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.
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Take trans. Gender-identity disorder was not that long ago an extraordinarily rare psychiatric diagnosis largely constrained (...)
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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.
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While the seeds of a mania have often been planted earlier, for most ordinary people it comes out of nowhere.
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Moreover, all these recent examples illustrate how moral panics have become more international in scope than ever before.
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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.
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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.
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Because a proper mania brooks no dissent.
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Manias are prone to grow increasingly extreme, accumulating evermore casualties before collapsing from their contradictions.
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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.
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Some hysterias die an easier death than others.
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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.
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Once manias die down, most people pretend they never believed these things to begin with.
https://www.sott.net/article/469811-Propaganda-Trudeau-style
Bernays emphasized in Propaganda that "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country"
We can look at these strategies as a way to reflect on the recent media propaganda
1) If you manipulate the leader of a group, the people will follow
2) Words are powerful, and the key to influencing group emotions is through the clever use of language
3) Any medium of communication is also a medium for propaganda
4) Reiterating the same idea over and over creates habits and convictions
5) One can manipulate individual actions by creating circumstances that modify group customs
Time-tested propaganda strategies for framing a discussion, and weaponizing it against a group