Article by eugyppius.

Extract (conclusion):

The hysterical style arises from a fundamental change in the nature of western government, which has been underway since the early twentieth century, and which has recently accelerated. Managers and administrators have replaced politicians as the primary political actors. Along the way, state power has been diffused and deformalised. Today, a wide array of bureaucrats, stakeholders, NGOs, philanthropic enterprises, journalists, academics and advisory committees all have a say in politics. Hysteria is a means of coordinating all of these widely scattered people and getting them to push in the same direction. The more distributed and generalised state power becomes, the more the hysterical style will grow in importance.

In this brave new system, there is no distinction between media propaganda and political processes. Press hysteria is about much more than simply marshalling support or directing public opinion; it is how our states coordinate their diffuse organs. Because Western nations cannot stir themselves without these hystericising impulses, their scope of action has become remarkably constrained. They have serious problems fixing anything, reforming anything, getting rid of anything, or instituting anything, unless they can do so in response to some minimally credible emergency somewhere. Politics ought to be predictable and boring, at least for those countries that can afford to make it so. Instead, we have unwittingly bred an insane system that is forever losing its mind over ephemeral and often quite illusory problems.

Still worse, all the hysterical appeals presently in circulation appear to be locked in competition with each other for attention and buy-in. Thus the hysterical style is forever escalating, with tamer appeals like those of Fridays for Future losing out to the more extreme rhetoric of Letzte Generation, with Pistorius warning of imminent war in five to eight years because he has to shout over the climateers, and with the anti-AfD contingent reduced to Nazi comparisons because they have to make their bête noire sound even worse than Putin. Trifling things like accuracy and honesty are impossible in this competitive system; the hysterical style rewards instead manipulative imagery, facile historical analogies and apocalyptic scientific models. Moderation is likewise hopeless, as it is easily out-competed and as over time the hysterical system selects for crazy excitable people who prefer to live frantic anxious overdramatised lives.

All narratives in the hysterical style have an acute phase, when they first burst onto the scene and command the most attention; and a longer post-acute phase, after they have been out-competed by other things to panic about. Ominously, post-acute hysterias never quite go away, and they continue to exercise some degree of control on the institutions of government for years or even decades. I suspect one reason that Europe can’t close its borders to the third world, is that this would require a coordinating border security hysteria, which is precluded by the persistent influence of the 2015 open-borders maniacs. The Covidians have likewise become a chronic political affliction, who will strive for decades to realise the next pandemic and reimpose random mask mandates wherever they have any power. You have to wonder what it betokens, as ever more post-acute causes accumulate at the margins of influence, subtly pushing politics towards irrational ends and forever threatening to erupt all over again.