As I See It

Vayu Putra

Chapter 8

Hypernormalisation

There is a strange phase societies enter before they change.

Everything is visibly wrong.

Everyone knows it.

And yet, nothing is allowed to be acknowledged openly.

This is hypernormalisation.

The term was first used by anthropologist Alexei Yurchak in his 2005 book "Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More" to describe the final decades of the Soviet Union. The system no longer worked. Officials knew it. Citizens knew it. The economy was failing, ideology was hollow, and public language had drifted so far from lived reality that discourse itself had become performance, ritual without meaning.

But the system persisted. Not because people believed in it. But because no one could imagine anything else. So everyone pretended. Citizens pretended to work, the state pretended to pay them. Officials pretended the economy was growing, citizens pretended to believe them. Propaganda pretended to inform, audiences pretended to be informed.

British filmmaker Adam Curtis expanded the concept in his 2016 documentary "HyperNormalisation," arguing that this same condition now defines Western societies. Political leaders gave up trying to control the real world and instead focused on managing perception. Financial systems became so complex that no one understood them. Technology created personalised fake worlds that feel more real than reality. And populations learned to live inside this managed unreality, knowing it was false but unable to escape it.

This chapter examines how hypernormalisation operates, why it persists, and what it reveals about consciousness, power, and the psychology of collective denial explored in previous chapters.

Living inside the contradiction: what hypernormalisation feels like

It is Tuesday afternoon in 2023. You sit in a meeting where everyone discusses quarterly targets. The targets are unrealistic. Everyone knows this. Last quarter's targets were not met, nor the quarter before. The gap between projected and actual performance grows each cycle. Yet the meeting proceeds as if these numbers represent genuine plans rather than ritual performance.

No one says "this is theatre." No one acknowledges the gap between what is claimed and what is true. People nod, take notes, make commitments they know will not be fulfilled. The performance continues because stopping would require admitting the system does not work, and that admission has consequences no one wants to face.

You scroll news about climate change. The articles describe escalating disasters, failed targets, inadequate responses. Governments announce new commitments that everyone knows will not be met, based on previous commitments that were not met. Fossil fuel production continues expanding whilst leaders claim progress toward reduction. The contradiction is visible yet unresolved.

You read about housing crises, rising inequality, declining life expectancy, political gridlock. The same problems are described year after year with minor variations. Solutions are proposed, debated, abandoned. Nothing changes fundamentally yet discourse continues as if engagement itself constitutes action.

This is hypernormalisation at personal scale. You know the narratives are false. You participate anyway. You speak the required language whilst maintaining private awareness that it is hollow. The split between what you experience and what you are allowed to acknowledge creates constant low-grade cognitive dissonance, a background hum of unreality that becomes so familiar you stop noticing it consciously.

Curtis describes this state as living inside a "fake world." Not fake in the sense of entirely fabricated, but fake in the sense that the frameworks for understanding reality have detached from reality itself. The map no longer describes the territory but everyone continues reading the map because acknowledging its uselessness requires confronting the terrifying fact that no one knows where they are.

This produces a peculiar psychological state that differs from simple ignorance or deception. You are not fooled. You are trapped. You see the contradiction but lack the power or language or collective organisation to address it. So you adapt. You lower expectations. You privatise doubt. You learn to live with dissonance.

Recall from Chapter 2 the burden of consciousness, the perpetual awareness that humans carry. Hypernormalisation represents a specific form of this burden: you are conscious of the lie but must pretend you are not. This is not the unconscious denial explored in psychology but conscious denial, performed knowingly for survival within systems that cannot tolerate honesty.

The Soviet Union: anthropology of systemic pretense

Alexei Yurchak's anthropological study of late Soviet society provides the most detailed documentation of how hypernormalisation operates. His research, based on interviews with Soviet citizens and analysis of cultural artefacts, describes a society where official ideology had become "authoritative discourse" that everyone performed without believing.

By the 1970s, Soviet citizens no longer believed in communist ideology. This was not secret dissent but common knowledge. Jokes about the system circulated openly. Kitchen table conversations expressed cynicism freely. Yet public discourse continued unchanged. Communist Party meetings occurred as scheduled. Newspapers printed the same triumphant narratives. Officials gave speeches everyone knew were false.

The economy provided clear evidence of failure. Official statistics claimed 4% annual growth throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Actual growth was closer to 1% and by the late 1980s was negative. CIA estimates from declassified documents show Soviet GDP per capita peaked in 1975 at approximately $5,800 (in 1990 dollars) then stagnated, reaching only $6,000 by 1989 despite official claims of continuous progress.

Consumer goods were chronically scarce. Queues for basic necessities were normal. The saying "they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work" captured the system's mutual pretense. Workers showed up at factories, performed minimal labour, and received wages that bought little. Everyone knew this yet continued participating.

Yurchak's key insight was that this was not cynical manipulation from above or passive acceptance from below. It was collaborative performance. Officials needed citizens to maintain appearances. Citizens needed officials to provide basic security. Neither group believed the ideology but both groups needed the system to continue functioning, however poorly. So they cooperated in sustaining unreality.

