Hegelian dialectics for the 21st Century
The end of (online) history
What is the nature of our age, the 21st century?
This is a comically broad question to start a long-researched analysis with. Admittedly, what I am asking here is the kind of thing asked in dorm rooms by freshman students, high together for the first time. Any answer will necessarily be obtusely general. All this is true.
It is also, as a question, utterly necessary. And despite its vagueness, there is a clear starting point to answer it. To understand the nature of our century, and how the titanic forces at play around us will resolve over the next decades, we must begin, as strange as it initially sounds, with the 19th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
Why? Look to the most popular document about the ultimate nature of the 20th century, one written near its end, and you’ll find that it also starts with Hegel. I am referring to Francis Fukuyama’s famous 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, in which he argued that human ideological development had culminated, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, with “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” People still argue with Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, of course—it has been revised, retrospected, embraced, rejected, all to the tune of tens of thousands of academic citations alone.
That an obscure and complex continental philosopher like Hegel is the inspiration for such an influential work has been strangely passed over. When I first read Fukuyama I went in thinking it would be about dry economics, given that he’s a famous political economist. But what I thought instead was: holy crap, that’s a lot of Hegel!
This is the secret to Fukuyama’s success, and why it is closer to what might be called the metaphysics of history than anything else. In his original 1989 article “The End of History?” (that his later book would be based on) Fukuyama admits:
The notion of the end of history is not an original one. Its best known propagator was Karl Marx, who believed that the direction of historical development was a purposeful one determined by the interplay of material forces, and would come to an end only with the achievement of a communist utopia that would finally resolve all prior contradictions. But the concept of history as a dialectical process with a beginning, a middle, and an end was borrowed by Marx from his great German predecessor, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
Of course, in starting with Hegel, we must be careful. Even when I was a college student and stayed up late in the library reading Hegel and his ilk, I was aware that much of what I was reading was, in the end, kind of bunk. Hegel is continental philosophy, a tradition that peaked in the 1960s with, as Foucault would describe it, the “obscurant terrorism” of Derrida (imagine how obscure and terroristic someone’s philosophy must be to frighten Foucault).
Personally, I’m an old-school scientist and lover of analytic philosopher (the more sciencey side of philosophy). But I can admit that occasionally continental philosophy speaks to a deeper truth, one inaccessible by the more conservative standards of empiricism and rationality. Continental philosophy has the habit of ignoring such trivialities and leaping wildly. In the process it sometimes finds a footing in midair where none should be. And this is how I think of Hegel.
Francis Fukuyama must think this too, since he mentions Hegel 33 times in his original 15-page article, “The End of History.” More than twice per page on average. In fact, the first half of it is simply a Hegel explainer. In particular, Fukayama makes use of the notion of a “Hegelian dialectic,” a process that describes the back-and-forth between cosmic and ultimate forces. The result of such a back-and-forth battle must end in a detente, truce, or compromise between the forces.
A Hegelian dialect always starts with a proposal: a thesis. Then it is countered by an antithesis. Finally the two combine, merge, mate, and the product of this reproduction is the synthesis. For Hegel, this process was a quasi-mystical universality—he was using this method to reason about Being and Nothingness, about Ultimate Reality.
But for anything to survive historically it must be bled dry until it is a caricature of its former self. What made Hegel’s dialectic so lasting was his application of it to the political sphere, to world history, viewing that too as a series of proposals and counterproposals leading to a hidden teleological end state.
As for himself, Hegel thought that the end of history’s dialectic process was being decided in 1806 at the Battle of Jena, when Napoleon essentially conquered all of Prussia. This is just a footnote to history now, but if you had lived through them, might not you too think the Napoleonic struggles were some sort of ultimate end of history? As Hegel, who was in Jena, wrote in a letter to a friend:
I saw the Emperor, this world soul, ride through the town.
There is a provincialism to this application of the dialectic, but still, an odd incisiveness. Marx in turn looked around his own era and applied the dialectic to the class conflicts of his age; for him the end of history via what he called “dialectical materialism” was the quickly coming global revolution (Marx, describing himself as a young student, wrote that “I openly avowed myself as the pupil of that mighty thinker Hegel”).
