Crises? What crises?
An unfashionably positive review of 2025 and optimism for the coming year
Note for non-British readers. In 1974 Prime Minister Harold Wilson was quoted (probably inaccurately) as saying “Crisis? What crisis”, which prompted the name of the 1975 Supertramp album. Then, in 1979, The Sun famously ran it as a headline to attack Prime Minister James Callaghan during the Winter of Discontent (who also never actually said it).
Welcome to the Rarely Certain retrospective for the year gone by; what I learned, how some of my positions shifted and how the emergence of a more ‘philosophical’ strand began to emerge.
Tl;dr - most of the current ‘crises’ discussed online and in media are really only normal facets of a complex advanced civilisation. The two main reasons that it’s so popular to catastrophise about unpleasant but civilisationally benign things are ‘negativity bias’ and incentives. Our attention is captured more easily by doom and gloom and going on about such things is driven by social and commercial incentives.
If you want predictions for 2026, here’s one; you will be encouraged to believe that we are on the brink of a tumultuous event, such as civil war or some form of regime collapse, none of which will happen. You will be entertained by these predictions, while mistaking this for being informed. In a year’s time people will be making the same claims for 2027 and again they will not come to pass.
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The gap between customary chatter about ‘the state of the world’ and the actual state of the world is obvious, but consistently overlooked.
One reason for this is incentives.
There are incentives for catastrophising and maximalist portrayal of sub-optimal things as irretrievably awful. There’s a social ritual quality to this. Being upset about things being sub-optimal at the meta level is de rigueur. It happens all the time in everyday interactions and it has throughout my lifetime. These days we have an actual space to really revel in that vibe, which is the internet. There’s nowhere better than the online world for seeing how all this works.
Look at the comments from rightoids and leftishists under their favoured articles across Substackistan. They read something that jibed with their priors and were compelled by the social incentive of avowing their belonging to the group. This is why (especially under right-wing polemical screeds, the consumers of which tend to be less cerebrally sophisticated) all the comments are the same and add nothing but noise.
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The writer’s incentive is to please an audience by whom they’ve been captured. The reader’s incentive is to feel that they’re sophisticated and well-informed, while investing as little effort as possible to actually achieve that state. This is why catnip polemics and slogans work so well. Repeating things like Gaza ‘genocide’ or how Britain’s Reform party is going to neuter ‘the Blob’ is hugely popular because it requires zero thought to consume and regurgitate in bitesize bits.
I can tell you right now that if Reform takes power in Britain there will not be a single successful prosecution of a civil servant who waved through the application for asylum from a mentally unstable Somalian ne’er-do-well who went on to rape someone or kill a child. This is nothing to do with ‘justice’ or ‘fairness’ because it’s just an obviously unworkable idea designed to positively arouse a certain type of person who is legitimately sick of ridiculous asylum laws. Bless those people who expressed their relief at this ‘policy’ proposal though with comments about how good it will be. A right-wing writer got oodles of engagement and his readers enjoyed chipping in.
All of this nonsense is familiar from my days on Twitter succumbing to the perverse incentives of social media. The reassurance of the group amplifying my pronouncements provided no incentive to say anything new. I played the hits and my followers loved it. And the sense that I was fighting for a righteous cause was a psychological incentive, let alone the incentive of financial opportunities that came as a reward for such behaviour.
I came to dislike this in myself and so I avoid it now, while disliking it even more in others.
In a way it’s unfortunate because I could have been raking it in by now.
When this blog started it caught the wave of dismay that emerged among left-leaning liberals during the 2016-2020 madness in the anglophone world, prompted by Brexit and Trump. The Great Awokening wasn’t new, but those events - along with Covid - seemed to exponentially amplify a mania that we had never seen before.
That’s when Rarely Certain became an earner. If I’d carried on critiquing the excesses of leftish moral confusion and utopianism it would be much more profitable today. But I’d be bored and I’d know exactly what I was doing, so I moved on instead.
Which means that Rarely Certain ends the year with 3 more paying subscribers than 12 months ago while blogs offering variations on a theme around the badness of Donald Trump or Sir Keir Starmer 2 or 3 times a week go from strength to strength.
Am I complaining? I won’t lie. It sometimes frustrates me to see certain writers who came later and cover the same talking points in every post clearly earning significant subscription revenue. So the pep talk I give myself is that it’s remarkable that such a boutique niche enterprise as this newsletter survives at all when the lions share of demand is for emotionally arousing invective.
