"How To Know You’re In a Mass Hysteria Bubble"

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Psychologists in 50 years will be studying our times like they study the Salem witch hysteria of the 1600s. If you ever wondered how people could go crazy like they did then, just look around you.

How To Know You’re In a Mass Hysteria Bubble

History is full of examples of Mass Hysterias. They happen fairly often. The cool thing about mass hysterias is that you don’t know when you are in one. But sometimes the people who are not experiencing the mass hysteria can recognize when others are experiencing one, if they know what to look for.

I’ll teach you what to look for.

A mass hysteria happens when the public gets a wrong idea about something that has strong emotional content and it triggers cognitive dissonance that is often supported by confirmation bias. In other words, people spontaneously hallucinate a whole new (and usually crazy-sounding) reality and believe they see plenty of evidence for it. The Salem Witch Trials are the best-known example of mass hysteria. The McMartin Pre-School case and the Tulip Bulb hysteria are others. The dotcom bubble probably qualifies. We might soon learn that the Russian Collusion story was mass hysteria in hindsight. The curious lack of solid evidence for Russian collusion is a red flag. But we’ll see how that plays out.

The most visible Mass Hysteria of the moment involves the idea that the United States intentionally elected a racist President. If that statement just triggered you, it might mean you are in the Mass Hysteria bubble. The cool part is that you can’t fact-check my claim you are hallucinating if you are actually hallucinating. But you can read my description of the signs of mass hysteria and see if you check off the boxes.

If you’re in the mass hysteria, recognizing you have all the symptoms of hysteria won’t help you be aware you are in it. That’s not how hallucinations work. Instead, your hallucination will automatically rewrite itself to expel any new data that conflicts with its illusions.

But if you are not experiencing mass hysteria, you might be totally confused by the actions of the people who are. They appear to be irrational, but in ways that are hard to define. You can’t tell if they are stupid, unscrupulous, ignorant, mentally ill, emotionally unstable or what. It just looks frickin’ crazy.

The reason you can’t easily identify what-the-hell is going on in the country right now is that a powerful mass hysteria is in play. If you see the signs after I point them out, you’re probably not in the hysteria bubble. If you read this and do NOT see the signs, it probably means you’re trapped inside the mass hysteria bubble.

More details follow:

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/1642976286 ... ria-bubble

Yeah but the difference is, the "witches" were not actually DOING anything.

Today's situation, DOING horrible things is actually happening.

NOT THE SAME THING.

The potential for hysteria here probably has much less to do with whether or not there's actual harm or potential for evil involved and more to do with whether our society actually has the situation under control and that it will be dealt with. Truthfully the way to tell whether we're really in danger of one type or another is if they're falling into a fallacy of either panicking disproportionately or saying that everything's fine while people are being loaded into railcars without any sort of clear due process or legal reasoning, that's something like the human equivalent of extreme cases for human Type I and Type II alpha error. I'd like to think, for example, that far fewer people than not believe that the police, FBI, and other law-enforcement are actually the submerged part of the nazi iceberg but if that does become a pervasive attitude we're in deep trouble from our own panic. Similarly if nazis had military control of every city, we had to check in with the town or city nazi every day at work, and they had checkpoints on the roads everywhere and we were collectively whistling tunes in the line at Starbucks that's the other psychotic extreme where we ignored warning signs and chose denial over recognition.

Also TBH we're in a situation where, since it's only at its beginning, the only type of error capable of showing up is the first one. Things would have to progress badly for the later to start emerging, which is why it might seem unevenly-handed that people would criticize hysteria rather than denial. One can't tell a person who'd be in denial from a person who simply isn't panicking right now because there are no criteria at the moment for parsing the difference.

I just wanted to let everyone know that Tech's reference to the "rail cars" is a reference to the Nazis placing Jews and other "unsuitable" ethnic groups/disabled people into railroad cars which lead, ultimately, to the concentration and death camps during the World War II era.

