Two Perspectives: Moral Panics and Hysteria | TER Post Woke

It's a universal problem we need to talk about more

Welcome to TaraElla Report Post Woke, where we consciously aim to move beyond the woke vs anti-woke culture wars, and towards a post-woke model of culture and politics.

Perspective 1: As a progressive, I am dismayed at the way our culture is evolving. Twenty years ago, progressives used to be the cool ones. Conservatives used to get upset about everything from hip-hop music to gay marriage, from video games to Harry Potter, and we used to laugh at that. In recent years, many people say that we have become like how the conservatives used to be like, and I honestly can't disagree with that. As an old-school progressive, I think that overreacting to everything and having a problem with people having fun is stupid, because it makes us unpopular and discredits us. I wonder how we became this way.

Perspective 2: As a conservative, my biggest problem with mainstream conservative politics is its tendency to embrace collective moral panics and hysteria over artificially amplified non-issues. This also seems to happen in cycles. For example, the 90s and 2000s conservatives were really bad in this regard, but things got more rational in the 2010s. I fear that we are seeing things turn bad again now. I wonder if there is a way to break free from this toxic tendency.

I guess the tendency towards collective panic and hysteria is present among both progressives and conservatives. While there have been better and worse times in the past for both sides, it seems that, right now, both sides are getting worse. Therefore, it really is a problem that we need to actively address. The fact that it is on both sides makes it somewhat easier, because this means we won't be targeting only some people in our criticisms.

The first thing we need to do is to acknowledge that the problem exists in the first place. We need to talk about it enough, so that it is firmly in the consciousness of most people. This way, when certain people want to encourage more hysteria for whatever reason, enough people can consciously say no to it, and put up a resistance that hopefully gets stronger over time. We also need to remember that, history has taught us that it takes bravery and courage to take a stand against moral panics.

The other thing we need to do is, of course, to address the problem of echo chambers. In the past, I've said quite a lot about the need to break the echo chambers and how we might do that, in the context of addressing political polarization. Breaking the echo chambers is also important for addressing collective hysteria, because it is easiest to build hysteria in an environment where everyone is under pressure to agree with certain viewpoints. I guess this is why the problem is getting worse on both sides, with the echo chamber effect being made worse by social media. This is why the hysteria problem is ultimately linked to the many other problems affecting the social and political landscape of the Western world right now.