The Revenge of the Age of the Idiot

What “Learn To Live With It” — From Climate Change to Covid — Really Means, and Why It Matters

Image Credit: A collage of headlines from Fox News, Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and the Washington Post. 

Call it the Great Gaslighting of the 2020s. Take a glance at some of the headlines above. “Climate change obsession is a mental disorder. “Your body can build up tolerance to heat. Here’s how.” “With a few basic steps, most of us can finally ignore Covid.” “One more Covid Summer. Will it always be like this?”

Meanwhile, in the real world? “July will likely be the world’s hottest month on record and possibly the warmest in 120,000 years, according to climate scientists.” 

The killing heat is here. People are dying of burns they get from falling onto superheated surfaces — roads, streets, pavements, patios. Canada’s still on fire, from coast to coast — and nobody knows how to put megafires that big out. Heat domes are heading back to America and Europe. China just saw apocalyptic floods. Oh, and — Covid’s back.

If it feels apocalyptic, that’s because it is. It’d be bad enough if we just had climate change to deal with. But we don’t. We have…a panoply of existential threats. Climate change. Plus pandemics. Plus fascism. 

And in the midst of all that, we’re being…gaslit. We’re told, increasingly, that to care about this…that’s the pathological thing. That’s the message, after all, of “climate change obsession is a mental disorder.” What’s “normal” is…indifference. Quite literally: “most of us can finally ignore Covid.”

What’s happening here? On a formal level, norms are emerging. Societies always negotiate — and renegotiate — norms. And norms are much, much more powerful than many of us — especially Americans — understand. Why is it that America’s so broken? It’s not just the politics — it’s that a certain set of toxic norms set in, apathy, the celebration of ignorance, social indifference, contempt for the public good. And soon enough, those hardened — and became the open hate, violence, brutality, and idiocy we see rising everywhere, especially, of course, among and championed by the GOP.

Norms matter. At a fundamental level. They lie beneath politics and economics, and shape and mold what possibilities they hold.

So. With that in mind, let’s talk again about what’s happening here. It’s so perverse that it’s hard to even put into words — but all these attempts to set norms, which now come harder and faster, and these articles were roasted on social media, for a reason, because they all carried the same message. We could call it “the pathologization of being a decent, thoughtful person.” Or something like the “normalization of indifference to anything that matters, which of course does the heavy lifting of clearing any remaining obstacles in the way of fascism and authoritarianism.”

Adam Curtis calls this process “hypernormalization.”

We could call it something like the Orwellianization of catastrophe — because the underlying message here, which is the same, goes like this.

Learn to live with it.