2025: The Year of Agency
This year, let's turn inward first, then outward again, with a stronger locus of control.
Much of the West has fallen victim to cultures that seek to externalize one’s locus of control. Without that locus of control, finding scapegoats and villains around every corner is too easy. This is an invitation for a few of us to reclaim our agency.
I recognize that 2024 was a year in which we collectively scrutinized so many of humanity’s evils—as the contours of depraved power syndicates were revealed.
But 2025 is the year we seize control—not of others but of ourselves.
It’s too easy to chase comfort, whether one more bite, one more video, or one more degree of re-circulated air.
It’s too easy to blame the migrants, the partisans, the oligarchs, the healthcare system, the education system, systemic racism/sexism, or MAGA.
It’s too easy to withdraw into the digital world and become a society of house cats—fat, lazy, weak, and quick to yowl demands of others.
It’s too easy to forget what virtues are, much less how to practice them. Those who forget to practice the virtues treat politics as morality. It is not.
It’s too easy to outsource core responsibilities to functionaries, middlemen, or people making promises they can never keep. In our disappointment, we whine but fail to act.
Don’t listen to the voices claiming willpower is too scarce or that some political figure, celebrity, or influencer will deliver our salvation. The best any such person can do is afford us more elbow room to exercise our agency, and only for a time. Those who seek power will always be among us. And we must become the counterpower.
But first, we must engage the process—assess, deliberate, and act—which is central to our spiritual annealing. In doing so, we will naturally find one another and organize ourselves, which is also our path to exodus. The cottony confines of the recent past will no longer hold us, but the present will not always be comfortable.
We must regard our posterity as our master and be its humble servants. We must look to the past and accumulate wisdom from those who succeeded and failed before us. We must learn to command the present through a more highly developed internal locus of control.
We can see ourselves as cut adrift on oarless boats. Or we can look inward and see our fates as red-hot steel waiting to be pounded into shape.
I was first introduced to the concept of locus of control by two of my mentors, Bill Casey and Claudine Paris, trainers extraordinaire, decades ago. Two things I learned. When people take responsible for their choices, they feel more powerful, even if they fail. Second, one reason that oppressive authority flourishes is that there are too many people looking for someone else or something else to rescue them too much of the time.
Viktor Frankl, the Austrian neurologist, psychologist, philosopher, and Holocaust survivor, also wrote about personal responsibility.
"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
To be clear, we might not be responsible for what happens to us, but we can be responsible for how we react and what we then do.
This is a simple (simplistic?) model of the concepts I created for my workplace classes in communication, management, and leadership.
Internal Locus (Point of Control)
• I am responsible for my choices.
• I can learn to choose how I respond to life, including the behavior of other people.
• I can find out how to get what I want.
• Success is knowable and replicable.
• I can create and execute a plan.
• I set goals for the future, learn from the past, and take action today.
• I can learn new behavior.
External Locus (Point of Control)
• I am not responsible for my life.
• Other people and situations create my life.
• I am not responsible for my behavior, including my responses to other people.
• I will never know how to get what I want.
• Success is a magical accident.
• I react instead of plan.
• I only know the present and the past, not the future.
• I don’t believe I can learn new behavior.
Best wishes for the New Year.
I for one will accept the invitation to reclaim our agency, I really like how you put it here. I've been interested in this idea for a while now as a form of Bodisatva agent in the world.
Does anyone follow Doug Rushkoff's work,? he has also been expressing a very similar message.