To the editor:
Creeping normality is one of those quiet forces that reshapes our lives while we’re not looking. It rarely shouts. It whispers. It nudges. And by the time we notice, the landscape has changed beneath our feet.
We know this in our personal lives. The extra pound or two that shows up on the bathroom scale each year. The clutter in the basement that grows box by box until it feels overwhelming. The way we call a friend less often, until silence becomes the new normal. None of these shifts begin as crises. But over time, those small changes accumulate into something weighty.
The same phenomenon plays out in politics and society.
Democracies do not collapse in a day, they are eroded by degrees. Freedoms trimmed in the name of security. Cruel policies explained away as necessary. Lies repeated until they no longer shock us. And because each shift is incremental, we adjust. What once would have been intolerable begins to feel ordinary.
Václav Havel, the playwright who became president of a free Czechoslovakia, understood this all too well. Living under a communist regime built on propaganda, he wrote that the greatest danger was not simply the lie itself, but the way citizens learned to live within it. When people repeat slogans they don’t believe, or look the other way when truth is twisted, they become complicit.
Normalizing lies, treating them as part of everyday life, is how authoritarianism survives.
We should take Havel’s warning seriously. In the United States today, lying has become a political strategy. We’ve watched leaders deny the results of an election they lost, call an attack on the Capitol “legitimate protest,” and repeat falsehoods so brazenly and so often that citizens grow numb. The danger is not only that leaders lie, but that we, the people, stop noticing. When we sigh and say, “That’s just politics,” we are already adjusting to the new normal.
History offers its warnings. The Roman Republic slid into dictatorship step by step. The Weimar Republic tolerated lies and extremism until they consumed the nation. In each case, creeping normality lulled citizens into acceptance. By the time the truth mattered most, it was too late.
But creeping normality works in both directions. Just as we can adapt downward, we can also adapt upward. We can insist on truth, however inconvenient. We can refuse to excuse cruelty or corruption, however loudly it’s justified. We can practice what Havel called “living in truth” – an act of resistance as powerful today as it was in his time.
The question before us, both personally and politically, is simple: will we notice the drift?
Because once we accept lies as the background noise of public life, democracy itself slips quietly away.
Jeff Pierpont
Walden
Jeff Pierpont
Jeff Pierpont is the interim minister at the Greensboro United Church of Christ while Ed Sunday-Winters is away on sabbatical.
