Hysteria: The Left’s Default Setting

Member Group : Jerry Shenk

 

Mass hysteria” and “mass psychogenic disorder” are psychological terms for a “condition affecting a group of persons, characterized by excitement or anxiety, irrational behavior or beliefs, or inexplicable symptoms of illness.” It’s an emotional pathology that transmits hysterical symptoms throughout homogenous or cohesive elements of a society. Common manifestations include an inability to think/concentrate.

A current example – the politically-correct madness about how one “feels,” how deeply one “cares” – started in American higher education and gradually infected, or “woke,” progressives everywhere.

Resolving political and social disagreements once depended, primarily, upon civil discussion, facts and data. Not anymore. To modern hysterics, politically-correct expressions of “feelings” and “caring” have become more “virtuous” than genuine virtue, more “meaningful,” even, than facts or the law.

When feelings trump decorum, simple disagreements trigger hostile emotional outbursts. What would once have been considered embarrassing hysterical tantrums are now considered righteous rather than ridiculous.

Progressive hysterics are thrown into angry panics by “sinners” who “disobey” (disagree with) liberal orthodoxies. Too arrogant, lazy, intellectually-insecure or unhinged to argue or explain, hysterics lash out at “apostates,” labeling them stupid, racists, science-deniers, Nazis, homophobes or xenophobes, among other charming sobriquets.

Retrospectively, the Tea Parties represent an irony of modern political history. Orderly, polite Tea Partiers even cleaned up after their peaceful protests. Nonetheless, the media, liberal Democrats and others, including Republicans who considered them threats to their insider status, deployed every imaginable slander to attack the Tea Party. So, over time, Tea Partiers and other normal Americans got the message and, in 2016, elected a thick-skinned, combative, less-respectful winner.

Victor Davis Hanson wrote: “[President Donald] Trump found a seam in [former-President Barack Obama’s] supposedly invincible new progressive electoral paradigm… He then blew it apart…by showing the nation that Obama’s identity-politics voting bloc was not transferrable to most other Democratic candidates, while the downside of his polarization of the now proverbial clingers…assuredly was. To her regret, Hillary Clinton learned that paradox when the deplorables and irredeemables of the formerly blue-wall states rose up to cost her the presidency.”

Hillary’s failure “triggered” the left. Mass hysteria ensued. But President Trump’s election provided an upside for liberal losers by giving them something many value more than the presidency. It gave them “evidence” to confirm their bigoted contempt for voting Americans who only disagreed with them, and afforded the hysterical left endless opportunities to proclaim and display their snobbish, self-assumed “moral” superiority and pointless virtue-signaling.

The left is the epicenter of intellectual, political and social snobbery. Liberals, especially social and academic liberals, are extremely status-conscious, but their “status” is merely conditional, one they can enjoy only in contrast to “inferiors.” In that context, the left’s narrow-minded condescension to, vilifications and denunciations of perfectly normal people who hold different opinions are entirely understandable – and dismissible.

Mass hysteria generally surges, then dies out. In their ever-increasing detachment from reality, today’s holier-than-thou left-wing hysterics will compete to out-feel and out-virtue each other until the phenomenon collapses under the enormous cumulative weight of its mindless, mean-spirited, ultimately-insecure faux-sanctimony.

https://www.ldnews.com/story/opinion/2019/04/08/hysteria-modern-lefts-default-setting/3404664002/