Sunday 8 August 2021

Hysteria-Prone

 In the old days (at least before 2000).....most people defined hysteria as a psychological disorder which meant you needed to visit a particular doctor and probably spend four weeks at a special clinic.  

These were people that professed that they'd seen hovering alien UFOs near their barn and they'd gone into a 'turbo-like' mental decline.  They weren't dangerous, but they weren't 'trusted' to the degree they'd been before.  

A great example of hysteria is the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692/1693.  In this small community of a couple hundred folks....a couple of these teenage girls had reached a stage of hysteria that they truly believed themselves or others were engaged in witchcraft.  In a matter of days, they had the entire village driven by this belief and were willing to destroy the stability of the village to get to the bottom of the witchcraft business.  

The chief people in the middle of this?  Oddly enough....those who weren't consumed with the passion or determination of the Puritan 'lifestyle' and religious cause.  Obviously, without the passion....they must be connected to Satan.

How many died during this witch process?  Nineteen.

If I look around today....via Twitter, Facebook, CNN, and a dozen-odd news or social media players....I see the same type of hysteria being played out.  

There is social justice hysteria.  There's Covid hysteria.  There's vaccination hysteria.  There's gender hysteria.  There's border hysteria.  There's eviction hysteria.  There's college loan hysteria.  There's environmental, climate-change and global-warming hysteria.  There's Marxism hysteria.  There's capitalism hysteria.  There's defund-the-police hysteria.  

If you flipped the local news on at 6 AM.....there's various examples of hysteria being played-out even in your local town or region.  As you drive to work.....hype-radio wants you to get hysteria over a dog-attack, fire-ants, or some crazy women who was naked along highway 44.  

In simple terms.....the mess is just feeding you day after day.  

So chill out....skip the news for a few days.  Go camping for a week.  Paint the barn roof.  Shoot off some fireworks.  

Life's too short to waste it on a hyped-up hysteria campaign.  

1 comment:

LargeMarge said...

Paranoid hypochondriac -- the sufferer believes 'because you do not believe in my sickness hallucinations, you must be trying to infect me'.
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Classic DSM-5.