We’ll just get used to this, like we get used to higher prices in grocery stores, or everyone carrying around a smart phone, or hearing gunshots while drinking your tea. Things will just stop working and will continue to stop working.
And though this may sound terrifying, it’s actually quite the opposite. We’ve the history of fallen empires to console us. Just because Rome officially “fell,” the people who were Roman citizens just the day before didn’t fall, too. Most of them did things on that day and the next, the very same way they did the day before. Farmers didn’t just stop farming, weavers didn’t just stop weaving, because those are things you don’t need an empire for.
Years ago, in Seattle, I took a short break from an essay I was writing to have a cup of tea on the balcony of the house where I lived. I stared dreamily at the near-full moon, lost in a delicious reverie of words I intended to write, and then counted the staccato sounds I heard not far in the distance.
1,2,3,4. Then a short pause, then 5, followed, a brief two seconds later, by 6.
Someone just emptied six bullets into someone, I thought to myself, then suddenly dropped my tea.
A horror swept through me as a series of cascading realizations awoke all at once within my soul. Those were gunshots. And they were close by, probably only a few blocks away. They hadn’t startled me, though: I’d recognized them and nonchalantly counted them as if it was normal. And it was normal, because I’d heard them enough to get used to them as just another background noise.
It was this last realization that horrified me the most. Without even noticing it happening, I’d concluded that someone shooting someone else not far from my home wasn’t strange, unusual, or even very remarkable.
It’s funny how we can do that, to experience violence as just a normal part of any day, yet to not admit it has become normal. We separate such things out from the mental constructions of our world, preferring not to adjust to our current reality. Sure, that I wouldn’t have ever said, “this is normal,” despite knowing full well it was the normal in which I was living. In fact, I wouldn’t have even thought about it as something that was happening at all.
The process that occurs here, for which I have no good name and really don’t fully understand, is exactly the same process by which societies come to normalize degradation of the social order. That’s how they become things to manage and accommodate, rather than things to do anything about.
Cities with massive homeless populations, for example, get to this point quite quickly. After the fifth or sixth large homeless camp springs up, the city managers start to build their own, so at least they can be better mitigated. What started as a symptom of the breakdown of the social order (people without homes) becomes just background noise, just like those gunshots I heard.
You just get used to degradation and collapse while telling yourself it’s just temporary, like a rising sea slowly flooding homes built along its shores. Eventually, of course, things will get so bad that the background becomes foreground, and we’ll maybe act surprised when that happens. But the time to have prepared for it will have been long gone by then.
Increased instability in food distribution, rising prices, failing infrastructure, civil unrest, community breakdowns fueled by anger over mass immigration and wealth disparity, and even political assassinations: these are increasing everywhere throughout the west. But in most of those places, the changes still feel to be mere background.