COLLECTIVE PSYCHOSIS

Richard Koenigsberg

It is conventional to claim that when certain forms of behavior occur with great frequency in society or history—however bizarre, weird or destructive—these forms of behavior are "normal" simply because they occur frequently.

I view recurring episodes of warfare, genocide and mass-murder, rather, as manifestations of collective psychopathology. Perhaps “madness” is a central characteristic of the domain of politics. 200,000,000+ million deaths in the 20th century as a result of warfare and genocide.

SOCIETAL DELUSIONS

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV, 2000, cited in the “Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy”) defines a delusion as a

false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everybody else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person’s culture or subculture.

Delusions are beliefs “held with great conviction in spite of little empirical support.” A delusion is a “false belief based on incorrect inferences about external reality that is firmly sustained.” A person is deluded when he holds a particular belief with a “degree of firmness utterly unwarranted by the evidence at hand.”

Hitler and the Nazis embraced a delusion about the Jews and Jewish power, believing Jews were acting to destroy the German people and civilized world; asserting Jews were equivalent to bacteria or viruses; claiming that “international Jewry” stood behind Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin.

The term “delusion” usually refers to a clinical syndrome associated with paranoid schizophrenia. What then are we to say then about a delusion that comes to dominate an entire society?

I was at a Holocaust Conference where Professor Jeffrey Herf and I had just presented our keynote addresses.  We were rapping in the back of the auditorium after our presentations. He was pleased that I agreed with his hypothesis that the Nazis' perception of Jews represented a collective delusion.

Then I said, "So you could say that the Nazis were psychotic."  Apparently disturbed by this statement, Professor Herf walked away.