It’s Not a Smooth Ascent

The fields of Ypres, 1915. A ghostly green cloud creeps across no-man's-land, bringing unspeakable agony to soldiers in its path. This was humanity's first mass experiment with chemical warfare. Turning the very air into a weapon. In that moment, we crossed a threshold that had stood for millennia. The ancient taboo against poisoning your enemy.

Yet something strange happened next. Instead of chemical weapons becoming normalized, we recoiled from them. Not just governments signing protocols, but soldiers themselves. Even in WWII, when every other weapon was fair game, both sides largely refrained from gas warfare. It was policy. And it was visceral. Something in our collective soul recognized we'd gone too far.

This pattern keeps repeating throughout history. We develop new forms of cruelty, but our capacity for empathy expands to reject them. Public executions were once entertainment; now they sicken us. Slavery was once global; now it universally horrifies. Each time we touch the darkness, we build new moral antibodies against it.