I am currently reading “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman and among the many, many takeaways that I have from this book (really, go read it!) is that the human mind is optimized for pattern recognition. In most cases, this serves us well, allowing us to make quick decisions with impressive accuracy, but also can go wrong – particularly when we encounter something abnormal that doesn’t fit our predefined patterns. In those cases, we can tend towards normalizing the abnormal.
Which leads me to Superman and Lex Luthor (yes, that was a Superman reference in the title and, yes, for better or worse, you are getting a peak into how my mind works – yay! Free association!). At one point in the Superman universe (even in the mainstream timeline), Lex Luthor becomes President of the United States. Lex, a known supervillain, runs a populist campaign to become POTUS. He is actually mostly competent until, of course, he goes insane and tries to kill Superman.
At the time, this seemed like a preposterous concept (the well-known supervillain becoming President part, not the going crazy and trying to kill Superman part…that part was totally on brand for Luthor). Those were the days.
Despite what may seem like parallels to today, in the real world, we don’t seem to have anyone nearly competent enough to be a supervillain either leading our government or even in the shadow government made up largely of tech billionaires (who, we can admit, have largely been exposed as far less competent than even most pessimists would have previously thought).
The problem I struggle with is that impulse to fit the abnormal into normal paradigms as Kahneman discussed. We are in a bizarro world where sometimes it feels like nothing is normal, but everything fits within the preexisting structures of normality. We seem incapable of grasping the scale to which the existing structures are merely a normal facade on a completely abnormal world.
We’re in a world where global political stability is regularly threatened by the temper tantrums of billionaires who feel unloved. Where the leaders of industry, my industry in particular, openly fantasize about replacing their entire human workforce with an artificial one (apparently the only role AI can’t replace is that of the billionaire CEO). Where we’re seeing the return of literal Nazism, something that directly caused millions of deaths and so many sacrificed to defeat not even one hundred years ago.
I could go on, but you get the point. Nothing about this is normal but we have to go on with our lives and jobs, so we place the abnormal into a normal bucket where it warrants all kinds of completely normal responses – strongly worded condemnations, boycotts, donations to the opposition, formal complaints or even maybe (gasp!) a lawsuit. Meanwhile we struggle with the cognitive dissonance between our seemingly still normal lives and the absolute batshit craziness that surrounds us.
Do normal responses work in an abnormal world? I don’t know. I suppose we’ll find out. Unfortunately, this isn’t a post with answers (you’re probably like, “Brian, I wish you’d said that in advance!” but it’s really just me trying to mentally work through what I am seeing and experiencing). I do know that this cognitive dissonance is like a ringing in my ears that keeps growing louder and that I can’t seem to get rid of.