• Federated Micronations
• Institutions
• Constitution
• State Department
• Federal Agencies
• BOFM
• Federal Electoral Commission
• CERAG
• Climate School
• Climate Fiction Contest
• Older Projects
• Methane Crisis
• Reverse Thinking
• Deep Time
• Populism and Ecology
• Collapse and Hypernormalization
• FADO
• FAFA
• FCBA
• FeMTO
• FOCUS
• FedEvac
• FEAT
• FIPS
• FSDM
• JCOT
• JSFM
• OPC
• Balanda Republic
• Capricornia
• Naquarnia
• Murwillumbah
• Musograd
• Federal Territories
• Education

Collapse and Hypernormalization

Motivation

The Climate Catastrophe will leading to a massive change in all societies, worldwide. This is a prediction which can be safely made, as this change will either have to come sooner, to prevent the worst aspects of the catastrophe, or later, too late, where it will be the consequence of the catastrophe. There is no solution which would avoid this change and still limit the Climate Catastrophe to something easily handleable.

Change of this order of magnitude is unprecedented in our history, outside of war. In this report, though, we do want understand how such change is effected, how people would react, and how and if it can be predicted. With the World Wars, we have situations where this change was organized from above, enforced by the military situation. While this may be helpful if one wants to estimate what a mobilized society can do, it does not help to understand how a relatively peaceful world and its societies would behave.

Methods and Sources

We decided to look at one special case where a great empire crumbled peacefully within a few years, the Soviet Union. We did not focus on the clientele states like the GDR, where it was simply a question of the collaboration regimes crumbling after the withdrawal of political and military support from the USSR, but on the inside view of the Soviet Empire as seen by its citizens. Two en extremely valuable sources for this are the following books:

• Alexei Yurchak: "Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More" (Princeton Paperbacks, ISBN 978-0-691-12117-8)
• Andrej Amalrik: "Can the Soviet Union Survive The Year 1984?" (German Version, Diogenes detebe 5)

In 1969, Amalrik, a Soviet citizen living in Moscow, wrote a book predicting the end of the Soviet Union which was received with worldwide interest, but then forgotten. Reading it 50 years later allows to compare its predictions with the real history of the USSR and the world. Surprisingly, Amalrik has not only made a good prediction regarding the end of the USSR, only some 6 years off, but also described some circumstances and facts which have found their mirror image in real history. A good example is the limited war he predicted to break out between the USSR and China, which would be the tipping point fatally weakening the USSR. That war did not come up, but a similar limited war, in Afghanistan, must be seen as one of the main factors for the demise of the USSR.

The book, thus, serves as proof that it is possible to predict historical developments over a long period, against a background of "experts" on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Furthermore, it reminds us that there are ancient threads in every society which are strong enough to survive any kind of revolution - he describes different social-political groups in the USSR which had survived the 1917 revolution, WW 2 and, as we now know, also the end of the USSR. The lesson from this is that we need to analyze such groupings also on the "modern" societies of the present, to understand and predict the future.

In contrast to Amalrik, Yurchak wrote his book in 2005, long after the fall of the USSR. He especially analyzed the inner workings of the USSR and its official modes of communications, which he named "hypernormalisation". In his view, the breakdown of this very formal, normalized communication in the public dialogue in the late 1980s was the key for the breakdown of the system.

Currently, in developed countries, there does not seem to exist such a hypernormalized communication system. But communication is crucial, anyway, and we see that reactionary organisations and indivduals try to disrupt the existing modes of communication, e.g. by inserting hate speech into public discourse. In some countries and parts of society, this has had some successes. On the other side, progressives try to re-form communication in a gender and ethnic neutral way, also with limited success. It is an open question if language can be used as a lever to accelerate climate friendly developments in the physical world.

CERAG CHRG Goals

The CERAG Collapse / Hypernormalisation Research Group has been created to predict and analyze possible trajectories of social development under Climate Crisis conditions, with a special focus on language and its power to influence human thinking. Results will be published in due time.