Fear sells. Extreme fear sells faster. And today I’d like to address the five-fold ministry of fear that is taking over the human race.

From politics to religion, from finance to technology, and from artistic expression to sexuality, humans of every stripe, from every social stratum, and from all corners of the globe are surrendering personal and collective responsibility to systems that have either already enslaved them or soon will. Some want the state to redistribute wealth. Banks want to centralized crypto while robots replace dock workers and accountants. Meanwhile, doctrinal purists want to certify the faithful. As for fiction, it makes for a great warning system but don’t count on it to be your savior.

I’ll leave sex out of it. We’ve got enough problems.

If you’ve got the sense that the future is dystopian, welcome to the club. Below are five recent developments that have me so tied up in knots that I might just write them down.

Dystopian Nightmare No. 1: The Red Kiss

Seventy-six years ago, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy asserted that he had a list of communists working in the U.S. state department. Three years before that, the House Un-American Activities Committee had already launched its persecution of Hollywood celebrities it considered communists or communist sympathizers. The list of celebrities affected numbers in the hundreds and includes such luminaries as Charlie Chaplin, Pete Seeger, Langston Hughes, and Irwin Shaw.

Some, like Chaplin, were effectively exiled.

Known as the Second Red Scare, it has proven to be one of the darkest periods in U.S. history. But history has not run its course.

Many on the left seem to have forgotten that communism is responsible for millions of deaths and other abuses in the 20th century. They’ve replaced the Red Scare with a Red Kiss by openly embracing communism.

For more than thirty years, comedian Bill Maher has been a consistent critic of Republicans. For good reason. In a recent , however, he dropped the hammer — and the sickle — on the Democratic Socialists of America, who have openly embraced Marxism and typically vote for the Democratic candidate in presidential elections. Now, they want to run their own candidate.

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I believe in the First Amendment, and that means everyone should be free to believe what they want, say what they want, and support the causes they believe in. What scares me is that socialism and communism have both grown in popularity in recent years.

A 2025 Cato/YouGov survey found that 34 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 viewed communism favorably. Gallup found broader support for socialism: 66 percent of Democrats viewed it positively, while only 42 percent said the same about capitalism. Another Gallup poll found that 54 percent of Americans viewed capitalism positively in September 2025, down from 60 percent four years earlier, while 39 percent viewed socialism positively; 81 percent view free enterprise positively and 95 percent view small businesses positively. People do not hate markets. They hate being trapped inside markets controlled by institutions too large to challenge. Still, a trend is a trend.

Socialism and communism are different philosophies, but the above numbers reveal a generation willing to trust centralized authority to manage economic interests in the name of misplaced justice.

That’s sad. And it makes me wonder if history is on the verge of repeating itself.

Stalin’s forced collectivization helped produce the 1932–33 famine across Ukraine and other Soviet regions. Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge pursued a classless agrarian utopia through forced labor and execution — nearly two million people died.

To be sure, capitalism isn’t perfect. It can concentrate wealth, reward exploitation, lead to political fiefdoms, and create unfettered monopolies. According to the World Bank, cartels have raised consumer prices by an average of 49 percent around the globe.

Despite its downsides, capitalism has created more prosperity than any other economic system because markets distribute economic decision-making and reward participants for creating value. Its failures call for restraints and reforms, not abolition.

Big Tent thinking refuses to deal with bad ideas taking root and festering. While Republicans have their own examples, the problem with the Democratic Party is that it is being colonized by an ideology it has historically rejected. If this trend continues, the Red Kiss could result in a deadly kiss for all of us.

Dystopian Nightmare No. 2: The Death of Decentralization

Crypto started as a decentralized peer-to-peer money system. It has transformed into a corporate slogan.

What drew me to crypto in the first place was the promise of autonomy, decentralization, and freedom. But somewhere along the way it has changed business suits.

I do not oppose centralization in all its forms. Governments, banks, corporations, and regulated exchanges perform useful functions. Traditional finance and decentralized finance can be partners. But a system created as an alternative to the status quo cannot preserve its core nature after the status quo captures its gateways.

Captivity has accelerated.

The Securities and Exchange Commission spent five years trying to wrangle Ripple and make it into something it isn’t. In March 2025, the United States established a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve stocked initially with forfeited assets. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency then reaffirmed that national banks may provide crypto custody, hold stablecoin reserves, use distributed ledgers for payments, and participate in node-verification networks. Some of these developments may be a good thing, but they spell the end of a pioneering era.

