A few weeks ago my Eureka Street colleague, John Warhurst, wrote a fascinating piece on the ‘normalisation’ of lying in Australian politics. ‘The terms lie and liar,’ Warhurst said, ‘have become so completely devalued that there are now far worse sins in modern politics.’
This set me thinking about ‘normalisation’, but I was not alone. Warhurst’s article had provoked many comments. ‘Normalisation’ has some sophisticated connotations, but what I mean by it here, and what I think Warhurst was interested in, is that process whereby certain phenomena that intrude on our daily lives and that we usually find shocking, or at best unacceptable, have their effect gradually dulled.
By a process of relentless iteration, they become normal. The catastrophic extinction of lives, especially of teenagers, by the mad excesses of road death, for example, becomes almost ‘normal’ because it happens so constantly and predictably. ‘Carnage on the roads’, despite its acknowledged horrors and waste, is regarded simply as the way things go for people in technologically advanced societies. It has become accepted, however reluctantly and shamefacedly by those who don’t directly experience it, as normal for our time and place.
The dispensation under which we now live, which may be loosely described as one manifestation of neoliberalism, both relies on and encourages new episodes of normalisation that go far beyond helpless acceptance of catastrophes on the roads. We are, for example, slowly coming round – or being brought round – to accepting that danger and disaster are always imminent.
They are ‘coming to get us’, warns our Prime Minister, adapting the ‘bogey man’ mode of our childhood fears to the contemporary narrative of terrorism and violence. It’s not that there is no threat – of course there is. It’s just that each manifestation of it, whether domestically or in world trouble spots, becomes, in neoliberal hands, a trigger for a further ramping up of nervous excitation, fear-mongering, khaki diplomacy – the fortuitous substructure of policy. The human tragedy, loss, grief and waste, central to and pre-eminent in every terrorist outrage, are disjoined from the event which quickly becomes an aspect of and yet another justification for policy decisions. In The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein puts it like this:
At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country’s vast oil reserves … Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly out-sources the running of the ‘War on Terror’ to Halliburton and Blackwater … After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts … New Orleans’s residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened … These events are examples of ‘the shock doctrine’: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters – to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy.
Although Australians have been spared some of these shocks, the description is still hauntingly familiar: Tampa, the Lindt Café siege, the shooting down of Flight MH17, weapons of mass destruction, the ‘Coalition of the Willing’, the commitment of troops to Afghanistan – each of them, among many others, have been followed by an Australian governmental reaction that continues to have political, electoral, social and economic effects reaching beyond the immediate cause, creating an atmosphere of uncertainty and apprehension and, in the case of the Abbott administration, designed to provide some renovation of the government’s tendentious image with the distraction of apparent decisiveness. The plan to ‘shirtfront’ Putin saw this process at its lowest ebb. More in line with shock doctrine politics was Julie Bishop’s apocalyptic insistence that Daesh (aka ISIS) is ‘an existential threat’, that is, a threat to our very survival.
Whether or not we can bring ourselves to believe in this confected maelstrom of emergency – remember the budget emergency that just somehow faded away? – the fact is it’s becoming more and more ‘normal’ for people to feel threatened and, in this condition of continuing unease, to consider surrendering long-held liberties in the cause of stopping ‘them’ from ‘coming to get us’; to contemplate with distress the further disadvantaging of the poor, the disabled, the aged, the ‘other’; to suspect, reject and malign refugees; and to see the ignoble causes of racism and religious prejudice championed on the streets.
Orwell is often quoted these days, and no wonder. He caught the neoliberal atmosphere imaginatively seventy odd years ago. Airstrip One, the Britain of 1984, is on a constant war footing, the people in an unrelieved state of apprehension. Their attention is distracted from domestic realities by warnings and alerts, enlisting them blindly as if joining a team in solidarity against the ‘enemy of the moment [which] always represented absolute evil …’ To Winston Smith’s anguished question, ‘Why?’ O’Brien gives the answer that has distinguished and continues to distinguish neoliberalism in our time. ‘Power,’ says O’Brien, ‘… the object of power is – power.’
Brian Matthews is honorary professor of English at Flinders University and an award winning columnist and biographer.
Shocked man image by Shutterstock.