Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

I'm starting to realize, very belatedly in life, that we suffer from an end-of-history illusion in politics and political economy. I used to think we live in a golden age because a hundred years ago, democracy broadly replaced monarchies, market economies replaced feudalism and other coercive systems, and with it went many of the old, indirect mechanisms of subjugating large populations (e.g. moral imperatives through the Church, legitimization of rule through concepts such as the divine right of kings, control of education etc).

But it seems we've only replaced those mechanisms with more refined versions (manufacturing consent through mass media, surveillance and indirect indentured servitude through student debt, rent and health insurance).

We probably have another century of socioeconomic and political evolution to go before we reach a decent end state.

I like your optimism that a decent end state can be reached at all.

There are so many ideas that sound good on paper but are bad in practice, and that happen to be convenient for the goals of unscrupulous powerful people.

The notion that society as a whole will at some point stop falling for such ideas seems very optimistic to me.

It's math. You can model what happens in n-player repeated games of incomplete information, and you'll realize we're far from any stable point. And it's not even that hard to understand that the narrative of "end of history" benefits the people who get to say that and uphold that narrative.

I was in the same place not long ago, convinced that democracy’s march and market liberalization meant we’d finally broken the old chains. But the more I watched what people actually do, versus the rhetoric they spew, the clearer it became that most of our "freedoms" are just stage props. We have the illusion of democracy so we can feel free, the illusion of equal justice under law so we can feel secure, the illusion of meritocracy so we can feel hopeful. And thanks to this, they get stability. In reality, there are always those who want to be above the law and steer the masses and today’s new kings just wear different robes.

Media conglomerates manufacture consent far more subtly than the Church ever could. Student debt servitude, rent extraction, and opaque health insurance bureaucracy bind millions in ways that feel inescapable. Yet because it’s all cloaked in market-speak and "public interest" we barely notice our chains. Recognizing these illusions is painful, but it’s also the first step toward tearing them down. If we’re honest, the next century of political and economic evolution won’t be about perfecting the PR, it’ll be about building genuine checks on power, creating institutions that can’t be gamed, and demanding real accountability, even when the robes change.

The problem is you can't even point a finger or single out people responsible for the current state of things. Unless we collectively accept there is a problem, the solution will not get implemented.

Could just be cyclic? 1776->1861 (romanticism leading into civil war), 1861->1940 (modernism leading into WWII), [weird cold war baby boomer era of prosperity] 1970->2025 (post-modernism leading into..)

We are going up, slowly, in health, literacy, education - globally. But, like all progress, it is up up and down, then again up up and down. Thanks to retro grades like Putin and Trump. As to health indenture -that form of slavery is primarily in USA. Most other countries have figured it out. I agree with hope for the future though. Star Trek, not Star Wars!

> We have the illusion of democracy so we can feel free, the illusion of equal justice under law so we can feel secure, the illusion of meritocracy so we can feel hopeful.

All values and freedoms need to be fought for constantly and perpetually. They are not hard constants outside rare exceptions when it’s very clearly defined law. It’s simply the sum of the efforts of people currently on the planet. They are always under threat by people with good intentions or more overt bad ones.

What you may be seeing is a decline in people publicly pushing for them, especially in our institutions (politics, press, academia etc). But you can still find plenty of people fighting for them if you look deeper.

gd it why did my ancestors never warn me about the end-of-history illusion

Well, we have been improving. I don’t consider it too optimistic we’ll continue to do so.

Society came very close to realizing the beginnings of a decent state in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. George Orwell faught in it, and wrote about what he saw that society achieving in his book, Homage to Catalonia.

See the Fourth Turning!

Globally this is true because of improvements in developing countries. Not uniform improvement everywhere. Some places backslide.

What is this "end of history illusion", if not the belief that there is a "decent end state"?

There will always be reasons to oppose any current equilibrium for improvements, and that's ok.

I can think of numerous people who while not solely responsible for the state of things, have certainly fanned the flames to attain great personal prosperity at the expense of our collective psyche. Those people have names and addresses and they are not as they may believe immune from retribution.

