John Sweeney - RBC Pro: "The global collapse was provoked by a dozen people"

American futurist, consultant, co-editor of the World Future Review: A Journal of Strategic Foresight. He has worked with numerous private and public entities, including the Asian Development Bank, the Joint Research Center of the European Commission, and various UN agencies. He cooperates with business clients through Duke Corporate Education, one of the world's leading structures in the field of education for top managers. He worked at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and was Associate DIRECTOR of the Center for the Study of Post-Normal Politics and the Future in London from 2014-2018. Sweeney is now a senior fellow at Westminster International University in Tashkent and a visiting lecturer at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University.

— In 2014-2018, you were Deputy Director of the Center for the Study of Post-Normal Politics and the Future in London. Was the world post-normal even before the covid-19 epidemic?

Postnormal is a concept related to the problem of the very idea of ​​normality. There is nothing normal in the world. We design what we consider adequate. The feeling of normality arises only in certain periods and in certain places. There is also the concept of artificially created normality, for example, we teach children to brush their teeth, to follow the rules of the road. That is, we create certain norms and force them to act in accordance with them, because we believe that they have a certain meaning. The idea of ​​the postnormal is connected with the fact that a lot of new and completely incomprehensible things happen at once, so that the idea of ​​normality becomes inapplicable, loses its usefulness. Postnormality as an idea was formed in 2010, although, for example, postnormal science appeared much earlier, in the 1980s, as an attempt to look at doing science a little differently. And now we apply it to the study of society. The main concepts of the current era are complexity, contradictions and chaos.