Tuesday, April 9, 2024
How to spot the next mania Each new panic follows the
same playbook (by Lionel Shriver)
In the late Eighties and Nineties, the psychiatric profession became infatuated with “recovered memory”, which was conceived in the US but also captivated Europe, including Britain. Practitioners claimed that patients sexually abused as children would naturally repress any recollection of their suffering as too painful, but therapists could employ specialised techniques to retrieve these terrible experiences and so heal the patients’ trauma. As a profusion of books, articles and documentaries cultivated a larger cultural fascination, the recovered memory juggernaut resulted in countless adults “remembering” early childhood abuse, usually by parents. Patients would exhume recollections of having been subject to parental rape or oral sex when they were babies. Accusations followed. Families were torn apart.
In hindsight, it’s now accepted that the therapists
were frequently implanting these “memories” in their suggestible patients.
Recovered memory was a social mania — a.k.a. a moral panic, social contagion,
mass formation psychosis, or mass hysteria. In the throes of the popular
delirium, many people found this exercise in psychic archaeology wholly
convincing (and no little titillating). For a few years, recovered memories
were even accepted as factual testimony in American courts. Only from a
distance does the sordid psychological dowsing look barmy.
For me, since roughly 2012, what has therefore been
more disturbing than the content of any given hysteria is our continuing
susceptibility to collective derangement, which can spread and take hold with
alarming rapidity in a digital era. To examine the unnerving phenomenon of the
communal fever, often destructive but rarely contested at its height, in my
most recent novel Mania I invented my own. Suddenly everyone
accepts that all humans are equally intelligent, and “cognitive discrimination”
is “the last great civil rights fight”. In other words, there’s no such thing
as stupid. Because that assertion is itself stupid, my concocted mania seems
apt.
Within the astonishingly short time frame of 10
years, I count four real-life collective crazes: transgenderism, #MeToo, Covid
lockdowns (which spawned sub-crazes over masks and vaccines), and Black Lives
Matter. I also worry we’re already in the grip of social mania number five.
Take trans. Gender-identity disorder was not that
long ago an extraordinarily rare psychiatric diagnosis largely constrained to
men. Abruptly circa 2012 — on the heels of such a successful crusade for gay
rights and even gay marriage that homosexuality became passé — a profusion of
television documentaries hit our screens about little boys who wore dresses and
played with dolls. Fast-forward to the present, and the renamed diagnosis has
exploded by thousands of percent across the West and now pertains abundantly to
girls. Teachers tell toddlers that they have to decide whether they’re a girl
or a boy or something in-between. We’re subjecting children to powerful,
life-altering experimental drugs and surgically removing healthy breasts and
genitals, even at the cost of permanent sexual dysfunction and infertility.
“Some people are born in the wrong body” has become a truism, which sounds to
me as medically credible as phrenology or bloodletting.
The social mania displays a few consistent
characteristics. First and foremost, it never seems like a social mania at the
time. In the thick of a widespread preoccupation, its precepts simply seem like
the truth. Trans women are women; get over it. Or: masculinity is
toxic; virtually all women have been subject to sexual torment and male abuse
of power; regarding any accusations they make, no matter how far-fetched or
petty, women must be believed. Or: Covid-19 is so lethal, and such a threat to
our endurance as a species, that we’ve no choice but to shut down our whole
economies and abdicate our every civil liberty to contain the disease. Or: all
Western countries are “systemically racist”; all white people are genetically
racist; the police are all racist (even if they’re black) and should be
defunded or abolished; the only remedy for “structural racism” is anti-meritocratic,
over-compensatory racial quotas in hiring and education.
While the seeds of a mania have often been planted
earlier, for most ordinary people it comes out of nowhere. Transgenderism
rocketed to a cultural fetish over a matter of months. After one fully
fledged creep was exposed as a serial sex abuser, #MeToo spread on Twitter like
potato blight. Literally overnight, citizenries in March 2020 took it for
granted that their “liberal democracies” could justifiably deny them freedom of
movement, assembly, association, press and even speech, while many became eager
enforcers of the chaotic, despotic, and sometimes positively silly new regime.
