The cost of looking away:
A conversation over coffee, over a drink, or around a dinner table can begin easily enough: sport, a reality show, something outrageous on a screen that nobody will remember tomorrow. Then someone brings up a photograph from the news. Someone asks how a value that once seemed beyond compromise has become so easy to compromise. Someone wonders what sort of world their children will inherit. The air changes. You can almost see the people at the table calculating the social cost of staying with the subject.
“It’s not that deep,” somebody says. If the conversation goes on, perhaps it becomes “word salad.” The table can relax. The difficult guest has received the warning, and everyone else can still expect an invitation next time.
It is remarkable what those words accomplish. They answer nothing, but they make curiosity embarrassing. Ask again, and you have broken an unspoken rule of polite company. Eventually you learn to close certain doors in your own mind before anyone else closes them for you. Perhaps we do this because we suspect we might not like what we see if we look any closer.
But sometimes you look. You notice one decision, then another, and then the pattern underneath them. Once you have seen it, you cannot quite go back to the conversation you were having before. Other people may not see it yet. That does not mean it will leave them alone. Reality does not wait for us to find it socially acceptable.
History is full of people sounding an alarm while others tell them to calm down and stop being crazy. Engineers warned that the space shuttle Challenger should not launch in the cold; the warning was overruled. Before the financial crisis of 2008, warnings about mounting imbalances competed with markets that still looked confident. In retrospect, the reasons for dismissing the warnings can seem absurd. The trouble is not that there was nothing to see. It is that not everybody could see it at the same time. A society does not move at one speed. People meet what is happening with different faculties, and they recognise its significance at different times.
Some begin to react when nothing has yet become visible. They sense a loss of meaning or purpose; a distance opening between what a country says it is and what it is becoming. They cannot photograph what they sense. It sounds too distant to the person asking for evidence. We might say they are leading with spirit. Others notice a change that can be pointed to, though its consequences cannot yet be felt: an emergency power that stays in place, a safeguard quietly removed, a court or institution whose authority is being hollowed out. The evidence is visible; the harm is still abstract. They are leading with the mind.
Then the damage becomes someone’s suffering. A child is killed by a military or militia group. A family searches for somebody taken from them. A neighbour is treated as though their life counts for less. The argument has a face, and the heart responds. Eventually it crosses another threshold: the rent, the electricity bill, the petrol pump, the job you can no longer count on, the question of whether your own child will have somewhere to live. Now the body knows.
These are capacities within every one of us. We develop them differently, and one may lead us long before the others have caught up. This helps explain why societies can take so long to respond to what has already begun. I think of that delay as social latency. The early warning may come through meaning. The mind may then see the structure shifting. The heart feels the human cost. The body recognises the cost as its own.
Look around now. Across Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South America, sovereignty is challenged and civilians are uprooted. The United Nations struggles to turn its principles into restraint. The Geneva Conventions still tell us that even in war there are things we must not do; the organisation charged with defending them warns that respect for those rules is eroding. The International Criminal Court, intended to bring the gravest crimes before the law, has seen its own officials sanctioned. Within countries, trust in government, courts, journalism and even an honest public argument has thinned. We spent much of the last century promising ourselves that catastrophe would teach us to build rules against the next one. Some days it looks as though we are testing whether we learned anything at all.
The suffering will not stay inside a map. A child killed in war had parents who planned tomorrow as we do. The person who crosses a border because home has become unlivable carries a life as complete as ours. You do not have to know the articles of an international treaty to recognise what it means when they fail a human being.
And then there is the quieter violence of the kitchen table. The rent rises before the wage does. A prospective buyer runs the numbers on a modest house and closes the listing. The electricity bill arrives while the last one is still being paid. At the petrol pump you watch the total climb and decide what else the week can do without. You put food back on a supermarket shelf. Across different countries, these pressures have different immediate causes. But the calculation is familiar: how much longer can a family absorb this?
