Our social media-driven, artificial intelligence-enabled society is changing at extraordinary speed. We walk through streets looking at smartphones instead of one another. Once-vibrant coffeehouses are often filled with people sitting silently behind screens. Restaurants, gyms, bars, and stores surround us with televisions and digital displays.
None of these technologies is inherently antisocial. Yet taken together, they make retreat from one another incredibly easy. We risk becoming less practiced at the simplest forms of human connection: looking up, noticing another person, saying “hello,” apologizing when we bump into someone, or recognizing that strangers occupy the world with us.
This retreat has a disturbing counterpart on the international stage.
Conflict among nations has become increasingly volatile. The escalating confrontation involving the United States, Israel, and Iran has severely disrupted energy flows through the Strait of Hormuz. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues after more than four years of devastating loss. Israel’s military response to Hamas’s October 7 attack has left Gaza with extraordinary loss of life, displacement, and physical destruction.
The relative stability that many in the West came to expect after the Second World War now feels increasingly fragile.
So does another assumption: that nuclear catastrophe belongs primarily to history.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials have repeatedly invoked Russia’s nuclear capabilities. Nuclear weapons, once largely pushed to the edges of everyday consciousness, have returned to geopolitical conversation.
How do we counter forces this large when individuals, corporations, political movements, and nations all have incentives to protect their own interests?
The unfashionable answer, in a word, is:
LOVE.
Uttering the word, of course, is considerably easier than living it.
By love, I do not mean sentimentality. I mean the ability to recognize the humanity and welfare of people beyond ourselves: empathy, respect, patience, altruism, and humility.
Perhaps an era characterized by extraordinary self-interest can also produce a reaction against it. We live at a time when wealth and corporate power are increasingly concentrated, governments struggle to respond to global problems, fossil fuels remain deeply embedded in the world economy, and authoritarian political movements wield enormous influence.
History does not necessarily move in straight lines.
Although “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” oversimplifies his philosophy, G.W.F. Hegel1 argued that historical development occurs through contradictions in one period that are challenged, transformed, and partially preserved in what follows.
In that sense, our current emphasis on individual self-interest need not simply reverse itself into self-denial. Self-interest can remain while becoming counterbalanced by other-oriented values:
Empathy. Respect. Patience. Altruism. Humility.
Many of today’s most dangerous international conflicts are shaped by governments and leaders willing to pursue national, ideological, or personal interests at enormous human cost. If cooperation is ever to counter tribal aggression, citizens themselves will have to insist upon it.
I understand how naïve this sounds.
But consider the alternative.
Imagine large-scale demonstrations emerging across democratic societies around issues that transcend national borders: nuclear disarmament, climate change, democratic institutions, or the protection of basic human rights.
Such movements would first require citizens to rediscover something technology and contemporary culture make easy to neglect: concern for people we do not personally know.
The world has never been more interconnected. Despite enormous differences in culture, religion, politics, and history, people everywhere share certain fundamental desires. Most want physical safety. They want people to love and people who love them. They want security for their families and some meaningful control over their futures.
Mass movements can alter political reality.
Ukraine offers one recent example. Demonstrations began in November 2013 after President Viktor Yanukovych suspended preparations for closer political and economic ties with the European Union. The protests expanded into what became known as the Maidan Revolution. In February 2014, more than 100 protesters were killed during clashes with security forces. Yanukovych subsequently fled Kyiv, and on February 22, Ukraine’s parliament declared that he had withdrawn from performing his constitutional duties and called early presidential elections.
Whatever one’s interpretation of the complicated politics surrounding those events, they demonstrated that collective political action can produce enormous change.
The same principle applies beyond Ukraine.
Global citizens can organize around democratic institutions, climate change, nuclear arms control, and other problems that no nation can solve alone.
Yet the very moment when these questions demand sustained attention is also the moment when distraction has become nearly limitless.
Our screens offer an endless stream of entertainment, shopping, sports, outrage, news, advertisements, and increasingly AI-generated companionship and content. None of these things is inherently sinister. Many are useful, pleasurable, or both.
But collectively they can make disengagement remarkably comfortable.
The ancient Romans famously used the phrase bread and circuses to describe the political value of keeping populations fed and entertained. Our version requires no emperor issuing instructions. Governments, corporations, algorithms, advertisers, and our own preferences can together produce a culture in which there is always something easier to attend to than a frightening problem.
Climate change unfolds across decades. Nuclear weapons could transform civilization in hours.
Both are extraordinarily difficult realities to hold continuously in mind.
Denial therefore becomes tempting.
We can shop. Scroll. Watch the game. Read another post. Ask an AI assistant another question. None of these individual acts constitutes a moral failure.
The danger lies in allowing distraction to become withdrawal.
The question is not whether humanity will abandon technology or self-interest. We will not.
The question is whether we can remain connected enough to one another to recognize shared threats—and organized enough to respond to them.
Will we look up?
One can only hope so.
Silence, after all, has rarely been a reliable source of human progress.
A note on thermonuclear weapons
The United States conducted the Castle Bravo thermonuclear test at Bikini Atoll in March 1954. Its explosive yield was approximately 15 megatons of TNT, roughly one thousand times the explosive yield of the Hiroshima bomb. In October 1961, the Soviet Union tested the Tsar Bomba, with a yield of approximately 50 megatons, the largest nuclear explosion ever produced.
The scale of such weapons is difficult to comprehend. That difficulty may help explain why societies so readily place the possibility of nuclear war outside ordinary consciousness.
It does not make the danger less real.
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References
Hegel, G. W. F. (2010). The science of logic (G. di Giovanni, Trans. & Ed.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1812–1816)