This is not normal! 

How often have you said, thought or felt this sentence? Probably very often. What seems normal to people and what doesn't depends on many factors. There are subjective factors such as different political and moral ideas, the upbringing one has enjoyed, the social milieu in which one moves, age and so on. Of course, objective factors such as the prevailing zeitgeist and, above all, laws also play a role. When I celebrated my birthday thirty years ago, there was an ashtray on every table and my guests had the choice between goulash and goulash. That was normal back then. Today it would be abnormal because smoking indoors is frowned upon or prohibited and many acquaintances expect a vegan alternative. You could have philosophical debates about normality. I would like to focus on one aspect that plays an underestimated role. Normality always has something to do with interpretative sovereignty, power and authority. This can be clearly seen in the Milgram experiment from 1961 [1]

The Milgram Experiments. Subject in the Study (c) Yale University

This experiment, named after the psychologist Stanley Milgram, was about the question of how far people are prepared to go to do inhumane things when instructed to do so by a supposed authority. Unfortunately, people went very far. The result was sobering. People tortured other people with electric shocks because they believed in the authority of the experimenter. Their own abnormal actions seemed normal to them in the context of the experiment. That will be right. It will be normal.

Ab März 2020 fand ein weiteres Milgram-Experiment statt. Das Versuchslabor war nicht New Haven in den USA, es war die gesamte Welt. Die deutsche Milgram hieß Merkel. Als Autorität, als Mutti der Nation, verkündete die deutsche Bundeskanzlerin am 18. März 2020 in einer TV-Rede das neue Normal [2]. Das Unmenschliche wurde zum Menschlichen erklärt und umgekehrt. Als Erinnerung ein Auszug aus der Fernsehansprache:

"We have to keep our distance from each other out of consideration. (...) No more handshakes, wash your hands thoroughly and often, keep at least one and a half meters away from the next person and preferably hardly any contact with the very old, because they are particularly at risk."

From one day to the next, a new normality was defined. Distance was the new closeness, cold was the new warmth. The human being as an empathic, social being was erased. No more visiting grandpa, no more hugging mom, keep your distance and cover your face with a mask. Have you known all your life how important facial expressions are for human communication, how important movement and physical contact are for mental and physical health? All this was normal for you? From one day to the next, it was no longer normal. From March 18, 2020, it was abnormal, because all this can kill. If you were one of the few who said NO out loud to this Milgram experiment, if you didn't want to accept this new normal, you were a nutcase and a weirdo. This is how Rainald Becker insulted dissenters in an ARD commentary when he predicted that there would be no return to the old normal [3]. Basta!

Corona is over. The issue is over. Humans have recaptured human behavior and the old normality of life. You might think so, but that's not the case. After all, there is the looming climate apocalypse. In the face of the climate catastrophe, normality must be redefined in order to avert the impending end of the world. Welcome to "Futur Zwei" [4], a taz talk format hosted by Peter Unfried. I watch the show regularly to understand what other people consider normal.

Hedwig Richter and Bernd Ullrich were guests of the chief reporter of the Berlin daily newspaper last week. Richter, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of the Federal Armed Forces in Munich, and ZEIT journalist Ullrich, leading analyst of German politics according to host Unfried, presented their new book. It is called "Democracy and Revolution", subtitled "Ways out of self-inflicted ecological immaturity" [5]. That sounds pleasantly enlightened because it is reminiscent of Immanuel Kant. As I have not read the book, I cannot review it. What I can say, however, is what the two authors want humanity to do. The path lies in a new normality. Hedwig Richter puts it like this:

"Our whole everyday life, how we buy clothes, what we eat, how we move, all of that contributes to destruction and that is the normal thing. And it's considered radical to speak out against it. And what is radical, so to speak, is that we shouldn't eat meat, we have to get around differently. That is a very important point for us in this book, that we say that this normality must be reversed, that we need a new normality and that we need to get out of this normalism, that it is no longer considered radical to point out that we are living in destruction."

So we have to change radically, in everything. The radical must be seen as normal and the normal as radical. The old normal must be radically replaced by a new normal. I'll summarize the rest. It's about revolution and transformation, it's about change and this change lies in renouncing everything we are used to. It is about renouncing internalized behaviours, human life dreams and goals. All these individual goals should be subordinated to a collective goal. The collective goal is called "saving the planet".

Mir gefror während der gesamten Sendung das Blut in den Adern. Ich empfinde die vorgeschlagene Radikalität als dystopisch unnormal. Die drei Anwesenden hingegen betrachten das neue Normal als zwingend erforderlich. Wie eingangs erwähnt – was normal zu sein hat und was nicht, kann zutiefst subjektiv sein. Manchmal liegt die unterschiedliche Wahrnehmung einfach an einer unterschiedlichen Herangehensweise. Ich analysiere die Vergangenheit und lebe im Präsens. Andere Menschen modellieren die vollendete Zukunft und leben wie Peter Unfried in einem Futur zwei. Vielleicht liege ich falsch. Vielleicht bin ich ja unnormal. Es ist gesund, das niemals auszuschließen. 

However, I will definitely maintain one criticism. My criticism is directed against the hypocrisy of the apologists of asceticism, against their hypocrisy in asking other people to go without something they are not prepared to do themselves. It seems implausible to stand in front of an empty buffet with a full stomach and burp while calling on people to starve. No one put it better than the well-heeled Eckart von Hirschhausen in an interview from September 2021, which he gave to the editor-in-chief of taz, Peter Unfried.

"It's precisely the people who talk most about the environment who objectively have a higher footprint because they are more educated and richer, can afford a bigger apartment, more cars and vacations. These contradictions also apply to me."

In other words? Those who are least affected by restrictions are also those who call for restrictions the loudest. For reasons of politeness, I'd better keep to myself how uneducated this Hirschhausen statement is. My spontaneous thought was a different one.

"Hirschhausen is not normal!"