Signs of Collapse: When We Normalize Abnormality

Now that the collapse of our political, economic, social and ecological systems is accelerating, the signs of this collapse, including scapegoating, corruption, and social disorder are becoming more obvious. This is the sixteenth of a series of articles on some of these signposts.

Blinken/Biden testimony — anti-genocide protesters, 2023; video from CBC

Humans, it is said, can be made to accept and believe almost anything, if we’re conditioned long and hard enough. Joseph Goebbels notoriously said “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.” In George Orwell’s 1984, the governing party insists the masses accept that “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength”. This effect is called the Illusory Truth Effect:

The illusory truth effect… is the tendency to believe false information to be correct after repeated exposure… When truth is assessed, people rely on whether the information is in line with their understanding or if it feels familiar… Repetition makes statements easier to process relative to new, unrepeated statements, leading people to believe that the repeated conclusion is more truthful… Researchers observed the illusory truth effect’s impact even on participants who knew the correct answer to begin with but were persuaded to believe otherwise through the repetition of a falsehood. The illusory truth effect plays a significant role in fields such as advertising, news media, political propaganda, and religious indoctrination.

This same ‘condition-ability’ applies to our behaviours as it does to our beliefs. The first time we witness an action that we have been conditioned to believe is abnormal or abhorrent, we may be shocked, but if we see that behaviour continually repeated without it being challenged, for long enough, we can become re-conditioned to see it as acceptable, and even normal.

Some examples:

• The repeated and even ritual abuse (mostly) of women and girls by rich corporate leaders, politicians, celebrities, and in-groups, most recently exemplified by the Epstein Class, and related activities of misogynistic groups like so-called “incels”
• Wars and genocides of all kinds, and related overt displays of racism
• Bare-faced lying, often followed up by “I was just kidding” when called on it
• Abuse of due process by politicians, police, judiciaries, extrajudicial expulsions and murders, on the grounds that “the ends justify the means”

These activities can tend to legitimize abhorrent and abnormal behaviours in the same way — through constant repetition that is not challenged — that the Illusory Truth Effect legitimizes untruths. What underlies these misbehaviours is often the perpetrators’ deep-seated and repeatedly conditioned fear, distrust, and hatred for the victims of these abuses.

What’s happening here that enables these abnormalities to be normalized?:

• We witness it, and get outraged, but nothing is done about it.
• Peer groups of the perpetrators reassure each other the behaviour was reasonable and justifiable.
• The media and political interest groups ignore it or even excuse it.
• We rationalize that it’s not up to us to stop it, but that “somebody should”.
• It continues to happen, more frequently and more openly, without consequences.
• We feel quite justifiably helpless to stop it.
• Over time, it eventually ceases to be ‘newsworthy’ and becomes accepted and normalized, even though we may not like it. And we stop talking about it.

Of course, this is exactly what the perpetrators of these outrageous behaviours are counting on. As one example, when masked Zionist “settlers”, with armed IDF support, steal and burn the homes of Palestinians in the West Bank, kill or injure their inhabitants, torture their farm animals, and then gleefully taunt the displaced Palestinians on videos that they freely and zealously post to the internet, and then continually get away with this behaviour, and when the news media refuse to report it, then these kinds of atrocities simply become, grotesquely, “normal”.

But surely, we must think, even when we can get away with such monstrous behaviours, it is not in the nature of most of us to commit them, is it? Where does all this fear and hatred come from that drives and legitimizes these atrocities? How do we become monsters?

My sense is that several factors are in play:

