The era of the U.S.-established Pax Americana, which lasted 80 years, is over. If Europe, now lagging behind the U.S. and China in technology, wants to remain competitive, it needs a whole series of economic reforms, President Toomas Hendrik Ilves said.
I would like to begin today with a field that is quite far removed from the main subject of my lecture: social psychology. Psychologists — much later than writers — have identified a tendency in people whereby, despite the warning signs around them, they continue to believe that circumstances or their environment will never really change. Psychologists have given this phenomenon a name: the normalcy bias.
It is a psychological defense mechanism that leads people to underestimate danger or ignore the signs of impending disaster, mistakenly assuming that everything will continue as it always has. It is the brain’s built-in way of preventing panic and irrational behavior. Yet history is made up of unexpected change.
One of the best-known examples of the normalcy bias in politics comes from the 1980s. At the time, both the Soviet Politburo and CIA analysts in the United States believed that the Soviet Union’s military, economic and political situation was stable and, if not permanent, would remain unchanged for decades. Both were wrong. Completely.
Reality, however, can change remarkably quickly, as we saw between 1989 and 1991. It is not as though the signs were invisible — more and more Estonians recognized them even then. Yet Moscow, trapped in the illusion of normalcy bias, either failed to notice them or chose not to.
Author: Toomas Hendrik Ilves
Read more: ERR.EE
