What has gone before: Recently, I bewailed the New Racism in MoCo, mentioning that visually obvious "street gangs" seem increasingly race-based, entrenching themselves into various neighborhoods, increasing the appearance of ethnic enclaves, perhaps spurring on the formation of new race-based street gangs. I also had to digress through another posting that I was experimenting with a new literary structure for blogging.
A little history followed, about ethnic separatism and race/ethnicity-based hatred and crime and how it affected my ancestors here in the US. This is so that the Astute Reader -- and even readers less than astute -- will understand that I am not without sympathy for the victims of racial hatred.
Then I just had to make some clarifications regarding the distinction between simile and metaphor so that people will know that while you can call someone an Ass, that doesn't make them actually a Donkey. I pointed out that there are few faster routes to madness than the embracing of Superstition, and actually starting to believe ridiculous and utterly unreal stuff.
I did a long and probably pointless exposition on how I myself am effectively alone in a crowd, and thus somewhat immune to getting caught up in a lot of "mob psychology".
In "Don't Crush That Dwarf" I offered a bit of background of the popular Role Playing Game "ShadowRun", and more importantly covered the concept of Moral Panic, a variation on Mob Psychology which doesn't quite rise to the level of Riot, but which can be a first step into the sort of madness usually referred to as Witch Hunts.
(For those who wondered whether or not it's available for their gaming console, please see ShadowRun for Xbox 360 Trailer.)
There aren't many things that will spark a Moral Panic in the short-term, or a Witch Hunt in the long term, than a Blood Libel.
The best-known such cases have been the unfortunately common Blood Libels against Jews.
Yet even in the modern day, in a country full of people one would hope had been well-educated in their modern society, there are such blood libels as those of Satanic Ritual Abuse, in which alleged Satanists allegedly tortured or sacrificed their own children, each others' children, or the children of neighbors or total strangers.
From Wikipedia:
Allegations of SRA involved reports of physical and sexual abuse of individuals in the context of occult or satanic rituals. At its most extreme definition, SRA involved a world-wide conspiracy involving the wealthy and powerful of the world elite in which children were abducted or bred for sacrifices, pornography and prostitution.
That the majority of such alleged cases turned out to be either nothing at all, or something totally different, still, genuine and real horrors abound, and have abounded throughout history.
For example, recently here in Aspen Hill, a woman living on Vandalia Court allegedly abused her adopted children for so long that she wound up keeping the bodies of two of them in her freezer after she eventually killed them. Renee D Bowman is under indictment for Murder as well as a host of child-abuse offenses in the disturbing "Freezer Babies Case".
How disturbed does a person have to be in order to (allegedly) beat two young children until they die, and than pack them into the freezer and tote them around the state over a series of moves?
Pretty damned disturbed, I'd say.
You'd think that someone with that level of disturbance would be obvious, and remarkable. Yet none of the neighbors even noticed that two of three adopted children were missing, and the woman was able to hold down a fairly demanding job. Indeed, the District of Columbia government cleared her to adopt, not just once, but twice.
My point is, nobody noticed how disturbed and potentially violent this woman was, and she held down a job and in all ways fit every detail of the picture most of us have of what constitutes a good and decent citizen.
And allegedly, she fit that picture perfectly until she beat her adopted children to death and iced them down in the garage deep freeze.
I am quite certain that I am not the least bit alone in wondering: How many other people who seem totally normal are actually seething pits of frothing madness and repressed violence, possibly only a tiny nudge away from who-knows-what sending them over the edge?
"Oneirataxia" is an inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality.
In a non-pathological form, almost everyone has experienced this, especially as children or teenagers.
An example: you go out to see a movie. For example, you go to see the latest version of Dracula... at the midnight showing.
On the way home, you walk past a darkened alleyway and see a lurking figure within. Of course, you pick up the pace. In all likelihood, this is nothing more than some homeless person doing some dumpster-diving, or a drunk urinating in public. "Onierataxia", however, is experienced for a moment: having just walked out of a horror movie, and it having been actually interesting drama as well as rather scary, your mind first leaps to the possibility that the individual in the dark alley is...
