A number of years ago, I went to a women’s event where Condoleeza Rice was keynoting. The former Secretary of State spoke for a while about her time serving in the Bush administration and then took questions from the audience. In what I found to be a really brilliant question, a woman stood up and asked Rice what she would have students of today study in order to be better citizens. Rice’s response I found to be equally brilliant. She said that one the most important things we could all study was the rise and fall of a great empire. Pick one of the many, she remarked. We just need to recognize how even great ideas and aspirations are delicate.
I never did exactly take her up on this advice and study a particular collapse, but her remarks stayed lodged in the back of my mind. Despite their resonance, however, I never actually considered the nearness of a collapse. Collective hubris or self-protective denial made the idea of things falling apart seem still fairly far-flung.
And then several months ago, before the election had been decided, I read Malcolm Gladwell’s Revenge of the Tipping Point. In a chapter about how change often comes slowly and then all at once, he talked about how one of the most surprising aspects of the collapse of the Soviet Union was the fact that it was such a surprise. By all accounts, it shouldn’t have been. The writing was all over the walls.
As I said, I haven’t done a lot of personal study on political history, and so the details of the fall of the Soviet Union are well outside my knowledge base. But the way people experienced it – the idea that a major shift happened in a way that felt ultimately surprising but never should have been – that intrigued me. Because what we allow ourselves to be conscious of and what we ultimately keep unconscious is in many ways at the heart of what I explore as a psychologist.
And then in the last couple of months, I started to see a concept circulating that offered an explanation for how people could wind up in a state of surprised-but-not-surprised at the Soviet Union’s fall. And, like for others who were learning about this resurfaced idea, it struck an instantaneous chord. I think you’ll understand why.
–
The concept circulating is called hypernormalisation, and it’s an idea that was originated by Alexei Yurchak, a Russian-born American anthropologist, in his book, Everything was Forever, Until It Was No More (I mean, that title, right?). Yurchak describes this particular state that Soviet people found themselves in for many years in which they knew – they could feel – that the system was failing, and yet because they could see no other alternative, they maintained the pretense of a functioning society. He describes it as a kind of mass delusion, but that it started with at least some awareness that things were not good at all. But, again, without the ability to imagine something different or the agency to change it, people at all levels had to pretend that things were just fine – until they weren’t. Hypernormalisation.
Fine. It’s all fine. It’s a tongue-in-cheek catchphrase in popular culture for the same reason. We have been living in our own era of hypernormalisation and our psyches know it intimately. For those of us most distressed by current events, our bodies have been holding this dual awareness. We’re processing what’s happening but also processing the fact that we’re supposed to pretend that it’s not.
This term hypernormalisation feels so apt because while the landslide of inhumane policies is gutting, it’s actually the feeling of disillusionment and normalization of it all that feels the most disorienting.
As a therapist, I can’t help but see this as the exact same pattern that so many of us experienced growing up in our families. We’re like the children who peer out at night from our bedrooms to witness the chaos and then sit at the breakfast table the next morning swallowing the fear and anger and despair. Our bodies know that this isn’t right, but pretending it is is indeed the only safe way through it. And after all, the people who are supposed to know best are saying everything’s fine.
For many of us, this was when the split happened. This was when we began to distrust our bodies and alienate ourselves from our knowing. Our wisest and most attuned selves were working just right to signal us, but we cast them aside when we looked into the faces of the grown-ups and we knew we had to pretend.
For me, what felt most chilling after the election was not exactly another Trump presidency, but rather the return to what I can now call this hypernormalisation. It wasn’t dissimilar to 2016, but it had intensified and felt even more alienating. It was that childlike feeling of wanting to look around and say, “But this can’t be, right? Things feel really scary and broken here, right?” But then the eerie realization that the very real descent into madness would be minimized and normalized by such a large swath of our community. I’m not sure if there is actually a more destabilizing feeling than one of feeling alone in your own reality.