When Fukuyama looked around his own age, he saw the end of history augured by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the triumph of liberal democracy.
So it is inevitably enticing to speculate similarly about our own era, just as Hegel did in 1806, just as Marx did, just as Fukuyama did right as the Soviet Union collapsed.
Therefore, What is the nature of our age, the 21st century? becomes the more specific What is the Hegelian dialectic of our age?
It must be noted that many historical dialectics, once of primary contention, have already been resolved, played out into synthesis. E.g., accepting Fukuyama’s case, Western liberal democracy has won out in the face of authoritarian regimes. While those still continue to exist (Russia being a primary example), they are (at least according to Fukuyama’s own later arguments) brittle and weak in key ways, with no sign of surmounting this. The dialectic of the 21st century is therefore unlikely to be political.
Nor is the 21st-century dialectic likely to be economic, for that too is also already mostly played out. In a way, Marx was right, there was a material dialectic that occurred. Except communism wasn’t the synthesis, but the antithesis to the earlier thesis of rampant capitalism. The East India Trading company debuted in 1600. The term “robber baron” got introduced in The New York Times in 1859. Going into the 20th century children were still working in deplorable conditions in textile mills.
The Hegelian antithesis to capitalism’s extremes was communism. And it was almost successful: if you polled all people living globally in 1985, over one third of them would be living in a communist country.
The resultant economic synthesis was not the triumph of communism over capitalism as Marx hoped, but what we have now: semi-free markets mixed with a supportive and protective welfare state. Sure, capitalism arguably won more than communism did, but when zoomed to the metaphysical scale of Hegel a good deal of our political infighting looks like mere quibbling over the exact state of the capitalist/communist synthesis. Even a politician like Bernie Sanders, who has nominally socialist policies, is within spitting distance from his opponents in the grand space of possible political economics. In this the United States, with its big government, its top-down control over markets, and its many regulations and safety nets, is about as much a pure “capitalist” state as China is a pure '“communist” state, with its private property and its wild markets (economists sometimes call modern China a “socialist market economy” because, from the 1970s onward the Chinese Community Party was turned, sometimes via coups, explicitly more toward capitalism).
Thesis, meets antithesis, creates a synthesis (with disagreements about exactly where on the scale the synthesis lands and what we call it).
We can therefore conclude that, since it will not be political, nor economic, the 21st century dialectic must be domestic, internal, cultural, ideological.
It would be easy, at this point, to foreground the modern culture war, and look within its many hot-topic issues for a thesis and antithesis. Perhaps wokeness vs. anti-wokeness, or so on. But I think this is too zoomed in, too contingent. It’s not quite “dialectic-worthy.” We must speak in broader terms. It is worth returning to the source, and respecting Hegel’s notion that the historical dialect should be ultimately phenomenological, that is, concerned with changes to cultural consciousness, not merely events or occurrences that make the news.
Yet again, the initially absurdly broad question is honed, this time to a point: What is the Hegelian dialectic of our age? becomes What distinguishes the consciousness of our age, and how will that change?
In which case, the analysis nearly writes itself.
At the beginning of the 21st century there was a new thesis, one created by technological developments that brought the majority of the population online. This changed the consciousness of all of us permanently. That thesis was the mob.
Then, currently developing in reaction, there is the antithesis: the sovereign individual. The ones who stand above the mob.
The end of the 21st century, if not in year then in spirit, will occur when these forces are reconciled. When a synthesis is found that establishes liveable peace between individuals and the mob.
To see at least glimmers of how this could occur, we must start at the thesis.
In 2003 horny Harvard sophomores were hard at work on an equally sophomoric website, FaceMash. Its purpose? To rank student pictures by attractiveness. Mark Zuckerberg wrote on his blog then that:
I'm a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it's not even 10 p.m. and it's a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.
Barely avoiding expulsion by the Harvard administration for this antic, by 2004 Zuckerberg was writing the code for the first mainstream social media site.
