What follows is perhaps not so much a coherent text as an attempt for me to work out some of the things that have been troubling me lately, and also some of the things that are giving me reasons to be hopeful.
We’ve reached a point of total absurdity in our culture, because it is a culture that now depends upon the outright denial of reality. I think, for some period of time, we were able to get away with sort of skirting in and around reality. That’s now changed. Willful blindness is what is now required to navigate a world that no longer makes any sense.
As I performed my daily ritual of anxiously scrolling through the Guardian’s morning newsletter last Wednesday, I found myself confronted with the following headline, nestled within the newsletter’s “Climate crisis” vertical:
I somehow resisted the impulse to prevent myself from actually absorbing this piece of information. I sat with it for a minute and processed what I could of the scenario presented by the headline, in which monkeys were apparently falling out of trees “like apples” to their deaths as a result of the unfolding and entirely preventable climate catastrophe. And I somewhat half-heartedly committed to myself that I would revisit the newsletter and click on the link to the actual story at some later point, if and when my now perennially-shattered attention span found an opportune moment to function in the way I feel certain it once did, and if I were prepared to assign the resulting, additional browser tab on my laptop precedence over the hundreds of others I already had open with the intent of getting around to reading soon.
The moment did happen to come a day or two later, when, basically by chance, I revisited the Guardian newsletter that I’d left in my inbox, opening a new tab in Chrome, which I then read. Here’s some of what the story reported:
It’s so hot in Mexico that howler monkeys are falling dead from the trees.
At least 83 of the midsize primates, who are known for their roaring vocal calls, were found dead in the Gulf coast state of Tabasco. Others were rescued by residents, including five that were rushed to a local veterinarian who battled to save them.
In the town of Tecolutilla, Tabasco, the dead monkeys started appearing on Friday, when a local volunteer fire-and-rescue squad showed up with five of the creatures in the bed of the truck.
Valenzuela put ice on their limp little hands and feet, and hooked them up to IV drips.
So far, the monkeys appear to be on the mend. Once listless and easily handled, they are now in cages at Valenzuela’s office. “They’re recovering. They’re aggressive ... they’re biting again,” he said, noting that was a healthy sign for the usually furtive creatures.
Most aren’t so lucky. Wildlife biologist Gilberto Pozo counted about 83 of the animals dead or dying on the ground under trees. The die-off started around 5 May and hit its peak over the weekend.
“They were falling out of the trees like apples,” Pozo said. “They were in a state of severe dehydration, and they died within a matter of minutes.” Already weakened, Pozo says the falls from dozens of yards (meters) up inflict additional damage that often finishes the monkeys off.
For many of us (all of us?), life in 2024 requires constructing some way of encountering unthinkable news items like this and then filing the upsetting information away in order to go about our lives: to allow us to perform the social roles that we are forced to perform in order to afford the ever-increasing costs – literal and figurative – of merely living, all while the rich get richer, the corrupt commit crimes with increasing impunity, and the brutalization of the natural world, of our source of life, continues unchecked.
In this situation, we must figure out ways to avoid lingering on the thought of the limp little hands and feet of the howler monkeys for too long. The scenes that we learn are unfolding around us are the things of our dystopian imaginings of the future. What happens when the violent inevitabilities of the system in which we live start to become the present, rather than the future? When “die-offs” are not just coming, but already underway? We are learning the answer to that question in real time.
The way a society accommodates itself to the abnormal and unthinkable and preposterous – climate catastrophe, genocide, fraudulence and hypocrisy in what feels like all areas of public life – is explored by the British documentary-maker Adam Curtis in his 2016 film, Hypernormalisation. In it, he says in his distinct, foreboding style of narration, that:
We live in a strange time. Extraordinary events keep happening that undermine the stability of our world. Suicide bombs, waves of refugees, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, even Brexit. Yet those in control seem unable to deal with them. No one has any vision of a different or a better kind of future.