–
If hypernormalisation is taking hold and deluding us, then it can seem like the antidote is hyperawareness. One of the consistent tensions so many of us are feeling right now is indeed how “tuned in” we need to stay. How do we avoid normalizing the utter chaos and destruction that’s happening around us without also falling victim to the despairing weight of it all?
As someone who posts online and writes, it’s certainly a tension I feel intimately. I can find myself getting caught in the binary of believing I either need to disconnect completely or risk my own mental health. I read an outlandish headline about the latest appointee or executive order and I’m not sure whether to make sure every girlfriend I have is aware or to go do a facemask. What actually is self-care in an era of democratic collapse?
I remind myself that binaries don’t actually exist, and that the choice of having to stick my head in the sand or let it be blown off are not in fact my only options. What I believe to be more true is that there is a way to stay connected to culture while staying connected to self. But this is hard.
What I think this requires in our current era is two-fold. The first part is the one we’re hearing more about these days – managing the flow of information into our tender minds. We know this, but we are not built to process the amount of news or even interact with the amount of people with which our current platforms present us. After decades of social media serving as one of our primary information sources, it’s urgently time for us to make a change.
The second thing staying conscious will require is the part we haven’t been talking about enough. It’s the fact that to survive this – to be able to take the bad news and not end up dissociating to the point that we enter the hypernormalisation machine – we will need practices to metabolize what’s happening.
Metabolizing the stress of a broken system means that we are not letting the fear and the outrage stay sitting in our bodies day after day. The beauty of the human body is that we can in fact process even very extreme stress. But that doesn’t happen without intentional effort.
If you’ve ever witnessed an animal survive an attack or you yourself been in a situation where you’ve almost been hurt or killed – like a scary car accident – you may have seen or experienced the way that the body goes into these involuntary tremors or shaking. What’s happening is that the body is discharging that intense surge of stress hormones. (I talked about this in more depth here if you’re interested.) This is actually such an intelligent process because it prevents those experiences from continuing to wreak havoc.
What’s happening in our world is that our minds are experiencing – even if “just” through headlines – these threats to our sense of safety at a pace never before known in human history. To process that degree of threat and stress means that we need ways to shake it out, literally and figuratively. We can do this by everything from moving our bodies to engaging with art to giving long hugs. All of these practices – and more – are evidence-based ways of completing that stress cycle.
So, yes, what I’m saying is that we need now more than ever to be cultivating our practices to metabolize stress. We don’t have to keep our heads in the sand, but we do need ways to consistently recover from bringing them into the harsh light. And I personally believe that is all the more crucial for those for whom this hypernormalisation experience echoes their own early life experiences.
–
And maybe there’s actually a third thing that this will ask of us. It’s the one that almost seems paradoxical when we’re talking about not normalizing the abnormal, because it’s actually doing what feels most normal, most mundane. But when what’s out there feels so outside of the realm of ordinary, what feels familiar will become even more sacred.
I wrote the other day on social media (yes, I’m still there for now) that I can personally feel this tension in wanting to do and talk about the ordinary while not ignoring or appearing to ignore the burning. But the ordinary is where we find restoration and where we find meaning. Our work – even if not directly tied to what’s happening on a large scale – roots us to purpose. Our rituals – and I don’t just mean formal ones but things like bringing each other coffee or listening to our podcasts – root us to love.
My dear friend, Elizabeth, talked the other day about a Polish teenage girl who left apples for the starving imprisoned people at Auschwitz. It wasn’t much, but it was everything. I keep thinking about that and wondering what my apples can be.
I think what I’m really speaking to here is protecting our humanity. It’s acknowledging that the human psyche is resilient, but maybe not as resilient as we’d like it to be. We move toward things like hypernormalisation because we can only tolerate so much awfulness. Just as a child needs to believe that the people responsible for them are good enough, we as a society are oriented toward making it feel as okay as it can.
Confronting the darker truths is fraught. It’s scary. It’s taxing. It requires that we are doing intensive and intentional self-care. But it also helps us not lose ourselves. Because while empires do seem to always fall, all evidence shows that the human spirit has not.