Pre-internet, one would rarely be exposed to ideas that are extreme, unhinged, insane or downright weird. It would still happen but in moderation, for which I'll use the stereotype "village idiot". A village idiot is isolated for having off-base ideas and behavior, hence bad ideas don't take root.
Now it's as if all the village idiots of the world had a meeting and started to run society, at least culturally. The bad ideas and behaviors are not kept in check, they're rewarded, leading to the normalization of things deeply questionable.
Imagine being a youngster right now. You do as your peers do, you live online. Where insanity is your mainstream cultural input. Where mental illness, a very serious issue, is seemingly rewarded for oppression points. Where you might question your gender, where before this very idea didn't even occur to you. Where you're confused between body types, from anorexic to celebrating obesity. The normalization of the hating of the other sex. Or the other political half. Or an entire race. Or an entire class. Or anybody that doesn't agree with you. The normalization of doxxing, snitching, gossiping and cancel culture as "conversation" tools. The sheer volume of it. The pointless status games.
Comparing social media to smoking is a comparison that needs re-evaluating. It's frankly shocking how this untold harm goes unchecked. Then again, intervening can lead to creepy authoritarian legislation. As seen in China, but let's at least credit them for recognizing the harm.
I know it doesn't feel that way right now, but there is probably no time in history where racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, religious hatred, slavery, etc. were less normalized than right now.
These things are sadly all too common, there's lots of work to do, and we must not be complacent about past successes.
But when I was a kid, homosexuality was illegal. Twenty years ago gay fear and stupid women were typical jokes on most sitcoms. Some of our grandmothers could not vote. Swimming pools and schools - schools! - were racially segregated within a lifetime.
Contrary to your post, we have been gradually escaping from the extreme crazy bad ideas. Let's keep it up.
Do you have any evidence that the denormalization of racism etc. is because of social media? Or that social media even helped? The ongoing fight to change the things you cite all predate social media by decades or more. Even with the Arab Spring, was social media helpful or just the tool used to coordinate? Would it have happened anyway without Twitter being there as a means to broadcast? A common criticism I have heard of social media is that it is so easy to just retweet/like and wave the flag that many people stop doing anything meaningful and visible outside the echo chamber entirely.
In a time when people didn't question their gender, many of them might have felt themselves to be alone in their feelings. They not only learned to suppress their feelings (to avoid ridicule or worse), they were unable to understand them because literature was oppressed. Much self-isolation, even tragedy ensued. In many "less civilized cultures" these differences were not an excuse for abuse, but were recognized, even exalted ... until the colonizers came along with their 'truths'.
Exploring, understanding and accepting ourselves is an important step, for -all- of us, not just the typicals. "To thine own self be true..."
I don’t feel like either of you are wrong. We have made amazing cultural advances while also taking steps backwards. I love the internet (and technology in general), but at what point do we say enough is enough when you address the points that OP has made?
Edit: Never stop making things better in terms of equality, but perhaps we shouldn’t celebrate cancel culture or people getting internet points for gender confusion.
You're looking at a tiny elite slice of the modern West (I mean, sitcoms? Seriously?) and taking it as representative of the whole world. There's probably a whole lot more homophobia, misogyny and religious hatred now in some highly religious countries than there was 25 years ago or so. And the Internet is even less representative.
Not only that, but if you tell the village idiot they're being an idiot you become a villageidiotiophobe.
People are afraid to set boundaries for fear of getting cancel cultured or harassed by a woke tolerance mob. All disagreement is now "toxic behavior" on social media channels. Arguing over perspectives is now sometimes branded with the extreme label of gaslighting. Day by day our Overton window continues to shift, and yet we were all told the slippery slope was supposedly a fallacy.
Ironically I feel your beliefs about this stem from whatever bubble you yourself are in. No normal person goes around afraid of being "attacked by a woke mob". This is some stories you've been told, and blindly believe, from the other side.
The times we live in are absolutely brutal for people who struggle with diversity of belief (wherever they are on the sociopolitical spectrum). Never before has an individual had so many perspectives to contend with at once. It breaks a lot of people in different ways, although I think people who can navigate the noise without losing their sense of self are better for the experience.
Still, it's impossible to deny the negative impact it has on people who can't handle the vastness of opinion, and many of them turn to the comforting simplicity of reactionary extremism to cope.
I’ve absolutely met people especially with limited language skills who get confused and frustrated by all these complicated concepts they’re expected to understand to simply not be accused of being hateful.
Not to be too Orwellian, but I’ve often wondered why nobody say, talks about removing gendered pronouns altogether in formal speech instead of adding 50 new ones for instance. People seem to only talk about adding new words and concepts.
This was my struggle with social media as it evolved. I watched it go from a predominantly techie novelty to how everyone communicated. I'd say I became more anxious and self-doubting as a result, but in some ways that's an improvement.
They aren't 'coping' with reactionary extremism, it's always had its seductive song.
What has changed is just that extremist groups have very successfully adopted the communication tools available to them for recruitment and engagement.
I wonder if this is affecting all of humanity en masse or if this is just another form of infection, mental in this case, that thins the herd and ignores people who can resist its effects and continue living normal lives. Most of us within a healthy community with plenty of opportunity for gaining status, loving family and diverse friends who are willing to call us out on bullshit, purpose in life, and in good physical health are unlikely to get sucked into extreme TERFism, white supremacy, TikTok tics and god knows what else.
Those with weaker "immune systems" succumb to the mental viruses and cause themselves possibly irreparable harm by either joining a radical cult of their choosing or falling into some medical pathology rabbit hole.
> one would rarely be exposed to ideas that are extreme, unhinged, insane or downright weird
Except for the ones that were widely believed and accepted, of course. Or are you excluding those via a somewhat circular definition of "extreme," "unhinged," etc.?
> You do as your peers do, you live online. Where insanity is your mainstream cultural input.
Reductionist, but I follow. What is insanity, and who defines it? Prior to the modern day, homosexuality was insanity or illness.
> Where mental illness, a very serious issue, is seemingly rewarded for oppression points.
Outside of some very extreme circles, nobody is actually doing this seriously. Where are you even seeing this?
> Where you might question your gender, where before this very idea didn't even occur to you.
No, they just kept quiet about it. That’s the difference, and it seems many are not ready to face the complex nature of psyche.
> Where you're confused between body types, from anorexic to celebrating obesity.
Most people are reasonable enough to understand celebrating obesity and “health at every size” is a fringe, unscientific and extremist idea.
> The normalization of the hating of the other sex.
Once again, extreme communities. Not sure if you refer to incels, would love some clarification.
> Or the other political half. Or an entire race. Or an entire class. Or anybody that doesn't agree with you.
Hate and extremism was invented by the internet?
> The normalization of doxxing, snitching, gossiping and cancel culture as "conversation" tools. The sheer volume of it. The pointless status games.
I see nothing new here. It’s more accesible, yes, but public shame and gossip (!!!) has happened for millennia.
People can organize better and agendas can be pushed easily via the internet. But these voices are fringe and minority. Outside, in the real world — most people are reasonable and understanding.
