HyperNormalisation Page #5

a brutal, vengeful Assad,

"who believes in nothing except revenge."

The original dream of the Soviet Union

had been to create a glorious new world.

A world where not only the society,

but the people themselves would be transformed.

They would become new and

better kinds of human beings.

But by the 1980s, it was clear

that the dream had failed.

WOMAN GASPS:

WOMAN SPEAKS RUSSIAN

The Soviet Union became instead

a society where no-one believed in anything

or had any vision of the future.

RUSSIAN SONG PLAYS

Those who ran the Soviet Union had

believed that they could plan

and manage a new kind of socialist society.

But they had discovered that it was impossible

to control and predict everything

and the plan had run out of control.

But rather than reveal this, the

technocrats began to pretend

that everything was still going according to plan.

And what emerged instead was a

fake version of the society.

The Soviet Union became a

society where everyone knew

that what their leaders said was not real

because they could see with their own eyes

that the economy was falling apart.

But everybody had to play along

and pretend that it WAS real

because no-one could imagine any alternative.

One Soviet writer called it "hypernormalisation".

You were so much a part of the system

that it was impossible to see beyond it.

The fakeness was hypernormal.

TANNOY ANNOUNCEMENT IN RUSSIAN

In this stagnant world, two brothers -

called Arkady and Boris Strugatsky -

became the inspiration of a

growing new dissident movement.

They weren't politicians, they

were science fiction writers,

and in their stories,

they expressed the strange mood that was rising up

as the Soviet Empire collapsed.

Their most famous book was called Roadside Picnic.

It is set in a world that seems like the present,

except there is a zone that has

been created by an alien force.

People, known as "stalkers", go into the zone.

They find that nothing is what it seems,

that reality changes minute by minute.

Shadows go the wrong way.

There are hidden forces that twist your body

and change the way you think and feel.

The picture the Strugatskys gave

was of a world where nothing was fixed.

Where reality - both what you

saw and what you believed -

had become shifting and unstable.

And in 1979, the film director Andrei Tarkovsky

made a film that was based on Roadside Picnic.

He called it Stalker.

WIND WHISTLES:

I, Ronald Reagan, do solemnly swear...

...that I will faithfully execute

the office of president of the United States.

...that I will faithfully execute

the office of president of the United States.

The new president of America

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