By Dr. Charles Obiajulu Ugwu
A reckoning with humanity’s grand delusion
Something is wrong with us. Deeply, profoundly, maybe irreparably wrong.
We don’t just fight wars anymore. We are war. It’s in our bones, our algorithms, our economies, and this part hurts the most in our silences.
Look around. Watch the headlines scroll by like digital obituaries for a species losing its soul in real time. Another missile. Another massacre. Another leader posturing over a pile of civilian bodies as if death itself were a political currency.
In the past four days alone, Iran and Israel have engaged in military confrontations at a scale we haven’t seen since World War II. Not just an exchange of fire, but an escalation with the potential to collapse what little illusion of stability remains in the Middle East. And beyond that? There are at least seven proxy wars currently active across Arab nations alone. These aren’t minor skirmishes. These are complex, engineered conflicts layered with religion, pride, foreign interests, and old vendettas dressed in new flags.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world… watches. Maybe with mild concern. Maybe with popcorn. Or, more honestly, maybe with the same numb detachment we reserve for tragedy that hasn’t yet crossed into our postcode.
But this isn’t about just one region. This isn’t about the “Middle East problem” or “Eastern Europe tensions” or the “fragility of developing states.” No. What we’re witnessing is the global architecture of self-destruction meticulously designed, perpetually denied.
Take Nigeria, my home. A country blessed with brilliance and burdened by betrayal. We’re now so desensitized to horror that kidnappings, ritual killings, and violent crimes barely trend beyond 24 hours. Entire villages are wiped out, and the next day we’re back to dance videos and party flyers. The absurdity is biblical.
And yet, amidst this blood-soaked reality in the same cities, the same hours churches erupt in praise. Mosques echo with solemn prayers. Across the world, spiritual leaders speak of peace, compassion, love. We gather in social circles to discuss “community,” to toast to “togetherness.” NGOs release campaigns. Corporates talk ESG. Governments host summits themed around “sustainable futures.”
It’s all theater.
And we, the global audience, are both actors and hostages.
Because here’s the ugly, unfiltered truth: our moral foundations are a lie. A beautiful, glittering, gaslit lie. We’ve built societies on a choreography of contradictions.
We preach peace while funding war.
We light candles for victims while shaking hands with their killers.
We build billion-dollar temples, mosques, and cathedrals then ignore the starving children just outside their gates.
We talk about progress while bathing in blood.
How did we get here?
How did we evolve such exquisite intelligence and still behave like beasts? How did we craft the brilliance of AI, decode the human genome, land machines on Mars yet remain incapable of basic decency toward one another?
Somewhere, we stopped evolving morally. And started outsourcing ethics to performance. We became performers of goodness. Curators of outrage. Architects of narratives that feel good — so long as they don’t cost us anything.
But here’s the part that should haunt us:
Some people are profiting from this chaos.
Some people are building careers on the backs of the dead.
Some people educated, powerful, often well-dressed thrive in the fog of war.
And the rest of us? We scroll. We shrug. We move on.
This isn’t cynicism. This is diagnosis.
Our systems are infected structurally and spiritually.
Take global politics. War is now just another lever of influence. Nation-states fund militias like venture capital firms. They topple governments, arm factions, sabotage peace deals all behind carefully worded press releases. And when civilians die? Collateral damage. Or worse: classified.
Take media. Outrage is monetized. The more graphic the footage, the higher the clicks. The more polarizing the coverage, the better the engagement metrics. War isn’t just news — it’s content.
Take religion. Many of our most revered institutions are now spiritual corporations. Selling hope on Sundays while investing in silence during genocides. We condemn violence selectively, often only when the victims look like us or the perpetrators offend our affiliations.
Take education. Our curricula still teach sanitized versions of history — edited by the victors, bleached of blood, engineered to sustain the myth that “civilization” has always meant the same thing to everyone.
Take technology. We’ve built tools that connect us in milliseconds but sever us emotionally. It’s easier to swipe past a massacre than to sit with the discomfort of it. Algorithms reinforce our bubbles. Empathy, once spontaneous, now needs to be reminded.
So let’s stop pretending this is about them.
This is about us.
Because even in the so-called developed world, behind the façades of civility, violence simmers l racial, economic, ideological. The West may not bomb its streets daily, but it bombs its conscience through apathy, detachment, and selective humanity.
Let me ask the hardest question of all:
Are we truly human anymore?
I mean it.
Are we still beings with souls with the capacity for wonder, for compassion, for weeping at another’s pain?
Or have we devolved into something else post-moral entities capable of astonishing innovation, yet incapable of ethical coherence?
If we were made in the image of God, what version of God are we now reflecting?
The vengeful one? The passive one? The absent one?
Because right now, it feels like we’ve mistaken divine likeness for divine license a free pass to dominate, destroy, and dehumanize in the name of everything but truth.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t about being pacifist or naïve. Conflict exists. It always has. But when it becomes a norm, when it becomes background noise then something foundational has failed.
What’s terrifying is that we may have passed the point of no return without even realizing it.
We’ve normalized insanity.
Mass graves no longer shock us.
Children under rubble barely move us.
Cities turning into war zones have become Tuesday.
And yet, we still gather at conferences, summits, panels sipping water in air-conditioned halls discussing “sustainable peace” as if it’s a tech feature we just haven’t updated yet.
You want peace?
Then start by dismantling the economic and ideological scaffolding of war.
Start by holding not just militants, but politicians, corporates, religious elites, and complicit nations accountable.
Start by rewiring the global education system to prioritize truth, ethics, and history not sanitized national mythologies.
Start by refusing to consume violence as entertainment.
Start by telling your children that empathy is not weakness — it is a radical act of resistance.
And perhaps most of all, start by confronting the biggest lie of all: that this is normal.
Because the world is not suffering from random chaos. It is suffering from engineered madness enabled by systems, funded by powers, tolerated by societies, and excused by us all.
Unless we choose differently.
Unless we revolt not with weapons, but with conscience. With truth. With a kind of unapologetic moral clarity that cuts through the theater and exposes the farce.
Unless we admit that peace is not a policy. It’s a practice. One that must start in how we vote, how we speak, how we spend, how we believe, and how we see each other.
History won’t judge us by the wars we fought. It will judge us by the wars we normalized.
So here’s my final plea not to governments or gods, but to you, reader.
Remember your soul.
Find your anger again.
Let your conscience ache.
And then do something, anything that resists this global drift toward moral extinction.
Because if we are still human, then now is the time to act like it.
Before it’s too late.
About the Author
Dr. Charles Obiajulu Ugwu is a strategic leadership expert, knowledge architect, and author of the forthcoming book The Adaptability Quotient (AQ): Rewiring Humanity for the Future. He writes from Lagos, Nigeria, and speaks globally on moral intelligence, systems transformation, and regenerative leadership.
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