“The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying but they keep lying to us anyway, and we keep pretending to believe them.”
— Elena Gorokhova, A Mountain of Crumbs
The above quote is one of the most beautiful summations of the Soviet post-totalitarian system. It is quite similar to Adam Curtis’s description of Alexei Yurchak’s 2006 work “Everything was forever, until it was no more”.
Curtis writes,
“What he said, which I thought was absolutely fascinating, was that in the 80s everyone from the top to the bottom of Soviet society knew that it wasn’t working, knew that it was corrupt, knew that the bosses were looting the system, know that the politicians had no alternative vision. And they knew that the bosses knew that they knew that. Everyone knew it was fake, but because no one had any alternative vision for a different kind of society, they just accepted this sense of total fakeness as normal”.
In his description of Yurchak’s work, however, Curtis takes many liberties. Most notably, the implication that follow from “everyone knew it was fake” implies a more conscious awareness of the mechanisms underpinning the Soviet system by the “normal” person or svoi as Yurchak calls them. Svoi, rather than noticing the fakeness, were mostly unaware of it. That is to say, they did not accept it as normal — they did not accept it at all because it was more expedient, ie., easier, not to question the nature of the system. Instead, the svoi simply went through the motions.
Brandon Harris of the New Yorker provides a more palatable definition of hypernormalization than Curtis, pointing out that it is “an entropic acceptance and false belief in a clearly broken polity and the myths that undergird it”. The latter definition, in my mind, is closer to what Yurchak meant by the word. Interestingly, it also implies more modern parallels than Curtis’ understanding of the word.
While we would like to believe everyone understands the system is broken, and U.S. Senate approval polling might even suggest as much, it becomes less clear when we actually look at election outcomes. The same people, running on the same platforms, regardless of results continue to get elected into office with little effort, often until they retire.
Peer enforcement of the paradoxical generally accepted principle of democratic discourse is found in quips like “if you don’t vote, you can’t complain”. At face value, this is a strange assertion as the underlying premise is that we get to vote every few years for an opaque bundle of policies and only then, and presumably only if we voted for the bundle that did not get selected, are we free to complain. It sounds like a political version of Storage Wars rather than a political system based on constitutional principles.
Accordingly, many people actually believe we should be subject to the whims of whomever gets the most votes — it’s the democratic thing to do!
We have seen this absurd principle played out over the Western world for decades while our politicians make backroom deals and spend fortunes on foreign wars that ultimately benefit only their pockets and the pockets of a fringe group of special interests. The trend, however, is becoming more noticeable in the last two years. Troublingly, people have began to justify abuses of entrenched legal standards and Western constitutions with the justification that our politicians were democratically elected.
Roper, at least, wanted to cut down every law to get after the Devil. We just want to cut them down because they were included somewhere at the bottom of the bundle of policies that a fraction of the population bid on. Those who dare to question the basis of such authority are not svoi, and their elimination is celebrated with great candor. Yurchak, summarizing Brodsky and Havel, noted,
“‘Given the seeming stability of the system,’ a dissident was simply ‘written off’ by
most people, regarded by them as ‘a convenient example of the wrong deportment’ and therefore ‘a source of considerable moral comfort,’ the way ‘the healthy majority’ sees ‘the sick’”.
Sound familiar?
Brodsky and Havel, of course, could not have known how on-point their analogy would be in such a short time. These days, even the general language is similar. Those dissidents that dare to question mandate-mania are seen as sick, spreaders of disease, parasites. Likewise, those who “heroically” did exactly as they were told “did their part”. Even if there was a general dislike for many of the mandates in the general public and people only put on those masks with grumblings, the dissidents were still seen as a worse evil than the public health officials implementing these mandates. Such are the benefits of conformity and the wages of dissent.
Yurchak provides a similar example of, essentially a fee collector, who required everyone to pay a pointless fee that was seen as a great inconvenience. But since they did not consider the process to be the fee collectors fault, being simply a cog in the system, the fee collector was still a svoi; whereas, the dissident who refused to pay the fee on principle was not svoi. Created from this line of thinking was a peer enforced process where true dissidents became rare due to the social cost of taking a position on principle.
Interestingly, because dissidents and their opposite (activists) became rare, the system had time to became more immutable and routine acceptance more widespread. The process of hypernormalization then took place, which caused internal displacement in the system. In other words, as the ideological predicates of society became more circular in nature, closed to any internal disruptions, participation in society became so routine that the ideological basis on which society was constructed lost all meaning. At the end, the only thing holding the fabric of society together was the routine itself, and when the routine was no longer necessary, society in that form could no longer exist.
For the record, I do not think we are in the same place as the late Soviet era. The Trump-Brexit era has woken many people up and there are more dissidents than ever. There is a growing rejection of the system, which ironically, may prevent an internal collapse from occurring. Rather, the system is being displaced externally by a growing rejection of it by people around the world. The question going forward will be whether the system is still adaptable enough to sustain itself in the face of the dissident movement and what alternative will arise.
The trick to survive, even to thrive, is to first accept that you can't bring The System down, indeed you shouldn't even try to, not overtly. Because the system will crush you, it's immune system being very good at stifling dissent.
Instead you must learn to mimic the defenders of the system so they think you one of the, but you should do so non-committally: loyal and enthusiastic in words only. In swedish ,we have a term for it: ögontjänare, literally menaing "eye-servant" - serving only when the eye of power is upon you.
Also, try to live good, and thank the system for what a good life you have. No one can fault you for thanking the state that thank's to them you can grow your own veggies (meaning in real terms you have to since the state fails in its planning). Do not commit political crimes. Do not grandstand. No speechmaking.
Easiest way to learn is to read "Svejk", by Jaroslav Hasek. Adopt the outer countenance and attitude of the good soldier Svejk, and let the system rot while you live a pleasant and humble life.
Because one thing Havel and the others found out the hard way? When the state starts to push back, you're suddenly all alone. 9 out of 10 politically active, for any ideology, are hangers on and me too-ists. And the state is very very good at identifying that one dissident who is both charismatic, intelligent and rethorically gifted.
Harassment. Kompromat. Zersetzung. Finally, arrest on whatever charges can be made. Then big reveal to public: state has proof you are in pocket of foreign agents. You have committed tax fraud and embezzlement. You have weird, criminal , porn on computer. Always the same crimes are rolled out.
So do like Svejk. Be happy, humble and let the systemic idiocy take care of itself.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said something similar when the world order raped and pillaged Russia. Funded by banking institutions in the US and Europe to overtake the country. Who were the Bolshevik’s? It is important because now it is a whole world attack with strokeme 19 and now this right on time scripted war. New Bolshevik’s same tactics. 2014 in Ukraine was them using McCain and Biden plus US state department to maneuver it into civil war for this time right now. All a plan. They are evil satanic scum that needs to be scrubs from earth. They own everything including the weak-minded fools.