JL — Medium, 23 Sep 2020 Written mid-pandemic · Six weeks before US election
// DECODER ACTIVE // Annotated terms appear as [inline chips ▾] — click to decode the concept, reference, or history behind the phrase.

"… as we get used to the new normal…"
"… as companies adapt to the new normal…"
"… we just have to get used to the new normal…"

That's it. I'm calling bullshit on this emerging idiom. It is clearly an engineered, focus-tested phrase, that preys on praying idiots-with-faith-in-power. The world as it's shaping up to be for the next decade, is not a new one, a normal one, a normal new one, or even (and I hope by the end of this rant, I will be less annoyed with hearing it) a
Decoded Phrase NEW NORMAL: ORIGIN & WEAPONIZATION Originally a financial term from 2009/2010 — used by PIMCO's Mohamed El-Erian to describe post-GFC economic stagnation as a permanent condition, not a temporary slump. From there it migrated to management consulting, then to political speechwriting. By 2020, it had been deployed to frame the COVID pandemic's disruptions as something to adapt to rather than fix — shifting responsibility from institutions to individuals. → Wikipedia: New Normal one.

And now, with your consent, let me tell you why.

## NEW FOR A GIVEN VALUE OF NEWNESS

This is, at least on the surface, a semantic argument, but everything about humanity in the last three centuries has been some kind of "new" or another. On geological timescales humans are a fart in the wind, a speck of dust on the lens. Everything is new and it's been new for generations now.

Granted, humans have short lives and shorter memories. However, for a good long while now, we've been systematically unraveling our mechanisms of collective memory and replacing it with
Decoded Concept MANUFACTURED HISTORICAL MEMORY The author is reaching toward what historians call "invented tradition" — the process by which powerful groups construct narratives about the past to legitimise present arrangements. The classic text is Hobsbawm & Ranger's The Invention of Tradition (1983). Related: Walter Benjamin's argument that history is always written from the victors' perspective, suppressing counter-narratives. The author's point: what we call "normal" is often a story about the past engineered to make current power structures seem natural and inevitable. → Wikipedia: Invented Tradition → Wikipedia: Historical Revisionism . I can confidently say though, that for most of the time that we monkeys-in-shoes have been running about and playing with fire, humanity hasn't looked anything like 21st century life. Everything is new.
Decoded Reference UNITED NATIONS: 1945–PRESENT The United Nations was founded on 24 October 1945 — barely 75 years old when this essay was written. Its predecessor, the League of Nations, lasted from 1920 to 1946. The global financial architecture (IMF, World Bank, Bretton Woods system) was also established in 1944–45. The author's point: the institutions we treat as permanent features of civilisation are younger than many living people. None of them have survived a real civilizational stress test yet. → Wikipedia: United Nations → Wikipedia: Bretton Woods The global financial system hasn't been around nearly as long as its predecessors. Almost none of our current infrastructure, anywhere in the world, has stood any true test of time.

On top of that, for decades now (or at least the decades that I've been alive and conscious of my not-deadness), every damn day there is some "new" thing being sold, be it a product, a service or a concept… "New" has been a marketing go-to since before people called it marketing (and before people started making careers for themselves as marketers).

So what is new? Every-damned-thing-under-the-sun.

And what about this reality of uncertainty that everyone is running around calling the "new normal"… it isn't new. I would argue that it's the old normal. Survival. Mortality. Uncertainty. That's some old shit right there. People in power messing things up. Old shit. Poor folk having a hard time. Old shit. Having to deal with the risk of disease every time you walk outside.
Decoded Concept HUMANITY'S ACTUAL AGE & NEAR-EXTINCTIONS Modern Homo sapiens have existed for roughly 300,000 years. For the vast majority of that time — disease, starvation, violence, and environmental catastrophe were everyday realities. Genetic evidence suggests the human population may have been reduced to as few as 1,000–10,000 breeding individuals around 70,000 years ago (the Toba bottleneck hypothesis). The "normal" of stable, disease-free suburban life is an anomaly of the last ~70 years in wealthy countries — less than 0.02% of human history. → Wikipedia: Toba Bottleneck → Wikipedia: History of Disease …

It's only "new" to us because we've had a few generations worth of propaganda blasted into our brain holes telling us that this world is forever and forever the same. Except for the folks who research and study things about the world… but most folks don't listen to them (to be fair, they're pretty boring when compared to all the things that tell you to buy, buy, buy).

