I wonder how many of the people I’ve seen driving while wearing their N95 mask, dramatically lowering the oxygen level in their blood and thereby suffocating on their own carbon dioxide, have at one time or another ever chuckled at the people who participated in the mass hysteria over satanism in the 80’s? It would be ironic, considering what they’ve succumbed to now. Or even if they did believe the absurd claims of infant sacrifice at various daycare centers, surely they balked at the Heavens Gate cult and their subsequent mass suicide (Collective suicide seems hardwired into the cult phenomenon)? And yet, we appear to be living through a mass psychological event that in many ways combines the worst aspects of both historical episodes. The unhinged fear of a phantom threat moving silently and invisibly through the population, viral infection taking the place of demonic possession, a proliferation of End Times prophecies combined with prophecies of salvation through a soon-to-arrive Messiah who will vanquish the heretics and then establish Heaven on Earth, et cetera. It’s all there.
Cults need to keep their flock in a sustained state of fear. Cults require their flock to participate in various rituals that signal their total obedience. Cults separate their members from their family. Cults demand sacrifices, culminating in the ultimate sacrifice, either total enslavement or mass suicide.
It all sounds very familiar, but it’s also highly appealing to our more primitive nature, which is why we see various doomsday cults pop up occasionally among the inhabitants of “modern” society. Our minds evolved over a period of millions of years when we only had magical or mystical explanations for the inexplicable world around us. We are descended from fire eaters, snake worshipers, and virgin sacrificers. From the millions of years when our species saw both the sun and the State as gods.
My overriding fear amid virus hysteria is that extended periods of mass paranoia and hysteria could trigger a regression, a rebarbarization, away from the free and open society from which we’ve benefited so greatly. Not much different than the way that Hitler rose to power out of the ashes of the most highly cultured and sophisticated open societies that Europe has ever produced.
