The Time of Monsters

On Institutional Erosion, Normalcy Bias, and the Conditions That Precede Catastrophe

I am constantly perplexed by friends, family, and others who are unable to grapple with the seriousness of this moment. In fact, I have been increasingly telling people that the risk of global armed conflict is rising precipitously, and some people have questioned whether or not I've turned into an unhinged paranoiac. People close to me. To be clear, I am not predicting a war. But I am a careful student of history, political economy, and social epistemology. And the thing is, it's not hard to imagine flashpoints of escalation.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And the warning signs of catastrophic conflict are flashing red for anyone willing to see them.

On one hand, you have an insurgent elite which is in the process of trying to seize control of the United States federal government and consolidate their power. They are challenging the powers of Congress and the courts. They have backed themselves into a situation where the calculation for them increasingly has become power or jail. This is a dangerous dynamic.

Add to this the reality that many Americans will not view the economic hardship to come as Trump's doing, but rather a result of the rest of the world harming the US maliciously, as Trump tries to—in their mind—stick up for America. This creates a different interpretive frame for many of your fellow Americans, wherein they see their suffering not as a consequence of Trump's tariffs, but of our allies' unwillingness to yield to Trump's reasonable demands. This is how they view it.

When economic hardship arrives—as it inevitably will from these policies—it won't be experienced as a policy failure but as confirmation of the narrative that America is being treated unfairly by the world. Each retaliatory measure by trading partners, each market decline, each job loss becomes not evidence that tariffs were misguided, but proof that foreign powers are punishing America for standing up for itself.

This creates a dangerous feedback loop: economic pain leads not to policy reconsideration but to doubling down, which triggers more retaliation, which creates more pain, which further reinforces the narrative of victimhood. The worse things get, the more justified extreme measures seem.

I'm not describing some novel insight. This pattern appears repeatedly throughout history when nationalist economic policies fail. The Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930 didn't lead to acknowledgment that protectionism deepened the Depression—instead, they reinforced isolationist tendencies and blame of foreign powers. Similarly, economic hardships in 1930s Germany weren't interpreted as policy failures but as evidence of foreign persecution and the need for more aggressive action, stemming from the contingencies placed upon Germany in the Treaty of Versailles. Most people do not understand these nuances and details. It’s very frustrating, really.

What makes this especially dangerous is how it transforms rational negotiation into moral struggle. When economic conflicts are framed not as technical disagreements about policy but as tests of national will and dignity, compromise becomes impossible—it's seen as surrender, as weakness, as betrayal of the nation.

The response I'm getting from friends and family reflects a psychological phenomenon that's well-documented in both historical and psychological literature: normalcy bias. People have tremendous difficulty imagining significant departures from their lived experience. The mind reflexively rejects scenarios that threaten fundamental assumptions about stability and continuity.

This isn't unique to our moment. Similar patterns of disbelief appeared in the early 1930s as European democracies destabilized, or during various historical transitions where systems that seemed permanent revealed their fragility. Those who recognized the gravity earliest were often dismissed as alarmist until reality caught up to their warnings.

Meanwhile, we've seen reports that Canada—our closest ally and neighbor—is preparing for potential conflict with the United States. This isn't normal. This isn't business as usual. This is a profound shift in the geopolitical landscape that should alarm anyone paying attention.

The combination of internal institutional erosion, economic nationalism, and a leadership viewing power in zero-sum terms creates precisely the conditions where conflict becomes more likely—not through deliberate choice necessarily, but through a cascade of escalating responses and narrowing options.

Throughout history, regimes facing internal legitimacy crises often redirect focus to external threats. It's not hard to imagine how economic turmoil, combined with the narrative that foreign powers are to blame, could lead to increasingly aggressive posturing that spirals beyond diplomatic control.

When I express these concerns, I'm not predicting war as inevitable. I'm recognizing increased risk based on observable conditions and historical precedent. That's not paranoia; it's prudent assessment.

The challenge is that acknowledging these possibilities requires confronting profound uncertainty and potential loss of control—psychological states most people instinctively avoid. It's easier to dismiss the messenger than reckon with the message.

But we don't have the luxury of comfortable delusions. The signs are there for anyone willing to see them: the escalating rhetoric, the institutional erosion, the economic brinkmanship, the framing of disagreement as existential threat. These aren't separate phenomena—they're interconnected patterns that have preceded catastrophic conflict throughout history.

In some of my research this morning, I happened upon this interesting observation by Walter Benjamin that comes from “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” where he describes Paul Klee's painting “Angelus Novus” as depicting the angel of history: “His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet... But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

What Benjamin captured was the terrible momentum of historical forces—how catastrophe can build while we remain blind to its approach, how the storm of our own making propels us forward even as we look backward. This is the moment we find ourselves in—caught in a storm of nationalist fervor, institutional decay, and economic brinkmanship that propels us toward a future whose contours we refuse to see.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And the risk of catastrophic conflict is higher today than it has been in generations.

The center must be held—not because it is easy, but because it is ours to hold. And holding it requires first acknowledging the gravity of what we face, even when that acknowledgment is dismissed as paranoia by those who cannot bear to look.

Welcome to history. It gets much bumpier from here.

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” — Antonio Gramsci