And in the years since Facebook’s rise, we’ve all become intimately familiar with the mob. Far beyond its origins, you’ve experienced it—you’ve either seen it in operation from afar, or joined its ranks in righteous anger, or even been targeted yourself. I don’t need to explain, or give examples. You know what I mean. The mob is every cancelation. Every judgement on a TikTok. Every videos of strangers fighting in parking lots to 1,000 scrolling comments. The mob is quote-tweets and dunks and screenshots and exposures and drama and sometimes suicide. The fitful, mind-like workings of the mob reaches into the real-world, instantiates itself. It is more like a tempestuous inhuman individual, a group mind. It can burn cities to the ground in hot summers, it can summon up revolutions and resistances alike.
All this is easy to forget. Culture is huge and vast, and our memories are short. But if you seek it, you can find online mob-like dynamics happening everywhere, all the time, like small fires burning across hills at night, and, often enough, raging bright enough for everyone to notice.
A simple thought experiment I’ve long worried over: would a single person survive the judgment of their entire lives being fully livestreamed? Take the happiest household in America, with a truly loving mother and father who respect one another and their kind and intelligent kids, and imagine that family’s life, with all its complications and inevitable, yes, fights, streamed in its entirety to the world. Would a single soul could survive this modern Truman Show? I think not. Even a saint, if they were sane, would never allow the mob into their home—for the mob forms a group mind, and this group mind would act as unpredictable and reactively as a wild animal.
The existence of the new group mind uniquely defines the lived phenomenology of the 21st century. If we were to compare the psychological topography of two citizens, one living in the 1990s, and one living in the 2020s, the most significant difference is that only one lives with the oppressive knowledge that they are watched by a panopticon. Deep within the internal psychogeography of the 2020s denizen there is a Mordor with its towering Sauron, a great eye that entertains and entrances, but also terrifies, such is its power and dynamism. In its tyranny the group mind is a classic terrorist—striking rarely, but with such impact, and in front of everyone all at once, that its omnipresent mark on our consciousness is guaranteed. This change to what Hegel would call our phenomenology is why in an altercation people will now reflexively pull out their phones to record, holding it in front like a shield. They are saying: remember the group mind! Remember it! I’ll put you in front of it! I’ll burn you up in its gaze!
The degree to which the group mind of the mob is ontologically real, versus being reducible to the actions of individuals, is a difficult philosophical question. You, after all, are a group mind made of neurons. As I wrote in “The Egregore Passes You By” on this:
According to the binding problem in neuroscience, if you synchronize different parts of the brain, you get a single consciousness bound together. So following the idea’s logic: if you synchronized different people, what do you get? Is it not at least imaginable you could get some sort of experience that goes beyond any individual person’s consciousness?
Regardless of speculative philosophy, in practice, in function, the online group mind is real enough, even if it is reducible to people. And to live alongside this emergent group mind is to live in a world of constant reputation management, a return to what I’ve called the historical “gossip trap” of early societies where only raw social power rules.
The existence of the group mind is why our current culture is steeped in nostalgia: we are unconsciously pining for a world in which we were alone in our own heads. It’s why compilations of old videos from the 1980s or 90s will periodically go viral, with everyone remarking on how happy and carefree people looked. Whether people were or weren’t happier back then, the idea of existing in a world of only other individual humans is the great unarticulated desire of our age. People often ask why rates of depression are on the rise, and then give material answers, forgetting that depression is about consciousness, about a feeling of helplessness, and all of us primates are routinely reminded, at least subconsciously, that we are at the social mercy of a new hierarchy-topping entity.
Since its inception the online group mind has expressed a decentralized Nietzschean will to power, and it’s this will to power that kicked off the historical dialectic of our century. The innate want for the mob to govern culture, thought, speech, media, policy, the legal system, even the government itself, the wheels of power of everything everywhere—that hunger is the starting thesis of the 21st century.
What, then, of the antithesis?
In 1990 James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg published a book called The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age. In certain circles, the book is credited as being as prescient and impactful as Fukuyama’s work. E.g., the authors predicted Bitcoin decades ahead, writing that:
… controlling the world's wealth will be transcended by mathematical algorithms that have no physical existence. In the new millennium, cybermoney controlled by private markets will supersede fiat money issued by governments.
