The turn of the second millennium has brought about, in the Western world at least, an outpouring of concern about cosmic matters. A major portion of this concern has taken a delusional, even hysterical turn, specifically in imagining an end-of-the-world scenario. "The end of the world is near," predicts Karl de Nostredame, supposedly the "last living descendent" of Nostradamus; "White House knows doomsday date!" he claims (Wolfe 1999).
The study of collective delusions most commonly falls within the domain of sociologists working in the sub-field of collective behavior, and psychologists specializing in social psychology. Collective delusions are typified as the spontaneous, rapid spread of false or exaggerated beliefs within a population at large, temporarily affecting a particular region, culture, or country. Mass hysteria is most commonly studied by psychiatrists and physicians. Episodes typically affect small, tightly knit groups in enclosed settings such as schools, factories, convents and orphanages (Calmeil 1845; Hirsch 1883; Sirois 1974).
Mass hysteria is characterized by the rapid spread of conversion disorder, a condition involving the appearance of bodily complaints for which there is no organic basis. In such episodes, psychological distress is converted or channeled into physical symptoms. There are two common types: anxiety hysteria and motor hysteria. The former is of shorter duration, usually lasting a day, and is triggered by the sudden perception of a threatening agent, most commonly a strange odor. Symptoms typically include headache, dizziness, nausea, breathlessness, and general weakness. Motor hysteria is prevalent in intolerable social situations such as strict school and religious settings where discipline is excessive. Symptoms include trance-like states, melodramatic acts of rebellion known as histrionics, and what physicians term "psychomotor agitation" (whereby pent-up anxiety built up over a long period results in disruptions to the nerves or neurons that send messages to the muscles, triggering temporary bouts of twitching, spasms, and shaking). Motor hysteria appears gradually over time and usually takes weeks or months to subside (Wessely 1987; Bartholomew and Sirois 1996). The term mass hysteria is often used inappropriately to describe collective delusions, as the overwhelming majority of participants are not exhibiting hysteria, except in extremely rare cases. In short, all mass hysterias are collective delusions as they involve false or exaggerated beliefs, but only rarely do collective delusions involve mass hysteria as to do so, they must report illness symptoms.
http://www.csicop.org/si/2000-05/delusions.html
In the realm of the dark, with stolen opportunities, with the spring daffodils that lined the Yorkshire lanes, with the smell of others he wanted to grasp and entangle. He grew more gangly and disassociated by the day. The Christmas blessings were not what they seemed. He had held so much back; the thumping sequence of thoughts in his head so loud he couldn't believe no one else could hear them. It was a cruelty. It was a destiny. His usefulness was over. He hung on the edge of social clusters, embarrassed to be so out on a limb, and all was lost, all was lost. They could see it in his face and steered clear.
The remnants of the computer menace still lingered in his life, the imagery, the job of writing up the history. The constant pain had twisted his soul inside out. He was sure there was some other reason, but he didn't know what. The years of isolation were beginning to show. "I'm in housing," they said, in a terrible nasal Australian accent, hoooousssing, as if it was a badge of honour, or a badge of failure, the club, a social marker. He shuddered as he listened. Eight million go to work in a country of little more than 20 million, supporting millions on the welfare rolls. Centrelink is the central agency in these millions of lives, the source of income, frustration, often despair.
Adopt a pensioner is the latest campaign, humiliating, contemptuous, demonstrating the virtual impossibility of surviving. While those on average wages can barely step outside the front door. And others triumph; they chatter in smart houses, they gaze down the foreshore cliffs, the mansions perched high above the sandstone, their fabulous lives against the vivid blue of beach and sky, and here in the curling, mundane streets of Redfern, we go about our days. The entire country is backing up with a common flaw, a working wage gets you nowhere these days. All is lost, all is lost, here in our defective souls. He couldn't hear them screaming; their voices muffled in the morning cold as they made their way into another day of toil.
It was the gloss that got to him, the arrogance and the gloss. He was disassociated, thought disordered, depressed, longing for a life free of physical and mental pain. The solution presented itself repeatedly: travel. But the finances were tight, the children still dependent on him, and his eroded spirit could barely rise any more. Dear Lord, dear Lord, he chanted, and the muffled voices puffed steam in the morning air. All was lost, all was lost, the trails of garbage along the side of the road, the crowded street stalls, the entire collapse of the country they had known. Only the elderly could remember a different world, and they made it seem so fabulous, when people drove around in their very own cars, when hundreds of thousands were not living on the streets at any one time.
They had become the Calcutta of the future; and money cut a swathe through everything. He was wrong to regret it. He thought their hearts had been warmed, he had, briefly, relied on the generosity, the warm hearts, of others. But clearly, increasingly, his own mishappen heart reflected in the world that he saw. He took in the worse elements on a daily basis. He saw the fires of the future in the oil drums on the side of the road. He saw the chaos of Eveleigh Street, the fires, the rapes, the dealing, the fights and the drunkenness, as a gateway to the future. The leftwing politicians of the time had been so certain, had brooked no alternative view, deriding those brave enough to disagree with them.
