Who caused the collective hysteria, and who is responsible?

Here’s how I just responded to someone asking me this.

“If collective hysteria is a bunch of hysterical people, how can we hold anyone culpable?”

Collective hysteria is not individuals acting hysterically. The term is used to describe an emergent event at the level of the network.

There was in early 2020 broad concern of mass death by a supposedly dangerous and utterly novel virus, and that meme went viral in ways that changed the state of the network.

After that, there were trillions of deliberate decisions and conspirings, all under the new righteous Covid Cult philosophy born.