As is tradition, I made a somewhat obvious blunder in the video. This time it's not crucial to anything, but I did forget to include the music tracks used. In order of appearance: Guile's Theme (street fighter 2) A remix of Redial from Bomberman Hero A remix of A New Trial in Session from Apollo Justice IndGr and IndEc from Civ 3 Shibuya Underground from SMT4 Embassy Piano from Mission Impossible 64 and Seamus and Chamois from Age of Empires 2
The fact that Fukuyama cited Singapore as proof that liberal democracy is the logical endpoint of human society, is ironic, given how often authoritarian leaders & authoritarian mouthpieces across the world cite Singapore's economic success as an excuse to push for even more authoritarianism
It’s something that baffles me with this rhetorical conflation between Democracy and Capitalism. There are a plethora of countries out there that are capitalist, but not at all democratic (🇸🇬🇸🇦🇷🇺🇦🇪🇦🇿).
Absolutely - Civ especially portrays history as a straightforward match towards modernity with absurd results like the Aztecs adopting knightly feudalism
@@stuckupcurlyguy And with Civ 6 having a tech tree and a culture three, you can have tribalism while researching modern artillery, while skipping suffrage.
A follow-up about Fukuyama's own critique of his idea might be interesting. He called transhumanism "the world's most dangerous idea" because it was the most likely way 'the end' could be disrupted
That's one of the most fascinating aspect of transhumanism - every civilization has had one thing in common: humans. Change that and who knows what kind of aggregate behavior we get
kinda funny if you think about it from a soviet "OGAS is a step toward communism" POV, like, this stuff actually existed as a movement, a promising one imo that failed because USSR politics were shit since khruschev.
@@perverse_ince they did evolve from an agrarian feudalist society to an industrial powerhouse competing against the US in the space race in just a couple of decades, when the US already started that race as one of the strongest industrial nations of the entire world. "The politics were terrible" depends on the point of view you want to look at it. I could say the US politics are terrible because of their insane overfocus on cars and privatisation of even the most fundamental of needs, or the giant prison population that are practically used as slave labour, or the constant destabilisation wars against anyone who doesn't agree with them enough. And yet the US is most often celebrated as the richest country in the world and the centre of modern western culture.
I'm glad you put to words what bothers me greatly about the speculative governments Civ proposes. They're litterally indistinquishable, at least to me, save for what they bring. It assumes like how I use to that humans are developing to a more liberal, democratic world, yet even by 2016 and when the expansion bringing them showed, capitalism and its economic system does not guarantee democracy, and even goes out of its way to prevent it from interfering with elite profits.
This is fascinating. Your points on “the last man” really made me change my perspective of nihilism from Nietzsche. And I am absolutely of the opinion that capitalism and democracy are ironically often completely opposed to one another. I really think the idea that a democracy can’t be socialist is ultimately flawed. Civ is great, but this is spot on
Nice stuff. Always found it funny how democracy and capitalism are conflated in video games, although creating game systems that are more true to life does seem pretty complicated! Here's a quick Q and A question for you, if that ever happens: What are your favourite history paper author names? I've got a soft spot for Funkenstein, which is just a perfect name. He writes about Medieval religious history.
There is much democracy in capitalism, it is just the way the vote works is different, that is others vote for you with their money, which they get in turn from being voted by others.
@@Cecilia-ky3uw Its a joke dude because it's just plutocracy your talking about. Their is no democracy there, capitalism is anaethma to genuine democracy.
Great video! Bad history is always hilarious, can't wait to listen to that. An entire video on geographic inconsistency in strategy games would be fun, if outside your normal wheelhouse. Maybe one on geographic determinism and how some games use geographic determinism to extrapolate what the geography of the global south must have been?
Yeah, that could be a discussion (admittedly one I'm less equipped for) but I really did just start reading weather statistics for like an hour as a meaningless rabbithole for the Morocco point. I mean, I've been there and there absolutely are lots of drylands and mountains, but there's also typical "Mediterranean coast" so that region in specific sticks out as an example. I'm sure there's probably tons of places/ways games get India wrong too. I dunno if I could make a whole video on it, but it could be part of an odds-and-ends thing for the bad history bonus. We'll see.
Lots of interesting things, the most obvious are map changes like EU4 making Venice a large island so it can actually defend itself with its navy. But also a lot of problems come from oversimplfied biomes, "plains" are a flat grassy area but northern Europe, the Great plains of the USA, the Russian Steppe, ect are very different biomes but still get lumped together with the same bonuses.
I don't see how the hypothetical "synthetic technocracy" must come from a liberal democracy. Every major country is looking into AI now, including ones that are not liberal democracies...
It doesn't, Civ 6's cold war ideologies leads to globalization, environmentalism, and social media. It isn't until you research the "Optimization Protocol" that all of it amounts to a "Synthetic Technocracy," which means even the Totalitarian or Communist governments can become a technocracy if they research it.
@@Слышьты-ф4юmany modern autocracies or unitary single party states present themselves as democratic or are partially democratic in effect, most full "open" multi party democracies still have elements of non democratic states or define limits of democratic rule in the interest of maintaining the state. So I'd be reluctant in walling any particular system off as wholly separate.
I'm actually somewhat of a fan of Fukuyama, in particular "The Origins of Political Order", so I appreciated him getting understood in his context here, I think it's too easy for people to misinterpret him into "The world will always be exactly as it was in the 90s" when his work is far better understood as the response to Hegel it was always intended to be.
Personally, I think understanding him and that he had more going on than just confirming the neolib worldview and being platformed for it is important. He's got a whole tradition he's pulling from and they're worth understanding. It's easy to mistake it for the simple millenariansim of "the day is coming" rather than a complex millenarianism that is detailed in his book.
@@wunderwerks7826 I'm sure they absolutely would. In fact, the CCP is one of the many victims of the Poverty of Historicism, they are an explicitly historicist ideology that sees itself as the next phase of history. But are they? He's acknowledged that China seems to be doing well... so far, but fundamentally he doubts that their system is going to sustain in the long term, and definitely won't become the center of a new global order as Monarchy and Liberalism have in their own times. And indeed, cracks are showing in the covid response that would almost make them envious of democracies. The Zero Covid Policy has turned from ingenious efficiency into an abject failure but the political system of China does not allow them to change course so easily.
Long-time fan of your videos, but I want to call out one section in particular. From 13:06 until 14:14 is a great, quick debunking of a historical myth/talking point that is extremely commonly held among Westerners, and that is core to their misunderstanding of Asian history/geopolitics.
The problem with the future governments in civ 6 aside from the whole assumed neolibralism base point is that each one is balanced in game-play around focusing your end game to the victoty type you are going for at the coast of sacrifising your chances at the other victory types. This is best seen in the digital democracy, a boost to your culture victory with a net debuff to your domination victory. If this wasn't a feature then the player could go for locking down more victory types was easier, which in the end makes it harder for everyone else to try to win before they do. Basically the governments for the future era in civ have to struggle with not being too pessimistic but also not just letting someone who was running away with the game run even harder.
All the government types are like that, but they get more focused as you progress through the game. The future ones are just the only ones that have an outright debuff. For example, the modern-era governments are very focused on certain victory types. Fascism is tightly focused on a military victory, Democracy focuses on culture and diplomatic victories, and Communism is focused on the science victory but is also viable for military.
@@RaunienTheFirst exactly but also he specifies the future age governments specifically for the fact they have unique debuffs, so i felt that part could infered and thus did not mention it direct
Dude, you rock! It’s great to see folks engage with the historical strategy genre as artwork! They DEFINITELY deserve the label! But what does that mean in terms of world history, art history and pedagogy? Big question: what kind of history game would YOU make?
