Zarathustra's nightmare endpoint: the comfortable, riskless, blinking herd that invented happiness and stopped despising itself.
Documented
The prologue's warning
In Zarathustra's first speech, the crowd laughs at the tightrope walker and chooses the last man instead: no shepherd, one herd, everyone the same, 'we have invented happiness, say the last men, and they blink.' It is Nietzsche's prophecy of a society optimized for contentment.
Assessment: Documented: the prologue, section 5, verbatim.
Stories
The prophecy fulfilled
The modern citation: the last man as algorithmic man, fed, entertained, medicated, outraged on schedule, risk-free and meaning-free. Every decade since 1883 has claimed the portrait as its own selfie.
Assessment: Stories: the fit is uncanny enough to keep the passage in print; prophecy is the reader's work, not the text's.
Interesting claims
The herd without a farmer
The colder turn: the last man needs no tyrant. No Napoleon required, no Squealer, no wall edits. Comfort is self-administering, which makes it the first cage in history that maintains itself, and the only one its inmates will defend.
Assessment: Interesting: this is the bridge between the farm wing and this one; the archive files it under both.
Sources and further reading
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, section 5
Walter Kaufmann translation and commentary (1954)
Francis Fukuyama, The Last Man (1992), the later redeployment
Worth asking
If comfort is the cage, who holds the key, and do they need to?