Alejandro A. Tagliavini *
Among the silly things that become fashionable – and last as long as a shooting star – now the «New Normal» is emerging. Wikipedia tells that, to an article published in 2008 in Bloomberg News, its authors Rich Miller and Matthew Benjamin called it «Post-Subprime Economy Means Subpar Growth as New Normal in U.S.«
Then, the investment fund PIMCO, in early 2009, used the same expression to warn that the return to the situation prior to the 2007-2008 financial crisis would be complex and uncertain. In 2010, Mohamed El-Erian, of PIMCO, declared that «our use of the term was an attempt … (to show) that the crisis (was not) a mere superficial wound … on the contrary, the crisis has penetrated deeply». Since then, the expression has been replicated by numerous media.
Starting in 2012, China’s economy began to show a marked slowdown, with growth rates going from double-digit figures to around “moderate” 7%, in 2014 when the Secretary General of the Communist Party, Xi Jinping, declared that China was entering a «new normal» precisely to justify the decline due to less openness to the free market economy.
Thus, deep down he was warning that a turning point was beginning in the economic opening initiated by Deng Xiaoping at the same time that he defended Marxism (Maoism), and increased the cult of his personality, to «understand and transform the world». And within this «New Normal», indeed, are the forced quarantines and the repression of democratic attempts in Hong Kong.
As Antonio Imízcoz points out, it is a new neo-language term, from the dictionary invented by the Orwell Big Brother dictatorship. What do they want to sell us? continues Imízcoz. Well, nothing is further from what you and I understand by normality … The «new normal» is going to consist in that we can only do what they say, when they say and how they say. And, as Agustín Etchebarne says, «it is easy to be a communist in a free country, the difficult thing is to be free in a communist country».
Now, as I have already said in previous columns, “Whenever there is a cause outside beings that forces them to execute what is contrary to their nature or their will, it is said that… they do by force what they do… This will be… the definition of violence … «, wrote Aristotle. Thus, according to Tomás de Aquino «Violence is directly opposed to the voluntary as well as to the natural» and for this reason Etienne Gilson wrote as early as 1989 that for Aquinate «The natural and the violent are mutually exclusive … reciprocally.»
In other words, violence can never have a natural result. If the «new normal» will be rules coercively – using the state monopoly of violence – imposed against the will of the people, they will simply violate human nature and, sooner rather than later, will be overcome. As the “social distancing”, when during all our life, out of common sense, we know that humans are necessarily sociable, and that kisses and hugs are great, human gifts. Not to mention sex without which humanity would not exist.
In short, it is only a matter of time before we return to what we have to be, normal and non-humanoid people, robots directed from the central command.
* Senior Advisor at The Cedar Portfolio and Member of the Advisory Council of the Center on Global Prosperity, de Oakland, California
Alejandro A. Tagliavini 
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