Charles M. Blow: Normalizing mass hysteria

I’m fascinated by mass hysterias. To me, their histories are both mysterious and incredibly revelatory about how human beings can lose themselves, dangerously so, in groupthink, a sort of psychotic contagion. There were relatively limited and brief hysterias, like the dancing plague of 1518, when hundreds of people in the European city of Strasbourg (then part of the Holy Roman Empire, but now part of France) joined in a seemingly inexplicable “dancing epidemic” that lasted for weeks, as people fell dead of strokes and heart attacks.