2025 Year In Review

+ 2026 Predictions

2025: The Year the Masks Slipped

If 2024 cracked the illusion, 2025 tore it open.

This was the year when power stopped pretending it was benevolent, neutral, or even rational. Across politics, media, technology, and global affairs, institutions abandoned the last remnants of moral language and replaced it with something colder: efficiency, dominance, and narrative control.

Three truths became unavoidable in 2025:

1. Authoritarianism Stopped Whispering

Strongman politics no longer needed coded language or plausible deniability. Loyalty tests replaced competence. Intellectual friction was treated as treason. History was rewritten openly, not quietly.

What had once been described as “norm erosion” revealed itself as something more direct: a belief that constraint itself is illegitimate.

This wasn’t new—but the denial ended.

This topic was explored in December's blog: A King Like Trump: Herod the Great where the myth of the “necessary ruler” fully replaced the idea of shared governance, in the case of Trump, and for Herod, seeking legitimacy from the people he ruled destroyed him and left the indelible mark on his legacy of the brutal, corrupt king who tried to kill the baby Jesus.

2. Capitalism’s Shadow Stepped Fully Into the Light

By 2025, neoliberalism could no longer plausibly describe itself as an economic system alone. It revealed itself as a psychological operating system—one that trains individuals to self-optimize, self-blame, and self-erode while power consolidates upward.

Marketing, politics, and identity collapsed into a single feedback loop:

Consume → perform → obey → repeat.

Trumpism was no longer an anomaly. It was recognized—by supporters and critics alike—as capitalism’s shadow made flesh. One stripped of civility, decorum, and restraint and operating without apology.

3. Consciousness Became the Real Battleground

2025 wasn’t primarily about elections or wars. It was about perception.

Who controls:

• attention
• memory
• fear
• meaning

Book bans, algorithmic suppression, AI-generated mythmaking, and the quiet erasure of inconvenient voices all pointed to the same conclusion:

Reality itself is now contested territory.

And yet—something else happened.

While power centralized, awareness decentralized. People didn’t suddenly agree, but many began to recognize manipulation as it was happening.

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The Counter-Movement No One Could Fully Contain

While power centralized, awareness decentralized.

2025 saw a quiet but unmistakable rise in:

• whistle-thinkers rather than whistleblowers
• cross-disciplinary truth tellers
• elders refusing to be dismissed
• autistic, sensitive, and highly perceptive minds finally naming what they see

People didn’t suddenly agree—but they began to recognize manipulation when they felt it.

This recognition—uneven, fragile, incomplete—may prove more important than consensus.

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2026: The Year of Fracture—or Awakening

2026 will not be a year of stability.

It will be a year of choice.

Because it will be a year of overreach—and reaction.

Here are the patterns already locked in motion:

Prediction #1: Power Will Overreach—Openly

Authoritarian systems always do. The pressure to maintain narrative dominance will produce increasingly absurd contradictions, harsher loyalty demands, and more visible incompetence.

This will wake some people up.
It will radicalize others.
There will be no middle ground left to hide in.

Historically, authoritarian systems do not collapse because they are challenged.

They collapse because they overextend, as we are exploring in my podcast Wisdom Guardians.

As 2026 begins, we are already seeing signs of this dynamic:

• escalating executive claims unconstrained by Congress or international law
• rhetoric of regime change treated as casual policy discourse
• open talk of territorial expansion, annexation, or “running” other nations
• the normalization of militarized solutions to complex political failures

Whether every threat materializes is almost beside the point.

What matters is this shift:

Power is signaling that it no longer recognizes meaningful limits.

This is not merely “Trump being Trump.” It reflects a deeper fracture: when institutions fail to impose boundaries, leaders test how far reality can be bent before it breaks.

History is clear on what follows.

Such overreach does not produce submission alone. It produces counter-forces:

• diplomatic isolation
• internal resistance
• fractures within alliances
• destabilization that cannot be fully controlled

The irony of domination is that the harder it grips, the more instability it creates.

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Empire, Resources, and the Old Justifications

Drilling down a little deeper on this long established, destructive, historical pattern, the renewed language of regime change and territorial ambition also resurrects an older logic—one the modern world claims to have outgrown.

Resource control.
Strategic necessity.
“Stability.”

These arguments have justified interventions for more than a century. When leaders speak openly about oil, minerals, or strategic territory while dismissing sovereignty and law, they are not innovating. They are repeating a script whose consequences are well documented.

What has changed is not the logic—but the willingness to state it plainly.

That candor may feel powerful in the moment.
It is also how nations drift toward pariah status: not because they lack power, but because they abandon legitimacy.

Prediction #2: AI Will Accelerate Myth—or Meaning

AI in 2026 will be used in two radically different ways:

• to mass-produce comforting illusions
• or to reveal patterns humans were never meant to ignore

The danger is not that humans will merge with machines.
The danger is that we will do so without consciousness, repeating domination at a higher speed.

AI isn’t replacing humans.
Rather, humans are surrendering authorship of their inner world to AI and the doctrine of silence commanded by corrupted systems.

Those who treat AI as an oracle will hollow out.

Those who treat it as a partner—within ethical bounds—may sharpen perception rather than surrender it.

Prediction #3: Burnout Will Become Political

Exhaustion is no longer personal—it’s systemic.

By mid-2026, withdrawal, refusal, and non-participation will increasingly function as forms of resistance. Not everyone will protest. Many will simply stop performing obedience.

That quiet refusal will frighten power more than spectacle ever did.

