Humanity is living in an era of permanent crisis and continuous conflict ... .

Societies are becoming desensitized ... .

Conventional World War III has not begun, but some psychological and structural conditions for a wider conflict may already be present:

• the globalization of insecurity
• economic disruption
• technological competition
• erosion of international norms

Current pressures include major-power competition across regions, record military spending, routine sanctions, cyberattacks, information warfare, AI, and overlapping regional wars involving the US, China, Russia, Europe, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Türkiye, and others. The normalization of continuous geopolitical confrontation echoes pre-global-war atmospheres.

Assertive nationalism is returning alongside rapid military-technology changes ... .

Digitalization brings unprecedented information access and connectivity but also creates “compassion fatigue” and information overload.

Conflicts that are currently contained risk spilling out and engulfing whole regions, perhaps the world. If the Iran and Ukraine conflicts were to merge, we’d see a war that runs from Poland to the edges of India. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky says that World War Three has already begun.

Iran and Ukraine are far from the only potential theaters of escalation: there is the possibility of a war in Yemen between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis, Iran’s proxy force, and a growing anger in the Muslim world about Israel’s seizure of parts of Lebanon. Not to mention the India-Pakistan border, the South China Sea, the Korean Peninsula and the Strait of Taiwan.

As the military confrontation between the US and Iran grinds on, a specific rumor has begun taking hold in both Iran and Pakistan: that the war itself is the mechanism that will summon the Mahdi, the messianic figure of broader Islamic end-times belief, back to earth to defeat America.

The same underlying rumor, that this war is building toward a divinely orchestrated climax rather than a negotiated or militarily decided end, is now circulating through two entirely different transmission belts in two different countries at the same time.