This proves that he sees, in at least a somewhat fulsome sense, the extent of the evil which the Nazis perpetuated.

Hysteria? naaa .....

but seriously, let's rename this site to "TRUMP Planet"

My many ancestors who participated in the Salem Witch Trials have taught me that, just occasionally, an accused individual wasn't the innocent we might want them to have been. For example, Giles Corey ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giles_Corey ) is famous for having stood up to the puritan court and its judges by declining to enter a plea regarding his guilt or innocence. His resistance stalled the court's ability to act, and earned him the accusation of being a witch or, at least, in league with known witches.

That is the common story of Giles Corey, but in 1676 (16 years before the witch trials), he was convicted of murdering Jacob Goodale (my sixth great-granduncle) who was described at the time as "almost a natural fool" (autistic, maybe?), and was employed by Corey as a farm laborer. For the sin of eating Corey's apples, Goodale was beaten so severely by Corey that, at a medical inquest, blood clots were found surrounding his heart. Years later, during the witch trials, Corey faced his accusers who had claimed that Goodale's specter (ghost) had told them that Corey was, indeed, a witch.

The Essex County, Mass., community was large for its time, and 1,500 individuals were involved with the trials in one or more ways (my other ancestors were variously jurors, executioners, marshals, sheriff deputies, and plaintiffs and petitioners for or against the accused). But, the community was small enough that petty bickering and gossip fueled the community's resentments and accusations. It is true that too many accused individuals during the witch trials were innocent, and, even those who had acted criminally in earlier years were wrongly charged and convicted. But, sometimes, especially in the case of Giles Corey, the moral universe "bends towards justice" (Theodore Parker).

Last edited by AspieUtah on 18 Aug 2017, 10:48 am, edited 1 time in total.

Someone brought up in other threads, and I think poignantly, Hitler's replacement of the rather vulgar/crass (culturally perceived) brown shirts with the upperclass-credible SS in the night of long knives. If we're going to worry about something it's letting our culture get bad enough that family men and women, finance professionals, programmers, accountants, lawyers, etc.. don't see things getting so bad that they decide that the nazi train isn't something they have to jump on or that the nazi game is the game they need to excel at to survive.

The critical question I'd probably want to pose to people is how do we stop people from getting any sense that there's any risk of nazism becoming the primary game, and how do we stop that from being the primary game. My own suggestion - if we know that if one type of parental totalitarian thought inspires or excites another type of parental totalitarian thought, we should probably consider parental totalitarian thought to be a great thing for the discard heap of unhelpful ideas.

LOL. Q.E.D.

Okie dokie ...

Trump hasn't done anything bad.
Just depends what side your on. I don't see stopping unconstitutional removed of disabled people's rights as bad, but the left sees it as horrible wrong and that trump is arming mentally unstable people.

Republican controlled congress (thanks to democrats) on the other hand has a laundry list of bad stuff they want to do. And everyone's to focused on trump and making stuff up about him to notice or care what congress is doing.

Exactly.
Thanks for an insightful post.

So what is Mr. Dilbert saying exactly? We Americans are all hysterically hallucinating? What exactly is this thing we are all hallucinating?

Which my now cynical attitude says is determined by whether a group is getting its particular way or not.

Oh, MAN----you're as bad as the MSM, manipulating us, like that (making us want to read, more); but, it WORKED!! LOL

EXCELLENT article!! I took the "test"----and, PHEW, I'm NOT in a "Mass Hysteria Bubble"! ! Also, I truly DO believe that the author, has just given us a PSA!!

I don't think Trump is all that great of a president or person. But the over exaggerated way many people have gone on about him seems like mass hysteria. Those who aren't affected by it keep wondering if it will eventually subside or continue going full tilt for his entire presidency.

Speaking of mass hysterias, there is a famous one which actually didn't happen.
I wonder whether any concepts from that situation might apply to this situation.
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/hist ... t_did.html