By Steven Yates
January 4, 2025
“The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.” —Paul Valéry
Since numerous writers I read regularly are offering predictions for the upcoming year, I thought I’d offer a few of mine. In the past I’ve shied away from this sort of thing — because, after all, “it’s tough to make predictions. Especially about the future” (Yogi Berra, renowned philosopher and late catcher for the New York Yankees).
But after thinking about it, making predictions shouldn’t be all that hard. After all, there’s nothing special about this particular position of our planet in its course around the sun. Designating a particular day as “New Year’s Day” is totally conventional.
What we can be sure of: human nature will be the same this year as it was last year. People will still try to get as much as they can, with the least possible effort. Most will continue to coast through life. They will still respond to incentives or “nudges,” except for that small minority that figures out the incentive structure encircling them and ignores, escapes, or thwarts it. Such people might actually develop free minds.
With that as background, here are 15 predictions for 2025. We’ll check in at the start of next year, to see how many came true. That’s assuming I’m still walking above ground on this planet and still writing pieces like this.
- The growing divide, the “MAGA civil war,” between billionaire technocrats (Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy) and less-moneyed populists (Steve Bannon, Laura Loomer), latent all along, will widen until it fractures the movement. Nothing surprising here: it isn’t just that billionaires and less-moneyed populists aren’t likely to be on the same page, though that’s true. Rather, if there’s anything Republicans excel at, it’s shooting their own feet off. The controversy bespeaks a dark truth: America’s schools aren’t cultivating a mindset likely to produce legitimate scientists and engineers (as Ramaswamy’s controversial tweet pointed out). Naturally those who want to hire such people will go overseas to find them, and will try to bring them into the U.S. legally. American universities won’t produce them as long as they remain left wing indoctrination mills that repel men who have always been more likely than women to study physical science and computer engineering.
- Trump will not annex Canada, nor purchase Greenland, nor take back the Panama Canal. The negative repercussions would far outweigh any (scanty) benefits.
- He will, however, face difficulties from the get-go with parts of his agenda, such as deporting 15 million illegals. For starters, immigrants, legal or illegal, don’t mind working for peanuts while Americans want livable wages. They’re profitable for corporations, therefore — the other side of (1) above. Corporations will therefore fight Trump on this as much as woke leftists. Trump’s effort will face the added problem that those to be deported must go somewhere, and where that somewhere is, is unclear. Their homelands? At whose expense? No one thinks the affected countries, all of them eyeball-deep in their own problems, will foot the bill!
- Leftist frustration risks exploding into violence at almost any time. I’m predicting there will be at least one more assassination attempt against Trump this year. It will fail. An angry “anti-racist” or some other leftist will be taken into custody.
- Violence in schools, workplaces, streets, subways, will continue. Mental illness will be factor in some cases; terrorism in others (it only took a little over three hours for the first violent attack of 2025 to take place). The liberal-left will continue to act as if they really believe guns get up and go off by themselves. They will lament the availability of guns, although guns have always been available while they violence we’ve been seeing is of more recent vintage. No one, not even most conservatives, will attend to fundamentals, such as exactly what is producing shoot shooters, why their families are dysfunctional, what pharmaceuticals they’ve been put on, or why Americans’ mental health is in freefall with suicide rates climbing, especially among men. The braver of them may point to militant feminism. They won’t point to an atomizing neoliberal political economy which reduces the value of everything, including human beings, to a marketplace price tag.
Nor will they look at American foreign policy. Even Trump is a committed Zionist.
- Speaking of which: those drawing attention to such facts as children in Gaza being traumatized due to Israeli war crimes will continue to be denounced as antisemitic. Many on the right will continue to lump those who won’t shut up about Gaza in with campus wokesters. The latter will play their role because Palestinians are, well, an ethnic minority. They are, aren’t they?
- Leftists being slow learners, they will remain locked into identity politics with all four claws. Hence the country will remain divided: men versus women, blacks versus whites, native born Americans versus immigrants, etc. Higher education will continue to offer a smorgasbord of pseudo-subjects taught by pseudo-intellectuals.
