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Hysterical Zeitgeist

Entry 2282, on 2023-07-13 at 21:27:26 (Rating 4, Politics)

Sometimes it seems that I'm constantly fighting against currently popular opinions. When neoliberalism became popular, starting in the late 70s and early 80s, I pointed out the problems with that. Now we have done a U turn and woke-ism is the latest fad, and (as you have no doubt noticed) I am even more against that!

Arising from this are two obvious questions: why does the world lurch from one crazy ideology to another, and why am I always against them? These are two very good questions, I believe, and I have been recently thinking about the answers, which of course, I will share here!

So first, the big question: why do certain ideologies become prevalent across many parts of the world, why do they spread from country to country, and why do they last a certain time before being replaced with the next crazy idea?

Unfortunately, the majority of humans are not exactly what I would call free thinkers, or rational, or very self-reflective. People are often referred to as "sheeple" (that is, a portmanteau of sheep and people) meaning they tend to follow the leader rather than think independently. As an idea becomes popular amongst the general population, governments and corporations think they also need to demonstrate a commitment to those ideas (to retain voters or customers), which reinforces the idea's credibility with the sheeple, and ultimately acts like a giant positive reinforcement system.

Usually the idea originates in a particular institution or group of institutions. For example, the current wave of woke politics originated in the universities a few decades back, where postmodernist theory became popular, leading to critical race theory, and identity politics.

So following this process, you would expect that the positive reinforcement loop would just continue indefinitely, but as Lincoln allegedly said: "You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time". In other words, people eventually detect the smell of BS and reject stupid ideas, no matter how popular they might have been at one time.

This happens on many different scales. For example, New Zealand's previous prime minister was the queen of BS, and she fooled most of us for several years (even me briefly), but ultimately her incompetence and dishonesty became apparent and she scuttled off like the coward she was.

And political fads come and go as well; neoliberalism has had its day and is now in decline, and I even think I detect the beginning of the end for woke-ism, or maybe that's wishful thinking! And on the biggest scale of all, some beliefs last hundreds or even thousands of years, as shown by the prominence and decline of empires, religions, and other large scale human contrivances.

Humans are a social species, and it is in our nature to form tribes with common beliefs. There are a few of us who are more independent thinkers, but that is the exception rather than the rule. Additionally, there are mechanisms in place - from social shaming, to actual punishments and even death - which discourage people from revolting against the orthodoxy. So these irrational trends sweeping the world are probably inevitable.

Of course, the Germans have a word for it, which has now become part of English too: zeitgeist. It's my second favourite German word (my favourite is schadenfreude) and it is very relevant here. Here's the definition: "zeitgeist noun [in singular] the defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time: the story captured the zeitgeist of the late 1960s."

I think it is undeniable that different trends, ways of thinking, and political preferences sweep the world from time to time. And when you ask people why they have followed this new way of thinking they will often not be able to give a good answer, or come up with something very vacuous, like "it's the right thing to do".

Some bizarre trends, which are more obviously based on irrationality or even hysteria, have hit groups of people in the past. Here are some examples...

The Dancing Plague of 1518 was a case of dancing mania that occurred in Strasbourg from July 1518 to September 1518. Up to 400 people took to dancing for weeks. There are many possible explanations, including stress-induced mass hysteria, hallucinations caused by ergot, and religious explanations. There were an unknown number of deaths.

The Miracle of the Sun was a series of miraculous events where a large crowd claimed to have seen the Sun appearing to "dance" or zig-zag in the sky and careen towards the Earth, and emit multicoloured light and radiant colors.

More recently, there was the day-care sex-abuse hysteria of the 1980s and 1990s, which involved a moral panic with charges against day-care providers of several forms of child abuse, including Satanic ritual abuse, which had no basis in fact.

These are obviously on a far smaller scale than the trends which I claim affect the whole world, or at least large parts of it (like the countries of the Western world), but they are only a difference in scale rather anything fundamental.

In fact, there is a massive list of examples of this phenomenon. As well as the examples above, there were the witch trials from 1450 to 1750, and especially from 1580 to 1630, the Salem witch trials from 1692 to 1693, the Orson Welles War of the Worlds panic of 1938, and the Blackburn faintings of 1965. Google these for details.

