I noticed something strikingly different about the Covid and 10/7 social manias
We can make sense of sociopolitical disagreement by placing it into a 2×2 grid, with facts on the horizontal axis and principles on the vertical axis (see table at top).
Most people assume political disagreement lives in the bottom-left box:
same facts + different principles → different conclusions.
But much of modern political conflict actually lives elsewhere, especially in the right-hand column, where the “facts” themselves are constructed to justify an already-decided moral stance.
What’s striking is how differently COVID and 10/7 fall on this grid.
COVID lived in the bottom-right quadrant (4) — the double-disagreement zone.
There were hallucinated facts (“natural immunity doesn’t exist,” “zero COVID is achievable,” “asymptomatic healthy people are the main threat”), but there was also a genuine principles conflict about civil liberties, coercion, bodily autonomy, and the limits of state power. Even if everyone had agreed on the scientific data, the freedom-versus-control dispute wouldn’t have vanished.
10/7 is the opposite. It sits almost purely in the top-right quadrant (3) — same principles, but entirely different “facts.” Strip away the hallucinated claims (genocide, colonial fiction, intent inversions, fabricated famine narratives, erasure of Hamas tactics), and both sides share the same core moral principles: civilians shouldn’t be targeted, genocides require intent, self-defense is legitimate, hostages should be returned, terrorists are blameworthy.
COVID mixed value-clashes with fact-hallucinations.
10/7 is almost all fact-hallucinations.
And that suggests something deeper: perhaps the more a conflict moves upward into the “principles agreed” region, while still sitting in the “facts disagreed” column, the deeper the hysteria must be. When a mania becomes intense enough, it seems to abandon the vertical value axis entirely; communities no longer try to invent new principles. They only rewrite the “stimulus,” bending the world until it fits the moral signal they began with.
COVID required two disagreements.
10/7 required only one — and that one was reality itself.
Maybe that’s the signature of truly deep mass hysteria:
the fight over values disappears, because the hallucinated world does all the work.
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