- Inflation will continue even if is “coming down,” e.g., prices not rising quite as fast as they were a year ago. Government numbers will remain as skewed and misleading as ever. Homelessness in 2025 will surpass 2024’s record high. If Trump follows through with his threats to impose tariffs on imports and corporate predators are allowed to pass the cost on to consumers causing more price inflation, he will get the blame.
- The billionaire class will continue getting richer, fueling resentment across the political divide. The Dow is already completely decoupled from the real economy.
- Guys like me urging primary prevention in health education will continue being invisible, meaning that obesity, chronic illnesses, myriad other avoidable ailments will continue unchanged. This will go on as long as such conditions remain profitable. Junk food and hyperprocessed foods will continue to fill grocery stores as long as they remain profitable, and consumers can’t be bothered to get informed.
- Another healthcare CEO or some other bigwig will be gunned down in a street somewhere between now and the end of March. This person will also be lionized on social media as was Luigi Mangione, despite gasps of horror from pundits and Establishment writers and podcasters. CEOs, especially those atop corporate healthcare leviathans, will hire private security, which will accompany them everywhere they go, 24/7.
- Sadly, people on my side of the aisle in some areas will keep going down false rabbit trails, e.g., this. Jack’s Substack takes a perfectly sound idea — responsible freedom — and runs off a cliff with it, this time into “parentarchy,” the idea that parents are little dictators over children, that this is an illicit exercise of authority (because in Jack’s view all authority is illicit), and that no one has previously noticed.
The idea has structural similarities to militant feminist “patriarchy” and critical race theory’s “systemic racism,” in its unstated starting assumption that we’re fundamentally the same — even children! — homunculi of a sort whose ideal state is autonomous reason, sufficient to make us our own authority.
Authority relationships thus reduce to the familiar “oppressor” versus “oppressed” dichotomy, the bane of academic wokeness. It saddens me profoundly to see a good idea (responsible freedom) encircled by a worldview in which it doesn’t fit, and then fall into something that in practice would only further the unraveling of families (flesh and blood human beings in unique situations, not interchangeable units of pure intellect). Jack ignores the actual sources of our problems: godless materialism as a worldview and neoliberal political-economics (see 5 again or go here and scroll to the section on “The Coming of the Neoliberal Era”; for more on parent-child go here.)
- There will be more and more people who opt out of everything. Their numbers may be larger than anyone knows. They won’t be wasting time posting on social media. Hence they’ll be all but invisible. They won’t care. They won’t want to hear from any of us: right, left, somewhere in the middle, or off this spectrum entirely. They will be busy tending gardens, trading healthy foodstuffs locally, building things, educating their children to do the same or to pursue trades, and probably praying that the idiots in the cities don’t blow everything up. There are such people now. Some of them do product how-to podcasts. By the end of 2025, I think there will be more of them. This might be difficult to verify but I shall try.
- The Everything Bubble will continue to expand. Eventually it will pop. I’ve learned the hard way not to try and put this on a timetable. Although a consumer-debt-based political economy cannot defy financial gravity forever, those profiting from it doubtless learned plenty from the 2008 meltdown and will milk their cash cows for as long as they possibly can before the plug gets pulled.
- The Rapture will not occur. In this one, I have complete confidence.
That’s all I could come up with in the 24 hours I gave myself to write this. I’m sure I omitted a few issues. Readers who think of more may feel free to go here and share in the comments.
© 2024 Steven Yates – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com
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Steven Yates’s Substack site is called Navigating the New Normal. You’ll find content there that isn’t available here. While more and more of the Internet is disappearing behind paywalls, NtNN is still free. Consider subscribing, as that is how the Substack algorithm knows I exist.
Steven Yates is a (recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored three books, more than 20 articles, numerous book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself.
In 2012 he moved to Chile. He married a Chilean national in 2014. Among his discoveries in South America: the problems of the U.S. are problems everywhere, because human nature is the same everywhere. The problems are problems of Western civilization as a whole.
As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!
He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.
Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.
His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.
His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.
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