Are we the last men? On repairing the world - and speaking to those who want it broken

Reflections on “World in Pieces”

In the Bavarian Alps, at Schloss Elmau - the improbable blend of G7 summit venue, cultural monastery, and geopolitical spa - a group of political thinkers gathered under the title World in Pieces. Dietmar Müller-Elmau had given the curator carte blanche. And that Ivan Krastev had not been optimistic when he chose the title.

What followed were five days that did what serious gatherings rarely manage: they mapped the present with unflinching clarity, attempted  -  with more honesty than success  -  to see where we are headed, and in doing so quietly answered a different question altogether: what each of us, as individuals, must now do.

The cast was formidable, such as Timothy Garton Ash, Oxford historian and one of Europe's most essential chroniclers; Peter Sloterdijk known as philosopher of European disillusion; Avril Haines, former U.S. Director of National Intelligence; Eva Illouz, the Franco-Israeli sociologist who has spent her career dissecting the emotional machinery of modern politics; Walter Russell Mead – explainer of American power; Wolfgang Schmidt - architect of Germany's Zeitenwende; Alexander Soros - heir to liberal internationalism.

And one controversial addition: Curtis Yarvin, the intellectual architect of the MAGA movement, and Peter Thiel's house philosopher. That invitation alone became a moral test  -  and the real question lurking beneath it: are we facing turbulence, or a civilizational fork?

What world do we live in?

The question that haunted the first day was not whether democracy is failing. That much, by now, is easy to say. The harder question was: why does it feel so different this time?

Krastev has been working on an answer for years. His most recent lecture  -  "The Return of the Future and the Last Man"  -  is built around a striking reinterpretation of Fukuyama. When Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man in 1992, his "last man" was contented, polite, married to democracy if no longer in love with it. Satisfied and unheroic  -  Nietzsche's warning, rendered now as a post-historical reality. What Krastev argues is that a different last man has arrived: anxious, mistrustful, consumed by what he called at Elmau "three extinction fears"  -  the displacement of populations by climate, the perceived demographic replacement of majorities, and the replacement of workers by machines. This last man does not vote out of contentment. She (or for once: he) votes to confirm his worst fears. He tends to believe the next election should be the last.

This is not irrationality. It is a different kind of rationality  -  one that Eva Illouz has mapped with clinical precision. In her 2023 book The Emotional Life of Populism, she identified the emotional matrix of contemporary authoritarianism: fear, disgust, resentment, and a weaponized love of country. At Elmau she pushed the argument further. What is happening, she said, is not a failure of information but a transformation of political grammar. The medium is the emotion. Fear unites against an enemy. Disgust keeps you separate from it. Resentment redirects economic grievance into identity conflict. And when Trump says "they are eating pets," he is not making a factual claim - he is performing the grammar, activating the disgust reflex with the precision of a trained instinct. Illouz's insight, which deserves to be taken seriously: if everyone knows Putin or Trump are lying, they are no longer lying. You are demonstrating power. Truth-telling is a constraint on the weak.

Stephen Holmes - co-author with Krastev of The Light That Failed, the most unflinching autopsy of liberalism's self-inflicted wounds - arrived with three surprises still fresh. The partisan ferocity of change in America. The speed of institutional capitulation. And the alliance between Silicon Valley and Republican nostalgia, which Walter Russell Mead contextualized carefully: this is not a cultural conversion. It is a strategic realignment. Silicon Valley can thrive without free trade and labor immigration in ways that the rest of American industry cannot. US-China technological competition has made tech a national project, and national projects need patrons, and that patron is Trump.

The structural condition underneath all of this was named quietly by Avril Haines: Trump is a symptom, not a cause. Since the 1940s, the share of people who believe their children will live better lives has collapsed from 80 percent to 40. That is not a political failure. It is a civilizational withdrawal of trust in the future - and it is the soil in which every demagogue of our era has grown.

What must we do?

Sloterdijk, one of the most unsettling philosophical voices in Europe, offered his own diagnosis: Europe is a Galápagos  -  long isolated from the world's evolutionary pressures, having developed exquisite democratic forms in conditions that no longer exist. The holiday from history is over. Democracy fails, he argued, not when people become evil, but when they lose the expectation that things can get better and begin voting their despair. The melioristic assumption - that progress is the default - has been withdrawn. In conversation with Alexander Soros, chair of the pro-democracy powerhouse Open Society Foundation, the exchange carried a particular charge: one man had spent his life diagnosing liberal civilization's blind spots; the other had inherited the largest private bet ever placed on its survival.

