2025, the atomization of reality, and the failure of imagination… (part 1)

The free world is thinking small. Our adversaries are not.

Since 2009, most of what I’ve tried to do in my professional — and personal — life is get more people to better understand the nature of the adversaries of the free world (starting with Russia), and how the artistry of using our own systems against us combines with our own unwillingness to see what that exploitation is costing us to have far more extensive impacts than we are prepared to admit. Sometimes I honestly don’t understand why we deny what is right before our eyes.

Looking only at Russia, the steady drumbeat of ignored warnings — the Bronze Night events in Estonia in 2007, the invasion of Georgia in 2008, the Georgian election in 2012, the annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine in 2014, the influence campaigns during Brexit and the US elections in 2016, the expansion of hybrid means across much of the globe, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — doesn’t speak well of our ability to assess and respond to security threats.

For anyone in the proliferating group chats of security and foreign policy professionals on any connected topics, hardly a week goes by when serious people don’t seem to deny the facts of what has happened even while accepting the general nature of the adversary. This bizarre discordance has many points of origin — but it points toward our failures to grapple with this timeline, and toward our deep failures of imagination about how we got here and what to do.

A short piece from Mick Ryan, written as a reflection on the recent Bondi beach attack in Australia, was a sharp reminder of many points on which I think we could all use a refresher (and I encourage you to read it in its entirety). The central theme of the piece is that “surprise remains a central feature of the security environment” and occurs when we fail to challenge our own core assumptions about our security. Ryan references key recent and historical examples of surprise, including the October 6th attack by Hamas, 9/11, and Pearl Harbor. He includes this quotation from a 1962 book on Pearl Harbor by Rebecca Wohlstetter:

The possibility of surprise at any time lies in the conditions of human perception and stems from uncertainties so basic that they are not likely to be eliminated, though they might be reduced.

This has been rattling around in my head since I read it, amplified by the disheartening awareness that lessons from 80 years ago are as apt today as then.

For any nation, its concept of security is about perception. Perceptions of its allies, perceptions of its enemies, perceptions of its strengths, perceptions of its weaknesses, perceptions of its interests, perceptions of its values. The accelerating technological toolkit to hack, exploit, and manipulate perception — to alter our ability to perceive security — should elevate our efforts to counter cognitive warfare near the top of the list.

But in America, at least, we have done anything but. The American information environment — and thus the global adjacent English-language information environment — is a toxic sludge of semi-reality fueled by billionaires and politicians who believe it confers an element of control they can exploit, foreign and domestic campaigns of information manipulation, and an array of grifters and “influencers” buoyed by the easy money of spreading coercive information on the internet.

Truth has been atomized. Reality has been atomized. Everyone perceives their quest for truth is the real one and everyone else has yet to see the light.

This will define the coming time of darkness — unless we reverse course.

In America and globally in the free world, 2025 has been a year of taking refuge in smaller communities. Smaller information environments, smaller circles of allies, smaller definitions of what we think of as being like us.

Left or right, conservative or liberal, we think of this contraction the same way. Preservation. Survival. Defending what can still be defended.

This perception of where we are leaves a lot of open space for the adversaries of human freedom — who do not perceive themselves as on the defensive, but riding the winds of good fortune.

Hamas put Israel to sleep. Russia put the West to sleep. China hopes absolutely everyone stays asleep. Once in the state of sleep, it is comfortable to believe a state of repose will never change. Things are happening somewhere — but they won’t impact us.

Part of this simply comes from being human. We cannot live permanently in a state of physiological dread/stress, so we choose not to.

Back in the late ‘90s, there was some very interesting scholarship on how our brains evolved to enhance our survival — including the completely improbable advantage of believing in things we can’t see. You can interpret this as manifesting as religion or other systems of belief that structure human beings into more ordered, collaborative, and productive systems. But said another way, this is perception — a state of becoming aware through assembled sensations and interpretations, rather than what is direct and actual.

Everything is about perception and how the human brain evolved perception. The ability to believe in things that aren’t there insulated us from the proto-human reality that things were trying to eat us and the more pre-modern reality that life can be really terrible. It’s kind of become the default setting — to live in a perception that makes us feel better psychologically but may or may not at all reflect the reality that will allow us as individuals to survive. We’re aware that crisis may come and we’re convinced that our innovative monkey brains will figure something out. But not always. We know those panic moments are defined by a lot of us getting eaten by whatever modern tiger — but we hope it won’t be us. We perceive that others will be eaten first.

But this takes us back to Ryan’s reflections on Bondi beach, surprise, and confronting modern adversaries:

“The key responsibility of state and federal governments in Australia now, beyond ensuring the safety of all citizens, is challenging the existing ideas or conceptzia about our domestic and national notions of resilience, cohesion, prosperity and security. The resolve of our adversaries – and their desire to surprise us – remains unchanged and relentless. Preparing for this, and ensuring we have the time, resources and will to respond when we are surprised in the future, begins with open and honest conversations on hard topics between government and citizens. And the ability to tackle hard truths about ourselves.”

“The resolve of our adversaries — and their desire to surprise us — remains unchanged and relentless.” And judging by our inability to correctly perceive the threat of Russia even after countless direct confrontations and surprises, we remain at a disadvantage and without imagination. We perceive that what is directly around us is kinda ok, and we fail to imagine its collapse.

It’s time to confront that our perception of security isn’t enhancing our survival odds as citizens of the free world anymore. We need to see what is actually there. And we need to imagine better ways ahead.

Americans have failed to imagine a country that serves us all and serves us all better — a country where being the wealthiest, most powerful nation in history translates into better opportunity,

better education, better governance, and better health for everyone. We have always been an insular nation, and many Americans simply do not know how much worse Americans live than our peers in wealthy democratic nations while believing we live better and more freely. In the past half-century, we’ve fallen behind.

The American dream is a great and worthy one — and it has been weaponized to take things away from the vast majority of us while funneling unthinkable wealth to those who understand how to exploit our concepts of freedom to oppress and control us. We don’t like to see how that aligns them with our adversaries. We make laws to protect and advantage those very few because we’re all supposed to believe we could be the next one of them. Aspiring to be the next oppressor of others isn’t much of a dream.

Our imagination has failed us, and we live worse because of it, and our zealotry is now exporting ideas abroad that inspire not enhanced liberty but sharper tools of oppression. The connection between the failure of imagination internally and externally is accelerating the corrosion of everything we believe in as a nation, and it’s bringing the rest of the free world down with us.

Europeans as a collective have failed to imagine what Europe can be as a necessary fourth great power in the world — a bastion of economic might and democratic freedom that is newly enhanced with phard power assets that secure their own ideals and ensure the legacy of democracy and the enlightenment when the American beacon is shrouded and dim. Europeans have failed to imagine themselves a definer of power instead of a place in between powers. They have failed to overcome historical hobbles and assumptions to embrace what modern Europe can become.

The collective west, including our Asian and Pacific democratic allies, has failed to imagine a free world that includes and encourages more nations. Our fear of losing what we have has helped define an era where things must be taken and held by force. Since the Iraq war, we have chosen to leave more people behind in systems of oppression and control. The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy delineates this in the starkest possible terms — but it is at least honest in its cynicism and abandonment of the idea of human liberty.

These are just a few examples.

So far, there is a vast failure to imagine a different century ahead for collective human advancement and accelerated human freedom.

We can do better. We must do better.

But more in that in part 2…

— MM