We all like to think we have a firm grip on our sanity, but drop anybody into a group of people and they can, given the right conditions, go from level headed to frighteningly insane in the time it takes to shit their pants. You may want to remember this stuff for any future insanity pleas.
Public Panics
For all our stuffed crusts, miracle boner pills and other marvellous achievements, modern man hasn’t strayed from his primitive herd mentality as much we’d like to think. When our caveman ancestors were threatened, there wasn’t time to form a committee and canvas opinions on how to address the big furry thing dragging children into the jungle. In order to survive the group had to be able to act immediately as a coherent unit without any thought or coordination. While our mind’s ability to suppress our own personality and conform to the will of the pack on a moment’s notice certainly helped our ancestors avoid becoming sabre-toothed tiger poop, today it’s often the cause of a lot stupid and downright frightening behaviour.
Public panics represent this herd mentality in it’s purest form, with irrational fear spreading from one person to another like a disease, until people are convinced alien invaders are on their way, or that a Mad Max-esque apocalyptic wasteland is inevitable because their computer's calendar only goes up 1999. A particularly retarded event took place in England during the 19th century. A chicken began laying eggs inscribed with the message “Christ is coming”, inciting mass hysteria and countless religious conversions, that is until it was discovered the owner of the animal was simply writing the messages on the eggs and shoving them back in the chicken. God works in mysterious ways and all, but we’d like to think news of the second coming wouldn’t come out of a chicken’s ass.
Speaking of God, this next phenomenon was seemingly created by him as a gift to comedy writers. Genital retraction syndrome, or penis panics, involve all the guys in an area being overcome by the belief that their junk is shrinking/disappearing. There’s a good chance you’ve read at least one short story about this in the “What are Those Wacky Foreigners Doing Now?” section of the paper, since apparently this shit happens all the goddamn time. We chuckle at this, but take a second to imagine how you might react if you genuinely thought somebody was making your dong disappear.
Mobs are formed, people are butchered and hey, why not, let’s blame the Jews. It ain’t pretty. Cracked.com, not afraid to bring you the dark side of dick jokes.
Hysterical Contagion
Human beings have an innate need to mimic others. Subconsciously we’re constantly synchronizing everything from our moods to expressions to posture with those around us. We’ve all been doing it since the day we were born, as babies essentially learn how to be human by imitating every expression and emotion of their parents. Sometimes people take this mimicry far beyond moods and expressions though. In the case of hysterical contagion very real physical ailments or symptoms will manifest in people without any underlying cause. In most cases the spread starts with a single person who, more often than not, never had anything actually wrong with them in the first place. Turns out “fire!” isn’t the only thing you shouldn’t yell in a crowded theatre.
Hysterical Contagion
Human beings have an innate need to mimic others. Subconsciously we’re constantly synchronizing everything from our moods to expressions to posture with those around us. We’ve all been doing it since the day we were born, as babies essentially learn how to be human by imitating every expression and emotion of their parents. Sometimes people take this mimicry far beyond moods and expressions though. In the case of hysterical contagion very real physical ailments or symptoms will manifest in people without any underlying cause. In most cases the spread starts with a single person who, more often than not, never had anything actually wrong with them in the first place. Turns out “fire!” isn’t the only thing you shouldn’t yell in a crowded theatre.
The most well known case of hysterical contagion was the 1962 June Bug Epidemic. It was a regular day at the Strongsville textile factory, or at least it was until one-by-one the women working there were stricken with dizziness, rashes and vomiting. The cause of this mystery plague according to the women? An evil June bug that could make you sick with a bite, which of course is absurd, but no other cause of the illness was ever found. What surprises us is the lack of any low-budget horror movies based on the incident.
There have been bigger, and much more stupid, incidents. In Portugal, teen soap opera with a filthy sounding name “Strawberries and Sugar” ran a storyline about a deadly virus. Soon hundreds of kids across the country were seemingly contracting the same symptoms as the TV characters. It got so bad 14 Portuguese schools had to be closed due to the epidemic. Say what you will about America’s youth, but at least we never lost our minds watching Saved by the Bell. Wasted them, sure, but we didn’t lose them.
Oh, and the toxic woman mentioned in this previous Cracked article may have also been an example, but it’s more fun to believe she was a gamma ray emitting mutant from the lagoon of death.