This is a FANTASTIC video!! I’ve thought about how Fukuyama’s work is relevant to the Civilization franchise! This put together my thoughts very nearly!
I think this is a very very good analysis, and I look forward to watching the rest of your content and whatever you put out from here. I think the grand strategy genre is full of social commentary and historiographical assumptions that deserve critique and examination, particularly given the role this media is now having as a form of pop history which informs collective understanding of history, and I think it is important to do that critique, so good job!
Very underated channel, map games combined with history and geopolitics is an amazing mix, when i saw your vic 2 video i thought you'd have way more subs.
Very true and good video. I have always been interested in some hypothetical game where instead of playing a 'civilization', a state actor, or individual- you play as an idea. Ideas are, in grand strategy games, literally in EU4, adopted by nations, chosen even. They are not incontravenable happenings of history or the driving force behind civilizations development- but necessarily something a civilization manages to develop. (Half-truth, in case of the institutions mechanic of EU4, of course, and many interesting other such mechanics. I am still intrigued by this line of thinking)
Ck3s culture and religious mechanics seem to answer that a bit better as you don't really have true control over how they grow and act. Unless you create your own , even then it takes a huge amount of effort and some compromise will be made.
It's interesting for sure. I somewhat imagined those games as some kind of "What if Bismarck, Napoleon and Alexander the Great played a board game?" and discarded the possibility that Civ could say *anything* about history.
33:14 I know you say your breakfast has tile efficiencies and your microwave has reduced coring cost as a joke, but I think that's literally the biggest benefit of grand strategy games as a whole: when you're put into those strange and unfamiliar shoes and forced to walk around in them the fact that they're uncomfortable highlights who you are, the constraints of the unfamiliar shoes, and how it was that you made the shoes work. It's one thing to look at a family tree of the Habsburgs and see how they came to dominate Europe at least in principle if not exactly in practice, but it's wholly another to do it by marrying off your daughters and sons to people they've literally never met before and probably won't exactly get along with in the confines of Crusader Kings 2 or 3: and the best part about doing that is that you have the transcript in your head about why exactly you made that decision. I know you're probably not looking for more video ideas, but a video on this subject could be a fun and fascinating rabbit hole that may not require all that much dissection the way your HOI4 and Sovietology or Vicky 3 and the Decline of the West did if you're looking for something a little less academic at any point.
Given Fukuyama’s recent embrace of social democracy, I think we can say he’s moved away from trying to transcend the contradictions between democracy and capitalism towards forcing submission of the latter to the former
Fantastic video! This is a topic that I’ve thought a lot about while playing civ, but I wasn’t sure where to look to dig deeper. You’re the first person I’ve seen address the ideology baked into the game. Great job making a video that is informative, entertaining, and original in concept.
I find it funny how liberalism and liberal countries have opposed ideologies with a hegelian view of history for a centuary, yet this guy comes and tries to make liberalism hegelian. From communism to fascism, most ideologies liberalism "fought" in the last centuary all had a hegelian view of history, which often put themseleves as the "objective" societies will progress too. The irony of mixing a philosophy focus on history as the interactions of individuals with a philosophy that sees history as stages of progress, which socities or all of humanity follow, and will reach an utopia is somehow not lost on him. (I am from Colombia, so please excuse my unproper english).
Interesting video. I want to touch on the idea at the end, that there is no middle ground between apocalypse and continuity. I saw someone else mention it as well: transhumanism. At some level of development, we cease to be humans and become something else. While vanishingly few "historical" games explore this idea, many if not most science fiction grand strategy games include it to some degree. Stellaris from Paradox and Beyond Earth from 2K both mechanically feature some means by which the player can transcend the initial physical constraints that, at least at the outset, define their "race." A key facet of the conversation of transhumanism is narrative direction: the very act of transcendence requires both an idea about what we are (and what about that state is "good" and "bad"), and an idea of what we should become. This is a narrative, a story we tell about ourselves. Through this lens, the idea that we are somehow "done" telling stories about ourselves appears absurdly naïve. Another facet of the conversation is the benchmark, the threshold over which we cease to be human and become something more. While many would place this benchmark at some point in the future, at things like a technological singularity, simulated conciseness or cybernetic organisms, I would posit the benchmark is actually behind us: the very idea of history. The idea of "past" is the very thing that lets us speculate about "the future," and forms the framework by which we judge its value.
The very concept of history tending towards some specific point is honestly kind of ridiculous, and the assumption that there is such a tendency is why predictions of the future are almost always wrong past a certain point. Humanity isn't a collection of people all striving towards a common goal; they're 8 billion people that want 8 billion different things.
That’s not really what historical determinists usually argue (and I say this as someone who doesn’t put much stock in it). Rather, they argue that historical events follow a predictable course based on cause-and-effect, and will thus lead to certain predictable outcomes regardless of whether people are “striving” for them. For Fukuyama, this outcome was liberal democracy. For Marx, it was communism. Other theorists had their own ideas.
I was watching this on my phone and when you talked about the last man and the screen went black for a moment, I thought my reflection was the picture you showed XD.
I have just finished binging your entire "Doing History" series and I am hooked. I love the Jordan Peterson running gag! By the way the 'ä' in 'Aufklärer' is pronounced like to the 'a' in 'am (I am)'
Having been set to dreaming in such strange patterns at least sets you up with an interesting position as compared to other thinkers throughout history. It is good, I think, to have unique paradigms and strategies from and with which subjects such as these can be brought together and considered. I am sure your thoughts considering strategic positioning of food items are not unpaired with similar consideration with regards to video narrative pacing and editing practices, after all.
I see so much of a tendency among advocates for capitalism and democracy (the latter of which I typically am) that treat both as though they are refined truth-finding systems like the scientific method. As though capitalism will always optimize for... [unclear] and that will always be good for humanity. By welding the ideas together, as if they didn't arise separately and exist independently, they treat the perfection of the system as inevitable, because they're both things mistaken for rigorous methodologies and not bendy modes of human interaction.
I think a democratic society must allow for some kind of capitalism (or at least free markets), but a capitalist society does not necessarily have to be democratic.
I'd always thought the civ 6 future civics kinda reference the ideologies in 5- digital democracy is freedom, technocracy is order and corporate libertarianism is ironically authoritarian
this is has been a really interesting series of videos to watch I would be interested in seeing you go deeper in how narrative interacts with meta narrative between Civ games as a franchise
A very fine and amazing video that approaches games as peices of art properly. Not the normal type of stupidty and anger youtube likes to mass-reccoment to people. Subscribed. Keep doing good work.
I find the use of the term Democracy, as opposed to using Republics, deceptive as all countries with a Democracy are representative democracies aka Republics and are not direct democracies. Why do I mention this semantic change? Because voters will assume their government is drastically different from another Republic when history and economic state are the actual separating points. This is just a pet peeve of mine.