The loss of purpose is no longer only a feeling. The strain on institutions is no longer merely a diagram. The suffering has a face, and the cost has reached our own front doors. Back at the dinner table, “it’s not that deep” can still sound comforting. But the connections run through the systems we depend on and across the borders we draw. Looking away carries a cost. So how did so much of the world arrive here?
This is a global story, but it begins in America. What happens there reverberates through the world. I grew up in America and later watched it from Australia, where Christmas comes in summer, winter comes in July, and a country is also a continent. It was a nation that welcomed immigrants whose work helped its economy grow, and it valued honesty, hard work and a fair go. Watching America from there gave me no special sight. It gave me distance. I could see a country I remembered change, while feeling some of the same currents move through the place where I now lived.
I grew up in a different century, and in a different America. It was widely respected. I do not think its standing rested only on the size of its economy or military. It had something to do with the people who gave its ideals a human form: people who valued honesty and hard work, and looked beyond someone’s birthplace to what they might contribute. They could look beneath appearances, hold a contradiction without turning away and see the human being beneath a label. A few people from my own life show what I mean. They were not rare figures encountered once in a lifetime. In the America I knew, they were the people around me.
I wrote with poor spelling and bad handwriting, but my history teacher always seemed to see the idea beneath them and the prose that connected it. “You’re a great writer and you don’t know it,” she told me. She recognised something in me I did not recognise in myself. What stayed with me was less the compliment to a talent I thought I did not possess than the person who had looked beyond the surface to find it.
My wrestling coach did something similar. I was an abysmal athlete, and he knew it. He gave his time to the possibility that I might become more than I was that day.
Later, working in sales, I outperformed all my peers. Some resented it and began taking racial jabs. Our manager, a white man as red-blooded American as they come, was driving the van when it happened. He stopped, turned around and took more offence than I did. “He’s more American than any one of you,” he told them. To him, being American had something to do with working hard, speaking straight, failing and trying again. He recognised a contribution instead of checking a birthplace or a skin colour.
Perhaps one person brings this memory into focus better than anyone else: the principal of my kindergarten, whom my father spoke of fondly. In a business transaction he could have overcharged my father by a couple of hundred dollars, serious money in the 1980s. Nobody would have known. He did not do it. When my father asked him why, the man said, “Well, I have to live with myself.” His answer stayed with my father, and my father’s account of it stayed with me.
The irony is that the school he ran was called Lee School, after Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general who fought for a cause that would preserve slavery. The name over the door belonged to one American history; the conscience of the man inside it belonged to another. He had a chance to take advantage of someone, and the only person who could have stopped him was himself. So he did.
Racism was there too; my colleagues had made sure I knew it. I do not offer my memories as everybody’s memory of America. They are mine, and I know many others had reason to remember a different country. But in the America I knew, the lie, the racial insult, the attempt to strip somebody of dignity: those seemed the exceptions to what I had come to believe the country valued.
This was more than a private impression. Around the turn of the century, opinion leaders abroad described America as a place of opportunity and admired its democratic ideals, even as they criticised its use of power. The respect had a basis deeper than force. People could see a country trying, however imperfectly, to be worthy of its promise.
In the people I knew, I recognised the spirit of a promise America placed at the Statue of Liberty, its enduring emblem of freedom:
“Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free …I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Now place those lines beside footage of ICE raids and detention. Place them beside Native Americans carrying proof of citizenship for fear of being stopped by immigration officers on land their peoples inhabited long before the United States existed. The poem never described everyone’s experience, and America has always struggled with exclusion. But this was a promise the country chose to make. How did we get from that promise to this fear?
This is the part of the dinner conversation where you might never be invited again. The instinct is to name one villain, especially when real people are frightened and hurt. Their injuries demand to be taken seriously. But if we want to stop the next injury, we have to see the pattern that produced it. A surgeon cannot turn away from the blood and guts and still perform the operation. The discomfort is part of the work of seeing clearly. And to understand how we got here, we have to look at September 11, 2001.
