Who's normalizing it?

I have exactly zero control over what these people do. They're gonna do what they're gonna do, and I have fuck all to do with it.

And don't tell me we have influence en masse. If that were true, then this stuff wouldn't be happening. Quite the opposite, clearly most people don't want to look past the smoke and mirrors for the stuff they're hyped about. (We're all susceptible to this kind of thing).

A quote from 230+ years ago kind of sums it up nicely:

Happy will it be if our [decisions] should be directed by a judicious estimate of our true interests, unperplexed and unbiased by considerations not connected with the public good. But this is a thing more ardently to be wished than seriously to be expected.

He's talking about public good, but you could insert any subject, eg. Perspective on a sales presentation (all of them are lies, to greater and lesser degrees).

I'm sure I could find similar quotes from the Stoics (~1000 years ago), Sun Tzu (~1900 years ago) or even Hammurabi (~3800 years ago), showing this ain't new. It's part of human nature.

Liars gonna lie, telling myself I can change that is just delusion, which gets me nowhere.