This essay follows naturally from my earlier piece, ‘Thinking in a time of flux’, and continues that attempt to make sense of a world tilting toward uncertainty. If that earlier essay was about the atmosphere of uncertainty, this one is about what that uncertainty can so easily become. In that regard, I had several possibilities in mind for a title:
· “How Easily the Ground Gives Way”
· “The Quiet Slide Toward Darkness”
· “On the Ease of Falling”
· “The Soft Descent: Reflections on a World Losing Its Bearings”
· “The Abyss Is Not a Sudden Thing”
· “When Thinking Stops”
· “The Fragility of the World We Take for Granted”
· “The Ordinary Path to Catastrophe”
· “How Societies Lose Themselves”
· “The Slow Unravelling”
In the end, I settled for: It is Surprisingly Easy. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t moralise. It is understated, precise and quietly honest. It simply states the truth I have arrived at through decades of reading, watching and thinking- a truth that becomes more obvious the more one studies how societies actually behave.
As a life-long student of history, I often find myself asking, as many still do, how it was possible for the Nazis to come to power, and then to unleash a global war and genocide. Observing events over recent times has given me the answer: it is surprisingly easy.
Actually, this was not a dramatic revelation, but something I have come to understand slowly, reluctantly, through a lifetime of watching how people and states behave.
When one studies the 1930s in isolation, the rise of Nazism can look like an aberration, a monstrous exception. But when you place it alongside the patterns I’ve been observing in recent years – the speed of collective emotion (exacerbated by the internet), the collapse of nuance, the hunger for simple narratives, the willingness to trade complexity for certainty – it becomes less mysterious. Not less horrifying, but less mysterious.
And this is the unsettling truth: the conditions that allow terrible things to happen are not exotic. They’re ordinary. They’re human. They’re familiar.
It doesn’t take a uniquely evil population.
It doesn’t take a master plan.
It doesn’t take a single cause.
It takes:
· fear
· humiliation
· economic insecurity
· a longing for order
· a charismatic simplifier
· a public confused and exhausted by complexity
· institutions that hesitate or crumble
· and a population that slowly stops thinking for itself
None of these are rare. They recur. They recur because they are rooted in the vulnerabilities of human beings and the fragility of political systems.
And when I say, “ it is surprisingly easy”, I am not being cynical.
I am being historically literate.
I recognise that the line between stability and catastrophe is thinner than we like to believe, and that societies can slide into darkness not through a single decision, but through a series of small surrenders:
a little more propaganda
a little less truth
a little more fear
a little less empathy
a little more fatalism
a little less resistance
Until one day the unthinkable becomes normal.
But there is one part I never lose sight of, and it’s what keeps me from drifting into despair.
If it is easy for societies to slide, it is also possible for individuals to resist the slide by doing what I am doing now: thinking, noticing, refusing to be swept along by fatalism.
I am not saying, “history repeats”.
I am saying, “ history reveals how fragile we are – and how much vigilance matters”.