Tolstoy’s ‘epidemic suggestion’ and the end of truth
Tolstoy wrote of “epidemic suggestion” to describe those moments when humanity seems to be gripped by a kind of mass hypnosis that no force can counter. The resulting movements, like the Crusades or the 17th-century Dutch tulip craze, cannot be controlled. We find ourselves in such a moment.
To imagine that the words I write, or those of countless others lamenting the world’s lurch toward the politics of violence, may stem this “epidemic suggestion” is to indulge in fantasy. It is part of the infernal nature of such eruptions that everything feeds them, including outrage. The slouching beast is insatiable.
Warnings of danger are just the self-important whining of those in whose favor the decadent, soon-to-be-destroyed system has been rigged. The movement is the answer. Mendacity is the new truth. Choreography is stronger than content. The world is upside-down.
Writing into such an environment is like directing a canoe into a gale. Still, here goes, while words still have some meaning.
Goodbye to all that. This looks like the end of a brief interlude that began in 1945. The interlude was relatively peaceful by historical standards. It saw the construction of a rules-based world order undergirded by visceral knowledge of destruction and acute awareness of potential Armageddon. The postwar order involved new institutions, treaties, alliances, and even a union of the very European nations most given to repetitive bloodshed.
Read the rest of Roger Cohen’s piece for The New York Times here.
Incidentally, ‘epidemic suggestion’ is also what propelled Muscat’s government to power with a 36,000-vote majority. That’s exactly why you felt at the time that people were gripped by some kind of mass hysteria, that they were actually singing the praises of a bunch of clearly corrupt people, unable to see their corruption, and hailing them as saviours while going nuts against buses and a clock. And yes, as Cohen writes here, it was unstoppable. Situations like that are like a mad fever. As he writes, too, those who sound warnings are insulted and dismissed as being keen only on preserving the status quo in their personal interest. And so you watch helplessly as the population surges like lemmings towards the cliff-edge.
