What have we normalised?
One of the many questions on the original (flawed) political compass test concerns the moral principle of commodifying water, that, “it is an indictment of our society” that water could be bottled and sold to willing consumers. At the heart of that is an interesting affect, one that actually asks two separate questions, that of the mechanism, and that of the possibility. Political alignment would likely follow that where some see immorality in coercing the consumer into a transaction in order to survive, others see the action of participation in the capitalist market system as a moral engagement in the provision of a willing contract. Both modes of thinking hold true for all ideological forces (context dependent), but the inter-connectedness of these various politico-economic systems produces a tension between coercion and will.
Where this may become a problem is in the extended problematic of competing interests among all sectors of the public, that is, where we might almost universally find child labour detestable, the fact remains that many companies utilise child labour for cheaper retail goods. Where it may have been unthinkable twenty years ago that large sectors of the British public would be using foodbanks, last year 2.5 million parcels were given out in the wake of the economic crisis brought on by the government’s response to COVID-19. We quickly become attached to systems that help us survive, or even thrive, so that it becomes difficult to imagine life without it, and so as long as people are technically ‘willing’ to receive subsidised goods, the coercive forces that drive people into the situation of requiring cheaper food or clothing are disguised.
As humans are generally liable to dismiss things that transgress their concurrent understanding of the world, when those on the left push for racial justice or rights for trans people it conflicts with a large number of peoples’ self-understanding within the social order. As people have become more aware of this, however, the discourse has shifted, and suddenly what (re)started in recent times as a means to recognise the validity of variance in gender identity ends in widespread cultural & institutional acknowledgement of (at least) existence. That the grassroots confirmation of being trans becomes the new site for challenging wider pre-conceived notions of gender.
But this kind of progression belies an important point: that institutional acceptance is the conditional acceptance of something that has already been normalised. But coercive institutional operations don’t end because of that normalisation, in fact they facilitate the parameters of what has been normalised in order to therefore exclude other struggles.
For the youngest of us, in the current day and age, there seems no end to perpetual strife, that to make it non-perpetual would suggest there is indeed an end to it (or a definable ‘good’ before-time). Perhaps the trick to social systems is maintaining themselves for longer than the collective memory, and the interesting thing about the Internet is that it’s a forever digital archive with a diffuse, and ever-repeating, collective memory. Every time something new enters the realm of discourse it becomes a necessity to debate its minutiae, so that long-settled arguments become reignited under the purview of seeking the truth and creating a more desirable society.
It’s tempting to view each progression as a concession to the invariably necessary calls for reform from an ever-growing minority of interest groups— and even more-so tempting to attribute to the Internet not only the rapid progression of these concessions but also the progressive means itself. When what’s being normalised is constantly at the forefront of reactionary assault, repeated endlessly; or conversely, when normalisation is left unchallenged across different representational theatres (the news, films, music etc.), it might be important to recognise how a progressive strategy needs to rely on more than just constant reiteration of the cause to different institutions as if it were a completely willing and autonomous agent outside of operational mechanisms.
Perhaps I just don’t want to live in a world where bottled water is sold daily and unflinchingly, but wanting to change a letter on your birth certificate is contested by the national media, daily and equally unflinchingly.
