Creeping normality

Creeping normality or death by a thousand cuts refers to the way a major change can be accepted as the normal situation if it happens slowly, in unnoticed increments, when it would be regarded as objectionable if it took place in a single step or short period. Examples would be a change in job responsibilities or a change in a medical condition.

Example

American scientist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond has invoked the concept (as well as that of landscape amnesia) in attempting to explain why in the course of long-term environmental degradation, Easter Island natives would, seemingly irrationally, chop down the last tree:

Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. By the time the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, palms had long since ceased to be of economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the felling of the last small palm.

Diamond, Easter's End

See also

• Principiis obsta
• Shifting baseline
• Boiling frog – creeping normality metaphor
• Camel's nose – creeping normality metaphor
• "First they came..."
• Foot-in-the-door technique
• Moving the goalposts
• Overton window
• Slippery slope – an argument, sometimes fallacious
• Salami tactics
• Technological change § Technological change as a social process