On the point on Korea/Taiwan, I think you miss the mark here. Korea's growth, particularly its convergence with the rest of the developed world occurred *AFTER* the dates you show of 1963-1981. In 1960 Japan had 3x the GDP per capita of Korea as a bit of a baseline. In 1963 Japan had 5x the GDP per capita of Korea. By 1981, Japan was nearly 6x the GDP per capita of Korea. So compared to another poor nation in the region, they did *worse* and by a wide margin. The gap went from ~300 USD per capita difference to ~8500 USD per capita difference in a generation. Taiwan is in a similar situation. In 1960 Japan was only 3x as wealthy per capita. By 1981 it was 4x as wealthy per capita. The gap had grown again from ~300 USD to ~7700 USD. How do things stand today? Well Japan is only about 12% more in per capita than South Korea and 20% more than Taiwan. In other words, the periods *after* they liberalized are when we seem them grow fastest and converge most rapidly with the developed world. Why the focus on convergence? Well because the economic literature is pretty clear that poor nations should grow faster than rich ones, that convergence is the trend. Despite that, Korea and Taiwan *weren't* converging with richer neighbor Japan and in fact that gap was widening. Yes, their growth was positive during the authoritarian years, but it was slower than the trend should have indicated. Liberal democracy Japan grew faster over that period and diverged from them, only for them to catch up after liberalizing.
Anecdotally, I don't think the sub count went up bc of the last video, but just bc the algorithm is recommending ur vids more. I watched one of them, checked the channel out, and then just kept watching.
20:03 but isn’t that exactly what a lot of the „authoritarian communist“ countries ended up doing? Revert to capitalism, not infrequently by participation of the party apparatus. But of course, it absolutely is true that this represents a complete break from their previous path.
I think there's a point that political and economic systems as gradients are correlated. Specifically that on the command economy end there's a threshold cap value of democracy you can have and that on the free market end there's a threshold cap of authoritarian you can have. No nation or state will be purely command, free market, democratic or authoritarian, BUT the more command economy you are, the more you are viewing all productive and economic activity as a totally computational objective system that precludes democratic input in favor of technocratic bureaucrats(if you think there's a correct amount of grain to produce for the year then you can't allow people to vote to produce less grain) likewise the more you think people should generally operate economically independently and make their own diffuse decisions then the less you can ever control and manage decisions in their lives and the more likely the government will always need to solicit input from large portions of society in how government works around the decisions they make in their everyday life.
I think you should take a look at Millennia when it releases later in March. It's a take on a historical 4X but with the possibility of alternate history and some other stuff.
Lol quoting singapore, we didnt even allow long hair during the economic development, no hippies allowed lol. Luckily they lifted it, so my hair could sway about as i headbang
If fortune tellers could really see the future, they'd be buying stocks and lottery tickets instead of trying to making money telling other people's fortunes.
You should really check into SMAC for your deep dives, relevant here for a current age man (1990s End of History) positing how things would follow on in the far future. Plus technically a Civ game still? Hah!
When I play Civ 6, I use the communist system of government when I reach that stage of development, and simply assume that I have a combination of a socialist economy and a democratic system of government. There is no closer definition to exactly how the communist system of government work in that game anyway, except that the means of production are supposedly not privately owned. It is just a matter of stats and abstractions. So I think I can reasonably assume any system of government I want when I play with it, although the economic system is socialist.
16:45 AHAHAHA I feel so called out in a sense. Literally today a discussion about 9/11 had me start a rant about the birth of agriculture. Was relevant, I promise, but it was a lobster moment. Love your videos.
legitimately, i just end games of civ 6 on communism without moving to the final stage governments. the chonky production and science bonuses are just sufficient to propel me to Mars which if that's not evidence that Posadas was right I don't know what is
Did Fukuyama actually believe his own thesis or did he just write it to validate the people who pay him money, so they pay him more money? Asking for real, I have no idea.
25:31 this description of Marxism isn‘t accurate though. The goal isn‘t the „socialization of work“ because work already is socialized under capitalism, which is in fact the main driver of progress under capitalism. Under capitalism, production is a social process into which multitudes of people are integrated either directly or indirectly. This is a major difference from and major progress over previous productive systems were most production happens individually or in small groups. What isn‘t socialized is the ownership of production, and it‘s exactly this that marxism seeks to change. The fundamental systemic contradiction is that enormous mountains of commodities are created by the cooperation of huge numbers of people…and then one guy owns all of it. Or a handful of guys, but always a tiny section of the population. That‘s the contradiction: a handful of people personally controlling at will the productive faculties of multitudes; of course that‘s going to go wrong. And the only way to fix it is to socialize ownership the way the productive process itself already is socialized.
You have to try out the games made by Kremlingames, those are late communist political simulator games. There are three that are historical and only one is invented. I recommend you start with ostalgie as it's the most easy to understand.
21:00 I'm not on the same wavelength that HUMANKIND and CIV's presentation of the future... or, rather, the negative implication of the future are not so different that they're essentially similar, but more so that HUMANKIND leaves the future up to question, without taking a stance on whether it becomes positive or negative... though the intra-era cinamatics go for the Optimistic--but reality acknowledging approach to the presentation of history... not sure if there's a word for that. The thing that is at my forefront of my mind when it comes to leaving questions up to the player to decide, is the example of Humankind's narrator chiming in whenever the player researches Empirical power. Being "Your empire becomes one of the greats, astride the globe. And what will you do with that power?" (I found myself responding with "I don't know 🤔" to that recently heh). Granted, the narrator is not robotic enough to not show that he takes a stance depending on what the player does or commits to doing, however looking at end point of of HUMANKIND's history--being a Developer stated 2020 with some near future technologies, it's... or at least I think it is accurate to say that game takes a more off-hand approach when it comes to the end of history. Though maybe that's liable to change in whatever theoretical future DLC that may or may not come out or even exists for that game.
Yeah, I actually originally considered writing a section on this in a bit more depth. It's very much as you say, an open ended conclusion. I was looking at it more as just flat and sudden. The games I've reached the endpoint to have tended to just suddenly be happening with like 1 turn's warning before the game was over, and I suppose that took the fore in my experience (even though the discussion is more about tech/civics than the timeline). In the end, I ended up leaning away from the distinctions, and maybe that was a mistake and there's more conversation to be had than I anticipated. I do genuinely appreciate that Humankind has a narrator with a bias, who also seems to mostly be curious what you'll do. There's more than a few moments where you're asked "so what happens next?" and I think that's charming. I'm...not optimistic about near future content.
I think his two other books are better . Of course the inherent problem is that the scope is so wide it's bound to have a lot of errors. Still worth reading tho.
I think the ‘narrative’ of history is more similar to a soap opera narrative than a single novel. It goes on and on with ridiculous repetitions; anyone thinking that socialism had been defeated hasn’t been on a western university campus. Like a characters’ repeated bouts of amnesia on her wedding day; the world will continue to fight the same old struggles between liberty and tyranny ad nauseum.
I think synthetic technocracy could be seen as the follow up of a planned economy pushed to its logical conclusion And the be seen as the follow up of the soviet union you know the old potential soviet cybernetics and all that
I'm not sure I agree with your read on Fukuyama wrt Asian tigers; he uses Singapore and south Korea as examples of authoritarian capitalist states as part of his assertion that mere materialism can prove capitalism superior, but is insufficient to explain the dominance of democracy, requiring him to integrate Hegel.
Beyond Earth is SciFantasy, but it does explore the possibility that humans might evolve into robots. Purity/ Harmony doesn't make sense, and are mostly there for "fantasy" aspect.
