3.4. The Collapse of Collective Belief

Hack: August 2021, Kabul

In mid-August 2021, the world witnessed scenes unimaginable two decades earlier. Thousands of Afghans desperately clinging to departing aircraft. People falling from the sky. Helicopters evacuating embassy personnel from rooftops. Taliban fighters calmly walking through the presidential palace.
Twenty years. 2.26 trillion dollars spent by the United States. 2,448 American military personnel killed. Tens of thousands of Afghan lives lost (The Economist, 2021). The outcome: the return to power of the movement the Americans had come to overthrow in 2001.
President Ashraf Ghani, whose resume included Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford Universities, work at the World Bank, and the title of "Top Global Thinker" in 2013, fled the country with bundles of cash. The army, on which 83 billion dollars had been spent, dissolved within days. The government, constructed according to the finest models of Western political science, vanished as soon as the force sustaining it was removed.
In this collapse, something was laid bare that liberal discourse has been accustomed to concealing: civilization, values, institutions do not exist by themselves. They are sustained by a force willing to pay the price for their maintenance.

Hegel and the End of History That Did Not Occur

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama, reading Hegel through Alexandre Kojève, declared the end of history. Liberal democracy, in his view, represents the endpoint of humanity's ideological evolution, the final form of government. History as the struggle of ideologies had concluded; what remained was only the technical perfection of institutions within an already discovered truth (Fukuyama, 1989, p. 4).
Hegel, to whom Fukuyama appealed, conceived of history as the process of the development of the World Spirit. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, he describes how consciousness passes through successive stages of self-unfolding, each sublated in the next, higher stage (Hegel, 1977, pp. 18-22). History possesses direction, meaning, and a final goal—the attainment of freedom and self-consciousness of the Spirit.
Afghanistan in 2021 demonstrates the opposite. Twenty years of presence, incalculable resources, thousands of lives—and a return precisely to the starting point. History not only failed to follow the Hegelian path; it showed that there is no preordained path at all. There are only temporary configurations that hold as long as there is a sustaining force and collapse when that force is exhausted.
Fukuyama himself, commenting on the Afghan catastrophe, was compelled to admit: "American democratic institutions have been malfunctioning in recent years," and "American tribal feuding and dysfunction" are hardly worthy of emulation (Fukuyama, 2021). This is not merely self-irony—it is an exposure of the fact that even the model conceived as the end of history itself exists in a mode of sustaining.

Kant and the Universality That Fails at the Border

Immanuel Kant, in his treatise Toward Perpetual Peace, laid the philosophical foundations of liberal internationalism. Republican governance, Kant argued, leads to peace because peoples are not inclined to wage war when they decide for themselves. The spread of such regimes is the path to perpetual peace (Kant, 1991, pp. 258-267).
Behind this project lies a more fundamental idea: the universality of moral norms. The categorical imperative requires that one act such that the maxim of one's will could become a principle of universal legislation. Reason is one and the same for all; therefore, morality is one and the same for all. Human rights belong to everyone, regardless of culture, history, or religion.
Afghanistan revealed the limit of this universality. The values that the West sought to implant did not take root. They held exactly as long as they were sustained by bayonets, money, and presence. As soon as the sustaining force was removed, everything receded, laying bare another layer—clan solidarity, religious identity, a patriarchal structure.
Éric Zemmour, in Le Figaro, formulates it harshly: the Western ideology of human rights is seen for what it really is—"neocolonialism that is no longer fashionable" (Zemmour, 2021). Too harsh, too polemical, but the essence is captured: universality works only for those who produce it. At the border of its applicability, it requires force to sustain those who do not fit into this universality.
The Kantian project collapses not because it is false, but because it requires constant maintenance. And maintenance requires force and a willingness to pay the price. When the price becomes too high, it is exposed that universality was sustained not by reason, but by hegemony.

