
The arrival of each new year with the Science Fiction stamp that all the century’s years carry both hope and terror. Some technological promises have been fulfilled, but rarely the ones we expected. There are few legal flying cars, but AI learning tools can remix and produce art and text that resemble creativity.
We’re not going off to explore the stars, instead, the promise of the future has vastly expanded the reach and grasp of the Big Tech matrix we all live in now, the smart surveillance devices we carry in our pockets, the shrinking retail options we have become dependent on and the platforms that control speech. Behind the scenes, industries became algorithms and break down regularly, from airlines to frozen french fries.
And yet technology also offers the promise of resistance. The internet has become a centralized peril, but it’s also the best means of challenging it. The debates that define the future are still playing out here.
Few people across the country are feeling optimistic about 2023. The old jokes about 2021 and 2022 have long since worn thin. Inflation is draining incomes, insecurity is growing and the lack of confidence in a better future has hit numbers that we may have never seen before among Americans in modern times.
Times are hard.
But hope paradoxically comes from hard times. Comfort breeds complacency. The seeds of the tragedy we’re living through were sown when most people decided that they could take a vacation from history, from thinking about what their leaders were doing, what was being taught in their schools, and from politics.
No answer was ever going to emerge from the false hopes of a comfortable society.
The pain that’s being experienced is something that no one should welcome, but it will get worse. And the only hope will come from that. As we’ve seen in the midterms, people are worried, angry and afraid. But the lessons still haven’t been learned. Life can get worse than the price of staples going up by the double digits.
If things go on at this rate, it will. And economics are the least of it.
The hard times we’re living through are nothing compared to what some previous generations experienced. And while I hope that things won’t have to get worse, wake-up calls are painful miserable things. And we’ve gone by for a generation without one. We are living through a transition from the Boomer era to what will follow. It’s a culturally painful shakedown cruise. Succeeding generations failed to establish meaningful identities, culture and values. In the transition to nothingness, the Left has seized the opportunity to trash everything. With no fixed verities, all sorts of bad actors, not just leftists, have seized the moment to tear everything apart and rebuild it in their own twisted image.
The future is up for grabs. There’s terror in that, but also hope.
We are living through history. And we’re not passive actors in it. We can seize the moment. We can fight for change. The guard rails are off. The system is coming apart. But we’re not doomed to be passive actors in it. Unlike so much of the last generation, what we do can actually make a difference if we make the right choices.
2023 is ours to win or lose.
” industries became algorithms and break down regularly”
That’s for sure. I was thinking earlier that all the promises politicians make, are predicating on the industries working correctly. But in actual fact they break down regularly. I am going through that currently with both my phone and internet. Digital currency without cash money would be a disaster. Also been reading how electric vehicle charging infrastructure is already going to pot in various ways.
Our fight back starts with the word NO.
We will not comply with the totalitarian regimes running the world, we will no longer listen to the UN The WHO The WEF and their ESG and we will resist Agenda 2030
Keep exposing the truth Daniel. Happy new year to everyone here.
Mo, a big YES to your NO. All through the COVID hysteria, I blithely walked into “masks required” spaces with my face uncovered, despite the screams of Karens and the terror of their poor little masked, hypoxic children. My mantra was, “I will not comply.” So simple; what could people do? Throw me out? Fine. I’ll go to a different store, or a different doctor, or a different whatever venue. And those throwing me out would lose a customer or patient or whatever, probably for life. I will not comply, in small ways or ultimately, in large ones. All it takes is one person at a time, saying “No, I will not comply.”
Daniel Greenfield is a rare treasure. Thank you for writing this magnificent article. We must live in our spheres of influence and make our homes and communities little islands of hope. It need not be big and dramatic, but it must be purposeful and focussed.
Saying “no” is a big part it – a protective response to evil as Mo de Profit suggests. We must add big, unashamed “yes” as an affirmative assault upon that evil, embracing the good, true and beautiful without apology or fear.
God bless us all.
thank you, we can all make a difference in the way we live our lives
Choose Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. Or at least reject altruism and embrace RATIONAL SELFISHNESS.
If religious Americans and non-religious Americans would at least do that much — discover, understand, and embrace Ayn Rand’s moral code of ratioal selfishness, there will still be a chance for America to survive.
