For the average American, the most well known example of a mass panic in popular culture is probably the famous War of the Worlds incident of 1938, when Orson Welles’ radio drama based on H. G. Wells’ novel of the same name caused thousands (some claim millions) of people to believe that an alien invasion of New Jersey was taking place. While the panic was widespread, little harm was caused, and the story is today mostly thought of as an amusing early episode in Welles’ colorful career.

One of the oddest forms of mass hysteria is the “penis panic”. I first read about this in William S. Burroughs’ novel Naked Lunch, where it is referred to as “bangutot” a condition he describes as an erection of the lungs and shrinking of the penis caused by misplaced sexual energy. Bangutot, it turns out, is one form of a specific type of mass hysteria called Genital Retraction Syndrome, wherein victims believe their genitals to be shrinking leading to impotence or even death. GRS has historically occured primarily in southeast Asian countries, where it is known primarily as “Koro” – and there have been many instances of similar panics occuring in Africa as well, where they are often attributed to sorcery.

Past examples are often thought of in present times as being somehow indicative of a cultural naivety, such as in the case of the War of the Worlds incident, which occured in part because the average radio listener at the time assumed anything that sounded like a news broadcast was true. Often examples of mass hysteria are used in one culture to describe a perceived “primitivism” of another – such as descriptions in the west of panics in Africa and Asia where sorcery and witchcraft are blamed. However, there is plenty of evidence to show that mass hysterias can occur in any society regardless of the level of technological or cultural “advancement” of the society in which they take place.

South Korea, for example, is widely considered one of the most technologically sophosticated nations in the world. However it is also the home of a recent, ongoing, and increasingly well known form of mass panic – Korean Fan Death. This involves the idea that sleeping in a room were a fan has been left on can cause death, either through strangulation (there are various theories involving the fan “sucking air out of the room”) or hypothermia caused when the fan lowers the victims’ body temperature. In spite of the fact that occurrences of fan death almost never occur outside South Korea – and there is little scientific evidence to suggest that sleeping with a fan on can cause death – the hysteria seems to persist and continues to be taken quite seriously by authorities. As recently as 2006 the Korea Consumer Protection Board issued a warning about the dangers of asphyxiation by electric fan.

The United States is also currently the home of several ongoing and increasingly well known forms of mass hysteria. One such panic exists in the form of a conspiracy theory that has spread primarily through the internet since the 1990′s – the chemtrail theory, which involves the belief that some jet contrails are in fact chemicals sprayed by government planes as part of some sinister secret project. Another modern American panic that is increasingly widespread is belief in Morgellons Disease, a medical syndrome characterized by threads or thread-like parasites emerging from the victims skin. The disease began to come to public attention in 2001 and has become increasingly present in the media throughout the decade, however most medical professionals seem to attitribute it largely to delusional parsitosis. Recently, I have seen websites in which these two fears are combined, with instances of Morgellons Disease being blamed on the chemicals that fall from chemtrails.

Most of the examples of mass hysteria given above exist on the same level – they occur within one culture and, while they might be fairly widespread among the citizens of a given country or region, they are usually not accepted by authorities and, when they subside, usually cause few permanent changes to the societies in which they occur. However there are also forms of mass hysteria that exist on a much larger scale – and these forms of hysteria tend to be caused by or at least perpetuated by various authority figures. One of the most well known examples in American history is that of the Red Scare – a period in the 1950′s when many Americans became suspicious of Communist sympathy or party membership among their peers, which led to the blacklisting of many artists. Accompanying the Red Scare was a widespread (and some would say, somewhat justified) widespread cultural fear of a nuclear holocaust.

In my opinion we are today in the midst of another such hysteria, also government-sponsored, which initially was a natural reaction to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 but which has been strongly encouraged over the past seven years by both the government and the media. This panic is characterized by the deliberate amplification of fears through the use of such devices such as the Department of Homeland Security’s infamous color-coded national threat level, increasingly complicated and severe rules regarding airline passenger safety, and the passage of controversial laws which increasingly limit civil liberties with the purpoted intent of allowed the government to better protect citizens against hypothetical future attacks. The results of this hysteria have ranged from local incidents that are primarily amusing and embarassing in nature – such as the Boston Mooninite Scare of 2007 – to international catastrophes – the Iraq war was in many ways justified by the American government by alleged links between the government of Saddam Hussein and the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. While levels of public fear seem to be much lower compared to earlier in the decade, the full international consequences of terrorism related mass panic remain to be seen.

Throughout this post we have looked at several different examples of mass hysteria occurring in a variety of cultural contexts and on a few different scales. It is evident that the process of mass hysteria is, in the grand scheme of history, a process that is relatively common in human cultures and one that is greatly aided by mass human communication. Many of the more recent forms of hysteria have been able to spread as quickly and as far as they have largely due to advances in communications technology. Thus the idea that such hysterias are related to any kind of technological or cultural “primitivism” is quite unfounded. On the contrary, as human societies become increasingly globalized and the capability for instantaneous, long-distance communication becomes more widespread and affordable across the world, the pattern of mass hysteria is one that we will more than likely see much more of in decades to come.