2025, the kayfabe year, or, the year of performance

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kayfabe

Kayfabe is a term used in professional wrestling to describe the act of portraying staged events as genuine

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“When a fact begins to resemble whatever you feel is true, it becomes very difficult for anyone to tell the difference between facts that are true and “facts” that are not.”

Katharine Viner

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“Alternative facts aren’t facts, they are falsehoods.”

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2025. My “prediction” is it will be the year of performance, or, the kayfabe year. This year has been creeping up on us for over a decade if not more. What I mean by that is decades ago someone suggested that perception was reality. From that point on that belief has been burrowing its way into the minds of people. And while reality is fairly resistant to perception performative efforts, perception is a stubborn motherfucker because it taps into feelings more than the rational brain. In addition, along the way the performative perception artists gained two allies. The first was the World Wide Web and social media. A relentless onslaught of fragmented truths and partial facts created a shifting ground of uncommon sensemaking. It was like a tectonic shift, all the time, in what the common public knew and understood. The second was a kind of purposeful passivity with regard to defending reality. What I mean by that is those of us who believe in reality felt like it was so obvious that perception would just bang its head against the reality wall time after time .. and get nowhere. The problem that I overlooked was that reality needed to be defended. It needed to fight back.

Which leads me to my prediction for 2025.

Perception has now roared to the head of the class and is attempting to teach everyone that reality isn’t reality and what you perceive is real and performance is more important than substance. Yeah. I believe 2025 will be the year of the performative grounded in perceptions. Let’s call it kayfabe. Kayfabe is used to create the illusion that professional wrestling is not staged. It’s similar to the suspension of disbelief used in other forms of entertainment, such as movies or soap operas. What this means is nothing can be ‘disbelieved’ and anything is possible.

Full disclosure. I have always disliked professional wrestling. Mainly because I imagine I was never able to accept the unspoken agreement between wrestlers and fans to pretend that wrestling events, characters, and stories are real.

That said. Used by performance artists, kayfabe – managing perceptions by defying reality – is all about making the people they need to believe; believe. In addition, you need others to not only believe, but ‘do.’ Yeah. In this version of a performative world while the performance artists are seeking something for themselves, they are also asking others to do things. It is within the ‘ask’ in which performance artists are most insidious. What I mean by that is they make things black & white, simplistic to a fault, in a world in which reality is more often found in the greys and nuance. They thrive in the black & white because in this world of judgement of actions “the perception is ‘x’, they didn’t deliver ‘x’, therefore ‘x’ is not reality.” Yeah. Real behavior is judged on perceptions. Upon a razor thin line perception and reality dangles.

Which leads me to politics.

To be clear, politics as I am referring to it also resides in business. What I mean by that is business has always had the ‘performance douchebags,’ the ones who acted confidently, spoke confidently, treated perceptions confidently, none of which matched reality. We have always had people in business who have not only been attracted to those douchebags, but actually followed them. And therein lies the problems of performance anywhere. This kind of politics begins to mix the fake world of perceptions with reality, bringing real tension (in an individual as well as in society) through a mindfuck of what might or might not be real; what is possible and what is probable. The mindfuck resides in all the people having to constantly figure out, and debate, what is real and what is not. This all gets exacerbated by the performance artists who view no perception as off-limits. In fact, it almost seems like the more outrageously non-real, the better because in this warped performative world it seems to create a higher likelihood the mindfucked people begin seeing it as, well, reality. To the performance artists its ‘better’ because in this blurry world of ‘I feel’ versus ‘reality’ no one can figure out if what they are seeing is real or not. Its dangerous for society because this performance politics, this kayfabe, is grounded in a slick configuration of muddied isolated factoids, half-truths, and unequivocal lies, all delivered with unequivocating confidence. Within this performative world everyone loses the ability to distinguish between what’s real and what isn’t. Reality gets deconstructed on a daily basis and performance trumps substance.  As Hannah Arendt stated “the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction – the distinction between true and false no longer exist.” I bring in totalitarianism because there is not a single performance artist, in business or public life, who has the best interest of society or the public or the business in mind. They are in it for themselves and they seek power if not wealth.

Which leads me to the year of performance.

