Mass Climate Change Hysteria

It seems like it was only yesterday that the psycho political world was abuzz with talk about mass formation psychosis. I said nothing about it at the time, because, why legitimate an absurd concept. By nearly all serious psychiatric sources, psychosis is a brain disease, to be treated by medication. 

Besides, we already have the notion of mass hysteria, a perfectly serviceable category to describe the forms of collective madness that befall the citizenry. When thinking about Covid responses, most people have recently discovered that the lockdown regime imposed by many countries produced something like a bout of mass hysteria.

Of course, some people believe that the mass hysteria was caused by Joe Rogan. Apparently, some people on his show uttered some dread misinformation, thereby producing mass hysteria in the populace. 

As it happens, Rogan’s audience is not that big and he does not have the power to implement shutdowns, lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine mandates and social distancing. Those who are responsible for ginning up the national hysteria quotient include Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx and the better part of the public health administration group.

One suspects that the mass hysteria was produced by the simple fact that those holding different opinions or proposing different policies were demonized relentlessly by the media and politicians. The end is nigh, they kept shouting. The world is coming to an end. The virus is going to get you, and you must become a professional scold. You must confront and call out your neighbors for crimes like not wearing a mask in public.

And, of course, as we have reported repeatedly on this blog, the truth of the matter was that there are trade-offs in life. There was a cost to the lockdowns and the shutdowns and the school closings and the office closings. In truth, as we now know, the lockdown policies did not contain the virus, but caused significant damage to people’s lives, beginning with children.

So, we got to see how government authorities, granted a bit too much control over peoples’ lives, could produce mass hysteria. Not so much by trafficking in what some authorities insisted was misinformation, but, and here is the salient point, by imposing groupthink, by insisting that one set of opinions is so completely and utterly true that any dissent is criminal and even homicidal. Mind control, anyone. How about brainwashing, on a mass scale.

Good mental health, being defined in terms of clear thinking, requires balance. It involves the ability to consider opposing points of view, and to make a rational decision about which to adopt. Bad mental health involves mental imbalance, refusing to grant any credence to opposing points of view and insisting that everyone think the same thoughts, believe the same beliefs and feel the same feelings. 

This brings us to the impetus for these thoughts. That is, climate change hysteria. In fairness, the New York Times article that tells us how patients across the country are become depressed and anxious over climate change does not consider that their condition has been drummed into them by the media and by idiot activists like Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

No, the Times does not even consider that patients’ problems with climate change might have something to do with media mind control. The Times suggests that the people who are becoming pompously and piously neurotic about the climate are effectively being rendered hysterical by the climate itself. Not by the way they think about the climate. Not by the gasbag politicians who are railing about greenhouse gasses, but by the climate itself. 

For those who care to examine contrary opinions about climate change, I recommend Francis Menton’s blog, The Manhattan Contrarian.

In truth, this mass hysteria, and the notion that people should change the way they conduct their everyday lives in order to save the trees and the bushes and the planet itself, is the problem, not the solution. When people have anxiety attacks over a piece of aluminum foil or plastic wrap, you can see that they are advertising their superior virtue, even though it is making them crazy.

Case in point, one Alina Black, a woman in Portland-- where else?-- who has panic attacks about how much her everyday behaviors are causing global warming. Since this effectively makes her look like a blithering fool, you can rest assured that she is confessing it all to the New York Times in order to advertise her virtue. Heck, she is even allowing them to use her picture. 

What happened to anonymity?

Here is her case.

It would hit Alina Black in the snack aisle at Trader Joe’s, a wave of guilt and shame that made her skin crawl.

Something as simple as nuts. They came wrapped in plastic, often in layers of it, that she imagined leaving her house and traveling to a landfill, where it would remain through her lifetime and the lifetime of her children.

She longed, really longed, to make less of a mark on the earth. But she had also had a baby in diapers, and a full-time job, and a 5-year-old who wanted snacks. At the age of 37, these conflicting forces were slowly closing on her, like a set of jaws.

In the early-morning hours, after nursing the baby, she would slip down a rabbit hole, scrolling through news reports of droughts, fires, mass extinction. Then she would stare into the dark.

But seriously, she is a mother. She is caring for children, for young children. I suspect that she has a husband-- because in her picture she is wearing a wedding band-- but nothing in the story recognizes his existence. This is the Times, of course, and if you want to gin up the climate hysteria and cause people to become more anxious and depressed, treat them as human monads, not as family members, or, Heaven forfend, as wives.

Of course, you will be happy to hear that the psycho world is on the case. In truth, they are feeding the anxiety by explaining that it is perfectly rational to fear for the climate while changing those diapers. Seriously.

If you think I am kidding, take a look at this, from the Times:

A decade ago, Dr. Doherty and a colleague, Susan Clayton, a professor of psychology at the College of Wooster, published a paper proposing a new idea. They argued that climate change would have a powerful psychological impact — not just on the people bearing the brunt of it, but on people following it through news and research. At the time, the notion was seen as speculative.

That skepticism is fading. Eco-anxiety, a concept introduced by young activists, has entered a mainstream vocabulary. And professional organizations are hurrying to catch up, exploring approaches to treating anxiety that is both existential and, many would argue, rational.

Though there is little empirical data on effective treatments, the field is expanding swiftly. The Climate Psychology Alliance provides an online directory of climate-aware therapists; the Good Grief Network, a peer support network modeled on 12-step addiction programs, has spawned more than 50 groups; professional certification programs in climate psychology have begun to appear.

So, the therapy world sees it all as a business opportunity. More patients for therapists. Hurrah. They have no idea what works or not. They have no idea about effective treatments, but they are learning the vocabulary of climate change hysteria, the better to show off how empathetic they are. And to show that they are members of the same faction.

Seriously, you cannot make this up.

If you did not think that this was real, Alina Black was happy to share, with the Times and with her friends and neighbors, not to mention her children, her symptoms.

If you want to know how to lose friends and to alienate people, expose your batty thoughts in the New York Times. Exception made for those friends who are feeling her pain.

Two years of wildfires and heat waves in Portland had stirred up something sleeping inside her, a compulsion to prepare for disaster. She found herself up at night, pricing out water purification systems. For her birthday, she asked for a generator.

She understands how privileged she is; she describes her anxiety as a “luxury problem.” But still: The plastic toys in the bathtub made her anxious. The disposable diapers made her anxious. She began to ask herself, what is the relationship between the diapers and the wildfires?

“I feel like I have developed a phobia to my way of life,” she said.

It might be time to reconsider some of your dopey ideas, dear.

Anyway, the single minded attacks on the American mind by climate change fanatics has turned a generation of young people, the Gen Z cohort, into anxious and hysterical climate activists:

Recent research has left little doubt that this is happening. A 10-country survey of 10,000 people aged 16 to 25 published last month in The Lancet found startling rates of pessimism. Forty-five percent of respondents said worry about climate negatively affected their daily life. Three-quarters said they believed “the future is frightening,” and 56 percent said “humanity is doomed.”

Surely, it beat getting a job, becoming a functioning member of society, being a responsible spouse or parent, even working to compete in the clash of civilizations.

No, siree. The young people who have been summarily brainwashed have become Nature Goddess worshippers. They have reverted to pagan idolatry and fear, to the roots of their being, that the least offense against the goddess of the underbrush will provoke her very serious wrath and will cause her to consume the world entire in the fire to end all fires.

Seriously, team. Is this the best we can do? If you think that these people are going to forge a great future for America you have been smoking the wrong kinds of cigarettes.