Civilization is old. But it ain't as old as humanity. In the grand old scheme of things, all of this is new… and almost none of it is normal. Except sex, violence and food… oh, and taking a shit far away from the food… that's pretty normal.

But I'll get to the normal in a bit… But before I do…

## BUYING IN TO BULLSHIT IS ONLY USEFUL TO FARMERS

That's a lame joke, but I beg no forgiveness. Bullshit abounds and, instead of carting it off to some faraway field to feed the worms, most humans eat it up. The why is a bit too long a detour for us to depart on here, but suffice it to say that we eat it because we must. We're drowning in it, too much, too often, piling on and on and on. It is the sustenance of civilization, bullshit begotten by bullshitters. The effort of sifting through it, wading through it, ploughing through it, in the hopes of finding even the teensiest nugget of sustenance for our souls, is task that bleeds us dry. And so we eat it, until we become food for the worms.

That last paragraph is bullshit. I'm not asking you to eat it.

I am asking you to think. Think about the parts of human life that are not bullshit in a candy wrapper. None of those things are products of the 21st Century, or the 20th for that matter. The things that keep us going, that truly nourish and sustain our souls, the salves for our selves, and the cures for our communities… they're as old as the hills and humanity itself.

What about science and medicine and technology? All iterative, incremental processes of building on top of the wisdom that came before. Not bullshit. Not new. Normal is debatable.

I'm not looking to rain hellfire and brimstone upon the good people all around the world working hard to do good things in it and to it. Good people are not the problem. The bullshit is.

And for the purposes of this autofellatory exercise in imagined oratory, I shall restrict my bullshit-about-bullshit to this "new normal" bullshit.

This "new normal" bullshit, is a desperate appeal to keep shoveling. Adapt to what? A system held together with duct tape and prayers to the
Decoded Concept FINANCIALIZATION & LATE CAPITALISM The author's recurring term for the quasi-religious status accorded to capital accumulation — where profit functions as both metric and moral justification. Economists call the broader process financialization: the shift in developed economies from productive industry to financial instrument returns. The moneygod "system held together with duct tape" is a reference to structural contradictions exposed by 2008 and COVID — sovereign debt, zombie corporations, asset bubbles inflated by quantitative easing. → Wikipedia: Financialization → Wikipedia: Late Capitalism ? A system that not even the powerful seem to have faith in?

Please keep shoveling the big boys' bullshit while the big boys figure out their escape.

Enough with the scatology, but not yet time for eschatology.

There is nothing new about this normal. But I don't believe I have convinced any beyond the choir yet. Am I preaching? I hope not.

## OH, THE NORMALITY!

I almost forgot… I fully intend to bitch about the concept of normal too. Thanks for reminding me.

Read Snuff, by
Decoded Reference TERRY PRATCHETT (1948–2015) British author of the Discworld series — 41 novels of comic fantasy that consistently used absurdism and satire to interrogate real-world politics, economics, religion, and human nature. Often described as the best-selling author you weren't taught in school. Snuff (2011) is the 39th Discworld novel, featuring Commander Sam Vimes on a forced holiday that becomes a murder investigation touching on class, slavery, and the nature of law. Pratchett was knighted in 2009. He was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's in 2007 and wrote publicly about dying until his death in 2015. → Wikipedia: Pratchett → Wikipedia: Snuff . Read everything that man ever wrote (for sanity in such times as these, consider this sentence a friendly PSA). The plot of Snuff doesn't have any major bearing on the next phase of the ranty rant… but it is still well worth the hours. What is relevant, is this quote:

"What is normal? Normal is yesterday and last week and last month taken together"

— Terry Pratchett, Snuff

, bound by collective sense of time, and defined according to criteria set by a group of humans. Accepted norms are the yardsticks of culture. Culture is the fabric of society. And society makes up the fleshy, squishy bits of civilization. What we call "normal" is, in effect, whatever we damn well choose, for as long as other humans around us agree to call it normal too.