This created what Yurchak calls "deterritorialized milieus"—spaces of life that existed outside official discourse. People pursued relationships, careers, interests, creative projects within the cracks of the system, ignoring official ideology except when performance was required. They were simultaneously inside and outside the system, participating without believing, complying without accepting.

The system appeared stable precisely because no one believed it would change. The phrase "everything was forever" expressed this sense of permanent stasis. The Soviet Union seemed eternal not because it was successful but because its failure had been normalised into background reality. People could not imagine its collapse because they could not imagine any alternative.

When collapse came in 1991, it shocked everyone including those who had long known the system was broken. Knowing something cannot continue is different from knowing what will replace it. The gap between those two forms of knowledge is where hypernormalisation persists, where systems continue operating past the point when everyone knows they have failed.

The speed of collapse was extraordinary. In August 1991, a failed coup attempt by hardliners trying to preserve the system instead accelerated its disintegration. Within months, the Soviet Union, which had existed for 74 years and controlled half of Europe, simply ceased to exist. The pretense could not be maintained once a few key actors stopped performing it.

Curtis's expansion: hypernormalisation in the West

Adam Curtis's documentary "HyperNormalisation" argues that Western societies entered their own version of this condition beginning in the 1970s when complexity overwhelmed governing capacity and political leaders gave up trying to control reality.

Curtis identifies the 1975 fiscal crisis of New York City as a turning point. The city faced bankruptcy. Banks refused to lend. The federal government refused to bail it out. The crisis was resolved by essentially transferring control from elected officials to financial institutions. The banks dictated terms, cutting public services, laying off workers, undermining democratic governance in favour of financial management.

This established a pattern that spread globally: when systems become too complex and crises too severe, democratically elected leaders cede control to financial and technical managers who operate outside democratic accountability. Politicians no longer attempt to shape the future according to political vision. Instead, they manage decline, stabilise crises, and maintain appearances whilst real power shifts elsewhere.

The financial deregulation of the 1980s, documented in Chapter 7, accelerated this process. As financial systems became more complex, interconnected, and opaque, no one genuinely understood how they worked. The 2008 financial crisis revealed that senior executives at banks did not understand the products their companies sold, that regulators lacked capacity to monitor risks, that credit rating agencies provided ratings without understanding what they rated.

Yet the system's complexity was treated as natural and inevitable rather than as a choice that served specific interests. When complexity makes accountability impossible, those who benefit from lack of accountability have incentive to increase complexity. The result is systems that function without understanding, control, or democratic input.

Curtis documents how political discourse adapted to this loss of control through creation of simplified narratives and identified enemies. When politicians cannot deliver actual solutions, they offer emotional satisfaction through identifying villains. Gaddafi in Libya, Assad in Syria, Putin in Russia, these figures become convenient explanations for complex problems that actually have structural causes.

The intervention in Libya in 2011 provides clear example. Gaddafi was presented as uniquely evil dictator whose removal would liberate Libya. Western media showed crowds celebrating his fall. What was not shown was what happened after: the country fragmented into competing militias, slave markets returned, hundreds of thousands fled as refugees, and Libya became a failed state exporting instability across the Mediterranean and Sahel regions.

But the narrative had served its purpose: it provided emotionally satisfying story of good versus evil whilst avoiding structural questions about Western policies in the region, about resource conflicts driving intervention, about the limits of military solutions to political problems. The simplification made people feel informed whilst keeping them ignorant.

Syria presents even starker example. By 2016, the conflict had killed 400,000 people and displaced 11 million. Western discourse presented Assad as villain and removal as solution. What it obscured was that multiple regional and global powers were pursuing incompatible agendas using Syria as proxy battlefield, that no clear alternative government existed, that previous regime change interventions in Iraq and Libya had produced catastrophe not liberation.

The simplified narrative felt more real than the complex reality. People could have opinions about Assad as individual villain. They could not process the intersection of sectarian conflict, resource competition, regional power struggles, and great power rivalry that actually drove the war. So the simplified version dominated whilst the complex reality continued generating destruction.

Curtis calls this "oh dearism"—the phenomenon where news presents endless catastrophes as spectacle, audiences feel brief concern, then move on without action. Syria, Yemen, Myanmar, dozens of other crises follow the same pattern: brief coverage, emotional reaction, no sustained engagement or structural change. The presentation of horror becomes routine, normalised into background noise.

Technology accelerates hypernormalisation by creating personalised realities. Social media algorithms curate feeds to maximise engagement, which means showing content that confirms existing beliefs and triggers emotional response. This creates filter bubbles where people inhabit different information universes, making shared reality increasingly difficult to maintain.

Facebook's algorithm changes alone demonstrate this. In 2015, Facebook altered its news feed algorithm to prioritise engagement over chronological order. Posts that generated comments, shares, and reactions were shown more frequently. Research published in Science in 2023 showed this change dramatically increased exposure to partisan content and misinformation because such content generates more engagement than neutral reporting.

The result is not that people believe falsehoods instead of truth. The result is that truth itself becomes destabilised. When everyone inhabits different information environments, consensus reality breaks down. You are not being fooled by propaganda. You are trapped in an algorithmic bubble that feels like reality whilst being fundamentally divorced from it.