Curtis borrows the term “hypernormalization” from the Russian-born anthropologist Alexei Yurchak. Yurchak’s theory, per the scholar Brandon Harris, was (emphasis mine) that:
during the final days of Russian communism, the Soviet system had been so successful at propagandizing itself, at restricting the consideration of possible alternatives, that no one within Russian society, be they politicians or journalists, academics or citizens, could conceive of anything but the status quo until it was far too late to avoid the collapse of the old order. The system was unsustainable; this was obvious to anyone waiting in line for bread or gasoline, to anyone fighting in Afghanistan or working in the halls of the Kremlin. But in official, public life, such thoughts went unexpressed. The end of the Soviet Union was, among Russians, both unsurprising and unforeseen. Yurchak coined the term “hypernormalization” to describe this process—an entropic acceptance and false belief in a clearly broken polity and the myths that undergird it.
In a system that is in decline, in an order that is collapsing, truth and reality become distorted, obscured, concealed, avoided, laughed at. The cultural critic Neil Postman perceived this blurring, this interplay, of reality and fantasy as early as 1985, when he published Amusing Ourselves to Death, which was a cautionary exploration of what happens to a culture “in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment.” He asserted then that, “Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.”
Such was the culture that gave rise to celebrity presidents. Ronald Reagan, who was in office at the time Postman’s book was released and pledged to “Make America Great Again,” said in an interview while serving as POTUS that, “There have been times in this office when I wondered how you could do the job if you hadn’t been an actor.”
Donald Trump, who also pledges to “Make America Great Again,” owes his political rise to “reality TV” (and to his promotion of the “birther” conspiracy theory).
There is a process that unfolds on a daily basis through which we launder troubling truths – transform them – into sources of entertainment that render them digestible. In last Friday’s New York Times flagship newsletter “The Morning,” the most recent developments in the US Supreme Court’s legitimacy crisis were summarized as follows (emphasis mine):
Democrats said Justice Samuel Alito should recuse himself from Trump-related cases after The Times revealed that two pro-Trump flags flew above Alito’s homes. Alito was the subject of late night jokes.
What are we to do with the new, unsettling (but also somehow unsurprising) knowledge of the insurrectionist sympathies of an unelected Supreme Court justice who, like at least one of his peers, receives the patronage of right-wing plutocrats and authored the Court’s catastrophic opinion striking down the Constitutional right to abortion and who will soon weigh in on whether presidential immunity should permit an incumbent to order the Navy SEALs to assassinate the incumbent’s political opponents without repercussion?
The answer is that we chuckle at Stephen Colbert’s jokes about the whole thing, as invited to by the Times, and then scroll onto whatever the algorithm serves us next. Saturday Night Live has long done the work of hypernormalizing insane realities for us on a weekly basis.
The collective laundering of the intolerable unfolds all around us all day long – through the establishment media, TV shows, professional sports events, memes, and so on. This process allows us to get on with our day-to-day lives without having to openly acknowledge the ongoing failure of the system in which we’re living. The collective apathy and disengagement that results is very useful for our oligarchs, who are responsible for having gotten us into this mess. These distractions are more than merely useful to the elite; they are essential for the maintenance and expansion of their wealth and power.
One of the more on-the-nose moments that made this fact plain in our era was during the 2016 presidential race, when then-CBS executive chairman and CEO Les Moonves reflected on the influx of Trump campaign ad money into Moonves’s company by noting of the presidential race that, “It might not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
In late 2017, as the #MeToo movement accelerated, Moonves became a founding member of the Commission on Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality in the Workplace.
In July of the next year, Ronan Farrow published a story in the New Yorker that reported the following:
Six women who had professional dealings with [Moonves] told me that, between the nineteen-eighties and the late aughts, Moonves sexually harassed them. Four described forcible touching or kissing during business meetings, in what they said appeared to be a practiced routine. Two told me that Moonves physically intimidated them or threatened to derail their careers. All said that he became cold or hostile after they rejected his advances, and that they believed their careers suffered as a result.
