While taking an evening shower, I was listening to a lecture by Professor Jiang Xueqin, a Chinese educator, writer, and former journalist whose videos on history and geopolitics have recently gained prominence on YouTube. I then had a shower thought that I then put into writing six hours later, which meant it was quite the epiphany since I didn’t easily forget about it. Maybe I just came up with a renewed purpose for pro wrestling.
Kayfabe is the staged reality made to appear real to an audience, originating from pro wrestling. From that came the concept of kayfabrication, coined by the American venture capitalist and social commentator Eric Weinstein. Kayfabrication is defined as:
“The process by which real activities that are dangerous and/or boring tend to get sanitized by the participants so that they can present an as-if product to those outside of the structure, not themselves get hurt, and continue to make money off of it.”
This can then be applied to many other facets of society. Politics and current events are very much “kayfabricated” in this way — things that are consequential and sometimes even dangerous, yet boring most of the time. I then realized that kayfabrication is similar to another real-world concept — hypernormalization.
Kayfabe as a Model for Analyzing Current Events
The concept of kayfabe is a mental model I’ve been seeing more use for in recent years. I’m obviously biased since I’m currently a producer and contributor for a pro wrestling promotion here in the Philippines. While most would find it absurd that “fake fighting” can be of any relevance to whatever is happening in the real world, it’s precisely what various thinkers and pundits have noticed as prevalent in this day and age.
When asked a question by the publication Edge in 2011 about what scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit, Eric Weinstein answered with kayfabe. He described pro wrestling as an “unlikely research environment” and a “rigorous system” that is “capable of tying together an altered reality of layered falsehoods in which absolutely nothing can be assumed as it appeared.” I’ve previously talked about this idea of his in this 2023 blog post.
According to economic commentator Kyla Scanlon, kayfabe explains the current trade war between China and America, calling it WWEconomics. She also coined the term “vibecession” to describe the disconnect between official economic reports and the public’s negative perception of the economy. The AI bubble holding the American (and even global) economy up while worsening inflation and a dismal labor market keep common people strained.
The way the economy tends to be reported can be divorced from people’s everyday reality. We now have what’s being called a “K-shaped economy” — where the haves keep going up, while the have-nots keep going down. Much of the disconnect boils down to the powers-that-be hyping up the economy as better than ever, despite plenty of anecdotal evidence to the contrary.
While it’s rather simplistic to say Donald Trump — a one-time on-screen character and member of the WWE Hall of Fame — is employing kayfabe in his speeches, it’s not that far from how his good friend Vince McMahon ran the WWE during his last years as its head before his untimely exit — out of touch and out of his mind.
However, kayfabe is not just making things up, but also shaping the perception of reality.
What is Hypernormalization?
A phenomenon coined by Russian-born anthropologist Alexei Yurchak, hypernormalization describes the condition of late-Soviet society. It was later depicted in a 2016 BBC documentary by English filmmaker Adam Curtis, who is also known for The Century of the Self (2002).
In a hypernormalized society like the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the people knew the ideology was empty, the state knew the people knew, but they all proceeded as normal since no one could imagine life outside of it. The charade remained so until the system finally collapsed.
We’re seeing a similar thing going on today. Democracy feels increasingly moot as unworthy candidates who are obviously in the pockets of the rich elite get elected into office, yet the system persists as if it’s working as intended. The wealth gap is widening and people are being worked to the bone with decreasing ability to improve their living conditions.
The conditions of hypernormalization are as follows:
Universal Awareness of Falseness
We know the official story is fake. The officials know they know. Everyone still plays along.
Elections happen because they have to. We’re made to choose between a preordained selection of evils, and we each pick who we think is the lesser evil. We vote because we fear the possibility of the greater evil prevailing over our lesser evil. It has then become a democracy out of spite, a perpetual battle between evils.
It’s not like choosing between Coke and Pepsi. There’s no zero sugar version here.
We know social media influencers are mostly fake — they’re personas; alter egos of people posting content for profit. However, we still find ourselves stuck to our phones, continuing to give them power and authority over us, as long as we’re entertained and pacified.
We still compare ourselves to them, even if the lives they flaunt are kayfabe.
Money itself has no intrinsic value. Cash is universally known as arbitrary paper and numbers on a screen. The economy resembles a Ponzi scheme. We know financial net worth doesn’t correspond to human value, yet we still deify billionaires who don’t care for us.
Even if it has no real value in the grand scheme of things, we still seek to accumulate money.
No Imaginable Alternative
Even if everyone knows the system is broken, they’d rather maintain it than replace it.
