The country is in an hysteric mood these days. I felt such a mood for the weeks before Jack Kennedy was assassinated. Both conservatives and Lefties are feeling the same mood. I don’t know how it will play out.
The problem for me is that I find no description or explanation of hysteria to be intelligible or substantial.
I suspect the problem is that hysteria is so obvious that we can’t see it.
I’ve been through many hysteria’s in my life. Some I recognized at the early stages. The hippy belief in the core goodness of people was an hysteria, as was the hippy belief in the purity of life ‘in the country’. In the 1980’s there was a national hysteria that children were being kidnapped on a massive scale. (The number of non-family kidnappings never changed; always about 110 kids per year in the U.S.) We then had an epidemic of kindergarten teachers accused of kidnapping kindergartners to participate in sexual satanic rituals. Dozens of people went to prison for this hysterical crime. In the 1990’s we had an epidemic of women (and a few gay men) who had recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse.
I call this the Dan White phenomenon. Dan White a former cop and San Francisco Supervisor, with premeditation, murdered the Mayor and fellow Supervisor, gay, Harvey Milk. He went looking for another supervisor who hid under her desk, Carol Ruth Silver. It was Carol who alerted me to the fact that the District Attorney was deliberating blowing the case on behalf of Dan White and the police department.
The afternoon Dan White was sentenced to 5 years in prison for the double first degree murder, I felt a sense of outrage and headed for City Hall. When I got there it was early evening and I joined a crowd of 40k to 60k other San Franciscans. It was a cross section of the City, not in anyway gay. The mood was ferocious. I helped turn over a few police cars, while a few others were set on fire. Everything within reach of the crowd for a radius of 5 blocks was broken, burned and destroyed. The police and firemen formed a self protection line and never moved for the next two hours while the crowd rampaged. There are no decent photos of the riots. The hysteria did not exempt any news photographers.
I suspect that humans are hardwired for hysteria. Our mind is a community organism. Which is why our vocabulary expands when we are conversing with a smart person. Our minds must also be able to synchronize with other people on a more massive scale. I suspect that it is an emotional connection that is the vehicle.
I don’t know any more than that at this point. Please chime in.