My 2025 Solstice Message

Let me start out by wishing everyone all the best for the next year!

The year 2025 certainly was “interesting”.  Here are some thoughts…   If you are interested to read on.

And of course:

“No AI was used or molested in the making of this message”.  It is entirely natural.

Now, how to phrase this message?  There is so much to be angry about, so much incoherence, violence, misinformation, confusion.  My Ozzie friend told me to write with a tinge of optimism.  I'll try.

The best I could think of was to ask questions, leaving it up to you to think about your answers.  My personal conclusion is:

It's Time to Stand Up!

(you may think there is an undertone of attack on the USA in what follows.  I have many friends in the US,  I'm certain they understand what I'm trying to express.  They also know it's only the current government that I target.)

A take on things

I confess that keeping up with the news in 2025 has been very trying.  I look at the headlines, but mostly don't go further because it is all bad, despiriting, depressing, upsetting, enraging.

Many people are affected in the same way.  Some keep going and some are even positive.  Most of my friends are worried, grim.

It looks like in 2025 people's attitudes changed in one or more of these ways:

• they got tired of the negative news, gave up, don't care anymore, have egoistic fun,
• they got angry, veered to an extreme opinion, mostly to the right, got violent,
• they don't understand anything anymore, get depressed, search for simplistic answers.

I look at this puzzled, but really worried, trying to figure out a sensible course of action.  I'm increasingly disappointed in humanity's ability to solve the ever more complicated problems it faces.

What happens when the Good are too meek?

Humanity had some promising ideas, resulting in organisations that should have delivered.

But the organizations have grown old, been infiltrated by manipulators and second-rate people.

Why have the United Nations not stopped the war in Ukraine?  Why has the World Health Organization not done more against the conspiracy theories on vaccination?  Why … etc ?

I feel that the reasonable guys, i.e. you and me and our friends, have just been too trusting.  We have not acted.  We have not been firm enough.  We were too lenient.

That behaviour creates a vacuum, which soon gets filled with anti-social behaviour.  Bullies, reactionaries, extremists of all kinds, come out of the woodwork when there is not enough force to hold them back.

Looking after a livable society is hard work, every single day.  Keep the nonsense at bay.  Where are the resistance movements?

We cannot let the bullies take over.  It is time for us to stand up!

My resolution for 2026 then, is to work on finding what actions I can still usefully undertake to save the world for our children and grandchildren.  That sounds grandiose, utopian, even arrogant.  But what else can you suggest?

The Serenity Prayer, dating back a century, says:
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
the courage to change the things I can;
and the wisdom to know the difference.

Quite, and for 2026 I am asking all of you to pick up the courage to change what you can change.  Stand up!

Is there still any Compassion?

The diversity of humans means that some are better at making a living than others. They are stronger or more intelligent or whatever.

In a compassionate, civilised world the strong help the weak.  If this gets organized by the state, it is still compassion, though it requires the strong to contribute to the lives of the weak.  You can call this “socialism” if you like, but the obligation of helping the weak is explicitly in the rules of most religions.  For example, it is incoherent to claim to be a Christian and at the same time refuse to implement universal health insurance.

What is a “good” society?

Now this is the big question.  There are stable and unstable societies.  The Taliban in Afghanistan have built a stable society.  Modern democracies are not so stable anymore.  It looks like strictly ruled societies are more stable, as are those with a well-educated population.  Would you want to live in a theocracy?  Or any dictatorship?  So what do you define as a good society?  What does one want to achieve?  There will have to be rules, which ones to choose?  If we have to be tolerant, must we tolerate the intolerable?

What happened to Multilateralism?

In a complex world where problems flow across the old, traditional borders, we need agreements which involve all parties, all countries.

A mesh of unilateral agreements is bound to fail, it will be far too complex and too prone to opportunistic changes.

“America innovates, Europe regulates”

Well, no:  Europe invents, America buys it up.  There is no doubt that some innovations have their roots in the US.  But a lot comes from here.  The problem of Europe is still in its language mix and local rules.  Any invention made here is easier to drive to critical mass in the US. There seems to be more capital available to attract, or simply buy, budding enterprises into the US and develop them there.

And of course there are regulations, we would hope so!

Has AI taken all the attention?

The increasing evidence of global warming (aka the euphemism "climate change") should have motivated governments to act more and faster.  But it is going the other way, and now there is a scramble to get a part of the AI cake.  AI seems to have wiped ecological concerns off the news.

Certainly AI is interesting and useful.  Is it going to help to avoid the climate catastrophe?

Is there still hope for ecological dynamism?

The current ecological movements are changing.  They get smaller, more bitter and more extremist.  They lose popularity.  As said, people are tired, bewildered and grasping at straws.

Where has critical thinking gone?

Do we still have reasonable debates?

What happened to the spirit of the Enlightenment?

Do we still check facts?  Or are there now everywhere “alternative facts”?

Are the social media guilty?

My answer is “yes”.  They are definitely addictive.  Decades back there was a long fight to show that smoking tobacco did cause cancer.  It is going to be much more difficult to prove that social media disrupt society, hence must be regulated.  A world-wide information infrastructure needs world-wide regulatory agreements.

Have our daily lives become too complex to understand?

Probably:  when I grew up, the items in our house were simple, their use and their functioning comprehensible.  You did not even ask “How do I operate this thing?” because it was obvious.  You might have asked “How does it work?”.
Today the question “How does it work?” most often gets answered by instructions of how to operate the item.  Nobody knows how the item actually works:  what goes on inside that makes it perform its function?

Because nearly all items now have a computer in it, and many are “connected”, which means that most people have no idea what goes on locally and what is done on a server far away.

The worst aspect is that most people do not even care.  They don't want to know about the implications.  Maybe they are afraid to face the “inconvenient truth”(*) that control over everyday objects is now held by some giant corporation on the other side of the Atlantic from where I live.  As a friend points out:  people only care about their wallet.

Understanding connected devices is hard work, sometimes you can't even find out. Try to read the security sections of the Wikipedia page on WhatsApp messages.  It's totally unclear to me who can read what you send and who cannot.  Maybe it is difficult for someone in between to catch and read your message, but quite clearly the app on your phone can read it, since it displays it, and so can the receiver.  Did you set up a key of any kind?  Did you exchange encryption information with the people you send messages to?  I doubt it.

Unfortunately the complexity problem is not limited to physical devices.  Try to understand financial investments, currency exchange rates, food production.

(*) a phrase Al Gore used in talking about global warming

Maybe…

… the above considerations explain why I'm getting to be more and more of a misanthrope.

How do we get out of it?

I have no clue, but I'm working on it.  Figuring out what I can change.

Keep thinking and acting.

Stand up against ignorance, incoherence, indifference, inaction!

But have nice end-of-year celebrations.