Thread by @JewhadiTM

We must never surrender to the New Normal spiked-online.com/2021/02/05/we-…

The ‘dream of going back to normal’ is a ‘huge distraction’, says a writer for the Guardian. The inescapable Devi Sridhar, the public-health academic whose voice of doom is enthusiastically coveted by the media, speaks to us as if we are patients on a therapist’s couch-

– ‘it is perfectly normal to grieve for our lost normality, but denial needs to be followed by acceptance’, she has counselled.

This idea of ‘denial’ – the favoured slur of lockdown elites who want to frustrate discussion about life and liberty after Covid – was taken up by the New Statesman, too. The blather about going ‘back to normal’ is just a way of ‘denying reality’, says one of its columnists.

Which isn’t surprising – ‘denial… is a natural dysfunction’. ‘It is a hard truth to swallow, but: there won’t be a return to “normal”’, says a writer for the Atlantic.

The culture of fear. It exists. It is tangible. It influences almost every aspect of human life, from the economy to politics to the socialisation of the next generation. Over the past year we have seen the paucity of some commentators’ understanding of the culture of fear.

They seem to view it as a fleeting, occasional visitor (expressed in sporadic panics), or even as something performative, as a tool consciously deployed by elites who want to keep the masses in thrall to fear and control.

And the current threat of a New Normal – of a forever post-pandemic dystopia of distanced, masked pseudo-interaction – demonstrates that our future will be shaped at least in part by the ideologies and forces of the culture of fear.

By phenomena that predate the pandemic. By the pre-existing cult of safetyism, by the elites’ long-standing denigration of risk, by the sacralisation of ‘safe spaces’, by the problematisation of modernity, of connection, of travel.

Yes, the New Normal being talked up by the political and cultural elites will partially be informed by the experience of Covid-19 and the necessity of being prepared for a future virus.

But it will also be shaped by something as real as disease – the culture of fear and its attendant anti-human, anti-progress ideologies.

And fairly soon the practical task of minimising and managing the impact of Covid will have been largely completed, leaving us with the far larger humanist task of combating this culture and making the case for a freer, more dynamic future of growth, knowledge and engagement.

Those who underestimate the culture of fear will be ill-prepared for these future battles. They will have a tendency to surrender to the New Normal.

The rest of us should stand firm, even in the face of smears and wilful misrepresentations, and continue to recognise and confront the real and debilitating consequences that fear has on everyday life and on humanity’s future.