Normalizing the New Normal

Todd Hayen

For something to be a “new” normal, it must reach some measure of consensual normalcy. What is normalcy? Many people believe it is whatever sits at the middle of the proverbial “bell curve,” i.e., “majority.”

Is this true?

In my practice as a psychotherapist, I am very uncomfortable when a client asks if their behaviour is “normal.”

Usually I will reply, “well, it is probably the most common behaviour” or, the negative response, “you might be an outlier and not many out there behave that particular way.” That response is never very satisfying. People, it seems, equate “normal” with “what most people are doing.”

Obviously, this analysis is not very accurate—how many times did you hear dear mother say, “if all your friends were jumping off of a cliff, would you do it?”

All that being said, I am afraid to say now, that in our culture, being normal means you are doing what most everyone else is doing (or thinking). Today, you are “normal” if you wear masks everywhere, or normal if you fear Covid, and scramble to get in line for the latest booster.

At first there might be a bit of an enticement, i.e., “you will die of Covid if you don’t get vaccinated,” but if you really examine the true incentive, it usually isn’t that, it is the fact everyone else, or most everyone else, is conforming.

Once you reach that point of conformity, or “normalcy” there isn’t much else you need to do if you are an authority trying to pressure people into compliance.

In fact, it can often work against that authority (getting people, through a coercive fear campaign, to comply) because it can then become impossible to get these masses to let go of the thing that makes them feel “normal” (compliance with the majority).

Even today as authorities remove mask mandates, people are opting to ignore the relaxation of mask compliance, and deciding on their own, or within their organization (such as a hospital) to continue requiring them.

There are many things in our culture that have become normal that in previous years, or decades, or even centuries, were not normal. We are continuously experiencing a wave of “abnormal (or nonexistent) to normal” flowing over us as the years pass.

Things that were not consensual, or embraced by the majority, did not become normal until they were.

The first example that comes to mind are cell phones, or more accurately, “personal mobile phones.” I remember while living in LA in the Hollywood film biz, it was very trendy to have a phone in your car.

Typically, only doctors or big-wig professionals had such things. They became more and more popular, for various reasons, over time and then reached a level of “normalcy” when nearly everyone had a cell phone they carried around with them.

We can, of course, think of thousands of things like this. We can also think of an equal number of things that were better before, and for whatever reason, lost “normalcy” due to economics, or difficulty of installation or execution, such as bottled (in glass bottles!) milk being personally delivered to your front porch every morning, or real wood hardwood floors.

These are examples of “things,” what about concepts? Or psychological behaviours?

Yes, these also move in and out of what is considered normal. But keep in mind as I said before, normal does not mean “right” or “healthy”…far from it. The “non matrixed” people living underground in The Matrix were “abnormal” to all of the “matrixed” folks, but they were the most psychologically healthy—or actually, to be more accurate—spiritually healthy.

We may see, today, many things we are not happy about becoming normal, “things” like masks, vaccination records, mandates, etc. (which we will discuss in a moment) but the real damage we are, and will, experience is not so much the physical aspects to these things, but the psychological and spiritual implications.

We focus on the physical issues, which are also important and need to be factored in our fight for freedom, but the physical is easier to deal with, it is in your face, and objectively problematic—brain damage due to too much CO2 intake, the loss of freedoms to a totalitarian regime, the restrictions on travel, the loss of privacy, medical tyranny, etc.

The deeper issues of this assault on humanity are far more devastating, works its evil over time, and is much more difficult to see.

So, what have we observed in our culture that before Covid didn’t exist, and now does in large numbers? Things that the “normies” could start to identify as “normal.”

Mask wearing is probably the most obvious, and possibly the least obvious from a damaging psychological and spiritual perspective. Digital IDs, for which we are being prepped, from this Covid fiasco, to be totally accepted and normalized.

Digital currency is another, and its prep started long ago, but the mill has been greased even further for easy, normal, insertion into our culture and society. Online learning, which clearly is a trend with all levels of education.

Online work as well is becoming more and more common, therefore is being “normalized.” In fact, any sort of gathering now seems to be relegated to a Zoom session, destroying any psychological and spiritual need to touch shoulder to shoulder with other human beings, physically look into their eyes rather than looking into a camera that then creates a digital representation of an eye to gaze into.

Vaccines and vaccine passports have been normalized even further, of course. Not that it took all that much as the culture has long been brainwashed into thinking that all the vaccines children get are the only thing that keeps them alive through childhood, and anyone who opposes such practice is tantamount to Beelzebub himself.

