Social psychosis: noun, a widely-spread mental disorder characterized by disconnection from reality which results in strange behavior in mass, often accompanied by a mass perception of stimuli (voices, images, sensations) and other hallucinations.
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Progressivism as a political movement is based on one overriding assumption: history is a long march toward a more sophisticated, rational, and all-round better existence. The problem is, it isn’t. There are fits and starts, technological improvements, yes, advances in science, yes, and well-meaning attempts, but not all “improvements” are improvements. Some are a product of hysteria and periods of intense social psychosis that represent a step backwards to our more atavistic side. Our bestial nature never went away, and four years in college classrooms won’t eradicate it. We are probably in another one of those spasms of flight from reality.
Don’t expect our recent crop of elected leaders to appeal to the better angels of our nature. They haven’t been especially good at filtering the nonsense. Indeed, some have stoked it. President Obama was famous for admonishing his opponents for being on the “wrong side of history”. It’s the same stilted form of thinking. What he shows is that he is fully marinated in the same “march of history” stuff that warped the minds of Karl Marx, Marcuse, and today’s Ta-Nehisi Coats, Ibram X. Kendi, and Robin DiAngelo of critical race theory fame. The last three took Marcuse, and by extension Marx, to give us another one of those iron laws of history that handcuffed their minds, as it did many of their 20th-century predecessors who constructed some of the worst tyrannies to the unremitting disgrace of humankind.
The current phase of frenzy was 30+ years in coming. From the child sex-abuse witchhunts of the late 1980’s to the mid 1990’s through the nexus of the election of Donald Trump and aftermath, the resurgence of a revised Marxism and its manifestation in street violence and indoctrination into nearly every corner of the culture, to our current COVID panic, we seem to have lost our marbles. Events can be a catalyst, but so can personalities. These episodes can be linked because they have so much in common: they are manifestations of a social psychosis.
One factor boosting this mental dysfunction is an unfortunate byproduct of the ubiquity of electronic media in the form of tv in an earlier era and today’s internet. Thoughts and paranoias move at light speed. Today, social media and our instantaneous interconnectedness intensify an already powerful stimulant. Thanks to the ever-present electronic social communion, the unease spreads like wildfire, taking form in loose theories, unquestioning faith in media-grabbing public personalities, radical activism, and government coercion.
What sparks these episodes? The angst can be rooted in a little-noticed alteration in family chemistry. The shift from the social ideal of a single breadwinner to two working parents may have elicited a broad anxiety about the care of children, a lingering discomfort waiting for a trigger. The trigger came in the 1983-4 McMartin Preschool case in Huntington Beach, Ca. Child-talk to public officials, and that common staple of our times, the degreed “expert”, took the banter of children to place seven adults in the dock. It took six years of litigation to exonerate the defendants, at the expense of ruined reputations, the lingering emotional scars of the innocent at the hands of public officials and their lackeys, and millions of dollars of public and private money.
The outcome of the McMartin Preschool case didn’t staunch the jihad. As it was working its way out, the crusade waited for an avatar in the person of Dade County DA Janet Reno (future AG for Bill Clinton) to concoct a formula to turn the child-talk into convictions. The Miami Method, as it was called, relied on university-trained child therapists to extract the stories, physical evidence that was spuriously associated with the tales, and multiple witnesses in the form of children who went through the child-therapist mill. Three people would be railroaded – the Fusters and Grant Snowden – until Reno ran into 16-year-old Bobby Finjnje. He refused to plea-bargain, went to trial, found others who could expose the Method’s gross errors, and was exonerated. The fever broke in Miami.
It still raged elsewhere. In such far-flung places as Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, Texas, Washington State, Martinsville in Saskatchewan, Canada, and New Zealand, the illicit holy war persisted. Then, like magic, the hysteria disappeared by the mid-1990’s. Odd thing: fantastic tales of satanic rituals of sodomy and bestiality have a date-certain shelf life. Poof, it’s gone.
But the emotional virus was mutating below the surface.
Sometimes, the frenzy can grow out of other emerging socio-economic circumstances. Many have noticed the current divide in our country between the winners and losers in the new society emanating from the rise of our time’s latest edition of the global free market. Mind you, the global free market isn’t necessarily composed of free market societies. It’s just that all countries, whether free or unfree, are to be treated alike, no matter the impact on any one nation.
The winners in this brave new world are concentrated by geography. Urban centers became the epicenter of a new transnational commercial elite. They are concentrated in certain zip codes for work and residence. Allied to them are the elite prep schools and universities who help create and perpetuate an incestuous petri dish of culturally homogeneous elite social pools in these nodes.
