Waves of public hysteria

We seem particularly prone to these in the US.  The Germans tend to this as well.  "Welle." Is that the word in German?  

A few recent cases come to mind:

-The terrible fear of the end of civilized life that preceded the year 2,000.  

- The terrible fear of "the terrorists" that overwhelmed the country in the months after 9/11.  People hid out at home for weeks, refusing to go to work in places like the World Bank in Washington, DC.  People stared hostilely at each other on public transportation if there was anything unusual about a person's appearance.  "If you see something, say something."  Like a beard, perhaps

- The wave of insane trials in the 90s of the staff and owners of child day care centers for child molestation, satanic ritual, etc. on the basis of elicited testimony of three and four year olds.  A sample test question in court was "Is red heavier than yellow?"  Actual answer from a child witness - "Yes."  On the basis of such testimony many were sent to prison for long terms.  The public was quite happy with that.  No, the public was quite enthusiastic about it.

Now we have an MSM and social media induced madness over the death of St. George of Minnesota.  The craziness has led to successful mob demands for the destruction of historic monuments, toleration by business leaders of looting, and such whackiness as the proposed abolition of police forces and a reliance instead on the goodness of mankind.  The public, to include TeeVee executives have now meekly surrendered to the mob and are actually doing things like cancelling profitable programs that are about the police.  What are they going to do in the UK?  Half their programming seems to be about policing.  What will Her Majesty do if deprived of her favorite show, "Midsomer Murders?"

 pl  

Comments

[Diana Croissant]

The comparison I would make about Grant to another person--though a fictional person--is to Forrest Gump. (And Forrest Gump is the representative of my generation's Vietnam veterans: many guys called up by the turn of a dial.) Grant just seems to be a person who stumbled his way into fame. His father sent in his application to West Point and didn't tell him until the application had been accepted. The History Channel series made it clear that as a young boy others called him Useless Grant.

Having never lived near more sophisticated society myself, I understand that there are many people who just don't fit the mold, so to speak, of a person destined for greatness through "breeding' and because of his/her demeanor and whatever else makes a person catch everyone's respect. But..and there is always a "but"...sometimes, as Robert Frost wrote: "how hard it is to keep from being king when it's in you and in the situation."

I always, instead go to the Bible: "Time and chance happens to all."

Lincoln needed a general who would fight, and that general was Grant, despite his personal shortcomings.

Having grown up around horses, I liked that the series emphasized that he was an excellent horseman; and in the Civil War, that was a great advantage for a general. I understand people who are in "tune" with horses. My father was the one others brought their horses to when those horses were to be "broken" for riding. My older sister competed in barrel racing until she was 72. Then she gave away her gorgeous horse (who had some Seabiscuit blood in him) to a woman whom she judged would take care of him best and handle him best.

I'm always drawn to the unlikely winners. I would see that happen all the time as I taught about 225 students a year all those years in public schools. I'm referring to kids who end up doing something that surprises everyone since no one expects them to do it. (But, I do have to admit that in academics the valedictorian and salutatorian each year was an Asian kid.)

[Seneschal]

"Thank you and I consider myself Beige."

Come on, Babak... How convenient for you... You and I both know Iranians are neither 'beige' nor 'brown.' I'm reminded of the kind of 'white' people you were referring to in your earlier post who argue about whether or not Greeks are white or not. I might be able to tell the difference between a Persian and a Greek but I daresay many from outside those regions could not and, dim-witted Aryan(!)-identifying fantasists aside, we both know Greeks are 'white.' I'm also reminded of another tribe of 'whites' who conveniently shed that identity as and when it suits them. In all the years I've observed this committee, I never had you down as a member of team victimhood, Babak.

"Before living in the United States I never paid attention to race as a component of my identity - and I think that is also true in India."

There are those in the north of India who still consider themselves to be better than their southern 'brown' neighbours by virtue of their complexion. I may be wrong but I believe those northerners trace their ancestral heritage back to a certain empire that also took in your ancestral neck of the woods?

"But the United States is quite clearly a race-conscious society and she has taken that race-consciousness with her and spread it where she has gone."

With the first part I agree. Still, you're an educated fellow. Surely you can rise above it? Or have the God-haters sucked you in now too? Who seeks to profit from this discord? As for the second, the Americans had no need to export it. It already existed wherever you could care to look for it. It is a sickness within mankind and there is nothing particularly American about it.

"East Asians, certainly Korean and Japanese, in my experience, are also race-conscious societies but lacking US dominance, have not been the major cause of elevated levels of this consciousness - however false it might be, as the Western Diocletians."

Indeed they are. I've spent time among both and also with the Chinese or, I should say, the Han - I can't say I encountered many of the Chinese untouchables (aka non-Han) in my line of work.

For what it's worth, the well I drink from is in the east and I'm no supporter of the 'enlightened' mode of thought or the Athenaeum. Do you think the God-haters will spare me because I'm 'white?' No, Babak. They'll come for us all in the end...

"Tribalism is quite evident in Southern Persian Gulf, the way they treat non-Arabs - they are the biggest bigots around - probably right up there with Hindu Brahmins."

Yes, I've had the 'pleasure' of working with the gulfies. At least I was held in higher regard than the Indians (clerical workers), the Pakistani's (taxi drivers), the Bangladeshi's (construction fodder) and the Filipinos (maids). I guess you could call that a privilege.

My advice to you, Sir, is not to follow those lost souls into the desert. You and they are not on the same team.

[turcopolier]

Diana Criossanr

Forest Gump was an imbecile. Grant was nothing like that.

