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1barney67
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 most visible Mass Hysteria of the moment involves the idea that the United States intentionally elected a racist President.
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.
1. The trigger event for cognitive dissonance
On November 8th of 2016, half the country learned that everything they believed to be both true and obvious turned out to be wrong. The people who thought Trump had no chance of winning were under the impression they were smart people who understood their country, and politics, and how things work in general. When Trump won, they learned they were wrong. They were so very wrong that they reflexively (because this is how all brains work) rewrote the scripts they were seeing in their minds until it all made sense again. The wrong-about-everything crowd decided that the only way their world made sense, with their egos intact, is that either the Russians helped Trump win or there are far more racists in the country than they imagined, and he is their king. Those were the seeds of the two mass hysterias we witness today.
2. The Ridiculousness of it
One sign of a good mass hysteria is that it sounds bonkers to anyone who is not experiencing it. Imagine your neighbor telling you he thinks the other neighbor is a witch. Or imagine someone saying the local daycare provider is a satanic temple in disguise. Or imagine someone telling you tulip bulbs are more valuable than gold. Crazy stuff.
Compare that to the idea that our president is a Russian puppet. Or that the country accidentally elected a racist who thinks the KKK and Nazis are “fine people.” Crazy stuff.
If you think those examples don’t sound crazy – regardless of the reality – you are probably inside the mass hysteria bubble.
When the horror in Charlottesville shocked the country, citizens instinctively looked to their president for moral leadership. The president instead provided a generic law and order statement. Under pressure, he later named specific groups and disavowed the racists. He was clearly uncomfortable being our moral lighthouse.
The tricky part here is that any interpretation of what happened could be confirmation bias. But ask yourself which one of these versions sounds less crazy:
1. A sitting president, who is a branding expert, thought it would be a good idea to go easy on murderous Nazis as a way to improve his popularity.
or…
2. The country elected a racist leader who is winking to the KKK and White Supremacists that they have a free pass to start a race war now.
or…
3. A mentally unstable racist clown with conman skills (mostly just lying) eviscerated the Republican primary field and won the presidency. He keeps doing crazy, impulsive racist stuff. But for some reason, the economy is going well, jobs are looking good, North Korea blinked, ISIS is on the ropes, and the Supreme Court got a qualified judge. It was mostly luck.
or…
4. The guy who didn’t offer to be your moral leader didn’t offer any moral leadership, just law and order, applied equally. His critics cleverly and predictably framed it as being soft on Nazis.
One of those narratives is less crazy-sounding than the others. That doesn’t mean the less-crazy one has to be true. But normal stuff happens far more often than crazy stuff. And critics will frame normal stuff as crazy whenever they get a chance.
5. The Insult without supporting argument
When people have actual reasons for disagreeing with you, they offer those reasons without hesitation. Strangers on social media will cheerfully check your facts, your logic, and your assumptions. But when you start seeing ad hominem attacks that offer no reasons at all, that might be a sign that people in the mass hysteria bubble don’t understand what is wrong with your point of view except that it sounds more sensible than their own.
For the past two days I have been disavowing Nazis on Twitter. The most common response from the people who agree with me is that my comic strip sucks and I am ugly.
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/164297628606/how-to-know-youre-in-a-mass-hysteria-b...
The most visible Mass Hysteria of the moment involves the idea that the United States intentionally elected a racist President.
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.
1. The trigger event for cognitive dissonance
On November 8th of 2016, half the country learned that everything they believed to be both true and obvious turned out to be wrong. The people who thought Trump had no chance of winning were under the impression they were smart people who understood their country, and politics, and how things work in general. When Trump won, they learned they were wrong. They were so very wrong that they reflexively (because this is how all brains work) rewrote the scripts they were seeing in their minds until it all made sense again. The wrong-about-everything crowd decided that the only way their world made sense, with their egos intact, is that either the Russians helped Trump win or there are far more racists in the country than they imagined, and he is their king. Those were the seeds of the two mass hysterias we witness today.
2. The Ridiculousness of it
One sign of a good mass hysteria is that it sounds bonkers to anyone who is not experiencing it. Imagine your neighbor telling you he thinks the other neighbor is a witch. Or imagine someone saying the local daycare provider is a satanic temple in disguise. Or imagine someone telling you tulip bulbs are more valuable than gold. Crazy stuff.
Compare that to the idea that our president is a Russian puppet. Or that the country accidentally elected a racist who thinks the KKK and Nazis are “fine people.” Crazy stuff.
If you think those examples don’t sound crazy – regardless of the reality – you are probably inside the mass hysteria bubble.
When the horror in Charlottesville shocked the country, citizens instinctively looked to their president for moral leadership. The president instead provided a generic law and order statement. Under pressure, he later named specific groups and disavowed the racists. He was clearly uncomfortable being our moral lighthouse.
