By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on August 1, 2024
…or take the red pill of the rebel. photo: Bill Hackwell
HyperNormalisation (2016), a cult documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis, argues that governments, financiers and technological utopians have given up trying to model the complex “real world” and, instead, have established a simplified “fake world” for the benefit of corporations that thus manage to maintain the stability of neoliberal governments, until one day the bubble bursts, as happened with Lehman Brothers.
In this way, crime is normalized and collective apathy is generated in the face of situations of extreme violence: coups d’état, femicides, forced disappearances and loss of social guarantees.
Alexei Yurchak, a professor of anthropology originally from Leningrad and now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, introduced the word “hypernormalization” in his book Everything WasForever , Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, published in 2006, which describes the paradoxes of Soviet life during the 1970s and 1980s. Everyone in the Soviet Union knew that there were deep flaws in the system, but everyday life was lived in two worlds – the one that produced the Chernobyl accident and the one of the imposing parades in Moscow’s Red Square and the well-stocked stores – because no one could imagine an alternative to the status quo. Politicians and citizens alike were resigned to keeping up appearances of a society that seemed to work, but would eventually explode.
Curtis, a BBC documentary filmmaker, shows in his film that these processes were not exclusive to real socialism, but that the society in which we live suffers from that strange disenchantment where people are becoming watered down in a world without horizons, pure wasteland, but the majority act as if they did not know it for fear of breaking the structures, which they judge to be unalterable.
The term can be perfectly applied to our days of social networks, individualism and loneliness, in which a good part of citizens seem to have abandoned real life -politics in its broadest sense- with the illusion that the world can be managed and somehow controlled from our screens.
However, outside this universe, the opposite phenomenon is taking place: technology is advancing at an exponential rate, driving a process of automation that in a few years will eliminate most of today’s jobs. Moreover, an economic convergence is taking place that significantly reduces the decision-making capacity of politicians, making it practically irrelevant. Yurchak describes this state of affairs in precise strokes: “When everything is falling apart, but the majority finds no possible alternative. When there is no time left for anything but believing the lies and going downhill. Welcome to the era of hyper-normalization”.
Events are normalized, for example, that at another time would have seemed the stuff of madmen out of control, such as the barbarities said and done by Donald Trump, the presidential self-proclamation of Guaidó, the chainsaw of Milei, the unspeakable crimes of Israel in full view of all, the glorification of Netanyahu in the US Congress, the coup attempt in Venezuela after Sunday’s elections…. While this is going on, the majority watches impassively and accepts this state of affairs as commonplace, trapped somewhere between the Matrix and the real world.
It is not thanks to social networks, but to hypernormalization that power has ceased to spread from a center exclusively to sprout, or impose itself, from all the peripheries. As in the Matrix, there are only two possibilities: take the blue pill, which will turn people into happy slaves of a program in which there is no free will, even if it seems so; or decide for the red pill, that of the rebels, who face the designers of the world of unreality and know that each decision is their own.
Rosa Miriam Elizalde is a Cuban journalist who served as the Vice-President of the Union of Cuban Journalists (UPEC). She holds a PhD in Communication Sciences and is the author of several books. Rosa is a founder of Cubadebate and its Editor-in-Chief until January 2017. Currently she is a columnist for La Jornada, Mexico.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English