I don't know much about any of the psychological uses of the word hysteria. Freud became famous for having a way to treat the hysterical behaviors that were found in American soldiers returning from the First World War.
What I'm talking about is group hysteria. I have seen it myself on many occasions in both physical form and in its social form.
The wildest group hysterical population I was ever part of was the night when Dan White, a man who deliberately murdered the San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk (both friends of mine), was sentenced to five years in prison. 25,000 people around me at Civic Center went on a rampage, burning police cars and destroying anything that could be found from trash cans to windows of retail stores.
There are perpetual social hysterias as opposed to physical group hysteria. An example of a social hysteria is prevalent right now in which hundreds of millions of people believe in global warming despite factual evidence that it doesn't exist. That is social hysteria. Nothing can convince a person who is within the hysteria that it doesn’t exist.
The number of such social hysterias is vast. I recall one in the 1980s in which Americans universally believed that hundreds of thousands of children were being kidnapped annually. FBI data showed that the correct number was 110... nationwide.
Shortly after this there was another social hysteria where tens of millions of Americans believed that young kindergarten children were being terrorized by satanic cults. Dozens of innocent teachers and administrators went to prison on the testimony of six-year-olds.
There was a subsequent decade of ‘recovered memories’ in which thousands of women remembered being sexually molested by adults. There was never any evidence to corroborate these reports.
There is no question in my mind that each one of these phenomena was real. People really believed in these as factual. Despite it being contradicted by the evidence and solid data.
I'm sure I am part of some social hysteria right now.
I have slowly come to believe that social hysteria, by groups of people, a perception of the world, that is not amenable to challenge by data, tradition or fact, is a standard way a large part of the human mind works.
It works this way daily, monthly and yearly. It works this way on a small scale among dozens of people and on a large-scale among millions. It is not a separate mental event that can be designated with the words ‘social hysteria’. It is the way the human mind works.
Some day when we know more about the mind I expect us to find that it has substructures that are based on vital human passions that are not amenable to any form of examination. The only solution is the Jewish-America model.
The Jewish model is the multi-generational Talmud. In the Talmud, many generations think about and dispute any issue that requires thought and rational consideration. What finally gets written down has survived generations of thinking and examination.
The American model is in the separation of powers that assumes that hysteria will sweep the population regularly and the best way to deal with it is to create different representative systems, judiciary, Senate the House and to allow different lengths of time for their processes to work. Hopefully sufficient time to resolve an issue will subdue the most extreme and dangerous of the social hysterias that arise.
Both the Jewish and the American model of social hysteria assume that the only solution is to wait it out.
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(* The lower photo is the police looking for the underground room where children at the McMartin Kindergarten said they were sexually molested and tortured. They didn't find anything but dirt.)