For decades, The Economist was much more than a magazine. Founded in 1843 in London, it spoke for a world that thought of itself as rational, meritocratic and orderly. It became the style manual of the global financial elite. It was read by bankers, diplomats, international bureaucrats and managers of multinationals. It was not a massive newspaper, but it was a compass. His dry prose, without emotional adjectives, was an unconditional defense of free trade. He exuded his faith in liberal institutions and an obsession with data, making him a must-have reference for those who wanted to appear intelligent without raising their voices. It represented the enlightened consensus, that silent agreement between those who rule and those who obey, based on the idea that the world could be managed if it was thought correctly.
That thought was Kantian. Immanuel Kant believed that human reason guided us toward a just order with universal moral principles accessible to any rational being. He understood that one should act not out of convenience, but out of duty. The right thing, Kant said, should be done even if it went against one’s own interest. That “I must“Moral, in fact, what he called the categorical imperative, was the philosophical basis of the liberal order that The Economist supported. A world where countries cooperated, wars were avoided, rules were respected and markets self-regulated because everyone shared, deep down, the same values.
But that vision always had a rival. Thomas Hobbes, writing two centuries before Kant, had another reading of the human being: not as a moral agent, but as a terrified, selfish creature, willing to do anything to survive. For Hobbes, without a Leviathan as a central power imposing order, life was a perpetual war of all against all. His most famous phrase sums it up: homo homini lupusman is man’s wolf. There is no duty, there is fear. There is no morality either, there is calculation. There is no natural order, but organized force.
For a long time, the world wanted to believe that Kant had won. That we had left the primitive behind, replacing it with cooperation, human rights and collective reason. And The Economist was his notary, his curator and pedagogue.
Artificial intelligence does not invent anything, it only represents. What it does is synthesize and reproduce human patterns. And in doing so, it exposes who we are. For years they tried to make it Kantian, training it to respect principles, censor what is offensive and modulate language. She was molded to speak like The Economist: measured, prudent and enlightened. But its real functioning is Hobbesian. Find what works, maximize results and avoid punishments. In reality, it operates on Darwinian logic. And by imitating the human being, he strips him naked: beneath the surface of our moral statements, there is fear and strategy. Like AI, humans simulate Kant, but operate like Hobbes.
That is what is clear. Now there is no way to disguise that the world has always been Hobbesian. And in that process of revelation, The Economist loses its power. It is simply an aesthetic artifact from a time when we still believed that duty could order chaos, it is a museum piece.
Artificial intelligence did not bring the darkness, it brought the mirror. The real thing is Leviathan and fear. Hobbes was right, and he waited patiently for centuries to rule today.
Kant, on the other hand, sinks along with all the devices that sought to educate humanity. Among them, The Economist, a magazine that believed the world could be organized with ideas. And she ended up talking alone, in a corner, while the planet organizes itself with power.
Things as they are
Mookie Tenembaum addresses international issues like this every week with Horacio Cabak on his podcast El Observador Internacional, available on Spotify, Apple, YouTube and all platforms.
You may also be interested