I don’t want to live through any more historical times but I increasingly believe we’re on a precipice of incredible amounts of political violence, both against people who don’t deserve it, and people who do. And those people would be wise to pump the brakes a little.

Thats called illusion of control. Just look at your family and friends.

Some will always want much more than others. Some will always take paths that are easy. Some will have no problem taking advantage of the weak.

Keeping all those traits in check is a full time job. Its not free. It eats into limited time and energy. Sooner or later compromises are made.

Therefore parasites and predators always find space in any ecosystem you look at. You might be able to turn off/keep in check behavior of a few. But never all.

I felt a glimmer hope from Grok believe it not. On X it has been showing the potential of an AI being seen as a trusted authority to cut through a lot of propaganda based on facts. But then elon didn't like the "facts are liberal" vibes and nerfed it and now it can't be trusted, it's just another propaganda mouthpiece.

This points to what I think is the missing amendment to the US constitution, when a media company gets big enough to influence significant portions of the electorate it should not be allowed to be owned by a single billionaire or a small family. Large media ownership should be distributed as widely as possible across society so that one rich guy isn't able to force his opinions on everyone.

Improving at...what exactly?

Please don't give some tripe about medecine or something...sure we have some fancy new techniques and the like, but that doesn't matter if those systems aren't generally available or rejected on pseudo-religious grounds.

It might be true we have been living longer for a while, but that's a trend of the past 50 years in some areas, not some inexorable progress towards longer lives...

Maybe we have lots of food and entertainment. I suppose that is good, in theory. But again, not something of recent history, that has more to do with the availability of large shipping vessels and TV production...

The part people may find optimistic is continuing to improve in any appreciable manner, versus some gains made decades ago...

It's not that hard for a new idea to look good for a couple short months/years. Building an ongoing, self-sustaining society that doesn't go completely off the rails is a whole other thing. There's a reason all these idyllic examples people give (Catalonia, Pre-USSR Ukrainian socialism, Paris Commune) were short-lived. If the Bolshevist revolution had been quashed in 1919, it would be idealized today.

Consider how insignificant your worries will seem to future generations in one, two, ten centuries from now.

Or maybe you think we’ll destroy the world or something, in which case that’s “chicken little syndrome.”

It’s hard to imagine we will regress in any meaningful way. That’s basically never happened, and even when it did, during the “dark ages,” we recovered – on a long enough timeline (which isn’t even that long) we’ve made exponential progress in every facet of life. There’s a lot to look forward to. Or you can be pessimistic about it during the few brief years you have in this world…

For more on this exact topic I strongly recommend Plato's "The Republic". The entire book is phenomenal, but "book" (chapter) 8 [1] is something that just completely reshaped my world view. There is an occasional reference that will make you think we've genuinely made progress, like casual acceptance of slavery, but when one reads just the political timelines and transitions he speaks of, he sounds like he's describing modern times, with a bit of edgelord flair, with complete hindsight bias. But that book was written 2,400 years ago!

It was a realization that nothing, except technology, is changing. We're not entering into some scary unknown time, but just regressing to the mean. Humanity seems to be stuck on a perpetual loop, probably because we really suck at learning from the past and inevitably convince ourselves that 'this time it'll be different.' And even on those issues we do seem to have made progress on, like slavery - is it just a coincidence that slavery ended universally, after millennia of efforts, only just after the Industrial Revolution and mass urbanization which effectively obsoleted it?

On the theme of slavery, consider that we mostly don't even blink twice now a days when a country drags men off the street, separates them from their family, puts a gun in their hand, and throws them in a trench to kill and most likely die. Those that continue to refuse to kill not infrequently end up 'dying in training.' To say nothing of barrier troops. This is all much worse than even slavery, but we casually accept it, because it hasn't yet been obsoleted. If the role of humans in warfare is ever minimized, imagine what lovely things they'll write about our morality and hypocrisy, just as we are wont to do about the past today.

---

As for the chapter referenced, Ctrl+F for "And democracy has her own good" and read from there. "Drone" is a term you'll see throughout classical writings. It's a reference to drone bees who contribute nothing to a hive, but exist solely to consume and mate if they can. So it's a term that refers to everything from beggars to criminals to corrupt politicians who prefer enriching themselves and special interests over broadly socially motivated politicking. So in modern times it would include practically all politicians.

