Look Up

How Normalcy Bias is Stopping Us From Panicking As Much As We Should

I used to wonder, when I was learning about slavery, the holocaust and other atrocities inflicted by human beings upon each other, how it could have possibly happened. Why didn’t people do something to stop it? Why didn’t they speak up more? I reasoned that they must have been terrified for their own lives and families.

Now I have the misfortune of living through a time where the fascism is gaining traction across the globe. Where we have watched helplessly as a genocide has taken place in Gaza. Where protestors and innocent citizens are being beaten, disappeared and murdered in what was once considered the beacon of Western democracy, the United States. I no longer wonder how it happens. I know the answer is a combination of the impotency of political institutions when faced with powerful people incapable of shame and the complacency of the majority of the population.

Author and essayist Naomi Shulman once wrote: “Nice people made the best Nazis. My mom grew up next to them. They got along, refused to make waves, looked the other way when things got ugly and focused on happier things than ‘politics’. They were lovely people who turned their heads as their neighbours were dragged away. You know who weren’t nice people? Resisters.”

I have heard people say that they don’t ‘do politics’, that they don’t ‘know enough’ or ‘it’s complicated’ or ‘not for us to get involved with’. Despite the democratisation of information access which has been facilitated by technology, it seems that there are some topics which are still considered dangerously taboo. Whilst millions throughout the world have taken to the streets to protest, they’re not the majority of citizens. The mainstream rather fit Shulman’s definition of ‘nice’ people. They’re just trying to get by, make a living and not bring too much unnecessary stress upon themselves.

It’s frustrating because collective action is so powerful in seeing off tyranny. Yet it seems humans are doomed to repeat a historical horror-loop in which despotic leaders pick off groups one by one until, as in the last line of Pastor Martin Neimoller’s famous poem ‘there is no one left to speak out’.

So, why the abject failure to learn from history? Increasingly, I think it’s ‘normalcy bias’. This is a bit of cognitive trickery whereby we convince ourselves that things cannot possibly be as terrible as they appear. That’s why you find people desperate to try and justify the murders by ICE caught by multiple cameras in which the victim clearly posed no threat. If they can somehow have made them ‘deserve’ it then we, who do not deserve it, will be fine. My initial hunch that it’s based in fear wasn’t actually wrong: It’s a way of self-soothing, reassuring yourself that if you can just keep your head below the parapet and above water, you’ll probably be alright.

It works on the basis that stuff similar to this has happened in the past, and ‘we’ were okay then, so ‘we’ probably will be again. It’s why some are comparing what’s been revealed in the Epstein files to the Clinton and Lewinsky scandal or Watergate, despite them being in no way whatsoever similar. The problem is that the ‘we’ that is referenced doesn’t, by definition, include all the people who didn’t survive. The people who were incarcerated, lost their minds, limbs or lives, don’t feature in the internal probability calculators of those engaging in normalcy bias.

There’s also the temptation to believe that someone cleverer, or more wealthy/well resourced will sort it all out in the end. So, we ignore the warnings from the United Nations that the world is now in a fresh-water crisis and continue to use Chat GP-sodding-T and other forms of AI knowing that it is accelerating the depletion of our already scant reserves because we reason that something will happen which will mean that, ultimately, it didn’t matter that we made that choice.

Look. I get it. You’re tired. It’s harder than ever to make ends meet and pay the bills. It’s handy having AI write your emails, tell you how to rewire a plug and make you an amusing video of a dancing kitten wearing a sparkly bonnet to distract you from the corruption and cruelty happening in the world. But if the time we’re living in teaches us anything it’s that we’re being ruled, at a global level, by spectacularly narcissistic and sociopathic people who do not give a single shit about any of us. In fact, as this interview with Naomi Klein demonstrates, many of them are busy trying to work out how they can live offshore or in space whilst the rest of the world burns. No one is coming to save us.

You don’t have to solve it all by yourself. Think of it like a patchwork quilt. If we each create a small patch, we can sew them together we create something massive. Do what you can. Share the truth to counteract misinformation. Donate to charities working in crisis zones. Sign petitions and support campaigns. Write to your MP. Go to protests. Engage with your community and support local businesses. Don’t vote for Reform. And, for the sake of humanity, please, look up.