Garton Ash, who has spent his career as one of Europe's most clear-eyed witnesses, insisted on a distinction that matters: the EU began as a peace project and has become, whether we chose it or not, a war project. The eight decades of European stability that we grew up treating as a permanent condition are, in historical terms, extraordinary and fragile. Germany - at the heart of both the achievement and the current unraveling - is in what he called a deep identity crisis.

Wolfgang Schmidt, who as Germany's Federal Minister for Special Affairs was the architect of that very pivot, pushed back against the narrative of European paralysis. Europe's lack of competitiveness was never complacency - it was a deliberate political choice, which means it can be reversed. Greenland has already shown as much. The EU is mediocre in normality and formidable in crisis - and crisis is now the permanent condition. Do not count Europe out. Do not count Germany out either.

Mark Leonard, whose The Age of Unpeace dissected how connectivity became a weapon, offered the sharpest prescription. The rupture flows from his four plus one Cs - Capital, Climate, Chips, Civilization, plus China - and from two fears talking past each other: demographic replacement on the right, climate catastrophe on the left. His most important observation: we may not be in an interregnum at all, but in permanent fragmentation. If so, stop waiting for the new order. Become an artisan - someone who finds what works and builds it now. Monnet and Schuman were not architects. They were artisans.

Should we speak to fascists?

Krastev was challenged before the symposium even began. The invitation to Curtis Yarvin  -  blogger, neoreactionary theorist, Peter Thiel protégé, and one of the most influential intellectual sources of the MAGA movement  -  provoked outrage. Some invited speakers withdrew. The question put directly to Krastev: are you giving a platform without genuine confrontation  -  a microphone, not an examination?

Yarvin, under his pen name Mencius Moldbug, developed the thesis of the "Cathedral" - the media, universities, and bureaucracy as an interconnected, unaccountable ideological regime. He advocates replacing democracy with a form of monarchical management: a sovereign CEO running the state as a startup, unencumbered by the procedural friction of elections. His "Dark Enlightenment" framework provided much of the intellectual architecture that the American far right uses to describe its project. JD Vance credits him. He was present at Trump's inauguration events. He had had come straight from a Martin Sellner event in Vienna.

What happened in the room was instructive in a way that confirmed Krastev's instinct, though perhaps not in the way he expected. Yarvin was evasive and - in person - strikingly unimpressive. He avoided repeating any sharpness from his blogs. The self-declared intellectual refused every direct question. Krastev asked him why he had come: no answer. He asked why the 2020 was stolen: no answer. He asked about succession in a CEO-driven government: no answer. It was important to witness firsthand.

The argument for engagement - the Ivan Krastev argument - is not that Yarvin deserves a platform. It is that refusing to look at something does not make it smaller. His ideas have shaped a presidency. They circulate in the upper reaches of American power. Pretending they don't exist, or treating their proponents as victims whenever anyone engages them, does not weaken them. What weakens them is the light: trusted interlocutors, in rigorous settings, asking the questions that expose where the edifice is hollow. At Elmau, the hollowness was visible to everyone in the room.

Conclusions

We came away deeply stirred, and relieved. Not for Yarvin's presence, but for the clarity his evasiveness produced: not a rigorous system, but a performance of authority, betting that no one will press hard enough to find the emptiness underneath.

Three things to do with that clarity.

First: understand the infrastructure of what we are facing. The new regime rests on the mesalliance between reactionary power and technology. At the moment of our symposium, OpenAI signed a landmark agreement with the Pentagon, deploying its models on classified military networks. Technology is the super-spreader of this new order, the amplifier of its emotional grammar, the source of its leverage. But it is also its Achilles heel. Every platform abandoned, every algorithm refused, every alternative built withdraws the oxygen it runs on. We have more agency here than we use.

Second: do what they do. The Yarvins and their networks have invested heavily in identifying, connecting, and backing a new generation of leadership  -  one fluent in the language of disruption, comfortable with power, and unafraid of conflict. The liberal world has not done the equivalent. It has institutions: Elmau, the Open Society Foundation, the forums and foundations and think tanks. What it lacks is the same systematic effort: to find, connect, and back the next generation of people who can out-think, out-work, and out-engage the right's new intellectual class. That is a concrete project, not a wish.

Third: act as artisans. With what is at hand. Now. That is the posture Havel would have recognized  - and that Garton Ash reminded us of: "Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out." That certainty is enough to begin.

This article is also published on LinkedIn. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

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