[1] - https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.9.viii.html

Well, for one thing, neither me nor my son work in coal mines. We don’t have to breathe any of the sooty gases that coal burning spews forth, and can turn on airconditioning in summer when it’s hot. Also, heated toilet seats in winter.

We are probably several centuries out.

Thought experiment - how many generations does it take to forget grandpa?

If Grandpa is the issue, their grandchildren may have falsely optimistic opinions of their corrupt roots. Their children (grand grand children) don't have the same rosy memories, and don't get why Mom and Dad are into their weird rituals. But it's Mom and Dad so it can't be so bad, right?

It's not till their grandchildren, normally, that (assuming they are decent people and the trait isn't genetic or somehow encouraged by society) people can maybe see what utter crappy people their grand grand grand grand parents were, and maybe do something about it.

They never collapsed from anything innate, though. They were always destroyed from outside forces. When your society represents actual freedom, you become the enemy of everyone, from capital to stalinism.

Centralization of power has so far made every society deeply flawed or even hellish. The three societies you mentioned are the only ones where power was purposefully decentralized, and that seems to be the most promising path forward that was never allowed to stretch its legs.

> I like your optimism that a decent end state can be reached at all.

For a few brief years, it looked like we were there.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...

>We probably have another century of socioeconomic and political evolution to go before we reach a decent end state.

I agree with everything you said, but that's a rather odd conclusion. things are getting worse, not better.

> If the Bolshevist revolution had been quashed in 1919, it would be idealized today.

I don't think so. Pretty much all the negative things about Bolsheviks were already prominently there by 1919. Anti-democracy, mass terror, torture, concentration camps, you name it.

I would argue that Rojava is one modern case that still shows hope. Although not as decentralized as those other examples, perhaps this is also why they're still there 11 years later.

This is why monarchies are better than democracies. There is no accountability or ownership. A king wants to pass down something better to his progeny. A politician wants to make money and generally doesn’t care what state he leaves things in.

The "end of history illusion" is not the belief that there is a decent end state, but the belief of each generation that that state has been reached, and that they were to first to reach it.

Concur, but from a control systems point of view. Any system that does not define upper/lower limits and does not address feedback loops, are prone to oscillations, and if the size of the system grows over time, the oscillations can become progressively more violent.

Our socioeconomic/political systems currently do not define any hard upper or lower limits on its primary driver (economic power) and does not address feedback loops (e.g. more capital availability -> larger scale -> more economies of scale -> more market share -> more capital -> more scale).

Same, and it's quite obvious. You will get the same government regardless of who you vote for, its controlled opposition design to cushion some of your grievances but policies are set in stone.

Why don't politicians care about their kids and why do monarchs not care about money?

I never said either of those things. By progeny, I meant both the heirs of the king and the common race of people belonging to the kingdom. Kings were the head of different races of people and as the head, they looked after their people (if they were a good king). For example, a good king wouldn’t import millions of people who are different from those in his kingdom for economic reasons, and you don’t see this in history. It is his job to take care of his people and if he suddenly gave them an incredible amount of competition for resources, he would be responsible for causing his people great difficulty. He cares about them and wouldn’t do that.

Politicians don’t have this headship and from their behavior clearly don’t view themselves as stewards of their country and people (they do care about their own children though). An example of this would be Mike Lee’s attempt to sell off American public lands to foreign interests. The money raised from this would not make a dent in the deficit or debt, and it would take away beautiful fishing and hiking from Americans. Thankfully this was done away with, but a good king would never consider selling public land in the middle of his country to foreigners.

Actually, this expression "end of history" has been coined, and the ideology(*) behind it promoted, in the 1990s after the collapse of the eastern block. Before that, for what I can tell, the prevaling idea seems to have been that of an "ustoppable march of progress". Long before that, I would guess that the most common ideology was that of a persistant, immuable order.

(*) That's the proper term to denote a concept that justify the will of a group, regardless of its veracity.

