Have Hope: The Unpredictable Will Happen In 2025
Visitors walk through the yearly Christmas market in the Syrian capital Damascus, 20/12/2024 (Syria Direct)
The streets are full of Christmas lights and decorated trees. The churches are full of celebrations and songs. A spirit of unity is pulling together (almost) an entire society. It's 2024, and it's Christmas in a free Syria, imperfect and uncertain as it may be.
For so long, the Syrian government's brutal war has led to widespread death, destruction, poverty and division. Neighbours feared each other, scared that radical sectarian jihadists or regime loyalists would do harm to one another. For more than a decade Syrian society was torn to shreds, both literally and figuratively. There were fewer places on earth more miserable than Syria.
And yet, with Hezbollah and Iran weakened in Lebanon and with Russia stuck in a losing bloodbath in Ukraine, a new rebel coalition was formed to take the fight to the regime. Despite their differences, the group pledged to work together to remove the corrupt war criminals and drug dealers who ran the country, and afterwards they promised to work together to build a new, just, free and united Syria.
The night before the American holiday Thanksgiving they launched their offensive. Two days later they captured Syria's most important city. 10 days after the initial campaign the Assad regime completely collapsed. Syria is free.
The road ahead is long and uncertain, but this is the most remarkable thing, the most unpredictable thing: Syria! Is! Free!!! These words should shock every reader to the core. If you had asked me just a few days before the rebel offensive I would have told you that there was a possibility that they would lose but, yes, Assad was weak enough that the rebels could win, or at least fight hard enough to push Assad to a settlement. And I would have predicted that this would have taken between one and three years. I could not have even dreamed, in my happiest dream, that this process would take only ten days, sparing perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives in its expediency.
Change is possible. Even unlikely change happens all the time. In fact, Syria was another low-probability high-impact event, and such events happen all the time.
Of course, not all change is good, and high-risk events also happen all the time. Also, sadly, good change is rarely uniform, and setbacks happen regularly. Every progress is met by an opposite reaction, as true in physics as it is in culture. Last night, a group of Islamists lit fire to a Christmas tree in Suqaylabiyah, West of Hama. This is exactly what many Christians have feared — that sectarian, hardline Islamist forces will take control of the country.
But even in darkness there is hope. Today, thousands of people — including many Muslims — took to the streets in Damascus to protest the act, and Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham has condemned the burning and pledged to replace the tree.
2025 is going to be a very trying, very dangerous, very risky time for many — in Syria, in the United States of America, and beyond — but history, especially recent history, shows us time and time again that we cannot predict the future, we can only see some of the possible outcomes.
Technological Revolution -- But a Cultural Devolution?
The first thing that is making low-probability events happen with increasing likelihood is the rapid development of truly extraordinary technology.
My grandmother is 98 and still alive. She was born in a house with no electricity, running water, or automobiles. Now she has a pacemaker that sends real-time information to doctors on the other side of the country who electronically report that information to a chart that her doctors and I can read at the click of a virtual button on an internet-connected smart phone.
The rapid rollout of this technology has brought great rewards and also a slew of cultural problems. The reality is that cultural norms around this tech aren't developed until sometimes years after it is in the hands of the public, and even a basic understanding of the impact of the tech we could buy now is sometimes not understood until we have all encountered the consequences the hard way.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in our politics. Many Americans believe that technology is a key reason for our political divisions, and many also believe that social media is a key disseminator of disinformation, and they have good reasons for thinking this. After all it's hard not to get fatalistic about the negative impacts of our interconnectedness, especially heading into 2025.
But not that long ago, our feelings about the very same tech we fear now were very different. In fact, for a time it looked like social media and the internet were going to breathe new life into democracies all across the planet, and in areas where there was no democracy it looked bound to create one.
The Rise of Grassroots Change
By November 2008 the American people were in a funk. Only 22% of Americans approved of the job their president was doing, the lowest approval rating since Gallop started the poll in 1938. The American people had soured on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the economy was in freefall, and the whole world was horrified at George W. Bush's ineptitude in the response to Hurricane Katrina that devastated New Orleans and much of the American Gulf.
Furthermore, change seemed nearly impossible. Poll after poll showed the American people growing increasingly pessimistic about the economy, government, and the future country they would be leaving for their children. One key aspect driving this pessimism was the issue of money in politics. More and more Americans were expressing concern that the interests of corporations and the extremely wealthy would dampen any sort of grass roots movement that could affect real change.
Until the junior Senator from Illinois harnessed the power of the internet to overcome two of Washington D.C.'s more powerful and established political figures.