I'm not suggesting that these events, which affected dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people are the same as the zeitgeist which affects millions or even billions, but we should never underestimate the human ability to act irrationally.

I would like to add to this by making a controversial claim here. Hysteria is traditionally associated with women (hence the word), and many of the events I listed above primarily involved women and girls. Is it just coincidental that a lot of the "research" which modern postmodernist, woke theory is based on, was done by female philosophers? It's an issue worth considering, although it is not essential to my theory.

So new ideologies break out through irrational adoption, aided by the ubiquitous rapid communications we have today. Which ideologies fail and which become widespread might be largely random, but there is also the factor that people like change.

After the neoliberal revolution of the 1980s, which emphasised the individual, personal responsibility, and free capitalism, maybe people felt they wanted to try the opposite with more collectivism, central government control, and socialism. Maybe the problems associated with neoliberalism were realised leading to an ideology which superficially seemed to fix those problems, but arguably made them even worse.

So that's the first big question answered to some extent, although I feel that "it's just something that happens occasionally for no good reason" is somehow unsatisfying. But let's briefly look at the second: why am I opposed to them?

At this point that should be obvious. I'm opposed because these trends happen thanks to the irrational, hysterical nature of many people. Even if there is some element of utility and validity in these new ideas, which there almost always is, they succeed for the wrong reasons. And because they are accepted by the masses in a similar way to a religion, the theoretical ideas are never implemented to a sensible extent; they always go too far.

I currently have a broadly libertarian perspective, so I value individualism and freedom, and reject central control and more social actions. But I know there is room for both. I know pure capitalism doesn't work, and that we need some broadly socialist balance. I know that freedom has its limits, and I know there is a place for government as well as private enterprise.

So whatever form a new ideology takes, I know it will go too far, so I oppose it on principle. Now that I analyse it, it does seem like a pointless perspective to have, because whenever something I oppose is defeated, something else will come along and be equally bad in a different way. But however impractical it might be, that's the way I see it: I refuse to engage in mass delusion and hysteria. If you disagree, maybe you are part of the modern equivalent of a good old-fashioned witch burning!

Comment 1 (7465) by EK on 2023-07-22 at 16:45:42:

Good points. Durkheim and Freud blamed social crisis. For Durkheim this was an aspect of anomie when society is in disarray. For Freud it is psychosis when sublimation is too intensive and oppressive and ubercivilisation begins to damage collective social sanity -whatever that is. But as you point out with your examples that would mean that human society is chronically always in crisis and there is no hope of ever having a sane society. Perhaps stone-age hunter-gatherers already had crazy ideas. (Perhaps the Venus of Villendorf expresses such a fling into crazyness in assuming that dancing around this idol it would guarantee clan fertility.)

In my pessimistic moments I tend to think it is particularly bad in recent times: Trump, Putin's war, wokism, Sudan, Isis not long ago and lingering. But then there is Nazism almost a century ago now, although you can argue it was a "natural" reaction to the harsh settlement after WW1.

Probably the biggest question in this is what is the baseline from which one can justifiably pronounce an ideology as crazy. (Zeitgeist does not imply that it is crazy. Hegel, Herder etc. had a more neutral, even admiring connotation in mind I think.) You seem to assume rationality is the baseline. But there are several forms and orientation of rationality in existence. E.g., economic rationality, ethically based ratio (highest value to act morally correct), now ratio orientated towards sustainability and survival of humankind is popular; in other words, so many different values of Zweckrationalitaet a la Max Weber, not to mention Wertrationalitaet.

But keep trying to find out. All grist of the mill.

Comment 2 (7466) by EK on 2023-07-22 at 16:56:26:

I should have added: applied rationality is an ideology too. So there.

Comment 3 (7467) by OJB on 2023-07-22 at 17:26:56:

Whenever I am arguing the positive aspects of one belief system over another (eg, science versus religion), I use the "argument from practical consequences", where I claim that science, empiricism, rationality gets better outcomes than religions, superstition, hysteria. I have no proof that my preference is objectively better, but do I have proof of anything? In the end, can I really refute solipsism?

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