What of the losers? They’re everywhere else. They reside in flyover country. They are found in places that have been caricatured in city-centered media as overrun with uncouth and ignorant oafs. For the beautiful people, they are the flotsam to be ignored on the way to the ascendancy of the “better” people, meaning them.
The bifurcation seldom ends well. If it persists, and resentment simmers, it won’t take much for a media-savvy personage, speaking in the right tone and tenor, to lead a counter-revolution. In 2015, that person arrived in the form of Donald Trump. He was combative, seemingly spoiling for a fight at every turn. He spoke for the forgotten, for the people who bore the brunt of the new prejudices and bigotry of the narrow set of elites coalescing at the commanding heights of the culture.
Remarkably, he won in 2016 and spent 4 years at war. The nouveau culture’s self-anointed vanguard elite spent 4 years at war with him and everyone associated with him, including his supporters, which culminated in the 2020 election and Trump’s single-minded crusade to undermine the results at the expense of everyone else in his party. The January 6 capitol riot erupted as 800-1,000 of his enthusiasts stormed Congress.
What did the party get for all the tumult? It’s a mixed bag. The Republican Party managed to squeak by with some victories down ballot as well as the loss of two Senate seats in Georgia.
What makes people perform unspeakable acts, such as rampage into the capitol, based on the drumbeat of an influential figure? The well-spring is the anxiety from stressed lives that was evident in prior witchhunts. Sometimes the underappreciated rally to an avatar who stylistically gives voice to their resentments. It’s not his ideas so much as it is his demonstrative qualities, the pugnaciousness. He’s deeply admired for these personality traits, not his brain. At this point, the movement reflects rabid fandom more than an exaltation of possible statesmanship.
The zealotry of the fan is evident in Trump’s famous line from the 2016 campaign trail:
“The polls — they say I have the most loyal people … I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”
Judging by the shenanigans on January 6, maybe not going so far as to turn a blind eye to murder, still, his most rabid followers would become a mob for him.
Though, it’s not as if Trump supporters had nothing to complain about as election day unfolded. The election laws in many places were contorted by partisan activism arising out of the urban/academic petri dish of our progressive jet-set. Standards of accountability were set aside in such a way as to get their bête noire, Trump. Legal, yes, in that no court has overturned the count. Disreputable, yes, in that nobody knows what happened in many locales when ballots were scattered in the mail, mysteriously made their way to a multitude of unsupervised drop boxes, and then on to their unobserved processing in counting rooms. Ballot harvesting was rampant in many places; honest verification was non-existent; and the vote-counting saga continued for weeks. Who wouldn’t at least scratch their heads at this circus?
The pandemic was the crisis too good to waste in order to make a hash of the election. It was used not only to create an election monster but, as it turned out, to introduce all-encompassing state control to a frightened populace. The pandemic proved to the nouveau elite an excellent opportunity to conduct a grand socio-political experiment testing the popular limits to a great expansion of government power.
Our ideological and social sorting by geography showed a distinct difference in submission to this new regime. An entire segment of our population, the urban part, who are routinely dependent on government services, have a preternatural tendency to accept authority, especially if it comes from the much-ballyhooed “expert”, many with the same credentials in tow as the influential residents in uptown high-rises and the outlying well-to-do ‘burbs. In other words, these new potentates have the additional advantage of being respected for having the same social qualifications as a sizeable portion of the governing coalition. Social comradery goes a long way in instilling fealty to “experts”.
The chief commodities of the “expert” are safety and a shield from risk. The notion of trade-offs – something is given up to get something else – is an alien concept to people who have lived their lives in the protective womb of uniformed and credentialed experts. Insulated from realities, citified people become easy marks for hysteria. The zero-risk myopia of administrative agencies, taken as the voice of God, can be easily transmuted into instances of personal bullying in the public square.
The true-believers’ public threats and denunciations for not wearing a mask in outings to the grocery store are not unusual.
The obsessive penchant for outdoor mask-wearing, even while strenuously exercising, and alone, is common. Being absolutely petrified about sending their children to school in an unthinking response to a threat that is smaller for the kids than the flu pre-COVID is a prevalent reaction. Mask-wearing became a totem of God’s mark of saintliness. All crazy, all unhinged.
