Reflections on the human condition
On 20 July, Germany held its annual public oath ceremony for new Bundeswehr recruits in Berlin. The date was no coincidence. It commemorates the failed assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg and a small group of German officers in 1944.
They failed. They were arrested, tortured and executed as traitors.
Continue reading “The Moral Dilemma of a Soldier: is obedience always right?”
As I settle into my new life in Spain, I wake up before dawn in order to jog along the promenade before it gets too hot, watch the sunrise, contemplate cosmology and meditate.
Last week, to the west above the Carihuela, there was a huge, bright, full moon poised low in the sky before the sunrise.
It wasn’t merely bright. It seemed suspended. As if detached from its control of the tides below. Silver against an increasingly blue sky, refusing — for a few precious minutes — to surrender to the approaching sun.
The sea below was calm. The seagulls were swooping down majestically to collect their breakfast. Somewhere behind me, the town was waking. Yet for a brief moment everything felt strangely timeless.
I stood there on the harbour wall longer than I intended. Not because I understood what I was looking at. Indeed, as I meditated, I was startled by how little I did.
That quiet moment began another of my recent intellectual odysseys. I jogged home and began researching in detail the origins of the universe.
The answers I discovered have profoundly changed the way I see both the universe and humanity.
According to our best scientific understanding, the Universe began around 13.8 billion years ago.
In the first few minutes after the Big Bang, almost all that existed were the simplest elements imaginable: hydrogen, helium and tiny traces of lithium.
There was no carbon.
No oxygen.
No calcium.
No iron.
No chlorine.
No lead.
Nothing from which planets, oceans or living organisms could eventually be built.
Everything else had yet to be created.
The next discovery astonished me even more.
I had always thought of stars as glowing balls of gas.
In reality, they are unimaginably powerful nuclear furnaces.
The identity of every chemical element is determined simply by the number of protons in the nucleus of each atom.
Hydrogen has one proton.
Helium has two.
Carbon has six.
Oxygen has eight.
Iron has twenty-six.
Lead has eighty-two.
Inside stars, gravity compresses matter with such extraordinary force that atomic nuclei are pushed together in a process known as nuclear fusion.
When four hydrogen nuclei fuse together, they produce helium and release enormous amounts of energy.
Later, when stars become even hotter, three helium nuclei combine to create carbon. Carbon can then fuse with helium to produce oxygen. Larger stars continue building heavier and heavier elements through countless further fusion reactions.
Quite literally, the periodic table is assembled one proton at a time.
Eventually, the largest stars manufacture elements all the way to iron. When those stars finally exhaust their fuel, they explode as supernovae, scattering their newly created elements across the galaxy.
During those unimaginably violent explosions, still heavier elements such as gold, lead and uranium are created before being hurled into interstellar space.
Without generations of stars living and dying long before our Solar System existed, neither the Earth nor we ourselves could ever have existed.
Carl Sagan famously said:
“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
He also said that we are made of star stuff.
For years I assumed that was simply a poetic metaphor.
It isn’t.
The hydrogen in the water within my body was formed shortly after the Big Bang itself.
But almost every other element within me has a different origin.
The carbon in my muscles.
The oxygen I breathe.
The calcium in my bones.
The iron carried around my body by my blood.
All of them were forged inside stars that died billions of years before the Earth even formed.
Some of those atoms may once have been part of ancient forests.
Some may have passed through dinosaurs.
Some may have circulated through countless generations of my own ancestors.
Matter itself is endlessly recycled.
The atoms change partners.
The universe never stops reusing its building blocks.
In this way, it is no coincidence that the branching networks of our neurons and the elegant spirals in hurricanes and elements of our DNA echo patterns that also appear throughout the cosmos. Different processes, different scales, yet strikingly familiar forms emerging from the same universe.
Just when I thought the story could not become any more remarkable, genetics added another layer.
Every person alive today shares common ancestry.
Research suggests that all living humans inherited their mitochondrial DNA from one woman who lived in Africa roughly 150,000 to 200,000 years ago.
Likewise, all living men inherited their Y chromosome from one man who lived much later.
They were not the only people alive at the time.
They are simply the individuals whose particular genetic lines survived uninterrupted to the present day.
Meanwhile, every generation doubles the number of our ancestors.
Travel back only a few thousand years and our family trees overlap so extensively that the distinctions between “my ancestors” and “your ancestors” begin to disappear.
In a very real biological sense, humanity is one enormous extended family.
As the moon faded into the brightening Andalusian sky, I found myself asking a question that science itself cannot answer.
