Where do we go from here?

“the beginning of the power of the powerless.”

I am not sure if 2026 could be any different year from the other years we’ve warmed out hearts to. I ain't a pessimist but every time we rehearse on the last day of the year, with blasts of fireworks, toasts of champagne and countdown ululations, and devotedly hoping and praying for the best, the worst happens.

Each year, we've gone through unique tribulations, misses, surprises of small victories. Some won against all ods, some we surrendered to the currents of time to sweep it away. And 2025 was no different, except it ranks far more weirder because it kicked off, in high gear, the decimation of already fragile institutions of social, legal and political order. Along way the interests of power took precedence over the interests of the people.

Today, if you are in America, you are more horrified of being an American because you have the arduous job of proving you're an American under the butt (I had to use it) of an ICE gun even with the undeniable evidence of naturalisation by birth. How will, in these unreasonable times, an ordinary American feel in front of an ordinary Venezuelan? Or commence a casual talk? Apologize or justify the absurdity? If you are in West Africa, you don’t know when the next coup is but you know it’s possible. It's a script you've seen played out before. An Israelian and an Iranian meanwhile know more of missiles and domes than any innovation to cure diseases. It’s an inverted world we now have to grapple with or let it descent further.

I am not an expert on geopolitics but for a long time we have relied on rule-based international order to oversee participatory governance o divergent interests, inject some sense of dignity, bind states to some values, enforce crossboarder integrity in all manner of transactions. This brought everyone— including foes and allies— under the same roof of consensus and compromise. But that rules based international order has since been ruptured.

What we now remain with is great power rivalry without restraints. Loyalty over competence. Obedience over merit. The end of a nice story as we know it.

So, where do we go from here?

you and I, in this era of competing madness, may not have so much options but the least we could do is reject the easiest path; shrink at the slightest intimidation.

We can as a retaliatory but strategic resolve shove in the philosophy of Camus which he called the revolt (the third path) to survive the survivable. To desert from your our turmoil is to spill away your own powers to the absurd, Camus warned. This is the only option, we the preyed on, have at the moment.

To further emboldened our arsenal of the third path, we can emulate the ancient Myth of sisyphus, a man who didn’t tire rolling the boulder up the hill. Even when it boomeranged again and again, he didn’t victimised himself. He turned this energy-depleting despair into a moment of redemption. Every return journey downhill to recover the rock hardened him into a man who is superior to his fate.

You and I are now not different from Sisyphus. The same ball of fate now rolls in our court. The current wave of politic is stripping away the victims of their rights and dignity and blames them for their vulnerabilities while an army of predators is glorified.

But the choice is ours. We either shrink our voices further, which is the easiest thing to do and the easiest way to lose our freedom (politically, socially, legally, or economically) or alternatively return downhill to harden our might to strike back.

It is a hard moment to be alive, a moment no one at the back of their mind could imagine they would one day shoulder more than they're capable of. But it’s even harder if we huddled together in horror like a lost flock of sheep under fear of state-sanctioned violence and watch the predators of injustices maul our tranquility, human progress, and global connection. The strong would take anything they set their eyes on and the rest would not have any backbone of resistance to take any recourse like it’s happening now everywhere else.

What we are witnessing is hurtful, indecent, snarky. The dismantling of the old order of great power display and dependence systems is ripping off not only our age-old social-political-economic tools of human ingenuity and prosperity but also regressing our hard-earned civility.

But the Canadian prime minister in his Davos speech this week has a new suggestion, an observation that may set out the new world order in the coming years; “the beginning of the power of the powerless.” While in his mind he was referring to the not-so-great states, I have a different angle of interpretation extrapolating the shift of powers away from institutions.

This power, the human freedom to stand on your own without states or institutions or limiting ceilings, has already played out well elsewhere, as manifested in the decentralisation of institutions, like mainstream media, finance, universities. I don't want to shed so much light on this but you know, in this tech era, you can study a four-year college course in a 4-week binch-watching in YouTube or podcasts. In the same note, Substack and social media has given me and you the power to distribute our own voices, angles of our opinions and observations without the old gatekeepers. All these handed us the freedom to operate from a place of authenticity rather than obedience and fear.

And soon given the shifting contexts of geopolitics, these same trends might culminate in the decentralisation of our political rights which for a long time had been abused by institutions like parties.

I have no idea how these will take shape but I feel the events shaping up are setting up a precedent for that direction.

Happy new year

P.S

What is it that surprised you and didn’t expect to happen last year? Will the US recover from DT syndrome? How are you coping to remain sane in an insane world? Will you brave the sisyphus moment or coil your tail under pressure?

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