While elections are indeed seen as corrupt, they’re still performed as the sacred ritual of democracy. While people may no longer believe in democracy as a functional system, they cannot imagine not living in a democratic country.
They can’t just give up on “being free”, even if society is becoming less and less so.
Social media is no longer just a part of the Internet; it has become the Internet. While there’s a growing movement for “going offline” in response to the harmful effects of being “terminally online”, you can scarcely find yourself in a public setting without seeing people glued to their phones even outside idle moments.
What if someone messaged you something important? What if something crazy just happened?
Money as it is now — fiat currency, created through fractional reserve banking — is a monolith whose shadow we can’t escape from. Even if you choose to live off–grid, you may still need supplies and perhaps some technology that can only be purchased with money, unless you wish to live like a mountain hermit.
Everything except bare necessities is a money sink, but we just can’t live without them.
Behavior Replaces Belief
We continue to participate not out of conviction, but out of necessity, convenience, or fear.
While living in a democratic society continues to get increasingly harder, we’re expected to do our part and contribute our share. We watch the powers-that-be skim off the top and get fat with the fruits of our labor while we’re expected to wait for the remainder to trickle down. We live as batteries, as sources of energy to be drained dry, then discarded when empty.
The least we hope for are smoother traffic and working facilities, yet we make do with waste.
Even if we want to look away, few of us can ever stay out of social media. Everyone else is there, and we have to be a part of it. We have the lingering urge to follow, communicate, and express. While the platforms force feed us advertisements in our feeds, we’re there to represent ourselves with our profiles like uniforms.
As you may be reading this on your phone right now, try putting it down and staying away.
We need money to house ourselves, keep the lights on, eat three square meals a day, and pay the necessary taxes. We then get to buy a smartphone to keep ourselves content and whatever else we’re told we should have to live a “complete” life. If you lack the cash, you can “buy now, pay later”. We incur interest, not only to what we owe, but also to physical and mental health.
Nowadays, you’re considered lucky if you’re not buried in debt or tightening your belt.
Hypernormalized Kayfabe or Kayfabricated Hypernormal?
That shower thought I had of parallels between kayfabrication and hypernormalization led me into this rabbit hole of realized fiction and fictionalized reality. It wasn’t simply just about deceiving people, but how those people choose to respond to that subterfuge.
While they do have their similarities, there is a crucial difference between kayfabrication and hypernormalization. Kayfabe can exist without disbelief, hypernormalization cannot.
What is hypernormalized today isn’t just kayfabe, but a form of meta-kayfabe or managed reality. It’s how pro wrestling is in this day and age, no longer just a simulation of sanctioned fighting, but a simulacrum with its own rules, tropes, and alternate reality.
Modern pro wrestling doesn’t ask you to believe the fighting is real. It’s more about the performance of belief.
We can get into kayfabe, experience the show, and hopefully leave feeling like we got our money’s worth. We can’t leave hypernormalization for it’s everywhere around us.
Kayfabe is intentional performance; hypernormalization is structural paralysis.
We can be told the story of how Brock Lesnar beat the Undertaker’s Wrestlemania streak and act shocked by it, and life goes on.
We can be told by our leaders that the economy is just fine, even if we’re struggling to make ends meet, and life still goes on.
They’re the same, yet different as well. You can say all hypernormal is kayfabe, yet not all kayfabe is hypernormal.
Kayfabe is actively produced and managed, while hypernormalization emerges when belief is dead yet ritual remains.
Much like pro wrestling, the 21st century world is in a state of meta-kayfabe. Everyone is in on it, everything is ironic, and we are all exhausted. Yet we still boo, cheer, argue online, defend our favorite promotion, and pretend stakes still exist. Without stakes, all that remains is choreography and commerce. That’s hypernormalization.
Hypernormalization is when a lie stops being believed, but never stops being lived. It’s when bullshit becomes the operating system.
Conclusion
Kayfabe in pro wrestling ceased to be about deception the moment newspapers decided to stop publishing results of matches in their sports pages long ago. People already knew they were “worked”, wherein results were fixed and the “fighting” was “made safe”, yet pro wrestling thrived on its own. But if pro wrestling is not your cup of tea, you can choose not to watch it.
You can’t simply choose to leave a hypernormal society. Hypernormalization is not really about deception. It’s the collective entrapment in a fiction everyone recognizes as fiction, yet cannot escape. You can stop watching pro wrestling; you can’t stop living in this civilization. Hypernormalization is more insidious than propaganda and more stable than lies.
Lies can be debunked, but hypernormalization shrugs it off and persists.
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