We should call time on the ‘end times’

The writer is professor of intellectual history at the European University Institute and author of ‘Conspiracy: The History of a Political Obsession’

From the climate meltdown to the possibility of a runaway AI triggering a paper-clip apocalypse, catastrophic scenarios aren’t in short supply these days. Whether it is in order to prep for impending doom or to denounce the toxic ideology of new corporate overlords, everyone seems to have settled on “end times” as the expression that best captures the zeitgeist.

Much of this has to do with the idea, widespread among tech elites, that only the unfettered development of AI will see the elect through the coming catastrophe. The eschatological subtext is occasionally made explicit. In a recent interview, US vice-president JD Vance mused that his political work might be paving the way for the consummation of human history. The conversation also touched upon the uninvited guest who crashes the party at the eleventh hour: Vance confessed he would not be surprised “if the Antichrist was walking among us”.

Peter Thiel too has expatiated on this intriguing figure, warning that he might be masquerading as a do-gooder bent on regulating AI or fighting climate change. The spat that followed the publication of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical about AI was a throwback to medieval times, when pope and emperor hurled accusations about being the Antichrist at each other.

Secular thinkers as well have shored up the notion that we are living through the end times, from Peter Turchin’s prognosis of societal collapse to Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s recent warnings about the form of elite “survivalism” they call “end times fascism”. Whether the end is nigh or not, everyone thinks we have run out of rope.

What is striking about all these discussions is how bleak they are. Even those who claim the authority of scripture for their politics or their corporate pitch do not have much of a future to offer.

Yet, from Christian expectancy to secular ideologies that envision “the collapse of capitalist society and the dawn of classless society as a mighty apocalypse”, as the philosopher Jacob Taubes once put it, visions of the end have not always been a source of terror. For centuries, they gave hope to the downtrodden and reconfigured crises as opportunities for renewal and redress. The “end” was not only the end-as-catastrophe; it was also the end-as-telos, which gives a sense of purpose and meaning to the present.

This is no longer the case. Today’s political culture has lost the capacity to discern a redemptive future beyond a horizon of crisis. We have, literally, nothing to look forward to.

This condition isn’t new. It is the one Francis Fukuyama diagnosed more than 30 years ago as the “end of history”. It has become fashionable to dismiss his idea, yet Fukuyama was very clear that he wasn’t talking about world events but about the exhaustion of the liberal imagination: the end of history arrives when we can no longer imagine “a world that is essentially different from the present one, and at the same time better”.

Everything indicates that living at the end of history may not be sustainable — especially if it did not turn out to be the blissful dispensation that was promised. In the absence of desirable alternatives to the current state of things, the world ceases to be the space in which we experience our creative powers and, therefore, our freedom. It becomes opaque and alien, as if invisible forces were thwarting our agency.

A century ago, psychiatrists identified the “apocalyptic experience” as a typical symptom of schizophrenia. The narratives that best comport with this experience are also apocalyptic in the etymological sense of the term: the revelation of what is hidden. The end times are when the dark forces acting in history will be revealed, the dots connected, the enemies unmasked.

Today, politics swaps the pursuit of a future good for the defeat of an enemy; conspiracy theories spread and become the only possible vision of history.

This is certainly cause for concern. Yet it is also an indication that the catastrophe is not written in stone — or in algorithms. It is the result of faulty politics that, like Dorian Gray, have embraced the fantasy of eternal youth promised by the end of history, while their decay was increasingly visible. The fact that some things age badly does not mean history ends with them but that it’s time to let go of them and contemplate new departures.