.jpg)
Quid De Cogitatione? Glenn Rose
“Mass psychogenic illness, also called mass sociogenic illness … or mass hysteria, involves the spread of illness symptoms through a population where there is no infectious agent responsible for contagion. It is the rapid spread of illness signs and symptoms affecting members of a cohesive group … whereby physical complaints that are exhibited unconsciously have no corresponding organic causes that are known.” ‒ Wikipedia M.P.I. is most often associated with a “cohesive group” such as in an office setting or a clique of teenagers who have come to feel sick and/ or nauseous with no apparent pathogen being detectable.
However, it’s not only associated with a physical illness. It can also lead to a social breakdown, a “mass hysteria” that leads to believing and acting on rumors and fears, frequently irrationally.
Historically things like the “Salem Witch Trials” in colonial Massachusetts, the “Hammersmith Ghost” hysteria in 1803 London, and the “Great Fear” that gripped France the summer of 1789 at the start of the French Revolution are examples of this psychological disorder.
More recently Orson Welles’ 1938 radio presentation of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” had many listeners who missed the opening explanation panicked by a fictional invasion from Mars.
Even today we have a plethora of whirlwind mass hysterias blown up by conspiracy theorists looking for attention.
Epidemic hysteria can be traced back to the ancient Greek storyteller, Aesop (620-560 B.C.) whose fable of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” has been handed down intact. Of course that little shepherd boy-turned-conspiracy-theorist was ultimately the victim of his own doings!
Likewise the story of Chicken Little and the mass hysteria that “the sky was falling” has survived over the centuries mainly intact, often with Chicken Little and his foolish followers being the victims of an enterprising fox!
(The coincidence of the benefactor of that cozening being a fox is not lost on me.)
Most recently the incident of “New Jersey’s urban skies being filled with ‘mysterious’ drones” captured nationwide attention on all the news outlets for maybe a week before drifting out of the public’s attention span.
Personally, I think that bit of mass hysteria can be traced to someone going outside and, for the first time, noticing a crowd of what is normal airline traffic over what is one of the country’s busiest air routes. Once alerted to this nighttime activity, others started looking up, and, for their first time, noticed the huge number of lights flying hither and yon or circling in landing patterns!
That traffic ‒ airplanes ‒ has been there for decades and getting more stacked up. Nonetheless, someone said “Drones” and the hysteria was on.
If that “someone” had thought flying saucers first we’d have had another War of the Worlds in New Jersey!
We need to step back at moments like these and rationally reassess the situation, looking for mistakes of reasoning, lack of tangible proofs, and the prejudices of the provocateur.
The unscrupulous sales barkers hawking their wares, whether products or politics, are banking on their “marks” being impulsively swept into an hysteria of believing and buying anything.
People prone to M.P.I. are easily manipulated by the fallacy of “an appeal to ignorance.” This fallacy is when an advocate argues that his/ her conclusion must be true, because there is no evidence against it. The hidden trap in this “reasoning” is it wrongly shifts the burden of proof away from the one making the claim!
In November we experience two creations of the marketeers, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, two carefully orchestrated events to whip up the “cohesive group” of shoppers into a frenzy of buying.
The second weekend of this February will revolve around The Super Bowl. Those promoters are whipping up the “cohesive group” of football fans, making a simple football game a cultural event for America and then reach out to other countries in an effort to make sure they don’t miss this “iconic” event.
They’ll sell those collective eyes to their sponsors for big bucks. And then declare to another “cohesive group” the entertainment value of the commercials themselves. It will be must see TV!
I confess I’ll be there in front of my television for that hysteria, particularly if my Washington (erstwhile) Redskins are in it! But not for the commercials.
I’m not a member of that cohesive group!
Unfortunately there are more sinister uses of the M.P.I. phenomenon. In the last century we had two megalomaniacal individuals who twisted nascent democracies into autocratic police states by inflaming fears and prejudices and creating mass hysteria in opposition to imagined and invented crises. That led to a disastrous war that ended in crippling defeats for both.
Jonathan Swift wrote, “Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it; so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late.”
Those of us who treasure honesty must be diligent and prepared to champion the truth no matter the circumstances and make sure it arrives in time.
