Normalization Quotes

“Labels such as ‘‘the culture wars,’’ ‘‘the science wars,’’ or ‘‘the Freud wars’’ are now widely used to refer to some of the disagreements that
plague contemporary intellectual life ... But I would like to register a gentle protest. Metaphors influence the mind in many unnoticed ways. The willingness to describe fierce disagreement in terms of the metaphors of war makes the very existence of real wars seem more natural, more inevitable,
more a part of the human condition. It also betrays us into an insensibility toward the very idea of war, so that we are less prone to be aware of how totally disgusting real wars really are.”
― Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What?

“Just because something is normal in a culture does not make it ethically sound. Normal merely means there is a social consensus that it is held as self-evidently "true", predominantly precluding further critical examination of the matter.”
― Kevin Focke

“The numbers grow as the technology and its accessibility grow. The technology by its very nature encourages more and more passive acquiescence to the graphic depictions. Passivity makes the already credulous consumer more credulous. He comes to the pornography a believer; he goes away from it a missionary.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin

“By being uninvolved we almost participate in the most outrageous practices.”
― Elias Tsikoudis, Political thinking for the masses: Way to freedom

“[I]t was really only in the generation or two before hers that the idea had started to traverse the spectrum of likelihood in the popular imagination, beginning at unthinkable, progressing to absurd, then going from possible but unlikely to probable and likely, before eventually arriving – round about the time of her birth – at seemingly inevitable.”
― Iain M. Banks, The Hydrogen Sonata

“Polarization, of course, is no accident. A divide and conquer game is now underway inside the United States which is calculated to produce instability. It naturally comes on the heels of a societal demoralization (decades in the making). Given current preparations for war in Korea, stage three (crisis) will likely result from a military clash in the Far East. The final stage (normalization), signifies the acceptance by the United States of Russian and Chinese military dominance (formalized by a treaty). This, of course, is only one dimension of the crisis/normalization process. Yet, if things go according to plan, it will be the decisive dimension.

Of course, destabilization is carried out by secret agent networks in much the same way as demoralization. It is a process guided by KGB officers and recruited agents. These agents not only operate on the political left. In order to guide the process the KGB has placed agents on the political right – in the guise of rock-solid conservatives. Bezmenov says that recruiting agents on the left is, in fact, not as important as recruiting (or planting) them on the right.”
― J.R.Nyquist

“What amounts to a plague of mental illness is now addressed as ‘normal’ rather than as an indication that there is something terrifyingly wrong with our culture. The fact that we no longer understand mental illness as a message – that is, as a nondeclarative communication of an imbalance that requires rectification – not only demonstrates the degree of our emotional illiteracy, but our failure to understand the principle of balance as the axis of all existence.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“During the Psychedelic Revolution, eroticised violence towards
the feminine not only became normalised, but was also presented
as the ideal.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“When injustice becomes predictable, it stops looking like injustice and starts feeling like weather.”
― Adeel Ahmed Khan