The stifling of dissent began slowly in the early part of the century, but rapidly escalated. Dissent was crushed or more often, and often more effectively, ridiculed. The myths were beyond astonishing; and public policy was run by a series of manufactured crisis, the obesity crisis, the domestic violence crisis, the aging crisis. The figures failed to support many of their public campaigns, showing that in reality most people went about their days quietly and with little violence, and were largely able to look after themselves. But this didn't stop the building of ever larger and more complex layers of bureaucracy, and saw, as more and more people became reliant on falsehoods for the livelihoods, the drowning of dissent.
A uniform silence came to dominate public life. No armed forces were necessary. They simply isolated and ridiculed those who dared to disagree. We were ruled by fads and fantasies, by left wing shibboleths that harked back to the days of Stalin and Trotsky. What was most amazing was that most people appeared to believe the pap they were fed; or at least did not speak up. The social isolation of those who did was a very effective weapon. He shuddered at the cruelty of it, but was beginning to understand. Stand up and be counted really meant stand up and be shot, live a lonely life, be ridiculed as an eccentric; or embrace the apocalyptic visions of global warming, obesity epidemics, the left wing lies that the family was the most dangerous place to be. Accept; or be isolated. You might as well be shot.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/union-ministers-warn-of-backlash/2008/05/31/1211654370878.html
FEDERAL Government ministers, staff and unions are pleading with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to slow down or risk a serious political backlash.
And the Opposition has warned Mr Rudd that his frenetic work demands and hypocritical stance on work and family balance could be politically fatal.
The Commonwealth Public Sector Union, covering more than 60,000 Federal Government employees and hundreds of political staffers, is gearing up for a showdown over conditions.
The union's national secretary Stephen Jones said he would shortly call a meeting of parliamentary staff, ahead of a meeting with the Prime Minister. After a string of complaints from distressed and exhausted staffers, Mr Jones has met with senior ministers to relay health concerns over their extreme working conditions.
A minister told The Sun-Herald the Prime Minister's cracking pace and "unfair" expectations of everyone in government, including the bureaucracy, was "the elephant in the room". Ministers were embarrassingly aware of how the Government's work practices differed from the philosophy it preached. "He [Mr Rudd] doesn't want to hear it", the minister said.
Widespread concern in the public service has also prompted a string of meetings between the union and the bureaucracy. Reflecting the growing backlash within the Government at Mr Rudd's style, Mr Jones could not rule out industrial action. "I certainly hope it doesn't get to that," he said. "I wouldn't want to speculate on that".
http://business.smh.com.au/were-all-fiscal-conservatives-now-20080530-2js0.html
Update: Australians are morphing into Kevin Rudd's fiscal conservatives - albeit mostly against our will.
The long-held passion for the plastic is waning, with repeated Reserve Bank rate rises - amplified with interest by the commercial banks - prompting more shoppers to leave the credit card unswiped.
Today's credit numbers published by the RBA showed just a 0.4% increase for April, half the pace expected by economists. It was the weakest growth in more than two years.
While the annualised rate still looks extravagant at 14.1%, the growth pace compared with a 16.5% clip at the end of last year.
The effect of interest rates on consumer outlays is even more severe on the home front.
Housing credit grew by just 0.7% in April, as the yearly rate dropped to 11.1% - the lowest rate in 16 years.
A breakdown of that number shows that owner-occupied housing rose 0.8% and investor housing up merely 0.5% or 9.5% annualised - a 17-year low.
The numbers will not bode well for those hoping for an ease to the national housing shortage.
http://www.canada.com/vancouvercourier/news/artsandentertainment/story.html?id=cb007eea-cacc-4819-ae13-1be138dc31c6
Kudos & Kvetches
Dropping out
Vancouver Courier
Published: Friday, May 02, 2008
If the doors of perception slammed shut on you recently or the snake you were riding with the ghost of a Native American chief suddenly turned back into your IKEA sofa and ottoman, it's probably because Albert Hoffman, the "father of LSD," died of a heart attack at age 102 this week.
The Swiss chemist accidentally discovered LSD in 1938 while studying medicinal plants, trying to synthesize their active components in hope of discovering a stimulant for respiratory and circulatory systems. Five years later, he spilled some synthesized LSD ("Lyergsaeure-Diathylamid" or lysergic acid diethylamide) on his hand and reported that he felt waves of happiness, hallucinations and the sensation that he could fly--something members of the K&K team feel every time we eat too many Timbits. After dropping acid for the first time, Hoffman finally understood the appeal of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, which he had previously dismissed as self-indulgent and tedious. The fact that Dark Side of the Moon wasn't recorded for another 30 years was proof of LSD's magical powers.
LSD's psychedelic properties were originally championed by psychiatrists treating patients who were in a reactionless state and in the 1960s by dirty hippies and bands such as the Beatles whose song "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" was reportedly a nod to the mind-expanding drug, although we're pretty sure the band's little known B-side "Hey Paul, Check Out That Eagle Growing Out of Ringo's Forehead" was way more influenced by LSD.
So all you acid heads and tie-dye shirt wearers, take a moment of silence, if that's possible, and pay some respect to the man responsible for the circus that paraded across your bedroom wall and the talking ashtray who kindly told you the secret of life, which you wrote down on your living room carpet with a hotdog wiener that could shoot lightening. Ride the snake.
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