Moonves resigned two months later, and denied all of the allegations against him. In his time at CBS, he was, according to CNBC, “one of the highest paid CEOs in the U.S. for many years, sometimes earning more than $50 million in a year. In 2015, Forbes estimated his net worth at $700 million.”
Elites like Moonves and Trump – the demagogue whose rise was so “damn good for CBS” – need us to amuse ourselves to death so that they can enrich themselves as they prey on the vulnerable.
Getting at a slightly different angle of this same dynamic, the historian Rick Perlstein related an instructive anecdote recently, in a piece about the tech billionaire and “reactionary futurist” Marc Andreessen. Perlstein tells us that he’d found himself, in 2017, in the unlikely scenario of speaking at a meeting of the venture capitalist’s book club at his 12,000 square foot mansion outside of Silicon Valley. Andreessen had grown up in an “impoverished agricultural small town in Wisconsin, and despised it.” Perlstein says that, in conversation at the book club event with Andreessen on the fate of such towns, Perlstein:
… brought up the ordinary comforts of kinship, friendship, craft, memory, legend, lore, skills passed down across generations, and other benefits that small towns provide: things that make human beings human beings. I pointed out [to Andreessen] that there must be something in the kind of places [he] grew up in worth preserving. I dared venture that it is always worth mourning when a venerable human community passes from the Earth; that maybe people are more than just figures finding their proper price on the balance sheet of life …
And that’s when the man in the castle with the seven fireplaces said it.
“I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet,” [Andreessen said].
Andreessen and other like-minded billionaires in the Silicon Valley set believe that virtual reality will soon become a more efficient replacement for opioids and video games as a tool for “keeping those people quiet.” In a 2021 story with the headline, “Billionaires See VR as a Way to Avoid Radical Social Change,” Matthew Gault wrote in Wired that, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a Facebook-branded set of VR goggles strapped to an emaciated human face—forever.”
Andreessen is now selling the house with the seven fireplaces, where Perlstein had met him; it’s listed for $33 million. The New York Post tells us that Andreessen and his wife are “now set to embark on a new chapter, relocating to Southern California after amassing an impressive property portfolio in Malibu totaling more than $250 million.”
There is another tactic that proves useful in ensuring that we, as a public, fail to confront unbearable realities: the circumscription of permissible discourse. Nowhere is this more evident today than in “debates” about Israel’s violent and illegal annihilation of more than 35,000 people in Gaza. This spring, mainstream American media coverage of the war increasingly focused not on the bloody events on the ground where the actual war on Palestinian civilians is being waged by a lawless, extremist government with taxpayer-funded support from the United States. Instead, the coverage has obsessed over the domestic protest movement that spread in response to the bloodshed, in particular on college campuses. Discussion of the central facts involved has been scant. Key among those inconvenient truths is that Bibi Netanyahu and his ideological allies have, for decades, pursued policies and politics that led to the very establishment and increasing radicalization over time of Hamas.
The breathless American media coverage of the protests has centered the perspectives of professional “pundits” who brand themselves champions of free speech standing athwart “cancel culture” and “wokeness” and bravely yelling “stop!” These same characters have been wrong about all of the major issues of our time and, nevertheless, continue to enjoy the most prestigious platforms in civil society. For some reason, the very commentators who have built careers out of hand-wringing over the alleged crisis of free speech on college campuses insist that the inviolability of free speech cannot, must not apply vis-à-vis Gaza. Why? What’s going on here?
Last month, in assessing the disproportionate coverage of the protests in comparison to that of the actual events that were unfolding in Gaza, Alex Shephard pointed out in the New Republic that:
A mass rebellion among young people—particularly college students, many of whom will be in positions of political and economic power themselves one day—is undoubtedly a legitimate news story. But the media is partly missing what makes it so compelling. It’s an affront to the current political and economic order: Tens of thousands of college students are demanding not only an end to America’s unconditional support for a brutal ally but a drastic change in how the U.S. wields influence broadly around the world. They’re doing what journalists are told to do on day one: Follow the money. And the protesters don’t like where that money leads.