[Mark Logan]

Diana,

I think Grant's problem was he was unwilling to play the games the other officers played to advance through the officer ranks in the peacetime army. His main "shortcoming" being he didn't particularly care what others thought of him. A shortcoming common among those who insist on doing their own thinking.

[Babak makkinejad]

Sensechal

Of course they are all wrong and misguided.

Fermi went to see the Secretary of the Navy (in regards to the Atom Bomb) and the sargent there went to and told the Secretary, "There is a Dago here to see you."

And then there were Armenians who were considered as "Darkies" by millions of people in the United States.

Of course those were all misguided and benighted people but their racialist fakeries did not prevent those fakeries from materially and spiritualy harming others.

I normally can tell the difference between Greeks and Iranians, they are generally lighter and the men more frequently more handsome than Iranians.

My desination of myself as Beige is just an attempt to distinguish my physical features from, say, an Irishman. He would walk to his mail box outside of his house to pickup his mail and summer sun of Chicago would burn the ridge of his nose.

In the United States, race was also and has been mixed up with Religion. One has to be a Protestant of some sort to be considered White. The epitome of it is visible among American Mormons, when they meet a Black or Brown Mormon and they are just shocked!

I think, at some point, likely after Renaissance, Western Diocletian people moved to a mental position that they considered marriage to non-European people to be akin to sacrilege.

Had Jefferson married Sally Henning, that act would have destroyed him socially. Who knows, it would have obliterated his intellectual legacy as well.

Muslims were never so, they married into races all over the world and thus transmitted their culture and civilization to Africans (Sahel) and Javanese.

Among Diocletians and among Muslims or Orientals, we are encountering civilizational patterns that are quite old and thus that much difficult to alter.

Yes, in India, popular culture and Bollywood actors and actresses from the North are considered handsomest. I think Malialis and Telugu are also quite attractive people. It must be the lighter skin complexion of the Northerners.

All of this, I find amusing.

[doug]

Been going on a long time. Charles MacKay said it well:

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”

[LJ]

Now that rioting is now officially a "thing," I have for some time feared that it will be escalated to heights we can not yet imagine. More specifically, having watched the Hong Kong "freedom" rioters at work sponsored by our own State Department and their color revolutions operatives, I have wondered if those methods will be repatriated. Now this:
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/09/hong-kongs-far-right-us-politicians-crush-black-lives-matter/?fbclid=IwAR2cOuEF4PRKHttiRs1TegQZw7z3VsmMoHZbkgQBeNmeYWYBzRkgzMy6N6Q

[Seán]

Yes, indeed. If the 19th century Glaswegian journalist, Charles Mackay, were to be writing his 1841 monograph, " Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds," today, it would run to at least a dozen volumes. Some things never change.

[Keith Harbaugh]

Babak wrote above:
"One has to be a Protestant of some sort to be considered White."

I have lived in America since the 1940s, and I must say that comment is stunningly ignorant.
There certainly is a group called, very reasonably, the WASPs,
but that is just a proper subset of the white population.

Examples of prominent non-Protestant, but Christian, white Americans would include John F. Kennedy, his relatives, Patrick Buchanan, and Kevin B. MacDonald, not to mention the host of this blog.
Would any of them be considered non-white?
That is a laughable thought.

[A.I.S.]

"Panik-Welle" or "Hysterie-Welle" would be the german expression.

I also think it is quasi religious. The religion is "white guilt". I find it a pretty obnoxiously stupid one, which will produce far less in terms of artistic value then any actual religion.

As far as racism goes, it is an offshoot of the pretty universal concept of xenophobia which is a thing nearly everywhere because the possible drawbacks of trusting strangers tended to exceed the possible benefits of trusting them. One can make a claim that the need for Xenophobia decreases, because mankind is becoming increasingly more alike (we can like, actually talk with each other now which was far more of an issue back then).

As far as slavery goes, slavery is caused when one grouping of people has more economic and military capabilities then another grouping of people. They then enslave people from the other community, essentially stealing/Robbing their labor.
The interplay with racism is more that racism keeps the polices the borders between these groups, thus preventing slaves from assimilating towards their "masters" (this has arguably been the case for the Irish and their English overlords). Racism also limits the "carrer choices" of the enslaved population (military slavery like the Jannisarries or the Mamelucks would have been unthinkable in the south), but its not a neccesary let alone a sufficient requirement for slavery.

[Jack]

Doug and Sean,

Charles Mackay’s "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”, and Charles Kindleberger’s book “Manias, Panics and Crashes” are must reads if one is to be a good investor. Unfortunately economic history has been removed from the course work at many economics departments replaced with the “science” of mathematical modeling. The Fed is home to hundreds of Ph.Ds and run by them for decades. Under their century of monetary policy management the purchasing power of the savings of our grandparents has been eroded by over 95%. The Ph.Ds seem convinced that the capriciousness of human behavior can be modeled in their mathematical equations. However, their actions over the past couple decades show they’ve drunk their own koolaid and become completely unmoored from both historical experience and common sense.

[Deap]

Y2K - was another doozy of a mass, we are all gonna die, hysteria.
Radio broadcast of War of the Worlds - 1930's?

Good to plot out these cyclic mass hysteria patterns and triggers. Maybe we can predict and prevent the next ones. Or stop over-reacting and making their cures worse than the perceived but inchoate threat.

Some sort of helplessness - real or imagined - seems to be the common denominator before the exaggerated responses kick in.

Camus "The Plague" remains highly instructional too - the emergence of Karens as self-appointed spiritual guides during these times of hysteria - what did the Greeks say about the unleashing of these primal forces?