There is a Tigrigna joke my people tell.
A child comes home from school and asks his father: is it true that we came from apes? The father thinks for a moment and says, I don’t really care where we came from. I am more concerned about where we are headed.
I have spent years watching war films. Not for entertainment, exactly, though they are entertaining. I watch them the way some people read history, to understand how catastrophe arrives, and more specifically, to understand the people who saw it coming versus the people who didn’t notice until it was too late. Downton Abbey, where a family discusses the approaching war over dinner as though it is a weather system that will pass. Winds of War, where Herman Wouk traces the slow accumulation of the inevitable through the eyes of one American family moving through Europe in the late 1930s. The New Look, about Dior and Chanel navigating occupation and liberation and the strange moral compromises that survival requires.
I always wanted to be one of the ones who saw it coming. Not to stop it, necessarily. Just to be awake. I always wanted to be woke, before it was fashionable, and then unfashionable.
I am no longer sure that is a gift.
In those films, the public sleepwalked into catastrophe because information was scarce and controlled. Governments decided what people knew. The machinery of propaganda was crude but effective precisely because there was nothing competing with it. The peasant in 1914 who never heard about Sarajevo and the office worker in 1938 who trusted Chamberlain’s piece of paper arrived at the same place, unaware of what was already in motion.
We have the opposite problem now. Information moves faster than comprehension. It is cheap, abundant, and everywhere. And yet here we are, sleepwalking again, not because we know too little, but because we are drowning in too much, and the excess has made us numb. The Iran war competes for the same three seconds of attention as [insert your favorite guilty pleasure]. Urgency becomes just another content format. Distraction is no longer imposed from outside. It is the path of least resistance when everything is equally loud.
And we have been joking about World War III for so long that the phrase has lost its weight. We have used it as hyperbole so many times, over so many crises that resolved or faded, that when something starts to feel different, the language we would need to name it has already been drained of its alarm.
So we watch the news the way I used to watch those films, looking for the scenes that will matter in retrospect, the quiet moments when doors close that cannot be reopened.
Just in the last one year, we watched when USAID was dismantled at the hands of the richest man. Not reformed, not reduced. Dismantled. Decades of famine relief and disease prevention and civil society building, ended not by war or bankruptcy but by an act of will, the way you might delete a file you no longer find useful.
We watched when, with a single decree, the greatest threat to human civilization and the Earth system outside of war was declared a hoax. No counter-theory. No scientific debate. Just erasure. I wrote about this elsewhere, about what happens when ideology replaces evidence, about the scientists who paid for that substitution with their lives and their life’s work. The short version is that the Earth does not negotiate with decrees. Carbon emitted today commits the planet to warming for centuries. The grounds we lose today will never be regained.
We watched the tariff wars, each escalation and retreat and re-escalation, the Supreme Court striking down tariffs that were reimposed within hours under different legal authority, the president calling his own appointed justices disloyal and an embarrassment to their families.
We watched the abduction of a sitting head of state in Venezuela. We watched the Iran strikes begin, a joint American-Israeli operation with a name, Operation Epic Fury, which tells you something about how it was conceived, not as a response but as a statement. We watched the Senate quietly block a war powers resolution, not with drama but with a procedural vote, one more door closing without ceremony.
And then we read about Canada. Prime Minister Mark Carney, speaking in Australia this week, said he had flatly ruled out joining the attack on Iran, and then, in the same breath, said, “One could never categorically rule out participation. We will stand by our allies. It makes sense.” That is not a contradiction. That is a man narrating, with great politeness, the closing of a door he did not choose to open.
We watched the guardrails disappear, one by one, each removal individually explainable, collectively transformative. Legal guardrails. Scientific ones. Institutional ones. And the quieter ones, the unwritten norms that once made certain behaviors unthinkable in public life. I notice I am being careful here, not naming what I see as directly as I might have some time ago. That carefulness is not new to me. I have lived it before, in another country, in another time. The fact that I feel it here, now, is its own kind of data. Déjà vu is not always about memory. Sometimes it is a warning.