The media – and the “establishment” more broadly – have missed the fact that the “mass rebellion among young people” is “an affront to the current political and economic order.” In other words, the protesters are rejecting the hypernormalization of what is clearly a moral injustice, and are rejecting along with it the cultural and political order that permits and demands that hypernormalizaton. The protests amount to what the theorist Herbert Marcuse, writing in the context of the 1960s student movement, described as a “Great Refusal.” A Great Refusal is “the protest against that which is.” Against hypernormalization. As the linguist Noam Chomsky wrote in The Common Good in 1998:
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
What the campus protest discourse serves to do is reinforce the presuppositions of the (failing and unjust) system.
The pervasive degree to which we have collectively mastered the art of hypernormalizing a brutal world is reflected in the apparent inability of so many elite pundits simply to absorb the idea that many people are genuinely, morally outraged by their country’s ongoing support for crimes against humanity as an unambiguous matter of principle. This is why we find ourselves in the outrageous situation in which Jewish protesters in support of the people of Gaza are labeled “antisemitic.”
“Principle” is not a concept that those in power (nor those in proximity to power) seem capable of grasping, let alone possessing. Last week, South Carolina politician Nikki Haley broke news by announcing, at an event put on by a right-wing think tank, that she would vote in the November presidential election for Donald Trump. Vanity Fair’s Bess Levin has compiled an extensive list of the searing criticisms Haley lobbed at Trump while campaigning against him in the embarrassing spectacle that was the “Republican presidential primary” earlier this year. To highlight just one (with my emphasis):
Speaking to The Wall Street Journal in February, Haley said that the idea of making Trump the party’s nominee “is like suicide for our country.”
We’ve now learned how this works: Haley, like other, shameless Trumpist boosters along the lines of Ted Cruz, Elise Stefanik, Marco Rubio, and J.D. Vance, will not be pressed in any meaningful way to reconcile support for Trump with earlier, dramatic condemnations of him. Haley could even be tapped to serve as Trump’s running mate –an appointment that would presumably hinge on her willingness to exceed Mike Pence’s level of tolerance for debasement.
Haley’s first act as a Trump surrogate in the 2024 race came this week – not on the domestic campaign trail, but in northern Israel, and it was appropriately depraved: she was “photographed bending down and writing on [an Israeli artillery] shell with a purple marker. ‘Finish Them!’” This PR stunt came on the heels of the Israeli airstrike “that caused a huge blaze at a tented area for displaced people in Rafah,” killing 45 and resulting in “images of charred and dismembered children.”
If the farcical “debate” around Gaza reflects our inability as a society to grapple with the truth, another manifestation of this ongoing failure to confront reality is the sorry state of reflection on the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 7 million people around the world, including no fewer than 1.2 million in the United States. Rather than address or even acknowledge the systemic failures, corruption, and profiteering that have been exposed by the pandemic – not to mention the trauma that it has left in its wake – what passes for discourse around COVID consists largely of contrarian click-bait focused on such “taboo” topics as the “lab-leak theory” and whether, actually, too many lives were spared as a result of the measures put in place to contain the virus.
Hypernormalization abhors honesty, reflection, and moral clarity. This is how modern corporations work, too; Boeing (on whose board Haley sat from 2019-20) is a good example of this in the present moment.
One of the effects of COVID was clearly the intensification and hastening of many people’s retreats into fantasy worlds. This has been powerfully documented by the writer Naomi Klein in her Doppleganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, in which she engages with the question of what happened to “non-essential workers” when, in the state of quarantine, everything, in an instant, slowed down; indeed, it all came to a halt. Some, Klein finds, reacted to baffling disruptions to the rhythms of daily life by following the algorithms to which they were tethered to their logical conclusions –that is, down the rabbit hole. They sought meaning in it all, ultimately finding the explanatory narratives that they sought – as well as entertainment – in the malevolent mythologies of such fever dreams as QAnon, conspirituality, and “the great replacement.”