Cryptids and Folk Monsters
We’ve all been taught that monsters don’t exist, and yet somehow tales and sightings of legendary creatures continue to be pervasive. These legendary beasts are known as cryptids, and believe it or not, not all of them are the fabrications of moonshine swilling hillbillies. For those who believe, their experiences with these creatures can be very real, and in some cases these delusions can become widespead in an area. A possible explanation could be Folie à deux, a rare phenomenon in which a fullblown mental disorder can be trasferred from one person to another.
Mental disorders such as the delusional belief that this cuddly fellow exists for instance…
Despite looking like a refugee from the pages of “Where the Wild Things Are”, back in 2001 the Monkey Man of Delhi caused some serious apeshit to hit the fan. Delhi was driven into a frenzy, with countless people witnessing the critter. People would show up with wounds supposedly caused the Monkey Man (most of them self inflicted), midgets were mistaken for the creature and pummelled, and reportedly as many as 3-people leapt to their deaths trying to “escape” it. One of the last sightings of the Monkey Man was of him boarding a Russian airliner. Not saying we believe in all this, but if the Cold War sparks up again, I think we know who to blame.
Some monster scares involved more human threats. Take for example Spring-Heeled Jack, a shadowy figure that terrorized England during the 19th century with his claws, glowing eyes and amazing leaping ability. There continues to be debate over whether he actually exited in some form, but he kind of looked like Batman, so he couldn’t have been all bad.
Crazes
If public panics are the result of fear, crazes occur are when people become insanely enthusiastic about something. While ancient defence mechanisms may explain public panics, it’s not as clear what causes people to become irrationally passionate about something. A contributing factor could be Collective effervescence, a powerful, usually positive energy people perceive when in a group of people. It explains such timeless mysteries as why people still cheer for the Cubs and why nobody at a rave realizes how retarded they look. Sometimes this collective effervescence can escalate into full-blown mania, with people suffering hallucinations, delusions and totally losing control of their actions.
Take Dancing Mania for example. Kind of sounds like the title of Time Life CD collection, but it’s not as harmless as you might think. The Dancing Plague of 1518 involved hundreds of people feverishly dancing for nearly a month straight, only stopping when most of them died heart attacks or exhaustion. At least the dancing plague took place during the 1500s and not the 1990s; nobody should have to die doing the Macarena.
But forget dancing mania, let’s talk nuns gone wild. During the 15th century nuns in one convent after another began taking chomps out each other, as nun biting mania spread across Europe. Around the same time a large convent of nuns in France decided to up the crazy stakes, and all began meowing together, only stopping when the police theatened beat them with rods. To be fair, a life of forced celibacy mike make us want to do a bit of meowing and biting ourselves.
For a more recent example we head back to the crowd based crazy capital of the world, India. In 2006, the residents of Mumbai claimed the water in their creek had turned sweet and the craze was on, with thousands of people flocking to drink the water believing it was a divine miracle. Yeah, turns out now so much. The creek in question was one of the most polluted in India, receiving tons of raw sewage daily, and officials believe people thought it tasted sweet simply because, for whatever reason, the river was temporarily less contaminated. India, where temporarily having less shit in your drinking water is considered a miracle.
Riots
So crowds can make you sick, drive you insane with fear, and make you drink shit, but what happens when instead of going into defensive mode, as in a public panic, a crowd lashes out in anger? Well then you’ve got a riot, and you’ve got some serious trouble. Riots usually form around a single aggressive person (or perhaps a small group of them), willing the make the first violent move, and then spreads, with normally peaceful people getting caught up in the frenzy. But hey, people wouldn’t riot without a good reason, right?
Well, no. Of course there’s a long and proud history of people getting way too worked up about their favourite sports teams, dating back to the 6th century when Constantinople was rocked by the Nika revolt, a riot that would put the work of Britain’s best soccer hooligans to shame. Started over chariot racing, by the end of the riot half of Constantinople was destroyed and approximately 30-thousand people were dead.
But it’s not just sports fans that like a good riot; music fans can get in on the fun too. During the 19th and early 20th century it became fairly commonplace for the performance of new classical music pieces to degenerate into melees. Riots at concerts continue to this day, like the one that rocked Woodstock ’99 after a performance by this modern day Mozart…
Nathan Birch also writes the hysterical webcomic Zoology.
