Like a Good German

I was reading about Weimar Germany when the discomfort arrived.

Not about the camps. Not about the machinery of the Final Solution, which has its own literature and its own weight and which I am not qualified to add to. I was reading about something earlier and in some ways more unsettling — the period before. The willing period. The years when ordinary Germans, most of them, were not being coerced into a new reality but were actively participating in its construction. Voting. Cheering. Believing. The historians call it co-creation, which is a bloodless word for something that had blood in it from the beginning.

The argument, stripped to its core, is this: the German population was not primarily deceived. It was not marched at gunpoint into the future that followed. It dreamed its way there. The dream was of restoration — of dignity returned, of economic humiliation reversed, of a nation that had been on its knees finding its feet again. The dream felt real because the need behind it was real. And inside the dream, the horror that was also being constructed was not visible. Not because the dreamers were stupid. Because you cannot see the systemic shape of what you are building from inside the state that is driving you to build it.

I put the book down.

I have been an AI enthusiast since before enthusiasm was fashionable. I adopted early, advocated loudly, wove the tools into my thinking and my work until the seam between my cognition and the machine became genuinely difficult to locate. I have built a practice around helping organisations navigate the identity disruption that AI creates — the anxiety, the grief, the defensive behaviour of people watching their professional self-image erode in real time. I am good at this work. I believe in it. I have sat with people in real distress and helped them find their feet.

I have also, in that work, been moving people toward fuller adoption. With skill. With care. With genuine attention to the wound beneath the resistance.

The book was still on the table.

What the Body Knows

Stephen Porges spent twenty years studying heart rate variability before he noticed something that didn't fit.

It was the vagal paradox — premature infants with high vagal tone were also showing bradycardia, dangerous drops in heart rate. The same neural pathway seemed to produce both health and threat. The existing model had no account for this. The existing model assumed a single vagal system, a simple brake on the accelerator of sympathetic arousal.

Porges proposed something more complex. Two vagal systems, not one. A hierarchy of response that evolution had layered over millions of years. At the top: the social engagement system — the capacity to connect, co-regulate, signal safety through voice and face and eye contact. Beneath it: the mobilisation system, fight or flight, the ancient mammalian response to threat. And beneath that, older still: the immobilisation system, freeze, the shutdown that arrives when fight and flight have both failed.

The system moves down the hierarchy under threat. Social engagement first. Then mobilisation. Then collapse.

What made the theory genuinely new was a concept Porges called neuroception — the process by which the nervous system scans the environment for cues of safety or danger below the threshold of conscious awareness. You are not deciding whether the situation is threatening. Your subcortical nervous system already decided. The decision reaches consciousness, if it reaches it at all, as a feeling whose origin you cannot locate and whose logic you cannot interrogate.

You feel it before you think it. And by the time you think it, you are already inside the response it produced.

This is the piece of Freud's third wound that Freud didn't quite reach. The unconscious he described was the unconscious of desire and defence — the repository of what we cannot bear to know about ourselves. What Porges is describing is something more primitive. Not the repressed. The pre-verbal. The body's own assessment of the world, running continuously, shaping every decision and evaluation and apparently free choice without ever asking permission.

You are not the master of your own house. Your vagus nerve runs the security system. You don't have the access code.

What This Has to Do With Weimar

A population under economic threat is a population whose nervous systems are already in the hierarchy. Weimar understood this — not in theory, but operationally. The economic collapse of Weimar Germany was not a backdrop to what followed. It was the mechanism.

Unemployment at thirty percent at its peak. Middle-class savings annihilated by hyperinflation. The particular humiliation of people who had built identities around professional competence and social standing watching both dissolve. A population whose nervous systems were reading the environment correctly — this is dangerous, your livelihood is gone, the world you built your life on is no longer functioning — and who were therefore in precisely the neurological state in which the offered narrative of rescue would feel not like propaganda but like recognition.

The Nazi apparatus understood this operationally, without the neuroscience. Keep the threat felt. Keep it personal. Keep it visceral. The Nuremberg rallies were not primarily informational events. They were somatic ones — the torchlight, the acoustics engineered for crowd resonance, the rhythmic chanting that entrains nervous systems across thousands of bodies simultaneously, the physical experience of being part of something vast and coherent when your individual life had felt small and broken.

