Social mania
From Wikinfo
See also Social mania:The Downside
Social manias are mass movements which periodically sweep through society, sometimes on a world wide basis. They are characterized by an outpouring of enthusiasm, mass involvement and millinnialist goals. Social mania are contagious social epidemics. Social mania are social phenomena and should be differentiated from the general state of frenzy in individuals, mania, which is a defined psychiatic disease.
In recent history social manias have included Nazism and Communism, including such related phenomena as the Cultural Revolution, McCarthyism and Zionism; Abolitionism; Mormonism; the Hippies, the Taiping Rebellion; the French Revolution and the current wave of religious fundamentalism, including Islamism, Christian Fundamentalism and Hindu fundamentalism.
Social manias come in differerent sizes and strengths, some fail to catch fire, some persist for hundreds of years or even millenia, although sometimes in severely attentuated form. Common to all is a vision of salvation, a new way of life, which if realized would radically change everyday life, ushering in a new world of freedom and justice. This claim is always false, or at least the practical results obtaining are revealed as somewhat pedestrian if viewed objectively, as the results obtained by movements such as Communism and Mormonism show.
If social mania are to be considered as evil, it is evil that arises from a vision of the good. However it is a good in competion with other goods, thus implying and resulting in conflict, sometimes very serious conflict, resulting in the death of tens of millions of people.
The Taiping Rebellion is an excellent illustration as it was both widespread and destructive and has no modern adherants to whom its use as an example would be a distraction. To think objectively about Islamism with the many strong feelings it currently brings forth or Communism which while moribund continues to show some life is difficult. To turn back on ourselves and view Christianity as a social mania, which it surely has been, is nearly impossible although sometimes historical perspective helps.
The Ghost dance which was briefly embraced by Native Americans of the Great Plains in 1890 is another excellent example which may be viewed in some historical perspective as may The Crusades.
