WE are stockpiling essential medicines in Britain in anticipation of a No-Deal exit from the European Union.

Boris Johnson is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He has hired a former journalist who used to torment politicians dressed as a chicken as his director of communications. Lee Cain, who was pictured on several occasions taunting people while dressed as poultry, has been installed as part of Johnson’s team.

The Trade Secretary Liz Truss is travelling to Beijing to “open up new markets” in pig sperm.

Brexitland Britain is a very strange place, but it’s emerged from a stranger world. This isn’t just a world of fake news, but of fake everything, where we consume the strange spectacle through a torrent-stream of information and data.

A series of fragments and “highlights” stand out in scrambled recollection.

Do you remember watching people falling from the World Trade Centre in 2001?

Do you remember Lynndie England with her thumbs up in Abu Ghraib?

Do you remember watching Saddam Hussein being hanged in 2006?

Do you remember watching Gaddafi being executed in 2011?

Do you remember the photograph of the Syrian boy Alan Kurdi?

Deep Denial

YESTERDAY Twitter suspended a conspiracy-peddling account amplified by President Donald Trump. Before the suspension, the account enthusiastically pushed QAnon conspiracy memes and bizarre theories about prominent Democrats murdering children to harvest their pineal glands.

One such meme targeted Bill and Hillary Clinton, claiming they “torture and sacrifice children” to get at “a drug that can only be found inside the human skull”.

So, it seems that it’s NOT TRUE that Democrats are harvesting kids’ pineal glands.

But the extent to which we are awash in a world of make-believe, self-created myths that we cling to is extraordinary.

We have the leader of the western world as Fantasist-in-chief.

In a speech this week to guarantee health rights for firemen involved in 9/11, President Trump himself claimed to be a 9/11 first responder: “I was down there also, but I’m not considering myself a first responder. But I was down there. I spent a lot of time down there with you.”

Part of this is just about denial of unpleasant truths, and we’re all in the middle of one giant collective one. As James Melville notes: “Brexit is a bit like the crew members of the Titanic deciding, by a vote of 52% to 48%, that the iceberg doesn’t exist.”

Denial or lying to ourselves about truths we find uncomfortable is not a new thing, nor is political propaganda or myth-making. But at some point, reality “lands”.

Whether it be sweltering climate science denialists, or the pro-Brexit farmer who can’t understand why he can’t get the farm workers any more, or the people who didn’t like it when Dubya Bush was president so watched the West Wing instead – or adults who read Harry Potter – reality has a nasty habit of coming home to roost.

Our immunity from unpleasant truth stems from three conditions: the loss of collective experience, the decline in quality of life and the inability to think for ourselves. All of this is fueled and boosted by the petri-dish of social media.

As quality of life deteriorates, the myth of progress is faltering and this feeds a blame culture. The loss of a public realm, now reduced to the cutesy “water-cooler moment”, is far more significant than we realise. Whether it be the privatisation of utilities and services or the break up of media into tiny targeted slivers, the collapse of shared moments and a sense of collective have eroded any togetherness.

In this culture – as we face a daily torrent of information – we huddle together in silos of people who think the same as us about a world we can’t understand. Isn’t it a paradox that we simultaneously have access to all the information we could possibly need and yet know nothing?

Blame Culture and Binary Culture

IN this predicament, blame culture and binary culture feed off each other. Instead of acknowledging complexity we want to retreat into the comfort of simple “truths”.

Britain is riven with such tribalism, Scotland is too.

We live in mutual incomprehension.

Blame culture has driven the Brexit fiasco from start to finish: blame the immigrants, the East Europeans, the bureaucrats, blame “Brussels”, blame the Irish, blame the Metropolitan elite.

There are wider, deeper problems at play that Brexit will only make far, far worse, and the solution isn’t Jo Swinson.

Liberal capitalism, with its promise to enrich all of society through continual economic growth, is malfunctioning.

Inequality is spiralling and living standards are falling.

Our political class don’t know what to do because the institutions they inhabit and the systems they operate in are dysfunctional.

The problems aren’t confined to crazy Brexitland. As Dougald Hine has written on the election of Donald Trump:

“When the values of social liberalism got hitched to the mercilessness of neoliberalism, it kindled a resentment towards the former among the latter’s losers. The deal was summed up in Alan Wolfe’s formulation: ‘The right won the economic war, the left won the cultural war and the centre won the political war.’ He said that in 1999. It was under Bill Clinton’s presidency that the ‘centrist’ settlement between progressive cultural values and There Is No Alternative economics was consummated. Two decades on, that made Hilary Clinton the dream opponent for a candidate running on the fuel of resentment.

