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Hypernormalization in the Face of the Emergency Hans-Peter Plag Published in Library on May. 29, 2025. Social, governance, economic and ecological systems are crumbling around us, but daily life continues as normal in obvious dissonance with reality. This hypernormalization prevents urgent action. Share

In the article “Systems are crumbling – but daily life continues. The dissonance is real“ published in the Guardian, Adrienne Matei comments on the hypernormalization that takes place at a societal scale when reality develops into a systemic state that is difficult to accept ethically or economically. This hypernormalization allows people to continue functioning in their daily life as if the nothing had changed to the bad or worse.

Hypernormalization is a term introduced by Alexei Yurchak in his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation published in 2006. (For an introduction to the term applied to today's situation, you can listen to Rahaf Hardoush on instagram.) The term is now used to describe a situation when everybody knows the system they live in is failing, but no one can imagine any alternative to the status quo. Politicians and citizens alike are resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society. The danger in this dissonance is that over time, the mass delusion becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, with everyone accepting the degrading situation as the new norm rather than act to change the crumbling system.

The article discusses the hypernormalization in the face of the political and societal system degradation in the U.S. However, there is a similar hypernormalization with respect to the human and planetary existential emergency. Wildlife is disappearing rapidly, biodiversity is reduced at a dramatic speed, pollution is increasing at scales from local to global, the climate system is changing resulting in a severe impact on the spectrum of hazards society is exposed to. Many humans are seeing a society that appears functional but they sense that it is crumbling beneath the surface. The socio-economic and governance systems that emerged over the recent past are failing the people, and they are incapable of addressing the evolving reality of a planetary emergency. In particular, our governance systems and the economic leaders fail to act on this existential emergency. And the people go on with their daily life as if the Earth's life-support system was not ailing.

This raises the question of how this fundamental dissonance can be addressed. It is not enough to ring the alarm bell. People can only overcome the hypernormalization if they can imaging alternatives. Those ringing the alarm bell need to point to the lifeboats.

Imaging alternatives requires new stories to enact. The story of economic growth no matter what the costs, of dominance over nature, of exploitation can not provide any alternative. This underlines the importance of the The New Story Project on Place4Us.