A transition towards a new state of balance (“new normal”) requires intermediate changes – which we usually feel to be changes for the worse. And we oppose them. A behaviour shared with the old, wise Mother Nature. Nothing changes until it really has to. In a similar way, the social need for inertia is so big that real crises, wars, and great catastrophes need to happen in order for something to really change. For ‘new normalities’ to emerge. Normalities that would really differ from all previous ones, differing from each other like capitalism differs from feudalism or democracy differs from fascism. There is no new normal so far. And the pandemic is not making it come into being.
All studies of our behaviour during the pandemic reveal the age-old paradox according to which the more things change, the more things stay the same. Politicians in Poland, the US, the UK, and France alike all pose as guardians of their nations, giving thoughtful speeches and announcing subsequent lockdowns, caring little about the opinion of societies or scientists, treating the pandemic as yet another weapon to aim at the opposition. They haven’t grown wiser or become more united thanks to the pandemic.
Studies conducted by our mixed KU and UW team, “Business in the Times of a Pandemic”, have consistently been showing since April that the pandemic doesn’t have any major impact on business or management. Some are doing better, others – worse (some sectors have been hit really hard, but they are few), and organisations are managed as usual – with more online operations, though. Managers, in turn, act and manage as if their employees, locked inside their homes, often with their families, were still in the office. But they’re not.
Studies carried out by sociologists have shown that the changes taking place during the pandemic are paradoxical and often mutually excluding – one accelerates, another – slows down. Traditionalism speeds up next to modernity, inequalities see united communities emerge.
So there’s no ‘new normal’ after all. We’re dealing with the ‘old normal’, systematically modified and mutated, but mostly on the surface.
There are new technologies (large-scale e-commerce, online work), borrowed old political solutions expected to be obsolete by now (fascism, populism, nationalism), and sometimes there’s something strange, something blue. We can say that the new normal is like the old saying about a bride. Always different and always the same, wearing something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.
The text is part of the publication "The New Normal. Reality in the times of the global Covid-19 pandemic. A commentary by the faculty of Kozminski University".