Considering history, I see no signs of converging to some end state. I guess technical progress and knowledge accumulate somehow, but even this is not linear and history shows plenty of exemples of drastic step backs. But even assuming an ever increasing technical progress, in a world with infinite resources (that's a very big assumption), what would be the end state? I guess, given we are on HN, a state were humans program conscious machines which then do all the hard work? In other words, the ideology of bigtech?

The way I look at it - you can be optimistic and hope that your actions can have a positive effect on your life and the world - if you’re wrong, you’re no more fucked than if you’d been pessimistic the whole time, and you at least felt better during said time.

I agree human nature hasn't really changed since Plato's time and technology is the main thing that has. But the tech provides much more information and communication which leads to things like slavery going. Also I think most people are shocked that trench warfare is still going on but the Russian leadership seems a bit behind the times. Apparently Putin spent time during the lockdown reading previous centuries history and here we are.

> a good king...

Now compare a good king to a good politician.

Both of which are improvements not unique to even the past 10 years - even if you only recently experienced these improvements, that merely makes you "late adopters".

You can have personal improvement, and you can continue to reap the benefits of existing systems, this is not the same as general progress or, progress made by society, much less any sort of indication that progress will continue...

Russia is neither forcibly conscripting nor are they preventing anyone from leaving the country should they wish.

Ukraine is doing both at an increasingly absurd scale, all the while people wave their flag-of-the-week in their social media profile, either aloof of what they support or seeing no problem with it.

The same was probably, more or less the same, during slavery. People adopting views based on tribe rather than any real thought or even knowledge of what they support. The overwhelming majority of everybody obviously never owned a slave and likely had an idealized view of the institution.

- Strauss & Howe. Exactly

The myth of social progress conflated with technological advancement. Even that isn't assured when corruption, apathy, and cult of insane beliefs defund the "Library of Alexandria" and the world slips back into relative darkness again.

It cannot happen in even 1000 years because it would need evolutionary pressures to select for saner and more intelligent people. The idiocracy ain't going to let the happen.

Totally wrong. Are you a Russian bot or simply ill-informed, unserious human talking out of your posterior?

Russia doesn't give out passports to men until they've fulfilled military requirements. Please inform yourself.

https://youtube.com/channel/UC9HHZMXng9reLBQmNc1Y8iA

That's insane nonsense.

I agree. Though unfortunately there have been reports of them slowly centralizing power away from community councils toward the military over time. Even still, it's offering far more freedom and diversity than any of the surrounding countries. I'm rooting for them to succeed.

You're conflating two things. There is indeed conscription in Russia, Scandinavia, and many countries in the world where people are expected to do some period of time of military training within a country. These people are generally not used in active conflicts, though it does entail enrollment in the equivalent of Selective Service in the US meaning they can be called up later (2 years in Russia) for "real" service in the case of a draft/mobilization. Russia carried out a limited mobilization once early on in the war in 2022, and it was horrifically unpopular, leading to the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Russians from the country. People don't want to risk being called up to possibly die for a war they may not even agree with. Since then they have relied exclusively on volunteer forces.

Ukraine, by contrast, immediately after the war began they made it illegal for men of "fighting age", which they define as between the ages of 18 and 60, to leave the country. And they have been relying on forced conscription for an ever larger percent of their entire armed forces since then. This is why you can find countless highly disturbing videos of Ukrainian TCC (conscription) officers brutalizing and even killing civilians in efforts to conscript them and throw them on the front lines. Wiki has some sampling of incidents here [1] which I will not quote. In many cases they are, again, quite disturbing.

People really have no clue what they are supporting over there.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_Center_of_Recruitm...

I think there's a more fundamental issue at play. Two people, both rather intelligent and completely sane, can come to complete different conclusions on things. For instance, I think fertility is one of the most critical issues facing civilization in modern times. I can offer reasons why, though you've already done so yourself in part, but that's outside the scope of this post for now.

By contrast, others may see the fertility crisis as not even an issue, let alone a crisis. After all humanity's not going to go extinct anytime in the foreseeable future, and billions of people is a lot of people. There are even some who think it may be a good thing - fewer people could reduce the impact of human emissions for instance.

So this difference in worldview would lead to radically different perspectives on seemingly completely unrelated things, like LGB representation in childhood education. Add in a bit of a radicalism and these otherwise reasonable disagreements gradually breed extreme hostility.

