These irrationalities are primarily experienced as a mass hysteria phenomenon

The coincidence of timing. I have recently picked up Connected by Nicholas Christakis. It is chock-a-block full of challenging claims, insights, and information. Just this morning I happened to read:

Everyone has experience with emotional contagion: we share a joke with a friend, we feel sad when a spouse cries, we rage against city hall with our neighbors, and we hug our kids tight when they’ve had a bad day. Yet one often overlooked aspect of all this sharing is that emotions spread not only to our friends but to our friends’ friends and beyond—even when we are not present. We are like a herd of buffalo quietly grazing on the plain until one of our neighbors starts to run. Then we start to run, and others start to run, and suddenly, mysteriously, the whole herd is barreling forward.

Epidemics of emotional states have been reported for centuries. They just have not involved laughter like the Bukoba outbreak. When emotions spread from person to person and affect large numbers of people, it is now called mass psychogenic illness (MPI) rather than the old-fashioned and more poetic epidemic hysteria. MPI is a specifically social phenomenon involving otherwise healthy people in a psychological cascade. Like a single startled buffalo within a herd, a single emotional reaction in one person can sometimes cause many others to feel the same thing, creating an emotional stampede.

There are two main types of MPI. In the pure-anxiety type, people may feel a variety of physical symptoms, including abdominal pain, headache, fainting, shortness of breath, nausea, dizziness, and so on. In the motor type, people may engage in hysterical dancing, pseudoseizures, and—yes—laughing, though the actual feelings underlying these behaviors are fear or anxiety. Both types of MPI thus involve the same basic psychological processes.

[snip]

Outbreaks of epidemic hysteria are not restricted to children and schools. They have been documented in adults too. One systematic review of cases of epidemic hysteria identified seventy outbreaks that occurred between 1973 and 1993 and found that 50 percent of them took place in schools, 40 percent in small towns and factories, and only 10 percent in other settings. The outbreaks usually involved at least thirty people, and often hundreds. Most outbreaks lasted less than two weeks, but 20 percent lasted more than a month.

[snip]

Paradoxically, the presence of official personnel—whether police officers, rescue workers, scientific investigators, or government officials—often worsens the epidemic, for it reinforces the belief that something serious is going on and that the situation is potentially dangerous. When these same officials attempt to provide reassurance that the situation is safe and that no cause was found, it typically generates deep suspicions among the emotionally charged populace that a cover-up is under way, especially because the official response was previously so substantial. Paranoia can spread too, undermining the very authority that is needed to bring an end to such an episode.

The recommended treatment for MPI outbreaks focuses on social networks and recognizes that social ties are the medium for spread. The psychological guidelines for emergency workers include “providing reassurance… using a calm and authoritative approach” and “separating those who are ill from those who are not.” 20 As one expert put it, “You can only stop these things by being honest… . I could get caught up in this kind of thing too, as a parent or just a person. We all could. It’s a very powerful thing, and it needs to be respected and understood. And health officials shouldn’t be so scared to call a spade a spade.”

As I was reading these passages, I was creating a running list of Epidemic Hysteria which are deliberately fostered rather than being an emergent order from affiliative networks. Global Climate Hysteria, Trump Derangement Syndrome, Income Inequality, Transgenderism, etc. All issues subject to rational and empirical debate but none of them representing the existential threat with which they are viewed by some.

Two or three hours later I am reading CNN’s Presidential Climate Change Town Hall Was Insane And the hysteria is getting dangerous. by David Harsanyi.

The most benign climate-change plan proposed during CNN’s seven-hour Democratic Party presidential candidate town hall was more authoritarian than anything Donald Trump has ever suggested during his presidency. Democrats were proposing policies that would not only require massive societal upheaval but mass coercion to enforce. Because few people, no matter what they say, are willing to give up modernity without a push.

CNN says it’s a “crisis,” though, so Democrats, using the patina of “science,” were free to offer one insane Nostradamus-like prediction after the next. Not only is every weather event now a manifestation of global warming, but Beto O’Rourke says our communities will soon be “uninhabitable,” and Pete Buttigieg says the challenge of warming is on par with World War II, a conflict that took more than 400,000 American lives and tens of millions of others.

None of this hysteria, as far as I can tell, was challenged during those seven hours.

As Joel Pollak notes, at this point climate change “is primarily experienced as a mass hysteria phenomenon,” a collective illusion of a massive threat. Just listen to audience members earnestly asking questions based on the risible premise that we’re on the brink of extinction. It’s really one of the tragedies of our age that so many anxious young people have been brainwashed into believing they live on the cusp of dystopia when, in fact, they’re in the middle of a golden age — an era with less war, sickness, poverty, and suffering than any in history.

Interesting to come across someone seeing the same phenomenon as you are in near real time.