Social mania
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Social manias are mass movements which periodically sweep through society, sometimes on a world wide basis. They are characterized by an outpouring of enthusiasm, mass involvement and millennialist goals.
Social mania are contagious social epidemics. They are social phenomena, which should be differentiated from the general state of frenzy in individuals (mania), which is a defined psychiatric disease.
In recent history social manias have included Nazism and Communism, including such related phenomena as the Cultural Revolution, McCarthyism and Zionism; Abolitionism; Mormonism; the Hippies, the Taiping Rebellion; the French Revolution and the current wave of religious fundamentalism, including Islamism, Christian Fundamentalism and Hindu fundamentalism.
Social manias come in different sizes and strengths -- some fail to catch fire, while some persist for hundreds of years or even millennia (although sometimes in severely attenuated form). Common to all is a vision of salvation, a new way of life, which if realized would radically change everyday life, ushering in a new world of freedom and justice. This claim is always false (or at least the vision is revealed as somewhat pedestrian if viewed objectively), as the results of such revolutions (e.g. Communism and Mormonism) show.
If social mania are to be considered as evil, it is evil that arises from a vision of the good. However, it is a good in competition with other goods, thus implying and resulting in conflict (sometimes very serious conflict resulting in the death of tens of millions of people).
The Taiping Rebellion is an excellent illustration, as it was both widespread and destructive and has no modern adherents to whom its use as an example would be a distraction. To think objectively about Islamism, with the many strong feelings it currently brings forth (or Communism, which while moribund, continues to show some life) is difficult. To turn back on ourselves and view Christianity as a social mania (which it surely has been) is nearly impossible, although sometimes a modicum of historical perspective helps.
The Ghost dance which was briefly embraced by Native Americans of the Great Plains in 1890 is another excellent example which may be viewed in some historical perspective, as may The Crusades.
Further reading
- Jessica Stern, Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill, Harpercollins, August, 2003, hardcover, 400 pages, ISBN 006050532X
Reference
- Adapted from the Wikinfo article, "Social mania" and related articles, http://www.internet-encyclopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Social_mania April 2, 2004