The 2008 financial crisis: normalising catastrophe

The 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath demonstrate hypernormalisation's mechanisms with unusual clarity. The crisis revealed that the global financial system had become so complex and interconnected that no one understood it, that risks were being hidden through deliberately opaque financial products, that regulation had been systematically weakened through industry lobbying, and that major financial institutions were engaged in widespread fraud.

These revelations should have triggered fundamental restructuring. Instead, they were absorbed, managed, and normalised. The system that failed was preserved essentially unchanged.

Consider the sequence of events. By 2007, financial institutions were packaging subprime mortgages into complex securities, rating them AAA despite knowing they contained loans to borrowers who could not repay, and selling them to investors globally. When housing prices stopped rising, the system collapsed. Bear Stearns failed in March 2008. Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in September 2008, triggering global panic.

The crisis wiped out $10 trillion in global wealth. Unemployment in the United States peaked at 10% in October 2009, representing 15.4 million unemployed workers. Millions lost homes through foreclosure. Pension funds lost trillions. The damage was enormous, visible, and undeniable.

Yet the response normalised the crisis rather than addressing its causes. Banks deemed "too big to fail" received $700 billion through TARP bailout plus trillions more through Federal Reserve programmes. Meanwhile, homeowners who lost houses through fraudulent lending received minimal assistance. No senior executives faced criminal prosecution despite evidence of widespread fraud.

The explanations offered for this response revealed hypernormalisation's logic. Prosecuting bankers would destabilise the financial system. Breaking up large banks would harm economic recovery. Strict new regulations would constrain growth. Every argument for accountability was met with argument that accountability itself was too dangerous.

So the system was stabilised rather than reformed. Dodd-Frank Act passed in 2010 imposed some new regulations but left basic structure intact. By 2018, even these modest regulations were being rolled back through lobbying by banks that had received bailouts. The four largest US banks—JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup—are now larger than before the crisis, controlling combined assets exceeding $9 trillion.

Public discourse adapted accordingly. For a few years, the crisis dominated discussion. Then it faded. By 2015, media treated financial sector recovery as success story. The stock market reached new highs. Corporate profits recovered. The fact that this "recovery" benefited primarily those who caused the crisis whilst leaving most people worse off was acknowledged then normalised into background reality.

This created cognitive dissonance similar to what Yurchak documented in Soviet society. Everyone knows the financial system is corrupt, prone to crisis, and operates beyond democratic control. Yet life continues as if these facts are not relevant. People invest retirement savings in markets they know are rigged. They accept that banks can commit fraud without prosecution. They watch wealth inequality accelerate whilst being told the economy is "recovered."

The 2023 collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and First Republic Bank followed remarkably similar pattern. Banks engaged in risky behaviour, regulators failed to intervene, crisis emerged suddenly, government bailed out depositors to prevent contagion, no executives faced criminal charges, and discourse quickly moved on. The script was identical to 2008 because the system had not changed.

What makes this hypernormalisation rather than simple corruption is that everyone knows it. The information is public. The patterns are obvious. Yet acknowledgment does not translate into change. The gap between knowing and acting becomes so large that the contradiction itself becomes normal.

Climate change: the supreme hypernormalisation

Climate change represents perhaps the most comprehensive example of hypernormalisation in contemporary society. The scientific reality has been clear for decades. The consequences are accelerating visibly. Yet response remains catastrophically inadequate whilst discourse pretends otherwise.

The first UN climate conference occurred in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro. Countries committed to preventing "dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system." Thirty-two years later, global greenhouse gas emissions have increased 60%. Atmospheric CO2 has risen from 356 ppm in 1992 to 421 ppm in 2024. Global average temperature has increased 1.2°C above pre-industrial levels and is accelerating.

Every year, the same ritual occurs. Climate conferences convene, targets are announced, commitments are made, media reports progress. Then emissions continue rising. Fossil fuel production expands. Deforestation accelerates. The gap between promise and reality widens.

The Paris Agreement of 2015 aimed to limit warming to 1.5°C. Current policies put the world on track for 2.7°C to 3.1°C warming by 2100 according to Climate Action Tracker analysis from 2023. This would produce catastrophic consequences: ecosystem collapse, agricultural failure, hundreds of millions displaced, massive species extinction. Yet discourse treats this trajectory as if it represents progress because it is slightly less terrible than previous trajectories.

The contradiction is visible in real time. In 2023, global temperatures exceeded 1.5°C threshold temporarily, the year was the hottest on record by substantial margin, extreme weather events killed thousands and caused hundreds of billions in damages, and fossil fuel companies announced record profits and expansion plans. All of this occurred simultaneously whilst governments claimed commitment to climate action.

The presentation of this contradiction has been normalised into ritualistic patterns. Climate conferences generate headlines about ambition. Scientists publish warnings. Activists protest. Media covers all of this. Then emissions rise another year. The performance continues without translating into action at the scale required.

What makes this hypernormalisation is not ignorance but awareness without action. Polling consistently shows majorities in most countries understand climate change is real and dangerous. A 2021 Pew Research survey across 17 advanced economies found that 72% consider climate change a major threat. Yet the same populations continue supporting policies and consuming in ways that worsen the problem.