A good, healthy chunk of political discourse centers itself around negotiating what should and should not be considered normal.
Decoded Concept NORMALIZATION: POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY In political science and psychology, normalization describes the process by which extreme, harmful, or previously unacceptable ideas or behaviours become gradually treated as ordinary. The Overton Window describes the range of policies considered politically acceptable at any moment — normalization shifts the window. After 2016, the term gained widespread use to describe how political rhetoric previously considered beyond the pale was brought into mainstream discourse through repetition and incremental escalation. → Wikipedia: Normalization → Wikipedia: Overton Window is an activity we homo sapiens engage in, be it intentional or not.

So, perhaps, instead of asking whether this is normal, or that is normal, maybe we should ponder who wants this to be normal or that to be normal. In our present circumstances, who wants this normal that they are determined to call new? Who wanted the old normal, for that matter? Whom does this new normal serve?

And there's the rub.

This "new normal" is mostly the old one, with a big ol' heaping of desperation thrown into the mix.

I get it. I do. Things were working out pretty well for a lot of folks before it all went to hell in a hand basket. And then folks had the privilege of having a prominent voice in the public discourse. "Normal" served them well. From their perspective, normal was safe, predictable and dependable. It was normal.

Their normal, is the ongoing
Decoded Concept THE SIXTH MASS EXTINCTION Scientists call it the Holocene extinction or Sixth Mass Extinction: the ongoing, human-driven elimination of species at a rate 100–1000 times the natural background extinction rate. Previous mass extinctions (including the one that killed the non-avian dinosaurs) were caused by asteroid strikes, volcanic eruptions, or ice ages. This is the first caused by a single species. The WWF Living Planet Report 2020 estimated a 68% average decline in monitored vertebrate populations since 1970. → Wikipedia: Holocene Extinction → Wikipedia: Biodiversity Loss . Their normal is sitting silently while "shithole" countries suffer. Their normal is growing the
Decoded Reference GREAT PACIFIC GARBAGE PATCH A gyre of marine plastic debris in the North Pacific Ocean, estimated at twice the size of Texas — approximately 1.6 million km². Not a solid island; more of a suspended plastic soup at various ocean depths. About 80% comes from land-based sources. It has been actively growing since plastic production scaled in the 1950s. The Ocean Cleanup project has attempted partial remediation since 2018. → Wikipedia: Garbage Patch daily. Their normal is donate to charity, pat your back and check that your asset and stock portfolios are still doing what they're supposed to. Their normal was, in the grand scheme of things, very new, very unsustainable, and awful for the rest of us.

Normal as defined and understood by the "new normal" crowd, is shit.

Normal is not what we need. And "new normal" is just normal with a mask on.

So no… fuck that shit. Toss it in the wildfires and burn it to the ground. Make it motherfuckin' worm food.

We don't need normal. We need whole lot of new, and a good dose of old too.

We need, as a species, to reckon with what our hubris has wrought on our home. It's the only one we have right now. How can we be trusted to venture forth to other worlds, when we simply destroy the one we're already on?

Humans have been around for 200,000ish years… we've faced extinction a few times and survived. We were here when the
Decoded Reference THE AFRICAN HUMID PERIOD / GREEN SAHARA Between approximately 11,000 and 5,000 years ago, what is now the Sahara Desert was a lush, lake-filled savanna — the African Humid Period. Humans and megafauna (hippos, crocodiles, elephants) thrived across the region. The shift to desert conditions was caused by a shift in Earth's orbital cycle reducing monsoon intensity. Cave paintings in Algeria and Libya depict the environment. This periodically-green Sahara allowed human migration out of Africa along routes now buried under sand. → Wikipedia: Green Sahara → Wikipedia: Prehistoric North Africa . I don't know about you, but the things that got humanity this far might be worth remembering, because putting all our trust in our toys and the moneygod… that is too new to be declared fully tested. And as far as the planet is concerned, it is abnormal AF.