And I don't think there's any real solution here. No side can ever win, because neither view is really wrong. The best solution is probably general decentralization. But most people don't realize their opinions are opinions, and think they are factually and objectively correct - and want to impose their views on everybody, which trends towards attempts at centralization, inevitable collapse, and repeat.

You forgot to mention the widespread coercion of Russian conscripts into "voluntarily" enlisting for the war in Ukraine. Stories like this are extremely common:

  Semyon* (name changed) was conscripted in Chelyabinsk, in the Urals, having served in the Pskov region of northwestern Russia for the first five months, where he was asked to sign a contract several times but refused. On 20 April, he was transferred to the Chebarkul garrison and signed up for professional service after just two and a half hours.

  His mother says that on the way to the unit he complained of being actively pressured into signing a contract, after which Semyon was taken to a separate office, where a sergeant fired a gun next to him and showed him a video of dead and wounded people, threatening that the same thing would happen to him if he didn’t sign. Semyon broke under the pressure, his family says. On the same day, he applied to have the contract annulled, saying he had signed under duress, asking for it to be declared invalid as the commander had not yet signed it, but to no avail.

https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2025/05/14/unwilling-signat...

Not to mention authorities raiding places like gyms to get the conscripts in the first place:

  Russian police are targeting migrants and draft-age men in a wave of raids on gyms and martial arts clubs across major cities, with activists describing them as part of a broader crackdown that intensified ahead of the country’s spring military draft. Lawyers in multiple regions told Sever Realii that gym raids now happen at least twice a month in major cities. Russian citizens are typically sent to enlistment offices, while foreign nationals are taken to temporary detention centers. Many are ultimately deported.

  In one raid, a military officer reportedly accompanied police to hand out conscription notices directly. Activists say authorities are also targeting naturalized citizens who have obtained Russian passports but avoided military service, pressuring them to sign military contracts under threat of deportation or loss of citizenship.

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/05/01/russian-police-rai...

There's a difference that Ukraine had not much choice after being invaded but a larger enemy, aside from maybe surrendering and letting Putin take over. Russia's invasion however was almost entirely their choice and could be stopped tomorrow if Putin just told them to stop.

That's a bit of a false dichotomy as the early terms were relatively modest but, in general terms, I would agree with the point you're making. However the issue you run into is that the exact same arguments were made in favor of slavery. For instance even Aristotle some 2400 years ago predicted the end of slavery, if slaves only were not necessary:

"For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, 'Of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods.' If, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves." [1]

Of course society could have gotten by without slavery, but it wouldn't have been as convenient, particularly for the wealthy and political classes who were the exact sort that could afford to own slaves. And the exact same is true of conscription. If people are not willing to die for the political class of a country, who are the political class to insist they die for them? And the greatest irony is that the most 'brave' of the political class are often made up of cowards and draft dodgers themselves. But it's an entirely different game when it's not their life on the line anymore.

People, who live in a time when humans in warfare are obsoleted, will look back upon this as even more vile and barbaric than slavery. And they'll damn us all for it. Yet it's an issue that "we", the people without power, mostly do not even really think about one way or the other - because it's just how it is. We might speak out against it, those in affected regions might even start their own 'Underground Railroads' to escape tyranny, but everybody knows it won't end.

[1] - https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.mb.txt

I guess 1919 is a bit late for rose colored glasses--though there's a shocking number of people who are still nostalgic for Bolshevism after _everything_.

You get my point, though. It's one thing to propose an idyllic society. It's another thing to try to implement it. In all cases where there's been a serious attempt at implementation on any scale above local and short-lived, we view the results with horror.

Ehh, I would put it differently: purposefully decentralized societies are ineffective, and create a power vacuum that tends to be quickly filled. Assuming they would have worked requires a view of human nature that I just don't buy. Along comes a Lenin, or a Mao, or a Trump, or a Robespierre, who starts giving rousing speeches about how dangerous forces are rising against the movement, and next thing you know you've got concentration camps, guillotines, mass shootings, and so on. And that environment rewards authority and tyranny.