Sane people immediately discount this notion. First, it's ridiculous. Even if it wasn't ridiculous, what are the odds? That's like walking out of an end-of-the-world movie into the opening salvo of World War Four, or being struck by a meteor watching a cable channel replay of "Deep Impact". Of course, there's the added difference that it is actually possible that there could be a meteor impact, or a nuclear war.
In the mildly pathological forms of onierataxia (literally, "walking into a dream"), role-playing gamer teenagers spend all night in a grueling game of ShadowRun and emerge in the morning and the first thing that they see are some skinny blonds with prominent and pointed ears. "Elves!" they exclaim, though ideally not all of the gamers will exclaim this. Ideally, at least one of the gamers will point out to the onierataxic gamer that, first, they are not playing ShadowRun any more, and that secondly, there is no such thing.
In a really bad case, however, you might see all of the gamers declare, "zoh my gawd, it really is an elf!"
In the the next-to-worst of all possible cases, the group decides to kill it.
In the worst possible case, they succeed... and want to do it again, and go recruit towards that end.
Folie à deux is a rather worrisome type of mental illness. Please read the link, above, and then ask yourself if perhaps our society's constant immersion in media -- from television through internet and through video gaming, etc -- might not tend to increase the number of persons predisposed to this "shared psychotic disorder":
Folie à deux /fɒˈli ə ˈdu/ (translated, "a madness shared by two") is a rare psychiatric syndrome in which a symptom of psychosis (particularly a paranoid or delusional belief) is transmitted from one individual to another. The same syndrome shared by more than two people may be called folie à trois, folie à quatre, folie à famille or even folie à plusieurs ("madness of many"). Recent psychiatric classifications refer to the syndrome as shared psychotic disorder (DSM-IV) (297.3) and induced delusional disorder (folie à deux) (F.24) in the ICD-10, although the research literature largely uses the original name.
More intersting in a way which should be considered carefully and deeply (italics mine):
Folie à deux and its more populous cousins are in many ways a psychiatric curiosity. The current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders states that a person cannot be diagnosed as being delusional if the belief in question is one "ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture" (see entry for delusion). It is not clear at what point a belief considered to be delusional escapes from the folie à... diagnostic category and becomes legitimate because of the number of people holding it. When a large number of people may come to believe obviously false and potentially distressing things based purely on hearsay, these beliefs are not considered to be clinical delusions by the psychiatric profession and are labelled instead as mass hysteria.
First, "Moral Panic", and then "Folie à deux"... can Mass Hysteria be long in coming?
Charles Mackay, the original author of "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" has this to say:
"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."
Mackay takes on the mass-hysteria aspects of fashions in beards and everything from witch-hunts to economic bubbles. His work however, doesn't cover much of the modern day; the work was first published in 1841... long before such things as the First Civil War in the US, before the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s, or the War on Drugs ongoing since then, or the recent so-called "Culture Wars".
If indeed we witness the formation of gangs of onierataxic persons trying to stalk and destroy imaginary beings, I'd guess that this falls under "Extraordinary Popular Delusion".
But this might indeed be "the New Racism"... a form of mass Witch Hunt, maybe a bit more low-key than in colonial Salem Massachusetts. Wouldn't want the authorities to get into a Moral Panic and stop all of the fun, right?
I've noticed that some folks just want or need someone to hate, to hate with the sort of hatred that doesn't much think about anything other than exercising that emotion. In the modern day, there isn't much for such people to do. All of the things people might have been encouraged to hate in the past, those reasons to hate are deeply deprecated and often even illegal.
Hating people based on their race, religion, national origin, matriculation or lack thereof, or even disability or mental challenges... it's considered just beyond the pale to hate people for this sort of thing, and crimes demonstrably motivated by such hatred are prosecuted more intensely, and rewarded with harsher sentences than mere crimes of random passion.
So why not direct hatred at the imaginary?
I suppose that's almost cathartic in a drama, but hating the imaginary and failing to distinguish between the imaginary and the real...
It's hard to know whether to charge them with Hate Crime, or lock them up as criminally Insane.
More to come?
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