Others refashioned, retooled our horror into amusement. The experience of the preceding years – of responding to the latest buzzy news item further revealing Donald Trump’s flagrant and unchecked criminality and chauvinism with the caustic refrain “LOL nothing matters” – had preconditioned us to meet the COVID crisis with derisive sluggishness. To wit:
The American president’s suggestion that people inject themselves with bleach as a way of curing the virus in April 2020 was quickly laundered into a viral video by the lip-syncing comedian Sarah Cooper. At the time, one had to laugh at it; one found a kind of reassurance in laughing at it. Now, at a remove, it rightly strikes the viewer as an artifact of a botched civilization
Four months later, Trump sat for a shocking interview with the reporter Jonathan Swan, who worked for Axios at the time. In the exchange, when Trump falsely claimed that the pandemic was “under control,” Swan confronted him with the fact that “a thousand Americans are dying a day” from the virus.
“They are dying, that’s true,” Trump responded, “and it is what it is.”
The exchange plainly demonstrated a truth that was, of course, already apparent: that the purported “leader of the free world” was neither capable of nor interested in addressing the ongoing crisis. Those of us who were horrified by this spectacle dealt with it by seizing on Swan’s visible and relatable revulsion in response to Trump’s pablum and turning it into a funny meme
In the UK, Boris Johnson’s incompetence was quickly commodified as a TV mini-series starring Kenneth Branagh. (It has now become commonplace for us to fictionalize scandal almost instantaneously. The Dropout, a Hulu series telling the story of the Theranos affair, was released in March 2022, before the real-life trials of former executives Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani had even played out).
Another quite bizarre response to COVID was literally to amuse oneself to death, as did a startling number of anti-vax talk radio hosts who used their platforms to rail against the shots and subsequently contracted the virus which in turn, predictably, killed them (along, one assumes, with some number of their more devoted listeners).
One of the more ubiquitous memes that emerged early in the pandemic, in those days when “quarantine” was new and exotic, textured by previously-unimaginable bread-baking and strange Zoom happy hours, revolved around the sardonic reflection, “Nature is healing. We are the virus.” Here’s how Buzzfeed explained the origins of the trend at that time:
People have been posting photos and videos of animals flourishing in our new less-human, and thus less-toxic, environment….
People rejoiced and showered these posts with hundreds of thousands of likes and retweets.
Fact-checkers, though, can be real killjoys.
One by one, reporters, including us at BuzzFeed News, were able to show that most of these reports were fabrications….
But humans are a resourceful bunch, and in the face of this devastating letdown, a new meme was born: "nature is healing, we are the virus."
The resulting social media posts tended to make a mockery of the whole notion and were often very funny, but I think the initial impulse – before it descended into the particular kind of nihilism that has marked our age – actually reflected both a deep, collective, aching desire to indeed allow nature to heal, and the knowledge that we actually have the ability to make that happen – to change. The writer Julio Vincent Gambuto perceived this in realtime, arguing in April 2020 that COVID represented a “Great Pause” that might allow us to take honest stock of our lives and our world, and to change them to our liking.
In a podcast interview with the writer Douglas Rushkoff, Klein wonders if the reason that an estimated 15 to 26 million people had decided to participate in Black Lives Matter protests across the U.S. in 2020, having concluded that the police murder of George Floyd (just over four years ago, now) – and the broader structures that produced it – were intolerable, was that, in “lockdown,” people had the time and space to confront the truth of this injustice and decide, as a result, to exercise their right to do something about it. She said:
“There was a slowing down, and I believe that that slowing down was part of the reason why George Floyd’s murder entered people’s hearts in a different way… Part of that was just slowing down, you know? And being able to go into streets and protest [because the streets weren’t filled with cars].”
If we are to shape a better world, it will have to involve the kind of slowing down – the kind of Great Pause – that, for a brief, strange, inspiring moment in 2020, seemed to open up new possibilities, and terrify those who desperately seek to maintain the status quo and further pervert it to their ends.
Using Marcuse’s ideas about student protests to analyze the Black Lives Matter movement, two scholars recently suggested that “the withdrawal of toleration for violence belongs to an organic, democratic movement of conscientious individuals, a rejection of prevailing values called ‘the Great Refusal.’” A rejection of hypernormalization.
