36 Reasons to Be Pessimistic About a Return to Sanity in 2025
Happy Holidays!
Like so many of you, I’m rooting for some semblance of a free speech culture, less groupthink, an end to mob madness, and a reversal of the creeping barbarism we’ve seen over the past decade. (No, words aren’t violence. Yes, it’s wrong to murder people for being CEOs.)
And I want to be optimistic about the future.
I’m on the lookout for good news. But there’s good news and then there’s wishful thinking.
I keep hearing about how we’ve supposedly passed “peak woke,” or we’ve reached the end of woke, or the end of Cancel Culture, or the end of some other fill-in-the-blank tedious trend.
Some people I respect a great deal have made such declarations, but I believe those declarations are premature, myopic, beside the point, or just wrong.
I wanted to explain why, but when I started writing, it ballooned into something too sprawling for me to keep my day job. So I figured I’d take a step back and simply present you with a list of pithy reasons to be pessimistic about the future—because I know that’s what you want to hear as you prepare for your Netflix Bad Christmas Movie Watch-a-thon!
I expect to elaborate on my list in the future, but until then I hope you can still enjoy Hot Frosty.
Related
What if Student Protesters Had to Defend Their Positions with Logic? Schools should make bad arguments embarrassing
Milk, Cookies, and Therapy Dogs: Trump Wins and Universities Ramp Up the Coddling
Filmmaking During The Great Chill: Why We’re Releasing Our Movie on Substack (Part 1)
Attack of the Eight Percenters: Why We’re Releasing Our Movie on Substack (Part 2)
Liberating Filmmakers: Why We’re Releasing Our Movie on Substack (Part 3)
Most suppression of wrongthink is unseen, and unseen suppression will likely continue.
Speech policers no longer need to rely on garish Cancel Culture spectacles because they’ve trained us to self censor: People (mostly) know what could get them publicly shamed and (mostly) adjust their words and actions accordingly.
As terrible as they are, at least Cancel Culture explosions remind the public that a threat exists. The future might very well deliver censorship with less transparency. If that happens, we won’t know what we’re missing.
The chill is worse than the heat: A celebrity like J.K. Rowling or Dave Chappelle might get uncanceled, but the chilling effect on up-and-comers remains. Remember, Cancel Culture is mostly not about the poor sap in the crosshairs.
Eight Percenter groupthink still reigns at monoculture institutions such as entertainment, media, academia, K-12 education, and tech.
We thought safe spaces were going extinct, but after Trump’s win universities busted out milk, cookies, and therapy dogs for rattled students.
Cancel Culture could transform into something worse. It wouldn’t be the first time something like that happened. In their essential book The Canceling of the American Mind,
and point out how political correctness faded and then morphed into Cancel Culture.Younger professors are usually more strident than the ones they’re replacing.
Younger journalists are usually more strident than the ones they’re replacing.
Younger therapists are usually more strident than the ones they’re replacing.
As the great
would say, younger generations have already been demoralized.Science and medicine have already been corrupted.
Countless people still assume what’s good for DEI is good for minorities (even though a certain documentary film—one that Steven Pinker calls “excellent!”—reveals how DEI can be especially harmful to minorities).
The Bad Idea Factory (a.k.a. academia) still enjoys massive taxpayer subsidies.
Hooray, legacy media is being replaced by podcasts! … produced by NPR and The New York Times.