Barack Obama inspired young people as well as old and sparked a massive wave of voter registration, the likes of which hadn't been seen in decades. Instead of relying on large corporate donations, the kinds of things that were weighing heavily on the American people, he used the internet to drive one of the most successful grassroots fundraising campaigns in history. After overcoming the odds and winning the Democratic primary against establishment-favorite Hillary Clinton, he easily defeated another D.C. institution, John McCain. His inauguration was perhaps the largest crowd of people ever gathered on earth, and having personally witnessed three inaugurations, I've never experienced anything like it in my entire life.
The ability to use technology and social media to connect, spread messages, raise awareness, and defeat dystopian autocracies soon toppled firmly-established dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt and shook the foundations of many more: Ukraine, Bahrain, Libya, Iran, and Syria, just to name a few. Technology was going to bring about the golden age of political reform and grassroots democracy.
Same Technology, Very Different Outcomes
That, well... didn't really happen. Iran and Russia were arguably the first to fully utilize that same technology to spread disinformation and division. Many other state actors, and many non-state actors, quickly joined the fray. You all know the rest of that story.
Or do you?
In 2018 futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil spoke at the Yalta European Strategy (YES) conference in Kyiv, Ukraine. He cautioned that no one, not even a famous futurist, could predict the future. Referencing the story I've told above he pointed out that the space between the hope that technology would allow democracy to bloom was separated perhaps only by months, or may have actually been coexistent, with the idea that technology would crush democracy in a flood of weaponized disinformation and hate speech. These two completely contradictory ideas existent concurrently, and at times one or the other looked like it would dominate the other.
Since 2016, sentiment toward this technology has been very sour. And yet right now technology has unified the Ukrainian people and much of the world against Russia's invasion, and has sparked massive anti-corruption protests in the country of Georgia. The embers of the Arab Spring are what toppled Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and the embers of 2009's Green Movement in Iran could lead to tremendous change there as well. We simply do not know which of these two models will win the day, or where, or how, or when. And when change happens it often happens very quickly, just as it did in Tunisia, Egypt, Ukraine, and now Syria.
Low-probability high-impact events happen all the time. Six years earlier, I heard pollster and analyst Harry Enten speak at Boston College. Enten talked about how all indications and demographic shifts favored the Democratic party, so much so that it was hard to see a path for Republicans hoping to win the White House or even Congress in the near future. And yet Enten cautioned that the GOP would either shift policies or tactics and try to reverse those trends. And of course they did.
In late 2021 it looked to many analysts, including me, that Russia was prepping a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. A source in NATO sent me a classified document predicting what that invasion could look like. Many predicted Kyiv would fall in days. What happened instead was one of the most one-sided military defeats in world history. Russia was so thoroughly defeated by Ukrainian defenders that they are now defending Russian territory and are on a course to lose that war.
No one knew about Covid-19, or that Iran's president would die in a helicopter crash, or that the UK would go through with Brexit. There were warning signs for many of these events, but there are warning signs for many potentialities that never materialize. These events were still low-probability, and they happened, or they were high probability, and they failed to happen, and those events shape the world.
The Next Revolution Could Start Closer To Home
We head into 2025 divided and anxious. Donald Trump will take over the White House on January 20, and we already see signs that some, but perhaps not all, of the [worst-case scenarios](https://www.thecasualanalyst.com/blog-1/category/analysis/close-to-chaos-and-in-total-denial) may already be playing out. But we simply do not know what the reaction to Trump's actions will be. At the same time that it looks like billionaire Elon Musk may become the most powerful man on earth, other billionaires are being shot in the streets and health care executives are[ changing policies](https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/anthem-blue-cross-blue-shield-time-limits-anesthesia-surgery-rcna183035) to cater to populist pressure. Tariffs, if they are instituted the way Donald Trump has pledged, could push the economy into recession and spark the dreaded "stagflation." But we can't predict whether that could spark a reaction from the public that might lead to change, and we can't tell what kind of change could occur.
There are many positive and negative disrupters in the world. Some of them are latent, waiting for a spark, like a cart vendor in Tunisia lighting himself on fire, or a police officer kneeling on a man's chest until he dies, or a President flubbing a debate, or a terrorist attack, or a sudden scientific breakthrough. Even when we see the warning signs we can't ever really know what's going to happen. There are always foreseen and surprising outcomes, the results of predicted and unpredicted events.
Terrible things may happen in 2025. That's what many people are predicting. Someone burned a Christmas tree in Hama province, Syria, proving to many cynics that hope and change will remain elusive. But they're celebrating Christmas in a free Syria right now, and Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham just pledged to replace a Christmas tree! Change is not perfect, nor easy, and progress is a process, not a result. In fact, the journey toward a truly free Syria has likely just begun. But change is possible, and if that doesn't give you a reason to keep working toward a better world in the new year, nothing will.