Agreed, OP's post was reductive and sensationalist, to the point that it contributes to the problems it critiques. Our nature as people hasn't changed much, the internet just prevents much of the curation of voices that occurred before it existed.
It's not reasonably possible to rid ourselves of the internet, and in fact I think it's a net Good. The issue going forward is to consider and teach responsible internet use for not just young people, but everyone. Most of the shitty, intentionally hurtful things I see on the internet don't come from young folks, but from adults trying to inflict harm. People like that have always existed, and are the real problem in these cases.
> Outside, in the real world — most people are reasonable and understanding
I think OP is expressing concern that maybe young people aren't living there as much as you'd hope.
Most of these issues, and the extent to which they are issues, are in the eye of the beholder.
> Oh, and monocultures aren’t great.
Does being terminally online contribute more or less to this? I'm still not sure, but leaning towards more. People always parroted others, but now with social reach being so concentrated, it seems like everyone parrots from a smaller pool. The consequence/reward for expression are much more well defined in the online world as well.
One major problem, in my opinion, is that people think what they see online is a representative sample of the population. It’s clearly not.
You don’t have to browse Reddit for long to to see plenty of self-described loners, people dealing with anxiety and other mental issues. And it makes sense that these people would find community online.
But if kids are going online and being bombarded with “the world is doomed”, and “what I thought were just the challenges of growing up are actually a mental illness” or “once I did [unhealthy coping mechanism], I felt like my problems were solved”, they developed unhealthy and distorted views of how kids their age think and act. I can see it being very easy to get sucked into the worst kind of community.
And if kids isolate themselves further the online world is literally 99% of their entire world view. And what an awful distorted world that is.
>A village idiot is isolated for having off-base ideas and behavior, hence bad ideas don't take root.
>The normalization of doxxing, snitching, gossiping and cancel culture as "conversation" tools.
You seem to be contradicting yourself here. Back in the pre-internet days, the "village idiot" was "canceled". No one bothered to listen to his idiotic blatherings or attempting to debate or debunk him; everyone just ignored him because he was a waste of time. Hence, he was "canceled", or "isolated" as you put it. But now you're complaining about similarly stupid and dangerous people being "canceled" (i.e., ignored and shunned).
I personally believe that this is a great example of a moral panic. There isn't much of a there, there. If you look closely.
For example, let's look at the Tide Pod incident, how many teens in total ate tide pods?
86.
A global moral panic was launched over 86 teenagers doing a very stupid thing as teenagers are wont to do.
> It’s true that since the Tide Pod Challenge began, the American Association of Poison Control Centers (AAPC) has received 86 reports of teenagers intentionally ingesting laundry detergent. Yet at the end of last year, the AAPC reported that over 10,500 children under the age of five were exposed to laundry pods in 2017 (for example ingesting, inhaling, or absorbing the detergent). If we are going to have a mass panic about poisonings, ten thousand children are clearly in greater danger than less than a hundred teens. So why was it that only the Tide Pod Challenge that made pearl-clutching headlines across the globe?
The actual threat is accidental ingestion or inhalation by little children and elderly adults with dementia. They form the tens of thousands of cases that end up at poison control centres. But there's no moral panic around that, because "Elderly lady with dementia who lives alone accidentally ate a tide pod and then ended up in the ER" is less of a salacious story than "Teen eats tide pod for tiktok challenge"
Let's examine this 'Tourettes-like' story,
> Over the past 2 years, a remarkably high number of young patients have been referred to our specialized Tourette outpatient clinic presenting with symptoms closely resembling the ones Jan Zimmermann shows in his videos
What's a remarkably high number? As far as I can tell, this Op-Ed doesn't specify it. The author has only examined one patient that he classifies with this diagnosis. Ever.
Also interestingly enough, in most of the articles that talk about this subject, guess whose name repeatedly pops up? The same patient named in this Op-Ed.
We are told that there are "hundreds" of such patients, but we're never given an actual number, citation, or source.
If you try to track the source down, you find pieces like these, here's the "concrete" evidence that's offered,
First the background rate,
> The new surge of referrals consists of adolescent girls with sudden onset of motor and phonic tics of a complex and bizarre nature. In London, UK specialist tic clinics at each of the two children’s hospitals, each centre received four to six referrals per year (out of a total of approximately 200 in 2019/2020), which were acute onset tics in teenage girls
Then the "surge"
> In the last 3 months (end of 2020–January 2021), both centres have been receiving three to four referrals per week of this nature which, if it continues, would amount to 150–200 cases per year and effectively double the referral rate.
4 * 12 = 48. There are two centers so 96.
And this is during the onset of the pandemic, where global quarantines produced a constellation of anxiety in people of all age groups around the world.
This entire moral panic has been driven by referrals, not diagnoses, not confirmations but referrals from primary care physicians during one of the most stressful events of the past few decades (for ordinary people). No evidence has been presented if any or all of these cases are related to social media use or not.
The paper goes into this aspect and theorizes that this is an acute stress response,
> It is hypothesised that this unusual presentation is related to lockdown, change in usual structure and routine, social media related events/bullying and pandemic-related stress in vulnerable adolescents. Stress may be unmasking a tic predisposition in some, while in others compounding existing vulnerability to anxiety, for example, underlying neurodevelopmental or emotional difficulties to the point of becoming overwhelming.
No specific numbers are provided anywhere w.r.t. how many people were influenced by social media or not, v. how many were patients that were predisposed to such a response that then presented with it in response to a hyper-stressful event.
So no, there is no epidemic of people watching tik toks and running around and changing their gender or becoming tourette-like.
96 possible, undiagnosed referrals does not a pandemic make.
This is just as silly as the moral panic over D&D back in the 80s. It's just updated for modern times.
> For example, let's look at the Tide Pod incident, how many teens in total ate tide pods?
You say 86, but that was just the number of children reported to the AAPC. I think it'd be reasonable to assume that there were many more cases that were not reported (due to varied levels of ingestion/concern) or were reported elsewhere and so not included in AAPC stats.
Some of what you call "Moral Panic" and "Pearl-Clutching" in regard to the whole tide pod thing was also what I'd call "Education". It informed both parents and children that this was occurring and why it was a bad idea. I think it's also safe to assume this helped prevent a few cases.
Young children were and still are the primary concern when it comes to ingesting household poisons, and there have been active efforts and ongoing campaigns for ages warning both parents and children about that particular danger (see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Yuk), but what made the tide-pod challenge remarkable and newsworthy is that very few people would have expected that so many teenagers would be stupid enough to do something like that.
All that isn't to say that the media didn't jump at the chance to generate clicks by exploiting parent's fear and exaggerating the phenomenon, but it wasn't simply something invented to panic parents the way the D&D scare was, and it was just one of several stupid dangerous things children were doing around that time motivated by internet points and social media attention.
