Dark Sentiments Season 11 — Day 17: The New Normal
Posted By Randy on October 17, 2020
Every societal upheaval gives birth to period specific terms. This is most commonly brought to the fore when soldiers return from war, and every major conflict births a dictionary all its own. But it doesn’t take a war. for as we will discuss today, the current world wide pestilential unpleasantness is societal upheaval enough for the principle to make its effects known.
Most of these have been previously little or unused constructs built of common words, and of these we now have “self-isolate” and “social (or physical) distancing” as commonplace examples. Some are initialisms like “PPE” meaning “Personal Protective Equipment”, previously little used outside health care institutions and construction sites. And then there are insidious ones that speak more to social engineering than any motive to improve understanding. I posit that the most dangerous of these to enter into common usage in these troubled times is “the new normal“.
In its basic interpretation, this would refer to one leg of the Tripod of Life that governs all living things faced with a change of environment:
- Adapt in place;
- Migrate; or
- Die.
Animals that are too perfectly specialized to their environment will only be able to adapt to changes in it when the changes are sufficiently gradual to favour an organism’s pace of adaptation and, ultimately, mutation. Too sudden and you get what happened to the Dinosaurs and entire Human cultures. Those creatures equipped to thrive as they range in the extremes common in northern climes will be seen to employ a variety of time tested methods ranging from food hoarding to being omnivorous, as well as growing a more comprehensive coat as a hedge against cold weather, and shedding it in Spring.
In Nature, we have animals and Human cultures whose existence is predicated on migration driven by cyclical changes in environment. Dry season to rainy season and back again. Summer through Winter and back to summer. All driven by predictable seasonal development of unfavourable climatic conditions bringing an attendant dearth of necessary consumables. A variety of this reality includes migration to the Land of Nod in the form of hibernation and other forms of cyclical dormancy.
And then of course, if you can’t do either of the first two, the third option is always open for business and speaks for itself.
In its current application, “the new normal” is anything but a realization of change with its attendant Natural imperatives. Rather, with the abrupt displacement of what was benignly endemic with a cacophonous pandemic, the term is a demand for acceptance in perpetuity of a declared state of affairs, and as such flies in the face of the Natural drive of any animal, Homo Sapiens included, to not merely survive, but to thrive.
Modern society is not Nature so much as it is an intellectual construct loosely based on Nature with the sharp edges rounded off for a price. Its inhabitants, though, are demonstrably resistant to domestication, their brains and instincts, though slowed through disuse, little different from their cave dwelling ancestors for whom choice of response to a threat was governed by flight, fight, or an end in sight. Applying the laws of man to limit those options can lead to nothing sustainable, and anyone who holds a position of such empowerment as to take the helm of such a ship of fools and believably steer her to the Promised Land had better keep that in the forefront of his lizard brain.
Simply MAGNIFICENT!
“and anyone who holds a position of such empowerment as to take the helm of such a ship of fools and believably steer her to the Promised Land had better keep that in the forefront of his lizard brain.”
Thank you Jim.
Well put and definitely reposted.