The Soviet Strategy Fueling America's Decline [View all]

[ancianita]

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When we adapt and pretend what's happening is real, we are captive to hypernormalization to keep society stable: politicians, financiers, and technological utopians -- they constructed a simpler version of the world in order to hang on to power, allow dark and destructive forces to fester and grow outside. Forces that are now returning ... we know that the powerful lie.

The word hypernormalisation was coined by Alexei Yurchak, a professor of anthropology who was born in Leningrad and later went to teach at the University of California, Berkeley. He introduced the word in his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2006), which describes paradoxes of Soviet life during the 1970s and 1980s.[3][4] He says everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system was failing, but no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, and politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society.[5] Over time, the mass delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy, with everyone accepting it as the new norm rather than pretend, an effect Yurchak termed hypernormalisation.[6]