The more subtle “normalities” being afflicted upon us include a general fear of nature and our natural environment. Children are clearly being taught to fear other children, teachers, and anyone who is not masked. We are being trained to believe that to fear life itself is normal. Certainly, a totally irrational fear of death is being made normal.

And slowly we are being introduced to the normal idea that quite possibly, if we play our cards right and support the efforts to do such a thing, technology will bring us a deathless experience of life. Why anyone would want that to be “normal” is beyond me, but it certainly is being actively promoted out there, as if the true meaning of life lies in some artificial, and technological, way to keep life eternal.

As usual, with a short article like this, I am just skimming the surface of this dark and hideous creature raising its head out of the muck of human shadow. The problem here, though, is this normalcy I am speaking of is being forced upon us not in a natural organic way.

Humans have always gone through weird ventures into strangeness—but typically pull out of it at some point saying “oops, that didn’t work, what was I thinking?” But only if the venture was organic, psychically evolutionary—a wrong turn corrected in the nick of time. What we are experiencing now, which we have also experienced to a limited degree in the past with odd experiments such as Nazism or Soviet/Marxist communism, or other totalitarian “experiments,” is purely manipulative from a global (which has never happened before) point of reference. We are being conned to believe these things I have described here are normal, ONLY because they are consensual.

Only until a majority agree they are normal are they declared normal. But these things are not normal. They go against the fabric of nature, of spirit, and if you believe in such things, God Himself. We seemed to have lost sight of this measure of normalcy, and only see “normal” as “majority” and thus believe it is simply no big deal—which is something you hear all of the time about, say, wearing masks, or being educated by a computer screen at home.

“Just put on the damn mask, what’s the big deal.” Actually it is a big enough deal to lead us to the eventual destruction of humanity. No kidding.

Although most grow tiresome of Nazi references in discussions of “New Normal” issues, National Socialism in Germany in the mid 1900’s continues to be a relevant, and a useful, comparison. In Peter Fritzsche’s book Hitler’s First Hundred Days he describes a later manifestation of Germany’s “new Hitler order”—the Third Reich. Here is a description of a dissident returning home from political prison and the subsequent treatment he receives:

The big fight that Social Democrats and Communists lost to the National Socialists (Nazis) in February and March was one in which the nation was bitterly divided. The prisoners who returned home at the end of 1933 took the measure of how quickly Germany had changed from a country of highly articulate partisans who flew flags and pinned on badges of allegiance into a country of believers and conformists who, for reasons that were not always clear or verifiable, had made their peace with the new regime. This was the Nazis’ achievement in the two short months between the Reichstag elections on March 5, 1933, and the day celebrating German labor on May 1. The “48 percent” who had not voted for Hitler almost entirely disappeared from view, its remnants treated as miscreants and “asocials,” agents of national and social corrosion, drowned rats in the sea.”

The point to be taken here is the psychological effect of mass formation psychosis. A people who before were “articulate” and probably capable of debate and critical thinking, to a people who were essentially braindead and in 100% compliance with the authority of National Socialism—and all manner of supporting or living within that regime has been declared “normal.”

It is interesting here that the “48 percent who had not voted for Hitler almost entirely disappeared from view.” Where had they gone?

We like to think, in our current situation, that we who call ourselves freedom fighters will never “disappear,” but can we really rely on that? Will many of us eventually conform? Will we eventually fall into the zombie state?

I for one (and I am certain there are many who would stand with me on this) plan to die on this hill. But can we really be so certain that we will not eventually fall victim to the status quo, to the “new world normalcy” and be absorbed by the system, and become “drowned rats in the sea”?

I shudder to think of such a thing. But most of us are familiar with the “Stockholm Syndrome” where prisoners become complacent, and actually ally with their captors and criminal perpetrators.

This phenomenon is a very deep-seated human compulsion based on our instinct for survival. When we see all hope disappear, we will naturally warm up to those who hold the power and resources to keep us alive.

I think of movies like The Matrix and even silly fare like Demolition Man where there is a thriving underground of “free people,” burdened to the brink of collapse with pressure of survival, living almost like animals, usually underground (the collective unconscious?)—and certainly not considered normal.

Is this even a possibility within the limitations of the instinctual drive to survive? It is difficult to tell. There was indeed a resistance to the Nazis in the ‘30s and ‘40s. It may have been small, but it definitely was there. I believe there is at least an equally powerful archetypal compulsion to “be free, or die.”

However, it seems this archetype, if pressured enough, falls short. I suppose we have yet to see how it will fare while facing this current assault on the human spirit.

Todd Hayen is a registered psychotherapist practicing in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He holds a PhD in depth psychotherapy and an MA in Consciousness Studies. He specializes in Jungian, archetypal, psychology. Todd also writes for his own substack, which you can read here