In the case of this "Not Tourette’s", while I'm sure it has been being reported elsewhere and perhaps even irresponsibly, the source is an academic paper and no matter the actual prevalence of this behavior it's absolutely appropriate for something like this to be reported and discussed in that setting. Even if this does turn out to be nothing but a blip in referrals that never amounts to a larger trend of great concern and the fad of kids pretending to have Tourette’s dies off quickly, that's perfectly fine.
What matters is that there are records and reports so that all available evidence can be collected, compared, and studied in the event that it isn't simply a non-issue that dies off on its own. In the meantime, because it is happening, it seems like a good thing for healthcare providers to be aware of what's been observed so far and that researchers can look into the "Why" behind it.
> The normalization of the hating of the other sex. Or the other political half. Or an entire race. Or an entire class.
If federal, state and local legislation or exclusive constitutional rights qualify as normalization, then we've been here before in the US... on several occasions.
> The sheer volume of it.
%100 agree. The difference between now and all the other times is that it's hard to escape it if you want to function in society-at-large. But I'd add that an obsession with growth is also key to the deleterious effects of social media.
The problem is that the internet enables the sociopaths, narcissists, power hungry etc. to easily spread their toxicity. And the internet rewards this behaviour by giving them attention.
Challenging gender roles isn't a new thing. I assure you that not being able to inherit property, or other gender-based discrimination has had people questioning gender roles for a long time.
From my reading of the article (which is hard to parse not being an expert) it seems there is a German YouTuber with Tourette's who also on his YouTube shows displays non-tourette's tics. And these tics are being copied by other young people watching his shows, and being presented as Tourette's until they arrive at the clinic where these experts go "hang on this kid does not have Tourette's but does have tics similar to the German youtuber above"
So, the weird thing is not they pick up someone else's tics but they cannot get rid of them.
Learnt behaviour, copying, or physical tics that once learnt get stuck in the brain?
There may be a relation to military conditioning. I spent just a single week at a military academy introductory program in high school and when I returned home I was "uncontrollably" (if I thought about it I could avoid doing it, but if I was on autopilot it happened by itself) squaring my corners and calling my family "sir" and "ma'am". The thing was, those patterns were my entire life for that week, and they were very deliberately drilled into me. Eventually they faded because they weren't reinforced outside of the academy (if anything, they were "deinforced"), but there may be a connection here.
If someone spends many hours a day watching someone with particular quirks, it doesn't seem surprising (drawing parallels here to my experience) that those quirks may transfer because their brain starts to make those associations through observation. I would expect that stopping watching that particular person would probably let the transferred tics decay over a period of time (I'd give it a month).
The article says that one thing differentiating these kids from acutal Tourette symptoms is that instead of symptoms waxing and waning, they only deteriorate. So that definitely squares
After your first sentence I thought the next would be “uncontrollably dropping two f-bombs for every noun and one for every verb” but the classic hallway “at ease, make way” is good fun too. It was hilarious how it could travel in waves up a hall ahead of the drill like a preceding shadow. My floor was enthusiastically and maliciously conformant and loud about it.
Reminds me of how Americans spend a couple of months in the UK and return with an affected British accent.
Before social media, there were movies that molded society. Bollywood and more recently K-dramas/K-pop have influenced an entire generation.
Often these were used for shaping a younger generation as a long term strategy for a desirable adult demographic. To a certain extent, it is happening in our American public school system. Everyone who comes through it are kind of identical. It may not be apparent to those who have never stepped out of the States, but it is obvious to those outside or have known other cultures.
With social media impacts, its effect is like an oil spill. Even if you can contain it, it will be messy, expensive and traumatic for years and years. This is a Faustian bargain we have made.
I read about "mirror neurons" where humans watching others do physical activity also have some of the same neural pathways fire.
(V. S. RAMACHANDRAN)
The author/researcher says he believes that is one of the main mechanisms of human learning (babies look at adults and imitate. Adults look at other adults and imitate. Subconsciously)
I am by all accounts neurotypical (except perhaps for a touch of Aspergers) but I have an involuntary tic. Every now and then (like once or twice a week) a memory of some incredibly stupid thing that I once did -- sometimes decades ago -- will pop into my head and before I can re-establish conscious control I'll make a vocalization that sounds like a cross between a whimper and a sneeze. It's kind of embarrassing, but usually I cover it up with a cough afterwards. I don't think anyone has ever actually noticed except me.
I have this happen to I've always assumed it was an anxiety response. The interesting things is I am able to control it to some extent, I used to hit myself, now I mutter profanities. Anyone else do something like this?
Is this not totally normal and very common though? This exact thing happens to me all the time, with some specific memories linked to seemingly random acts like shaving the left side of my neck.
I have SAD and this happens to me several times a day. Though it's not so much that it pops into my head, more that my train of thought leads me there by association.
In a lot of ways SAD feels like a form of PTSD where instead of a single extremely traumatic experience, or many extreme experiences(known as complex PTSD), it's a huge amount of slightly traumatic ones. So it's sort of like a flashback.
One of the things I've noticed is that when I'm on SSRIs and they're working(which has never been a long-lived state of affairs, unfortunately), this phenomenon is drastically reduced or even gone altogether.
I also do that from time to time, though less regularly, maybe once a month. But then I also sometimes talk to myself (not excessively, just occasionally when I take a walk or while at home, replaying some conversation or imagining a possible situation). I thought this was rather normal, or at least not too far from normal.
I too have issues with these kinds of thoughts that very nearly cause a whole-body shudder, followed by a kind of yell just to get it out of my system. It doesn't happen often, but hearing others talk about this gives me hope that I'm not a total weirdo... even though I know I am in many other ways LOL!
I've also wondered if my ADHD somehow factors into it, but that I don't know.
This is me to a tee! I either get a neck spasm when my chin gets brought down (also happens spontaneously, but often with a cringe worthy thought from the past), or I'll 'almost' same something out loud while replaying something.
Assumed it wasn't just me who did this but glad to know there are others.
I am wondering if you've tried EMDR after the event happens? So you have the thought that triggers the tic and then you'd focus intensely on the event and do the EMDR stuff. That may reduce the intensity of the past event and reprogram your nervous system to not trigger so intensely on it.
I had a significant tic, and found profound relief through Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). I strongly recommend "Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life".
Happens at least twice a day to me, sometimes a lot more. My wife finds it bewildering so I’m not sure it’s totally normal, but I know it’s not uncommon either.
> Learnt behaviour, copying, or physical tics that once learnt get stuck in the brain?
The article itself makes it clear. There's an obvious reward for these behaviors. This youtuber got exceptionally popular very quickly and was able to turn that into appearances on other shows. The other patients are also noted to have their "symptoms" express themselves during unpleasant tasks, but to be missing during pleasant ones. To the point it gets them out of doing the unpleasant work.
We've built a system that rewards this behavior because we built a system that also makes this behavior profitable. To me, these results shouldn't be a surprise, and I wonder if this "new illness" is really just an emergent lower level expression of something like Munchhausen syndrome; now given a wider and less sophisticated audience to play to.
It's the mere suggestion that they might have those tics, but the article says:
> Fourth, in some patients, a rapid and complete remission occurred after exclusion of the diagnosis of Tourette syndrome.
