Moral Hysteria's Landscape Traps

 Ever since I was a kid I've been fascinated by moral hysterias. Why were the 1830's such a rich time for new religious movements & revivalist fervour? What would it have felt like to be a Christian during Nero's time and into Constantine's? Would you have cowered for the lions? Would you have gone over-board with religious fervor? How could the Spanish Inquisition ever have gone so crazy?

I think we are beginning to see how these things happen.  Pelosi is making hyperbolic, but politically useful signals about insurrection charges for congressmen who dared support a political rally on a very contested point (whose contestation is constitutionally spelled out because of its likelyhood).

The dynamics of the current moral hysteria are well played out with Tim Pool's facebook ban and pending social media removal. He's already blacklisted. The end is soon.

What's happening is that anyone who supports any venue where anyone with contrary views can organize or talk is now considered insurrectionally adjacent.  If you don't see the parallels to moral contagion, then you're missing most of what's happening.

Any contrary voice is being condemned in much the same way as heretical beliefs are usually condemned by priests. The parallels are fascinating and frightening.

Because it is hard for many people to imagine what it was like for someone to go against the medieval church, here's a modern analogy.

ANALOGY

Imagine if during the height of the Jim Crow days a black person was somehow elected president. They didn't have a political machine and so organizational chaos occurred. This was of course legitimized and facilitated by a dedicated resistance who considered themselves system saviours. How would the judiciary have acted? How would it have acted if it got signals about that person's illegitimacy. Now how would the system have acted if there was a marginally close call for that person's election. Especially if that person called out the system as systemically racist, with many actors acting illegally and pursuing frame jobs to delegitimize the upstart? Would they have tolerated dissent? Would group think emerge? And if so, how quickly.

I think we know the answers. They are unfolding in real time.

We have a system coherence that is pretty unprecedented. Covid enables a throttling of dissent not seen in anything other than the most authoritarian of countries. It's all pretty fascinating to watch in a morbid way. After all, how often do you get to see the merging of governance and religion backed by rule of law and enforced by one-dimensional morality based upon having the "right identity".