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Comment by UncleOxidant | Hacker News Reader

19 pointsUncleOxidant6 comments

We’re trying to tell you as loud as we can. You can get out of it, but you have to understand where you are to even turn around. This, I fear, is one of many things Americans do not understand. You tell yourself American collapse is impossible. Meanwhile, look around.

This is the key point in the article. Normalcy bias is a killer.

Normalcy bias implies Mom can do something about ALL threats one drops in her lap. Sooner or later one realizes Mom can't, and its not related to how loudly one cries or screams about the problem or how quickly Mom runs into the room.

People are acting as if awareness and consciousness is some magic to solving complexity and unpredictability.

Nature has already shown us how to compartmentalize info flows so that we don't get overloaded. For example you are not conscious about what every organ in your body is doing at all time. You are not aware about how many cells are glitching or failing. You are not aware about whats happening at the molecular or atomic level. This is not an accident cause the system doesn't have capacities to do anything about it even if it was magically aware about every problem.

Today our info architecture of society is that pathetically designed, that it is doing nothing useful other than overloading everyone.

People have survived all kinds of chaos throughout history. Just look at the life stories of ordinary people who survived the World Wars or Russian or French revolutions. Guess what helped them from having their brains totally fried by the chaos? Ignorance did. Don't pay attention to things way above your pay grade or career trajectory. Nothing good will happen in the current info landscape.

This was submitted by someone else earlier and then seemed to get immediately flagged, can someone explain why? I may not agree with everything in the article ("In the last three months America has lost more people than Sri Lanka lost in 30 years of civil war" - this seems unlikely), but the idea that collapse can sneak up on you and feel really normal is an interesting one to ponder.

I think this is related to why people say the great depression happened slowly and then suddenly: you are actually in the depression long time before unavoidable events overtake the slow pace.

The events in Sri Lanka were semi normalised, much as life in Belfast in the 1970s normalised bomb outrages. People did not flee the city en masse, they just kinda worked around things and pretended it wasn't PTSD central. People didn't flee Sri Lanka if they could work around the collapse of society.

People have normalised living in an economy where your neighbours may disappear with unidentified ICE agents, if somebody thinks they aren't legal, irrespective of paperwork or citizenship. People have normalised having no idea if the court system applies to WH decisions, economic indicators being yo-yo, prices rising, Fox news not reflecting their observed reality, you name it, they've normalised it.

It would be nice if the original year of publication had been included in the tagline. Too bad HN doesn’t automatically extract and include such metadata.

Needs (2020)

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