It also mentions other examples of MSI, where symptoms across the group would subside after a couple weeks or months. So yeah, in most cases all it needs is someone to say Stop That! You're imagining things
All behavior is total behavior, so it doesn’t really matter. Article makes the point that this is attention seeking behavior and often used as an excuse to avoid unpleasant tasks. Whether the teens are aware they are choosing the tic, eventually it becomes habitual and they “can’t stop”. Except they can after meeting with a trained phycologist. Get to the root of the behavior and usually the behavior goes away.
> First, all patients presented with nearly identical movements and vocalizations that not only resemble Jan Zimmermann’s symptoms, but are in part exactly the same, such as shouting the German words Pommes (English: potatoes), Bombe (English: bomb), Heil Hitler, Du bist häßlich (English: you are ugly) and Fliegende Haie (English: flying sharks) as well as bizarre and complex behaviours such as throwing pens at school and dishes at home, and crushing eggs in the kitchen.
> Fourth, in some patients, a rapid and complete remission occurred after exclusion of the diagnosis of Tourette syndrome.
To a first approximation, the kids are 'faking it'. The third point I didn't quote was that symptoms appear when it will preclude then from doing a tedious task, and then disappear when they are doing something they want to do.
Stuff like this makes me wonder if taboo and stigma "evolved" in societies as defense against the spread of behavior that could cause a breakdown of social order. For example, if something like dancing mania[0] got out of hand, then important jobs could be left undone and people starve or whatever. So if the notion that such behavior is bad is drilled into everyone's mind before being exposed, then they are more likely to avoid "catching" it.
There's no need for convoluted explanations. A good taboo, understood as a restriction on certain kinds of behavior or speech at least in certain circumstances, exists to protect some good. It's the same reason (or one of the reasons) we partition our houses into rooms by purpose. Human flourishing requires certain limits, not letting it all hang out. The latter is more akin to the liberal notion of freedom understood as "do what thou wilt" and limitless indulgence of the appetites and desires. The classical understanding of freedom is the ability to do what you ought. Guess which leads to happiness and which leads to misery.
"limitless indulgence of the appetites and desires" has a different word. That's not freedom, that's called debauchery and has absolutely nothing to do with "liberalism" in the political science meaning of the term.
I don't see how it's at all convoluted. If anything, it's too reductive.
Taboos, traditions, etc., don't need to exist because of a reason that's explicit. Sometimes, they do, but that doesn't explain the taboos that don't make obvious sense. A taboo can be more or less a form of "cultural neuron" that doesn't have an explicit purpose but incidentally changes the balance of the system towards something that society at a given time may benefit from without even knowing it. A religion featuring more ornate hats than others may have more true believers, or perhaps the other way around for all we know. If that's at least plausible, if not true, that wouldn't necessarily mean a reverend at one point decided to declare a certain kind of hat wearing because of the "good of the church."
The inverse can also be true. Take for instance the taboo of sexism. Makes sense, right? Given modern western principles, why should culture allow for discrimination based on sex? On the other hand, there's evidence that many women, regardless of their political positions, actually appreciate men who are "benevolently sexist." It's a phenomenon compelling enough that even Psychology Today, a publication heavily biased against anything unflattering to women, has reported on it more than once. By making sexism a taboo, and far more taboo as of late, society has raised the bar for just how confident a man has to be to attract a woman. We really don't need a study to demonstrate that, on average, women are attracted to confidence. An effect of making sexism taboo is it changes the signal to noise ratio, allowing women to better identify which men they'll actually be attracted to. Maybe there were some people arguing against sexism with this in mind, but I imagine they are an extreme minority. Most anti-sexists probably weren't thinking along those lines.
At least that taboo makes some reasonable sense in isolation, and even the fashion of religious garb can be made sense of, but what about a taboo that makes no sense? What about merely making a mouth-noise that comes out sounding like "shit?"
It makes little explicit sense that saying the word "shit" be a faux pas. You can say poop, doodie, scat, dung, and even crap, but shit is considered a curse word. It's really pretty stupid.
Except I would argue that having any form of taboo can have a positive effect, even if it barely makes sense. By having cultural limits of any kind, it puts the society on the same page and creates a mindset where individuals try to at least maintain some level of basic class as a mindset. Personally, I like saying the word shit, but adding virtually any variable to a chaotic system can have effects that weren't explicitly predicted.
Oh yeah definitely. It's easier to just have a general learned feeling of a taboo than to have to explain to everyone the historical and societal consequences of it to every person. It's a learned behavior that helps perpetuate a higher survival rate not because the thing itself is bad if done a handful of times but because it can get out of hand and be done by the whole population.
I've been starting to think the bible and other religions have their place due to this. Plot people on a bell curve, that's a lot of people that can't grasp basic nuance and critical reasoning.
I always thought it's just that there are things that you, personally, find weird and there are things you don't, and that it's heavily based on your upbringing, and because your neighbor will have a similar upbringing, both of you find the same things weird. When you hang with your neighbor, you will naturally shit on weird things, as we all like to do. A group of people automatically make up a society and so your society finds the exact same things weird and shits on the same things.
And at no point in the process did you have any individuality or real thought in the matter -- usually at least. Society created your identity and you simply promote it. Over time, opinions change because things happen to society collectively, but it's a slow process.
Taboo and stigma are also what drive irrational prejudices, so I'm not sure about the rush to judgment about, ummm, "important jobs" which definitely were not how society was organized during the vast majority of our evolution.
It’s like how religions tend to be similar and yet at their core are mostly emphasizing some ways to act and ways not to act. Often those ways tend to be similar. The result of mass compliance is a civilization larger than small tribes.
There's a whole field studying how our cultural capacity to create culture is one of the key abilities of human beings as a species, and how the cultures that we create are themselves subject to evolutionary pressures.
One good introduction is "The secret of our success" by Joseph Heinrich. There's a good review here:
> Moreover, they can be viewed as the 21st century expression of a culture-bound stress reaction of our post-modern society emphasizing the uniqueness of individuals and valuing their alleged exceptionality, thus promoting attention-seeking behaviours and aggravating the permanent identity crisis of modern man.
is rather peculiar. I didn't expect that this is how neurologists and neuroscientists would speak these days. "Our postmodern society", "permanent identity crisis of the modern man" - these sentiments sound like they've been transplanted from a humanities paper.
This language style is a bit more common in academic writing outside of the Anglo tradition that is most commonly reported in the English-speaking world. British and American university training emphasises more clinical language, for better and worse.
I agree. It is a bit weird to see such subjective takes and cultural pessimism in an article like this. Hadn't noticed it the first time around, probably due to my own biases. So thanks for pointing it out.
Isn’t this kind of a social and cultural phenomenon though? It can’t be explained by means of a physical infection right, so it makes sense they have to reach for potential social or cultural answers?
A freaky thing that this paper doesn’t mention is that in some cases these tics have gotten so extreme, that one patient began having almost constant seizures and became wheelchair-bound. Imagine being “infected” by watching a video on TikTok! It sounds like a horror movie.