This creates psychological state similar to Soviet citizens knowing the system was failing: you are aware of the reality but trapped within structures that prevent addressing it. You know flying contributes to emissions but your job requires travel. You know consumption drives environmental destruction but your economy depends on growth. You know urgent action is needed but political systems move slowly and fossil fuel companies block change through billions in lobbying.

The discourse has adapted to manage this contradiction. Solutions are discussed in ways that avoid confronting scale of change required. Electric vehicles are presented as climate solution despite requiring massive mining expansion and continued automobile-dependent infrastructure. Recycling is promoted whilst plastic production increases. Carbon offsets allow continued emissions through accounting tricks that often provide no actual mitigation.

Meanwhile, the actual solution—rapid reduction in fossil fuel use, transition away from growth-dependent economics, redistribution to enable lower-consumption lifestyles for wealthy whilst improving conditions for poor—remains largely unmentionable in mainstream discourse. The changes required challenge capitalism's fundamental logic explored in Chapter 7, so they are excluded from the range of acceptable proposals.

Young people express this contradiction most acutely. Survey research shows high levels of climate anxiety, particularly among those under 30. They have grown up knowing about climate change, watching targets fail, observing the gap between rhetoric and reality. Many report feeling betrayed by older generations, hopeless about the future, and alienated from political systems that perform concern whilst enabling catastrophe.

Yet they participate in the systems driving the problem because non-participation is impossible. They fly to universities, consume products wrapped in plastic, work for corporations with poor environmental records, because opting out means exclusion from economic and social life. The system is totalising even as it collapses.

This is hypernormalisation at civilizational scale: collective knowledge that current trajectory leads to catastrophe, combined with collective inability to change trajectory, producing surreal situation where societies continue activities they know are suicidal whilst pretending they are addressing the problem.

Psychological mechanisms: why pretense persists

Understanding hypernormalisation requires examining psychological mechanisms that sustain collective pretense despite individual awareness. Multiple research traditions converge on explaining why people participate in maintaining fictions they privately reject.

Pluralistic ignorance. This occurs when individuals privately reject a norm whilst assuming others accept it, leading everyone to comply publicly whilst privately doubting. Floyd Allport first identified this phenomenon in 1924, but research by Deborah Prentice and Dale Miller in the 1990s demonstrated how widespread and consequential it is.

In their studies of college students, Prentice and Miller found that students overestimated peer support for heavy drinking whilst privately feeling uncomfortable with alcohol culture. Each individual conformed to what they believed was a group norm whilst privately rejecting it, creating a social pattern no one actually supported. The norm persisted because everyone assumed others believed it even though no one did.

This dynamic scales to societal level. People assume others believe official narratives, political rhetoric, or economic claims whilst privately doubting. This assumption of others' belief sustains the pretense even when collective doubt is widespread. No one speaks openly because everyone assumes they are alone in their skepticism.

Preference falsification. Economist Timur Kuran's "Private Truths, Public Lies" (1995) analyses how people systematically misrepresent preferences to avoid social or political costs. In authoritarian contexts, this is obvious: citizens express support for the regime whilst privately opposing it to avoid punishment.

But Kuran demonstrates that preference falsification occurs in democracies as well whenever expressing true preferences carries costs. People may privately doubt economic orthodoxy but publicly support it to maintain professional credibility. They may privately question political narratives but publicly affirm them to avoid social conflict. They may privately recognise systemic problems but publicly minimize them to reduce anxiety.

The aggregation of individual preference falsification creates collective lie that becomes increasingly difficult to challenge. Each person assumes others genuinely believe what they are merely performing, reinforcing the illusion that the performance represents reality.

System justification. Social psychologist John Jost's research on system justification theory shows that people have psychological motivation to defend and rationalize existing social arrangements, even arrangements that disadvantage them. This occurs because acknowledging systemic problems without clear alternatives generates anxiety that feels worse than accepting the flawed system.

His experiments demonstrate that when people are reminded of systemic unfairness but given no sense of alternatives, they increase rather than decrease their support for the system. The mind protects itself from the distress of acknowledged injustice by justifying the injustice as somehow necessary or inevitable. Better a flawed world that makes sense than an unjust world without explanation.

This helps explain why economic crises often strengthen rather than weaken commitment to the economic system that failed. The alternative—accepting that no one is in control and no system is reliable—is more terrifying than believing the system will eventually self-correct.

Cognitive dissonance and adaptation. Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance describes psychological discomfort from holding contradictory beliefs or from actions that contradict beliefs. The standard response is to reduce dissonance by changing beliefs or behaviors to achieve consistency.

But hypernormalisation represents a different response: sustained dissonance without resolution. People learn to live with contradiction not by resolving it but by compartmentalising, by accepting that private knowledge and public performance need not align. This adaptation is psychologically costly but becomes habitual when changing either beliefs or structures is impossible.

Research on adaptation to chronic stress shows that humans are remarkably capable of normalizing abnormal conditions. What initially produces distress becomes background reality if sustained long enough. The constant low-grade cognitive dissonance of hypernormalisation simply becomes how life feels.

