’s exactly what Fukuyama did, in the final section of the book—before the streamers and ticker tape landed and while fireworks still illuminated the Western night sky.

That warning is heralded by the and the Last Man of the title, which is the part that’s usually forgotten, even by people who have read the book.

So who or what is the Last Man?

The Last Man is a figure taken from the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, and developed most fully in later books like Thus Spake Zarathustra.

In basic terms, the Last Man is the typical person who exists at the End of History, when all the great quarrels have been settled and there remains little worth fighting over or striving towards. Man turns his eyes away from the stars and down towards the ground, abandoning high goals and aspirations. He settles for a life of consumerism and membership of a political community of millions of people who are all equal, morally, politically and economically; his lot is a material, rather than a spiritual one, defined by things whose value is set in a series of marketplaces.

Here are two crucial paragraphs where Fukuyama introduces Nietzsche’s Last Man and how he represents a pale shadow of man at his fullest, embodying values born of weakness, resentment and the crude strength of numbers.

“Nietzsche’s last man was, in essence, the victorious slave,” Fukuyama writes.

“He agreed fully with Hegel that Christianity was a slave ideology, and that democracy represented a secularized form of Christianity. The equality of all men before the law was a realization of the Christian ideal of the equality of all believers in the Kingdom of Heaven. But the Christian belief in the equality of men before God was nothing more than a prejudice, a prejudice born out of the resentment of the weak against those who were stronger than they were. The Christian religion originated in the realization that the weak could overcome the strong when they banded together in a herd, using the weapons of guilt and conscience. In modern times this prejudice had become widespread and irresistible, not because it had been revealed as true, but because of the greater numbers of weak people.

“The liberal democratic state did not constitute a synthesis of the morality of the master and the morality of the slave, as Hegel had said. For Nietzsche, it represented an unconditional victory of the slave. The master’s freedom and satisfaction were nowhere preserved, for no one really ruled in a democratic society. The typical citizen of a liberal democracy was that individual who, schooled by Hobbes and Locke, gave up prideful belief in his or her own superior worth in favor of comfortable self-preservation. For Nietzsche, democratic man was composed entirely of desire and reason, clever at finding new ways to satisfy a host of petty wants through the calculation of long-term self-interest. But he was completely lacking in any megalothymia, content with his happiness and unable to feel any sense of shame in himself for being unable to rise above those wants.”

You don’t have to agree with Nietzsche’s account of the “slave revolt of morality”—the inversion of aristocratic values caused by the Christianisation of pagan Europe—to see the basic point that life in a liberal democratic society offers man a very limited range for self-expression, defined entirely in terms of his being equal with his fellow man.

That strange word in the second paragraph of the quotation—megalothymia—is key to understanding Fukuyama’s account of the End of History. Megalothymia is a variant of thymos, a Greek word that’s usually translated as “spiritedness,” but Fukyama parses it as “desire for recognition.” Plato, in The Republic, famously wrote that thymos makes a man like a “noble dog” who displays great courage and anger in defending his city, but thymos is also about more than just being a brave warrior in defence of one’s own community. According to Plato, thymos is distinct from reason, and yet it can clearly inform and guide reason. Megalothymia is the desire to seek distinction and to be judged better than one’s peers, while its opposite, isothymia, is the desire to be recognized as equal to one’s peers.

For Fukuyama, the triumph of liberal democracy is the triumph of isothymia at the expense of megalothymia.

In Civilisation and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud warned that a society that represses fundamental aspects of man’s nature will inevitably provoke a revolt. And that’s exactly what Fukuyama, drawing on Nietzsche, is saying: A political system that cannot give full expression to man’s fundamental desires—to his thymos—is storing up trouble.

Liberal democracy can satisfy our desire, and particularly men’s desire, to be accorded equal value, but it actively prevents from being better in any meaningful way.

This is the jumping-off point for my new book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, and my attempt to explore how, by its very nature, modern liberal democracy is hostile to masculinity—or, to paraphrase, how modern liberal democracy is low-testosterone. It’s my contention that all political systems and societies are unique hormonal environments.

What’s interesting about thymos, for my purposes, is that it stands as an almost perfect proxy for the master male hormone, testosterone. It’s testosterone that drives men to compete, to seek distinction, to defend what is theirs and embody the classic virtues we associate with masculinity. In a very real sense, without testosterone, men aren’t men at all, something that becomes abundantly clear if you read testimonials from the low-testosterone sub-forums of Reddit. Men with low testosterone lack motivation and libido, they are anxious and overweight, depressed and lethargic.

If avenues for expressing megalothymia, and with it testosterone, are completely closed off from modern man, we would expect testosterone levels to decline, since a fundamental aspect of having high testosterone is acting like a man who has high testosterone. Hormones exist in feedback loops. And we are seeing a decline: the best studies, like the Massachusetts Male Aging Study, suggest a 1% year on year decrease, across the Western world, over many decades.

But we can go further than this. It’s not just that life in modern liberal societies drives testosterone decline because megalothymia is outlawed: it’s that there’s also a kind of chemical warfare being waged on our bodies by sedentary lifestyles, obesity and chronic disease and, importantly, thousands of hormone-disrupting chemicals—food additives, pharmaceuticals, herbicides and pesticides, plastic chemicals—that mimic or drive production of the “female” hormone estrogen in the human body. We’re bathed in these chemicals from conception, and they upset the crucial ratio of testosterone:estrogen, with potentially lifelong effects. A male fetus given an infusion of hormone-disrupting chemicals may grow to be a man with lower testosterone, a smaller penis, fewer sperm, more fat, less muscle mass and, of course, significantly less thymos.

These chemicals may even be driving the explosion of transgenderism we’ve seen in recent decades.

On my reading, far from being a shameless apologist for liberal democracy, Fukuyama is a great prophet of the crisis facing Western civilization today, politically, socially and biologically.