From The Guardian:
“Over the next few weeks, Wacek noticed that she was having tics. “They were just little noises,” she says. “Nothing to write home about.” She would scrunch up her nose, or huff. The tics escalated from sounds into words and phrases. Then the motor tics kicked in. “I started punching walls and throwing myself at things,” she says. By July, Wacek was having seizures. She had to stop work. “Being a chef with seizures is not safe at all,” she says.
Her GP referred her to a neurologist, who diagnosed her with functional neurological syndrome (FND). People with FND have a neurological condition that cannot be medically explained, but can be extremely debilitating. “In a general neurological clinic, around 30% of the conditions we see are not fully explainable,” says Dr Jeremy Stern, a neurologist with the charity Tourettes Action. In Wacek’s case, FND manifested in verbal and motor tics, not dissimilar from how Tourette syndrome appears to lay people, although the two conditions are distinct.
Wacek has up to 20 seizures a day and currently has to use a wheelchair.”
Yeah, I'm surprised on a forum like this people are using it as an opportunity to be like "ugh kids these days in $current_year seeking attention" and not "holy shit this is fascinating." Social media turned "picking up an accent" up to 11 in a way that actually manifests in tangible problems.
IMO the problem is that complex systems is not a field that is taken seriously yet. It got off to a bad start years back with that shitty James Gleick Chaos book.
We just don't have enough people thinking about this as a SIR model on a social graph to spark the conversation. We literally lack the critical mass of people understanding the language. Without the language the thoughts don't exist.
I am sure a 100 years from now people will look back at us as completely insane to be letting social contagions spread around to children as random graphs on a network.
They write 'people with FND have a condition that cannot be medically explained' as though it's just insufficient research, not understood yet. 'FND' is just polite for 'all in your head'. This article reads like 'they're being treated with a drug called Placebo'.
When I was in high school, one of the "popular" kids used to talk a bit odd on purpose and sure, it generated a bit of a chuckle at first, but he kept doing it and a lot of kids also adopted a similar vocal tic to seem like they were part of the cool group as well. Monkey see, monkey do.
The Mid-Atlantic accent, or Transatlantic accent, is a consciously learned accent of English, fashionably used by the late 19th-century and early 20th-century American upper class and entertainment industry, which blended together features regarded as the most prestigious from both American and British English (specifically Received Pronunciation). It is not a native or regional accent; rather, according to voice and drama professor Dudley Knight, "its earliest advocates bragged that its chief quality was that no Americans actually spoke it unless educated to do so". The accent was embraced in private independent preparatory schools, especially by members of the American Northeastern upper class, as well as in schools for film and stage acting, with its overall use sharply declining after the Second World War.
Not Mid-Atlantic, but I've heard that one way to acquire a "standard" Mid-Western US accent is to speak along with a trained speaker, such as a particular newscaster. And "You are supposed to stop before sounding just like that person."
I worked with a couple of college classmates, who when they were taking to each other would use this hurry up to stop type of speech pattern. A few really quick words, then a pause, and a few more words. For autistic people this is called cluttering, but they talked to clients and others and didn’t talk that way, so I always wondered where it came from.
it sounds similar to how catch-phrases like simpsons and other shows become common things for kids to adopt and (over)use. i'd say it's hard to break patterns developed when young and seems to be what others around you are doing... downward spiral?
"they can be viewed as the 21st century expression of a culture-bound stress reaction of our post-modern society emphasizing the uniqueness of individuals and valuing their alleged exceptionality, thus promoting attention-seeking behaviours and aggravating the permanent identity crisis of modern man."
There is a tendency to reify aberrations and disorders and to identify with them because it gives you another way of attaining a feeling of (false) "uniqueness" and exceptionality, or a way of trying to manipulate people into showing you "compassion" or pity. It's a disease of our age. "The spectrum" seems to be a popular example. These are afflictions, not identities. They're nothing to be proud of when you have them, if you have them, nor are they things to be desired.
There may also be passive-aggressive motives. Personal autonomy and the absolute sovereignty of the individual and his desires are a superordinate value today. We chafe under any perceived constraint or restraint on our desires. What do some people do when they don't want to follow some rule they should, but fear opposing that rule overtly? They rebel through small, passive-aggressive ways. Imagine now you are faced with the internalized emotional compulsion or fear to behave or not behave a certain way that you don't want to submit to, but fear opposing or ignoring for whatever reason. Simulating tics could be an interior rebellion against that undesired compulsion. Repeat something often enough, and it becomes a habit.
(Curiously, I would attribute the very cause of this inner struggle to our disordered attitude toward desire and appetite in the first place where the tail is essentially wagging the dog. Putting reason before desire and submitting to the truth liberates a person from the capricious tyranny of appetite.)
this reads to me like a typical modern's response to an unfamiliarity with the feeling of actually being one of the alienated people who are attempting with varying degrees of success to find anything of substance.
but really I think that alienation is dealt with differently by each subject, with temporally near groups just chosing similar patterns based on environmental and cultural factors.
there isn't any "right" way to deal with it, just the ones were currently trying. maybe it's good, maybe it's unhealthy, maybe it's going to cause the death of society. either way, the earth still spins.
As someone who deals with the misery of an “invisible” chronic illness, one of my great fears is that everyone (or the majority, anyway) thinks like GP.
For those who think this is "just" a fad, there are some descriptions of the emotional harm that that it can cause in this article from February: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/social-med... The semantics of "mass sociogenic illness" aside, there do seem to be damaging real-world consequences.
Readit News
Pre-internet, one would rarely be exposed to ideas that are extreme, unhinged, insane or downright weird. It would still happen but in moderation, for which I'll use the stereotype "village idiot". A village idiot is isolated for having off-base ideas and behavior, hence bad ideas don't take root.
Now it's as if all the village idiots of the world had a meeting and started to run society, at least culturally. The bad ideas and behaviors are not kept in check, they're rewarded, leading to the normalization of things deeply questionable.
Imagine being a youngster right now. You do as your peers do, you live online. Where insanity is your mainstream cultural input. Where mental illness, a very serious issue, is seemingly rewarded for oppression points. Where you might question your gender, where before this very idea didn't even occur to you. Where you're confused between body types, from anorexic to celebrating obesity. The normalization of the hating of the other sex. Or the other political half. Or an entire race. Or an entire class. Or anybody that doesn't agree with you. The normalization of doxxing, snitching, gossiping and cancel culture as "conversation" tools. The sheer volume of it. The pointless status games.
Comparing social media to smoking is a comparison that needs re-evaluating. It's frankly shocking how this untold harm goes unchecked. Then again, intervening can lead to creepy authoritarian legislation. As seen in China, but let's at least credit them for recognizing the harm.
These things are sadly all too common, there's lots of work to do, and we must not be complacent about past successes.
But when I was a kid, homosexuality was illegal. Twenty years ago gay fear and stupid women were typical jokes on most sitcoms. Some of our grandmothers could not vote. Swimming pools and schools - schools! - were racially segregated within a lifetime.
