2025: The Coming Realignment | Digital Tonto

Before 1789 the world was ruled by the divine right of kings. The economy was driven by a feudal system of lords, vassals, and fiefs. Your economic prosperity and personal security were based on land ownership and personal loyalty. There was little you could do to change your lot in life, so you just had to accept your place in the world.

Yet 1789 would prove to be an inflection point. The American Constitution and the French Revolution would forever change how the world was governed. The Industrial Revolution, already underway since James Watt’s introduction of the steam engine in 1776, would begin to shift power to a new class of industrialists.

These events unleashed a series of countervailing forces as the European continent struggled to adapt to shifts in technology, economics and identity. These forces would build and clash until eventually things came to a head in the revolutionary year of 1848. Today, we seem to be in a similarly liminal space, as we decide what kind of future we want to live in.

Points Of Inflection And Convergence

The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot saw the world through what he called Noah effects and Joseph effects. Joseph effects, as in the biblical story, support long periods of continuity. Noah effects, on the other hand, are like a big storm creating a massive flood of discontinuity, washing away the previous order.

History certainly seems to bear this out. Events propagate at a certain rhythm and then converge and cascade around certain points. 1789 was certainly one of those points. So was 1776, which saw the writing of the Declaration of Independence, the publishing of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and the introduction of Watt’s steam engine.

To be clear, I don’t think there’s anything spooky or supernatural about these points of inflection. Rather, periods of continuity attract powerful institutional constituencies that reinforce the status quo and suppress nascent forces until they become too large and powerful to ignore, at which point they boil over and undermine the current order. George Soros called this pattern reflexivity and embraced it as an investment strategy.

For roughly a decade, I’ve thought that 2020 would be one of those inflection points and that certainly seems to be the case. The 2020s are echoing the 1920s in some very troubling ways. I think it’s pretty clear by now that 2020 was pivotal and what we are experiencing now are exactly the Noah effects that Mandelbrot described.

The Four Shifts

Today, we are facing four profound shifts that include changing patterns of demographics, migration, resources and technology. These have been building for some time as we have been focused on other things, such as the war on terror, the financial crisis and the Covid pandemic. Now they have come to the fore.

The Boomer generation has dominated since coming of age in the 1960s, making that a famously tumultuous decade. Yet now, Millennials, who are more diverse and focused on issues such as the environment and cultural tolerance, have begun to outnumber them. This represents a seismic shift in values and outlook.

The US government observes that due to demographic shifts, economic incentives, conflict and climate disruptions, migration from developing countries in the global south to more prosperous countries in the global north will increase. This migration has economic benefits, but also fuels income inequality and social instability, straining political systems.

Another major shift is from fossil fuels to renewables. The International Energy Agency reports that renewables are on course to meet almost half of global electricity demand by 2030. This represents an extreme shift in economic power from incumbent industries to nascent ones focused on solar, wind, energy storage, nuclear and geothermal technologies.

Finally, technology is shifting from industries focused on software and consumer gadgets in which you could move fast and break things, to much more resource intensive fields such as AI, synthetic biology and industry 4.0 as well as  novel computing architectures such as quantum computing. In effect, we are seeing a shift from bits to atoms.

A Series Of Countervailing Forces

Before 1789, most conflicts were between states and religions. Eventually a homeostasis was reached in the form of the  Treaty of Vienna and the Concert of Europe that prevailed in the 19th century. In the 20th century, the lines of battle were on more ideological grounds between Capitalism, Socialism, and Fascism. Eventually, things settled into a détente.

Today, the traditional lines of battle are shifting one again. Consider that a number of prominent members of the incoming Republican administration, including Donald Trump, RFK Jr, Tulsi Gabbard and Elon Musk, were Democrats 15 years ago, while Republican stalwarts like Dick and Liz Cheney supported Kamala Harris for President. It’s clear that the old categories of “right” and “left” no longer suffice.

Today there are new sets of countervailing forces. The first is between universalism and community-based standards, playing out in issues ranging from vaccines to abortion. The second, between meritocracy,—which in its extreme form manifests itself in the Übermensch philosophy of crypto libertarians such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel— and the cultural relativism that often manifests itself as wokism.

Underlying all of these is the tension between networks and hierarchies. Technology is allowing us to connect in ways that transcend time and space, leading many to question the role of leaders and the sovereignty of governments (e.g. the Seasteading movement). Yet there is growing evidence that there are advantages to hierarchies, and disadvantages to networks, that are often missed. Effective governance needs to account for both.

While the full picture will become clearer in hindsight, it is evident that the new lines of conflict are only beginning to emerge. They will take years, perhaps decades, to play out.

The End of History?

In 1989, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama published an essay in the journal The National Interest entitled The End of History, which led to a bestselling book. Many took his argument to mean that, with the defeat of communism, US-style liberal democracy had emerged as the only viable way of organizing a society.

He was misunderstood. Fukuyama pointed out that even if we had reached an endpoint in the debate about ideologies, there would still be conflict because of people’s need to express their identity. What many thought to be a justification, was actually a warning to expect people to rebel against order imposed on them from outside their communities.

I began to better understand this when I went to live in Moscow for a time in 2003. It was my view, as it was of most Americans, that we had won the Cold war. In Poland, where I had lived for six years, people felt similarly. Yet Russians felt otherwise. In their view, they had not lost, but had been betrayed by Gorbachev. “This must have been what Weimar Germany must have felt like,” I remember thinking. “They are biding their time, plotting their return.”

The truth is that every revolution inspires its own counterrevolution and the pendulum will continue to swing until there can be some agreement about shared values and how to move forward. Lasting change is always built on common ground and there is precious little of that in this particular moment. Even the lines defining the battle are just now being drawn.

We won the Cold War not because we were able to overpower, but because we could attract. Nobody ever truly capitulates, not really. The human need for status and identity are too strong for that. They may surrender and retreat, but they will always be plotting their return. The forces of discontinuity will continue to prevail, until the forces of continuity are able to build strength, and are ready to take over.

The future will be shaped by choices we make—or don’t make. While many of these decisions will revolve around technology and economics, both are ultimately shaped by deeper questions about who we are and who we aspire to become. That’s why dominance will always be fleeting. Until we make our minds up about our identity and aspirations, conflict will continue.

As Josep Borrell put it, “It’s the identity, stupid.

Greg Satell is Co-Founder of ChangeOS, a transformation & change advisory, an international keynote speaker, host of the Changemaker Mindset podcast, bestselling author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change and Mapping Innovation, as well as over 50 articles in Harvard Business Review. You can learn more about Greg on his website, GregSatell.com, follow him on Twitter @DigitalTonto, his YouTube Channel and connect on LinkedIn.

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