Creeping normality

Rafta rafta wo meri hasti ka sama'n ho gaye

Pehle jaa'n, phhir jan-e jaa'n, phhir jaan-e jaana'n ho gye

You must be humming this song the moment you read the lyrics. Originally, the late ghazal maestro Mehdi Hassan immortalised these lyrics. The underlying thought is the gradual importance of a species to someone. But I have a different reason to quote these lyrics here — with slightly negative and contrary connotations.

The apologue of the boiling frog says that when a frog is thrown into hot water, it jumps out in no time. However, when put into cool water which is then heated slowly, the frog stays until it boils to death. People, like frogs, get accustomed to abnormality if it is introduced slowly — but it kills them in the end.

This sluggish acquiescence to unpleasant circumstances which are later compromised as normal proves detrimental to human abilities and capabilities, particularly the ones that are sine qua non for bringing about amelioration in individual as well as collective life. This mentality is dubbed 'creeping normality', which describes how deleterious changes are sugar-coated as acceptable after a little psychological and physiological resistance in the beginning. The negative changes, no matter how small, cumulatively, eventuate in catastrophic outcomes.

It might sound odd to some that how a teacher of mine in the sixth grade brought home that smoking is injurious to health. He used to say that when we take the first ever drag at a cigarette, we cough out of choking. It's our body's natural reaction to anything extraneous and harmful. But with our adamant insistence on feeding our physiological systems upon deleterious elements, our body and mind yield in and accept the carcinogens present in the smoke of a cigarette. When these harmful elements accumulate stealthily in the body, sufficiently enough to pose a serious threat to our life, it becomes too late to escape their ambush.

This phenomenon of creeping normality is visible in its embodied form at the individual, departmental and state levels in our country. Our governance failures, economic instability, social regression and educational decline reflect in one form or another our oversight of the dereliction of duties and normalisation of abnormality. Corruption and malpractices face the least pushback; rather, they are accepted as the new normal. Psychologists call it habituation. Pricking of conscience is dulled by polemics that pious is he who never finds the opportunity of corruption, and that brain drain is better than brain in the drain.

Political analysts blame the corrosion of governance on the constitutional amendments which systematically undermine institutional independence. The erosion of judicial independence by the 26th Constitutional Amendment and the strangulation of media through the Prevention of Electronic Crimes (Amendment) Act 2025 have deleted the idea of accountability from our national consciousness. It nurtures the psyche of "Kon poochhta hey yahan?" (Who will hold us accountable?) That's why the most vulnerable institutions to corruption are exactly those vested with the responsibility of upholding the rule of law. It results in the piecemeal dismantling of effective governance in Pakistan.

The petering out of public outrage against stifling inflation represents another classic case of creeping normality. Accepting shrinkflation and greedflation meekly is the default outcome of zero resistance, even at the ideological level. It all normalises the status quo. We turn into accomplices, not by choice but by surrender.

Students often ask the question if any uprising similar to the ones we have seen in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh is possible in the near future. My answer, pardon my pessimism, is a resounding NO. We are constantly being conditioned to accepting malignancy and abnormality as normality. The public agitation is lulled into slumber methodically by inflation fatigue. The political dissent is defanged by the dictatorial hold of the alien powers.

To resist this resignation requires first recognising the phenomenon and then offering whatever resistance we are capable of. Saint Augustine said: "Habit, if not resisted, soon becomes necessity."