It was a wound. The people killed that day, the families who survived them, the lives lost in the wars that followed and the changes to the world were all real. None is a device in an argument. We can honour that suffering and still examine the response to it.
The men who hijacked the planes also claimed a religion while committing acts it forbids: the murder of civilians and suicide.[^religion] They had hijacked the faith as well as the planes. But in a frightened country that knew little about Islam, how easily could people separate the perpetrators from those whose religion they had claimed?
Yet in the immediate aftermath there was a chance for something else. Governments around the world condemned the attacks. In Tehran, people held candlelight vigils for Americans. In Gaza, the then Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat joined hundreds of people donating blood intended for victims in the United States. Across borders that usually held suspicion, people recognised grief. For a moment it was possible to imagine that catastrophe might also open a path to healing.
Inside America, too, the public response was more generous than the history we tell backwards would suggest. Favourable views of Muslim Americans rose from 45 percent in March 2001 to 59 percent that November. Anti-Muslim attacks and harassment did occur; the numbers do not erase them. But the polling does not describe a nation that instinctively hated its Muslim neighbours. The distinction between the attackers and those they had claimed to represent was possible. It needed to be understood and defended.
This was not a temporary public relations campaign. The connection had older roots, even if most Americans knew little about Islam. Before September 11, Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian Sufi poet, had become one of the best-selling poets in the United States.[^rumi] In the dome of the Library of Congress, twelve figures represent the cultures and epochs its builders saw as contributors to Western civilization. Greece stands for philosophy, Rome for administration, and Islam for physics.[^loc] On the north wall of the Supreme Court courtroom, the Prophet Muhammad appears among the historic lawgivers.[^scotus] These buildings do not prove that every visitor understood those contributions. They do show that the country had made room to recognise them.
The solidarity was there. The history was there. It looked, briefly, as if the country might move through its grief without making an enemy of an entire people. So what happened between that moment and the ICE raids we see now?
A slow, unholy convergence helps explain that path. Government reached for surveillance and extraordinary power in the name of security. The market offered relief through consumption, drawing attention away from harder questions. Hatred supplied a way to turn fear into action. Safety matters; a market can sustain lives; anger can alert us to injustice. But brought together in this form, these forces fed one another. Fear was the doorway. Money was the incentive. Power was the temptation.
First, government answered a genuine need for safety with expanded surveillance, extraordinary security powers and diminished civil liberties. The PATRIOT Act enlarged the state’s reach; the detention and interrogation practices that followed tested boundaries a free country was supposed to defend. Fear helped make wars easier to justify, including the invasion of Iraq. The land of the free gave up freedoms in the name of protecting them. The home of the brave was asked to look away from questions that required bravery and call it resolve instead. It was a kind of self-betrayal: liberty was still honoured in words while intrusions into it became ordinary. The more people feared, the more readily they accepted surveillance; the more ordinary surveillance became, the more danger seemed to be everywhere.
Second, how do people live with a contradiction they would rather not face? The market offered one answer to disquiet: keep moving, keep buying, keep the appetite occupied. The White House called on people to carry on shopping after the attacks; the immediate wish may have been to preserve ordinary life. But the broader economy was increasingly skilled at offering relief through consumption. Food, entertainment, sexualised attention, outrage, the next thing on the screen: each promised the body a momentary rest from what it could not resolve. Attention moved toward what could be bought or watched and away from meaning, thought and the person next door. As liberties eroded and wars were fought overseas, an anxious public could be comforted with more to consume. The state gained powers; businesses found customers; the difficult questions could wait.
