It's a wrap

At the start of this year, I had a stressed-out family, a nervous cat, a substantial electricity bill because our heating was all electric, some neighbours who judging by the noises, kept horses in their flat on the floor above ours, a comfortable job, and a small but growing audience on the Substack newsletter I started last summer.

As the year progressed, the world began to change in ways that some would have called unexpected but were, in hindsight, only a matter of time. The geopolitical shifts, the European energy crisis that began last year but fully blossomed this year, the oil price rise and OPEC’s response to it, the double-down on the energy transition — it was a good year for the news industry, with big, important things happening every day, sometimes many at the same time.

It was in a lot of ways a depressing year as well. Most of the news was bad and for me personally 2022 will go down in history as the year when the bar of stupidity was pushed to a record high, pretty much like natural gas prices in Europe. Sadly, it wasn’t just stupidity that we had to witness and, for many of us, experience this year.

Energy wasn’t the only story out there and neither was the war in the Ukraine although they certainly held the spotlight. While we were all watching this spotlight, several countries traditionally praised for their democratic ways moved in a direction that few would have dreamed of just a few years ago, even though the process was already underway.

Canada froze the personal accounts of Canadian citizens because it disagreed with their views on its healthcare policies and how these citizens chose to express these views.

New Zealand’s government declared that it is the only source of information people should believe and, most recently, encouraged New Zealanders to report on their friends, neighbours, and strangers if they seem suspicious, suspicious here meaning people with potentially extreme political views, including dissent with the New Zealand government’s healthcare policies. Oh, and they also banned smoking for all those born after 2008.

In the UK, children were being taught to not be afraid of strangers approaching them on the street but treat them as friends and adult women were being taught to not worry if they come across a man in the ladies’s room but treat them as friends.

In both the UK and the U.S., the use of the word “woman” declined, actively discouraged, in favour of alternatives such as “birthing individual” and “menstruating individual” to reflect an accelerating trend in the new and highly fascinating field of identity politics that seeks to do away with biological facts and replace them with a spectrum of choices, often based on mood and hormonal imbalances.

The urge to dispense with facts, however, was not just reserved for identity politics. With far longer traditions in doing this, energy politics was the star this year in the sports discipline of fact-ignoring.

It is likely to retain the top spot next year as well while previous bastions of democracy continue on their way to full-blown totalitarianism, complete with various charming forms of censorship, encouragement of people to report on other people with dissenting opinions, and the constant threat that if you don’t sing in the government-conducted choir, you may well lose access to your money with an option on losing tour freedom, too.

Questioning the human origin of climate change is now a criminal offence in the court of public opinion across the West, punishable by aggressive mocking on social media and very probably by reputational damage in real life although this is just speculation on my part.

The West seems to be trying for its own version of what we used to call socialism in Eastern Europe once upon a time. This version is strikingly similar to the version we had, or so I’ve heard from those who spent most of their lives during that time.

Now that I’ve got you good and depressed, and possibly a bit agitated, here’s the good news. The truth began to leak through the cracks of the dominant narrative this year at a steadier flow than ever before.

Climate scepticism increased, not least because people were too preoccupied with worrying if there will be enough energy, so they had less time to worry about the source of that energy. EV scepticism increased or, I suspect, simply came out of the shadows, including, notably, in the car manufacturing industry.

Identity politics began drawing all sorts of attention, including the kind of journalistic attention that can — and did — lead to the urgent shutdown of at least one so-called gender reassignment clinic in the U.S., after an investigation revealed the owner had referred to it as basically a money-making machine.

The totalitarian ambitions demonstrated by the leaders of supposedly democratic world powers also began to draw attention, probably because of their scale and fast pace of advancement. Whether this attention will lead to a change or not remains, as always, to be seen but I’d say attention is a good start.

With all this attention going into previously dark places, carefully kept out of the public eye, it has certainly been a busy year for a lot of people, including me. At the end of it, I feel like I’ve been saying the same things over and over again three times a week, four weeks a month except my mid-year break.

That feeling is probably caused by the fact that there are not many problems facing us today but even though their number is low, the metastases of these problems are multiple and, as I’ve said before, using one of my favourite quotes, nothing good ever follows multiple.

I won’t stop harping on about the things I have been harping on this year, however. I strongly believe that the best way to effect a change for the better in a society devolving into totalitarianism (and it’s not just the aforementioned four former democracies, it’s a broader trend) is to call out the criminal mistakes politicians make, their idiotic agendas, and their corrupt motivation in many if not most decisions.

A couple of months ago, a reader who I like to count among the new friends I made after I started this Substack, told me something along the lines of “Okay, it’s bad, it’s horrible, I get it, but what can we do to change that?”

My answer was and remains: Keep calling them out. Keep shining the light, any light, on shady dealings, blatant lies, and obvious untruths. It’s thankless and it’s depressing but someone has to do it and the more of us do it, the more people we can reach and, hopefully, spark some interest in the workings of today’s world and raise some questions. It’s the only way I see of avoiding having to ask one quite horrible question: What the hell happened and how did we get here?

At the end of this rollercoaster of a year, I have a calm family, a happy cat, a neighbour with an actual horse that he keeps in a stable, a fire to stare at while I drink my pre-dinner beer, a comfortable, though often quite emotionally taxing, job that I love, and several thousand people who seem to think what I have to say deserves their attention. Please accept my sincere gratitude. It’s been great having you here.

Happy holidays to each and every one of you. Eat, drink, wear your new clothes, and be merry because next year will probably be no better than this one. The silver lining is that the sooner the dominant narrative breaks down under its own considerable weight, the sooner the healing process can begin. I’ll see you in January.