Remote Mass Hysteria

I don't think that one person can experience mass hysteria all by himself. He can be hysterical for sure, but mass hysteria requires a mass of people interacting with each other, which is why they call it mass hysteria. If you think about it, though, Uncle Ken was not watching that game all by himself. Thousands, maybe millions, of other people were watching it, just not from the same location. In the army they taught us that, if you can disperse the crowd, the riot is over. The crowd watching that game was already dispersed, but they were linked together through the magic of television. With the advent of the internet, the phenomenon of the remote interconnection of people was raised to a whole new level, and I'm sure that the smart phone raised it another notch or two.

I seem to remember that they had a problem in the UK a few years ago with kids raising a crowd with their phones in a matter of minutes, and then looting a store with it. They also used this technique to bring people together for more benign events, like a surprise birthday party. There was a name for this, I think it was "flash mob" or something like that. I haven't heard anything about that lately, I wonder whatever became of it.

What Uncle Ken said about the culture of mass murder was what I think I was driving at when I came up with my Blood Sacrifice Theory. The word "culture" didn't occur to me at the time, but the word "cult" did, which is pretty close. You have all these people believing in pretty much the same thing, that death is cool. They don't have to be in physical contact with each other anymore, or even mutually know each other, all they need to do is know about each other. First the idea, and then the behavior itself spreads from one to another like a virus or something. I don't suppose that everybody who has the idea moves on to the behavior but, as Uncle Ken says, we don't know which one will be the next one that does.