Still, governments now rank among the largest known Bitcoin holders. Bitcoin Treasuries estimates that the United States holds more than 328,000 BTC and China 190,000, as of late 2025. Much of that came through seizures, not purchases. Yet Strategy still holds more than either government.

Central banks have also moved. In August 2026, European Central Bank board member Isabel Schnabel argued that central banks should move on-chain to preserve their role in the financial system and prevent private stablecoins from weakening their influence. Stablecoins themselves have become more acceptable to centralized power brokers, and more than 100 countries are exploring central bank digital currencies.

These developments do not change Bitcoin’s protocol. When most users enter through regulated funds, leave their assets with a few custodians, accept bank-issued tokens, and depend on state-approved interfaces, decentralization survives in the code as it disappears from ordinary experience. And this is happening in crypto right now. Some projects even claim to be decentralized when they are as centralized as the local police department.

If banks become the locus of financial power in decentralized finance, we’ll just have another room where Wall Street dominates. The furniture might change, but the landlord is the same.

Dystopian Nightmare No. 3: Who’s Right If the Robots Win?

Elon Musk and Dario Amodei describe the same automated economy from opposite floors.

Musk looks down from the penthouse, predicting universal high income, the elimination of poverty, and a world where work is optional. I think he’s smoking rocket fuel.

Amodei, looking up from the pavement, warns that AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs and drive unemployment to 10 or 20 percent within several years. Workers in technology, finance, law, and consulting would absorb the first blow.

Looking at the same world through the same artificial intelligence lens, one sees abundance and the other displacement. Does it matter who is right when everyone who wants a job can’t have one?

Available evidence supports disruption without settling the prophecy. The International Labour Organization estimates that one in four jobs worldwide has some exposure to generative AI, but it considers job transformation more likely than wholesale replacement. Anthropic’s own early usage data found more augmentation than automation — 57 percent to 43 percent — while later research found that real-world AI use still covers only a fraction of what current systems could theoretically perform.

Online writers and artists are bickering over the ontology of human expression: whether a machine creates, whether prompting constitutes authorship, and whether synthetic work contains art or merely resembles it. The U.S. Copyright Office has already ruled that generative output receives protection only when a human determines sufficient expressive elements beyond the prompt.

I like AI. I use it every day. While I have my concerns, I’m skeptical of today’s tech prophets. I live in the real world where work produces more than income. It builds competence, status, discipline, relationships, and a sense of contribution. Removing drudgery can free people. Removing purpose can hollow them out. Musk’s abundance requires a mechanism that distributes machine-produced wealth. Amodei’s displacement leaves ownership concentrated among those who control the machines. The penthouse and the pavement may belong to the same building, but neither is a full house.

If Musk and Amodei are right, someone will have to provide incomes to everyone who can’t or won’t work. That may very well hand the Red Kiss to tomorrow’s communists on a platinum platter.

But I have a different take: everyone should learn entrepreneurial skills now. Learn how to identify a problem, create value, reach a market, own productive assets, and develop more than one source of income. Entrepreneurship will not immunize anyone against automation. But it can preserve some agency while institutions renegotiate the value of future human labor.

AI is the genie out of the bottle. Whether you like it or hate it, you can’t wish it away. And you shouldn’t make it a golden calf. The biggest downside I see is that we all wake up one day and discover that Frankenstein’s monster is our president and he’s invited all his synthetic friends to the White House for human roast. None of us will worry about jobs then.

Dystopian Nightmare No. 4: Spiritual Bones with No Flesh

If the political left has swallowed the red pill, American Christians have swallowed a bitter one. Doctrine and political ideology have become substitutes for character.

To be clear, doctrine matters. It shapes conduct. Bad theology wounds people, and first-century Christians defended essential truths. But Messiah did not arrive with a systematic-theology textbook under his arm. And the Apostle Paul wrote letters, not theses.

Jesus said the world would recognize his disciples by their love for one another. But judging from blogs, newsletters, and podcasts, one might think Christians consider doctrine more important than unity. You can see this in reactions to recent comments by William Lane Craig on the Nicene Creed. Some have gone as far as labeling departure from “Nicene orthodoxy” as “theological anarchy,” as if the creeds themselves define orthodoxy. But this view forgets that pre-Nicene theologians held widely diverse views on many matters, including the Trinity.

And let’s not forget that there is an entire genre of Christian literature devoted to the relationship between faith and works. Serious Christian thinkers can disagree amicably.

