Author:: Anne Helen Petersen Full Title:: Habituation to Horror Tags:#media/article Link:: https://annehelen.substack.com/p/habituation-to-horror
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* highlights from 2021-02-08
* All of us are unraveling, but it’s happening so incrementally that it’s easy to ignore just how vulnerable we’ve become.
* In short: we acclimate. We decide this is just the way things are, and that the number of deaths — in our community, in our country, in our world — is acceptable, because if it were unacceptable, wouldn’t we be expected to act differently? Wouldn’t we ask our elected officials to behave differently? Wouldn’t we fight until it was acceptable again? But we’re too exhausted for that.
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* Many attribute these behaviors to our Americanness: to the cult of the individual, to our general resistance to systemic or longterm thinking. But solidarity has historically been an American trait; so, too, has collectivism, and community, and generalized commitment to the greater good. We often forget as much when we talk about just how American our behavior is, because we don’t want to acknowledge that we decide, every day, in ways large and small, conscious and unconscious, which traits will be “American” moving forward.
* People keep comparing the photos of San Francisco against the backdrop of eerie orange to Blade Runner. We use words like “apocalyptic” and “Cormac McCarthy sky.” It’s a way of deflecting the fear, of making it speakable through comparison to a text that is solidly otherworldly. But the thing about dystopian narratives is that they are not distant from our world; they’re just what happens when our world, or at least our civilization, begins to bend towards its end.
* Dystopia doesn’t arrive with a bang, but in a gradual slide. We read and watch those narratives with terror. But that’s only because we’re on the outside, and can see what’s happening. Living in a dystopia just feels like living: you get through one day, and then you get through the next, and then the next. You embrace mild self-deception and self-delusion because you must. You move forward because what other choice do you have? If that sounds familiar, it should.
* Hayes Brown wrote around this time last year, “the weight of knowing, this time really knowing, our future is taking its toll.” We can allow ourselves to not just bend to new forms of normal, but actually break. This isn’t about being better about sorting your recycling. This is about completely reconceptualizing the way we think about energy, and waste, and consumption. It will require a complete renovation of our value system. And it’s going to be hard and uncomfortable and different, but you know what else will be hard and uncomfortable and different? The end of the fucking world.
* We don’t have to acclimate to dystopia. We don’t have to compartmentalize horror. We can recognize this moment, as George Packer recently put it in The Atlantic, as a “plastic” one: when “an ossified social order suddenly turns pliable, prolonged stasis gives way to motion, and people dare to hope.”
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