In his 2006 book, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, anthropologist Alexei Yurchak introduced a powerful concept called hypernormalisation. Drawing from his experience growing up in Leningrad before becoming a professor at UC Berkeley, Yurchak identified a intriguing social phenomenon that defined Soviet society in the 1970s and 1980s.
Throughout this period, Soviet society engaged in a mass performance of normalcy - citizens and leaders alike carried on with daily routines despite knowing the system was crumbling around them. The true tragedy lay not in their awareness of the dysfunction, but in how thoroughly this fake reality had taken hold of their collective imagination. Even as they acknowledged the system's deep flaws, they found themselves unable to picture any other way of living. It was like everyone was stuck playing their part in a messed up game and going through the motions even though they could see everything was falling apart.
HyperNormalisation is also a BBC documentary by Adam Curtis. It presents a statement about modern society's retreat from reality. Released in October 2016, the film argues that a pivotal shift occurred following the 1970s economic crisis. According to Curtis, key power players, including governments and financial institutions, abandoned their attempts to grapple with the world's true complexity. They created a watered-down version of reality that mostly served big business interests and was propped up by policies favoring free markets and less government involvement. According to the documentary, this shift showed how those in power stopped dealing with actual problems head-on and instead focused on managing public perception completely changing how power and control work in today's world.
While this documentary sounds like a conspiracy theorist's notion, it looks at how we've reached a point where many people no longer care what's true and what isn't. Over the last 50 years, global politics has become so complicated that politicians can easily twist facts around to tell whatever story they want. Instead of pointing fingers at bad guys or giving oversimplified answers, the film connects the dots between world politics, conflicts in the Middle East, and our current moment - where truth seems optional and democracy feels shaky. The filmmaker, Curtis, takes all these big, messy ideas and breaks them down in a way that helps viewers understand how we ended up in a world where reality itself seems up for debate.
I don't take everything in this documentary as gospel - it definitely leaves out some important events, points and perspectives. But I find the concept useful because it gives me a way to make sense what we're all seeing in politics and society currently. With social media, politics, and news being what they are, it's getting harder to tell what's real and what's not. Having a term like this helps put a name to the weird reality we're living in.