The New Abnormal

As a society, we live within an elastic sense of normality. It expands or contracts a bit, and changes over time: that's our sense of what's normal. An intelligent, vital society recognizes signs and small changes that threaten that normality, and elements of the society work together to stop problems before they become threatening.

Right now normality is at the breaking point. The most obvious signs are the changes rippling through daily life caused by high oil prices and a global food crisis. At the same time there are other serious problems manifesting themselves in our financial and economic systems. The lives of millions of people are changing for the worse. Soon the elastic could break.

We could have avoided what's happening, and what may come. Within society, we are pretty good at diagnosis and innovation. Some people within society know what the problems are, and there are possible solutions.

But society as a whole isn't functioning intelligently. In many ways we are a cell phone version of the decadent Roman Empire. Our politics in this crucial year has become dominated by idiocy. After more than 20 years of cultural brutalization, we are ready to brand anything intelligent as "elitist." We can barely understand the word "distraction," because our lives are all distraction. While the Climate Crisis is contributing right now to the fractures in our normality, big money fuels loud voices calling reality into question, and those voices become enablers for the fearful. They call those who recognize the threat of the Climate Crisis alarmists, because they do not want to hear the alarm.

Civilization is in peril. We don't have the normal margin for error, or for stupidity. We could have prevented a great deal of what is starting to happen now. The sooner we recognize the threat to normality, the better chance we have of doing something effective, rather than something stupid that will only make things worse.