"One thing I've learned over these last 30 or 40 years is that people make history. There's no fait accompli to any of this"
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Rifkin’s line is a deliberate shove against the lazy gravity of “inevitability,” that favorite alibi of technocrats and market evangelists. After “30 or 40 years,” he’s not presenting wisdom as nostalgia; he’s staking a claim to authority earned in the trenches of energy scares, globalization, deregulation, climate politics, and the endless PR war over what counts as “progress.” The sentence is built like a quiet intervention: history isn’t a machine with a predetermined output, it’s a negotiated outcome produced by human choices, institutions, and power struggles.
“People make history” sounds almost civics-textbook until you notice what it’s trying to disarm: the contemporary habit of treating major shifts (automation, austerity, decarbonization, platform monopolies) as weather. Rifkin’s subtext is that “the market decided” and “technology is unstoppable” are rhetorical moves, not facts. They erase agency, and with it accountability. When he adds, “There’s no fait accompli,” he’s pushing back on both fatalism and the seductive comfort of spectatorship. If nothing is foreclosed, then someone is responsible for prying the future open.
The phrasing also smuggles in a moral demand. If outcomes aren’t prewritten, then “we couldn’t have known” becomes less defensible. Rifkin isn’t just arguing for hope; he’s arguing for participation, and for the uncomfortable idea that history’s winners aren’t chosen by destiny but by who organizes, persuades, and builds coalitions. In an era that sells inevitability as sophistication, he’s insisting agency is the more mature worldview.
“People make history” sounds almost civics-textbook until you notice what it’s trying to disarm: the contemporary habit of treating major shifts (automation, austerity, decarbonization, platform monopolies) as weather. Rifkin’s subtext is that “the market decided” and “technology is unstoppable” are rhetorical moves, not facts. They erase agency, and with it accountability. When he adds, “There’s no fait accompli,” he’s pushing back on both fatalism and the seductive comfort of spectatorship. If nothing is foreclosed, then someone is responsible for prying the future open.
The phrasing also smuggles in a moral demand. If outcomes aren’t prewritten, then “we couldn’t have known” becomes less defensible. Rifkin isn’t just arguing for hope; he’s arguing for participation, and for the uncomfortable idea that history’s winners aren’t chosen by destiny but by who organizes, persuades, and builds coalitions. In an era that sells inevitability as sophistication, he’s insisting agency is the more mature worldview.
Quote Details
| Topic | Free Will & Fate |
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