Abnormal The New Normal – A New World Order?
Suji Hettiarachchi
It’s a question worth asking because many people are genuinely worried there is so much of negativity around us. Society has become more and more competitive, combative and complacent. Anti-government protests, strikes, demonstrations are so apparent and commonplace and destroy the function of the governments. There is a diminished level of public trust in anything and everything. Sri Lanka, as a country, faces a real problem.
With due respect to our Colombo Telegraph readership, I am inspired to continue writing about the situation of Sri Lanka. In my journey forward, the positive comments and criticisms (those who speak from their brains not hearts!) I have received had expanded my knowledge giving me absolute satisfaction, strength and vitality.
One of our Colombo Telegraph readers’ comments made me wonder; what is the New Normal being referred to? Is that an emerging concept or an entity or is it about who we are or what we do? My curiosity journeyed me to explore as it relates to my writing about trust, distrust (mistrust), fear and uncertainty and now the topic of ‘New Normal’. In layman’s terms, the trust is firm belief and the distrust is absence of it. Fear is being afraid and the uncertainty is doubtfulness. We all are familiar with these words. The new set of words relating to this article is normal and new normal.
The abnormal to be considered normal and to be the new normal in our societies in the 21st century is scary and frightening. The developments, our far-reaching knowledge, and information rich society should have enriched the normalcy to a higher state and have given us the best of every world imaginable! Instead we have created a new scary and frightening world order.
Normal vs. New Normal
Normal came to English language around the 17th century; from Latin word ‘Normalis’ which means “made according to a carpenter’s square, forming a right angle. Extended meanings came into being and accordingly, it began to refer to ‘according to, constituting, or not deviating from an established norm, rule or principle’
Searching the origin of the term new normal did take me on the road of research. The origin accordingly goes back to World War 1 but came to be used in our time after the 9/11 attack in the United States.
Accordingly, the New Normal is a freestanding phrase, idiom and a cliché.
It is used in varied fields to describe a new form of societal condition. The original intent of the term has changed over time and its literal meaning or figurative meaning had gone to a state of vague ambiguity to extent that it cannot be immediately defined in any context as per everything in the world so that we are kept in a state of confusion.
When I researched the term I found it to be more relevant to Economics, Workplace relations, Medicine and Psychology. In the field of Economics, it is used for global uncertainty and instability. Thriving in the age of the individual the term refers to ‘doing things right than to succumb to the tyranny of urgency’ referring to playing by the new rules for the long term. The term first used in business and economics that refers to financial conditions following the financial crisis of 2007-2008 and the aftermath of the 2008–2012 global recession and post-crisis environments. The term has since been used in a variety of other contexts to imply that ‘something which was previously abnormal has become commonplace – the world is now way above the normalcy’
