Why We Can't Panic

Humans Are Designed to Keep Calm and Carry On

Ten months into Trump’s return to power, America feels like its full of pod people (you youngsters can go ahead and Google that one).

The FBI and DOJ have been purged and now serve as Trump’s personal revenge machine.

The so-called “Countering Domestic Terrorism” memorandum re-brands nearly half the country—anyone left of MAGA—as a potential extremist threat.

Kristi Noem is on airport TVs blaming “radical liberal Democrats” for the shutdown. The law doesn’t matter. The Hatch Act doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. And the public reaction is… nothing. I used to think the problem was information—that if people knew, they’d act. I’m not so sure I believe that anymore.

Here’s why:

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The Diary in the Dark

When I first started studying the Third Reich, I kept circling back to a single line from a Warsaw Ghetto diary.

The writer had already lost his home, his livelihood, and most of his family. He was starving in a room shared with five other families, living inside walls his own people were forced to build. Rumors were spreading that deportations east meant death, and he wrote something along the lines of

“We hear that being deported East means they are going to kill us, but there’s just no way the Germans would do that.”

That line told me something elemental about human nature and the unfortunate strength of optimism in our hard wiring, We are evolutionarily wired to survive what was until about 100 years ago, lives that were “nasty, brutish and short.”

When you’d spent 6 months a year freezing your balls off and eating preserved green beans while sitting in the dark after burying your 4th child, you needed a lot of capacity for optimism.

The refusal to believe what we can’t emotionally survive believing is not weakness—it’s wiring. The brain edits reality to protect itself. It lets us keep breathing inside the unbearable.

It’s the same reason most Americans aren’t in the streets right now. The mind simply cannot sustain the idea that this—open autocracy, political persecution, the militarization of domestic policing—might actually be happening here. So it files the terror away under “politics” and scrolls on.

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The Biology of Denial

Panic feels irrational, but it’s rational in the face of danger. The problem is that modern threats don’t trigger the circuitry panic evolved for. Evolution designed our alarm system for lions, not constitutions.

Psychologists have names for every part of this paralysis.

Normalcy bias—the tendency to assume tomorrow will look like today.

Motivated reasoning—using intelligence not to find truth, but to defend the tribe.

Conformity bias—the pain of standing alone, which the brain interprets as danger.

Together they form a perfect psychological firewall against reality. You can throw every atrocity, every executive purge, every constitutional violation at people, and they will metabolize it as background noise. Their nervous systems won’t let them do otherwise.

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The Cruel Design

Here’s the cosmic joke: the world was built to be diverse, and our brains were built to fear diversity. Whether you believe that’s by God’s design or evolutionary irony, it means the same thing. Humans are tribal. We evolved to love sameness and fear difference.

Propaganda doesn’t create that instinct; it hijacks it. Every authoritarian since time began has known the password. Trump just says it in American English: They’re coming for you. You are the real America.

So while our species can split atoms and map genomes, we still can’t override the part of the brain that lights up when it hears us versus them. The technology evolved. The software didn’t.

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The Civic Coma

The human brain can’t triage that chaos. It chooses calm over comprehension. It says, If the world were really ending, surely someone would stop it. But there is no “someone.” There’s just us—and we’re out of tabs.

Half the country doesn’t vote in normal times. Expecting them to mobilize against creeping authoritarianism is like expecting a man in a coma to leap from the bed when the fire alarm goes off. Civic habits decay slowly, invisibly, until there’s nothing left to wake.

And yet I still hear people say, When it gets bad enough, Americans will rise up.

As if “bad enough” has an objective threshold. It doesn’t. There’s always another rung of normalization. You think, Surely this will be the line. Then the line moves, and everyone adjusts.

A guy in the airport saying, “I haven’t watched the news in a while, but it seems weird out there.” Yes, it’s weird, sir. You should turn on the TV. But he won’t. Because he’s comfortable and wants to stay that way.

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The Terrible Truth

From the Warsaw Ghetto to Washington D.C., the story is the same: the inability to panic in time. It’s not that people are stupid or evil. It’s that they are human.

Our species evolved for adaptation, not alarm. We normalize the intolerable faster than we recognize it. We scroll through the fire until the Wi-Fi cuts out.

The only way to stop it—the only way any society has ever had a chance—is to make people panic before the crisis reaches their doorstep. That means emotional shock, mass mobilization, discomfort. Democracy can’t survive on civility; it survives on adrenaline.

But the civic body is anemic, the media fragmented, and the dopamine economy has rewired our survival instincts. We can’t panic, because panic requires presence. And presence requires attention.

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The Question

So here we are in October 2025. The president rules by decree. The justice system serves at his pleasure. The enemies list grows by the week. And the streets are largely quiet.

Maybe Americans will finally flood them if soldiers in uniform start mass arresting Beltway reporters or if Trump invokes the Insurrection Act.

Maybe. But I wouldn’t bet democracy on it.

Because the terrible truth I learned in those old diaries still holds:

by the time people believe what’s happening, it’s already too late to stop it.

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