The book describes the great struggle of the coming 21st century (essentially, their proposed Hegelian dialectic, although they don’t say that explicitly), as being between what they call the “sovereign individual” and the state itself. Emblematic of the libertarian ethos, to be sovereign for Davidson and Rees-Mogg is to use the growing power of technology to be free from the state (e.g., not relying on it for finances, communication, etc).
Yet already the short history of the 21st century disagrees that the state vs. the individual is the primary dialectic of our age. Bitcoin itself proves this. In the Davidson and Rees-Mogg model of the 21st century, Bitcoin should be the ultimate battleground between the individual and the state. Yet the conflict over Bitcoin has quickly become quite tame (despite some initial saber rattling and legal wrangling). Bitcoin exists. The government allows it to exist. Banks love it. A publicly-traded fund was recently approved so they can invest in it themselves! Bitcoin’s supposed radicalness was consolidated without much fuss into the system. Its users (mostly) pay their taxes. Everyone proceeds apace.
If such a clearly demarcated battleground between the individual and the state triggers no major conflict, we shouldn’t expect it anywhere else. The ease by which Bitcoin was integrated into the state falsifies Davidson and Rees-Mogg’s proposed dialectic.
Still, they had their finger on something. Davidson and Rees-Mogg’s language of a “sovereign individual” is taken from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, in which Nietzsche describes sovereign individuals as “a proud consciousness, quivering in every muscle” and “a sensation of mankind come to completion.”
In a way they were right, sovereign individuals are the antithesis of the 21st century. Yet they are pitted not again nations, but against the mob. For in the past decade we have seen the recent rise of many figures who might be described, whether you like them personally or not, as sovereign individuals. The mob cannot hurt them. No scandal can unseat them, no judgement can cancel them.
Elon Musk is a sovereign individual. Don’t like how speech on the internet’s town square is handled? Buy the company itself. Taylor Swift is a sovereign individual, and so is Joe Rogan, by the sheer vastness of their supporters. Donald Trump operates like a sovereign individual. Possibly going to jail? Attempt to win the presidency and pardon yourself.
I know there are political implications to these examples, so let me give another example: an anonymous poster is free of the mob too. With their identity kept hidden they can be unbothered by what the group mind thinks of them. They too are sovereign.
Since the mob and its group mind is such a terrible thesis, we might be tempted to say that the existence of sovereign individuals, the world souls of our day, are the natural “heroes” of this particular dialectic (even if you dislike, or even hate, some of the people currently operating as sovereign individuals). No doubt, something primal within us yearns for the Atlas-like form of a sovereign individual standing against the mob. The attraction of messiahs is ever-present in the human heart.
And yet, right now at least, to be a sovereign individual in the face of the mob requires all sorts of negative trade-offs and particularities, like immense fame or shamelessness (this is why anonymity allows it, since an anonymous person cannot feel shame in the way a named one does). Our current sovereign individuals are therefore flawed. At best, they can offer only an immature totalitarianism. A 21st-century where sovereign individuals triumph culturally is an empathy-less future, and unstable. It is cultural “strongmen,” but forever.
The fatal flaw is that they secretly depend on the mob for power. In the case of those famous or powerful enough to resist it, it is because they’ve captured a large enough segment of the mob to become unmoveable objects. In the case of those who rely on anonymity, they are just as tempted to join the mob as to resist it. Either way, they attain their immunity to the mob parasitically. They do not actually ignore the mob, they play to it. As an antithesis they are sequestered tapeworms, bulwarked blood flukes, pinworms pocketed in the flesh of a much greater organism. Their parasitic existence, and their rarity, means they are not a sustainable solution.
So what then is the synthesis?
Unfortunately, I lack the confidence of a Hegel, Marx, or Fukuyama, and cannot declare some golden path. But we at least know one important thing: for a true synthesis the mob cannot be the source of sovereignty for individuals.