On the contrary, Purity at least makes perfect sense. It is the expression of a politics of nostalgia, which has been given various forms in our real political landscapes, such as the irredentism of Russia under Putin that contradictorily yearns for the glory of both imperial czarist Russia and the communist USSR that defeated the nazis. Harmony, on the other hand, can be seen as another expression of the transhumanism at the heart of Supremacy, but one that focuses on, well, harmonising with nature as it is rather than wrestling with it through the brute force of Supremacy. It is also a more transcendentalist vision than Supremacy, trying to elevate itself beyond transhumanism into posthumanism. This is especially succinctly contrasted with the victory conditions associated with each ideology: Purity, naturally, looks back to and idealises Earth, making its ultimate mission the fulfilment of the hopes vested into the settlers by the people of Earth by bringing them to this new Promised Land. Supremacy, having subjugated the alien world with technological might, returns to Earth to subjugate the rest of humanity and bring them "into the fold", while Harmony fully realises the transhumanist vision and its own moniker, and finally turns posthuman, destroying the distinction between human and non-human, civilisation and nature, and unlike the other two ideologies, surpasses Earth and its own origin. All in all, I actually quite like the ideologies of Civ: Beyond Earth as speculative ideological adaptations to a new world and its conditions by the pioneers that make up the factions of the setting.
This is a very interesting video, but if you could clarify to me a part that from my own point of view seems like bias on your part: while true that Fukuyama's work refuses to acknowledge any contradiction between capitalism and democracy at all, I understand that you consider the two inherently unweddable, and the former obligatorily chained to colonialism. In a world where "real socialism has never been tried" is a prevailing argument (which I do not know if you yourself proclaim), it feels disingenuous to assume (almost axiomatically) that liberalism and capitalism are impossible to function without colonialism, simply because they happened to *stem* from it historically. How does one figure that socialism (at least the one described by its proponents) has a monopoly on "true" democracy, and that liberalism's democratic elements must collapse if one removes oppression from the equation (a millenarial notion on its own right, really)?
"Democratic elements" is the problem here, I think. Democracy itself is a looser concept than we take it to be, given that it applies to things ranging from voting rights and enfranchisement to representation and republic style government-- but also, since the time of Marx, at the least, has been applied to work as well. Defining the shape and limit of "democracy" is part of the issue , then. It's true that, for example, the Netherlands has a democratic government. But they also have a monarch still. And a representative legislature. And workplaces are not "democratic" in a way that mirrors even representative government. There are undemocratic things in democratic countries. Capitalism, if we define it not as open markets or "trade" as some might, but as the control of large industry by a small amount of people who use their profits to invest into expansion and the conglomeration and assimilation of smaller industries is, intrinsically undemocratic, because it necessitates a centralization of power. It is not "undemocratic" in the sense of being, on paper, at odds with universal suffrage, for example (though there are arguments that lobbying is not an unfortunate side effect but an inevitable element of capitalism, and it does, ostensibly exist to interrupt democracy). Charitably, if one's idea of democracy did not include labor, and did not take issue with representative government (as opposed to direct democracy) then capitalism is not at odds with democracy. I don't want to speak in absolutes here, but two things appear true in a "never been tried" way, as you put it: capitalism without economies of scale (forced through colonialism and exploitation, or otherwise) has not been tried, and modern democracy without the influence of money has not been tried. Now, the latter point is quite idealist, I recognize, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth consideration. Is it democracy when every person in Montana is represented by two senators, who can in turn choose to represent the interests of one pharmaceutical company, at the expense of their constituency, due to the influence of capital? This could go on, as a topic, for quite some time. As to your last question, that is a genuine concern, and it's why, at least for me, personally, "stage theories" of history are more templates than they are declarations of inevitability. And it's also why eventually there was the articulation of what we call "postmodernism"-- the absence of meta-narrative. (That does not make me a post-modernist, mind you.) I would argue that theories of socialism that are more articulated or mainstream present themselves more as theories or pathways that could happen, where at the very least Fukuyama is a bit more singular and expectant. The certainty is important to the charge of millinerianism. But that also becomes rather semantic. But ultimately, the monopoly on democracy, as you put it stems from having a more totalizing definition of what ought be democratized.
I disagree on the civ VI future goverments necessarilly evolving out of the liberal democracy branch. A communist goverment becoming a synthetic technocracy by inventing the perfect central planner is a cool narrative to think about. And Virtual Democracy might also be conceived of as a another step towards a classless, stateless society, a form of dictatorship of the proletariat (this is, in fact, how most of my games work). Corporate Libertiaranism could also evolve from Fascism, as State and corporate power continue to collaborate. These future goverments seem like evolutions of Liberal Democracy because there a predictions about the future made in a present where Liberal Democracy won, but they are not mechanically related to Liberal Democracy in any way and you can enjoy these emerging narratives.
I disagree with your point about the future goverment: I can defenetly see a fascist state slowly being eroded by corporate power, since in the end fascism doesnt actually have a solution, or even cares about the capture of state capacity As long as the corporations play into the rethoric of social conservatism, I doubt most fascists would even care. Same for a marxist-leninist state falling into an AI-run society, since those goverments are already marked by a technocratic impetus when compared to more libertarian communist ideologies, which probably would support some sort of digital democracy
I wonder how he got the point that fascism wouldn't be corporate if it literally was before WW2 started, while during WW2 Germany turned into a slave/conquest economy.
As is tradition, I made a somewhat obvious blunder in the video. This time it's not crucial to anything, but I did forget to include the music tracks used. In order of appearance:
Guile's Theme (street fighter 2)
A remix of Redial from Bomberman Hero
A remix of A New Trial in Session from Apollo Justice
IndGr and IndEc from Civ 3
Shibuya Underground from SMT4
Embassy Piano from Mission Impossible 64
and
Seamus and Chamois from Age of Empires 2
Loved Mission Impossible 64!
jordan peterson jungian lobster phase - I'd like to learn more about that, laugh
Ugh, another mistake: I've got a typo for the year 1984 in ~22:44
Another minor error: Crusader Kings 3 starts in 867, not 807
@@the_representative 867 is the other and i believe more popular start date
The fact that Fukuyama cited Singapore as proof that liberal democracy is the logical endpoint of human society, is ironic, given how often authoritarian leaders & authoritarian mouthpieces across the world cite Singapore's economic success as an excuse to push for even more authoritarianism
Singapore is what you want it to be.
Also Singapore is not "free market" the state owns the biggest investment company (from which its economy basically depends) and most of the housing
good
Singapore is a complicated onion where people look into what they want to see, and that's coming from someone on the inside.
It’s something that baffles me with this rhetorical conflation between Democracy and Capitalism. There are a plethora of countries out there that are capitalist, but not at all democratic (🇸🇬🇸🇦🇷🇺🇦🇪🇦🇿).
it is so refreshing to see someone talk about these games as texts that make claims about history and not just collections of interlocking systems
Absolutely - Civ especially portrays history as a straightforward match towards modernity with absurd results like the Aztecs adopting knightly feudalism
@@stuckupcurlyguy And with Civ 6 having a tech tree and a culture three, you can have tribalism while researching modern artillery, while skipping suffrage.
The unspoken subtext of all videogames is they represent a world view with a political and philosophical and even sociological opinion baked in
"the cold war is over! fukuyama promised us peace!" as the two planes crash into the tower
This is a fucking world heritage comment
Pilgrims pass enjoyer, pretty based
Like to see a fellow fan of pilgrim's pass, he's so skeptical of the elightenment, no wonder he only respects America's revolution.
A follow-up about Fukuyama's own critique of his idea might be interesting. He called transhumanism "the world's most dangerous idea" because it was the most likely way 'the end' could be disrupted
That's one of the most fascinating aspect of transhumanism - every civilization has had one thing in common: humans. Change that and who knows what kind of aggregate behavior we get
I would argue communalist ways of living are the danger for his supposed "end of history" propaganda bullshit.
kinda funny if you think about it from a soviet "OGAS is a step toward communism" POV, like, this stuff actually existed as a movement, a promising one imo that failed because USSR politics were shit since khruschev.