Third, fear was given somebody to blame. The public had not started out united in hatred of Muslims; we have seen that. Yet the attackers came to stand for Muslims generally, and Sikhs and others whom an ignorant observer thought looked “Muslim” became targets too. In the logic of fear, “they all look the same” could stand in for knowing who anyone was. Public language could insist this was not about Islam while suspicion settled into films, political cues and everyday encounters. In March 2002, a quarter of Americans thought Islam more likely than other religions to encourage violence; by mid-2003 that figure had risen to 44 percent. Between those polls there had been no second September 11 on American soil, but the rhetoric of war and the repeated image of a threatening “other” kept fear in circulation. The person in front of you could become a symbol of what had been done to you. This was a frightened tribal response, not the conclusion of an informed mind. Suspicion could become outrage; outrage could become a hunt for the next person said not to belong. The target might change—from Muslims to other brown people, immigrants or whoever was marked as the next “other”—but the fire would not stay inside the first boundary drawn for it.
Pause there. What happens to a person, or a society, when these are the forces addressing it every day? Someone asks what America is for, and is dismissed as a dreamer or a crank. Someone asks what new security powers are doing to its institutions, and is called a traitor. Someone asks about the people caught in the wars and the suspicion, and is called soft or naive. Meaning sounds impractical. Thinking sounds slow. Compassion sounds weak. The need for bodily safety is real; so is the pleasure of being alive. But when fear, appetite and belonging to a tribe are asked to rule the whole person, the rest of the self is pushed out of the room.
An old story comes to mind. As the story goes, when the Romans took Syracuse, Archimedes was absorbed in a mathematical problem. A soldier came upon him, demanded his attention and, angered when he would not leave the problem unfinished, ran him through with a sword. The soldier had the energy and the weapon. Archimedes had the mind. High energy and low IQ can beat high IQ in a moment. But the sword did not answer the problem, and it could not restore what it destroyed. That should frighten all of us. Force can end a difficult conversation in an instant and destroy something of value that cannot be recovered. It cannot repair the world on the other side of the cut. This is an old human pattern, not a verdict on any one people. We have been cutting short the work of understanding for as long as there have been swords.
No single person designed this whole arrangement. But we can see the pattern in the institutions it began to consume. They had taken generations to build, offering people rights, stability and room to make a life. Leaders gained power from fear; businesses gained customers and attention; media figures found that outrage held an audience. Each could benefit for a while from drawing down the trust and restraint that had made the system work. Governance became surveillance. Life became consumption. Grief became an excuse to find an enemy. A society can feel well fed while it eats the very structures keeping it alive.
Administrations changed, and sometimes the language became more polished, but the pattern did not stop. It crossed borders through wars and counterterrorism policy, through markets and entertainment, and through local politicians who learned to make the same appeal in their own languages. The line to today’s ICE raids is a line of permission: when neighbours are taught to suspect one another, ever more forceful ways of policing who belongs become easier to accept. Other countries have different laws and different uniforms. Britain’s Windrush scandal showed how immigration controls could turn on people who had long made their lives there.[^windrush] The warning can be put off until the consequences arrive in a language more people can feel.
Then America elected Donald Trump, its first billionaire president. It shocked people who thought a figure like him was impossible. I think the greater shock should have been how ready the ground had become. Resentment had learned to call itself honesty. Humiliation had become entertainment. Wealth and attention had become substitutes for authority. If it had not been him, someone else might have spoken to the same appetite. He did not invent it. He understood it. Then he won again in 2024. The system that had prepared the ground had not been repaired.
The desire for a different direction remained. During that campaign, people did not need to be experts in human behaviour to see Biden struggling to command the stage. At moments he seemed absent, and a natural question followed: if the president could not be fully present, who was making the decisions? People wanted a change they could recognise. Then Harris was asked on The View what she would have done differently from him over the previous four years. “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” she said, before later naming a difference. For voters already worried that nobody was prepared to change course, that first answer reinforced the fear. The candidates offered different futures, but to someone desperate for a break with what was failing, what choice did they feel they had?
