Horizons and The Arena

Next month, I will leave my job, country, and continent. The coming months are as of yet undefined, but they are not directionless. I will touch on that briefly, but first a short reflection.

Just over a century ago, Theodore Roosevelt stood before a packed, jostling audience in Paris. With dark clouds of the war gathering over the horizon, the former President looked over his small thin spectacles at his continental admirers, and in a resonant voice, delivered what in my view remains one of the finest speeches of the 20th century. “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.” No, said he. “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds.”

We live in an age of democratised cynicism. There has never been an easier time to be a critic. Now, we should carefully distinguish cynicism from criticism; for one does not necessarily beget the other. Roosevelt’s loose definition of the former shall suffice: “A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities - all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness.” But the cynic does not buy equity in shaping the future: they exist only in that moment. No cynic will ever find a place among the heroes of Thomas Carlyle, despite the alluring temptation to look around many parts of our lives and politics today and find comfort in this form of expression.

Roosevelt’s driving point was as follows: “the main source of national power and national greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation.” If this is true, he argued, that means “the average cannot be kept high unless the standard of the leaders is very much higher.” I have thought long about this conclusion. How can it be married with the Carlylean vision of a world shaped by the actions of a handful of truly exceptional individuals: the poet, the warrior, priest or king?

Perhaps the pair can be reconciled by distinguishing moments from systems. Carlyle is strongest at moments of rupture, when the agency of a few exceptional individuals becomes disproportionately consequential. Roosevelt is strongest over the long run: the character of a republic’s citizens shapes the leaders it produces, the freedom they have to act and the standards to which they are held and by which they are judged. So what role for the rest of us? I have arrived at this: we can actively resist cynicism, uphold those standards and, when we sense a consequential moment approaching, commit whatever agency we possess to shaping it for the better.

For the last few years I have had an unusual vantage point, both inside and outside the British Political Arena. Half inside Westminster’s machinery, I have watched and contributed to work on foreign policy, AI, defence, strategy, and many other matters at close range, day in and day out, speaking to a wide network of sources and institutions about the issues at hand. Half outside, I first ran a company analysing this world, which gave me the intense privilege of meeting hundreds of people from dozens of countries and organisations, from Delhi to DC, before serving as head of policy for an organisation straddling geopolitics and emerging technologies.

When you are granted the grace to look up beyond the tyranny of the present, you can spot patterns. Recurring concerns, warnings buried deep in scorecards, hushed conversations taking place in quiet rooms. To my ear, there is a murmur building, rolling gently across my line of vision like a thick haar on an ancient Scottish morning. The most capable AI systems are treated by their own makers - and the world’s most powerful governments, including Britain - as potential biological proliferation risks. Yes, a huge amount of extremely good work is going on internally, yes there are many exciting discoveries on the horizon, and yes, there are still many moats that offer a level of protection. Yet many of those I deeply respect have begun to ring the bell, and it is unclear to me if those peals are being heard throughout governments and in key boardrooms outside of San Francisco.

I care deeply about Britain. I profoundly care about this nation’s future, and about identifying those moments and individuals whose actions could be disproportionately consequential for this country as the geopolitical and technological tectonic plates beneath us move. So for the next section of my life, the ambition is to go deep on biology and emerging technologies from a security point of view, and I have already been fortunate enough to seek insight and guidance from some brilliant individuals and organisations working on this matter. I do not imagine I can solve this problem. But I think I can be useful. For I suspect this approaching era needs more people who sit between policymakers and technical experts, between translation and strategic direction and intuition, between cultures, who take immense satisfaction in moving complex ideas through difficult and often opaque incentive structures.

This, then, is the Arena I shall be joining.

One of my favourite novellas was published the third winter after I was born. ‘Story of Your Life’ by Ted Chiang runs to just over a couple of dozen pages, but asks a central question: if you could see your whole life before your eyes, would you change anything? As it closes, the protagonist ponders: “From the beginning I knew my destination, and I chose my route accordingly. But am I working toward an extreme of joy, or of pain? Will I achieve a minimum, or a maximum?”

I do not pretend to know my destination, but I know my direction. It is time to enter a new Arena, to get the dust and sweat on my face, and to venture into this unknown. So I choose my route accordingly.

Sam Hogg, July 2026