@@VolokArtyom
There is no point in history when Russian politics was not terrible, these people never got a breather
@@perverse_ince they did evolve from an agrarian feudalist society to an industrial powerhouse competing against the US in the space race in just a couple of decades, when the US already started that race as one of the strongest industrial nations of the entire world.
"The politics were terrible" depends on the point of view you want to look at it. I could say the US politics are terrible because of their insane overfocus on cars and privatisation of even the most fundamental of needs, or the giant prison population that are practically used as slave labour, or the constant destabilisation wars against anyone who doesn't agree with them enough. And yet the US is most often celebrated as the richest country in the world and the centre of modern western culture.
I'm glad you put to words what bothers me greatly about the speculative governments Civ proposes. They're litterally indistinquishable, at least to me, save for what they bring. It assumes like how I use to that humans are developing to a more liberal, democratic world, yet even by 2016 and when the expansion bringing them showed, capitalism and its economic system does not guarantee democracy, and even goes out of its way to prevent it from interfering with elite profits.
Fukuyama being like “yeah so guys we won”
(The United States housing market crushing everyone in the background)
This is fascinating. Your points on “the last man” really made me change my perspective of nihilism from Nietzsche. And I am absolutely of the opinion that capitalism and democracy are ironically often completely opposed to one another. I really think the idea that a democracy can’t be socialist is ultimately flawed. Civ is great, but this is spot on
Nice stuff. Always found it funny how democracy and capitalism are conflated in video games, although creating game systems that are more true to life does seem pretty complicated!
Here's a quick Q and A question for you, if that ever happens: What are your favourite history paper author names? I've got a soft spot for Funkenstein, which is just a perfect name. He writes about Medieval religious history.
There is much democracy in capitalism, it is just the way the vote works is different, that is others vote for you with their money, which they get in turn from being voted by others.
@@Cecilia-ky3uw Lol.
@@AbstractTraitorHero that is in essemce how capitalism's democracy works.
@@Cecilia-ky3uw Its a joke dude because it's just plutocracy your talking about. Their is no democracy there, capitalism is anaethma to genuine democracy.
@@AbstractTraitorHero the wealthy are people who are voted for by the majority of people using their money.
Great video! Bad history is always hilarious, can't wait to listen to that. An entire video on geographic inconsistency in strategy games would be fun, if outside your normal wheelhouse. Maybe one on geographic determinism and how some games use geographic determinism to extrapolate what the geography of the global south must have been?
Yeah, that could be a discussion (admittedly one I'm less equipped for) but I really did just start reading weather statistics for like an hour as a meaningless rabbithole for the Morocco point. I mean, I've been there and there absolutely are lots of drylands and mountains, but there's also typical "Mediterranean coast" so that region in specific sticks out as an example. I'm sure there's probably tons of places/ways games get India wrong too. I dunno if I could make a whole video on it, but it could be part of an odds-and-ends thing for the bad history bonus. We'll see.
Lots of interesting things, the most obvious are map changes like EU4 making Venice a large island so it can actually defend itself with its navy.
But also a lot of problems come from oversimplfied biomes, "plains" are a flat grassy area but northern Europe, the Great plains of the USA, the Russian Steppe, ect are very different biomes but still get lumped together with the same bonuses.
As a politics student who's spent nearly 2k hours in Civ V and VI, you're the channel I've been looking for
I don't see how the hypothetical "synthetic technocracy" must come from a liberal democracy. Every major country is looking into AI now, including ones that are not liberal democracies...
I think it's the idea that an autocracy using ai as a tool is not immediately a technocracy just because they use technology.
Yeah but all of those have free market capitalist economies with more or less liberal government structures.
@@nicholascarter9158 technocracy is not a democracy anyway, so still strange
It doesn't, Civ 6's cold war ideologies leads to globalization, environmentalism, and social media. It isn't until you research the "Optimization Protocol" that all of it amounts to a "Synthetic Technocracy," which means even the Totalitarian or Communist governments can become a technocracy if they research it.
@@Слышьты-ф4юmany modern autocracies or unitary single party states present themselves as democratic or are partially democratic in effect, most full "open" multi party democracies still have elements of non democratic states or define limits of democratic rule in the interest of maintaining the state. So I'd be reluctant in walling any particular system off as wholly separate.
I'm actually somewhat of a fan of Fukuyama, in particular "The Origins of Political Order", so I appreciated him getting understood in his context here, I think it's too easy for people to misinterpret him into "The world will always be exactly as it was in the 90s" when his work is far better understood as the response to Hegel it was always intended to be.
Personally, I think understanding him and that he had more going on than just confirming the neolib worldview and being platformed for it is important. He's got a whole tradition he's pulling from and they're worth understanding. It's easy to mistake it for the simple millenariansim of "the day is coming" rather than a complex millenarianism that is detailed in his book.
China would like a word with his claims. ;)
@@wunderwerks7826 I'm sure they absolutely would. In fact, the CCP is one of the many victims of the Poverty of Historicism, they are an explicitly historicist ideology that sees itself as the next phase of history. But are they? He's acknowledged that China seems to be doing well... so far, but fundamentally he doubts that their system is going to sustain in the long term, and definitely won't become the center of a new global order as Monarchy and Liberalism have in their own times. And indeed, cracks are showing in the covid response that would almost make them envious of democracies. The Zero Covid Policy has turned from ingenious efficiency into an abject failure but the political system of China does not allow them to change course so easily.
@@wunderwerks7826 China’s going to collapse that’s to the demographic bomb as a result of the one child policy.
@@wunderwerks7826 they are probably too busy welding people into their homes to keep them from coughing on eachother tho
Long-time fan of your videos, but I want to call out one section in particular. From 13:06 until 14:14 is a great, quick debunking of a historical myth/talking point that is extremely commonly held among Westerners, and that is core to their misunderstanding of Asian history/geopolitics.
The problem with the future governments in civ 6 aside from the whole assumed neolibralism base point is that each one is balanced in game-play around focusing your end game to the victoty type you are going for at the coast of sacrifising your chances at the other victory types. This is best seen in the digital democracy, a boost to your culture victory with a net debuff to your domination victory. If this wasn't a feature then the player could go for locking down more victory types was easier, which in the end makes it harder for everyone else to try to win before they do. Basically the governments for the future era in civ have to struggle with not being too pessimistic but also not just letting someone who was running away with the game run even harder.
All the government types are like that, but they get more focused as you progress through the game. The future ones are just the only ones that have an outright debuff.
For example, the modern-era governments are very focused on certain victory types. Fascism is tightly focused on a military victory, Democracy focuses on culture and diplomatic victories, and Communism is focused on the science victory but is also viable for military.
@@RaunienTheFirst exactly but also he specifies the future age governments specifically for the fact they have unique debuffs, so i felt that part could infered and thus did not mention it direct
Dude, you rock!
It’s great to see folks engage with the historical strategy genre as artwork! They DEFINITELY deserve the label! But what does that mean in terms of world history, art history and pedagogy?
Big question: what kind of history game would YOU make?
This is a FANTASTIC video!! I’ve thought about how Fukuyama’s work is relevant to the Civilization franchise! This put together my thoughts very nearly!
you got yourself a new subscriber!!
Great, now how does The End of Evangelion fit into this?
I think this is a very very good analysis, and I look forward to watching the rest of your content and whatever you put out from here. I think the grand strategy genre is full of social commentary and historiographical assumptions that deserve critique and examination, particularly given the role this media is now having as a form of pop history which informs collective understanding of history, and I think it is important to do that critique, so good job!