There might not be much of a market for saying that things are actually not that bad so I’ll take the win and thank those supporters who get it.
Stuff I really enjoyed and learned from in 2025
Let’s celebrate some of the other ‘stackers (and other sources) which left me feeling more intellectually stimulated and genuinely better informed this year, rather than poked into various states of emotional arousal. What they have in common is something new to say. And a scepticism about the stock assumptions that drive so much of the discourse among those who trade in orthodox platitudes.
There were two brilliant contributions from philosopher Dan Williams. One picked apart what’s really going on under the guise of ‘fighting misinformation’. The other detailed the epistemic basis for his drift away from left-wing orthodoxy. Both of these were comprehensive (published as series) and they were classic examples of what emerges when someone steps back from an assumptive framework.
Start with
Debunking Disinformation Myths, Part 1: This is Not the “Disinformation Age”
(Searching ‘Dan Williams misinformation’ will find the others - or go to his stack and scroll through everything)
Why Dan’s series on misinformation mattered to me was because I once made a minor name for myself posing as an authority on disinformation. I had a podcast - literally called ‘The Disinformation Age’ - and tweeted incessantly about all that stuff before it was cool. This culminated in presenting to an international conference on democracy with a PowerPoint deck snazzily titled ‘Fake it ‘til you break it’. Geddit?
Where Dan and me would doubtless part ways is in my assessment of misinformation - which is that it is largely a non-problem altogether, but I’m not here to persuade anyone of that (it’s on the list for a future RC though). He forensically unpicked that field to reveal that it’s really all just politics pretending to be epistemology. One of my own reasons for stepping away from that world was that I realised this too. We were all exclusively targeting right-wing ‘disinformation’ even though bullshit facts and stories are ideology-agnostic.
Dan’s other impactful series was about his own political stances. It began with ‘On Becoming Less Left-Wing (Part 1)‘ which exposed the epistemic deception required to assert that ‘reality has a liberal bias’ (I use ‘liberal’ interchangeably with ‘leftish’ in this context).
Based on the reactions to Dan’s pieces it was clear that becoming less left-wing is an experience many of us shared since the excesses of the Great Awokening drew attention to the left’s pivot to leftishism’s intersectional identity politics. Always nice when someone cleverer than you articulates your own experience.
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AI and Chatbots in particular are great and actually improve life
As the year wore on I became sceptical about the hand-wringing over AI that is now so commonplace. So I wrote Dead Substack Theory is Coming and Authenticity panic as coping strategy.
But you can’t have a real moral panic without some good old factual falsehoods to underpin it and the best example was that AI was using up all the water and energy. I was routinely told this in real life by just about everyone to whom I ever mentioned my use of ChatGPT as a daily tool. It got to the point where I just stopped mentioning ‘Chatters’ or Google Gemini (my alternative bot of choice, because it’s better at some things).
It reached the point around summer where popular specious claims about AI overtook the similarly popular specious claim that not liking the changes wrought by mass immigration makes someone xenophobic or racist.
Happily, someone who knows what they’re talking about was all the while crunching the numbers (and actually using his brain) which resulted in Andy Masley’s illuminating pieces on Chatbot water use and more.
A good place to start on Andy’s work is his retrospective A pause (for now) on AI and the environment posts, and a bounty for mistakes. This links back to his entire canon on the subject.
You’ll notice a theme emerging here.
It’s a form of scepticism. As in I’m increasingly sceptical that I should be as upset and worried as we’re encourage to be about lots of things.
Without me naming it, Rarely Certain was becoming a sceptical blog.
It took Doug Bates to notice this before I did. So Doug makes this retrospective as one of the positive influences on my 2025.
While I would love to start talking about the Hellenistic philosopher Pyyrho of Elis and how I’ve been a lifelong fan, with my theories about personal wellbeing and scepticism, the truth is that I’d never heard of Pyyrhonism until stumbling across Doug’s Ataraxia or Bust! and feeling a curious kind of recognition.
I’d written from time to time about finding a quiet steady-state wellbeing that had eluded me until 5 years ago and how the Book of Chuang Tzu resonated. I’d pondered the qualities of eudaimonia (honestly, it’s a curious thing to wander about on ordinary uneventful days thinking fuck, this is great for no reason at all beyond being glad to exist) and tried to explain it here. But what I learned from Doug’s ‘stack was that the evolution of a kind of equanimity to replace moral neurosis wasn’t my own invention. I was a couple of thousand years late to the party but thanks for making sense of things, Pyrrho.
