FADS AND PHANTASMS
From monsters under the sea to Elvis’s gyrating hips, the many objects that have sparked mass hype and hysteria.
Humans have many fears — the dark, the crowd, change. We also have passions for the wacky, like hula hoops and pet rocks. We act in panic and ignorance: in medieval times, people believed Jews were responsible for the Black Death and forced them into ghettos. We often believe urban legends — alligators are roaming through city sewers. We were once afraid of touching a person with AIDS, thinking the illness was contagious through touch. Our fears and passions are detailed in a new book by Robert E. Bartholomew and Peter Hassall, A Colorful History of Popular Delusions. U.S.-born medical sociologist and writer Bartholomew spoke to me from his home in Auckland, New Zealand.
You use the word “delusion” to explain our fears and passions — crazes like university students squishing into phone booths, mass suicides like the one at Jonestown, the Loch Ness monster, etc. In your book’s postscript, you say we can learn from this, but I wonder. It’s gone on for centuries. It is human, even if funny or despicable at times.
Social delusions and social panics are part of the human condition. They can’t be eradicated. But with better education we can understand them. When we talk about social delusions, we aren’t talking about the psychiatric term. What we mean is the idea that rapidly spreads through a population at a certain time and place.
There have been a lot in Canada. You had the toxic bus episode in Vancouver in 2003, soon after 9/11. A guy who had dark colouring walked on a bus and when he got off the bus the driver said, “Have a nice day.” The man getting off replied, “Your day is going to take a turn for the worse.” Soon after, the driver fell ill and then other passengers began to feel sick. The bus was pulled to the side of the road and the police began looking for traces of chemical weapons. Nothing could be found, and Vancouver’s chief medical officer decided it was a case of “mass anxiety.”
Elvis Presley was at the centre of many fads and fears, and there was genuine concern that western youth were being perverted by watching him swivelling his hips. Now it seems ridiculous, but it was a genuine fear in the 1950s.
It reminds me of the current Muslim scare, Islamophobia. It doesn’t make sense. People get concerned that Muslims are being repressed because some Muslim women choose to cover themselves. It wasn’t long ago when people were always covering their bodies. Remember those swimsuits at the turn of the 20th century? It was like swimming in your clothes.
Shortly after Elvis arrived in the ’50s, the hula hoop fad exploded. People could take the hula hoop and gyrate their hips in public. It wasn’t just children using them. They used to have hula hoop contests. It was just a different context, even though it was the same thing, swivelling hips.
The movie Jaws also had a huge cultural effect.
There have been a number of studies in psychiatric journals about people who had psychotic episodes related to Jaws. People wouldn’t go into the water. Are there sharks in the water? Yes, but only three or four people a year get killed by sharks.
Urban legends are pervasive. The yearly Halloween scare, for example, with parents checking their children’s treats to make sure there are no razor blades in the apples or candies that have been tampered with.
A sociologist named Joel Best went back to the early 1970s for reports of people putting razor blades in apples and poisoning apples, and there was not one report of a Halloween sadist. What he found was a handful of cases where candy had been poisoned, but in every single case it was family members trying to kill a young adult to collect insurance money. These were deliberate attempts at murder. But you get the perception in the media that this stuff is happening all the time, everywhere.
You claim most of the people involved in rumours, fads and mania over centuries have been women. That’s sexist, isn’t it?
Social delusions and mass hysteria are things I’ve studied for 25 years. I have collected over 800 cases of mass psychogenic illness; the majority are females. There are different theories as to why. No one is really sure why there are so many women in cases of mass hysteria. Look at Salem, Mass., in 1692. You had a very repressive group of people, the Puritans, who were very strict. Among the young girls, all work, no play triggers hysteria. Social delusion, mass belief in something that is false rapidly spreads.
Women are no more susceptible to social delusions than men. But in mass sickness, it is 99-per-cent women. Some sociologists have argued it’s the way women are acculturated. There may be some type of biological mechanism that makes them more susceptible. People have accused me of being sexist but if you look at the literature across time, it shows that when there is mass psychogenic illness, it is almost always women. What was the most horrifying thing you uncovered about human behaviour while doing your research?
For me it would have been the panic involving the McMartin preschool case in the early 1980s. That was the satanic cult scare at that preschool in California. Seven teachers were charged with molesting 360 kids. I remember as a young man hearing that case and thinking, “They must be guilty.” Why would so many children claim this had happened to them?
As it turns out, the workers were innocent and the case was mishandled from the beginning. The police asked the kids leading questions. There was one question about school aide Ray Buckey. A child was asked if Buckey touched him in inappropriate places, and if the child said no, he was told that other children had said yes, they were molested. That prompted the child to change his story.
The teachers were eventually all found innocent. But their reputations were ruined. Accusations of child molestation are the worst thing anyone can raise. If something like that can happen in modern times in the most sophisticated country in the world, what chance did the women in Puritan Salem have?