2025 Forecast: Reality Approaches

A long drive in a weirdly uncomfortable rental car over the weekend locked my lower back and left me hobbling, as if the driver’s seat had been designed in a medieval dungeon, but I figured that some normal Monday deadlifting would get the blood flowing and fix the problem. So I warmed up a bit, then loaded up the bar with a little more weight than I managed to lift last week, and then I started pushing the floor away.

Nothing happened. The bar didn’t move a single millimeter. My existence had no effect on the weight at all; it moved precisely as much as it would have if I had never been born.

I enjoyed it. The weight didn’t move because I couldn’t move it. I muttered obscenities at the bar, and grunted and shouted, and vigorously expressed an intention to move the weight. But the math wasn’t there: I couldn’t generate the force. I wasn’t strong enough today. The weight didn’t respond to my wishes and expressions. It stayed stubbornly real, insistently physical. I thanked it.

David Samuels, writing at Tablet about the development of media systems that exist to manipulate your perception — or your perception of your perception, if that makes sense — and push you down narrative paths chosen by other people: “The effect of the permission structure machine is to instill and maintain obedience to voices coming from outside yourself, regardless of the obvious gaps in logic and functioning that they create. The clinical term for this state is schizophrenia.”

We’ve been living for years in this state of insistent unreality, with enforcement mechanisms to keep us between the narrative guardrails. To offer just one glaring example, the unvaccinated have all been killed by the deadly virus, after that infamous winter when the cognitively sharp Joe Biden ran out of patience. But the reality of political narrative-making and media policing and social media account suspensions, the enforced reality of HR mandates and DEI seminars, the invented reality of permission structures, hasn’t defeated reality. Talk still moves no weight.

It’s interesting to see, at an inflection point, that people who do tangible things in physical space can see obvious realities that still haven’t penetrated to a good number of people in media, academia, and politics. Watch this acknowledgement of reality, but don’t miss the way it ends. Joe Biden says he just had a cold that one night, Jan. He’s actually just fine.

The narrative compliance with permission structures persists in one institution that should be firmly connected to the real, at considerable cost in the event of failure, but with the catch that the one institution in question is attached firmly to political systems. Like the Taliban, the Houthis are undefeated by the American military, which runs advanced institutions of higher learning for its senior officers so they can study the hard realities at the very core of warfighting and lethality. Savor the elements of this screenshot, taking in the information it gives you as you scan from top to bottom:

Yes, the United States Navy is currently sponsoring high-level analysis of the links between gender and climate in the maritime security arena. You can watch the whole panel discussion here, if you feel the need:

As noted elsewhere, this recent Naval War College symposium warned that the American military has not yet employed a sufficient number of gender experts, who should be embedded in all commands:

How useful. Clearly, we will now have more maritime security because of this important discussion at the Naval War College.

Long years of gibbering nonsense correlate with years of institutional decline.

Academia’s (literal) terrorists

The bill is coming due for the fantasies imposed by manipulative permission structures. And here comes the apparent transition. A sign of a coming pivot to cultural and political health has been presented this week as a catastrophe and an implosion into crisis:

This framing is everywhere:

Without revisiting the substance of the debate, which has been covered elsewhere, prominent supporters of Donald Trump like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy expressed their strong support for a program that quite clearly doesn’t work as advertised. People who mostly agree with them and appreciate their political efforts immediately disagreed with them in public, often vigorously, and produced real debate that dug into the merits of the program being discussed. The political outcome is TBD, but none of this is civil war. The actual term for what’s happening is “debate.”

We’ve slogged through a fake and guided discourse for so long that ordinary political disagreement between people who are mostly allies looks like, or is presented as, a form of destruction. It’s not. We used to just call this discussion, and it’s normal behavior — even when it becomes heated. The internal-but-open MAGA debate over H1-B visas is the healthiest political development of the post-election transition. A political landscape without apparent disagreement is fake, and sick.

Air disagreements. Make arguments. Present data. Seek reality. And don’t let anyone sell you the claim that the existence of debate is a sign of crisis.

Open, vigorous, sustained policy debate is a sign that we’re emerging from a cultural crisis. Hope for more. We fight our way back from the era of false narratives by talking to each other, even through ugly disagreement, which is much simpler than the permission structures would suggest. I prepare to enter a new year feeling hopeful, in good part because political allies are engaged in serious debate. We need openness again. Reality doesn’t yield to the commissariat of fake comity.