In his new documentary film, Hypernormalisation, Adam Curtis presents us with a vision of the world in which nothing we see is what we think it is, one in which both the official and the media narrative describing this world is simplified and spun to the point of fiction. We suspect this to be the case, but we go along with it, and in so doing we perpetuate it.
In the Soviet Union of the 1980’s, the economy had failed and the Bloc was on the verge of collapse. The evidence was everywhere, yet the official narrative differed from reality, creating instead a story of normality and stability. Everyone knew it was untrue, yet people accepted this “normalised” vision, and became so much a part of it when the end came they wondered why no one had seen it coming.
The same applies in the West. We are given various narratives aimed at maintaining the influence and the image of the power structures that have held sway now for half a century. We go along with them, even though we know something is wrong.
The evidence is everywhere:
1) 0.01% on our savings.
2) Offspring with university educations and thirty thousand pounds of tuition fee debt, labouring in warehouses, and flipping burgers on minimum wages because the graduate jobs they were told would be in abundance do not actually exist.
3)The means of owning even the cheapest of properties is beyond the means of anyone just starting out.
4)The closure of your nearest A+E department adds an extra half hour’s ride by ambulance to an emergency response, and that might just kill you.
5)A decade of civil wars in the middle east has created a refugee disaster on an unprecedented scale, one even the combined might and minds of the European Union is unable to cope with.
6) The European Union itself, as an institution, and a massive experiment of economic, social and trading cooperation is on the verge of collapse.
7) Everywhere there is a return to the pernicious evil of ancient fictions that incite inter-ethnic violence.
Yet we assume it’s just a blip, that things will level out, that the ponderous machinery of state and finance are but temporarily muddled and will shortly pull us back on course, back towards normality – normality being whatever our nostalgia genes tell us was our halcyon decade. We are living through astonishingly turbulent times, yet we paint for ourselves a narrow, comforting fantasy, choose only the cards from the Tarot we want to see, palm the rest, then pick up our telephones and play Pokemon.
I’m waking up a little late to be doing anything about this other than posting a snarky blog. But there was nothing I could do about it anyway, even had I known the truth decades ago, because I am part of the problem. Ignorance is bliss, and a man awakened rudely is one who wishes he could only go back to sleep. I would be better writing romantic fantasies, ones in which girl meets boy and they always live happily ever after, or crime dramas in which the bad guy always gets his come-uppance. Or maybe I should give up writing altogether, succumb to the entertainment media, watch two hours of mixed soap and then a celebrity cooking program instead.
My ignorance of the world astonishes me. I am a faithful follower of events yet seem always to miss the punch-line. Or in the game of three cups, seem always unable to guess under which cup the little ball of truth has come to rest, though I swear I have followed it diligently as the magician swapped them about.
Writing has been my own grand deceit, believing in the long ago that I understood the business end of it – that one penned a novel, posted it to a publisher, they published it and we became a writerly writer, finally giving up the day job. It is a fantasy, normalised to the point of myth – one no one who has tried it really believes, yet simultaneously accepts as the truth , for the reality is much more opaque. My naivety in this respect embarrasses me, even though I’ve submitted nothing to the peddlers of that myth since the turn of the century. The labyrinth, for such as it was, was to be navigated in total darkness -an impossible task, yet there is still a sense of failure attached to one’s inability to settle credibly even with the myth, to fit in with the official narrative of the struggling writer.
The truth of me is I do not make it big, but neither do I die in complete obscurity – well no more than anyone else. The truth about writing, the view from the typewriter, you see, is that neither matters. There have been plenty of incomprehensible scripts paper published already, scripts scanned briefly by the semi conscious, then forgotten – news even of terrible world events erased from the collective memory only days later, the papers on which they’re written used as fish-wrap. The blogging of articles such as these is no different, changes nothing, only wastes less time. Attention spans are short, and I have already far exceeded my 500 words of permission.
The red light of conference is now flashing.
The truth of the world then is a concept of varying complexity, a complexity relative to space and time. Truth, real truth, ground zero truth, is in the nitty-gritty detail of an event and only there does the truth exist in any meaningful sense. But it’s fleeting, ephemeral as a Snapchat squeeze. The further away we are from an event, geographically or historically, the less detailed, the less reliable our grip on things will be, until, when we’re far enough away, even a fiction will trump the truth, being more persuasive than the facts of the world, more influential in shaping further events which, with the passing of time become equally untrue.
The world in its entirety as fiction.
Publish that!
The Rivendale Review 
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