• The endless and growing precarity most of us are now facing in our lives must inevitably fill us with fear. Everywhere we go we can see the soaring dysfunction of our civilization and the obscene inequality of wealth. Combine that with false nostalgia about the past and unrealistic promises by politicians and others about a future that was never possible given the physical limits of resources that our planet has to offer, and the result is an understandable rage, fear of not having enough, bitterness against others who have more, or who also want a share of what we still have, and propensity to feel shame and to seek people to blame for this misfortune. Over time, this is, I think making us mentally ill, and susceptible of both behaving abnormally and believing what mentally ill abnormally-behaving people are telling us is acceptable behaviour.
• The rich and powerful have always grown up shielded from the reality of how most of the world lives, and are hence unpracticed and unable to develop any understanding, compassion or empathy for those not in their Epstein Class/Patriciate bubble. Their brains actually develop with a diminished capacity to relate to others. So they are afflicted with a different form of mental illness — a psychosis that drives them to believe they are superior to those who are not rich and powerful like them, and that their behaviour, no matter what anyone says about it, is unimpeachable. They are the ones making almost all the important political and economic decisions, oblivious to the views of, and the effect of these decisions on, most citizens, and oblivious to their own incompetence at making those decisions.
• With enough exposure to violence, lawlessness, abuse, and cruelty, we can gradually become inured to cruelty and suffering. A lot of the viciousness exhibited by gangs, soldiers, ‘settlers’ and paramilitaries like ICE inevitably stems from the fact that those in these groups become incapable of remorse or self-restraint and will even participate in escalating atrocities in groups with others as ‘proof’ of their allegiance to the group, a kind of ghastly ‘hazing’ to prove that they are no longer ‘weak’ enough to feel anything for their victims. And the rest of us are similarly vulnerable to inurement, when we see endless footage of violence and cruelty in the media, and homeless people everywhere on our streets. We can become numb to the cruelty and suffering, and unable to care.

This is, of course, a recipe for disaster. Our psychotic (and often also dementia-afflicted) ‘leaders’ associate with, and believe the same things as, and do the same things as, the others in their little bubble of Patriciate unreality. They use their enormous wealth and power to propagate the aforementioned ‘abnormal’ atrocities, and they do not think them at all abnormal or unjustified.

And likewise they use their wealth and power to oppress the rest of us, to whip up our fear, anger and bitterness at our precarity using their owned and compliant media, and to propagandize, censor, and misinform us to keep us in line while they hoard the planet’s dwindling remaining resources for themselves. And they use their military, paramilitary, ‘intelligence’ forces, hired mercenaries, police, legal and propaganda organizations to terrorize us if we dare dissent, disobey, or take any action that threatens them.

So what happens is that we begin to hear lies and misinformation and propaganda so often and so consistently that we stop questioning and challenging it, and just come to accept it as ‘normal’, even though we ‘know’ it is not.

And we see the misbehaviours of their warmongers, genociders, misogynists, liars, military and paramilitary and political and ‘intelligence’ and legal and judicial members and recruited gangs, and their handmaidens, as these misbehaviours go on being perpetrated without punishment or acknowledgement, and eventually we just come to accept these too as ‘normal’, even though we ‘know’ they are not.

We forget, then, that there was a time when those with wealth and power were expected and trusted to tell the truth and to do what was in the collective best interests of all of us. That was so long ago! Was that ever ‘normal’?

We live in an age of madness, with too much power in too few incompetent hands, a completely unsustainable way of living, and not nearly enough to go around as our populations (and their wants and expectations) continue to soar. This is what collapse looks like. What we used to think of as abnormality is, it seems, the ‘new normal’.

Gabor Maté delves into the psychology behind the abnormal behaviours our crumbling civilization is producing in a recent video. His main points:

• Spanking children was once considered normal; sometimes our conditioning can, over time, actually help us learn to correct abnormal behaviours, not just instil them.
• Western capitalistic ideology considers selfishness and greed as normal. Our toxic western culture conditions us to hate, to lie, to distrust, and to fight, in service solely of our own self-interest, and hence entrains in us mental and physical illness.
• In such a culture, many ‘normal’ human emotions are suppressed and unaccepted, so we learn to give up our authenticity (our true, innate feelings and beliefs) in return for social acceptance, and this comes at great personal and societal cost. We learn not to trust or accept ourselves, others, what we’re told, or even our own beliefs, and end up paralyzed into inaction and helplessness.
• Most of the depression that plagues our modern societies is just the result of ‘pushing down’ our authentic selves, in an attempt to cope with what seems a bewildering and endlessly hostile world.

I have enormous respect for Gabor’s work and analysis. But while I think he fully understands the nature of our predicament, I think he greatly overestimates our capacity to ‘fix’ it once we understand it.

It’s one thing to appreciate how grotesquely abnormal behaviours can become ‘normal’ in a profoundly sick civilization. It’s quite another to come to grips with the unbearable truth that this civilization is in wild and accelerating overshoot, and entering a stage of chaos leading to inevitable global collapse, and simply cannot be ‘healed’.

We’re just going to have to learn, each in our own way, how to cope with the grim reality of collapse, and the massive hardship it is already starting to produce.

Maybe at least understanding how and why it is inevitably falling apart, will help us cope.