“Here’s a stony truth to stomach: today, across the western countries, the culture war to defend the real social achievements of the past half century is grimly entangled with a class war against the losers of neoliberalism. If we now lose many of the unfinished achievements of the struggles against racism, sexism and homophobia, the Clinton generation of politicians will share the responsibility.”

As system failure kicks in and collapsonomics emerges, these phenomenon of blame and binary culture are likely to accelerate and solidify.

Hypernormalisation and The State of Exception

TWO distinct but linked trends have manifested themselves which we should notice. The first is the “mission creep” of law and political power as pervasive crisis beds in. The phenomenon is what the Italian writer Giorgio Agamben has called “The State of Exception”. The other is the idea that as paradoxes and system failure become very apparent we cope with this by colluding with each other to pretend that it’s not happening. This is called “hypernormalisation”.

To look at the state of exception first:

Giorgio Agamben argues that the state of exception, which was meant to be a provisional measure, became in the course of the 20th century a normal paradigm of government.”

In his book, Agamben traces the concept of “state of exception” (Ausnahmezustand) used by the political philosopher Carl Schmitt.

He investigates the increase of power by governments which they employ in supposed times of crisis. Within a state of emergency, Agamben refers to the states of exception, where constitutional rights can be diminished, superseded and rejected in the process of claiming this extension of power.

“Times of crisis” can be real, self-inflicted or entirely manufactured. It doesn’t matter. He gives many examples throughout the 20th century, including the First World War.

That war, he argues, coincided with a permanent state of exception in the majority of the warring countries. It was during this period that exceptional legislation by executive [governativo] decree (which is now perfectly familiar to us) became a regular practice in the European democracies.

“Predictably, the expansion of the executive’s powers into the legislative sphere continued after the end of hostilities, and it is significant that military emergency now ceded its place to economic emergency (with an implicit assimilation between war and economics).

“In January 1924, at a time of serious crisis that threatened the stability of the franc, the Poincaré government asked for full powers over financial matters. After a bitter debate, in which the opposition pointed out that this was tantamount to parliament renouncing its own constitutional powers, the law was passed on March 22, with a four-month limit on the government’s special powers.

“Analogous measures were brought to a vote in 1935 by the Laval government, which issued more than five hundred decrees ‘having force of law’ in order to avoid the devaluation of the franc. The opposition from the left, led by Léon Blum, strongly opposed this “fascist” practice, but it is significant that once the Left took power with the Popular Front, it asked parliament in June 1937 for full powers in order to devalue the franc, establish exchange control, and impose new taxes.”

(Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, 2005)

Agamben’s State of Exception investigates how the suspension of laws within a state of emergency or crisis can become a prolonged state of being.

More specifically, Agamben addresses how this prolonged state of exception operates to deprive individuals of their citizenship.

When speaking about the military order issued by President George W Bush on November 13, 2001, Agamben writes:

“What is new about President Bush’s order is that it radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnameable and unclassifiable being. Not only do the Taliban captured in Afghanistan not enjoy the status of POWs (prisoners of war) as defined by the Geneva Convention, they do not even have the status of people charged with a crime according to American laws.”

Many of the individuals captured in Afghanistan were taken to be held at Guantanamo Bay without trial. These individuals were termed as “enemy combatants.” Until July 7, 2006, these individuals had been treated outside the Geneva Conventions by the United States administration.

Examples are everywhere. Proroguing parliament, the Spycops scandal, “armed police” and “emergency status updates” or extraordinary rendition are just some.

The problem is that this level of system failure (or is it system success?) is happening in a world where we conspire to sustain the illusion that “everything is fine”.

This has been called hypernormalisation, a term coined by a Russian anthropologist and popularised by the British film-maker Adam Curtis.

Alexei Yurchak, a professor of anthropology who was born in Leningrad and later went to teach in the United States, introduced the word in his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2006), which describes paradoxes of life in the Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s. He says that everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system was failing, but no one could imagine an alternative to the status quo, and politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretence of a functioning society. Over time, this delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy and the fakeness was accepted by everyone as real, an effect that Yurchak termed "hypernormalisation".

Is the world becoming weirder?

Are governments expanding their power?

Are we in denial about what we are experiencing?

No Deal will be an opportunity for new states of exception and we are in deep denial about the process we are in.