Heidegger and the Limit of Enframing

In "The Question Concerning Technology," Martin Heidegger describes the modern relation to the world as enframing (Gestell)—a mode of existence in which all beings become standing-reserve, a resource for manipulation and processing (Heidegger, 1977, pp. 234-238). Technology, in its broad sense, is a mode of revealing in which the world appears as calculable, manageable, improvable.
This relation presupposes that nothing exists that cannot be set upon, processed, transformed. Any reality can be taken as material for a human project.
Afghanistan proved to be a reality that resists enframing. For twenty years, it was processed: institutions were built, an army was trained, billions were poured in, elections were held, schools for girls were opened. At the moment when the sustaining force was removed, everything collapsed within weeks.
Zemmour also observes: "Peoples are not as undifferentiated a material as wood or concrete. The concept of the nation-state, invented by the French many centuries ago, hardly corresponds to their civilization, where solidarity is subject to clans and law to religion" (Zemmour, 2021).
Heidegger, in his later works, argued that technology as enframing conceals other modes of revealing. Afghanistan reveals something else: there is a reality that does not become a resource not because it conceals another mode of revealing, but because it is denser, heavier, more inert than the project assumes. It simply cannot be processed. It returns to itself as soon as the sustaining force is removed.

Civilization Is Sustained by Force

And here we arrive at the main point. Afghanistan lays bare what liberal discourse has been accustomed to concealing: civilization is not the natural state of humanity. It is a temporary, local, fragile configuration that holds only through effort and only as long as there exists a force willing to exert that effort.
All classical philosophies of history—from Hegel to Marx, from Comte to Spencer—proceeded from the notion of progress as the natural movement of humanity. Civilization was conceived as the result of development, as something that, once emerged, would never disappear. Savagery was behind, civilization ahead—such was the common horizon of the 19th century.
The 20th century shook this optimism with two world wars and totalitarian regimes. But the belief that liberal democracy represents the endpoint persisted. Afghanistan dealt a blow to this belief that cannot be ignored.
What collapsed in Kabul collapsed not because the Americans built poorly. It collapsed because any construction is sustained by maintenance. Values depend on their bearers, institutions on legitimacy, legitimacy on the capacity to provide order and security. Remove the force sustaining the configuration, and it disintegrates, laying bare another layer of reality that was always beneath it.
The philosopher Andriy Baumeister, commenting on the Afghan events, remarked: "This is the collapse of the political thinking represented by the world's leading analytical centers" (Baumeister, 2021). Thinking that assumed institutions could be built, that values could be exported, that history could be directed.
But it is not only a matter of thinking. It is a matter of ontology. Afghanistan shows that the being of the social, the being of the political, the being of the civilizational is not a given, but an achievement. Not a substance, but a maintenance. Not something that exists in itself, but something that exists only as long as it is sustained.

Being as Sustaining

The resonance with the previous cases is here complete and necessary.
Ozempic showed: desire is not given, but is produced and sustained by a molecule.
Antihydrogen showed: matter is not given, but is produced and sustained by lasers and magnetic fields.
Kargu-2 showed: decision is not given, but is produced and sustained by the configuration of algorithm and data.
Afghanistan shows: civilization is not given, but is produced and sustained by force.
In each case, we are dealing with the same structure. What classical metaphysics conceived as substance—desire, matter, decision, culture—reveals itself to be a temporary crystallization within a field of tensions. It exists, but its being is a being-as-long-as-it-is-sustained. When the sustaining slackens even slightly, everything returns to another state.
In the case of Afghanistan, this other state turned out to be not chaos or savagery, but the Taliban—that is, also a specific order, but a different one, more ancient, more rooted, requiring fewer external resources for its maintenance. The liberal order required 2.26 trillion dollars, 20 years, 2,448 lives. The Taliban order requires only what is already present in the local soil.
The question that arises after Kabul is not "who is to blame" or even "what is to be done." The question is whether we are ready to acknowledge: any being that we consider our own, civilized, human, is sustained by maintenance. And for any maintenance, a price must be paid.
When the price becomes too high, it is exposed that beneath the thin layer of civilization lies what was there before it and what will remain after. Not because it is truer or more authentic, but because it requires less effort to sustain.
Being, in the final analysis, is not possession, but effort. Not a property, but a tension. Not a given, but a sustaining.
And any civilization that forgets this is doomed one day to wake up and see its airplanes taking off with people clinging to their wings.