The panic and hysteria show in polls. Rural areas are more hesitant in regards to COVID mitigations and more reluctant to get the vaccine. Urban areas, just the opposite. Yet, the vaccinated, the vast majority in municipalities, show a greater degree of fear about a return to normal and engagement in public activities than the unvaccinated. It’s not exactly a vote of confidence in the vaccine. Or, more importantly, is it evidence of something more troubling in the urban mind: a deeper, irrational dread of any risk not countenanced by the beloved “expert”? These people are naked on the barricades without their departments of public health, sanitation, public safety, transportation, urban planning, and water and power.
The strong sense of exposure in times of stress leads to anxiety and the anxiety leads to a population always on the brink of hysteria. It’s pure irrationality. COVID provides the latest example of a population pushed to the event horizon of public madness. Early on, prudence dictated strong measures till knowledge and treatments were discovered – not necessarily a vaccine. Within a few months, vulnerable populations were identified and treatments developed. While COVID isn’t the flu, it certainly is for a sizeable chunk of the population: the healthy and the young. Protective measures should have quickly focused on the aged and those suffering from chronic conditions. They should have been quarantined, not the whole of society in massive stay-at-home orders. It was a sledge hammer to fix a watch, and now we are paying the price.
For a people without a sympathy for risk, and in possession of an abject faith in the protective shield of the “expert” in government posts, they are extremely hesitant to leave the bubble of corseted “protections”. Their life will soon become as distorted as the late 19th-century female body after being bounded for hours by a corset. The mental and emotional capacities of self-reliance and confidence of urbanites will atrophy, like ladies’ abdominal muscles in a bygone era, after 18 months of universal mask-wearing, business closures, stay-at-home orders, social distancing, and distance-learning. The horror at the thought of cutting the apron string is palpable.
One of the unintended consequences of the smothering is that the isolation may have primed people on the emotional brink to fall headlong into fanaticism. Confined to Zoom and reluctant to venture outdoors, some were cramped in a prison of their own mind and pre-selected media preferences. In such a rarified and enclosed atmosphere, unacceptable ideas and actions may move into the realm of the acceptable. It’s a fused magazine of powder waiting for a spark. Enter George Floyd and Derek Chauvin.
The miscreants subsequently hitting the streets and passersby, and torching the downtowns, always a demographic speck, weren’t evidence of a popular uprising, but preposterous ideas, still preposterous, were starting to be taken seriously by our influential trend-setters. Big Everything – sports, media, Fortune 500 – began to sing a radical tune. Unable to prove actual racism, faculty-lounge extremists opted for mysticism. Amazingly, it caught on. The scientifically unprovable charges of systemic racism and the unscientific theorizing of critical race theory (CRT) were treated as physical realities on the order of the sun, wind, and earth. With their finger in the air of an artificial gale from a faculty-lounge wind machine, the culture’s hegemons repeated the chants of the new cult.
The normal check for sanity of broader social interactions in a normally functioning society were knee-capped. Normally, an ounce of good old-fashioned scientific skepticism would be enough to put the kibosh to the nonsense. In these times, not so fast.
CRT isn’t so much a real theory as it is a kind a Nicene Creed for race-hustlers. It starts with the conclusion – we’re a racist nation – and moves to condemnation – “systemic racism” and “white privilege”. It can’t be proven in any meaningful sense. The use of statistical disparities is “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” run amok. Racial statistical differences aren’t proof of much of anything, least of all a society who has it in for blacks. No tie can be made between the evidence – the variance in numbers – and the conclusion – systemic racism. The variances can be explained in many ways without “racism” ever rolling off your lips. It’s jump-to-conclusions time.
The hustler’s gambit of “equity” is simply a cover for vengeance. Those of lighter skin shades are expected to pony up with racially-based benefits till the numbers come up equal, in a statistically artificial state of “equity”. In a more rational time, this was good old-fashioned reverse racial discrimination, and patently and justly illegal. Not for today. Not in today’s climate of dysfunction-induced hyper-aggravation.
This isn’t progress. It’s a mania that happens so often that a person has to wonder if it is a built-in feature of the modern banality that we happen to call “progress”. Are we really that much better than the past’s socially psychotic behavior in the pogroms, witch trials, India’s anti-Muslim riots, the Ottoman’s second-class status for Christians, Rwanda’s Tutsi genocide, or today’s inner-city street thugs who routinely target Asians and anyone with a lighter complexion? There’s good reason to believe that the beast is always at the gates.
Jefferson’s faith in education as the cure-all is illusory. It can’t be if it is as corrupted as the malady it was meant to heal. Human failings are as persistent as is our willingness to believe in the unbelievable. They are everywhere, even in our “progress”.
RogerG