Learned helplessness and agency erosion. Martin Seligman's research on learned helplessness demonstrated that when animals experience repeated inability to control adverse outcomes, they stop trying even when control becomes possible. This translates to human contexts where repeated experience of political inefficacy teaches people that action is futile.

When voting does not change policies, when protests are ignored, when revelations produce no accountability, when systemic problems persist despite awareness, people learn that their agency does not matter. This produces passivity not from apathy but from learned understanding that effort is wasted. The consciousness burden explored in Chapter 2 becomes paralysing when awareness connects to no viable action.

These mechanisms interact to create stable hypernormalisation. Pluralistic ignorance prevents collective recognition of shared doubt. Preference falsification creates false appearance of consensus. System justification defends arrangements that people privately question. Cognitive dissonance is managed through compartmentalization rather than resolution. And learned helplessness prevents action even when collective doubt becomes evident.

Media's role: ritualistic coverage and false debate

Media systems play crucial role in maintaining hypernormalisation, not primarily through lies but through framing that makes certain questions unaskable whilst creating appearance of critical engagement.

Consider coverage of economic policy. Mainstream media presents debates between fiscal positions that all accept capitalism's basic framework. Arguments occur over tax rates, spending levels, regulatory details. What does not get debated is whether growth-dependent capitalism is sustainable, whether markets should govern all aspects of life, whether current distributions of wealth and power are just.

These exclusions are not conspiratorial. They emerge from structural constraints. Media organisations operate within capitalist systems. Their revenue comes from advertising by corporations. Their sources are predominantly officials and experts who operate within system boundaries. Their professional norms emphasise "objectivity" defined as presenting views from establishment figures on "both sides" whilst excluding views that challenge establishment consensus.

Daniel Hallin's "The Uncensored War" (1986) described three spheres of journalistic discourse. The sphere of legitimate controversy contains views considered reasonable for debate. The sphere of consensus contains views assumed true by all reasonable people. The sphere of deviance contains views dismissed as extremist or irrational. Media critically examines issues in the sphere of controversy whilst taking the sphere of consensus for granted and excluding deviant views.

Hypernormalisation occurs when systemic problems are placed in the sphere of consensus as settled matters whilst only superficial adjustments remain in the sphere of controversy. For example, that markets are efficient, that growth is necessary, that current political-economic arrangements are basically sound—these assumptions structure debate without themselves being debated.

Climate coverage demonstrates this. Media presents debate between "do something" and "do less" whilst excluding "the system causing the problem must change fundamentally." Coverage focuses on specific policies, individual consumer choices, technological solutions. Structural questions about growth imperative, about inequality, about capitalism's incompatibility with ecological limits explored in Chapter 7, these remain largely unaddressed.

The result is what Curtis calls the creation of "a simplified vision of the world." Complex structural problems are reduced to manageable narratives with clear villains and solutions that do not threaten power. Media provides enough information for audiences to feel informed whilst maintaining frames that prevent radical questioning.

Research by Robert McChesney and John Nichols in "The Death and Life of American Journalism" (2010) documents how corporate consolidation of media has intensified these dynamics. As journalism became profit-driven industry, investigative reporting declined, critical coverage decreased, and news became infotainment designed to attract audiences advertisers want rather than to serve democratic function.

By 2023, six corporations controlled 90% of US media. This concentration means that economic interests of media owners align with corporate capitalism generally, creating subtle but systematic bias toward framing that serves power. Not through explicit censorship but through structural filtering described by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in "Manufacturing Consent" (1988).

Their "propaganda model" identifies five filters that shape news: ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak, and ideology. Each filter systematically marginalizes perspectives that challenge power whilst amplifying perspectives that serve it. The result is media that appears free and critical whilst actually maintaining establishment consensus.

Social media has not disrupted this dynamic despite early promises. Instead, algorithmic curation has intensified fragmentation whilst maintaining overall system boundaries. People can find alternative perspectives but these remain marginalized, dismissed as conspiracy or extremism, excluded from mainstream discourse that shapes policy.

The overall effect is ritualistic coverage that creates appearance of democratic discourse whilst excluding questions that would challenge power. Problems are discussed endlessly without fundamental solutions being considered. This maintains hypernormalisation by allowing people to feel informed and engaged whilst actual structures of power remain unexamined and unchanged.

Political performance: governing without control

One of Curtis's key insights is that political leaders no longer attempt to control reality and instead focus on managing perception. This represents fundamental shift in the nature of governance from solving problems to performing competence.

Consider response to the 2008 financial crisis discussed earlier. Political leaders did not restructure the financial system. They stabilised it, bailed out major institutions, and declared crisis over once stock markets recovered. The underlying problems—excessive concentration of financial power, regulatory capture, moral hazard from implicit bailout guarantees—were not addressed because addressing them would require confronting powerful interests and accepting short-term disruption.

Instead, leaders performed decisive action through the bailout itself, claimed the system had been saved, and moved on. When Occupy Wall Street emerged in 2011 demanding accountability, the movement was allowed to continue until public attention waned, then quietly dispersed through police action. No policy changes resulted. The performance of listening occurred without actual response.

