Hypernormalization: Systems are crumbling – but daily life continues | Hacker News Reader

Hypernormalization: Systems are crumbling – but daily life continues

theguardian.com

8 pointstummler7 comments

"If everything feels broken but strangely normal, the Soviet-era concept of hypernormalization can help. Hypernormalization is a heady, $10 word, but it captures the weird, dire atmosphere of the US in 2025. First articulated in 2005 by scholar Alexei Yurchak to describe the civilian experience in Soviet Russia, hypernormalization describes life in a society where two main things are happening. The first is people seeing that governing systems and institutions are broken. And the second is that, for reasons including a lack of effective leadership and an inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo, people carry on with their lives as normal despite systemic dysfunction – give or take a heavy load of fear, dread, denial and dissociation."

Curious to hear how this narrative resonates with folks here. Does it feel spot-on, out of touch, or something in between?

Feels spot on. Take all the wildfires and their smoke. Every year it's worse than before but people have normalized it. It's just part of the weather forecast now, many will avoid outside activities, some ignore it and carry on as if it weren't there, others will sport an N95 mask. People have seemingly accepted it – give or take a heavy load of fear, dread, denial and dissociation

Absolutely spot on. We're on a sinking ship and just trying to live our lives as normally as possible.

Spot on. At least among the people I know.

How would you describe your circle (socio-economically or otherwise)?

Some upper middle class and coastal; some minimum wage or on disability, scattered across rural areas and small to mid-sized non-coastal cities.

Politically anywhere from totally disengaged to far left; mostly but not all express views that in the current climate would be considered at least slightly left of center, regardless of whether they vote that way or at all. Also a bunch who used to consider themselves right-center but now hold their noses and vote left because they think the current administration’s approach to political discourse, the constitution, and fascism is horrifying.

The term's context belongs to the USSR right before it broke apart.

If you look at Adam Curtis' wealth of documentaries, one of which helped popularize the term hypernormalization:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curtis

you will find Curtis oeuvre relies on mashing up content extracted from BBC's massive news archive arranged according to themes chosen by Curtis.

Once of Curtis' central themes is the observation of an intellectual gap between rationalist comprehension of the world through the news, and the wobbliness of how the world actually manifests, especially in the context of politics and leadership. The implicit, recurring question being what are the limits of our science to account for ourselves.

Curtis offers many views into the Soviets, especially in a series devoted to riffing on the mood of Soviet society during the 80s and 90s titled Traumazone.

Curtis' picks from the archives may help you gain a sense for distinctions between the political preconditions of the end of the USSR and ongoing mess of U.S. politics.

One take is that since the 20th century, the orientation of political leadership has profoundly changed: politicians no longer seek to offer coherent solutions in a mechanical nation, they seek the necessity of their own power in an electoral marketplace of influence within an organism of society.

Under such view, the question can be formed: Did the USSR may come undone because its bureaucrats couldn't account for everything well enough to coherently operate an economically coherent centralized state?

Curtis tries to form the same question for Thatchers' & Blair's UK when observing how the British Empire fell apart.

The intro to his film Hypernormalization sets forth the essential observation leading to such questions:

//"How we got to this strange time of great uncertainty and confusion where those who are supposed to be in power are paralysed and have no idea what to do".//

If this observation is true-- which question is begged through the survey of news-- then should it be expected that more centralized societies, however well controlled, might be more vulnerable to limits of understanding of their leadership, and by corollary as no society's leadership has a complete understanding of itself, churn and crisis are inevitable.

All of Curtis' docs deal with variations on the question of the limits of rationalism. His work now amounts large trove on the topic (see filmography):

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curtis

A excellent aspect of Curtis' work is that he is careful to always veer away from simple proscriptive judgements. He does not pursue belief that there's any specific way that societies are supposed to work, but rather continuously questions how and why they work as they do, embracing the possibility that minds can change and adapt in the face of uncertainty and crisis.

—

PICKS

For this thread, the obvious place to start is:

1 Hypernormalisation.

After this consider the following, in order:

2 All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace

3 Oceans Apart

4 Can't Get You Out of My Head

5 Century of the Self

6 Bitter Lake

and then on in any order that suits your interests.

As these docs produce an effect much like good music as well as offering high-quality narrative insights, they can be revisited and appreciated in changing ways with experience.

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