art credit: MaliaLitman.com
We all had a good laugh over the anti-Trump “Screaming Helplessly at The Sky” temper tantrums last week, but in a sense, the Scream Fests are not funny. There is something on the order of mass hysteria going on here. It's a year after the election, and adults are still stamping their feet and wearing stupid pink hats and screaming in genuine outrage.
I’ve come across a few think pieces on the phenomenon. Victor Davis Hanson examines the various “hysterias and frenzies” we have been witnessing:
Human nature is prone to a herd
mentality and the politics of excess. Groupthink offers a sense of belonging
and reinforcement to most people. Democracies in particular in their radical
egalitarian culture and exalted sense of self-righteousness are particularly
prone to shared frenzies.
Richard Fernandez, Mr. Belmont Club, summed up his take on the Primal Scream-a-thon:
What they were mourning was not some conservative's
sublunar fallibility, but their own. Whatever happens now, the progressives
have lost decades of "gains," not to the alt-right, which is nothing
special, but to the realization of their own human frailty.
Last summer, Dilbert / Scott Adams wrote about the “mass hysteria bubble” and how he defines it:
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.
I thought I would post these links, since we
live in crazy times, and maybe we are not the crazy ones. All three articles are worth the read.
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