If Carl Sagan was right that “we are a way for the cosmos to know itself,” what follows logically from that?
As far as we currently know, nowhere else has the universe organised itself into beings capable of wondering where the universe came from.
Nowhere else has hydrogen learned to write symphonies.
Or paint masterpieces.
Or decode DNA.
Or ask why anything exists at all.
Perhaps intelligent life is common throughout the cosmos.
I hope it is.
But until we know otherwise, we must take seriously the possibility that conscious beings like ourselves are extraordinarily rare. Maybe even unique.
If that is true, then our responsibility extends far beyond ourselves.
Protecting our planet.
Seeking truth.
Advancing knowledge.
Caring for one another.
Safeguarding future generations.
These are not merely useful social conventions.
They become responsibilities entrusted to the very few beings — perhaps the only beings — capable of understanding what is at stake.
The moon itself had not changed that morning.
Nor had the sea.
Nor the rising sun.
What changed was my understanding.
For the first time, I began to see humanity not as something standing apart from the universe, but as one of the most extraordinary things the universe has so far produced.
Perhaps, after all, the starry heavens above us do not merely invite our curiosity. They really can provide us with the most rational basis for human ethics that we will ever discover.
“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe… the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”
— Immanuel Kant
The Ten Commandments stand like granite pillars in the moral imagination of the West. Their clarity and simplicity — do not lie, do not steal, do not kill — promise a moral compass that transcends culture, time and circumstance.
Yet the moment we bring them into the tangle of real life, absolutes begin to rub against exceptions.
Take truth-telling: you shall not bear false witness. But if lying spares the hunted from a tyrant’s soldiers, can we still call it sin?
Or killing: you shall not murder. What of the soldier who fires not from hatred but to liberate, or the doctor who relieves excruciating suffering when life is otherwise ebbing away?
The commandments do not disappear. But they begin to bend under the weight of reality.
Each commandment, when examined closely, reveals a fault line:
Even the Hebrew scriptures acknowledge this tension:
David eats sacred bread when starving. Rahab lies and is praised.
The pattern is consistent: when strict obedience collides with human dignity, compassion begins to override rule.
The ancient dilemmas have not disappeared. They have intensified.
If citizens believe a war is unjust, are they morally obliged to fund it?
If millions refused to pay taxes in protest, would that be:
History complicates the answer. Figures like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. framed civil disobedience not as lawlessness, but as obedience to a higher law.
Yet the danger is obvious: if everyone decides individually which laws to obey, social order collapses. So where is the line — between conscience and chaos?
Consider population control policies that have led, directly or indirectly, to the killing of female infants. Is this:
Here the commandment “do not kill” confronts the brutal logic of state planning.
We do not steal — and yet entire economies extract from the planet in ways that may destroy future generations.
The commandments were written for individuals.
But today, systems commit what individuals once did.
“Do not bear false witness” once meant lying in court. Now it includes:
When truth itself becomes a battlefield, the commandment remains, but its application becomes infinitely more complex.
There was a moment when all of this ceased to be theoretical for me.
My mother came to visit me in Germany. At the airport, she was pushed over by an impatient passenger in one of those electric buggies. The fall seemed minor at the time, but it accelerated everything. Her health declined rapidly. Incontinence. Dementia. Depression.
Her GP made a suggestion. We could simulate a bladder infection. That would justify a hospital admission. From there, she would be transferred to a care home for short-term recovery — and, most likely, remain there long-term.
It would mean lying. It would mean manipulating the system. It would mean, in some sense, taking resources that were not strictly ours.
And yet the alternative was to watch her deteriorate without adequate care.
In that moment, the commandments did not line up neatly. They collided.
In the end, I followed the doctor’s advice.
My mother received excellent care. She lived for another seven years, safe, supported, and dignified in ways that would not otherwise have been possible.
Looking back, I still ask the question: was it right?
In the language of absolute rules, perhaps not.
In the language of lived reality, I believe it was.
And yet I cannot prove it was right.
I can only say that it was human.
The deeper issue is not whether the commandments are right.
It is whether they can ever be applied without interpretation.
Too much rigidity → cruelty in the name of morality.
Too much flexibility → chaos disguised as freedom.
We are left in tension.
Perhaps the commandments were never meant to function as rigid laws in every conceivable situation.
Perhaps they are moral directions rather than mechanical rules:
In this reading, the spirit matters more than the letter.
But that raises a dangerous possibility: who decides what the “spirit” requires?
This is where modern ethics fractures into two extremes:
Neither is sufficient.
The real challenge is harder: to hold onto moral clarity without losing moral intelligence.