So 2025. As we, the people, decline to embrace reality for performance, on occasion it will be a year where things do not actually happen, but it will feel like they did. Reality will be distorted when discussing real issues therefore making the issues themselves unrecognizable thereby making real solutions impossible. It will get a bit worse. The real issues become harder to distinguish from performative perception management ultimately leaving society cognitively, dysfunctionally, paralyzed. Within this dysfunction there will be a large sense of uneasiness and a larger sense we, the people, need to do something to get out of this dysfunctional malaise.  The problem is that ‘performance politicking’ (kayfabe) is difficult to ignore and difficult to combat. It’s difficult to ignore because if you ‘feel’ a sense of constant impending doom you will be drawn to scraps of performative doom to insure you don’t miss the real signs of doom. It is difficult to combat because it demands we learn to actually ‘see’ reality for what it is. It also demands, at least in today’s crisis driven social media world, we embrace kindness, hope and optimism. Nothing false, just a recognition that generally speaking the world isn’t a complete shithole to live in and most people are not shitbags.

Look. Every generation has always thought these were the ‘worst of times.’ Its almost like we ignore the full concept of “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,

it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,

it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,

it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,

it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,

we had everything before us, we had nothing before us ….”

Charles Dickens (Tale of Two Cities)

Performative people will certainly suggest the world is ending, civilization is crumbling and we are in some shithole (small or big). And performative people have mastered the art of their performance by hijacking the24/7 smartphone world which is a fragmented perception-based world. But. The truth is we cannot look away. There is no real “unhooking” because we are all connected and someone, somewhere, within your sphere is getting pummeled by performance politics and getting sucked in. Truly, the only way to navigate the year of performance is to better distinguish, and engage, with reality. The only way to beat back the year of performance is to defend reality and attack perceptions. To be clear. 2025 will not be for the faint of heart. This year will demand you fight the whole idea of “perception is reality” and “what you feel is real.”

Which leads me to ‘the fight against performance.’

The reality is, well, those of us who are grounded in reality also need to embrace some aspects of performance. Not the kayfabe version, but a performative attitude.

“We’ve been looking for the enemy for several days now. We’ve finally found them. We’re surrounded. That simplifies our problem of finding these people and killing them.”

Chesty Puller

Chesty Puller stated this when surrounded by the Chinese in the Korean War. He bent reality without changing reality. It is an attitude. Yeah. Fighting performative perceptions is tricky. I often believe it is all about part attitude and a lot of behavior. Managing perceptions is a combination of communicating what will be; and delivering what is. Let’s call it leveraging reality to showcase the future. As Blake said “if the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear infinite.”

In other words. If you manage perceptions; anything is possible.

In other words. If people start thinking about reality, i.e., what is; they start thinking about what could be.

In the end, let us be very clear on two things:

1.        Let me repeat that while I call it performative politics, it is performance within business as well as public governance.

Business and public governance have a symbiotic relationship. I believe this has become even more true with the rise of a performative business person like Trump. Business will mirror politics. If politicians push the extremism of performance, and warping of perceptions, more business people – at all levels in a business – will push the extremism of performative shit. It has always existed in business, but it is gonna get exponentially worse n 2025.

2.       Let me repeat some basic Truths.

–          Alternative facts live only in an alternative universe.

–          Perception is not reality.

As someone who has dabbled in marketing professionally “perception is reality” truly galls me. It is an ugly lie. And it is even uglier because in an untrained, inexperienced mind, or a misguided lack of moral individual, it can be used to defraud people – unintentionally or intentionally.

Perception is perception. Reality is reality. And perception is reality only, and ONLY if you permit it to be so.

As we all head into 2025 let me state a fact. Perception is hollow unless it is truly a reflection of reality. How do we know this? If you puncture perception, it deflates to whatever reality is. That is a ‘full, honest, perception.’ Let me be clear, when you float on the superficial surface of a “perception-based Life” you can only get away with it until people get interested enough to actually interact because interaction is when the piper gets paid. James Carse said it the best: “conversations are the smallest units of change.” Performance artists know this which is why they never stop talking bullshit – day in and day out, hour after hour. Maybe my point here is that in 2025 silence just ain’t gonna cut it for reality. Reality needs loud, concise, clear, voices engaging in the conversations. Small unit after small unit deflating a performance, perception, based world.  Kayfabe only exists if we permit it to, but, kayfabe will attempt to rule 2025. Ponder.