A New Age of Mass Psychosis

The following is largely writing and thinking from the gut. As a pastor after a while you get a feel for things, a sense of the mood of people, politics and deeper worries. This strikes me as an age of anxiety like no other. There are so many contributing factors to this, streams that flow into the wider harbour.

The above YouTube video on Jung interested me this morning. I’m not sure why it came onto my social media feed but it led me to thinking about our contemporary situation. The video propose that from time to time mass psychosis can emerge and take considerable time to subside, perhaps even generations. The examples given are witch trials in the 17-18th centuries and the rise of Nazism in the twentieth. 

These examples are typically where a faction within society is affected with a manifestation of hyper anxiety and paranoia. The sane are pitted against the delusional. The hysteric believe that they, and only they, have the true insight. No reasoning will dissuade them. Neurons in this instance click in with such ferocity that they become hardwired.   It is an almost incurable disease. Sometimes de-programming in prisons and mental asylums makes things worse as inmates spread their worldview.  This is highly infectious. More so in a world of social media billions of algorithms seek to give us what we want. Sanity has barely a chance. 

Social media aside this could also be an unique time in terms of mass psychosis because of another phenomena. What we might be seeing is a singular  context, something I cannot think of ever happening in history before, namely where two factions simultaneously “go into fever.” Could the culture war between Left and Right both be devoured by this? qAnon v BLM for instance. If so, who will remain sane? 

Worse still, what if there are three factions that end up in mass hysteria? As Left and Right potentially descend into madness, what if they were joined by large swathes of the population in the political centre who are gripped with overwhelming fear of dying from Covid? They too could become technically hysterical through the endless drip drip reception of bad news. You can imagine how the un-vaxxed or the germ variant becomes “the other”.  Everybody then becomes on edge. People fight over toilet roll in shops or shout down teenagers for not wearing masks. Drones hover parks to ensure social distance compliance.  Again, social media algorithms picking our taste and heightened emotionally response for negative news would ramp this up ten fold setting neighbour against neighbour. 

This is why despite the vaccines I’m not convinced we are not out of the woods yet. Something is brewing. The quiet before the storm perhaps. It always struck me as strange how the October 1917 revolution came from nowhere, just when Russia seem to have resolved things and settled into a centrist liberal democracy model - it then threw it all up in the air and allowed the Communist takeover. I find that time eerily analogous to our own. We could be sleepwalking into a calamity and chaos? 

Whatever happens we can only vaccinate ourselves from mass psychosis  by being grounded. For Christians we hold that being grounded in the Ground of Being is a sure foundation for any human. Christians know (hopefully) that the key way to negotiate  these times is to be deeply rooted  in the Tradition, the memory of the Universal Church. The key to unlocking that glorious memory is making the Bible our primary diet of news. 

In public pronouncements church leaders do well to be fluent in the Gnostic language of paranoia. Surely this is what makes the Gospel according to St John not only elegant theologically but compelling reading. He employs the black-and-white apocalyptic language of madmen and elevates it into the brightest and most sublime of religious texts ever penned. This is genius. No doubt his gospel manuscript rescued many from the both wild heresies of Christianity and the crazed cult of the Caesars. John’s language connected with them. They would have immediately understood that he understood their concerns, spoke their lingo. 

This to me is the nub of the problem. Namely, sanitised Christianity is unable to connect with those on the precipice of mass hysteria. Progressive Christianity in particular struggles to do this, unless of course it is harmonising with the political Left and its own cuckoo conspiracies. The post Enlightenment church with its bourgeoisie mentality, demythologising everything that breathes, cannot bring itself to connect with the existential anxieties that abound.  They would rather that the sad (as they see it) rot. It is a sort of spiritual snobbery.