Contrary to your post, we have been gradually escaping from the extreme crazy bad ideas. Let's keep it up.
In a time when people didn't question their gender, many of them might have felt themselves to be alone in their feelings. They not only learned to suppress their feelings (to avoid ridicule or worse), they were unable to understand them because literature was oppressed. Much self-isolation, even tragedy ensued. In many "less civilized cultures" these differences were not an excuse for abuse, but were recognized, even exalted ... until the colonizers came along with their 'truths'.
Exploring, understanding and accepting ourselves is an important step, for -all- of us, not just the typicals. "To thine own self be true..."
Edit: Never stop making things better in terms of equality, but perhaps we shouldn’t celebrate cancel culture or people getting internet points for gender confusion.
People are afraid to set boundaries for fear of getting cancel cultured or harassed by a woke tolerance mob. All disagreement is now "toxic behavior" on social media channels. Arguing over perspectives is now sometimes branded with the extreme label of gaslighting. Day by day our Overton window continues to shift, and yet we were all told the slippery slope was supposedly a fallacy.
Still, it's impossible to deny the negative impact it has on people who can't handle the vastness of opinion, and many of them turn to the comforting simplicity of reactionary extremism to cope.
Not to be too Orwellian, but I’ve often wondered why nobody say, talks about removing gendered pronouns altogether in formal speech instead of adding 50 new ones for instance. People seem to only talk about adding new words and concepts.
What has changed is just that extremist groups have very successfully adopted the communication tools available to them for recruitment and engagement.
Those with weaker "immune systems" succumb to the mental viruses and cause themselves possibly irreparable harm by either joining a radical cult of their choosing or falling into some medical pathology rabbit hole.
Except for the ones that were widely believed and accepted, of course. Or are you excluding those via a somewhat circular definition of "extreme," "unhinged," etc.?
Okay.
> You do as your peers do, you live online. Where insanity is your mainstream cultural input.
Reductionist, but I follow. What is insanity, and who defines it? Prior to the modern day, homosexuality was insanity or illness.
> Where mental illness, a very serious issue, is seemingly rewarded for oppression points.
Outside of some very extreme circles, nobody is actually doing this seriously. Where are you even seeing this?
> Where you might question your gender, where before this very idea didn't even occur to you.
No, they just kept quiet about it. That’s the difference, and it seems many are not ready to face the complex nature of psyche.
> Where you're confused between body types, from anorexic to celebrating obesity.
Most people are reasonable enough to understand celebrating obesity and “health at every size” is a fringe, unscientific and extremist idea.
> The normalization of the hating of the other sex.
Once again, extreme communities. Not sure if you refer to incels, would love some clarification.
> Or the other political half. Or an entire race. Or an entire class. Or anybody that doesn't agree with you.
Hate and extremism was invented by the internet?
> The normalization of doxxing, snitching, gossiping and cancel culture as "conversation" tools. The sheer volume of it. The pointless status games.
I see nothing new here. It’s more accesible, yes, but public shame and gossip (!!!) has happened for millennia.
People can organize better and agendas can be pushed easily via the internet. But these voices are fringe and minority. Outside, in the real world — most people are reasonable and understanding.
Oh, and monocultures aren’t great.
It's not reasonably possible to rid ourselves of the internet, and in fact I think it's a net Good. The issue going forward is to consider and teach responsible internet use for not just young people, but everyone. Most of the shitty, intentionally hurtful things I see on the internet don't come from young folks, but from adults trying to inflict harm. People like that have always existed, and are the real problem in these cases.
I think OP is expressing concern that maybe young people aren't living there as much as you'd hope.
Most of these issues, and the extent to which they are issues, are in the eye of the beholder.
> Oh, and monocultures aren’t great.
Does being terminally online contribute more or less to this? I'm still not sure, but leaning towards more. People always parroted others, but now with social reach being so concentrated, it seems like everyone parrots from a smaller pool. The consequence/reward for expression are much more well defined in the online world as well.
You don’t have to browse Reddit for long to to see plenty of self-described loners, people dealing with anxiety and other mental issues. And it makes sense that these people would find community online.
But if kids are going online and being bombarded with “the world is doomed”, and “what I thought were just the challenges of growing up are actually a mental illness” or “once I did [unhealthy coping mechanism], I felt like my problems were solved”, they developed unhealthy and distorted views of how kids their age think and act. I can see it being very easy to get sucked into the worst kind of community.
And if kids isolate themselves further the online world is literally 99% of their entire world view. And what an awful distorted world that is.
>The normalization of doxxing, snitching, gossiping and cancel culture as "conversation" tools.
You seem to be contradicting yourself here. Back in the pre-internet days, the "village idiot" was "canceled". No one bothered to listen to his idiotic blatherings or attempting to debate or debunk him; everyone just ignored him because he was a waste of time. Hence, he was "canceled", or "isolated" as you put it. But now you're complaining about similarly stupid and dangerous people being "canceled" (i.e., ignored and shunned).
For example, let's look at the Tide Pod incident, how many teens in total ate tide pods?
86.
A global moral panic was launched over 86 teenagers doing a very stupid thing as teenagers are wont to do.
> It’s true that since the Tide Pod Challenge began, the American Association of Poison Control Centers (AAPC) has received 86 reports of teenagers intentionally ingesting laundry detergent. Yet at the end of last year, the AAPC reported that over 10,500 children under the age of five were exposed to laundry pods in 2017 (for example ingesting, inhaling, or absorbing the detergent). If we are going to have a mass panic about poisonings, ten thousand children are clearly in greater danger than less than a hundred teens. So why was it that only the Tide Pod Challenge that made pearl-clutching headlines across the globe?
https://archive.ph/ACiFD
The actual threat is accidental ingestion or inhalation by little children and elderly adults with dementia. They form the tens of thousands of cases that end up at poison control centres. But there's no moral panic around that, because "Elderly lady with dementia who lives alone accidentally ate a tide pod and then ended up in the ER" is less of a salacious story than "Teen eats tide pod for tiktok challenge"
Let's examine this 'Tourettes-like' story,
> Over the past 2 years, a remarkably high number of young patients have been referred to our specialized Tourette outpatient clinic presenting with symptoms closely resembling the ones Jan Zimmermann shows in his videos
What's a remarkably high number? As far as I can tell, this Op-Ed doesn't specify it. The author has only examined one patient that he classifies with this diagnosis. Ever.
Also interestingly enough, in most of the articles that talk about this subject, guess whose name repeatedly pops up? The same patient named in this Op-Ed.
Jan Zimmerman.
You can see the search for yourself here, https://www.google.com/search?q=Jan+Zimmerman+internet+viral...
We are told that there are "hundreds" of such patients, but we're never given an actual number, citation, or source.
If you try to track the source down, you find pieces like these, here's the "concrete" evidence that's offered,
First the background rate,
> The new surge of referrals consists of adolescent girls with sudden onset of motor and phonic tics of a complex and bizarre nature. In London, UK specialist tic clinics at each of the two children’s hospitals, each centre received four to six referrals per year (out of a total of approximately 200 in 2019/2020), which were acute onset tics in teenage girls
Then the "surge"
> In the last 3 months (end of 2020–January 2021), both centres have been receiving three to four referrals per week of this nature which, if it continues, would amount to 150–200 cases per year and effectively double the referral rate.
