Is hysteria an inevitabale social phenomenon? Right now we’re riding the downside of a wave of swine flu hysteria, in which schools are closing, travel is restricted between some countries, and the WHO just declared a pandemic (even if the declaration is a technicality).

A few years ago, we went through a similar episode with Mad Cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and tens of thousands of cows were put down, beef imports were curtailed or eliminated, and the world’s agricultural industry held its breath.

I’m not too interested in animal-related pandemics (avian flu would be another), but more interested in the societal phenomenon of hysteria. Not necessarily mass hysteria of the OMG-the-world-is-going-to-end variety, but hysteria brought on by a lack of perspective. In all the recent pandemics, fewer people died than those who slipped on a bar of soap in the shower and hit their head. The level of reaction – or overreaction if you will – was grossly out of proportion to the evidence.

A couple thoughts. First, does modern mass media and/or distributed real-time media fuel or temper societal hysteria? I think you could argue pretty convincingly that mass media fuels it, due to the echo chamber effect, whereas internet-driven realtime media tempers the impulse, due to the sheer number of outlets, interests, and mini-communities of interest. Second, is societal hysteria a byproduct of the individual tendency to hysteria, or is it a phenomenon that is unique to groups? We all have a tendency to overdramatize and lose perspective from time to time, as I wrote yesterday – does this reverberate into our shared societal rhythms?

During the Mad Cow episode, England was the hardest hit of all countries, with some estimates claiming 50% infection rates in cattle herds and financial losses of up to $50 billion. That’s a lot of tangible evidence to support the hysteria, even if the infection vector was not adequately known. This is interesting to me because the English have historically been known as reserved, anti-hysterical types – stiff upper lip, and all that – and so the tension between national norms and actual hysteria-inducing circumstances was interesting to watch.

Individually, we are all Englishmen or otherwise – with a lesser or greater tendency toward hysteria and lack of perspective – and I’m really curious how individual circumstances and upbringing lead one toward one or the other pole. I’m pretty convinced, based on recent personal events, that one could design a study that proved conclusively that certain types of circumstances lead one inexorably toward a dramatic lack of perspective, regardless of individual upbringing. Or perhaps not – that’s the beauty of philosophical arguments; one can never quite be sure that one has the opposing argument in checkmate.