Society, Isolation, and Delusion
How to survive a time of psychic contagion
In 1518, a dancing plague gripped Alsace, France. Women and men spun in the streets, limbs flailing, screaming for help. Many had to be physically restrained.
It was not the first such outbreak. Dancing plagues had appeared repeatedly in Europe for centuries. Stories spread from village to village. People knew the signs.
Many hundreds in Strassburg began
To dance and hop, women and men,
In the public market, in alleys and streets,
Day and night; and many of them ate nothing
Until at last the sickness left them.
This affliction was called St Vitus' dance.
(Source: Public Domain Review)
While some have claimed all dancing plagues were a product of ergot mould in the flour causing hallucinations, this seems at once too complicated, too simplistic, and too reductive. You don’t need LSD in the bread to explain wild, uncontrollable actions. You need fear, stress, desperation — and the idea of a dancing plague that can spread to receptive minds. Call it psychic contagion.
Humans are highly susceptible creatures. (Or as René Girard and Luke Burgis would put it, innately mimetic creatures.) While we do not now experience dancing plagues, our common life is defined by waves of psychic contagion. Fads, memes, catchphrases, fashions, delusions spread at stunning speed.
And the fact that some 131,200 people saw my tweet above about dancing plagues may slightly increase the odds that someone, somewhere thinks it is possible to begin dancing uncontrollably, involuntarily, when life’s pains get too hard to bear.
The larger point is this: ideas that society regards as real, no matter how unusual they seem from afar, shape the consciousness of individuals and, thereby, the boundaries of the possible.
The Power of Isolation to Create Delusion
The converse of this phenomenon is isolation.
You can weaponize loneliness, darkness, and sensory deprivation to break a man’s commitment to his beliefs. So all great brainwashers have found, including America’s own CIA.
A declassified interrogation manual developed in the 1960s (called KUBARK, a once-secret name the Agency used for itself) describes the power of mostly non-violent techniques to manipulate a person’s mind.
In one experiment performed by the National Institute of Mental Health, subjects were placed in a sensory-deprivation tank. When they came out three hours later, they reported anxiety, stress, terror, delusions, and hallucination.
These findings reproduced the reports described in diaries of solitary polar explorers and sailors.
In the endless winter nights of the north, explorers fell prey to superstition; to love for any living thing; to believing dead objects were alive. They projected their inner anxieties onto the sensory void.
For the CIA, replicating such conditions in dark isolation facilitated breaking down a subject’s resistance to coercion.
For anyone living online today, these conditions may sound familiar. You may be reminded of the isolation of lockdown. Remote work. Living through a screen programmed algorithmically to feed us back our existing internal beliefs.
While persuasion is the art of connecting what your audience believes with what you believe, manipulation is exploiting the weaknesses of your audience to control them.
Being stuck in a mediated reality is, it turns out, an excellent recipe for being manipulated. The world of the senses connects us to what’s outside of us, our minds, our neuroses and suppositions. To be trapped in a highly filtered, physically isolated world is to be vulnerable to the opinions, ideas, and judgments of others.
What I’m Working On
For many of you who signed up for my email over the last two months, this is the first email you’re getting from my Substack. I’ve decided to switch over my email provider to this platform for a few reasons.
I know a number of great writers using Substack, and I’m interested to connect with them in this community.
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Let me know what you think. Looking forward to sharing more with you here.
Ben