re: #288 Teukka

A good example of what Alexei Yurchak termed “hypernormalization”. Basically, by the late 1970s it was pretty obvious to everyone living in the USSR that their society was essentially falling apart; however, because no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, a complete failure of the imagination (to put it mildly), everyone decided to put on a happy face and pretend that everything was completely normal - this lie became a self-fulfilling prophecy and in the end, the delusion became their reality. Or at least, until the lie completely fell apart.

Yurchak discussed this in his 2006 book, “Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation”.