Graft her moral code unto your religious beliefs — somehow. It will be a strange graft and it won’t make sense if you examine the graft too closely but it will be in your own self-interest and survival. You can keep on being religious in every other way. The consistent Objectivists will do the rest.
Happy New Year!
What is selfishness? Greed and self-indulgence. Sounds great! Huh?
Well you please read Ayn Rand’s “The Virtue of Selfishness”? Or try reading “In Defense of Selfishness: Why the Code of Self-Sacrifice Is Unjust and Destructive” by Objectivist Peter Schwartz?
Peter Schwartz’s book is probably easier to understand. Read both and get back to me if you have any questions.
“In Defense of Selfishness” – Peter Schwartz
Believe it or not, there have been multiple individuals engaged in thought and erudition even prior to Rand.
Enjoy your epiphanies.
You have failed to offer a refutation of rational selfishness. That’s what matters here.
Ann just took “if I am not for myself who will be, if I am only for myself who am I and made it into a rudimentary philosophy with a startling phrase. Lol the bachur of Ann poor soul.
Been asking for a while now, “where the F… is my jet pack.”
On a serious note, until people pay more attention to local elections there will be no change. If you know more about what some US senator form another state stands on and not what your own state senator stands on, that is a problem. If you know more about what is being passed in the US senate or congress than your own state, that is a problem.
There are 2 significant date that started the end of our republic. 1) May 26, 1865 and 2) April 8, 1914. What are those days? 1) that is the day that Lee surrendered to Grant ending the Civil War. History teaches today that the war was over slavery. While yes that was an issue the big issue that actually triggered the war was do states have the right to leave the union. The end of that war was the death of the 10th amendment. 2) that is the date that the 17th amendment was passed. This took away the representation of the state in the fed government and gave control over solely to the people. Congress is where the voice of the people is supposed to be heard and representes while the senate is supposed to be the voice of the state legislatures.
This is not and never was intended to be 1 country but 50 (13 original) countries that govern themselves, united in a bond of protection and trade. Until to we once again see that as a people our republic is lost.
There is 1 significant year that started the end of America — 1781. What happened that year? Immanuel Kant published his attack on reason — “The Critique of Pure Reason”.
The rest is history, the history of our era, what is our era? The Age of the Counter Renaissance, The Age of the Counter Enlightenment, The Age of Unreason, The Age of Anti-Reason.
America and the moral essence it stands for — the pursuit of rational, personal, happiness, individualism, freedom, liberty, and capitalism, are the result of men that were confident that reason was an efficacious means of knowledge. Destroy men’s confidence in reason, or undercut it, make them doubt it, which means make them doubt their own minds, and you destroy America.
“The man who . . . closed the door of philosophy to reason, was Immanuel Kant. . . . No, Kant did not destroy reason; he merely did as thorough a job of undercutting as anyone could ever do.
If you trace the roots of all our current philosophies—such as pragmatism, logical positivism, and all the rest of the neo-mystics who announce happily that you cannot prove that you exist—you will find that they all grew out of Kant.” – Ayn Rand
“No answer was ever going to emerge from the false hopes of a comfortable society.”
“Not all who are poor are frustrated. Some of the poor stagnating in the slums of the cities are smug in their decay…. It is usually those whose poverty is relatively recent, the “new poor,” who throb with the ferment of frustration. The memory of better things is as fire in their veins. They are the disinherited and dispossessed who respond to every rising mass movement.” – Eric Hoffer, “The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements”
“Eric Hoffer can tell us a lot about what’s going on in China right now” – Monica Showalter
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/11/eric_hoffer_can_tell_us_a_lot_about_whats_going_on_in_china_right_now.html
“But the lessons still haven’t been learned.”
Something like “doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different results”. Or put another way, most people have been so used to crap that they are afraid to do something about it and embrace the crap. It seems a certain segment of the population would rather stay with crap than take a chance at something else. Creeping communism/socialism/leftism has blurred the vision of many, including the younger generations. Leftist, especially politicians promote that for personal gain and ego.
We are not headed in a good direction.
America or the people for the most part will not make the right choices. They have not made the right choices for years. There are so many things that needs to be fixed in America that it has become a hopeless situation.
So, 2023 is not going to be any better than previous years. Remember, we have a government of the politicians, by the lobbyists, and for the special interest groups. Most of the American people are not going to change for the better either. There is no need to go into details because it is so obvious.
Enjoy the New Year as best you can.