We don't need a "new normal"… we need to catch a wake up and start fixing shit.

Mama Earth is pissed. Rightfully so, in my opinion. The reckoning is here, and it ain't gonna be letting up any time soon.

So let's dispense with the pretense that a "new normal" is anything but a bland brand put forward in desperation by the people whom the "old normal" served.

The politicians will play their games, the rich will guard their wealth, the media will yell about anything if it sells ads, and businesses will sell any bullshit that folks can be convinced to buy. That's why there is nothing new about this normal.

And this normal is about to die.

We're in for a wild ride kids, but we're the homos that survived. We'll survive again. If we don't, these words matter even less than they do now:

History may be written by the victors, but evolution is the story of those that survive.

Keep the community alive, and the community keeps you alive.

Make that your "new normal"… maybe then you'll make it. There is always hope.

Peace, Joy and a Little Madness — JL
PS… this one was a little unhinged. I confess I am a little rusty. But it was fun to write and I think I like it. I'm not sure what I'll write next… so don't be thinking that I'll do another like this again for a while. I might, if I think it will surprise you. And by "you", I mean the imagined audience in my addled mind.
I'm weird. Get used to it or go elsewhere.

// WHERE DID "NEW NORMAL" COME FROM? //

The phrase didn't arise organically. It has a traceable history of institutional deployment — each iteration shifting responsibility away from those who caused the disruption and onto those experiencing it.

1918
EARLY USE
Post-WWI usage in various newspapers to describe the return to peacetime conditions. Meaning: the old state of affairs has been disrupted; adjust your expectations.
2009
FINANCE
Mohamed El-Erian of PIMCO coins the term for post-GFC economic conditions: low growth, high unemployment, and financial fragility as permanent features, not temporary disruptions. First major institutional deployment as a framing device.
2010s
CONSULTING
McKinsey, Deloitte, and other firms adopt the phrase for change management literature. Meaning shifts to: adaptation to disruption is inevitable and desirable; organisations that resist the "new normal" will fail.
2020
PANDEMIC
COVID-19 launches "new normal" into ubiquity. Governments, health organisations, and corporations deploy it simultaneously, with wildly inconsistent definitions. The author writes this essay at peak deployment. Google Trends shows the phrase at an all-time search high in April–May 2020.

// NORMALIZATION: HOW IT WORKS //

The Overton Window describes the narrow range of ideas a society considers acceptable at any given time. Policies outside the window are politically impossible regardless of their merit. The window moves — and normalisation is the mechanism. Repeat an idea often enough, in enough mainstream contexts, and it shifts from radical to debatable to acceptable to policy. The author's implicit point: the "new normal" phrase is itself a normalization move — framing post-pandemic conditions as fixed and permanent, rather than as a political choice about whose interests are prioritised in recovery.
Pratchett's definition — "normal is yesterday and last week and last month taken together" — is descriptive and democratic: normal is whatever a community has recently experienced, collectively. It is fluid, local, and temporary. The political use of "new normal" is prescriptive and top-down: it tells communities what their new shared experience should be considered, and implicitly that they should stop expecting the previous one. These are opposite operations dressed in the same language.
The author's argument operates on two levels simultaneously. Level one: the "new" in "new normal" is false — the conditions being described (disease, instability, inequality, environmental degradation) are not new; they are the historical default. Level two: the "normal" in "new normal" is a political claim — a bid to establish whose conditions get treated as the baseline. The punchline is that both words in the phrase are doing ideological work while pretending to be neutral description. This is what the author means by "engineered, focus-tested" — not that there was a meeting where it was invented, but that its structure functions to serve specific interests regardless of intent.
The author does something precise when listing the "old normal": mass extinction, environmental destruction, growing wealth inequality, geopolitical indifference to suffering in the Global South. These aren't aberrations from the normal — they are its constitutive features. The "new normal" crowd's grief is not for the loss of a genuinely good world, but for the loss of conditions that were only good for them. The rest of the world had already been living in the crisis for decades. This is the argument the author is making when he says "I am othering the shit out of them folks right now."