“At least Trump says what he thinks,” his supporters said. People said much the same of similar figures elsewhere. But saying what you mean is not the same as seeing clearly. A drunk at a pub can say what he means. So can a frightened person who has found somebody else to blame for everything that hurts. We all have impulses we ought to examine before giving them power over another person. The populist leader can take the resentment people were once ashamed to express, say it loudly for them and make the cruelty feel like candour. Soon it becomes entertainment, and then a test of loyalty. When the defence of a leader is that “he only says what everybody is thinking,” even as people are being humiliated or harmed, we have learned something disturbing about the society doing the thinking.
It would be too easy to blame voters and leave it there. Their frustrations are often real. They have watched institutions fail them, heard fluent answers that changed nothing and searched for a voice that seemed to break the script. Across Europe, Australia and elsewhere, we saw the same move with different faces: promise a simpler nation by pointing to the people who supposedly do not belong. Different histories, different causes, familiar permission. Once fear and grievance become a political language, they can be spoken anywhere.
The rules we spoke of earlier were built because history had already shown how power behaves when fear spreads and restraint becomes inconvenient. We promise after each catastrophe that we will remember. Years later, a new grievance finds a new face and travels across borders. The rules did not become fragile because of one American election. Nor did the cost of a home, a litre of fuel or a bag of groceries rise for one reason in every country. But a politics accustomed to replacing difficult explanations with enemies has an answer ready for every fracture. It tells people that someone unlike them is living the life they have been denied. The story spreads easily; what it builds is much harder to find.
That story becomes especially powerful when the injury is real. A worker does another shift and still cannot make the rent. A parent hears the economy is doing well while deciding which bill can wait until Friday. People deserve an answer to those conditions. A leader offering somebody to blame can keep them angry after the bill is due. And when anger exhausts them, an offer of comfort can keep them occupied until the next bill arrives. Anger, sedation, anger again: neither pays the rent.
Look around the world at what happens when bodily relief and tribal grievance become the only answers. The person who is suffering, the thought that might test the promise, and the purpose the promise is supposed to serve are all pushed aside. What remains can be absurd enough to defy a straight face.
In America, the sedative is offered as a cheque. The president has promised a $5,000 payment to every adult citizen if Republicans retain both chambers of Congress. The payment has not happened. But consider the proposition: put our party back in power and you may get a cheque. Call it a dividend if you like. Politically, it is an attempt to win allegiance with a proposed public payout. When the proposal was Medicare for All, the same leader called it a “socialist takeover.” When the proposal is his own cheque, conditional on his party’s victory, it becomes a triumph of the American way. The first argument asks what care people ought to be able to count on. The second asks them to keep a party in power. You can say what you mean and still make no sense. A person who needs the money is not foolish for listening. It is the leaders who should be asked why their answer to a broken system is a cheque conditional on keeping their own jobs. The offer speaks to real material distress while inviting us to set aside the questions of meaning, thought and care that might have led to a lasting answer.
Australia offers a different irony. An Australian populist movement claims to defend the country by reaching for a narrower version of it, making First Peoples, Muslims and immigrants into problems to be managed. The people who came and built livelihoods, and those whose ancestors were there first, are treated as obstacles to the fair go the country claims to cherish. On the Commonwealth coat of arms stand an emu and a kangaroo, chosen to suggest a country moving forward. They cannot really walk backwards. Yet a movement speaking in Australia’s name would have us walk back into an imagined monoculture. It is difficult to say you embody a nation while refusing to understand its own emblem.
But the absurdity continues. In Britain, a political movement draws a line between legal citizenship and who it regards as a real Briton, looking to ancestry and an imagined continuity with the country’s past.[^britain] Very well: look at the Britain that came through the Second World War. Around 2.5 million people served in the army of undivided British India, the largest volunteer force of the war. Punjab was a major source of recruits; Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and others served. Those soldiers fought alongside Britain while living under an empire that had yet to grant them self-government. Some of their descendants made their lives in Britain. Now they can be told that their citizenship does not give them the same claim to the word Briton as someone else’s ancestry does. The country survived that war with their help. How easily does a politics of belonging forget the people who helped it survive?[^indianarmy]
And if ancestry is really the measure, go further back. Cheddar Man lived in Britain about ten thousand years ago. His is one of the oldest nearly complete skeletons of our species found there. Researchers examining his DNA concluded that his skin was most likely dark to black. A person alive today needs no ancient skeleton to justify their citizenship. But the evidence makes a mockery of the idea that belonging to Britain has always meant belonging to one colour.
