Happy Endings Lead to Hell

A critique of redemptive dialectics and the progressive myth of history

by Israel Centeno

“History has no meaning. It has memory.”

— Hannah Arendt

Yale philosopher Jacob McNulty has recently proposed a new political reading of Hegel that discomforts both Marxists and liberals. His proposition: to recover a tougher, more grounded Hegel—one who cannot be reduced to Marx’s historical engine, nor swallowed whole by globalist social democracy. For McNulty, even if Spirit and Reason have ultimate priority, this does not cancel the real force of ideology, the State, law, and—let us add—conflict as a structuring drive of history¹.

What McNulty subtly implies is that human history is not made of theses, antitheses, and syntheses, but of states, wars, betrayals, ambitions, and limits. It is not a logic textbook, but a field of force.

And yet, from Hegel and Marx to Fukuyama and his heirs, many have believed otherwise: that history is a narrative with a happy ending. That we are progressing—painfully, yes, but irreversibly—toward liberty, equality, and human fulfillment. That whatever opposes this path is merely a leftover of the past, and whatever advances is meaningful.

The myth of the happy ending

But history does not behave like a straight line. It looks more like a scribble drawn by a sleepless child. Democracy was not a final destination—it was an ancient experiment that collapsed, rose again, and now prostitutes itself. Empire was not overcome, it rebranded as global hegemony. The republic coexists with tribalism. Dictatorship has morphed into hyper-technological emotional control.

History does not advance: it circles. It returns. And when it is domesticated by redemptive ideologies, it becomes a landscape of extermination. Because happy endings lead to hell.

The fruit of the earthly paradise

Every ideology that promises earthly redemption ends up sacrificing real people in the name of an abstract future. The 20th century was its cruelest theater:

The USSR promised social justice, and delivered mass famine, ideological purges, and gulags. China proclaimed peasant liberation, and launched the Cultural Revolution: millions died in “re-education.” Nazi Germany vowed to restore national dignity, and built extermination camps. Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela… the list goes on.

Every time an elite claims to understand the ultimate meaning of history, what follows is not freedom, but totalitarianism disguised as virtue². As Leszek Kołakowski put it with biting clarity: *“The promise of redeemed history is the threshold of mass graves.”*³

The end is not political

Against this machinery of secular redemption, we must propose an active skepticism—one that doesn’t fall into cynicism, but also refuses to worship new utopias. Eric Voegelin diagnosed it sharply: *“The fatal error of modernity is the immanentization of the eschaton”*⁴—that is, trying to bring the final destiny of man (judgment, fulfillment) into the temporal and political realm.

The end of history will not be socialist, liberal, or technocratic. It will not be a contract or an algorithm. It will not come by evolution, nor by revolution. It will come—if it comes—by judgment. Until then, what we have are fragile institutions, struggling souls, and a freedom that must be exercised without idols.

Against redemptive dialectics

Dialectics, when used ideologically, promises that every conflict has a higher meaning. That all suffering is part of the Spirit’s labor pains. That History justifies everything—even the unjustifiable.

But this vision, so seductive to intellectuals and tyrants alike, has failed to account for the only thing that truly matters: the irreducible dignity of each human being, not as a means, but as an end. History is not a doctoral thesis. It is a valley of tears with flashes of grace.

Only theological hope—the kind that expects no fullness here, but elsewhere—can save us from hell in the name of heaven. Everything else is idolatry of the future.

Notes

Jacob McNulty, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, Yale University Press, 2023. See also his IAI article: “Hegel vs Marx: ideas change the world, not economics.” Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951. Arendt reveals how ideology annihilates moral judgment. Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. III, “The Breakdown.” Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 1952.