WWI was sleepwalking. Nobody chose a world war. They chose locally rational steps, alliance obligations, mobilization timetables, diplomatic gestures that arrived too late, and the machinery outran everyone operating it. The catastrophe was that there were no exit ramps once it started moving.
WWII was different. At least one side had a program. The catastrophe was not that nobody saw it coming. The catastrophe was that the exit ramps existed and nobody took them early enough, each accommodation feeling reasonable in isolation, each one making the next one harder to refuse.
What we are living through now looks like a hybrid. The initiation has the architecture of intention, named operations, pre-positioned proxy forces, a regime change logic that doesn’t end with airstrikes. The spread has the logic of WWI, Gulf states struck who didn’t choose this war, a prime minister giving a contradictory answer, nations with no position suddenly in crisis because the Strait of Hormuz is closed and twenty percent of the world’s oil passes through it.
So, if we are on the inevtiable path, when would we know we had crossed the point of no return? When the Senate blocked the war powers resolution? When the strikes accelerated rather than paused? When a prime minister rules something out and cannot rule it out in the same sentence? When an AI system is already inside the targeting loop before anyone has decided whether it should be?
Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, drew two lines he said he would not cross: no mass surveillance of Americans, no fully autonomous weapons without human involvement. He let a deadline pass rather than cross them. Hours later it was reported that his technology had already been used to process targets in Tehran, before the ban, through partnerships he had approved. He said, “we cannot in good conscience accede.” But the conscience question had already been answered by the machinery he had set in motion. That is not a failure of character. That is what it looks like when the point of no return passes quietly, while you are still deciding whether to cross it.
The point of no return may not announce itself. It may look like a procedural vote. A contradictory sentence spoken politely in another hemisphere. A deadline that passes at 5:01 on a Friday afternoon.
I think about Don Draper. Not because of his behavior, which is often indefensible, but because of his perceptual attunement. He notices the gay art director and doesn’t judge or expose him. He lets Black women work for him before it is expected. He works comfortably with Jewish clients and colleagues while others in the room are quietly sneering. He embraces television and computers while his peers treat them as threats. He is not ahead of his time ideologically. He just sees what is actually in front of him rather than what his context tells him should be there.
I have always wanted that quality more than almost any other. The ability to see the change coming, not to be heroic about it, just to be awake.
But the people in those films who saw it coming, what did they actually do with that knowledge? Cassandra saw everything, was believed by no one, and the city burned anyway. Seeing clearly is not the same as being able to change what you see.
What is different now is not the danger. Danger is not new. What is different is the fracturing. In 1939, even the people who were wrong about Hitler were wrong together. There were shared frameworks, shared institutions, shared sources of authority. The error was collective and therefore, in principle, correctable. Now there is no shared baseline. When the rude awakening comes, different communities will experience it as confirmation of entirely different narratives. Some will say the line was crossed years ago. Others will say it hasn’t been crossed yet. The awakening won’t unify. It will fracture further.
The great catastrophes of the twentieth century produced shared grief that built things. WWI produced the League of Nations, however failed. WWII produced the UN, NATO, Bretton Woods, all imperfect, all slow, but built from a world that could agree on what had happened and why it was terrible. I cannot imagine what gets built from a catastrophe that half the world experiences as someone else’s fault and the other half as long overdue.
I came from a country that knew what it meant when institutions failed. I watched it from close enough. I came here partly because it seemed like the kind of place where the mechanisms held, where the guardrails were real even when imperfect. I am watching those mechanisms now the way the people in Downton Abbey watched the summer of 1914, noting each small thing, not quite willing to name what the accumulation adds up to.
The father in the joke doesn’t answer his son’s question. He redirects it. He is not interested in origins. He is interested in trajectory.
Where are we headed? I don’t know. I am not sure anyone does. But I am no longer sure that seeing it coming is a gift. It might just be the particular shape of this generation’s helplessness, to watch with some clarity, to name things carefully, and to find that the naming changes very little.
The question is not whether we came from apes. The question is whether we are closing the loop.