Also, as a bonus, it was a moment to examine some priors. This was because I’d been interested in Stoicism for a while and Doug is a critic. For me, you can’t beat being blinded by your enthusiasm for something and then finding that other people can see faults in it. I still appreciate some Stoic practices because I adopted a few before really knowing what Stoicism was, but Pyyrhonism currently feels closer to my personal vibe and I’ve Doug to thank for that introduction.
It also has to be said that reading things like Ataraxia or Bust! is more psychologically nourishing than absorbing another development in transgender activism or other hot button sociocultural blather. I knew I was finding some version of equanimity with this life when I didn’t actually feel angry any more about stupid things like men being called actual women and the other canards of social justice progressivism. Or people saying the Covid pandemic was engineered as an exercise in social control and other canards beloved of rightoids.
Shut up about that stuff is what I mostly feel like saying, whether or not I agree.
That was my vibe for much of 2025.
It’s interesting to feel this. That shut up, you’re wrong and shut up, you’re right are both fine as positions to hold. Not suggesting that anyone else should think this way - just that it works for me.
Not that there weren’t plenty of negative things to capture my attention in enjoyable fashion.
The reliably gloomy David McGrogan is one of my favourite ‘stackers and his output this year has been educational.
As a conservative philosopher of law he is the antidote to that naive brand of social liberalism which insists that ‘The Law’ around ‘Human Rights’ is magically sacrosanct and preternaturally independent of politics when it obviously isn’t.
Where to begin with his News From Uncibal? His dissection of Human Rights law took me through the I’m feeling annoyed about this barrier into the this is so bad it’s really just stupid zone.
Lots of his readers clearly don’t share this view and eagerly await the abolition of Britain’s Human Rights Act of 1998, an objective that seems to me an obviously reasonable step too. But without feeling especially strongly about it.
But where David really earned a paid subscription this year was his analysis of ‘political reason’ and ‘regime politics’. After a lifetime of thinking that politics was just about who is nice to which group and mean to another group the emergence of identity politics upended my comforting student certainties. Instead of serious questions about things like industrial policy and tax all the oxygen was sucked out of the room by a kind of moral religious fervour around what life should be like for specific groups and how we ought to behave toward them above and beyond our previous obligations as citizens.
I thought all that was disappointing enough but it took David to untangle what else has been going on. Which is the engineering by politicians of dependence on politicians and the pursuit of power as a permanent structure rather than the turn-based game we used to have, in Britain at least.
His explanation of concepts like political reason and regime politics provided one of the richest learning experiences I’ve had in years.
You can dive in wherever you like, but a personal favourite was The Devil is Also Strong.
Yes, there were lots of great Substacks this year.
Others that I consistently made a beeline (you do this when you’re paying) for were:
Michael David Cobb Bowen’s Stoic Observations
Thomas Prosser’s The Path Not Taken
Ed West’s Wrong Side of History
Ian Leslie’s The Ruffian
Katrina Gulliver’s Notes From The Field
This was a piece after my own heart. The Telemetry - All the news the headlines missed in 2025.
To be reminded that good things are happening to make many people’s lives better is rare, so I enjoyed that for the feels. But also for the discovery that, at least according to what they tell Gallup, life really is getting better for more people than ever before.
Now, whenever someone casually refers to ‘the state of the world’ I want to ask which period would you prefer to live in and why? I can’t think of one.
There’s something about people wanting to influence others to be morally better that gets right under my skin now. And something happened around Christmas to bring this to a head. I don’t want to name names, but my Notes feed was suddenly filled with someone supposedly debating some particularly unpleasant characters. The way they were doing this was by ‘quote tweeting’ them.
This person (who I have followed for a long time) believed they were doing good; in a nutshell, educating extremists on all sides in an effort to make them more liberal. But instead of that, what I was seeing was showboating for attention under the guise of persuading people onto (as they see it) the right path.
As a veteran of the Twitter wars of old the habit of publicly responding to someone in a negative way by highlighting another person’s view to their own audience is now anathema. And it doesn’t take a particularly sophisticated operator in spaces like this to appreciate the Streisand effect - the phenomenon where an attempt to suppress something undesirable brings it to wider attention.
