Why does the world keep being sucked into collective crazes like transgenderism, MeToo, lockdowns and BLM in recent years? Lionel Shriver takes the question head on in an excellent article in UnHerd. Here’s an excerpt.
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.
The fifth mania, of course, is the “climate emergency”:
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.
Definitely worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Toby Young will be interviewing Lionel Shriver on stage at the Hippodrome at the Free Speech Union’s launch party for her new novel MANIA on April 15th. You can purchase tickets here – and it’s cheap as chips! £10 for FSU Members and £15 for non-members.
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Read the article earlier. Of course Shriver is right, but she neglects to give us a suggestion about how we counter this menace, unless she just thinks that each mania will blow itself out, and eventually the behaviour of the maniacs will soften and come back to reality..?
That’s obviously her idea of it.
No, she seems to be suggesting that one mania follows rapidly on the heels of another.
Stuff like this has happened in the past: for example Tulip Mania in the 17th century when men ruined themselves to buy overpriced bulbs; and the South Sea Bubble in the 18thC when so many piled on the dodgy investment. Common sense, prudence and rational thinking were all ditched.
But those manias were largely about making money and one didn’t follow the other with such rapidity. There was no mass communication.
Beatlemania came along with mass media and TV.
In the last few decades, the internet has spread IDEAS (memes) across continents in a matter of hours and most humans are conditioned to be groupthinkers, copying each other’s behaviour.
Although I appreciate Shriver’s broad arguments, I can’t agree with her sweeping statement that ‘EVERYONE’ thinks, talks of, believes in and promotes the latest mania.
As someone who has rejected climate change, transgenderism, covidia, BLM, and me-tooism, I hope there are many, many more of us who are sceptical on a daily basis and eschew the herd mentality.
But manias today are like buses – there’ll be another one along in a minute.
The global boiling crescendo is the same people who brought us COVID — The Virus Strike Back! continuing to use their newly learnt rethoric and other tricks, especially the substitution of facts with ever more hysterical lying, for their other hobby horse. Deadly heatwave season, with weather forecast maps all in RED!!!, has apparently already been started in Germany despite real temperatures remaining in the lower 20s, coming hot after a string of Hottest ever! months, starting with (I kid you not) unusually warm snow in winter.
“all white people are genetically racist”…..Why would that then exclude black racism towards white people?
These manias as she calls them often come at a time when something else big is happening in the world and is handy to keep the plebs looking the other way.
I’ve found some mania. Not that anybody can escape maniacs and mentalists these days so it’s not exactly a challenge. Look what these entitled, narcissistic little scrotes have just done today. They’re not even bothering to hide their identities. What do you think happened to them as a result of their actions? No doubt the parents will fit the bill and say ”well done!”
”BREAKING: We Painted @UKLabour HQ Red
Labour has blood on their hands. They are complicit in the murder of Palestinians, and millions of people around the world, as they continue to drive genocide.”
https://twitter.com/Wayward_sestra/status/1777380981432861020
Climate Catastrophism has been around a while now – since the ’70s at least. It has had various episodes, such as The Coming Ice Age, The Ozone Hole, Global Warming, Climate Disruption, etc.
I think Climate Alarmism is more of a money-driven scam by an elite rather than a mania of the masses. The Blob has found it a useful way of extracting extra tax from the populace and is keeping it going. It will lbe up to the populace to stamp it out, and there are signs (not least on the Daily Sceptic) that this is starting to happen.
I wonder if the next trend will be identifying as a different colour and ethnicity. We might all go Michael Jackson in order to get the jobs and sports scholarships allocated for those people.
Trans men are simply oddball gays or
paedos using it as cover and protection. Trans women are likewise. Gay people are often very narcissistic so being trans plays to this internal desire to be adulated
There’s a third option: They get paid for playacting something in public.
And the Putin threat mania? Once he is finished in Ukraine, he will first take Europe and then the rest of the world. Everyone to arms!
The herd is easily stampeded. It has always been this way. Just look at the toilet roll mania at the beginning of the covid scam or I can go back 60 years to bread strikes. I can also talk to the power of advertising. People of my age will remember The Golden Wonder peanut advert with the strap line “their jungle fresh”. People were coming into our shop asking for “Jungle Fresh” not simply peanuts.
But now with global connections and social media, nearly all the world goes mad together.
2016 also brought in the crazy clowns craze. Also going back a few centuries was the dancing craze.
I hope you are not referring to Brexit. The only crazy clowns between 2013, when the Referendum was announced, and 2016 when LEAVE won, were the Remainiacs. Idiots who predicted, like Chicken Licken, that the sky would fall down if we left the EU.
Crucial point: All of these manias conform to the agenda of the fashionable ruling elite. The institutions in power have every incentive to promote, support, and reward those who advance the progress of each of these trends.