// 23 SEPTEMBER 2020 — GROUND TRUTH //

The essay was written into a specific moment. Here is what that moment actually looked like in data.

~1M COVID deaths globally

The world crossed 1 million confirmed COVID-19 deaths in late September 2020. The actual toll was estimated at 2–3x that figure.

→ Pandemic data
42 DAYS to US election

The essay was written six weeks before the most contested US presidential election in modern history, amid active attempts to undermine postal voting.

→ 2020 Election
10M+ US jobs lost (net, 2020)

By September 2020, the US had lost roughly 10 million jobs net compared to pre-pandemic levels. Global unemployment hit a 25-year high.

→ Economic impact
2020 Hottest year on record (tied)

2020 tied 2016 as the hottest year in recorded history. Siberia hit 38°C. The Arctic was on fire.

→ Climate 2020

// THE "OLD NORMAL" BY THE NUMBERS //

The conditions the author identifies as the "old normal" — the ones being mourned and preserved by the phrase "new normal" — were not neutral or good for most of the planet.

1970–2020
EXTINCTION
68% average decline in monitored vertebrate populations (WWF Living Planet Report 2020). That's the "old normal" in biodiversity terms.
1950–2020
PLASTIC
Global plastic production grew from near-zero to 367 million tonnes per year. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is approximately twice the size of Texas and growing.
1980–2020
INEQUALITY
Global wealth inequality rose sharply. By 2020, the top 1% held more wealth than the bottom 50% of humanity combined. This was the normal being defended.
2020
AUTHOR'S POINT
The "new normal" phrase asked people to restore conditions that were catastrophic for most of the planet. The author's counterproposal: "we need a whole lot of new, and a good dose of old" — meaning genuine structural change plus recovery of older, more durable human values.
// ON THE PHRASE ITSELF //
New Normal (Business) — Wikipedia
The phrase's history in business and economic contexts, from post-GFC to pandemic deployment.
Wiki
Overton Window — Wikipedia
The mechanics of how acceptable ideas shift — and how language like "new normal" moves the window.
Wiki
// ON NORMALIZATION & POWER //
The Invention of Tradition — Hobsbawm & Ranger
The foundational text on how powerful groups construct narratives about the past to legitimise present arrangements.
Book
The Shock Doctrine — Naomi Klein
How disaster capitalism exploits crisis to restructure societies. The "new normal" argument's macro-economic twin.
Book
// ON THE OLD & THE ACTUALLY OLD //
African Humid Period (Green Sahara) — Wikipedia
When the Sahara was a savanna. The deep past the author invokes as evidence that "normal" is always temporary.
Wiki
Toba Catastrophe Theory — Wikipedia
The supervolcanic eruption that may have reduced humanity to a few thousand individuals ~70,000 years ago. We've survived worse.
Wiki
Terry Pratchett — Wikipedia
The man whose definition of "normal" is the only one in this essay the author agrees with. Read everything he wrote.
Wiki
There Is Nothing New About This Normal — Medium
The original essay. Written September 23, 2020.
Original
// WHAT IS NORMAL? //

### Pratchett's Definition vs. The Political Deployment

Pratchett's definition is disarmingly simple: "Normal is yesterday and last week and last month taken together." It is descriptive, democratic, and temporary. Normal is what a community has collectively experienced recently — it has no authority beyond shared memory, and it shifts constantly as days accumulate.

The political phrase "new normal" does the opposite. It is prescriptive and top-down. It tells a community what they should collectively accept as their new baseline — and by doing so, forecloses the question of whether that baseline is just, sustainable, or chosen. It converts a political decision into a fact of nature.

The author's anger at the phrase is partly this inversion: a Pratchettian normal is something that emerges from lived experience. The "new normal" is something imposed from above, packaged as adaptation, and sold as inevitable.

Pratchett's deeper argument — made across 41 novels — is that power always tries to make its arrangements look permanent and natural. The job of thinking people is to notice when this is happening. "Normal is whatever we damn well choose, for as long as other humans around us agree to call it normal too" is not a statement of relativism. It is a statement of political agency: we can choose differently.

→ Wikipedia: Snuff → Wikipedia: Normalization