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Normalcy Bias

Everything is fine. It's always been fine. It will always be fine. Right up until it isn't.

Normalcy bias is the tendency to assume that because things have worked a certain way in the past, they will continue working that way. Your brain treats the status quo as the default state of reality — not as one possibility among many. This makes people dangerously slow to recognise when systems are failing, when institutions are eroding, or when the ground is shifting beneath them.

This isn't stupidity. It's a deeply wired survival shortcut. Processing every potential threat would paralyse you, so your brain filters out signals that don't match your model of "normal." The problem is that truly abnormal events don't send polite warnings. Financial systems don't announce they're about to collapse. Democracies don't hold a press conference to say they're sliding into something else. The warning signs are there, but normalcy bias turns them into background noise.

Nassim Taleb calls these blind spots the setup for "black swans" — rare, high-impact events that people insist were unpredictable, even though the signs were visible all along. The signs were visible. People just couldn't believe what they were seeing, because it didn't fit what they expected.

The most dangerous sentence in any crisis is: "That could never happen here."

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