4 * 12 = 48. There are two centers so 96.
And this is during the onset of the pandemic, where global quarantines produced a constellation of anxiety in people of all age groups around the world.
This entire moral panic has been driven by referrals, not diagnoses, not confirmations but referrals from primary care physicians during one of the most stressful events of the past few decades (for ordinary people). No evidence has been presented if any or all of these cases are related to social media use or not.
The paper goes into this aspect and theorizes that this is an acute stress response,
> It is hypothesised that this unusual presentation is related to lockdown, change in usual structure and routine, social media related events/bullying and pandemic-related stress in vulnerable adolescents. Stress may be unmasking a tic predisposition in some, while in others compounding existing vulnerability to anxiety, for example, underlying neurodevelopmental or emotional difficulties to the point of becoming overwhelming.
https://adc.bmj.com/content/106/5/420
No specific numbers are provided anywhere w.r.t. how many people were influenced by social media or not, v. how many were patients that were predisposed to such a response that then presented with it in response to a hyper-stressful event.
So no, there is no epidemic of people watching tik toks and running around and changing their gender or becoming tourette-like.
96 possible, undiagnosed referrals does not a pandemic make.
This is just as silly as the moral panic over D&D back in the 80s. It's just updated for modern times.
You say 86, but that was just the number of children reported to the AAPC. I think it'd be reasonable to assume that there were many more cases that were not reported (due to varied levels of ingestion/concern) or were reported elsewhere and so not included in AAPC stats.
Some of what you call "Moral Panic" and "Pearl-Clutching" in regard to the whole tide pod thing was also what I'd call "Education". It informed both parents and children that this was occurring and why it was a bad idea. I think it's also safe to assume this helped prevent a few cases.
Young children were and still are the primary concern when it comes to ingesting household poisons, and there have been active efforts and ongoing campaigns for ages warning both parents and children about that particular danger (see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Yuk), but what made the tide-pod challenge remarkable and newsworthy is that very few people would have expected that so many teenagers would be stupid enough to do something like that.
All that isn't to say that the media didn't jump at the chance to generate clicks by exploiting parent's fear and exaggerating the phenomenon, but it wasn't simply something invented to panic parents the way the D&D scare was, and it was just one of several stupid dangerous things children were doing around that time motivated by internet points and social media attention.
In the case of this "Not Tourette’s", while I'm sure it has been being reported elsewhere and perhaps even irresponsibly, the source is an academic paper and no matter the actual prevalence of this behavior it's absolutely appropriate for something like this to be reported and discussed in that setting. Even if this does turn out to be nothing but a blip in referrals that never amounts to a larger trend of great concern and the fad of kids pretending to have Tourette’s dies off quickly, that's perfectly fine.
What matters is that there are records and reports so that all available evidence can be collected, compared, and studied in the event that it isn't simply a non-issue that dies off on its own. In the meantime, because it is happening, it seems like a good thing for healthcare providers to be aware of what's been observed so far and that researchers can look into the "Why" behind it.
I know there's a panic over "screen time", which I've never really been on board with.
But I think there's a lot more to be said for keeping children away from the internet. The screen isn't so much of a problem. But the internet is.
If federal, state and local legislation or exclusive constitutional rights qualify as normalization, then we've been here before in the US... on several occasions.
> The sheer volume of it.
%100 agree. The difference between now and all the other times is that it's hard to escape it if you want to function in society-at-large. But I'd add that an obsession with growth is also key to the deleterious effects of social media.
"Good afternoon, do you have a moment for me to talk to you about our lord Jesus Christ?"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_history
Dead Comment
So, the weird thing is not they pick up someone else's tics but they cannot get rid of them.
Learnt behaviour, copying, or physical tics that once learnt get stuck in the brain?
If someone spends many hours a day watching someone with particular quirks, it doesn't seem surprising (drawing parallels here to my experience) that those quirks may transfer because their brain starts to make those associations through observation. I would expect that stopping watching that particular person would probably let the transferred tics decay over a period of time (I'd give it a month).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning
Before social media, there were movies that molded society. Bollywood and more recently K-dramas/K-pop have influenced an entire generation.
Often these were used for shaping a younger generation as a long term strategy for a desirable adult demographic. To a certain extent, it is happening in our American public school system. Everyone who comes through it are kind of identical. It may not be apparent to those who have never stepped out of the States, but it is obvious to those outside or have known other cultures.
With social media impacts, its effect is like an oil spill. Even if you can contain it, it will be messy, expensive and traumatic for years and years. This is a Faustian bargain we have made.
(V. S. RAMACHANDRAN)
The author/researcher says he believes that is one of the main mechanisms of human learning (babies look at adults and imitate. Adults look at other adults and imitate. Subconsciously)
What you are describing sounds very similar.
I am by all accounts neurotypical (except perhaps for a touch of Aspergers) but I have an involuntary tic. Every now and then (like once or twice a week) a memory of some incredibly stupid thing that I once did -- sometimes decades ago -- will pop into my head and before I can re-establish conscious control I'll make a vocalization that sounds like a cross between a whimper and a sneeze. It's kind of embarrassing, but usually I cover it up with a cough afterwards. I don't think anyone has ever actually noticed except me.
---
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earworm
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrusive_thought
In a lot of ways SAD feels like a form of PTSD where instead of a single extremely traumatic experience, or many extreme experiences(known as complex PTSD), it's a huge amount of slightly traumatic ones. So it's sort of like a flashback.
One of the things I've noticed is that when I'm on SSRIs and they're working(which has never been a long-lived state of affairs, unfortunately), this phenomenon is drastically reduced or even gone altogether.
This happens to me as well, but usually I just kind of mutter 'damnit' under my breath or 'ugh'. Maybe shake my head a little.
Deleted Comment
I've also wondered if my ADHD somehow factors into it, but that I don't know.
Assumed it wasn't just me who did this but glad to know there are others.
I am wondering if you've tried EMDR after the event happens? So you have the thought that triggers the tic and then you'd focus intensely on the event and do the EMDR stuff. That may reduce the intensity of the past event and reprogram your nervous system to not trigger so intensely on it.
The article itself makes it clear. There's an obvious reward for these behaviors. This youtuber got exceptionally popular very quickly and was able to turn that into appearances on other shows. The other patients are also noted to have their "symptoms" express themselves during unpleasant tasks, but to be missing during pleasant ones. To the point it gets them out of doing the unpleasant work.
We've built a system that rewards this behavior because we built a system that also makes this behavior profitable. To me, these results shouldn't be a surprise, and I wonder if this "new illness" is really just an emergent lower level expression of something like Munchhausen syndrome; now given a wider and less sophisticated audience to play to.