But they no longer stand untouched on distant stone tablets.
They stand within us — contested, interpreted, lived.
To be human is not simply to obey rules.
It is to carry the burden of deciding when, and how, they apply.
And that burden cannot be escaped.
“He who fights with monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
What one person cannot do alone — and what millions can still do together.In a time of escalating global conflict and war, many people are asking the same question: what can one individual actually do?
Almost everyone I speak to says the same thing. On trains. In cafés. On the street. Among friends.
“Nothing.”
What can I do? I am one person. One voter. One consumer. One voice. The machine is too big. The war is too far away. The system is too entrenched.
It sounds like realism. But it is something closer to resignation.
At the time of writing, this is not an abstract question. The United States and Israel are engaged in a widening military campaign across Iran and the region, with consequences already extending into Lebanon and beyond. Civilian infrastructure has been hit. Escalation remains a real possibility. The language of expansion and power is no longer confined to the margins.
And yet, in the face of all this, the most common response remains the same: there is nothing I can do.
No one person can stop a war alone. That is true. But it does not follow that one person has nothing to do. It only means that conscience must become collective before it becomes consequential.
Every system of violence depends not only on leaders, generals, and ideologues, but on millions of smaller permissions: purchases, habits, silences, career calculations, and the daily decision to do nothing because doing something feels futile. That is where power really sits.
We do not have to look far, in my adotped country, to see both what passive compliance can enable and what collective refusal can undo.
We tend to imagine power as something distant: governments, armies, corporations. And of course, it is. But it is also embedded in the ordinary flows that sustain those systems: money, attention, legitimacy, cooperation.
Remove enough of those, and even large structures begin to strain.
As Charles Eisenstein has argued, modern systems are often more fragile than they appear. Confidence depends on participation. Withdraw participation at scale, and the system feels it.
The point is not that one person can bring about collapse. The point is that systems depend on millions of people continuing to cooperate. Which means that non-cooperation matters too.
Much of what passes for protest today is expressive. It allows us to signal disapproval, to feel aligned, to release moral tension. But expression is not the same as pressure.
Pressure is slower, less visible, and more demanding. It involves changing behaviour, not just declaring opinion. It involves cost.
If anything is to change, the question is not what we feel, but what we are prepared to do differently.
None of what follows is dramatic. That is precisely the point. These are actions available to ordinary people, within the law, that become powerful only when they are repeated, shared, and sustained.
Not “this is terrible.” Say what you oppose, what you want changed, and who has the power to act. Silence is easy to ignore. Clarity is not.
One message can be dismissed. Patterns cannot. Ask for a position, not a platitude. Follow up.
Reconsider where you bank. Review what your investments support. Cancel subscriptions tied to companies you wish to avoid. Move spending where you can. Systems built on constant inflow notice outflow.
Recently, after 20 years of brand loyalty, I shut down my Apple eco-system. I now use European-based Proton Mail, Calendar and Drive and I write using Linux Mint and open source software. I’ve discovered that I am not alone.
Vague refusal achieves little. Targeted, visible refusal accumulates. Choose specific companies or sectors. Be consistent. Make your reasons public.
Your university, your workplace, your church, your professional body. Ask what they fund, who they partner with, what position they take.
Institutions prefer neutrality. Pressure forces articulation.
Movements rarely begin large. They begin with a handful of people who decide to act together and to continue acting.
Continuity matters more than size.
Demonstrations are not sufficient, but they are not meaningless. Presence, visibility, repetition—these change the atmosphere in which decisions are made.
Support serious journalism, legal work and humanitarian organisations. Wars continue more easily when they are obscured.
Agreement has no effect until it is organised. Exchange names. Set a date. Do one thing. Repeat.
None of this is easy.
It requires persistence rather than intensity. Discipline rather than outrage. Coordination rather than isolation.
It also requires something else: the refusal to adopt the logic of the thing one opposes.
If protest becomes only anger, only dehumanisation, only the search for enemies, it begins to mirror the structure it resists. The aim is not to reverse roles within the same system, but to alter the system itself.
It is easier to argue about geopolitics than to examine the small ways in which we continue to cooperate with it.
That is slower work. But it is more durable.
No one person can stop a war.
But wars do not continue by themselves. They continue because millions of ordinary people, in thousands of small ways, continue to cooperate with the systems that sustain them.
Withdraw enough of that cooperation — financially, politically, socially, publicly — and pressure begins to build.
The question is not whether you can do everything.
It is whether you are willing to do something.
And whether enough of us are willing to do it together.
“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be either good or evil.”
— Hannah Arendt