It reminds me of the documentary Hypernormalisation, well worth a watch if you haven’t seen it.
“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. 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. 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”
tover153@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Yes, that’s a really good pull.
Hypernormalisation gets at the same feeling from a different angle. Everyone knows the system is strained, maybe failing, but the performance continues because nothing else feels imaginable. So the pretense hardens into reality.
At that point, the lie isn’t even that things are fine. The lie is that there’s no alternative to continuing exactly like this.
That’s the part that feels brittle.