While Christian scholars have debated theological concepts for centuries, disagreeing without being disagreeable, social media and the proliferation of denominational distinctions have changed the landscape significantly. It’s become a habit for Christians to inspect each other’s doctrines — sometimes under intense interrogation — before inspecting their own fruit. Heresy hunting has become its own sport; too bad there’s no trophy. For some, disagreement is betrayal and Christ’s body is divided.

Research on America’s religiously unaffiliated has found that many young adults associate organized religion with judgment, hypocrisy, and partisan politics. The church may reject that verdict, but it cannot dismiss the witness.

A church that cannot say anything kind about its other parts will struggle to persuade the world that those parts belong to one body. A congregation can sign an orthodox statement of faith while worshiping celebrity, political power, consumer comfort, and its own correctness. But in recent years we’ve seen an outgrowth of Christian doctrine used as a political weapon in the public square. The Culture War has divided Christ’s body into Progressives and Conservatives, and neither side is winning; the church’s collective witness is losing. On that front, Christian Nationalism has taken over the conversation.

Christ’s kingdom is not a political rally.

Doctrine gives the church a skeleton. Love supplies the flesh. A skeleton may be structurally correct, but no one mistakes it for a living body.

U.S. Christians have become too political, too partisan, and too polemical. Until the church realizes God put it here to be a witness and leave the judgment to Him, there is little hope for Christ’s bride or the surrounding culture. And to be honest, the culture needs a unified church — even one it can persecute — more than the church needs to control the culture. Getting that wrong could be the worst dystopia of all.

Dystopian Nightmare No. 5: A World with No Poets

Science fiction can warn us about the future. It can’t live it for us.

Writers often recognize something in their own time that turns out to be universal. George Orwell saw how power corrupts language and manufactures consent. Aldous Huxley saw how pleasure can pacify an entire population. Karel Čapek credited his brother with coining the word “robot,” which the former used in a play titled R.U.R. about artificial workers who replace humans. Octavia Butler traced the path from inequality, ecological stress, and political grievance to social fracture.

These authors did not receive tomorrow’s newspaper in the mail. They studied their own world and followed its natural progressions into the future. But every future path has multiple potential timelines.

Fiction excels at this kind of work because it translates systems into language. A policy paper can describe surveillance, but a novel puts the camera in your living room. An economist can chart displacement. A story shows a worker explaining obsolescence to a child. But readers seldom treat science fiction as a literal forecast. Rather, they more often recognize its scenarios as plausible.

In a word, fiction supplies patterns, not timetables.

Predictions also benefit from selective memory. We preserve novels that resemble the present and forget the shelves full of futures that missed. Even accurate warnings change nothing on their own. 1984 didn’t stop mass surveillance. Brave New World didn’t cure our appetite for distraction. Then there’s the question of the chicken or the egg: do fictional predictions come true because they were obvious to those who wrote them, or did later generations act on an idea that arrived before its time?

As I write this, colleges and universities are ditching humanities and social science programs. Not because they don’t want them anymore. It’s because fewer students are seeking them. The market has moved.

That’s a terrible indictment on the future. I believe in business. I own one. I also remember fondly my college days, sitting in a classroom studying the great poets of the past, critiquing fellow writers and being critiqued by them, and learning the passions and protocols that make humans tick. Business degrees are valuable. So are law degrees, medical degrees, and STEM degrees. But, to quote Mr. Keating from Dead Poets Society, “Poetry, beauty, romance, love — these are what we stay alive for.”

The world needs more poets. It needs writers willing to look at the present, learn from the past, and point to a future we don’t want to live in — and just as important, to point to one we do want.

Sadly, reading for pleasure is in decline. On the flipside, independent bookstores are making a comeback.

I don’t know what to make of this. If people are reading fewer books, what will become of the writing profession twenty years from now? Who will be our poets? Who will be our prophets?

No matter what kind of world works out in the end, if those with moral imagination are silenced — whether by markets or political sledgehammers — we could find ourselves living in a dystopia that makes literature’s biggest nightmares feel like heaven.

What Kind of Future Do You Want?

These five dystopian futures are all sitting at our feet. Right now. We can choose them all or we can choose none. But they are here, and we must make a choice.

Will America embrace communism? Will the traditional finance system snuff out every evidence of decentralization in the economy as it takes over digital alternatives? Will AI kill every job worth having — or worse, remove our desire for work altogether? Will Christians argue the church into irrelevance and leave the surrounding culture to fight its spiritual battles alone? And will literature die as people forget how to read, or simply choose not to?

I don’t have the answers. But I can ask the questions. Today, I’m asking this: what kind of future do you want to live in?

This post was first published at Substack. Image by ChatGPT.

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