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Creeping normality or death by a thousand cuts is the way a major change can be accepted as the normal situation if it happens slowly, in unnoticed increments. The change would be regarded as objectionable if it took place in a single step or short period.

The phrase was coined by American scientist, Jared Diamond, in his 2005 book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. He had previously alluded to this theory while attempting to explain why in the course of long-term environmental degradation, Easter Island natives would, seemingly irrationally, chop down the last tree:"'I suspect, though, that the disaster happened not with a bang but with a whimper. After all, there are those hundreds of abandoned statues to consider. The forest the islanders depended on for rollers and rope didn't simply disappear one day--it vanished slowly, over decades.'"In his book, Diamond also refers to creeping normality as landscape amnesia.

Other uses
The term has also been used several times in conjunction with the increase of maternity patients who present as obese and overweight. In their research article, authors Wilkinson, Poad, and Stapleton posit that as the number of pregnant women who are clinically obese or overweight increases, the negative stigmatization decreases. Schmeid, et al, states that as doctors see more women of an unhealthy weight, they are less likely to advise healthy weight gain goals during pregnancy.

Antheaume and Barbelivien described the creeping normality that hinders businesses, causing them to not see subtle, negative shifts in the community around them. The authors state that owners of family businesses are likely to notice the small changes more quickly than a large corporation, however "detecting a problem is no guarantee of the ability to solve it".

In his thesis, Chon states that the increase in cybercrime fits the pattern for creeping normality. The number of websites involved in "hacking and cybercrime activities " has increased at a slow and steady pace, mostly below society's awareness.

Peter Ho referred to creeping normality in his four part IPS-Nathan lecture series in spring of 2017. In regards to several issues that Singapore is facing, he claims that "things get just a little bit worse each year than the year before, but not bad enough for anyone to notice ". One example is through climate change, where he states that the country did not realize that an increase of flooding was caused by rising temperatures and not dirty drains as first suspected.

See also[edit]
There are a number of related metaphors to creeping normality, including:


 * Boiling frog
 * Camel's nose
 * Gaslighting
 * Defeat in detail
 * Foot-in-the-door technique
 * Moving the goalposts
 * Overton window
 * Principiis obsta
 * Salami tactics
 * Shifting baseline
 * Slippery slope
 * Technological change as a social process
 * Tyranny of small decisions