What Is Mass Hysteria In The Crucible

Mass hysteria is the condition of a society in a state of fear. Most of the time, mass hysteria causes irrational behavior, such as the way the characters in The Crucible acted in their situation. Whenever there is a prediction of snow on the weather forecast, everyone always chaotically rushes to the grocery store to buy all the bread and lunch meat. This is an example of mass hysteria. Mass hysteria not only affected the characters in The Crucible, but also affects people in the real world today, like the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The characters in The Crucible showed a very good example of mass hysteria. They were all living their normal, saintly lives when one incident happened that led to an insane series of events. Some of the people in the town were caught practicing witchcraft in the woods one night. Since witchcraft was outlawed there, everyone
started going crazy. People in the town were blaming each other for practicing witchcraft to get out of trouble. There was much deceit and lying going on in the town. This was a big change from their Puritan ways of individuality, and can be looked at as pure chaos. The core of this chaos is simply fear. They were in fear of being tortured or sent to jail, being controlled by the devil, and living among others that were under the devil’s control. This giant loop of fear caused more and more problems for the society. The fact that all of this chaos is based on faith makes the fear even more intense. As LitCharts.com intelligently states: “...if the devil is attacking your town, then ensuring that your neighbor is punished for selling you a sick pig suddenly becomes a religious necessity…” Their society and government were based around faith, and having a theology in government really does the opposite of unify the people. It makes them more individualized. Fear is what condition a society is in for there to be mass hysteria, and allthe characters in the story were at least somewhat faithful, causing them to show a very good example of mass hysteria. A really good example of mass hysteria in history is the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
On September 11th, 2001, there were a series of terrorist attacks in the United States that caused many people to go insane. These people were living their normal lives when suddenly a plane struck one of the World Trade Center buildings in Manhattan, New York City. These people were struck with shock and fear that this just happened, and soon after, another plane struck the second World Trade Center building. Two other planes were crashed in Washington D.C. This solidified the fear of the people, and led to other strong emotions such as anger and sadness. The fear of the people caused hate towards the mass of the Muslim people, which is what the terrorists identified as. This is a completely irrational feeling, since 19 people do not represent the entire Muslim community. We fought wars against them and were okay with killing innocent people because they also identified as Muslim. That’s like hating all hamburgers because one at McDonald’s tasted gross. This irrational behavior based on fear is mass
hysteria. Mass Hysteria is shown not only in the The Crucible, but in the real world too. Both of these instances truly show how mass hysteria affects a community and their values. Mass hysteria usually causes irrational behavior, such as profiling a whole group because of a small part of it, or lying and accusing people you know closely because of fear. These examples are both based on fear, which is the core of mass hysteria itself.