The tricky part here is that any interpretation of what happened could be confirmation bias. But ask yourself which one of these versions sounds less crazy:
1. A sitting president, who is a branding expert, thought it would be a good idea to go easy on murderous Nazis as a way to improve his popularity.
or…
2. The country elected a racist leader who is winking to the KKK and White Supremacists that they have a free pass to start a race war now.
or…
3. A mentally unstable racist clown with conman skills (mostly just lying) eviscerated the Republican primary field and won the presidency. He keeps doing crazy, impulsive racist stuff. But for some reason, the economy is going well, jobs are looking good, North Korea blinked, ISIS is on the ropes, and the Supreme Court got a qualified judge. It was mostly luck.
or…
4. The guy who didn’t offer to be your moral leader didn’t offer any moral leadership, just law and order, applied equally. His critics cleverly and predictably framed it as being soft on Nazis.
One of those narratives is less crazy-sounding than the others. That doesn’t mean the less-crazy one has to be true. But normal stuff happens far more often than crazy stuff. And critics will frame normal stuff as crazy whenever they get a chance.
5. The Insult without supporting argument
When people have actual reasons for disagreeing with you, they offer those reasons without hesitation. Strangers on social media will cheerfully check your facts, your logic, and your assumptions. But when you start seeing ad hominem attacks that offer no reasons at all, that might be a sign that people in the mass hysteria bubble don’t understand what is wrong with your point of view except that it sounds more sensible than their own.
For the past two days I have been disavowing Nazis on Twitter. The most common response from the people who agree with me is that my comic strip sucks and I am ugly.
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/164297628606/how-to-know-youre-in-a-mass-hysteria-b...
2jjwilson61
4. The guy who didn’t offer to be your moral leader didn’t offer any moral leadership, just law and order, applied equally. His critics cleverly and predictably framed it as being soft on Nazis.
When neo-Nazis and white supremacists march in a torch-lit parade shouting anti-Semitic slogans it doesn't really take much moral leadership to denounce that. You're defending the indefensible. It's perhaps more accurate to say that Trump is displaying amoral leadership, but probably most accurate to say that he's pandering to the racist part of his base.
When neo-Nazis and white supremacists march in a torch-lit parade shouting anti-Semitic slogans it doesn't really take much moral leadership to denounce that. You're defending the indefensible. It's perhaps more accurate to say that Trump is displaying amoral leadership, but probably most accurate to say that he's pandering to the racist part of his base.
3JGL53
> 1
No exegesis needed, no explanations needed, no apologetics possible.
trump is the worst President ever. In comparison trump makes Bush, Jr. look like a cross between Gandhi and Einstein.
We now have an out-of-control incompetent narcissist with access to the nuclear codes.
That is why we have so many people losing their shit now. And by many people I mean a large majority of Americans, and most of the people in the world who keep up with the news.
I shit on donald john trump and all that dwell in him.
He will crash and burn one day. It has to happen. I pray Jebus I am alive to witness the shit explosion on the fake news box.
No exegesis needed, no explanations needed, no apologetics possible.
trump is the worst President ever. In comparison trump makes Bush, Jr. look like a cross between Gandhi and Einstein.
We now have an out-of-control incompetent narcissist with access to the nuclear codes.
That is why we have so many people losing their shit now. And by many people I mean a large majority of Americans, and most of the people in the world who keep up with the news.
I shit on donald john trump and all that dwell in him.
He will crash and burn one day. It has to happen. I pray Jebus I am alive to witness the shit explosion on the fake news box.
4librorumamans
>1 barney67: You would be clearer if you indicated at the top of your post that you are quoting:
- by using italics;
- by legibly identifying your source;
- and/or by placing the link at the top rather than the bottom of your paste.
5barney67
>4 librorumamans: It's interesting that you think I need you to tell me that.
7jjwilson61
>5 barney67: You sound like an Eliza program.
8barney67
It's interesting that you think
I need you
to tell me that.
I mean I've been on this site longer than you have, with God knows how many posts demonstrating minimum intelligence, sometimes actually using verbs. I have full bookshelves behind me and a trail of letters after my name, and I learned how to document sources when I was thirteen years old. But you find it necessary to tell me something so obvious as how to use quotation marks. You really think I don't know that?
So, yeah, I find that revealing.
I need you
to tell me that.
I mean I've been on this site longer than you have, with God knows how many posts demonstrating minimum intelligence, sometimes actually using verbs. I have full bookshelves behind me and a trail of letters after my name, and I learned how to document sources when I was thirteen years old. But you find it necessary to tell me something so obvious as how to use quotation marks. You really think I don't know that?
So, yeah, I find that revealing.
9librorumamans
>8 barney67: This is silly.
Nonetheless, I will point out that in #4 I did not accuse you of not knowing how to quote. I said that you would be clearer if you used conventional means to do so. Your highly reactive responses lead me to infer that you are saying you know perfectly well how to be clear but choose not to be.
Nonetheless, I will point out that in #4 I did not accuse you of not knowing how to quote. I said that you would be clearer if you used conventional means to do so. Your highly reactive responses lead me to infer that you are saying you know perfectly well how to be clear but choose not to be.
11RickHarsch
>8 barney67: '...with God knows how many posts demonstrating minimum intelligence...' I think that was an unfortunate choice of words.
