13 Hysteria Spirals

Historical atrocities, such as the Holocaust, present a serious problem to any theory of human nature. The breadth of their violence and their divergence from the daily order of life are sufficient to falsify the premises under which human beings bring themselves to cooperate with and trust one another.

Confronted with this threat to their worldview, most intellectuals default to one of two responses.

The first is to endorse extreme cynicism, to assert (in the manner of Rousseau) that bestial violence is the root of human nature, and that civilization is a thin veneer stretched over this inalterable reality.

The second is to push atrocities into the black box of some extra-human force, an ineffable word like “nationalism” or “dehumanization” which gives rise to violent phenomena impenetrably.

In the face of these two alternative explanations, the general public chooses a third path, which is to avoid thinking about the issue altogether^[1]. This public abdication has heaped much grist on the mills of both camps. The cynics of the former camp read into this refusal to engage a refusal to feel properly guilty, and congratulate themselves on the rigor and principle which enable them to bear their repugnant conclusions. The idealists of the latter camp construe it as a refusal to recognize the dangers of their chosen black box, denial which they must overcome by haranguing the public repeatedly and at length^[2].

It is a general principle of the Framework that a commonly held opinion is either correct, or is the outgrowth of a specific pathology. In this instance, I believe that the public’s refusal to engage with these alternative, apocalyptic theories of human nature is a valid one.

The former assertion, that man’s nature is inherently bestial and vile, is contradicted on its face by the fact that the vast majority of human beings forgo violence the vast majority of the time; this is the basic bargain which makes civilization— every civilization— function.

The latter assertion, which pushes atrocity off onto the black box of an extra-human force, fails to cope with the fact that violence again and again arises systemically, in an organized manner. This systematization provides a structure which may be explored and rendered transparent by solve, and insofar as black box theories fail to import their forces into a model of man as he normally exists, in his day to day life, they represent a cessation of analysis, not a tool for it. Such notions simply kick the can of solve down the road.

If neither the cynical nor the idealistic model of atrocity is sufficient to our purposes, then it’s necessary that the Framework contain an original one. However, in constructing such a model, the Framework encounters a few difficulties.

The chief of these is that the very extremes of behavior which make analysis of atrocity necessary seem to force the adoption of mimetic explanations. Much of the Framework is about meeting people where they already are, explaining the rhythms and constraints that constitute their daily lives. Any abridgement of that rhythm which is significant enough to be noteworthy may seem to defy the Framework’s patterns. In such cases, it is tempting to deflect the extremes off onto one of the black boxes I mentioned earlier, casting them as edge cases which are of little relevance to day to day life.

To do so would be a failure of solve, however, and the Framework has been constructed from the beginning to address these questions directly. Just as in the study of individual behavior it is the extremes which illustrate the base case by outlining the boundaries of what is possible, in the study of aggregate human behavior it is the great crises and tragedies of history which illuminate how much restraint and civilization has accreted beneath our feet across uncountable cycles of the Thesis and Antithesis.

In addressing atrocity, the foremost case in my consideration is the Holocaust. It is apparent to any critical observer that reaction to the Holocaust has been the focus of Western culture since the end of the 2nd World War— reaction to the Holocaust, and to the ethos of conformity which gave rise to it. This is no accident; as we’ll discuss in the next chapter, Nazi Germany represented the maximal extent of the Capitalist Antithesis era, the cresting wave which has since begun to recede. The Holocaust has become emblematic of the excesses of that era, and knowledge of it problematizes 3c as a societal and individual force.

The details of 3c’s rise and fall will have to wait for the next chapter; for now, I’d like to lay out briefly the principles of the hysteria spiral, a 3c social phenomenon which I believe accounts for the Holocaust, and which continues to drive political action in the 3c centers of the industrialized world to this day.

The hysteria spiral is a phenomenon of 3c social interaction. It’s important to understand, at the outset, that it is not an emergent phenomenon.

As you’ll see later, the consequences of a hysteria spiral only become legible within the historical record when a large enough mass of individuals are inculcated 3c. For this reason, it may appear that the hysteria spiral is an emergent phenomenon of the 3c mindset, which only appears at all when 3cs gather in sufficient qualities; a qualitative change in their behavior. This is not the case, and it’s important that you keep in mind as we go forward that the qualitative nature of a hysteria spiral isn’t changed when a society reaches 3c critical mass in the manner of Nazi Germany; this is merely a quantitative outpouring of that 3c society’s repressed Thanattic urges onto the body of history^[3].

With that admittedly ponderous front matter out of the way, we can delve into what hysteria spirals actually are.

A hysteria spiral is a phenomenon by which a critical mass of 3c individuals begin to lose touch with reality through the reciprocal exchange of untruths, due to their willingness to lie in order to fit in with social groups. These lies escalate in intensity, creating tension within the minds of the 3cs involved, as they force their lower minds to repress their misgivings. This tension culminates in a violent explosion of their repressed Thanatos drives.