This pattern repeats across policy domains. After mass shootings, politicians offer thoughts and prayers, debate minor policy adjustments, and ensure nothing changes fundamentally. After climate disasters, leaders declare emergencies, provide relief, and continue approving fossil fuel projects. After corruption scandals, investigations occur, reforms are announced, and underlying systems persist.

The transformation Curtis identifies is from politics as collective decision-making about the future to politics as crisis management and perception control. Leaders no longer propose visions of different futures because they have accepted that fundamental change is impossible within existing systems. So they manage decline, stabilise crises, and maintain appearances.

Colin Crouch's "Post-Democracy" (2004) describes this condition: democratic forms continue whilst meaningful democratic control has been hollowed out. Elections occur regularly. Multiple parties compete. Media coverage is extensive. Yet whoever wins faces the same constraints, makes similar policy choices, and serves similar interests because the actual locus of power has shifted to economic and technical systems beyond democratic accountability.

The European sovereign debt crisis of 2010-2015 demonstrated this starkly. Greece elected governments opposing austerity in 2012 and 2015. Both were forced to implement austerity anyway because the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and European Commission—institutions not subject to Greek democratic control—controlled access to credit. Democracy became theatre whilst technocratic institutions made actual decisions.

Similar dynamics operated in Italy when Mario Monti, a technocrat never elected to Parliament, became Prime Minister in 2011 to manage the debt crisis. His government implemented economic reforms demanded by financial markets without democratic mandate. This was praised as responsible governance, which is to say governance that serves financial interests over popular will.

The result is what political theorist Sheldon Wolin called "inverted totalitarianism." Unlike classical totalitarianism which mobilises populations for grand projects, inverted totalitarianism demobilises them. Citizens are encouraged to consume rather than participate. Voting continues but matters less. Economic power is concentrated but operates through market mechanisms rather than state control. The system is totalising whilst maintaining appearance of freedom.

Politicians adapt to this reality by managing expectations downward. No longer promising transformation, they promise competent administration. No longer inspiring collective action, they appeal to private interests. No longer claiming democratic control over economies, they accept market discipline as natural constraint.

This creates political discourse that sounds increasingly hollow because it describes possibilities that do not exist. Politicians promise prosperity whilst accepting stagnation, promise solutions whilst managing decline, promise control whilst ceding power to financial markets and corporations. The performance continues because stopping it would require admitting that democratic governance has lost capacity to shape fundamental outcomes.

The emotional register: cynicism, irony, and learned helplessness

Hypernormalisation produces characteristic emotional and cultural responses that differ from either naïve belief or active resistance. The dominant register is what Curtis calls "oh dearism" combined with ironic detachment.

Cynicism becomes default stance. People assume politicians lie, that corporations manipulate, that experts serve power, that institutions are corrupt. This cynicism is reality-based—the assumptions are largely correct—but it produces passivity rather than mobilisation. If everyone is corrupt, why bother distinguishing between better and worse? If the system is rigged, why participate?

Research by political scientists Marc Hetherington and Thomas Rudolph in "Why Washington Won't Work" (2015) documents declining trust in institutions across decades. In 1964, 77% of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing most of the time. By 2023, that figure had fallen to 16% according to Pew Research. Similar declines appear in trust toward media, corporations, religious institutions, and scientific establishments.

This erosion of trust is rational response to repeated betrayals, broken promises, and visible corruption. But it creates problem: without trust, collective action becomes nearly impossible. People cannot organise if they assume everyone is motivated by selfish interest. They cannot build movements if they doubt others' commitment. Cynicism, whilst justified, serves power by preventing the solidarity necessary to challenge it.

Irony becomes defensive strategy. Internet culture, particularly among younger generations, is characterised by ironic detachment from everything. Nothing can be taken seriously. Earnestness is embarrassing. Commitment is naïve. This ironic stance provides psychological protection from disappointment and manipulation, allowing people to engage with political and cultural content whilst maintaining distance from it.

David Foster Wallace warned about this in his 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction." He argued that irony had become the dominant mode of cultural production, providing critique without commitment, recognition of problems without responsibility for solutions. Irony allows simultaneous awareness and inaction, the perfect emotional register for hypernormalisation.

Memes exemplify this dynamic. Political and social problems are endlessly memed, turned into jokes that acknowledge reality whilst maintaining emotional distance from it. "This is fine" dog sitting in burning room becomes ubiquitous representation of contemporary condition: awareness of crisis combined with passive acceptance. The meme format itself forecloses serious engagement whilst creating appearance of awareness and critique.

Learned helplessness operates at collective scale. When crises occur, when revelations emerge, when protests mobilise, the pattern is familiar: brief attention, emotional reaction, then nothing changes. This teaches that action is futile. The consciousness burden becomes paralysing when awareness connects to no viable path for change.

Survey research by the American Psychological Association shows increasing rates of what they term "eco-anxiety" and "political stress." In 2022, 66% of Americans reported significant stress about the future of the nation. Among young adults aged 18-34, 75% said climate change made them anxious. These are rational responses to genuine threats, but the anxiety exists without clear outlet for action, creating psychological burden without political efficacy.