These are different countries and different arguments, but the absurdities have a common root. When a society loses touch with what it is for, treats thought as an inconvenience and ceases to feel for the person in front of it, a forceful claim can defeat a careful answer. The soldier can silence Archimedes without solving his problem. People promise security by making society crueler, prosperity by attacking the workers and neighbours who help sustain it, honesty by abandoning the discipline of telling the truth. By the time the damage reaches the body, the body is told that still more fear, consumption and division will save it. That is a dangerous belief: it asks us to keep consuming the very things we need in order to recover.
In Fragmentation to Integration, I describe what happens when reality changes and cracks appear in a system. Those inside it can ignore the crack, blame somebody else for it, or look deeply enough to find what needs repairing. That is where we are now. A society pushed toward bodily fear and appetite is feeling the damage in its material life. The question is whether that pain becomes the beginning of recognition or another reason to turn on its own people.
Not everyone pays attention to a crack while it belongs to somebody else. But now nearly everyone has skin in the game. You do not need to sense a spiritual loss before it has a name. You do not need to be a systems thinker, or even somebody moved first by a stranger’s suffering. You need only care about your own life and refuse a foolish answer to a serious problem. The body is engaged. The question is what we ask it to do next.
So how do we respond? How do we become whole again?
We can descend further into the language of skin, group and tribe. We can turn on a Muslim neighbour for looking or praying differently, accepting a politician’s claim that Islam is incompatible with Western civilization even while the Library of Congress credits it with helping to shape that civilization. We can shut out people whose work, care and enterprise our economies depend on, then look for another enemy when the rent still rises. We can hand more wealth and power to people who keep us frightened, hoping that cruelty will buy us safety. That path threatens the very prosperity and security it promises to defend.
Or we can stop and begin to heal. See the person beyond the tribe and feel what happens to them. Look at the systems behind their suffering and stay with the hard questions until we understand what can be repaired. Ask what those systems are for, and whom their promises include. Bring together people who understand how institutions work and people who live with their failures. Let meaning give the work direction, the mind give it shape, and the heart refuse to make anyone expendable.
That is work for sober leadership and for the rest of us. It must produce things the body can actually live on: affordable homes, useful work, productive enterprise, wealth people can build and pass on, enough peace and safety to plan a future for their children. If we can do that work together, the body may finally have what it has been asking for: peace, security and prosperity.
Return, then, to the words at that table: “It’s not that deep.” They can buy a comfortable evening. They cannot mend a society that has stopped listening to its own conscience, stopped thinking about the systems that sustain it and stopped recognising itself in another human being. We have been consuming the things that keep us alive. Now we are being asked to consume one another. The choice before us is whether to keep going, or to stop and make ourselves whole again.
So maybe, just maybe it is that deep.
[^religion]: Qur’an 17:33 and 4:29 prohibit unlawful killing and self-killing. See also contemporaneous condemnations of September 11 by Muslim scholars and organisations.[^rumi]: The Christian Science Monitor, November 1997, reporting on Rumi’s sales before September 11.[^loc]: Library of Congress, Main Reading Room audio guide.[^scotus]: Supreme Court of the United States, “North and South Wall Friezes”.[^britain]: Restore Britain, “Philosophy of National Belonging,” September 2026.[^indianarmy]: Imperial War Museums on India in the Second World War; Royal British Legion on the soldiers and their religious diversity; UK National Archives on Indian Army recruitment.[^windrush]: UK Home Office, Windrush Lessons Learned Review.
