this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2025
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Very well said. I will make a concerted effort to inject "hypernormalization" into my speech more often going forward. For decades I've been saying to friends that the reductionist obsession with "normal" (whatever the hell that means) is a cancer to modern society.
In particular it already sounds creepy when you replace usage with its verb-form, e.g. changing "all my friends are normal" to "all my friends have been normalized". It's common practise to use a re-encoder to normalize a "background" playlist of songs to the same dB threshold so no single song sticks out and distracts us from what we are trying to focus on while listening. Similarly, authorities of an authoritarian ilk try to normalize populations so none of them stick out and distract from the primary focus (centralization of power and money). Hypernormalization involves taking that to its logical conclusion, telling the vast majority of people "stay in your lane" - meaning "shut up and consume, and when we tell you what to buy you buy it", AKA be "normal(ized)").
The authorities want an homogeneous population, as they also have a limited ability to imagine the social sphere in multiple dimensions, this is why you're seeing things like the gender binaries. At least that's just two simulations to run. But gender as spectrum, this becomes quickly untenable for the elites to model for control, they wish the squash the real world complexity into flattened binaries or even uniformity.
Yes, I think you got it exactly right and the audio normalization analogy is correct, at least for sound nerds like us.
Hypernormalization is a dysfunctional response from elites due to their human cognitive weakness. This is why we're not going back to "King" no single human can bear the complexity of the entire world in their skull mush. They will melt down and genocide the Kurds when it gets too hard for them to conjugate everything. This is why dictators and fascism will do a lot of damage, but have no hope whatsoever for success. They are "rebellion from cognitive weakness", they violently lash out at complexity itself, at those things they cannot understand. They want to reduce everything to a simple narrative of us versus them and then destroy "them" so only a uniform homogeneous "us" remains. This "us" identical to the ruler, does not require the ruler to imagine "the other" instead they only rule as if everyone else was an identical copy of them. And if anyone disagrees with that, they are "other".
From that we know the "few" cannot rule the many, but then how do we avoid the traps of design by committee, bikeshedding and the various paralysis that come from complexity beyond human cognition. Concentrations of power are too dumb to rule, but the mob and the market are also dumb and easily fooled, not to mention irresponsible and self-destructive. (The market is burning the planet, right now, it cannot see into the future). The mob is emotional and easily manipulated, often by its own emotions.
I think we need new modes of thinking more advanced than what we had in the 1700s. Something invented with at least the idea of what a computer could do.
You'll probably want to watch the best documentary on the subject
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr7T07WfIhM
I also recommend the following by the same author
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
about advertising and consumerism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6EBpLfLHCA&list=PLC4E798CAE3E10597
about how our own surplus value is used against us