> patients often reported to be unable to perform unpleasant tasks because of their symptoms
> resulting in release from obligations at school and home
> symptoms temporarily completely disappear while conducting favourite activities
This is a textbook example of secondary gain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_and_secondary_gain
> So, the weird thing is not they pick up someone else's tics but they cannot get rid of them.
In some cases they did get rid of them after the ruse was discovered and no longer served any purpose.
> in some patients, a rapid and complete remission occurred after exclusion of the diagnosis of Tourette syndrome
> Fourth, in some patients, a rapid and complete remission occurred after exclusion of the diagnosis of Tourette syndrome.
It also mentions other examples of MSI, where symptoms across the group would subside after a couple weeks or months. So yeah, in most cases all it needs is someone to say Stop That! You're imagining things
To a first approximation, the kids are 'faking it'. The third point I didn't quote was that symptoms appear when it will preclude then from doing a tedious task, and then disappear when they are doing something they want to do.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_mania
I don't see how it's at all convoluted. If anything, it's too reductive.
Taboos, traditions, etc., don't need to exist because of a reason that's explicit. Sometimes, they do, but that doesn't explain the taboos that don't make obvious sense. A taboo can be more or less a form of "cultural neuron" that doesn't have an explicit purpose but incidentally changes the balance of the system towards something that society at a given time may benefit from without even knowing it. A religion featuring more ornate hats than others may have more true believers, or perhaps the other way around for all we know. If that's at least plausible, if not true, that wouldn't necessarily mean a reverend at one point decided to declare a certain kind of hat wearing because of the "good of the church."
The inverse can also be true. Take for instance the taboo of sexism. Makes sense, right? Given modern western principles, why should culture allow for discrimination based on sex? On the other hand, there's evidence that many women, regardless of their political positions, actually appreciate men who are "benevolently sexist." It's a phenomenon compelling enough that even Psychology Today, a publication heavily biased against anything unflattering to women, has reported on it more than once. By making sexism a taboo, and far more taboo as of late, society has raised the bar for just how confident a man has to be to attract a woman. We really don't need a study to demonstrate that, on average, women are attracted to confidence. An effect of making sexism taboo is it changes the signal to noise ratio, allowing women to better identify which men they'll actually be attracted to. Maybe there were some people arguing against sexism with this in mind, but I imagine they are an extreme minority. Most anti-sexists probably weren't thinking along those lines.
At least that taboo makes some reasonable sense in isolation, and even the fashion of religious garb can be made sense of, but what about a taboo that makes no sense? What about merely making a mouth-noise that comes out sounding like "shit?"
It makes little explicit sense that saying the word "shit" be a faux pas. You can say poop, doodie, scat, dung, and even crap, but shit is considered a curse word. It's really pretty stupid.
Except I would argue that having any form of taboo can have a positive effect, even if it barely makes sense. By having cultural limits of any kind, it puts the society on the same page and creates a mindset where individuals try to at least maintain some level of basic class as a mindset. Personally, I like saying the word shit, but adding virtually any variable to a chaotic system can have effects that weren't explicitly predicted.
Deleted Comment
I always thought it's just that there are things that you, personally, find weird and there are things you don't, and that it's heavily based on your upbringing, and because your neighbor will have a similar upbringing, both of you find the same things weird. When you hang with your neighbor, you will naturally shit on weird things, as we all like to do. A group of people automatically make up a society and so your society finds the exact same things weird and shits on the same things.
And at no point in the process did you have any individuality or real thought in the matter -- usually at least. Society created your identity and you simply promote it. Over time, opinions change because things happen to society collectively, but it's a slow process.
One good introduction is "The secret of our success" by Joseph Heinrich. There's a good review here:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...
I have developed a lot more respect for traditional cultures and religions as a result of adopting this perspective.
> Moreover, they can be viewed as the 21st century expression of a culture-bound stress reaction of our post-modern society emphasizing the uniqueness of individuals and valuing their alleged exceptionality, thus promoting attention-seeking behaviours and aggravating the permanent identity crisis of modern man.
is rather peculiar. I didn't expect that this is how neurologists and neuroscientists would speak these days. "Our postmodern society", "permanent identity crisis of the modern man" - these sentiments sound like they've been transplanted from a humanities paper.
From The Guardian: “Over the next few weeks, Wacek noticed that she was having tics. “They were just little noises,” she says. “Nothing to write home about.” She would scrunch up her nose, or huff. The tics escalated from sounds into words and phrases. Then the motor tics kicked in. “I started punching walls and throwing myself at things,” she says. By July, Wacek was having seizures. She had to stop work. “Being a chef with seizures is not safe at all,” she says. Her GP referred her to a neurologist, who diagnosed her with functional neurological syndrome (FND). People with FND have a neurological condition that cannot be medically explained, but can be extremely debilitating. “In a general neurological clinic, around 30% of the conditions we see are not fully explainable,” says Dr Jeremy Stern, a neurologist with the charity Tourettes Action. In Wacek’s case, FND manifested in verbal and motor tics, not dissimilar from how Tourette syndrome appears to lay people, although the two conditions are distinct. Wacek has up to 20 seizures a day and currently has to use a wheelchair.”
Source: https://amp.theguardian.com/media/2021/nov/16/the-unknown-is...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekg45ub8bsk
Might I interest you in Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.
We just don't have enough people thinking about this as a SIR model on a social graph to spark the conversation. We literally lack the critical mass of people understanding the language. Without the language the thoughts don't exist.
I am sure a 100 years from now people will look back at us as completely insane to be letting social contagions spread around to children as random graphs on a network.
Your brain is an organ just like other organs. If it starts malfunctioning it can cause serious even life threatening problems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent
There is a tendency to reify aberrations and disorders and to identify with them because it gives you another way of attaining a feeling of (false) "uniqueness" and exceptionality, or a way of trying to manipulate people into showing you "compassion" or pity. It's a disease of our age. "The spectrum" seems to be a popular example. These are afflictions, not identities. They're nothing to be proud of when you have them, if you have them, nor are they things to be desired.
There may also be passive-aggressive motives. Personal autonomy and the absolute sovereignty of the individual and his desires are a superordinate value today. We chafe under any perceived constraint or restraint on our desires. What do some people do when they don't want to follow some rule they should, but fear opposing that rule overtly? They rebel through small, passive-aggressive ways. Imagine now you are faced with the internalized emotional compulsion or fear to behave or not behave a certain way that you don't want to submit to, but fear opposing or ignoring for whatever reason. Simulating tics could be an interior rebellion against that undesired compulsion. Repeat something often enough, and it becomes a habit.
(Curiously, I would attribute the very cause of this inner struggle to our disordered attitude toward desire and appetite in the first place where the tail is essentially wagging the dog. Putting reason before desire and submitting to the truth liberates a person from the capricious tyranny of appetite.)
but really I think that alienation is dealt with differently by each subject, with temporally near groups just chosing similar patterns based on environmental and cultural factors.
there isn't any "right" way to deal with it, just the ones were currently trying. maybe it's good, maybe it's unhealthy, maybe it's going to cause the death of society. either way, the earth still spins.