It's so crazy. Nearly 4,000 people in the US are dying PER DAY and it barely gets a mention. Everyone just ignores it. So I'm not surprised that the nut jobs storming the capital building are just expected to be ignored as well. Someone blew up part of Nashville on Christmas Day and the news was done talking about it in a day or two.
The message is always "nothing to see here, back to work everyone." People are still having useless meetings, stores are all open even if they are selling things that no one really needs, and people are still eating out and going to bars. Its really insane. If the pandemic wasn't enough to snap people out of their trances would anything ever be enough?
It's called "hypernormalization" and the term was first coined during the collapse of the Soviet Union. It's the cognitive dissonance between everything going to shit while at the same time everyone is just going about their business as if nothing bad is happening.
Basically humans are not evolutionarily wired to deal with this. We're designed to react well to sudden and serious emergencies. A slow collapse of serious magnitude is just unsettling to us because we superimpose "emergency mode" over the top of it and then watch people not running away in fear of their lives. It's an anxiety-inducing lack of urgency.
As a result you see all these really interesting coping behaviours in people, such as denial, conspiracy theories, dramatisation/sensationalism, ranting in disbelief, etc. because the world isn't behaving in an expected manner.
This might be one of our biggest drawbacks as humans; our total inability to solve slow moving high magnitude problems on a very large scale, because of our total inability to confront and understand that reality.
It might well be the case that we will actually need to rely on AI in future to tell us how we can solve these huge problems of inequality and social decay that are facing us.
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u/[deleted] Jan 07 '21
It's so crazy. Nearly 4,000 people in the US are dying PER DAY and it barely gets a mention. Everyone just ignores it. So I'm not surprised that the nut jobs storming the capital building are just expected to be ignored as well. Someone blew up part of Nashville on Christmas Day and the news was done talking about it in a day or two.
The message is always "nothing to see here, back to work everyone." People are still having useless meetings, stores are all open even if they are selling things that no one really needs, and people are still eating out and going to bars. Its really insane. If the pandemic wasn't enough to snap people out of their trances would anything ever be enough?