As memory moves at the speed of digitization, Covid has become a blip on the radar lost in the dim past [5 years ago]. We have rapidly moved from the Pre-Pandemic Phase through the Emergency Remote Phase, past the “New Normal” and “Slow Acceptance (Survivor)” Stages and are now entering the “Dividing Stage”, aka The New New-Normal.
Understanding the Dividing Stage
The “new new-normal” separates those who want to return to pre-pandemic conditions [golden age nostalgia] from those who want to live the “new normal” fully [hybrid work-life balance] and also from those who seek a blended approach [opportunistically developing new social and business structures]. But transitioning is never ending: it involves ongoing, deep-seated transformations, sometimes built around power blocks. And it “ain’t” easy.
The “new new-normal” is a time of constant change almost fixated on upheaval rather than stability. The emerging reality is reactionary and involves “them-us” discord.
Key Features of the New New-Normal
- A reassertion of command-control structures, where working remotely or in hybrid models is no longer acceptable. Work is now office bound, monitored and supervised, because “trusting workers” never took hold. But resistance increases as trust in leadership decreases, and the perceived incompetence of those in command rises.
- Survivor tendencies value “the here-and-now” and verge on convenient forgetfulness, as Covid becomes a distant memory, like the bubonic plague in the European Middle Ages, “never to happen again in our lifetime”.
- Dunning-Kruger takes effect, where we are convinced by social media influencers that vaccines have questionable merit, whatever the medical profession says, and can cause more harm than good, as some political leaders assert, despite the global celebration of the 75th anniversary of the discovery of the polio vaccine and the 100th anniversary of the discovery of insulin.
- Disruptions no longer focus on disease but are anchored in the political-economic-social-environmental policies and intentions of global leaders and multi-nationals. “You and I” no longer count as forces fueled by greed are in positions of power. And it is all about power, not about social capital.
- Technology has morphed from necessary [“need to have during shut down”] to essential [“must have in order to succeed”], challenging everything from how we communicate, to how we work, to how we purchase, to how we meet, to how we handle healthcare, to how we are entertained.
Personal and Organizational Impact
The New New-Normal is the Dividing Stage of a post-Covid world characterized by upheaval for its own sake, without any intention of creating stability. And upheaval has an impact on each of us individually almost on a daily basis. To bring the climate of the times into personal perspective, I quote at length from a recent Facebook video [user: @defiance13_].
What challenges do we face in our everyday lives?
It is the peculiar madness of our time that we are asked to believe simultaneously in two opposing delusions. First, that we are all so hopelessly divided by race, creed identity and culture that no bridge can be built between us. Second, that differences are meaningless since we are all the same, and that race, gender and faith are illusions that should be ignored for the sake of some tepid flavorless harmony.
The modern mind is expected to swallow both contradictions at once, as if the cognitive dissonance doesn’t rattle the teeth right out of our skulls.
The truth is always more complex and less palatable: Human beings are not uniform. We are not homogeneous cogs in some great machine of civilization – interchangeable and indistinct. Nor are we doomed to eternal conflict because we are different. We are at our core creatures of culture shaped by the landscapes that bore us, the struggles that tempered us, and the traditions that cradled us when the world sought to break us.
To erase these things, to insist that we are all just one human race and nothing more is to strip the color from the painting, to drain the blood from the body, to commit in essence a polite and well-intentioned genocide against the stories that define us.
And yet, here lies the paradox: respect for our differences does not mean submission to division. It does not mean constructing new hierarchies of oppression. Nor does it require us to engage in an eternal contest of suffering where the only prize is the moral authority to demand others bow in shame.
Respect simply means seeing a person as they are not as who we wish them to be: not as some sanitized, inoffensive abstraction of human existence, but as a fully formed, breathing, thinking, struggling individual with history and context.
To be spoken of as a person, not as a statistical entry on a census, is a mark of dignity. To acknowledge that people do not need your personal enlightenment, nor your approval, but only the space to live their lives without harassment as you live yours. To recognize that a person’s faith whether it commands them to kneel toward Mecca, light candles for the Sabbath, or pray a language older than the ruins of Rome deserves neither mockery nor suspicion.
And it is simple, and undeniable, and a fact that the right to exist in peace does not hinge on your comprehension. You do not need to understand someone to respect them. You need to be decent.
But decency seems to be in short supply. We have been trained like half-mad dogs to believe that we must pick a side in every culture war; that acknowledging another’s identity is a threat to our own; and that respecting someone else, their pronouns, or traditions or struggles, is somehow an act of self-erasure.
And so we rage, and we bicker, and we erect false idols of purity either in the form of colorblind oblivion or militant identity warfare – while the actual work of living alongside one another goes completely undone.
The “new new-normal” is intense. We will either step forward into growth or we will step back into safety [Adapted from Abraham Maslow].