Crazy has gone viral

     "Extraordinary Popular Delusions, and the Madness of Crowds."

             Title of book by Charles Mackay, 1841

 

Republicans believe the Big Trump Lie. They drank the Kool-Aid. 

The book by Charles Mackay looked closely at the tulip mania in Holland in the 1630s, then the South Sea investment bubble, the Salem witchcraft hysteria, and a time when poisoning one's friends was popular.

From time to time a popular enthusiasm catches on. A fad. At age three I owned a Davy Crockett coonskin hat--like all the three-year-old boys did in 1953. I remember hula hoops and Beatle-mania.  As an adult, I paid attention to financial manias. Mackay wrote about ones long ago but they still happen. The internet bubble. The mortgage loan bubble. We are witnessing something right now. GameStop, a thinly traded stock of a company with a dying business trading at $4 at the end of summer closed at 347, up 201 points for the day. (Don't buy it. Don't short it, either. Someone is going to get hurt here. Don't be one of them.) 

There are also social manias. There have been occasional infestations of teen-age girls getting and sharing the idea of committing suicide. Or political manias, like the Red Scare in the 1920s and Joe McCarthy's communist scare of the 1950s. Right now Republican voters are having a moment of crazy. They fell head over heels in love with Trump. They believe his lies, most recently the one about the election. The belief is unshakable. 

Click: Oregon Republican Party

Every bit of evidence can be dismissed or seen in mirror image. The Oregon Republican Party Executive Committee observed the insurrection at the Capitol and signed a resolution and published a press release saying the insurrection at the Capitol was not done by Trump supporters at all. It was entirely a "false flag" operation of tens of thousands of leftists, hoping to make Trump look bad. Those people in MAGA hats carrying Trump flags, cheering Trump were pretending.

"What a fool believes, he sees."

Penny Flenniken, a retired Portland School Teacher, shares her perspective on the hysteria involving fear of Satanic Ritual Abuse taking place in pre-schools. She wrote this Guest Post thinking it timely because she says she is seeing its parallel in the current circle of irrational belief held by Trump supporters regarding unverifiable--indeed debunked--conspiracies. He got started with an extravagant lie, telling Americans he had proof that then-President Obama was born in Kenya. The lie spread and stuck. It fit an idea that lots of Republicans had, that there was just something wrong about Obama as president, she said. Now Trump has a new one, the big Election-Fraud lie. It, too, is sticking.

"Now a majority of Republicans insist, against all evidence, that the election was fraudulent in some way," Flenniken said.  "It isn't about evidence or any search for Truth with a capital 'T.' It is a matter of faith. Audits. Hand counts. Republican election officials, Republican-appointed judges. It isn't that there is no evidence either way. There is overwhelming evidence that there wasn't fraud. But evidence doesn't matter."

Flenniken

She wrote "the vote counts all make a kind of sense nationally and in relation to the other races on the same ballot. Biden won by just a little in Georgia, where everyone thought it would be close, and then won again by the same amount in the election of the two Democratic senators, under the even-more-watchful eyes of everyone. It's crazy. They feel so certain of fraud that they go to the Capitol to riot and overthrow an election. They drank the Kool-Aid. It brings back memories of a very bad time in America for early childhood educators like myself." 

Guest Post by Penny Flenniken

                                         Hysteria 

In the early 80’s I trained to be a manager of a corporate daycare center in Washington state. Theoretically one might not see this a high-stakes-high-risk occupational decision. Daycare centers handle the task of managing a staff to take care of children aged two through five and provide them with meaningful preparation for school. It is hugely important work, and I was proud to do it. For many families centers like mine are an essential institution allowing parents to work outside the home.

A crazy idea--I call it hysteria--developed around daycare centers during this time. Stories were alleged that weird satanic rituals occurred in the middle of the day, especially during nap time while lights dimmed. The rituals involved supposed acts of sexual abuse and torture, all of which took place, and yet the children would go home apparently unharmed. There were fantastical things alleged. Puppies were said to be shoved up the bottoms of forty pound children. No marks or scars would be found, but prosecutors in court rooms argued that young children wouldn’t fabricate such details, and that somehow, because it was satanic, impossible things could happen without the children knowing or remembering or having any signs.

Parents and prosecutors asserted that the children testified that their daycare teachers flew around the room. They asserted they were taken on long trips inside tunnels underneath the building--tunnels which no investigation nor excavation could find, but which still certainly existed. Their undetectability was somehow proof that the devil was at work. It must be true.

As a result of these fears and wondering “who knew the real truth?" parents in need of child care almost always came at nap time to visit the center where I worked. Perhaps it was a lunchtime break, or maybe just a convenient hour, but it was difficult not to think parents believed that by visiting at the napping hour they were responsibly checking to see if evil was occurring.

I would take them from room to sleeping room and parents could see that everything was fine.

I lived during one era of hysteria to see another one now with the Q-anon conspiracies, or the more mainstream but widespread belief that somehow, in some mysterious way, Biden did not get the votes election officials and audits say he got. I hear that the people deepest in the belief-circle believe Democrats eat children, or at least drink their blood for growth hormones, or traffic them for sex. It is the same imagined peril of young children and abuse we saw forty years ago. Interesting parallel: Even adults with crazy ideas want to be heroes and save little children from harm.

I left the daycare center business soon after. It didn’t pay that much and the risk was too great. Some childcare workers were unfairly put in prison. People might have a question, which would turn into a concern, which could become an accusation. In an environment where evidence did not matter, truth and impossibility weren't a defense.

Teaching later in a public school I have often heard the blame leveled at educators for failing to teach critical thinking skills to students, who then grow up to be easily manipulated adults. Teaching critical thinking skills was always my first priority.