Hypernormalisation - Best of 2022
We The People are so caught up in this system that despite seeing with our own eyes that something is wrong everywhere, we keep voting for the same outcome.
Here follows the second piece in a new series –“Best of 2022” – in which we share our favourite releases from the last 12 months.
In his 2016 documentary film, HyperNormalisation, Adam Curtis explains that by the 1980s, Soviet leaders had realised that their vision for a socialist society had failed. They could not forecast accurately and could not micromanage everything.
However, they were so involved in the system they had built that they could not think of any alternatives. So instead, they pretended that things were getting better as they traveled along the road to a socialist utopia.
Aleksi Yurchak, the Leningrad-born professor of anthropology at Berkeley, explained what it was like to live through this period in his book, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. He wrote that the citizenry knew the leaders were lying; however, the people were themselves trapped in the system, and were therefore unable to imagine anything better. So they pretended to believe the pretending politicians. Society became fake, and Yurchak called this pretence 'HyperNormalisation'.
In Britain today, we also know that something isn't right with everything. This feeling was probably sparked in the mid-2000s, when it became clear that our leaders had dragged the country into a bloody war in Iraq on a lie.
Shortly after, the global financial system collapsed. Nation states saved the world economy from collapse by pumping vast sums of money into the banking system to repair their ruined balance sheets. Nobody went to jail for this potentially world-shattering catastrophe, just as nobody was punished for Iraq. And those reforms that were undertaken trimmed around the edges rather than questioning the assumptions upon which the systems were built.
And then, George Osbourne and David Cameron imposed austerity on Britain, which they said was necessary to maintain the confidence of the markets. Nobody in power bothered to ask whether *we* should still have confidence in the *markets* - a question every man and woman on the street was asking.
It was as though, faced with two calamitous events that made it obvious that their understanding of reality was wrong, the politicians, the media, the civil service, the financiers and the think tanks, simply ignored them and continued, like the Soviet Leaders, as though everything was fine.
Now, we see such events everywhere and all the time.
Nobody, left or right, thinks the government got its response to the pandemic right. It was clear that they were bumbling and bluffing the whole way. The migrant crisis on the South Coast continues even as the head of Border Force says he hates borders. Grooming gangs, which rape and press into sex slavery our most vulnerable daughters, remain at large in our cities. Drugtaking has reached epidemic levels, with the relatively tiny number of prosecutions making little difference. Knife crime and gang culture menaces the law abiding and wastes the potential of countless young men from poor backgrounds. Homelessness can be seen everywhere, and our country has recently been rocked by two child murders. Our leaders seem not only powerless to deal with any of this, but oblivious to it all.
Yet, these are mere events. What most of us realise is that our whole structure of national management is broken.
Our standard of living is only maintained by the acceptance of ever-greater levels of debt (state and personal). Even then, young middle class people find themselves unable to afford to buy a home, and as prices rise, it dawns on them that they are unlikely to be ever able to afford one. The working class shouldn't even bother dreaming. Our industry, which once provided decent, productive jobs, has disappeared. So much so that we cannot even manufacture PPE or glass vials for vaccines anymore.
The British concept of 'fairness' has been replaced (in law) with the alien notion of 'equality', which itself moves toward 'equity', and has manifestly unfair, strange and damaging effects throughout society and its organisation.
Our education and training system is failing to the extent that universities must be forced to accept state school leavers for undergraduate degrees, and that we are reliant on foreigners to do basic skilled jobs like plumbing, building, HGV driving and even waiting tables.
Children are considerably more likely to have a TV in their bedrooms than a father in the house. Fifty per cent of marriages are likely to end in divorce. And yet we know that being raised by two parents is a key metric for childhood, and thence adult, outcomes.
Meanwhile, fifty years ago, being wealthy meant a bigger house, a fancier car and a holiday to a more distant destination. Now, it means living in a completely different world, detached from the existence of the rest of us.
The response of our political parties has been Hypernormal. The mainstream left has made a weird and unholy alliance with big business and the holders of capital - first, to encourage the type of individualism and self expression (diversity) that precludes the class solidarity needed for change; secondly, to encourage the importation of cheap migrant labour to hold down wages; and thirdly, to encourage Californian megacorporations to take increasing control over our political discourse.
The mainstream right's response has been equally Hypernormal. Their argument for leaving the deepest and most successful free trade bloc in the world seems to have been that it would allow us to do more free trade. It has no concept that people voted for Brexit (and them) because of the excesses of free trade and free movement of capital. It wails about the effects of 'diversity', and yet it shows no sign, with an eighty-seat majority, of taking on the Blair-era Human Rights Act and Equality Act that make reform in this direction near impossible. It talks about family values, but further weakens marriage through legislation. It offers fighting talk on open borders, but takes none of the steps needed to stem the flow on the South Coast.
Both main parties are just moving ahead as normal. No matter what they say, their actions are in fact those of people who believe the system should continue as it is And We The People are so caught up in this system that despite seeing with our own eyes that something is wrong everywhere, we keep voting for the same outcome. We fear what might happen if we don't (the other side will get in) and lack the imagination to see an alternative.
But to paraphrase Aleksi Yurchak, Hypernormalisation is forever until it is no more. If we don't ourselves create a decent alternative soon, somebody charismatic well arrive and tell us a seductive story of a great future. But it won't be liberal, conservative, democratic or free.
