The sun rises, reaches its zenith, declines. The tides obey the moon. The heart beats, with a regularity that is almost an affront to our presumed complexity. But ask a man – especially a man sitting before a screen, with an academic title or a following of thousands – to tell you what will happen tomorrow in that vague land we call “geopolitics,” and everything turns dark. Not a fertile darkness, pregnant with possibilities, but the sterile one of ignorance disguised as wisdom. We collect their words as we once collected trading cards, only to discover, year after year, that we have filled albums with errors. Gaza, Damascus, Beirut, Kyiv, the Persian Gulf, Caracas: a rosary of catastrophes announced with apocalyptic tones or downplayed with unscrupulous levity, but never, or almost never, understood in their tragic, simple, profoundly human logic. We cheer. We comment. We pontificate. And meanwhile, the world burns with a flame none of these soothsayers saw spark.

The obsession with the “stand-in” of the moment – the President, the Prime Minister, the Strongman – is the most acute symptom of this blindness. We attribute to a single individual the power to divert the course of a river that has been flowing for centuries. In 2026, this is no longer merely an analytical error. It is intellectual bad faith. It is the refusal to look at the tectonic plates moving beneath our feet – the slow agony of a hegemonic order, the imperturbable rise of new powers, the genetic mutation of global capitalism, the hunger for dignity of entire peoples – in order to stare instead at the puppet on the stage, mistaking its gestures for the action of the drama. We debate whether he is an isolationist or an interventionist, a pragmatist or a madman, while the machinery of the state, corporate interests, the weight of history proceed on their way, heedless of the day’s protagonist. The presidency, in this drift, is infantilized: reduced to a spectacle of moods and quips, where the expert of the hour is replaced by the most skillful flatterer and decisions arise from whims, not analysis.

The Science of Failure and the Siren’s Song

Research, cold and unassailable as glass, tells us what the experts’ pride refuses to admit: when it comes to predicting major social and political movements, their performance is indistinguishable from that of an ordinary citizen or a naive statistical method. The curriculum, the publications, the media fame do not matter. Domain-specific expertise does not guarantee accuracy. Why? Because their causal models are simplified toys, they confuse levels of analysis, they fall in love with the theory of the moment and dismiss with contempt everything that does not fit. They are cartographers drawing elegant maps of a non-existent continent, while the real earth beneath them quakes and splits.

And yet, the chorus does not cease. On the other side of the spectrum, beyond the drawing rooms and lecterns, another kind of preaching resounds. Here they do not sell complex models, but mythical narratives. The world is reduced to a Manichean clash between Good and Evil, and every event, however chaotic or banal, is forced into this reassuring scheme. A tweet is a coded message. An electoral defeat is a clever move. A military attack is a feint. They build paranoid cathedrals where every stone is a clue and every doubt is proof of naivety. These cantors, these sectarians, do not analyze: they decipher. Reality loses all its thickness, all its annoying ambiguity, and becomes a heroic comic strip. The result is not understanding, but an emotional dependency. The follower does not seek truth, he seeks confirmation of his fairy tale, the thrill of being part of the Illuminati who have figured it all out. It is the surrender of reason to the need for a fabulous order. And it is a flourishing business.

In the middle, between the arrogance of the fallacious expert and the gullibility of the fanatical follower, lies life. The real one. It flows fast, with its concrete difficulties: the mortgage to pay, faltering health, the job that isn’t there, love that is born and dies. To steal time and energy running after these two categories of charlatans – those in ties and those in conspiracy theorist t-shirts – is a theft of existence. It is to avert one’s gaze from one’s own unique, unrepeatable, difficult world to stare at shadows on a screen.

The Devastation of the Present and the Cult of the Future

Take the recent facts, not as textbook examples, but as still open wounds. Gaza razed. Did we see it coming? Perhaps. But was it presented as inevitable, or as a move in a larger game, forgetting the specific weight of each single life cut short? Damascus fallen in days. How many had forecast the resistance of a regime that by then had little left to lose? Beirut devastated. Had the balance of terror, that dark and precise mathematics, been understood, or did we simply witness, here too, a clash of preconceived narratives? Ukraine. The grave geostrategic error of those who believed they could buy off a power with imperial pride, making it a junior partner, is now plain for all to see. But for years it was derided as alarmism. Some unions of states, meanwhile, discover they are economic giants but political dwarfs, shaped by events rather than shapers, dependent and divided. And Venezuela, Yemen… are they, for our gurus, anything more than names on a map onto which to project their own ideologies?

The contradiction is that this frenzy to predict the future makes us blind to the present. We do not see what is, because we are hypnotized by what could be. It is a theft of reality. As if a man, standing on a beach at night, stared so intently at the horizon to guess the dawn that he failed to notice the waves lapping at his feet, the breeze, the sand under his soles. That sand is our only dwelling.

The problem is not that predictions are often wrong. The problem is that our confidence in them prevents us from adequately preparing for uncertainty, which is the only certainty.

So, what is left to do? Unlearn. Stop looking for the prophet. Suspend judgment. Observe. Observe the bare facts, stripped of the ornament of hasty interpretation. Read the numbers, the maps, the documents, before the commentaries. Accept the discomfort of not-knowing. Perhaps, from this silence, a humbler, slower, more rooted understanding might be born. It will not serve to predict the next coup or the next market crash. But it will serve to live, with more awareness and less fear, the time given to us. To recognize beauty and danger as they present themselves, not as they are announced. To stop cheering, and start understanding. Life, yours, is slipping away at this very moment. It is up to you to decide whether to look it in the face, or to continue staring at the clouds, searching for the shape of a dragon or a savior.

#Geopolitics #FailedPredictions #Expertise #ConspiracyTheories #CurrentEvents #MediaAnalysis #CriticalThinking #Nostr