Apathy is often diagnosed as the problem, but this misunderstands the condition. People are not apathetic—they care deeply and feel anxious constantly. The problem is that caring has been severed from effective action. The masks explored in Chapter 3 become mechanisms of survival: you perform normalcy whilst privately experiencing distress, you engage with systems you privately recognise as failing, you go through motions whilst awaiting collapse you cannot prevent.

The resulting emotional state is exhausting. Constant cognitive dissonance, chronic stress from awareness of unaddressed crises, learned helplessness from repeated inefficacy, these produce populations that are simultaneously over-informed and paralysed, aware and passive, concerned and resigned.

When hypernormalisation breaks: the mechanics of collapse

Hypernormalisation is stable until it suddenly is not. Systems maintain pretense successfully for years or decades, then collapse with shocking speed once the performance becomes unsustainable. Understanding how this occurs requires examining cases where hypernormalised systems fell apart.

The Soviet collapse provides clearest example. The system appeared permanent. Dissidents were marginalised. The population performed compliance. Economic problems were manageable through continued extraction from satellite states and natural resources. Then in 1989, satellite states began breaking away. Poland held semi-free elections in June. Hungary opened its border with Austria in September, allowing East Germans to flee. The Berlin Wall fell in November.

Each event was individually explicable. Collectively they created cascade as population in each country saw that resistance was possible, that others shared their rejection of the system, that the authorities would not use overwhelming force to maintain control. The preference falsification described earlier reversed suddenly. People stopped pretending, recognised that others had also been pretending, and the system disintegrated.

The speed shocked observers. In January 1989, Soviet control of Eastern Europe seemed unshakeable. By December 1989, communist governments had fallen across the region. The Soviet Union itself collapsed completely by December 1991, just three years after appearing permanent. What seemed forever was over almost instantly once the collective pretense could no longer be maintained.

Similar dynamics occurred in the 2008 financial crisis, though in purely economic rather than political domain. The system appeared stable until suddenly it did not. Lehman Brothers was functioning normally on Friday September 12, 2008. By Monday September 15, it had filed for bankruptcy with $619 billion in debts, triggering global panic. The collapse happened within a weekend once confidence broke.

Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 followed similar pattern. Tunisia's Ben Ali regime appeared secure despite corruption and repression. Then Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation in December 2010 catalyzed protests. Within weeks, Ben Ali fled after 23 years in power. Egypt's Mubarak fell within 18 days of mass protests beginning. Libya, Yemen, Syria erupted into uprising and civil war. What had seemed stable revealed itself as brittle once population stopped performing acquiescence.

The common pattern is that hypernormalised systems appear stable because everyone assumes everyone else accepts the system. Once that assumption breaks—through cascade of small events, through sudden crisis, through visible demonstration that others also reject the system—collapse accelerates. The stability was always illusion maintained through collective performance. When performance stops, the underlying fragility becomes visible.

Economist Hyman Minsky's financial instability hypothesis describes how this works in markets. Long periods of stability breed complacency, which encourages risk-taking, which builds fragility, which makes the system vulnerable to sudden collapse once confidence breaks. The longer the stability persists, the more severe the eventual crisis because risks have accumulated invisibly beneath stable surface.

This applies to hypernormalisation generally. The longer societies maintain pretense without addressing problems, the more problems accumulate. Trust erodes. Legitimacy hollows out. Material conditions deteriorate. These contradictions are managed through performance until they cannot be. When breaking point arrives, the transition is not gradual adjustment but sudden rupture.

The danger is that populations living inside hypernormalisation, despite sensing problems, are unprepared for collapse when it comes. They have learned helplessness rather than organisation. They have cynicism rather than solidarity. They know the system is failing but have no alternative ready because imagining alternatives was systematically discouraged.

This creates dangerous vacuum. When hypernormalised systems collapse, what often fills the vacuum is not democratic liberation but chaos, authoritarianism, or opportunistic seizure of power by whoever is organised. Russia's transition from Soviet collapse descended into oligarchic capitalism and eventual authoritarian restoration. Arab Spring uprisings mostly produced either civil war or return of authoritarianism. The collapse of pretense does not automatically produce better systems without prepared alternatives.

Contemporary manifestations: where we are now

Multiple domains of contemporary life display clear hypernormalisation characteristics: visible contradiction between narrative and reality, collective awareness without collective action, ritualistic performance substituting for genuine response.

Economic hypernormalisation. Governments and media describe economic conditions as "recovered" or "strong" whilst populations experience stagnant wages, rising costs, declining security. The contradiction is visible in data: stock markets reach record highs whilst majority struggle to afford basics. GDP grows whilst life expectancy declines. Unemployment is low whilst underemployment, precarity, and poverty remain widespread.

The metrics themselves have been redefined to obscure problems. Unemployment rates exclude discouraged workers who stopped looking. Inflation measures exclude housing and healthcare costs that dominate household budgets. GDP counts financial speculation whilst ignoring environmental destruction. The numbers report success whilst lived experience indicates failure.

Political hypernormalisation. Democratic processes continue whilst democratic control over fundamental outcomes has been hollowed out. People vote but policies serve corporate interests regardless of electoral outcomes. Politicians debate but operate within narrow parameters set by financial markets. Media covers politics extensively but excludes questions that challenge power.