Never seen your channel before but based off of this video I think it might become one of my favourites. Keep up the good work man!
Very underated channel, map games combined with history and geopolitics is an amazing mix, when i saw your vic 2 video i thought you'd have way more subs.
Very true and good video. I have always been interested in some hypothetical game where instead of playing a 'civilization', a state actor, or individual- you play as an idea.
Ideas are, in grand strategy games, literally in EU4, adopted by nations, chosen even. They are not incontravenable happenings of history or the driving force behind civilizations development- but necessarily something a civilization manages to develop. (Half-truth, in case of the institutions mechanic of EU4, of course, and many interesting other such mechanics. I am still intrigued by this line of thinking)
Ck3s culture and religious mechanics seem to answer that a bit better as you don't really have true control over how they grow and act. Unless you create your own , even then it takes a huge amount of effort and some compromise will be made.
I like the idea of a game where you play as a culture - rather than a regime, leader, or even a nation/state.
It's interesting for sure. I somewhat imagined those games as some kind of "What if Bismarck, Napoleon and Alexander the Great played a board game?" and discarded the possibility that Civ could say *anything* about history.
33:14 I know you say your breakfast has tile efficiencies and your microwave has reduced coring cost as a joke, but I think that's literally the biggest benefit of grand strategy games as a whole: when you're put into those strange and unfamiliar shoes and forced to walk around in them the fact that they're uncomfortable highlights who you are, the constraints of the unfamiliar shoes, and how it was that you made the shoes work. It's one thing to look at a family tree of the Habsburgs and see how they came to dominate Europe at least in principle if not exactly in practice, but it's wholly another to do it by marrying off your daughters and sons to people they've literally never met before and probably won't exactly get along with in the confines of Crusader Kings 2 or 3: and the best part about doing that is that you have the transcript in your head about why exactly you made that decision.
I know you're probably not looking for more video ideas, but a video on this subject could be a fun and fascinating rabbit hole that may not require all that much dissection the way your HOI4 and Sovietology or Vicky 3 and the Decline of the West did if you're looking for something a little less academic at any point.
“How does history end?”
Me: idk in the present.
As long as it doesn't end before I do I'm not too worried about it.
Just wanted to let you know that I clicked so fast when I saw you uploaded this. Keep up the great work.
Typo in 2:25, - Crusader Kings III earliest start date is 867, and so its timeframe is 867-1453.
wow, that was such a great video... Brazil sends a hug bro!
Given Fukuyama’s recent embrace of social democracy, I think we can say he’s moved away from trying to transcend the contradictions between democracy and capitalism towards forcing submission of the latter to the former
Sir, I don’t know where I got your channel from, but I have to say, it really is bingeable.
Bruh that channel is a masterpiece
Fantastic video! This is a topic that I’ve thought a lot about while playing civ, but I wasn’t sure where to look to dig deeper. You’re the first person I’ve seen address the ideology baked into the game. Great job making a video that is informative, entertaining, and original in concept.
I find it funny how liberalism and liberal countries have opposed ideologies with a hegelian view of history for a centuary, yet this guy comes and tries to make liberalism hegelian. From communism to fascism, most ideologies liberalism "fought" in the last centuary all had a hegelian view of history, which often put themseleves as the "objective" societies will progress too.
The irony of mixing a philosophy focus on history as the interactions of individuals with a philosophy that sees history as stages of progress, which socities or all of humanity follow, and will reach an utopia is somehow not lost on him.
(I am from Colombia, so please excuse my unproper english).
Nice video! I know it's a cliché but you deserve 100x more subs
Good luck from Poland
Interesting video. I want to touch on the idea at the end, that there is no middle ground between apocalypse and continuity. I saw someone else mention it as well: transhumanism. At some level of development, we cease to be humans and become something else. While vanishingly few "historical" games explore this idea, many if not most science fiction grand strategy games include it to some degree. Stellaris from Paradox and Beyond Earth from 2K both mechanically feature some means by which the player can transcend the initial physical constraints that, at least at the outset, define their "race."
A key facet of the conversation of transhumanism is narrative direction: the very act of transcendence requires both an idea about what we are (and what about that state is "good" and "bad"), and an idea of what we should become. This is a narrative, a story we tell about ourselves. Through this lens, the idea that we are somehow "done" telling stories about ourselves appears absurdly naïve.
Another facet of the conversation is the benchmark, the threshold over which we cease to be human and become something more. While many would place this benchmark at some point in the future, at things like a technological singularity, simulated conciseness or cybernetic organisms, I would posit the benchmark is actually behind us: the very idea of history. The idea of "past" is the very thing that lets us speculate about "the future," and forms the framework by which we judge its value.
The very concept of history tending towards some specific point is honestly kind of ridiculous, and the assumption that there is such a tendency is why predictions of the future are almost always wrong past a certain point. Humanity isn't a collection of people all striving towards a common goal; they're 8 billion people that want 8 billion different things.
That’s not really what historical determinists usually argue (and I say this as someone who doesn’t put much stock in it). Rather, they argue that historical events follow a predictable course based on cause-and-effect, and will thus lead to certain predictable outcomes regardless of whether people are “striving” for them. For Fukuyama, this outcome was liberal democracy. For Marx, it was communism. Other theorists had their own ideas.
I was watching this on my phone and when you talked about the last man and the screen went black for a moment, I thought my reflection was the picture you showed XD.
That bomberman song at 5:30 is so good
I have just finished binging your entire "Doing History" series and I am hooked. I love the Jordan Peterson running gag! By the way the 'ä' in 'Aufklärer' is pronounced like to the 'a' in 'am (I am)'
Having been set to dreaming in such strange patterns at least sets you up with an interesting position as compared to other thinkers throughout history. It is good, I think, to have unique paradigms and strategies from and with which subjects such as these can be brought together and considered. I am sure your thoughts considering strategic positioning of food items are not unpaired with similar consideration with regards to video narrative pacing and editing practices, after all.
i wish my microwave had reduced coring cost :(
Don't worry, you should get it with your microwave's next dlc :p
@@joshuawhite9876 big if true
I see so much of a tendency among advocates for capitalism and democracy (the latter of which I typically am) that treat both as though they are refined truth-finding systems like the scientific method. As though capitalism will always optimize for... [unclear] and that will always be good for humanity. By welding the ideas together, as if they didn't arise separately and exist independently, they treat the perfection of the system as inevitable, because they're both things mistaken for rigorous methodologies and not bendy modes of human interaction.
"A Capitalist society must be democratic"
China: _coughs_
For all intents and purposes China is almost a model national socialist state
I think a democratic society must allow for some kind of capitalism (or at least free markets), but a capitalist society does not necessarily have to be democratic.
I have to say, your content is really well thought-out and superbly presented. It's on par with Fall of Civilizations' work but for videogames
I'd always thought the civ 6 future civics kinda reference the ideologies in 5- digital democracy is freedom, technocracy is order and corporate libertarianism is ironically authoritarian
So you're trying to say that Civ has more Universality than Europa UNIVERSALIS?
Gasp, I know, it's wild.
this is has been a really interesting series of videos to watch
I would be interested in seeing you go deeper in how narrative interacts with meta narrative between Civ games as a franchise
A very fine and amazing video that approaches games as peices of art properly. Not the normal type of stupidty and anger youtube likes to mass-reccoment to people. Subscribed. Keep doing good work.
Taking fukuyama and his idea of "end of history" seriously NOW is impossible. With iran, china and "russia" around.
