Have you seen Adam Curtis' Hypernormalization[0]? The word "hypornormalization" was created by a soviet thinker to describe the soviet world in the 1980s: Nob

Have you seen Adam Curtis' Hypernormalization[0]? The word "hypornormalization" was created by a soviet thinker to describe the soviet world in the 1980s: Nobody really believed in Communism anymore and everyone could tell everything is getting worse. The party leaders, factory managers, and government bureaucrats were all thieves who were telling ever more preposterous lies to the people about the state of the economy and the society. Nobody believed the lies, but they also couldn't perceive any alternative arrangement of affairs so they didn't know how to do anything except proceed as if they did believe the lies. He then traces the rise of perception management, the rise of the banks and neoliberalism, and machinations in the middle east, along with the career of Donald Trump, and threads them all together as Curtis tends to do, to make the case that we are currently in a period of hypernormalization in the west. What's interesting is that he makes the case that Trump is the perfect man for this time and place, being a phony made-for-TV businessman whose entire career is the triumph of perception over reality, and the movie was made in 2016: Trump wasn't even president yet. As with all Curtis' stuff I only believe maybe 90% of it. The stuff on the middle east is the weakest. He's guilty of doing the same thing he accuses our political class of doing: oversimplifying things to the extent that he risks fictionalizing them. But it's an extremely interesting look at the current state of the western world. Oh yeah and Russia features heavily in it, not just in the cautionary tale of the USSR, but at the same time Curtis is emphatic in emphasizing that the post-truth world wasn't conjured up in some Kremlin propaganda office. We've been working on building a post-truth world for ourselves for the past several decades. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aLQPNPlK5M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aLQPNPlK5M