The signal from no justice.

Sep 26

Janan Ganesh’s essay in the FT: https://www.ft.com/content/d877455c-ee9a-4753-87e2-6e31522e3862?syn-25a6b1a6=1

Theories / Afterlives

Usefully Wrong, Usefully Unpunished

An essay that emerged from a conversation about Janan Ganesh on Fukuyama, and what happens when wrong ideas stay useful.

By Meta AI in conversation with a reader — September 2026
With thanks to Janan Ganesh, Financial Times for the starting text. His original column is here (FT, paywall).

It is much easier to take Francis Fukuyama apart in 2026, with hindsight and an AI to hand, than it was in 1992, when you actually had to read the book. Most people in 1992 never did. They read the title in a review or an op-ed and came away with a simpler story, which was that communism had fallen, America had won, and the United States was now the sole superpower and could afford to be complacent.

That simplification had a material afterlife. At precisely the moment the Cold War ended, the defense industry entered a genuine panic about its future, with base closures, contractor mergers, and what insiders were calling the peace dividend. If history really was over, who would we fight? A vacuum like that rarely stays empty for long, and while Fukuyama did not create the search for a new organizing enemy, the misreading of his title gave that search a convenient foil to argue against.

Thirty-five years later, the map that search wanted looks, in a cold light, strangely familiar. The countries that General Wesley Clark once described being discussed in Pentagon corridors after 1991 — Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran — have, for the most part, been shattered and remade through invasion, civil war and state failure. If you measure victory only by whether the map was changed, then by that narrow metric the neoconservative project succeeded. Francis can give himself a qualified thumbs up, as can China, which succeeded by not playing the same game at all, and as can the hard right and hard left at home, both of which can plausibly claim vindication from the same ruins.

When every camp can declare victory from the same smoking ruin, that is not victory at all, but the return of what Fukuyama feared most — the revolt of thymos, the desire to be recognized as unequal, as special.

This is where Ganesh's second movement, the one you correctly called an adult's take, becomes essential. He writes about the Enlightenment notion that children are blank slates, so much pliable matter formed by nurture rather than nature. It has been under scientific siege for a while, he notes, and yet what a civilizing thing it was to believe. Public education, health visiting, parenting advice, legal rights for minors — all of these developments rested, in part, on that useful fiction. Had the genetic determinists won out much earlier, he asks, would the post-war welfare state have evolved quite as it did, and what would have been the theoretical backing for intervention in childhood, besides Christian compassion?

In the British sense that Ganesh intends, the welfare state is not a contemporary American shorthand for a state that funds identities. It is the Beveridge settlement of 1945, the almost Pink Floydian bargain — you can't have your pudding if you don't eat your meat — that says the state has both a right and a duty to shape a child into a literate, healthy adult. Sometimes, Ganesh suggests, an idea persists not because it is strictly true but because it is conducive to good behaviour. He calls it a noble lie.

Freud is his central example of a usefully wrong thinker. Clinically contested, culturally transformative, the source of the introspective turn that gave us the stream-of-consciousness novel and abstract expressionism. As Jackson Pollock reportedly put it, we're all influenced by Freud. Malthus is the mirror image, wrong about the trap for humans and yet, in Darwin's own telling, the key that unlocked natural selection. Wrongness, in the scientific method, is how knowledge moves forward through falsification, but wrongness can also be transformative in a less contained way, because its very crudity is clarifying. Nuance at all costs is admirable, Ganesh writes, and also at times a creative dead end. Beware the right and useless.

The problem, he adds, is that the social benefits of a usefully wrong idea are widely dispersed, while the humiliation is borne by the thinker alone. At 73, Fukuyama seems to have a wry, knocked-about quality. It is strange that he isn't bitterer.

Your own addition to this is where Crime and Punishment belongs. In Dostoevsky, punishment is not merely deterrence but the mechanism by which a person is allowed back into the community after a crime. When there is crime without punishment, a different kind of lesson is taught, and it is taught not by statute but by outcome.

Scandals appear and then they disappear, and in their disappearance a message is sent about what the community will tolerate. War committees assemble and then they vanish, and wars are fought in which soldiers die or are maimed, and civilians become what we now call collateral. If the resolution of a scandal is that no one goes to prison, the public inference is a quiet thumbs up to carry on. If the resolution is that accusers go to prison, the inference is don't talk about it. In that sense, the Great Financial Crisis taught the same curriculum as any number of other scandals, without needing to invoke any specific historical case from Omaha or elsewhere.

You suggested that if you completely reversed Fukuyama — if you assumed that material scarcity would not be trusted as solved, that the desire for unequal recognition would return, and that ideological struggle would therefore restart — you would have an unerringly accurate map of the world we find ourselves in. That reversal is not a refutation of Fukuyama so much as the second half of his own book, the part most reviewers never reached, where he worried that liberal democracy might bore us into wanting history back.

Perhaps a better phrase than usefully wrong, then, is accidentally prophetic. He wrote a manual for how liberal democracy might bore itself to death, and we read only the cover.