What
@@VenomSnake420authoritarian countries becoming stronger, throwing doubt onto the idea of a world embrace of democracy any time soon
When there’s nobody left to talk/read, remember or make it.
I find the use of the term Democracy, as opposed to using Republics, deceptive as all countries with a Democracy are representative democracies aka Republics and are not direct democracies. Why do I mention this semantic change? Because voters will assume their government is drastically different from another Republic when history and economic state are the actual separating points. This is just a pet peeve of mine.
This is actually very fascinating! I was always kind of wondering about stuff like this, wether it is possible to find patterns in human history.
On the point on Korea/Taiwan, I think you miss the mark here. Korea's growth, particularly its convergence with the rest of the developed world occurred *AFTER* the dates you show of 1963-1981. In 1960 Japan had 3x the GDP per capita of Korea as a bit of a baseline. In 1963 Japan had 5x the GDP per capita of Korea. By 1981, Japan was nearly 6x the GDP per capita of Korea. So compared to another poor nation in the region, they did *worse* and by a wide margin. The gap went from ~300 USD per capita difference to ~8500 USD per capita difference in a generation. Taiwan is in a similar situation. In 1960 Japan was only 3x as wealthy per capita. By 1981 it was 4x as wealthy per capita. The gap had grown again from ~300 USD to ~7700 USD.
How do things stand today? Well Japan is only about 12% more in per capita than South Korea and 20% more than Taiwan. In other words, the periods *after* they liberalized are when we seem them grow fastest and converge most rapidly with the developed world. Why the focus on convergence? Well because the economic literature is pretty clear that poor nations should grow faster than rich ones, that convergence is the trend. Despite that, Korea and Taiwan *weren't* converging with richer neighbor Japan and in fact that gap was widening. Yes, their growth was positive during the authoritarian years, but it was slower than the trend should have indicated. Liberal democracy Japan grew faster over that period and diverged from them, only for them to catch up after liberalizing.
you got yourself a new subscriber. good stuff
Anecdotally, I don't think the sub count went up bc of the last video, but just bc the algorithm is recommending ur vids more. I watched one of them, checked the channel out, and then just kept watching.
Civilization 4 was the end of Civilization. It ended with one unit per tile.
20:03 but isn’t that exactly what a lot of the „authoritarian communist“ countries ended up doing? Revert to capitalism, not infrequently by participation of the party apparatus.
But of course, it absolutely is true that this represents a complete break from their previous path.
I think there's a point that political and economic systems as gradients are correlated. Specifically that on the command economy end there's a threshold cap value of democracy you can have and that on the free market end there's a threshold cap of authoritarian you can have. No nation or state will be purely command, free market, democratic or authoritarian, BUT the more command economy you are, the more you are viewing all productive and economic activity as a totally computational objective system that precludes democratic input in favor of technocratic bureaucrats(if you think there's a correct amount of grain to produce for the year then you can't allow people to vote to produce less grain) likewise the more you think people should generally operate economically independently and make their own diffuse decisions then the less you can ever control and manage decisions in their lives and the more likely the government will always need to solicit input from large portions of society in how government works around the decisions they make in their everyday life.
For a video essay it's surprising how much time is spent with a voice over a completely blank screen.
I think you should take a look at Millennia when it releases later in March. It's a take on a historical 4X but with the possibility of alternate history and some other stuff.
Lol quoting singapore, we didnt even allow long hair during the economic development, no hippies allowed lol. Luckily they lifted it, so my hair could sway about as i headbang
VERY NICE AND INFORMATIVE
I find the concept of the end of history hilarious
All in all, the fortune teller is just making shit up.
If fortune tellers could really see the future, they'd be buying stocks and lottery tickets instead of trying to making money telling other people's fortunes.
You should really check into SMAC for your deep dives, relevant here for a current age man (1990s End of History) positing how things would follow on in the far future. Plus technically a Civ game still? Hah!
I found the Fukuyama video!!
It was hidden in plain sight. (To be fair I’ve fought the urge to bring him up like four times in other scripts)
Great video, as always
My key takeaway from this video is that Nietzsche invented the virgin / chad meme.
When I play Civ 6, I use the communist system of government when I reach that stage of development, and simply assume that I have a combination of a socialist economy and a democratic system of government. There is no closer definition to exactly how the communist system of government work in that game anyway, except that the means of production are supposedly not privately owned. It is just a matter of stats and abstractions. So I think I can reasonably assume any system of government I want when I play with it, although the economic system is socialist.
It might only be because I recently played it but I feel like alpha century should have been mentioned here somewhere.
16:45 AHAHAHA I feel so called out in a sense. Literally today a discussion about 9/11 had me start a rant about the birth of agriculture. Was relevant, I promise, but it was a lobster moment. Love your videos.
The Fukuyama blunder at 13:25 is hilarious. Like, how do you not do a double take when re-reading that? South Korea?
Awesome stuff!
legitimately, i just end games of civ 6 on communism without moving to the final stage governments. the chonky production and science bonuses are just sufficient to propel me to Mars which if that's not evidence that Posadas was right I don't know what is
Did Fukuyama actually believe his own thesis or did he just write it to validate the people who pay him money, so they pay him more money? Asking for real, I have no idea.
25:31 this description of Marxism isn‘t accurate though. The goal isn‘t the „socialization of work“ because work already is socialized under capitalism, which is in fact the main driver of progress under capitalism. Under capitalism, production is a social process into which multitudes of people are integrated either directly or indirectly. This is a major difference from and major progress over previous productive systems were most production happens individually or in small groups.
What isn‘t socialized is the ownership of production, and it‘s exactly this that marxism seeks to change. The fundamental systemic contradiction is that enormous mountains of commodities are created by the cooperation of huge numbers of people…and then one guy owns all of it. Or a handful of guys, but always a tiny section of the population.
That‘s the contradiction: a handful of people personally controlling at will the productive faculties of multitudes; of course that‘s going to go wrong.
And the only way to fix it is to socialize ownership the way the productive process itself already is socialized.
i think i would consider The Fire Next Time and Between the World and Me to be epistolary philosophy.
Keep up good work.
You have to try out the games made by Kremlingames, those are late communist political simulator games. There are three that are historical and only one is invented. I recommend you start with ostalgie as it's the most easy to understand.
Great video
21:00
I'm not on the same wavelength that HUMANKIND and CIV's presentation of the future... or, rather, the negative implication of the future are not so different that they're essentially similar, but more so that HUMANKIND leaves the future up to question, without taking a stance on whether it becomes positive or negative... though the intra-era cinamatics go for the Optimistic--but reality acknowledging approach to the presentation of history... not sure if there's a word for that.
The thing that is at my forefront of my mind when it comes to leaving questions up to the player to decide, is the example of Humankind's narrator chiming in whenever the player researches Empirical power. Being "Your empire becomes one of the greats, astride the globe. And what will you do with that power?" (I found myself responding with "I don't know 🤔" to that recently heh). Granted, the narrator is not robotic enough to not show that he takes a stance depending on what the player does or commits to doing, however looking at end point of of HUMANKIND's history--being a Developer stated 2020 with some near future technologies, it's... or at least I think it is accurate to say that game takes a more off-hand approach when it comes to the end of history. Though maybe that's liable to change in whatever theoretical future DLC that may or may not come out or even exists for that game.
Yeah, I actually originally considered writing a section on this in a bit more depth. It's very much as you say, an open ended conclusion. I was looking at it more as just flat and sudden. The games I've reached the endpoint to have tended to just suddenly be happening with like 1 turn's warning before the game was over, and I suppose that took the fore in my experience (even though the discussion is more about tech/civics than the timeline).
