The antisemitism on college campuses has spread like wildfire. While it can’t be justified, the real question is: Where did this hatred come from? In my humble opinion, it’s a 2023 version of a mass psychogenic illness. The truth is that none of these haters are Middle East history experts. So why would they gather in mass and display such venom toward a group of people they know little to nothing about?
Mass psychogenic disorder, mass sociogenic illness, and mass epidemic hysteria are different ways to describe the same thing and are certainly not new. In fact, there have been some fascinating cases throughout history, and most if not all have had tragic consequences in one manner or another.
One case has become known as the Dancing plague of 1518. Scientists and historians still aren't sure what led people in Strasbourg to dance themselves to death. However, in July 1518, residents of the city of Strasbourg, which was then part of the Holy Roman Empire, were struck by a sudden and seemingly uncontrollable urge to dance. At the time, Strasbourg was a densely populated and highly stressed city, with frequent outbreaks of disease, famine, and social unrest. Some historians have suggested that the dancing may have been a form of mass psychogenic illness, triggered by anxiety, religious fervor, or other psychological factors.
The hysteria kicked off when a woman known as Frau Troffea stepped into the street and began to silently twist, twirl, and shake. She kept up her solo dance-a-thon for nearly a week. Before long, some three dozen other people had joined in. By August, the dancing epidemic had claimed as many as 400 victims. With no other explanation for the phenomenon, local physicians blamed it on “hot blood” and suggested the afflicted simply gyrate the fever away.
A stage was constructed, and professional dancers were brought in.The town even hired a band to provide backup music, but it wasn’t long before the marathon started to take its toll. Many dancers collapsed from sheer exhaustion. Some even died from strokes and heart attacks. The strange episode didn’t end until September, when the dancers were whisked away to a mountaintop shrine to pray for absolution.
The Strasbourg dancing plague might sound like the stuff of legend, but it’s well documented in 16th-century historical records. It’s also not the only known incident of its kind. Similar manias took place in Switzerland, Germany. and Holland, though few were as large or deadly as the one triggered in 1518.
As strange as a mass dancing sociogenic illness is, in 1962 a mass hysteria involving laughter took place in Tanzania. The phenomenon was seen as an illness that people caught, and the boarding school in Kashasha was sued by some for letting the phenomenon spread outside the school. The laughter epidemic carried on for several months, affecting hundreds of people and forcing 14 schools to close.
Sufferers’ symptoms included recurring attacks of laughing and crying that lasted from a few hours to 16 days. These fits were accompanied by restlessness, aimless running, and occasional violence, but there was no evidence of organic causes. Christian Hempelmann of Texas A&M University, who has done research on the incident, describes the laughter epidemic as a legitimate case of mass psychogenic illness, a malady that has the capacity to strike in a variety of high-stress settings. The stress factors among the schoolgirls may have included the unfamiliar expectations imposed in the British-run schools and the uncertainties created by Tanganyika’s independence, achieved barely a month before the incident.
Hempelmann recalled an instance from his time living in Lafayette, Indiana. Workers at the local DMV were exhibiting respiratory distress to the point that the building was repeatedly shut down and eventually relocated. When the environment was tested for contaminants, nothing was found, and ultimately the local media reported the case as a sort of mass psychogenic disorder.
“It was just a terrible work environment, nobody wanted to work at the DMV, they had particularly bad supervision there, and they just subconsciously found a way out of the situation that they could copy from each other, It’s not as crazy as one would think.”
Probably the case most similar to what is occurring on college campuses right now took place in 1692. Salem. Massachusetts, was the place where women were accused of being witches. They were slandered and denied rights. In January of that year, mass hysteria erupted in Salem Village when the specter of witchcraft was raised after several young girls became unaccountably ill.
The Salem witch trials subsequently became a defining example of intolerance and injustice in American history. The extraordinary series of events in 1692 led to the deaths of 25 innocent women, men, and children. The crisis in Salem, Massachusetts, took place partly because the community lived under an ominous cloud of suspicion, religious fanaticism, power-hungry individuals, local disputes, misogyny, anxiety, political turmoil, and psychological distress.
In every one of these cases, what occurred was illogical and could not be justified as rational behavior. That said, stress, which included fanaticism, anxiety, political turmoil, social unrest, psychological distress and other mental maladies, affected the way the inflicted people reacted. I don’t claim to be a psychiatrist or a psychologist, but I don’t need to be one to come to the rational conclusion that college students in this day and age are weaker than generations past. Therefore, they are more susceptible to “perceived” stresses that generations past would not have been affected by.
The left has caused this turmoil and continues to churn it on every level of society on a daily basis. They start in grade school and even earlier. They force children to contemplate things that are irrational and biologically impossible. They continue the siege of their minds by preaching agendas and ignoring facts. By the time students reach college, they are opinionated and entitled. They have the swag, but not the fortitude. They are fragile snowflakes offended by everything, hating tradition, and blind to the fact that the Kool-Aid they have been breast-fed by the left has destroyed their ability to think rationally.
They are legends in their own minds. They see themselves as social justice warriors and independent thinkers with a voice. It’s laughable really. They are nothing more than followers of the hysterical left. Clowns with no makeup and oversized shoes who are so desperate to be heard that they scream at the tops of their lungs when they should be silent and learn.
The left has turned many of them into nothing more than zombies. They are infected, not by a physical virus but by a mental one that is more effective than anything portrayed in any George Romero movie. They are just as mindless and equally as dangerous. The mobs need to be dispersed and consequences need to be levied. Then we as a society need to reclaim our schools by tearing off the left’s mask and exposing them for the monsters they are.
Otherwise, every day will look like Halloween without the treats.
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