The plague of dancing

Tens, hundreds, sometimes thousands of people are seized by a frenzy of dancing, without any cause or plausible motivation, a frenzy which they are unable to control and which only total physical exhaustion ends. The collective phenomenon manifests itself in public places, squares, fairs, streets, large areas of the community. Since the 12th century, when has been recorded the strange episode of the children that traveled the 20 kilometers of 20 the road between Erfurt and Arnstadt, to that of the collapse of the bridge over the Meuse, under the tremors amplified by the staggered dance of the over 200 people, to the episodes of Aachen, Metz, Strasbourg, Utrecht, Zurich or Basel, which take us to the end of the 16th century. As usual, the explanation of the phenomenon is at best uncertain. Modern psychology makes it part of a class that is difficult to diagnose and assess, under the tag "mass psychogenetic diseases (MPI). Collective delusions, generated by the loss of the logical and critical control on the benchmarks of reality, in particular under the pressure of induced fear, panic, acute tension or maintained over long periods of time, in connection to a clear or unclear danger. Specialized literature quotes mas hysteria or epidemic hysteria, a phenomenon that Jung himself researched as one of the forms with severe consequences. The phenomenons of loss of collective control on the contact and interaction with reality are however not just part of our ancient history, but also that of our recent, contemporary one. Psychological disturbances can go as far as having large groups of people showing symptoms of some diseases, that should have a biological cause, but which upon careful medical research, proves non-existent. The symptoms seem to be sent through oral or visual contagion.

They range from headaches, dizziness, nausea, cough, to abdominal cramps, acute pharyngolaryngitis, hyperventilation and difficulty breathing, chest pain, diarrhea, anxiety, syncopes. Researchers of the phenomenon point out that this psychopathology can not be declared until after the natural, bio-medical causes of the symptoms have been removed.

And now, we are taking a deep breath and facing the strange reality in which we were immersed not once we reached the pandemic threshold of Covid-19 propagation, but even some time before that critical moment.

A reality that we can only shape from and through the official communications of the authorities, authorities which did almost everything that had to be done, from the aberrant taking of the army to the streets, to the communication-media gaslighting to maintain and cultivate an acute feeling of fear among the population, in the face of a danger, for which, we were constantly told, obsessively and in every possible tone, for which we had no therapeutic means of defense, even palliatives; all we could do was wash our hands, wear masks that were sold in drugstores, but which the authorities have repeatedly found to be inconsistent with the minimum standards of protection, and isolate ourselves from other people with whom we naturally gather among the extended family and day-to-day interaction groups.

If we didn't do what we were told, after a short and traumatizing stop in the ICU units, we would be going straight to the cemetery. Of course, no one can believe that the Covid-19 epidemic, plus the mutations, does not exist and that the whole world is prey to a collective illusion.

The disturbing question is another: if through behavior, attitude, the imposed measures and the lack of transparency, and even lack of honesty, that they have manifested, those who have dictated and imposed the measures for the management of the epidemic have actually generated, in correlation with the medical phenomenon, an acute episode of collective hysteria as well, that they have sunk themselves in. That parasitic addition has through itself massively destructive and corrosive effects which, combined with those of the pandemic, have filled out the picture of the disaster that we are sinking in and we are forced to bear. Ourselves and particularly the future generations. I would never have written these lines if the impact of what could be an unfortunate but costly episode of collective hysteria in the 21st century, created by the way institutional leaders deal with the pandemic phenomenon, at local, European and global level, didn't have such dramatic costs for children and young people, "serenely" disregarded by the authorities.

Everywhere the hysteria of the threat of the unescapable threat of the pandemic manifests itself, children suffer traumas and generational disabilities, the effects of which we will be able to see, amplified, in a decade, a decade and a half. Children raised in the fear that anyone, even the closest family members may be or are even a life-threatening danger to avoid, children whose normal socializing behaviors, play, and school interaction are prohibited or reduced to absurdly inefficient forms, children and young people who, under the threat of persistence of the state of abnormality, go into depression with suicidal impulses to a hitherto unprecedented proportion (the United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported a 400% increase compared to the year before the pandemic), all these children and young people will enter adulthood with a psycho-morbid disability not encountered even in times of war.Add to that the fact that the educational processes which were already precarious in Romania have been completely thrown out of whack, both for students and teachers. Of course, given that our Minister of Education is deeply concerned about the drafting and public dissemination, through his important voice, of regulations on the distribution of traditional Romanian spring gifts in schools, it is not surprising that the catastrophic effects of the pandemic, coupled with those caused by the collective hysteria heaped on top, no longer matter to the ministerial agenda. That is to say nothing of the hyper-authoritarianism of the authorities and the pushing of the democratic management of public affairs into a ditch, to be replaced more and more insistently by solutions that coarsely violate the rights and customs of individual and collective freedom, which up until recently were officially being declared sacrosanct, by treaties , constitutions, universal declarations and other such trivial legal stuff!

No one knows why the phenomena described as the "dance plague" stopped at the beginning of the 17th century. But we know for sure why the communities of the 21st century are much more likely to fall prey to convulsions of collective hysteria, whose destructive consequences are no longer just local, but global. Our societies have made the norm and the goal to break the barriers of reality, erasing its natural contours, to create the confusion between the real and the virtual confusion, to dissolve the truth and replace it with the outright lie, just because it sells well and someone takes full advantage of it, from the infantilization of people and the reduction of their behaviors to the primary expression of instinct-influenced preferences, from the dissolution of the conditions of rational decision making and their replacement with pseudo-rational or irrational processes.

All the conditions for phenomena of delusion and collective hysteria are met.

The stage for other plague dances has been erected and it is the first major show that seems to be taking place already under our own eyes.