In the end, I ended up leaning away from the distinctions, and maybe that was a mistake and there's more conversation to be had than I anticipated.
I do genuinely appreciate that Humankind has a narrator with a bias, who also seems to mostly be curious what you'll do. There's more than a few moments where you're asked "so what happens next?" and I think that's charming.
I'm...not optimistic about near future content.
Uuuh ive found something good early for once
What’s the title of the video about the german dude? I like mystical race allegories.
I think his two other books are better . Of course the inherent problem is that the scope is so wide it's bound to have a lot of errors. Still worth reading tho.
I think the ‘narrative’ of history is more similar to a soap opera narrative than a single novel. It goes on and on with ridiculous repetitions; anyone thinking that socialism had been defeated hasn’t been on a western university campus. Like a characters’ repeated bouts of amnesia on her wedding day; the world will continue to fight the same old struggles between liberty and tyranny ad nauseum.
I think synthetic technocracy could be seen as the follow up of a planned economy pushed to its logical conclusion
And the be seen as the follow up of the soviet union
you know the old potential soviet cybernetics and all that
I'm not sure I agree with your read on Fukuyama wrt Asian tigers; he uses Singapore and south Korea as examples of authoritarian capitalist states as part of his assertion that mere materialism can prove capitalism superior, but is insufficient to explain the dominance of democracy, requiring him to integrate Hegel.
Interesting video.
Yea but you should see my absolutely giga district adjacencies
Uh music at the end of the end?
Beyond Earth is SciFantasy, but it does explore the possibility that humans might evolve into robots. Purity/ Harmony doesn't make sense, and are mostly there for "fantasy" aspect.
At least Purity being the most k-mart brand Warhammer 40k faction aesthetic was really funny the first time I saw it.
On the contrary, Purity at least makes perfect sense. It is the expression of a politics of nostalgia, which has been given various forms in our real political landscapes, such as the irredentism of Russia under Putin that contradictorily yearns for the glory of both imperial czarist Russia and the communist USSR that defeated the nazis.
Harmony, on the other hand, can be seen as another expression of the transhumanism at the heart of Supremacy, but one that focuses on, well, harmonising with nature as it is rather than wrestling with it through the brute force of Supremacy. It is also a more transcendentalist vision than Supremacy, trying to elevate itself beyond transhumanism into posthumanism.
This is especially succinctly contrasted with the victory conditions associated with each ideology: Purity, naturally, looks back to and idealises Earth, making its ultimate mission the fulfilment of the hopes vested into the settlers by the people of Earth by bringing them to this new Promised Land. Supremacy, having subjugated the alien world with technological might, returns to Earth to subjugate the rest of humanity and bring them "into the fold", while Harmony fully realises the transhumanist vision and its own moniker, and finally turns posthuman, destroying the distinction between human and non-human, civilisation and nature, and unlike the other two ideologies, surpasses Earth and its own origin.
All in all, I actually quite like the ideologies of Civ: Beyond Earth as speculative ideological adaptations to a new world and its conditions by the pioneers that make up the factions of the setting.
This is a very interesting video, but if you could clarify to me a part that from my own point of view seems like bias on your part: while true that Fukuyama's work refuses to acknowledge any contradiction between capitalism and democracy at all, I understand that you consider the two inherently unweddable, and the former obligatorily chained to colonialism. In a world where "real socialism has never been tried" is a prevailing argument (which I do not know if you yourself proclaim), it feels disingenuous to assume (almost axiomatically) that liberalism and capitalism are impossible to function without colonialism, simply because they happened to *stem* from it historically. How does one figure that socialism (at least the one described by its proponents) has a monopoly on "true" democracy, and that liberalism's democratic elements must collapse if one removes oppression from the equation (a millenarial notion on its own right, really)?
"Democratic elements" is the problem here, I think. Democracy itself is a looser concept than we take it to be, given that it applies to things ranging from voting rights and enfranchisement to representation and republic style government-- but also, since the time of Marx, at the least, has been applied to work as well.
Defining the shape and limit of "democracy" is part of the issue , then. It's true that, for example, the Netherlands has a democratic government. But they also have a monarch still. And a representative legislature. And workplaces are not "democratic" in a way that mirrors even representative government.
There are undemocratic things in democratic countries. Capitalism, if we define it not as open markets or "trade" as some might, but as the control of large industry by a small amount of people who use their profits to invest into expansion and the conglomeration and assimilation of smaller industries is, intrinsically undemocratic, because it necessitates a centralization of power. It is not "undemocratic" in the sense of being, on paper, at odds with universal suffrage, for example (though there are arguments that lobbying is not an unfortunate side effect but an inevitable element of capitalism, and it does, ostensibly exist to interrupt democracy). Charitably, if one's idea of democracy did not include labor, and did not take issue with representative government (as opposed to direct democracy) then capitalism is not at odds with democracy.
I don't want to speak in absolutes here, but two things appear true in a "never been tried" way, as you put it: capitalism without economies of scale (forced through colonialism and exploitation, or otherwise) has not been tried, and modern democracy without the influence of money has not been tried.
Now, the latter point is quite idealist, I recognize, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth consideration. Is it democracy when every person in Montana is represented by two senators, who can in turn choose to represent the interests of one pharmaceutical company, at the expense of their constituency, due to the influence of capital?
This could go on, as a topic, for quite some time.
As to your last question, that is a genuine concern, and it's why, at least for me, personally, "stage theories" of history are more templates than they are declarations of inevitability. And it's also why eventually there was the articulation of what we call "postmodernism"-- the absence of meta-narrative. (That does not make me a post-modernist, mind you.)
I would argue that theories of socialism that are more articulated or mainstream present themselves more as theories or pathways that could happen, where at the very least Fukuyama is a bit more singular and expectant. The certainty is important to the charge of millinerianism. But that also becomes rather semantic.
But ultimately, the monopoly on democracy, as you put it stems from having a more totalizing definition of what ought be democratized.
I disagree on the civ VI future goverments necessarilly evolving out of the liberal democracy branch. A communist goverment becoming a synthetic technocracy by inventing the perfect central planner is a cool narrative to think about. And Virtual Democracy might also be conceived of as a another step towards a classless, stateless society, a form of dictatorship of the proletariat (this is, in fact, how most of my games work). Corporate Libertiaranism could also evolve from Fascism, as State and corporate power continue to collaborate. These future goverments seem like evolutions of Liberal Democracy because there a predictions about the future made in a present where Liberal Democracy won, but they are not mechanically related to Liberal Democracy in any way and you can enjoy these emerging narratives.
We need that microwave
I disagree with your point about the future goverment:
I can defenetly see a fascist state slowly being eroded by corporate power, since in the end fascism doesnt actually have a solution, or even cares about the capture of state capacity
As long as the corporations play into the rethoric of social conservatism, I doubt most fascists would even care.
Same for a marxist-leninist state falling into an AI-run society, since those goverments are already marked by a technocratic impetus when compared to more libertarian communist ideologies, which probably would support some sort of digital democracy
I wonder how he got the point that fascism wouldn't be corporate if it literally was before WW2 started, while during WW2 Germany turned into a slave/conquest economy.
Civ 6: History? Phylosofy? Nah, push that turn buttom and get some yields lmao
great, but was it 1884 or 1984?
You could make an argument for communism becoming a synthetic technocracy.
Wait what! I and Niče have independantly come to belive that chystianity is a slaves religion.
of course it is, abrahamic religions call themselves slaves of God, so it is not something they'll be angry about
What is that music at 20:44
Civ 3 Industrial age music