It took only a few days for George Floyd’s death to trigger huge protest
marches all over the world. This hyperbolic response to a single undeserved
killing in a one mid-sized American city was partially fed by the pent-up
frustrations of whole populations under house arrest during Covid. But for
Koreans to troop down the streets of Seoul chanting, “Black lives matter!” when
the country has hardly any black people was insensible. Likewise, Britons
chanting “Hands up, don’t shoot!” when their constabulary is unarmed. Moreover,
all these recent examples illustrate how moral panics have become more
international in scope than ever before.
Manias are fuelled by emotion. The cult of trans
has capitalised on our yearning to seem enlightened and compassionate. It
has been presented as the logical next step after gay rights, the movement
plays on our craving to feel ultra-contemporary. #MeToo both fed off and
promulgated resentment, self-pity, and vengeance; in standing up to abuse of
power, it tempted some women to abuse their own power to ruin men’s lives.
Covid lockdowns stirred primitive terror of death and contagion, until we came
to view other people as mere vectors of disease. BLM stimulated the nascent
Christian proclivities for guilt, repentance, and penitence even in the
secular, while offering black people opportunity to vent frustration,
self-righteous fury, and even hatred. All manias thrive on our
desire to be included by our own herd and on our anxiety about being exiled —
or, if you will, about being UnHerded.
Because a proper mania brooks no dissent. In its
grip, everyone believes the same thing, says the same thing, and even uses the
same language. A quasi-religious fervour makes anyone outside the bubble of
shared obsession seem heretical, dangerous, insane or outright evil. Opponents
of lockdowns were granny killers; the unvaccinated were pariahs who shouldn’t
be allowed to fly, eat out or obtain healthcare, while some argued
“anti-vaxxers” should be imprisoned or put to death. Their rhetoric and affect
often violent, transactivists tar critics as murderers; not long ago, writing a
single discouraging word about the mutilation of children would end your
career. (Self-protectively, I kept my own journalistic mouth shut for a good
four years; most journalists are still prudently bumping along on the trans
bandwagon.) Women who expressed reservations about the indiscriminate sweep of
#MeToo were traitors to their sex. In 2020, even tweeting “All lives matter”
got you sacked.
Manias are prone to grow increasingly extreme,
accumulating evermore casualties before collapsing from their contradictions.
Stalin’s show trials, Cambodia’s killing fields, Mao’s cultural revolution,
obviously Nazism; the eugenics movement in the West (which we like to forget),
the rage for lobotomies, and the paranoia about Satanism in day-care centres
and the contagion of multiple personality disorder of the Nineties — all these
misguided infatuations got worse before they imploded.
Hula hoops were harmless, but most manias are
malign. The trans movement has warped primary school education, demented our
culture with confusion over biological reality, condemned thousands of children
to painful surgery and pharmaceutical side-effects, encroached on women’s privacy,
and corrupted female sports. #MeToo contaminated relations between the sexes
with such mistrust that it may have alone lowered the Western birth rate, while
destroying the careers of countless men whose sins were at most venial. Covid
lockdowns ravaged our economies, fuelled inflation, and exploded sovereign
debt, while damaging the prospects of a generation of school children. BLM has
exacerbated racial animosity, demonised meritocracy, and fostered a wasteful,
parasitical managerial class of DEI enforcers whom it will be laborious to get
shed of.
Yet both the priests and disciples of moral panics
are driven by good intentions. They genuinely believe they are doing God’s
work. Aggressively virtuous, “wokeness” is one big bundle of mania.
Some hysterias die an easier death than others.
Although the fragile, whiny accuser of a US Supreme Court nominee was once
heralded as awesomely “courageous”, Christine Blasey Ford’s
recent memoir has drawn weary disdain. Ergo, #MeToo is over. Nevertheless, a
social frenzy seldom subsides because its agitators announce they were addled,
just as the masses of ordinary people caught up in the derangement seldom
acknowledge having been led astray. Everyone simply moves on, only to become
consumed by something else.
There’s rarely an identifiable point at which a
mania is debunked (barring a world war or counterrevolution). Few will recant,
much less apologise to the victims of their excesses. A funny amnesia sets in,
as forgetfulness is more palatable than shame; the Chinese have simply erased
the cultural revolution from their history books. Occasionally, when folks
outside the dogmatic bubble prosecute, the cheerleaders of utter tosh are
called to account. We did have Nuremburg, and the belated Pol Pot trials in
Cambodia. By contrast, the UK’s farcical Covid inquiry is conducted by the same
establishment it’s investigating. The subsequent report may criticise single
politicians for not having locked down sooner, but it can’t conclude that the
lockdowns were a cataclysmic mistake, lest practically everyone at the top be
implicated.