The 2016 US election and Brexit referendum demonstrated this. Both outcomes shocked establishments precisely because populations rejected hypernormalisation, voting for disruption over managed continuity. But the disruption itself was contained within system boundaries. Trump governed largely as conventional Republican. Brexit weakened the UK without fundamentally challenging capitalism. The anger was real but channelled toward targets that did not threaten power.

Institutional hypernormalisation. Institutions perform their stated functions whilst failing at their actual purposes. Education systems claim to promote learning whilst functioning primarily as sorting mechanisms for labour markets. Healthcare systems claim to serve health whilst maximising profit. Justice systems claim to ensure fairness whilst perpetuating inequality. Media claim to inform whilst serving corporate interests.

Everyone knows this. The contradictions are visible and widely discussed. Yet institutions continue operating because no alternatives have been built and immediate survival requires participating in systems everyone knows are broken.

Technological hypernormalisation. Technology is presented as solving problems it actually intensifies. Social media promised connection but delivered isolation and manipulation. The internet promised democratisation of information but created filter bubbles and misinformation crises. Automation promised leisure but produced precarity. Algorithms promised efficiency but created systems no one understands or controls.

The surveillance capitalism explored in Chapter 7 represents extreme form of this: systems that extract value from human experience whilst claiming to serve users, that manipulate behaviour whilst presenting themselves as neutral platforms, that accumulate power whilst maintaining appearance of providing free services.

Environmental hypernormalisation. As discussed earlier, climate change represents perhaps the supreme contemporary hypernormalisation. Everyone knows the trajectory is catastrophic. Action continues being inadequate. The performance of concern continues without translating into response at required scale.

The overall condition is life within systems everyone knows are failing but no one can change. Not from lack of awareness but from absence of collective capacity to act on awareness. The consciousness burden becomes paralysing. The masks become survival mechanisms. The crowd psychology prevents organisation. The indoctrination makes alternatives unthinkable.

Why this chapter matters for the book's argument

Hypernormalisation connects all previous themes into comprehensive explanation of contemporary condition.

Consciousness (Chapter 2) becomes burden without outlet. You are aware of contradictions but trapped within structures preventing action on awareness. The default mode network cycles through anxieties that cannot be resolved.

Masks (Chapter 3) become mandatory performance. You present public face that conforms whilst maintaining private awareness that performance is hollow. Authenticity becomes impossible when survival requires pretense.

Crowds (Chapter 4) exhibit collective awareness without collective action. Everyone knows yet no one acts because everyone assumes they are alone in knowing.

Indoctrination (Chapter 5) succeeds not through belief but through making alternatives unthinkable. You reject official narratives but cannot imagine different systems.

Early belief systems (Chapter 6) that created shared meaning are replaced by shared pretense. Where religion once provided genuine frameworks for cooperation, hypernormalisation provides hollow rituals everyone performs without believing.

Capitalism (Chapter 7) creates conditions for hypernormalisation by making resistance economically suicidal, by occupying consciousness with survival anxiety, by privatising all solutions, by making collective action nearly impossible.

Hypernormalisation is not separate pathology but predictable result of systems operating beyond democratic control, serving narrow interests whilst claiming to serve general welfare, accumulating contradictions beneath stable surface until collapse becomes inevitable.

Understanding this explains why societies can be simultaneously informed and powerless, aware and passive, concerned and resigned. It explains why exposure does not lead to accountability, why evidence does not produce change, why crisis feels both shocking and inevitable.

It also reveals what is required to break hypernormalisation: not merely awareness—which already exists—but collective organisation to act on shared awareness, alternatives ready to fill vacuum when pretense becomes unsustainable, and courage to imagine genuinely different futures rather than managed continuity of systems everyone knows are failing.

Conclusion: living in the interregnum

Antonio Gramsci wrote from prison: "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."

Hypernormalisation is the psychological condition of living in such interregnum. Old systems are visibly failing. New systems have not yet emerged. In the gap between these realities, societies maintain performance of normalcy whilst privately recognising abnormality, continue operating broken systems whilst awaiting collapse, and adapt to contradictions that cannot be sustained indefinitely.

This is not stable equilibrium but prolonged crisis. The pretense delays reckoning whilst ensuring reckoning, when it comes, is more severe. Problems compound beneath surface. Trust erodes. Legitimacy hollows out. The gap between reality and performance widens until maintaining performance becomes impossible.

What comes after depends on what is built during the pretense. If populations remain cynical, atomised, and unprepared, collapse produces chaos that authoritarian forces exploit. If alternatives are imagined, organised, and ready, transformation becomes possible.

The task for those who recognise hypernormalisation is not to keep exposing contradictions—everyone already knows—but to build capacity for collective action, to maintain solidarity despite systemic pressures toward isolation, to imagine alternatives despite indoctrination that makes alternatives unthinkable, and to prepare for moment when pretense becomes unsustainable.

Because that moment will come. Hypernormalisation always ends. The only questions are when, how violently, and what replaces it.

The pretense continues. Until it cannot.