Let’s lay out the steps of this phenomenon in greater detail:

1. A 3c group is made aware of an insoluble problem they face
   1. For instance, Germany could never muster the industrial might to oppose the United States and Russia unless they were willing to cede the supremacy of German culture in order to lead a pan-European empire. Refusal to admit this reality led to their defeat in World War 1.
2. In order to avoid solve, an irrational answer to that problem is adopted by the most radical members of the group.
   1. In the case of the Holocaust, it was the notion that a conspiracy of Jews and Bolsheviks betrayed and undermined the German war effort.
3. The most radical members of the group, because they are the most motivated, reach the center of the group and influence its institutions.
   1. As seen in the rise of the Nazi party, from its origins as a fringe movement into the centers of power.
4. Owing in part to this institutional capture, the less radical members of the group begin to fear that they will be ostracized if they fail to align with these radical members in the center.
5. In order to remain a part of the group, individual members of the group begin to lie about their beliefs regarding the insoluble problem faced by the group.
6.  Members confronted with these lies are unable to detect that they are lies, and therefore offer their own, yet more vehement lies to secure their own positions in the group.
   1. The more radical the lies they are willing to espouse, the more insulated they will be from ostracization and scrutiny; the incentives align such that individuals feel compelled to dig themselves towards the center of the bubble of unreality.
7. The bubble of opinions which the group operates upon is gradually pushed further and further from the central axis of the truth.
   1. It’s important to  note, this happens without any individual members of the group actually believing the lies which are central to it; at no point does anyone need to be actually convinced of any falsehood.
8. This process continues until a body of individuals external to the group intervenes to expose the group’s lies.
9. This intervention is met with forceful resistance by the members of the group, and is either overcome and integrated into the bubble, or dispels the hysteria successfully.
   1. This forceful resistance gives vent to the mounting repressed Thanatos drives of the 3cs in the group; Thanatos in this aspect is the drive which compels individuals to risk ostracization in pursuit of truth. Unable to operate inside the group, this drive is perverted and bent towards violence against the outgroup.
10. If external opposition is overcome by the hysteria spiral, the process repeats from step 4; the opposition is forced to join the hysteria spiral, or is exterminated.
    1. The Jews of Eastern Europe, because they could not be integrated into the Nazi Hysteria Spiral (due to their adherence to multiple competing hierarchies of submission and domination) were exterminated.
11. If external opposition successfully resists the hysteria spiral, it collapses
    1. This was seen in the defeat of Germany by the Allied powers in the 2nd World War

As you can see, the central force of this process is dishonesty, and it is dishonesty of an essentially 3c character. Willingness to lie about one’s beliefs in order to conform to the standards of a group is an essential quality of the 3c mindset, inculcated into them in adolescence. What the hysteria spiral actually consists of is simply the dominance of this mindset over the material and military forces of a society, a feat which can only be achieved through 3c numerical majority^[4]. It never “runs away” or compounds upon itself, but is instead constantly upheld by a tide of new lies; in a perfectly unipolar, 3c society, the only limits of a spiral’s reach would be the capacity of the 3c psyche to uphold those lies, a capacity we’ve never truly tested.

It may be a point of confusion that the 3cs involved in the execution of a hysteria spiral don’t always understand themselves to be lying about their beliefs. This is because the hysteria spiral perfectly straddles the breakages of self which the 3c disposition consists of. Their disbelief, where it fails to align with their social group, represents a Thanattic tendency on the 3rd level, and is consequently repressed. Their lies will begin consciously, as a decision not to speak up, a decision to knowingly espouse a falsehood; the force of repressing these lies, however, will demand that the 3c individual in question stop even thinking about them. The fact of the dishonesty is repressed into the subconscious, and what started as a lie of the upper mind becomes a lie of the whole organism.

The hysteria spiral demands not belief  but the cessation of thought from its participants. Its currency is falsehood not because human beings are gullible, but because closed dispositions are pathologically bent towards dishonesty. This notion instantiates one of the fundamental premises of the Framework: human beings as whole selves are fundamentally rational, and apprehend (however slowly) the truth of their circumstances. The perpetrators of hysteria are not the vanguard of the Party, the State, or whatever other configuration a totalitarian society has assumed; no one is being “brainwashed”. Rather, it is the continual, willful dishonesty of the public which sustains a hysteria spiral, and the consequences lay at their feet, and at the feet of the pathologies which divide them from themselves.

Examples of 3c hysteria spirals in history include:

1. The Holocaust
   1. This was the first major hysteria spiral, and remains the most significant; it was first because Germany was the first nation to enroll women in public life through factory work, a wartime imperative which eliminated the interior periphery of non-3o women capable of dissent. We’ll discuss this situation in greater length in the next chapter.
2. The Red Scare
3. The Stalinist Purges
   1. The action of the hysteria spiral differs in scale from the action of revolution, along axes of dishonesty and of consequence. A 3c revolution (as they occur at vernal equinoxes of the Cycle of Thesis and Antithesis) can be fought along relatively honest grounds, and violence will be constrained by the opposition of an open governing party. The hysteria spiral instantiates the same dialectical momentum at a time when the closed party has gained complete control of society’s institutions, a difference which is illustrated in the tenor of the Russian Revolution of the 1910s vs that of the Stalinist Purges of the 1930s.
4. The Satanic Panic of the 80s
5. The War on Terror
   1. This and the other American spirals illustrate that a 3c group need not necessarily dominate the institutional and military forces of a society in order to fall victim to hysteria; though, reciprocally, the violence which occurs as their repression vents itself will be limited to the extent that internal opposition and competition for these resources occurs. 3c society is a concatenation of small hysteria spirals, continually digesting one another, wherever 3 3c individuals gather.

Each of these hysteria spirals is delimited primarily by its dishonesty, not by its consequences. Other atrocities, from the Rwandan Genocide to the Cultural Revolution to the actions of Japan in the South Pacific, may represent the instantiation of multiple pathologies alongside 3c, and employ differing logics of falsehood and take place along differing levels of sublimation as a result. These examples of solely-3c hysteria spirals, however, are the purest occurrences of the type.

With that, our overview of hysteria spirals is concluded. We will use the concept continuously throughout the remainder of this book, and I hope that it proves as useful to you in the understanding of current events and the character of modern politics as it does in the pure exercise of solve. The next chapter will be discussing the causes and evolution of that most terrible hysteria spiral, the holocaust, in an overview of Capitalism’s Apotheosis in Fascism.