Once manias die down, most people pretend they
never believed these things to begin with. Having contracted Covid five or six
times post-vaccination, multiply boosted mRNA fanatics aren’t prone to
advertise their vicious denunciation of the unvaccinated only two or three
years ago — any more than recovered memory patients are inclined to advertise
that they destroyed their relationship with their parents over an erroneous
psychiatric fad. We like to think that we’re “modern” (and what peoples in the
present have ever fancied themselves otherwise?) and that we base our beliefs
on fact. But we’re just as prey to mass delusions as we ever were.
Accordingly, how’s this for mania number five. It
isn’t a mania; it’s just the truth: check. It’s suddenly all anyone
in the media seems to talk about, and they use all the same language: check.
It’s powered by emotion: check. It brooks no dissent, refuses to
acknowledge there’s even a debate to be had, and doghouses all sceptics as evil
“deniers” who will bring about the end of world: check. It’s
malign, getting increasingly extreme, and is driven by the very best of
intentions: check, check, check. I’m not about to get into the argument
here, but the escalating hysteria over climate change — or the climate
“emergency”, climate “crisis”, or climate “collapse” — displays all the
markers, does it not?
Lionel Shriver is an author, journalist and
columnist for The Spectator. Her new book, Mania, is
published by the Borough Press.
How to spot the next mania - UnHerd
65% of young British
Muslims oppose Israel’s right to exist (by Archie Earle)
Two-thirds of young British Muslims believe Israel
should not exist as a Jewish homeland, according to a major new poll.
Based on a survey of 1000 British Muslims, an astonishing 65% of
the religious group aged 18-24 said they did not believe Israel has a right to
exist. Within the 45-54 demographic, the percentage of those who agree with the
statement is almost half that, at 34%. Across all age groups, the proportion
who agreed with the statement is 49%.
The J.L. Partners survey also found that 80% of respondents in
both the 18-24 and 25-34 brackets believe that Israel is a racist endeavour,
compared to 67% in the 55+ age category, suggesting younger British Muslims
have far stronger views on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
These results come six months after Hamas’s 7 October attack, where public opinion has gradually hardened against Israel since. As early as February of this year, more Brits sympathised with Palestinians than with each side equally for the first time since the beginning of the war. As of March, 28% of Brits sympathise with Palestine more than Israel, whilst 27% sympathise equally with both sides and only 15% sympathise more with Israel.
According to the JLP poll, more than a third of respondents aged
18-34 said that they view Hamas positively, and over a quarter said they have a
favourable view of jihad.
The JLP poll also asked respondents about attitudes toward
various social issues including homosexuality, Christianity in public life and
the influence of Jewish people in society. The findings show that 36% of
Muslims in the 18-24 age group believe that Jews have too much power in the
media and financial sectors, while 44% think Jews have excessive influence over
government policy.
These findings arrive at a fraught moment in British Muslim
relations. Nearly three years on from the Batley Grammar School incident,
Dame Sara Khan published a report on the
threats to social cohesion in British public life. It found that there was “a
climate of fear” being created at some schools as community faith leaders had
aggressively interfered in school teaching, while schools had not been given
sufficient support to combat the problem.
The JLP data suggests that a substantial number of British
Muslims may show similar hardline views. Of Britain’s young Muslims, 59%
believe it would be very or somewhat desirable to make showing a picture of the
Prophet Mohammed illegal, with 33% saying that implementing Sharia law in the
UK would be desirable.
According to the 2021 census, Britain’s
Muslim population currently stands at 3.9 million, making up roughly 6.5% of
all UK citizens. This was up from a
population of 2.7 million in 2011, when the Muslim population made up 5% of
British citizens.
After three British aid workers were killed in an
airstrike that hit a World Central Kitchen convoy, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak
has come under increasing pressure to take a tougher line on Israel. He
responded to the deaths by calling on Benjamin Netanyahu to look for a
humanitarian pause which will lead to a “long-term sustainable ceasefire”.
On Sunday, Netanyahu responded to calls for
a ceasefire by suggesting that Israel was “one step away from victory”, and
that no truce would be achieved until Hamas has released all hostages.
65% of young British Muslims oppose Israel's right to exist - UnHerd