I now live in Leatherhead, the beginning and end of H.G. Wells’s prophetic War of the Worlds (1898). Wells summoned a Martian invasion of sleepy Essex in a parable of complacency.
In my last substantial contribution to Village, I charted the rise of the far right as a response to the collapse of the neoliberal consensus, the resurgence of racialised myth, and deepening inequality. I warned then that we risked sleepwalking into the abyss.
We have sleepwalked into regional wars, economic fragmentation, and environmental crisis. As Arundhati Roy said of ghost capitalism, Gaia herself groans—and she would know, given India’s ravaged ecologies.
This essay explores sleepwalking—personal, political, and historical—as a diagnosis of our current condition. Through literature, philosophy, and geopolitics, I argue that the true threat is not the tyrant at the gate but the passivity that lets him in.
This essay explores sleepwalking—personal, political, and historical—as a diagnosis of our current condition. Through literature, philosophy, and geopolitics, I argue that the true threat is not the tyrant at the gate but the passivity that lets him in.
I. The Metaphor of Sleepwalking
Sleepwalking is more than a medical condition. In law and psychiatry, it signifies diminished responsibility—a mind severed from agency. Politically, it evokes inertia: societies dulled by distraction, habituated to fear, or soothed by routine.
Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ (1932) conjures the archetype: a society pacified by pleasure, drugs, and distraction. Bernard Marx, the reluctant dissident, seeks exile in Iceland not to escape, but to think and feel freely. His yearning mirrors our own—our need to disconnect from systems that numb rather than enlighten.
II. History repeats: the sleepwalkers of 1914
I must apologise for the unoriginality of my metaphor. Libraries groan with unread volumes for more than a century with the title ‘Sleepwalkers’. I can think of at least six.
Christopher Clark’s ‘The Sleepwalkers’ (2014) shows how no one intended World War I — yet all contributed. A chain of miscalculations, rivalries, and hubris led Europe to catastrophe.
The parallel with today’s world — in Ukraine, Gaza, Taiwan—is chilling. Escalation becomes default; complexity is erased by binary narratives. Putin’s war, for instance, partly reflects fear of losing the Ukrainian breadbasket—a theme explored by Bulgakov with prophetic clarity. Again, the characters in his ‘The White Guard’ sleepwalk through crisis, trying to cling to a disappearing order.
In a nuclear and AI-driven world, the next miscalculation might not lead to trench warfare but instant annihilation. The challenge: to manage crisis without triggering it. As ‘The Fog of War’ (2003) reminded us through Robert McNamara, overreaction is often as dangerous as passivity.
III. Ethical decay and the return of brutalism
In Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers (1931–32), German society slides into fascism not through dramatic rupture but moral erosion. His character Bertrand, a hollow opportunist, is not exceptional —he is simply what his era produces.
So too today. The collapse of ethical boundaries—”profit before people,” governance by algorithm—makes authoritarianism seem rational. Michael Haneke’s ‘The White Ribbon’ (2009) portrays how a brutalised generation becomes ripe for tyranny. Our brutality is digital, but just as dehumanising.
Influencers and disinformation merchants understand this. Populism thrives by limiting choice, shaping identities, and feeding fear. There Is No Alternative—TINA—has returned in darker form.
IV. Scientific progress, spiritual drift
Arthur Koestler’s ‘The Sleepwalkers’ (1959) chronicles Western cosmology’s evolution. The title is double-edged: science has often advanced through intuition, not reason.
Today’s technologies—AI, surveillance capitalism, genetic engineering—mirror that ambivalence. They offer promise, but also unprecedented risk. Public discourse has failed to keep up, retreating from ethics, abandoning responsibility.
Koestler feared a world where science was severed from values. Jürgen Habermas warns us still: rationality without morality is not progress but peril.
V. The modern orcs and their enablers
Trump, Putin, Modi, Meloni, Orbán—these figures attract rightful attention. But more dangerous are the enablers: the centrists, bureaucrats, and technocrats who normalise cruelty in the name of order.
Broch’s Haguenau, the polished businessman who enables the system, is today’s bureaucrat overseeing deportations or austerity. Karl Kraus, in his 1933 return to publishing with ‘The Third Walpurgis Night’, wrote ascetically: “Of Hitler, I have nothing to say.” His scorn was reserved for Goebbels—and the collaborators.
The erosion of norms usually comes not from jackbooted fascists, but, dear reader, from moderates who remain silent.
VI. Media collapse and the end of dialogue
The digital sphere has obliterated what Habermas called the “ideal speech situation” In place of deliberation, we get outrage, echo chambers, AI-generated philosophy and algorithmic control.
Dialogue has become noise. Conspiracy replaces complexity; truth becomes optional. Richard Kearney’s Touch (2021) reminds us what we’ve lost: our interpersonal reality, our shared space.
Without shared meaning, politics collapses. We don’t just disagree—we live in different realities.
VII. Resisting the drift
Yet resistance is possible. Primo Levi, from the inferno of Auschwitz, insisted even small acts matter. Sonny Jacobs who died last week, wrongly imprisoned, spoke of “hope against hope”. Village published my eulogy.
Resistance begins with speech, thought, doubt. It requires civic imagination, solidarity, and ethical clarity. We must reject both technocratic fatalism and populist illusion. We must relearn how to disagree.
VIII. The need for a new Rationality
What we need is not less reason, but better reason—one that includes morality, embraces complexity, and reclaims imagination. In ‘the Structure of Scientific Revolutions ‘(1962), Thomas Kuhn showed that science does not progress through steady, cumulative knowledge, but through paradigm shifts—The shift is now as we face ecological entropy, psychological dystopia digital dehumanisation, and accelerating authoritarianism. These cannot be met with 20th-century ideologies applied by a sleepy elite. We must cultivate wakefulness — not just awareness, but responsibility.
To wake is to choose. What we choose now will echo long after us. There is no need for a discarding of reason — we need its moral and intellectual rebirth.
A scroll of honour: a call to Enlightenment
As Trump seeks to dismantle Harvard, California, due process, the rule of law — and others dismantle democratic norms — let us name those who kept the light: Socrates. Jefferson (for all his flaws). Swift, the prince of journalists. Voltaire. Dostoevsky. Darwin. Camus. Thomas Mann. Primo Levi. Hitchens—Christopher, not Peter. Chomsky, Habermas, still with us.
The somnambulant have slept until noon. We need a new generation of passion and rigour. Wake up!
