Caleb Anderson: Mass Psychosis – surely not - never!

Recently I had the privilege of listening to a woman who had escaped with her family from North Korea to the West.  One comment stood out, they were taught, among other things, that the great leader did not use the bathroom, a hint of his divinity.  This woman was too frightened not to believe this, everyone just went along with it.

That a man can be a woman, and a woman a man, madness even five years ago, orthodoxy to some today.  Do the proponents of this idea actually believe this?

The assertions by indigenous activists that all was pretty rosy before colonisation, that colonisation brought nothing of value, and that ancient ways of knowing are equal, or better, than anything produced by the enlightenment, or modern empirical science.  Do they simply not know their science?

That “Marxism is the solution to the problems of the West” was a comment I heard not so long ago from a young university student.  Despite the fact that Marxism (in its various iterations) has murdered more than one hundred million of its own people, and impoverished the rest.  Has he just not read history?

A spokesperson for a social service agency recently commented on television that gangs in New Zealand do not need harsher penalties, what they need is more love.  Does she actually believe that it is as simple as that?

The Green Party wants to impose further restrictions on landlords to improve the quality of rental stock, when evidence is everywhere of a rental house shortage, as landlords exit an increasingly over-regulated market ... and in spite of clear evidence that the more the government interferes in the housing market the worse it gets.  Why are they not joining the dots?

These are diverse examples of the same phenomenon.  They are obviously not equally dangerous ideas, but they all have very real knock-on implications.  They also have something in common.  In each case, people unyieldingly held (or hold) ideas that are clearly problematic, likely false, or at least highly contestable. 

I am going to suggest that people can come quite easily to believe in things that are self-evidently not true. 

There are a number of reasons people doggedly believe certain things, in spite of the fact that they are not consistent with evidence or reason.

Some people hold to spurious and falsifiable beliefs because it is too risky to do otherwise. Or, perhaps, adherence facilitates entry to, or progression within, a coveted group, perhaps it wins kudos with a lecturer, opens a career path, assuages guilt, or just settles their mind on something too controversial or vexed to nut out. 

Perhaps it is all, or some, or none of these things. 

Psychology suggests that a significant number of people come to believe something that is likely not to be true (according to conventional wisdom) for four primary reasons  ...

1. To garner, and maintain, membership of a social group
2. In order to make sense of things that are difficult to understand
3. Through anxiety
4. Through fear

Might these reasons help explain why one of the greatest and most highly educated nations in the world, the home of Hegel, Kant, Luther, Goethe, Beethoven, and Nietzsche, engaged in the systematic extermination of six million Jews? Or, at the other end of the spectrum, might they explain why a modern Prime Minister is frozen with fear when asked to describe the difference between a man and a woman, when the answer is self-evident to most people.

When people come to believe, or assert, an idea that is contrary to evidence, conventional wisdom, and common sense, and manifest hostility to critiquing this idea, this is called psychosis.  When enough people come to believe an idea, this is called mass psychosis.  When a mass psychosis gains a critical mass it can be extremely dangerous.

I have lost count of the number of people who have commented that New Zealand (and perhaps the wider West) seems to be stuck in a period of utter madness, where untruths are promoted by governments, media, activists, academics, and celebrities, as being true, where it is dangerous to question, and where eloquent and convincing arguments, from eminently qualified experts, are cast to the wind.

Some experts in the field of mass psychosis believe that when it reaches a critical mass exceeding twenty percent of a population it is in a position to be very dangerous.

So what are the antidotes to mass psychosis (and the anxiety, fear, and group think, that feeds it)?

I would suggest citizenship over tribalism, democracy over any alternative, the free sharing of ideas over censorship, a media willing to cover both sides of issues, an education system that is robust and apolitical ... and a population that insists on being heard, and that is willing to say “thus far and no further”.

When the veneer is stripped away, people are pretty constant over time and space.  There is nothing inherent in any group that makes it immune from the errors and excesses of any other group, or from the terrible mistakes of the past.  This is worth thinking about.

How appropriate would a tentative diagnosis of mass psychosis be for New Zealand?  Perhaps? Not yet? Your call.  If not appropriate now, at what point might it become appropriate?  Your call again.  

Caleb Anderson, a graduate history, economics, psychotherapy and theology, has been an educator for over thirty years, twenty as a school principal.