<
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/weve-hit-peak-denial-heres-why-we-cant-turn-away-from-reality/>
"If it seems like things are kind of off these days, you’re not alone.
Recently, more than 100,000 people liked a post marking the start of the
pandemic that said, “[Four] years ago, this week was the last normal week of
our lives.”
Objectively speaking, we are living through a dumpster fire of a historical
moment. Right now more than one million people are displaced and at risk of
starvation in Gaza, as are millions more in Sudan. Wars are on the rise around
the globe, and 2023 saw the most civilian casualties in almost 15 years.
H5N1 bird flu has jumped to cows, several farm workers have been infected, and
scientists are warning about another potential pandemic. According to data from
wastewater, the second biggest COVID surge occurred this winter. The Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention estimates at least 24,000 people have died
of COVID so far in 2024.
Last year was the hottest ever and recorded the highest number of
billion-dollar weather and climate disasters. Not to mention that over the past
few years, mass shootings have significantly increased, we’ve seen unparalleled
attacks on democracy and science, and mental health issues have skyrocketed.
Truth be told, things were bananas even before the pandemic: just think of the
Great Recession, the 2009 swine flu pandemic, and Brexit. Academics use terms
like “polycrisis” and “postnormal times” to describe the breadth and scale of
the issues we now face.
Welcome to the new normal, an age where many things that we used to deem
unusual or unacceptable have become just what we live with. Concerningly,
though, “living with it” means tolerating greater suffering and instability
than we used to, often without fully noticing or talking about it. When
authorities tell us to “resume normal activities” after an on-campus shooting
or give guidance on how to increase our heat tolerance in an ever-hotter world,
we may sense that something is awry even as we go along with it.
But what happens when overlooking and tolerating greater levels of harm becomes
a shared cultural habit? Like the proverbial frog in boiling water, we
acclimate to ignoring more and caring less at our own peril. In the short term,
living in a state of peak denial helps us cope. In the long run, it will be our
undoing. Because the danger here is desensitization: that we meet this
unprecedented litany of “wicked problems,” from climate change to the rise of
fascism, with passive acceptance rather than urgent collective action.
How does this happen? How do we overlook and become hardened to bad things,
especially in this scientific and technological age, when we’ve never been more
capable of understanding and addressing them? To resist complacency, we must
first understand how it operates."
Via Violet Blue’s
Pandemic Roundup: June 20, 2024
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pandemic-roundup-106544413
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