Attempts at Great Refusals tend to be met with Great Repressions. The violent quashing of the 2020 protests showed just the extent to which American policing has been militarized. That police response also involved the surveillance of protestors. Axios has noted that these kinds of police tactics have a long history, extending now to reactions to the present movement in support of Palestinians. Last month, Congress voted to renew, in an era of the least-productive law-making in decades, on a bipartisan basis, a provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that allows for the “mass, warrantless surveillance of Americans’ and foreigners’ phone calls, text messages, emails, and other electronic communications.” In the run-up to the renewal of the provision, Pro-Israel groups and members of congress cited Pro-Palestine protests as an important use case for the kind of warrantless spying that FISA allows.
Of course, we are a society that has now become desensitized to a situation in which, as Shoshana Zuboff shows, our “private human experience” has been captured by tech companies as “free raw material for translation into behavioral data” for purposes of revenue-generation. These corporations use our data to “nudge, coax, tune, and herd behavior toward profitable outcomes.” This regime of surveillance capitalism ultimately puts us in a situation of what she calls “digital totalitarianism.”
Surveillance capitalism has, among other things, confined us within algorithmic feedback loops. As individuals, we now consume what Netflix, Spotify, TikTok, and Amazon tell us to consume based on what we’ve been compelled to consume in the past. On the macro level, as a society, the culture we produce is now determined by what we’ve produced in the past; hence, the preponderance of film and TV reboots and remakes and requels and multiboots.
The theorist Mark Fisher had identified this larger cycle of cultural and political stagnation, this perpetual failure of imagination, in elaborating his notion of capitalist realism, which he defined in 2009 as "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it."
Fisher believed, though, that the “slow cancellation of the future” could be undone. “The tiniest event,” he wrote, “can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.”
Revolutionary change happens at moments when enough people determine that the prevailing state of affairs has become intolerable. We do not have to “restrict the consideration of possible alternatives.” We do not need to amuse ourselves to death. We can confront reality – we can acknowledge the fact that howler monkeys are plummeting to their deaths like apples from trees in the Mexican state of Tabasco as a result of catastrophic climate change caused by Fossil Capital’s profiteering and corruption; we can acknowledge the fact that we are increasingly imprisoned within the digital totalitarian hell that techno-feudal elites like Andreessen have built – and we can dare to imagine a different future: one in which we are all free.
There is a reason that Logan Roy’s declaration to his adult children in the final season of Succession that they were “not serious people” touched such a nerve with the show’s audience. We all know that the system we’re in is unsustainable, just as did Yurchak’s late-Soviet-era Russians. We know that the people who have brought us to this place and are desperately trying to keep us here are not serious people. But, like our Russian counterparts during the collapse of the Soviet Union, we keep this knowledge to ourselves.
But I think something might be changing, that the mood might be shifting – in many places. From his “vantage point in Lahore,” the British Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid agrees. Last month, he wrote, beautifully, that, “my sense is, in the parts of the world I see around me, here in Lahore and also on my travels, that vast numbers of people feel the time has come to imagine, to try something else.” The time has come for a Great Refusal.
“From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.”
Fisher, who had written about his struggles with depression, committed suicide in January 2017. He was 48 at the time. His local newspaper reported on July 18 of that year that:
Today an inquest heard Mr Fisher and his wife Zoe had sought psychiatric treatment in the weeks leading up to his death, but their [doctor] had only been able to offer over-the-phone meetings to discuss a referral.
Coroner Nigel Parsley said the cause of death was hanging.
Before he succumbed to the despair that killed him in the hollowed-out wreckage of the Britain that Margaret Thatcher and her neo-liberal circle had left in their wake, Fisher believed that people could fashion a better world – one that elevates justice, equality, and liberation over and above subjugation by those who have monopolized power to the detriment of the common good.
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” claimed Thomas Paine, in Common Sense. That assertion proved to be true, then. It’s just as true now.