Can a Shift in Consciousness Change the Future?

“You don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

—Bob Dylan

The Doomsday Clock is a symbolic measure to how close we might be to a human-made global catastrophe. The Clock has been published annually since 1947 in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and encompasses the existential threats of nuclear war, climate change and artificial intelligence.

In 1947 The Clock was set at seven minutes to midnight.

In 2026 the clock is set at 85 seconds to midnight, reinforcing what we already know about the danger we collectively face.

But the danger is not only in the weapons and technologies we have created. It is within us, in our own psyche, in our human capacity for hatred, division, and the hubris of domination.

From the beginning of recorded history, those who seek power have understood how to manipulate the people they govern—dividing them against one another, persuading them that some other group is responsible for their difficulties. While attention is diverted toward an enemy, those in power are freer to do what they wish. And ordinary people, who mostly want to raise their families in peace and have enough to eat, soon may be swept up in murderous mayhem.

We know this pattern. We have seen where it can lead.

And yet here we are in the twenty-first century, surrounded by knowledge, universities, science, and unprecedented access to information, slipping with remarkable ease into the same old patterns. We divide ourselves. We choose sides. We find safety and a sense of belonging by identifying with the powerful and the dominant.

Only this time the stakes are existential.

We have placed extraordinary powers in our own hands—powers capable not only of damaging the Earth and its creatures but of machines whose capabilities may eventually render homo sapiens less central, possibly even irrelevant.

Is there any hope that we can stop what at this moment appears inevitable?

Any hope that we might wake up in time and turn our faces and minds away from those who seek to divide us? Any hope that we can work toward healing our internal divisions?

We speak often of love, but we are skeptical of its power. Subtlety and kindness can seem no match for the powerful emotion of hatred. Hatred can quickly scale up and spread. It can create a go-along to get-along mentality, promising solidarity but securing submission, easily justifying cruelty.

Hatred is seductive. It fills us quickly. It is easier to access than love, and certainly easier than understanding, thoughtfulness, or the willingness to live with complexity.

That is why hatred is “the canary in the coal mine”. It announces, to anyone willing to look and to pay attention, that violent escalation is on the horizon. Despite centuries of experience, our leaders continue to return to familiar playbooks: aggression, nationalism, the glorification of force, and the stoking of hatred that fuels their ambition.

Individual citizens participate in these playbooks, too, and may be convinced they are working toward the good.

When anger becomes hatred, and hatred becomes an identity—a source of belonging or a justification for violence—almost anything can become permissible. People can be reduced to labels: evildoers, enemies, less-than-human. The circle can widen until it includes babies and other innocents who have nothing to do with the original grievance.

The Cycle

Hatred does not resolve injustice. It produces a thirst for vengeance, which produces another grievance, which produces another act of violence.

Action/consequence, consequence/new action, action/consequence… The endless cycle.

Hatred does not remain confined to the moment in which it is expressed. It enters history. It is remembered, transmitted, manipulated, and sometimes transformed into new grievances and new violence.

What begins as an apparently contained conflict can widen far beyond the people who initiated it. The original perpetrators may never understand how far the consequences of their actions will travel. And those who respond to them may, in turn, become part of the very cycle they believe they are fighting.

The question, then, is not whether we should resist injustice.

The question is whether we can resist injustice without becoming its next perpetrator.

For thousands of years, human beings have sought safety through power over others. We have developed increasingly sophisticated means of extending that power. Now we have created technologies capable of amplifying human intention on a scale we have never before experienced.

The question is no longer simply what our machines can do. The question is:

What kind of consciousness do we need to develop to better govern the extraordinary powers we have created?

We have seen individuals who seem to have achieved a different way of being—people whose lives are marked not by domination but by compassion, courage, wisdom, joy and an ability to remain human in the face of hatred.

If it has been possible for a few, we can be inspired by their example, for it can also be possible for us.

Reading the newspaper and watching the news, one could easily believe that almost everyone is corrupt, cruel, or driven by the desire to dominate and take from others.

But that is not the world I inhabit.

My world has not suddenly become populated by monsters. My friends are still trying to lead decent lives. They are raising their children with a sense of fairness and kindness. They are helping one another, worrying about their families, doing their work, and trying, in their ordinary ways, to be good human beings. The news shows us what is most dramatic, most threatening, most likely to capture our attention. It does not show us the millions of quiet acts of decency that take place every day.

If hatred is contagious, so is kindness. If dominance can become a pattern, so can compassion.

The future may depend less on whether we can eliminate hatred, which may be beyond us; It may depend on whether we refuse to let hatred determine who we become.

The Doomsday Clock is not a prediction; it is a warning. We do not have the luxury of closing our eyes.

Time to step off the carousel. Time to recognize the pattern. Time to choose something different.

©2026 Shulamit Elson