It’s not that I disagreed with anything that this well-meaning person was saying that made me object. It was that it was obviously having no effect beyond shoving genuine bigots into my face when I was looking for something interesting to read.
This idea, often justified by midwits with the fake Edmund Burke line about evil prospering when good men do nothing, that you can persuade people around to your perspective by publicly haranguing them is now so irritating to me that I had to block this person. My grounds were lack of self-awareness, naivety and unnecessarily amplifying perspectives that I’d rather remain fringe.
The episode made me reflect on the idea that many people seem to have that there is a duty to broadcast one’s moral opinions. And it turned out that I’m not alone in having no time for it. Various cleverer people than me have talked about ‘moral exhibitionism’, ‘performative morality’, inflated moral confidence and moral status-seeking. And when you’re already a moral sceptic it’s even worse to be subjected to virtuous grandstanding by people who ground their self-aggrandisement in nothing more than intuitions they just happen to have.
So that person had to be muted and my Notes experience is improved. They are an academic, which only makes it worse. My expectation of academics was always that they would be more sophisticated in their use of social media than ‘ordinary’ people. Unfortunately it seemed to turn out that many are activists and I’ll have more to say on this in 2026, because it has done so much damage to trust in academia.
But no wonder ‘rage bait’ got to be the Oxford word of the year.
Wouldn’t it be great if next year the Oxford word of the year was ‘sceptical’. Lol.
This post could go on forever, which means one of those abrupt and random endings is required.
It’s New Year’s Eve and tonight I’m interviewing a man in Buffalo, New York, whose father served in the 24th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron (Mechanized) (link opens my website memorial to them). These men were overlooked in all of the popular histories of WW2 and at the beginning of 2024 it accidentally became my mission to put that right. I wrote about this work a few times, but the best introduction is the piece called The most satisfying work ever.
What this project brings for the families of the men who came here to Normandy and fought all the way into Germany is a little lift. They love it and I’m always touched by their gladness that someone is bothering. What it brings for me is meaning. The story I’m telling has meaning to history of course, but the meaning to me is different. It’s something bigger than me and I think we all need something bigger than us. Not an achievement or a thing as such. Something transcendent. And a story like the one I’m trying to tell can never be complete, so it will never be my story. Some of it will have mysteriously channelled through me and that’s what it feels like.
It’s hard to explain when I try. People do historical research all the time and probably never see it in this way.
There’s a nothing village not far from me called Bourg de Lestre. On June 19 1944 the squadron suffered its worst day of the war, losing 7 men when the Germans unexpectedly attacked as a platoon of 30 men from Reconnaissance Troop C secured a crossroads and checked out the village. There were around 100 enemy. Two of the men were upstairs in a house when the fighting kicked off. They picked off as many Germans as they could before running out of ammunition, at which point they were captured. They were released a few days later, when Cherbourg fell to the Allies.
I wondered who those two guys had been. The ‘After Action’ reports (written in the field under combat conditions) are always sketchy on detail so this incident isn’t even mentioned in the account of that day. Except that several men were MIA (missing in action). I got it from another document. When I first established contact with the guy I’m speaking with tonight I had no idea that one of those two men was his dad. Or that nearly a year later, in Germany, he would be cited for the Distinguished Service Cross for taking out a machine gun nest while wounded and close to bleeding to death.
Sgt. Matthew Lukasik (32833917) was congratulated on his medal when he got home and replied “I don’t care about medals, I just need to find a job”.
Making a page on the internet for him means something, so I’ll spend New Year’s Eve beginning to make that happen. It’ll be my privilege to bring his story to anyone else who cares.
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There you go. It’s almost 2026 and I’ve got potatoes boiling for raclette and a call scheduled in 90 minutes. It was a pretty good year and I hope the next one is too, for you as well as for me.
Thanks for being here.
That's a very interesting take on the series of posts from the person you mentioned blocking (who I won't point out here given you chose not to in your essay). I hadn't considered it that way; I was thinking about it as a way to demonstrate liberal principles of open debate, and respecting one's interlocutors enough to have a (mostly) civil discussion. However, I'm not really steeped in Twitter culture (I see people write about "...and they quote-retweeted me" and I get that the implication is that this is something bad or rude or something, but don't understand); I think I see your point: pick on a particularly stupid response, hold it up for ridicule in the guise of having a conversation, or something like that.