There is a strange stillness to the world right now.
Not peace. Not calm. Something closer to exhaustion.
Everywhere you look, the map is on fire. Ukraine grinds on in a war of attrition that has outlasted outrage. Gaza exists in a permanent state of humanitarian emergency, punctuated by brief windows of global attention before the noise moves on. And then there are the quieter fault lines… Greenland, the Arctic, strategic corridors, resource shadows, the long reach of NATO, the gravitational pull of the United States.
None of this feels hypothetical anymore. It feels structural.
And yet, for most people, life continues in a strangely parallel universe. Work emails. School runs. Dinner plans. A muted anxiety humming beneath it all.
That contradiction… catastrophe on one screen, normality on the other… is where something important is breaking.
Because the defining feature of this moment isn’t conflict. It’s resignation.
Somewhere along the way, a critical mass of people has absorbed a quiet, corrosive belief: this is all far too big for you to matter.
It’s rarely stated outright. It arrives disguised as realism.
“I don’t know enough.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Both sides are bad.”
“There’s nothing I can do.”
“I just want to live my life.”
None of those statements are stupid. Or cruel. Or lazy.
They’re human responses to overwhelm.
But together, they form the most effective stabilising force power has ever known.
A population that feels powerless doesn’t need to be controlled aggressively. It self-regulates. It looks away. It keeps going. It adapts to the unbearable by pretending it’s inevitable.
This is the real danger of our time. Not escalation. Not weapons. Not borders.
Acceptance.
Wars do not require universal support. They only require enough people to emotionally disengage.
History doesn’t collapse because everyone agrees with what’s happening. It collapses because enough people decide resistance is futile.
What’s striking is how small the lie actually is.
Nobody is told, “You don’t matter.”
They’re told, “Your impact is negligible.”
And negligible feels responsible. Mature. Sensible.
But negligible multiplied by millions becomes policy. Becomes permission. Becomes silence loud enough to drown out suffering.
The uncomfortable truth is this… power fears mobilisation far less than it fears attention with teeth.
Not outrage that burns hot and vanishes. Not performative morality. But sustained, ordinary refusal to disengage.
Change has never arrived because everyone suddenly became brave. It arrives because enough people become stubborn.
They keep talking when it’s awkward.
They keep caring when it’s unfashionable.
They resist the language that turns people into abstractions.
They insist on naming harm as harm, even when it disrupts dinner.
Tiny acts, yes. Almost embarrassing in their modesty.
But systems don’t crack from grand gestures. They crack from cumulative friction.
From writers who refuse to soften language.
From readers who refuse to look away.
From citizens who refuse to outsource their conscience to experts, algorithms, or distant institutions.
You don’t need to solve geopolitics.
You don’t need the perfect position.
You don’t need to be certain.
You just need to resist the slide into moral anaesthesia.
Because apathy isn’t neutral. It’s stabilising. It keeps the machinery running smoothly.
And the most radical thing an ordinary person can do right now is remain awake.
Not panicked. Not paralysed. Awake.
To remember that caring is not naïve.
That attention is not pointless.
That refusal to accept inevitability is how every meaningful shift in history has begun.
The lie says you are too small to matter.
The truth is quieter, and far more dangerous to power.
Nothing changes all at once.
But nothing ever changes without someone, somewhere, deciding not to go numb.
And that decision… made daily, imperfectly, humanly… is still available to us.
That might not feel like much.
But it’s how the world has always turned.
Until Next Time
Discover more from Dominus Owen Markham
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.