Hypernormalization

 I read an article that captured my current feelings all too well. This strange feeling where the news, social media, and almost everything online shows an ongoing dumpster fire...

And yet my day to day life is pretty bland and normal. And not just that, but (as the article also mentions) -

...the institutions and the people that are in power just are like ignoring it and are pretending like everything is going to go on the way that it has

It is definitely a surreal feeling, especially when everyone seems willing to ignore things that I had previously thought were impossible to ignore.

Like all that classified material that had been found in Trump's bathroom, which was dismissed so carelessly.

The media could harp on Hillary for months, is still harping on Biden's health... and when it comes to something like this, all we hear is crickets.

Which isn't exactly a surprise anymore, since the same thing happened with Jan 6. It only seems to take a couple of days before what should have been a bipartisan and uniting moment of horror at the damage done and support for America (and the Constitution) somehow just got quietly ignored. 

Oh, a fig leaf was given to allow people to pretend that what happened wasn't really all that bad. "Protest that got out of hand" or whatever convenient excuse was made to allow people to pretend that there was nothing different or unusual or somehow threatening the Constitution.

It's that disconnect... that cognitive dissonance...

That I keep struggling with, even as it makes me tired and upset and I try to get a break I keep coming back to it. Like wiggling a loose tooth.

Part of me feels a little silly that I find this so hard to understand. I mean, I've talked before about how I had an entire college level course that discussed how hard it was for people to be logical!!! The fallacies, the pattern-recognition that makes it hard for us to truly think logically, the heuristics...

The emotional anecdotes, which are very powerful.

As they mentioned - you could do all your research on what the best car to buy is, but as soon as someone you know tells you that they had a bad experience with particular make and model? You're probably not going to buy it, no matter how much the research shows that was probably an outlier.

I know this, I've known it for a very long time.

And yet I'm still shocked and surprised. 

I think, looking back, that I thought it would be different when it really mattered. That ofc people would be illogical and swayed by emotions and anecdotes when it comes to something like buying a car, but surely when it comes to something as important as our Constitution and the entire nation... people would do their research? 

I've done it myself, to the point where frankly I don't trust anything on facebook unless I've doublechecked it. Because you get some cute little meme and it conforms to all your biases and prejudices and it just plain sounds true (or fake), but is it really?

It's part of why I looked up tariffs, even though I was pretty sure from my previous economic education that I knew tariffs would end up making prices rise for consumers. It's just that Trump was so unashamedly willing to claim that there was no impact, so I figured I'd at least double check.

Well... that was a bit unusual, because most of the time it's not even worth checking anything he says. It's almost always a lie.

Which gets back to the next frustrating bit - which is that nobody ever seems to call him on that!

Did Mexico ever pay for the wall? The wall that Trump promised to build?

Does anyone even care any more?

It's quite clear that Trump has 'won' by pushing everyone's emotional buttons.

Even worse, it's so ham-handed and obvious that it's hard to believe anyone falls for it!

Illegal aliens eating dogs? Really?!? You really believe that?

I've complained before about how he makes everyone smaller. Uglier. Pettier.

Fearful.

He brings out the worst in people, and it boggles my mind that people support him for it.

And yet...

Institutions and people in power just ignore it, and act like it's just some grand new tactic in typical political games. 

It's like we used to have the Cardinals play the Cubs, and referees would make the call whenever something was questionable.

Now someone is paying off the referees or putting someone from their team in the referee position, and everyone watching the game is just cheering on like normal and ignoring the increasing frequency of moments where someone steals a base and the other team claims they had tagged them out, and instead of replaying the cameras and getting at the truth it just turns into a fight for who can get the referee to make the call that benefits their team the most.

And newspapers write glowing articles about what a great strategy it was, and questions how the other team is going to counter the manipulation of the referees.