Say what you will about Fukuyama, but I credit reading The End of History and the Last Man with realizing I have been keeping the thumotic part of my soul on a hunger diet—and helping me understand the role of thumos in politics generally.
It seems that the only popular part of the internet that cares about thumos is the meninist internet. And the meninist internet, so far as I can tell, thinks thumos is roughly the magic juice inside men that causes them to beat up motherfuckers in bars who spill the drinks of their friends. And this isn't...obviously wrong, but to me, the best example of a thumotic person is Gandhi. Or maybe those people who set themselves on fire in protest of various things.
Thumos seems to be about the unwillingness to trade basic dignity* against either mere survival (which, according to Hegel, is beastly and slavish) or fungible economic goods and base pleasures (which, according to Nietzsche, is Last Man-ish—that is, nihilistic, ahistorical, listless, feckless, pain avoidant dicklessness impotence). Thumos is, centrally, about insisting that something has dignity because one is a person** and had better be treated like it!
When you don't get respect, your thumos is injured. If you take the disrespect, your thumos will wither from under you until you are a powerless, soul-trampled husk who doesn't listen to their own spirit. On the other hand, thumos must be the slave of reason and good judgement, lest it get out of control and start setting fire to things and biting that dumb bitch who stepped on your last nerve and should have known better.
I think a lot of the social media Perpetual Fires of Gehenna rage machine is far more intelligible in this light than in realpolitik/public choice theory terms of people politicking because they want certain goodies out of the government budgetary treasure chest or whatever. Angry Internet People are usually not upset that this or that person didn't get a certain amount of money for a thing. Rather, as Noah Smith has argued I think pretty persuasively, woke people online are mad because they don't feel they or others are respected.*** Fukuyama himself now thinks a similar thing has been going on on the identitarian right in Europe and the USA.
In general, I consider the stuff on thumos to be a strong point of Fukuyama's work. It's interesting and seems to explain the world in some helpful ways that other approaches seem to miss, try to get rid of, or unfairly minimize, to the harm of their own causes. I also think I understand now somewhat better why I'm deflated despite being manifestly comfortable and do Jungian shadow-throwing about internet activists, especially the full gamut of those in anything political and gendered, even activists who make good points or I'm sympathetic to. I don't respect this shadow-throwing on my part, and I think the thumos idea helps me treat them and myself with more respect.
And of course, as a fairly orthodox Popperian critical rationalist, I am not supposed to appreciate Plato or Hegel, especially not the bits that feel kinda mystical or low-key fashy. Alas, I am a thoroughly intellectually promiscuous internet idea ho and will not be put upon to justify my lifestyle, proclivities, or trashy taste in memeplexes even to you, dear reader, so I kindly ask that you not tell the discerning parts of the internet where you heard this wooey nonsense.
*The dignity can be of oneself, of those esteemed people or things one recognizes, or even of the truth, which would be insulted in allowing blatant falsehoods or affronts to reason and spirit to stand.
**The only philosopher I know of who has tried to explain why personhood is an important moral category of similarly dignified beings for good fundamental natural reasons is David Deutsch, who calls people "universal explainers". Whether this speaks more to the poverty of my own philosophical training or to how unproductive most academic philosophy is, especially that disconnected from physics and information science, is unclear to me.
***Of course, orthodox Marxists and other leftists in a hardcore materialist vein who understand their own projects well will probably recoil violently from this idea—or indeed from the suggestion that there is anything like "dignity" that isn't reactionary false consciousness or doesn't reduce to control over the stocks and flows of the material world. However, those people are in a somewhat tough spot to explain, if something like thumos doesn't real, how labor is necessarily alienated from the fruits of its labor under capitalism, or indeed why a perfectly rational worker who so much as has ordinal utilities should give a shit about the rate of exploitation if they bring home more bacon. Nor have vanguardists ever not helped themselves to what sure seems to be thumotic energy at any historical point. All this to say that if I were this kind of person, I would want to answer the question of how the politics of dignity, which often seems economically nonsensical, can fall so neatly out of materiality.
