You don't need elaborate psychological theories to explain coronavirus mania. You don't need much more than social media plus political tribalization to explain 80% of it. But if you want to go deeper, consider the dissonance between regular people and crisis addicts.
Most people want normal life to return, the crisis to be over. They're looking for an exit ramp. They do not like feeling helpless, so they will eagerly seize upon any proposal that appears to give them a tiny bit of power. They really want to trust lavishly-funded "experts."
Those impulses are largely rational, including the *desire* to trust expert opinions on complex and frightening issues. More people should understand how comprehensively inept our Leviathan State has become, but it's reasonable to *want* trillion-dollar agencies to function well.
A minority of people - much louder and more influential than their numbers would normally suggest, given the realities of our neurotic political culture and social media - are addicted to the crisis atmosphere in various ways and don't really want it to end.
For some, this desire is buried or private - in public they'll insist they want normalcy as much as anyone - but others are open about wishing to keep the crisis atmosphere rolling, and repurposing it to cover their other political interests, such as climate change.
Throw in the social media megaphone effect, the bitter tribalization of politics, and the tendency of bureaucrats to blame people who disobey their edicts for all bad outcomes, and you have a recipe for a collective national psyche that looks deranged and delusional.
Most of the individuals participating in that collective insanity are quite reasonable - IF they are approached as adults with the right and responsibility to make decisions based on the best possible information. Americans haven't been approached that way in decades.
Right now, we're paying a heavy price for the deliberate use of disinformation to stampede people into this or that behavior. People are confused and understandably distrust institutions that have repeatedly been either wrong on a gigantic scale, or deliberately dishonest.
But the masses aren't suffering from any psychosis. They have a reasonable desire to restore normal life. They're well aware of the horrendous price paid for following weird strategies that didn't work. They're angry that they still can't get straight answers to basic questions.
It's our leadership class - politicians, bureaucrats, "experts," media - that have acted like lunatics throughout this crisis, pulled in different directions by conflicting agendas, nursing tribal hatreds to gain power instead of acting rationally, efficiently, and honestly. /end
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