Pop culture has portrayed the cynical genius as the archetype of supreme intelligence.

But what if cynicism isn’t a mark of intelligence, but a mark of worse life outcomes and lower intelligence?

🧵 I explained why in last week’s newsletter, but here’s a cliff notes version: The cynic, we were told, is the one who’s finally honest. The one who’s been burned too many times to believe what the rest of the normies and NPCs believe.

They are the ones smart enough to see through the lies of the Matrix.

The problem with this story is that it runs completely contrary to the scientific evidence.

2024 was a vibe shift.

What trends can we expect in culture in 2025?

Here are 5 predictions based on my cultural analysis, starting with the “Religious Renaissance” hitting the Joe Rogan Experience in 2025. 🧵 1. The Religious Renaissance Comes to Joe Rogan

Joe Rogan is the most influential voice in media today. Not that long ago, Rogan sounded like most online New Atheists decrying the evils of religion.
But over the last several years, Rogan’s attitudes towards religion, and specifically Christianity, has been changing.

His trajectory seems to be follow the path of many who have left New Atheism for the Religious Renaissance.

This week @WesleyLHuff a Christian biblical scholar announced he was going on Rogan. This will be a pivotal moment in Rogan’s changing attitudes towards Christianity.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Rogan becomes a Christian in 2025.

America's culture war isn't primarily political.

What's really going on is a struggle over whether our culture should be more masculine or feminine.

If you want to understand what's happening, you should study the work of social psychologist Geert Hofstede. 🧵
Geert Hofstede was a Dutch social psychologist best known for his pioneering work on "cultural dimensions theory. "
Partnering with IBM's research power, he developed a framework for analyzing cultural differences and their impact on work and organizations.

Here are 3 more signs of a cultural shift that happened upstream of politics that most professional political analysts missed.
Again, some of these may seem absurd at first, but hear me out 🧵
Let’s start with the transformation of Post Malone into a country music superstar:

https://twitter.com/paulanleitner/status/1854250419679121824

1. Post Malone’s Turn to Country Music

Few expressions of music feel as uniquely American as country music, and yet country music has been largely disdained by those in the intelligentsia.

But go to just about any construction site in America, or hop in the pick up truck of union trade worker and you’re bound to hear the sounds of country music.

Post Malone’s shift toward country music and the broader rise of country music in popular cultured captured the same spirit as the shift toward unabashed celebration of movies like Top Gun: Maverick and Twisters.

I don't study politics, but I do study culture, and here are some of the signs that a cultural shift has been brewing for years in America that most of the professional political analysts just completely missed.

Some of these may seem absurd, but hear me out. 🧵
We'll start with this one: The Popular Success of Top Gun: Maverick

After the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent protests and rioting in 2020, it seemed to many in the intelligentsia that “culturally relevant” films needed to directly address DEI or systemic race issues to find wide appeal.

Top Gun: Maverick instead leaned heavily on classic modernist heroism themes, embodied by a white, male protagonist (Tom Cruise as Maverick) who is a traditional, rule-breaking figure dedicated to honor, duty, and meritocracy.

Maverick represented more traditional American values of meritocracy over aristocracy amid what was supposed to be a cultural revolution intended to set up a new inverted aristocracy.

In hindsight, as I talk with people experiencing burnout in Charismatic contexts, one of the things that is so exhausting in many communities is the sense that you have to constantly reinvent something new every week.
Though no one would explicitly say this, many Charismatics... pride themselves on being the most Protestant in that they get their community identity from what they do differently in comparison to traditions that they perceive as failing. It is a liturgy of perpetual protest and reform in pursuit of continual cycles of "revival."

I held off on listening to "The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill" pod for a couple reasons:
1. I had concerns about it feeding a strange sense of Christian celebrity voyeurism already too prevalent in evangelical culture
2. I have live through... the painful demise of a church on multiple occasions & seen the full weight of devastation immoral & toxic leadership can produce. Why would I want to hear more stories about this stuff?

Yet several people I trust recommended it, so I gave it a reluctant try.

Completely speculative theory here that I'm not the first to consider:
Why did the Magi follow a star?
First, they aren't kings or just "wisemen". Magi are Persian magicians and astrologers.
Could it be that they were tracking a "Great Conjunction" of Jupiter and Saturn? A great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn (like what we'll get in a few days here) gives the appearance of one heavenly body.
Their coming together would have symbolic significance too for ancient astrologers.
Saturn was a god of renewal & liberation. The reign of Saturn...

Along with what the author calls the "Church Regnant" and the "Church Remnant", I think there is a third category that needs to be acknowledged, especially in my generation and younger.

We could call this the "Church Revolutionary"...

christianitytoday.com/ct/2020/novemb… via @CTmagazine The Church Regnant has long had a propensity to culture war. The Church Revolutionary is largely comprised of the children of that war who have been spiritually formed by the liturgy of culture war but are now applying that energy to a left-leaning ideological vision.

In my experience, people who have been raised in the church and then go on to reject that faith later in life do so because of the following reasons:
1. Moral failures of leaders
2. They were told young earth creationism is the Gospel & find overwhelming evidence contrary to it 3. They experience evil and suffering and are given poorly thought out cliches that dont help
4. They were told that you can only be a Christian if you hold to Republican ideology