So maybe a synthesis looks like making sovereignty more accessible, i.e., extending it beyond monetary or cultural billionaires. E.g., some countries, like Sinagapore, are examining laws to “cancel cancel culture.” Yet often constraints on speech simply make everything worse. An alternative might be to look to the legal system of the United States, which technically has laws on the book against conspiring to deprive citizens of their constitutional rights, like the right to a fair trial or to free speech. However, these laws have not been applied to cases of online mobbing, and it’s unclear what the results would be.
Perhaps synthesis will occur naturally after a long period of churning tumultuousness? A sort of cultural immune system might develop. Examining a non-political and innocuous internet ecological niche is instructive. So consider that of gym culture, where there are now popular reaction channels entirely devoted to telling people filming others at the gym to “mind their own business.” It’s a sort of preemptive judo by shaming those trying to start internet mobs or publicly shame others. But it would need to become extremely dominant and widespread to actually enforce a synthesis (e.g., imagine norms so strong they stop people pulling out their phones at the slightest provocation).
Another path to synthesis is a re-emergence of understanding human nature as fundamentally flawed. And indeed, ever since what we now call online “cancel culture” started there have been think pieces across political aisles arguing that a new culture of forgiveness is necessary. This is, I think, the subtle motiving force behind the string of high-profile conversions of public figures to Christianity (from celebrities like Shia LaBeouf to New Atheists like Ayaan Hirsi Ali). Whatever one might say about the Christian worldview, it clearly views humans as being fundamentally sinful, and therefore fundamentally deserving of forgiveness. However, overall religion has been declining in popularity for decades—it is hard to imagine some sort of true sweeping Christian revival (leaving aside if it would even help at all, or the possible negatives, etc). Meanwhile, the secular art that most clearly paints the cracks in flawed human nature, literature, is also in decline, replaced by visual mediums that lack access to the sympathetic intrinsic perspective of individual consciousness.
To me, none of these paths seem convincingly scalable. Maybe more major changes will occur: technologies of brain-machine interfaces like Neuralink might shift the composition, mixing individuals into group minds in unimaginable ways to create some new synthesis.
All we can really say is that, if the phenomenology of the 21st is defined by the introduction of a novel psychic organism, the group mind, which acts as a supra-observer within everyone’s consciousness, then the 21st century synthesis is ultimately a domestication of this organism. Either by changing its nature or our own, as its constituents.
And one can indeed domesticate all kinds of things. In the Soviet Union there was a scientist, Dmitry Belyayev, who set out to domesticate foxes in the 1950s. The woman in charge of doing the actual work of selection and breeding, Lyudmila Trut, called the initial generation of foxes “fire-breathing dragons.” She selected only 10% to be bred into the next generation, those who were the most calm around people. After a few generations the morphology of the foxes began to change, becoming more puppy and dog-like. They even began to express vocalizations specific to their love of humans. Coco, one of the early foxes who showed promise, whose name came from the sound she made—co-co-co-co—lived in a human house, and, after producing many similarly-disposed offspring, died in the arms of her human owners.
We currently all live with a first-generation “fire-breathing dragon.” And we face a much harder question, one that requires more than backyard biology:
How do you domesticate a group mind?
To answer it is to resolve the fundamental conflict inherent to our century. When we are finally comfortable having the group mind in our home, living beside us, it will signify the end of our particular dialectic.
And the beginning of another one.
When you set up the thesis and antithesis like this, the synthesis I imagine is things like federated social networks and “mesoculture” (a term Chris Jesu Lee put me on). Substack itself is example of this. Maybe it’s a little over-optimistic. I can imagine a future where the global group mind breaks down and instead we have smaller communities enabled by the internet and platforms etc like discord servers and old-school online forums (but even smaller, I reckon), but also a return to an emphasis on actual physical spaces and local communities. In this world the “mob” still exists, it’s just smaller and less powerful, and the “sovereign individual” is empowered relative to the mob sufficiently to develop a strong individual identity and even influence the “mob” as a whole.
My favorite thing about this piece is how easy it is to understand what you're on about. I can't imagine how long you spent editing this thing for clarity, but it is utterly readable.
Not common for someone talking about dialectical materialism, Marx, phenomenology, Hegel or group minds. Really great writing.