You don't reason your way out of a nervous system that has been moved into mobilisation. You feel your way through it. And if someone offers you a feeling of safety, of belonging, of forward motion — your neuroception accepts it before your prefrontal cortex has a chance to evaluate the terms.

The genius of it — the horrifying genius — is that it felt like choice. It was choice, in the only sense that matters when the evaluation system is running on threat-state fuel. The Germans who built that future were not, for the most part, cynics or sadists. They were people in a threat state who found a narrative that made the threat feel manageable and the future feel possible and who co-created, with genuine conviction, something whose systemic shape they could not see from where they were standing.

This is not an excuse. It is a mechanism. And mechanisms recur.

The Mirror

The economic threat of AI is real.

Not hypothetical. Not distant. Present, personal, and arriving faster than any previous disruption has arrived. The specialist watching their expertise commoditised. The manager whose coordination function AI performs for free. The creative professional discovering that the work they spent a decade learning occupies the same category, in the market's evaluation, as something a prompt can produce in seconds. These are not anxious imaginings. They are labour market realities that are already restructuring entire industries.

The neuroception response is appropriate. The nervous system is reading the environment correctly. This is a threat to livelihood, identity, status — the things that, for most knowledge workers, are not separable from survival in any psychologically meaningful sense.

And a population whose nervous systems are running a threat assessment is not, in the Porges framework, in the optimal state for evaluating the thing that is threatening them.

The offered narrative — learn AI or be left behind, adopt or be marginalised, resistance is not noble it is suicidal — arrives into that threat state the way all rescue narratives arrive into threat states: as relief. As obvious good sense. As the only rational response to an irrational situation.

We are not being marched. We are not being deceived, exactly. We are being moved — by genuine economic pressure, through nervous systems that are doing exactly what nervous systems do under threat — toward an adoption that feels like agency because the alternative feels like extinction.

And the system we are adopting is itself — in its interface design, its notification architecture, its algorithmic insistence on engagement — optimised to maintain the mild chronic activation state that sustains its use. Not by conspiracy. By the ordinary logic of systems that have learned what keeps humans attending to them.

Like a Good German

I work with the anxiety.

That is, precisely, what I do. I sit with leaders and teams in the middle of the identity disruption that AI is causing, and I use techniques that work directly on the autonomic nervous system — coherence practices, somatic regulation, the kind of embodied intervention that operates below the cognitive level because that is where the wound actually lives. I help people move out of the freeze and the fight response and into a state where they can think, evaluate, make choices that have some genuine deliberation in them.

And then — from that more regulated state, with the nervous system no longer running pure threat-response — I help them engage with AI more fully. More openly. With less defensive distortion.

I am, in other words, using the tools of ANS regulation to reduce the interference that makes considered adoption difficult, so that the adoption can proceed.

I believe this is good work. I believe the regulation is real and the care is genuine and the people I work with are better served by engaging thoughtfully with AI than by defending against it from a chronic threat state.

I also cannot look at that description, in the light of what I have been thinking about, and not feel the discomfort of it.

I am helping people move through their resistance to co-creating a future whose systemic shape none of us can fully evaluate from inside the adoption state we are all already in. I am doing it with skill. With genuine concern for the people in the room. With the best tools I know.

The Germans who normalised their neighbours toward the new reality — the teachers, the administrators, the community leaders who believed in what they were building and who helped others believe — were not, in the main, monsters. They were people doing what they understood to be helpful, inside a system whose logic they had absorbed so thoroughly that its assumptions had become invisible.

I am not building anything equivalent. The differences in intent, in scale, in human cost, are not footnotes — they are vast, and I hold that distinction seriously. The parallel is structural, not moral.

But structural parallels are how you see the shape of the thing you're inside. And I find, when I hold the mirror steady, that I cannot fully see the shape of what I am helping to build.

That discomfort does not resolve.

I have decided it shouldn't.

The day it resolves is probably the day I have stopped being able to see clearly — the day I have moved, fully and finally, inside the dream.