Let me ask you a question.
I am in a particularly good mod today so, yes, I will entertain your question. I do demand however that it be a
smart question. As this is after all *the smart kid's thread*.
You don't feel embarrassed that you claimed to have scientific evidence and instead just came here and wrote another essay full of supposition and then tried to pretend as if you presented proof? Did you write in invisible ink? We can clearly see you offered none.
My dear child, my somewhat poor, disadvantaged mentally suffering, yet
appreciated child, please listen to the following:
Sociology as a topic is one that involves interpretation of cultural events, so too does *social psychology*, and these are not the sciences you seek. If they are they are soft sciences. And yet those who engage in this interpretive work have very important roles to play. And those who are very good at what they do, if they are good at it, rely on skills of perception that are not in a scientific category.
Who do you rely on to make interpretive statements to help you get a grasp on *what is going on*? Someone, anyone? Who?
In order for there to be *interpretation* there has to be someone who *looks* and *muses* and *thinks*. You will admit, and I will certainly agree, that what is
interpreted depends totally on the one who does the interpretation. Pretty basic stuff really but important to get it out there.
I did not claim to have *scientific evidence* and it is your folly to imagine that in such subjective territory that even 'science' exists. I suggested the discipline of Media Studies as being interesting, potentially valid for its *interpretive* analysis, and that film and novel play key roles in culture, certainly American culture.
And I did say, and I still believe, that the film 12 Years A Slave is an important *text* that can be
read. True it is that this is subjective territory.
Now, I use the term 'hysteria' and 'hysterical' to categorize, in a very general sense, a portion of what is going on around us. This is, obviously, a term of some exaggeration. But I suggest it is useful if it is carefully applied.
As an example of this hysteria
I submit this. I suggest -- many many people became aware -- that the reaction to Donald Trump's win sent many people careening toward a strange psychological edge. And there Trump Derangement Syndrome was, it seems to all appearances, ignominiously birthed.
2. an uncontrollable emotional outburst, as from fear or grief, often characterized by irrationality, laughter, weeping,etc.
I suggest that these *feelings*, these hysterical feelings (I say with some exaggeration and yet not veering out of the realm of the real), got worse as time went on. When the pandemic hit -- understandably perhaps -- things careened into
la-la-land. Flipped city. The looney bin got racing wheels . . .
the spontaneous outbreak of atypical thoughts, feelings, or actions in a group or social aggregate. Manifestations may include psychogenic illness, collective hallucinations, and bizarre actions. Instances of epidemic manias and panics, such as
choreomania in the Middle Ages,
tulipmania in 17th-century Holland, and radio listeners’ reactions to the Orson Welles broadcast based on H. G. Wells’s
War of the Worlds in 1938, have been attributed to collective hysteria. Also called group hysteria; epidemic hysteria; mass hysteria.
These are not *scientific observations*. They are observations that tens of millions of people share. We are perhaps not entirely certain how to characterize them. And yet we notice that they exist.
I would not say that such 'hysteria' is solely the possession, or affliction, of Left-Wing nut jobs (ooops, that is a bit subjective! may it be stricken from the record) but Good Lord it sure seems to have a certain purchase on them.