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The Choice That Remains

2026 will ask a single, uncomfortable question:

Do you want comfort—or consciousness?

You don’t get both anymore.

The age of plausible deniability is over. The age of spectatorship is ending. What comes next depends not on heroes or rulers—but on whether individuals reclaim their perception, their imagination, and their moral spine.

As I wrote in Sapience: The Moment Is Now:

Survival will not belong to the strongest, the richest, or the loudest—
but to those who can still see clearly while others beg to be told what to believe.

2026 is not the end.

It is the threshold.

January 6: The Unresolved Wound

This blog is published on January 6 for a reason.

Five years ago, a sitting U.S. president incited an attack on the Capitol to overthrow an election he lost. The event was broadcast, documented, and partially prosecuted—yet never fully resolved at the level that matters most: accountability at the top.

Instead:

• consequences fell unevenly
• narratives fractured
• responsibility blurred
• and justice became selective

When a society fails to metabolize a rupture, it does not disappear. It grows in the shadows and migrates, taking new and more dangerous forms.

Today, we see its echoes:

• detention without transparency
• disappearances into bureaucratic systems
• the erosion of due process for the “undesirable”
• historical amnesia about our own concentration camps, burn orders, and sanctioned erasures
• war in Venezuela and Iran as well as threats to Greenland, Canada, Mexico, and the rest of “the Western Hemisphere.”

The comparison to past authoritarian regimes is not a claim of equivalence.

It is a warning about patterns.

Power without accountability behaves similarly across history—no matter the flag.

What will you choose?

Compliance?

or

Pattern-Recognition and Reality-Grounded Action Based on Facts?

Feature Archetypal Animation

Music 1: Masked Reality Echoes 03:10 StabilitySlow tempo, sustained strings, deep synth pads, occasional dissonant piano chords, and subtle percussive pulses create a suspenseful, thought-provoking mood. No solos.

Music 2: Awakening Echoes 03:10 StabilityA slowly evolving, atmospheric electronic piece. Features ethereal synths, deep sub-bass, and subtle percussive textures. Harmony is minor-key, creating a contemplative yet hopeful mood. Tempo is slow, building gradually without explicit solos.

Music 3: 2026 Crossroads 03:10 StabilityA pulsing, low-tempo electronic beat anchors a spacious soundscape. Synthesizer pads swell with a sense of impending tension, occasionally punctuated by a high-pitched, ethereal melody. No solos. Overall mood is introspective and slightly ominous, building to a hopeful resolve.

Music 4: Threshold of Consciousness 03:10 StabilitySlow, pulsing synth pads create an ethereal yet foreboding atmosphere. A minimalist electronic beat underpins a low, resonant bassline. No solos, harmonies are dark and expansive. Mood is contemplative, unsettling.

Supplemental: The Cost of Honesty

Honesty is not only punished in dysfunctional families, it is punished in dysfunctional and corrupted systems throughout time and history. Watch this video and when it talks about the dysfunctional family system, substitute dysfunctional society, culture, civilization.

We learn how to stay quiet and not rock the boat in our families. Then, we repeat the pattern in our culture and society. The more people punished for being honest, the fewer people who are willing to speak when families, cultures, civilizations take that fatal turn over the edge of reality, which always happens when lopsidedness is not fixed.

Do you see the pattern repeating again?

Do you think we are doomed?

We are when we stand by and say and do nothing.

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Here is a knowledgable, intelligent man who once wore the mantle he inherited from his family of dysfunctional beliefs and silence. He became aware of the lies he had been fed by his family and the systems they inhabited.

Listen to his story.

Then, tell me if you think we are still doomed?

This Ph.D. Physical Therapist and Pastor tells how he was taught to believe lies that were meant to keep him unconscious of what is really going on around him. Lies meant to hide from his conscious ability to reason and detect patterns not to see how the authority figures around him are stealing, demeaning, or betraying anyone considered to be below or beneath them.

I have seen this cruelty in action in my own life through my dad’s life and my mother’s. Both had fathers who were pastors. Both spoke up about violence they had experienced in their homes. Both were label the Black Sheep of their families for being honest about what happened to them. Both were punished for it. Both persisted in being honest despite the tremendous cost of connectivity and acceptance by their families. Both suffered lifetime of feeling alone and unaccepted.

These are terrible costs to pay, and when speaking up and being honest in workplaces and social places means you will be fired from your job for speaking truth to power or targeted by unhinged people who threaten to kill you and your family for speaking truth to power… well, you see why so many people choose silence.

And you see that after 5,000 years of civilization, why we have not evolved very much since organizing into super sized collective systems that must find ways to cooperate and get along and share resources.

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I write about this stuff in my book Sapience. I even identify Narcissism as an underlying feature of most modern cultures and economic systems. I trace how this characteristic got favorably selected over thousands of years to become the dominate social trait that is awarded in most modern economic systems and societies.

Here is an expert in narcissism describing what happens when a narcissistic person has not checks placed on them by their structures and systems.

Evil is real and the darkness of narcissistic people who flipped into the grip of their unconsciousness is destructive. These are people who take pleasure in being cruel to others. They are people who actively try to destroy other people and the world. They are individuals who act like a psychological poison you and the world that they have given up living in as a human being.

Dysfunctional families and systems protect Narcissistic people. They become flying monkeys helping to carry out the daily performance of evil and cruelty. These monkeys are the people who have learned to keep quiet, to not notice the patterns, and to most definitely not state or say the obvious thing: This is wrong.