Hypernormalization
Discussion
Arran Gare:
"Lack of vision is really a failure of imagination, and the consequences of this were predictable.
Fred Polak (1973) had shown in his study The Image of the Future, that the existence or absence of inspiring images of the future largely determines the trajectories of societies. Societies, pessimistic about the future, decay, while those in which people believe a better future is possible, flourish.
As he put it:
- Any student of the rise and fall of cultures cannot fail to be impressed by the role played in this historical succession by the image of the future. The rise and fall of images of the future precedes or accompanies the rise and fall of cultures. As long as a society’s images is positive and flourishing, the flower of cultures in in full bloom. Once the image begins to decay and lose its vitality, however, the culture does not long survive. (p.19)
The fall of an image of the future was evident in the dying days of the Soviet Union. Alexei Yurchak in his book, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2006), coined the term ‘hypernormalization’ to characterize this. He claimed that everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system was failing, but could not imagine an alternative to the status quo, and politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society that would eventually realize the ideal of communism. This delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy and the fakeness was accepted by everyone as real. The whole society collapsed.
In 2016 the documentary Hypernormalization produced by British filmmaker Adam Curtis showed how in the West a similar condition prevails. Financiers and technological utopians have given up on the complex ‘real world’ and built a simpler ‘fake world’, run by corporations and kept stable by politicians. While Margaret Thatcher’s claim that there are no alternatives is accepted across the political spectrum, the problems generated by the neoliberal order are treated as mere glitches in the system, or ignored. A pretense of a functioning democratic society is maintained and fakeness is accepted by almost everyone as real. This fakeness is evident in the image presented by the global elite of technologically generated economic advances through the creation of a global free market along with the export of democracy upholding the rights of individuals. Little effort is required to see that in reality economic advances are not improving the conditions of most people’s lives, the institutions of democracy have been subverted, rights based in institutions that evolved over centuries, such as universities, have been undermined, most people have lost their economic security, the basis of genuine liberty, and wars to extend democracy into developing countries are really the exact opposite of what they purport to be.
As William Blum argued in America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy (2014), they are wars to impose institutions that facilitate control by the US ruling elites of these countries in order to plunder their resources and expropriate their wealth, with brutal consequences. Imposing markets has generated what William Robertson characterized as The Global Police State (2020), characterized by unprecedented levels of surveillance and social control. The massive concentration of wealth and income associated with the expansion of the financial sector has destabilized the global economy (Hudson, 2022). And efforts to deal with ecological destruction are failing miserably. In the West the only effective response to globalized capitalism has come from right-wing populist movements and religious fundamentalists, neither of which take ecological destruction seriously. This lack of effective response to all this manifests the extent of the paralysis of imagination on the part of critics of globalized capitalism, even when they do recognize that the dynamics of this system are now a threat to the future of humanity."
(https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1061/1691)