The War for Normal
Back in the 1990s, a marine biologist named Daniel Pauly noticed something about humans. They didn't remember how many fish there used to be in the ocean. To put it more accurately, they never knew. They didn't know how much had been lost, so they didn't feel any sense of alarm.
This problem extended to just about everything in the 20th century. Every generation developed their own new normal.
Every normal was worse than the last.
He called it shifting baseline syndrome. Sometimes it goes by a fancier name, generational amnesia. Psychologists and climate scientists have confirmed it in populations around the world. They've also observed it in our own public institutions. They don't try as hard as they used to. They accept and promote the status quo, and it's been declining.
Now we're in freefall.
We're living it.
Now there's a sinister element at play. The rich want us to forget that moment in history, just a few years ago, when we didn't get sick all the time. They want us to forge…