This is fine, says the dog in the hat, this is fine. While flames blaze behind him and thick clouds of smoke gather above him. A frozen smile on his face, a cup of coffee on the table next to him. This famous meme is already in circulation since 2013, but has been posted more often lately, in my opinion. Because in the world more and more flames are spreading higher and higher and therefore more and more people react with denial.
Because that denial is nothing exceptional, but a persistent phenomenon. normalcy biasis the term used by the Scientific Council for Government Policy in a recent report. The council cites as an example how two thousand years ago residents of Pompeii watched the eruption of Vesuvius for hours without fleeing and were buried under the ash. Dutch politics also suffers from this tendency to assume that everything will remain the same, despite clear signs to the contrary.
The document was drawn up in collaboration with an unlikely array of other institutes, including the Health Council, the Council of State and the Advisory Council on International Affairs. A cry for help may be heard in both the unusually heavy casting and the accompanying tone. Although the report itself is about corona, the lessons stretch further.
The authors clearly cannot believe that after all the misery of recent years, the government is once again only seriously taking into account the most favorable development of the pandemic: no scarier virus variants and properly functioning vaccines. That is precisely the attitude that has cost us human lives and unnecessarily long lockdowns: recognize the seriousness too late, improvise chaotically and give the signal safely too early. The result is a collapse of social trust. The piece urges you to think through choices now in case things do go wrong.
Overwhelmed by crises
The fact that the government refuses to work out such scenarios is the reason that the Netherlands is attacked in every crisis, according to chairman of the council Corien Prins. The reflex to downplay potential threats may be an understandable human response, but it is unsuitable as a basis for policy and collective action, according to Prince in NRC. According to her, the Netherlands also takes too little account of the possible consequences of the Russian war, such as food shortages and mass migration. She sees ‘not at all’ communication with citizens about this.
It is to be feared that thinking about these types of problems will only start once we are already in the middle of them. One self-deception always leads to the next, because if you’re still trying to repair the damage of previous times when you didn’t see the risks, it’s worth little and it’s tempting to squeeze your blinders even tighter.
Just as the Dutch government could see in March 2020 that the corridors of Italian hospitals were full without noticeably moving, people now have to roar to make it clear to this cabinet that a large group of Dutch people are heading towards poverty due to currency depreciation and absurd energy prices. The reactions of ministers are so misplaced precisely because of their normality: ‘Yes, but the computer cannot take measures so quickly’, ‘yes, but it is better to wait with the announcement until Budget Day’, ‘yes, but we have to not disrupt the energy market’.
That quadrupled bill? So it’s actually a monthly party in honor of an undisturbed market.
Forum for Democracy
Now not every politician is blind to every danger and that blindness is not reserved for politicians either. Something unprecedented happened in our parliament this week. Minister of Finance and D66 leader Sigrid Kaag held a political movement, Forum for Democracy, directly responsible for driving threats leaving her and her family in need of security. That should have been much bigger news. Mainly because it’s true.
But journalists are also far from immune to normalcy bias. Former BBC celebrity Emily Maitlis recently called in a magisterial lecture ‘no longer normalizing the absurd’. She argued that we media are reacting ‘numbly’ to ‘the rising temperature in which facts are being lost and constitutional norms are being demolished’. In addition, she described, we allow ourselves to be intimidated by populists: just to prove that we are not prejudiced, we move with it.
She didn’t even mention those colleagues who enthusiastically encourage the extreme right or join in with pleasure.
In the meantime, we are – and rightly so – hard about the failing policy and so the spiral continues to decline. Politics runs from crisis to crisis and does not adequately protect the population. The extreme right exploits the discontent. The media report extensively on all the disaster and the administrative chaos, but largely spare the extreme right and even help it intentionally or unintentionally by stretching margins and shifting the consensus.
That dog in the hat is originally from a comic, of which only the first two pictures have made it into a meme. In the third and fourth pictures he says – with flames still in the background – that he ‘can live with the developments that are happening right now’ and takes a sip. In picture five he says that everything will be fine. Picture six can be guessed.