Word: hysterias
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...million annual car thefts, but when combined with other incidents in which cars have become both weapons and targets -- the drive-by shootings in Washington or the cinder blocks dropped off highway overpasses in Detroit -- it leaves an impression of rolling danger that fuels a kind of hysteria. "Our agents say there's real fear on the streets," says Howard Apple, head of the FBI's interstate theft unit. "Some crimes you can avoid by avoiding high-crime areas, but people are getting carjacked in their own driveways. People are scared enough that they are not driving alone...
That comes as no surprise to experts who have studied product tampering since it first exploded in 1982, when seven people in the Chicago area died after taking cyanide-laced Extra-Strength Tylenol. Waves of tampering complaints have since swept the nation. But for all the hysteria, true tampering -- deliberately altering a product to endanger random victims -- remains a rare crime. "More than 90% of reports of product tampering turn out to be false alarms," notes forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz of Newport Beach, California, who is a consultant...
Only a decade ago, for example, the West was seized with a near mass hysteria about imminent nuclear apocalypse. The airwaves, the bookstores, the Congress were filled with dire warnings about our headlong dash to the abyss. Indeed, those who refused to lose their heads were said to suffer from a psychological disorder. "Psychic numbing," it was called...
...misunderstand. There is still a nuclear problem. There are environmental problems. But there is a difference between a problem and panic. The next time you find yourself in the midst of some national hysteria, remember the tulip craze that swept Holland three centuries ago, an orgy of panicked financial speculation in which land and houses and gold were all traded for . . . tulips. At the mania's peak, a single Semper Augustus tulip could fetch 20 town houses...
...fired off repeated barrages of new rules aimed at crippling Houtkin's business. The association even threatens to cut him off by scrapping the order-execution capability of its advanced computer system, which it touts in TV ads as "the stock market for the next hundred years." Why the hysteria? Houtkin's clients stir up "waves of orders that increase short-term volatility," charges Richard Ketchum, chief operating officer of the dealers' group. "This substantially increases the risk for marketmakers, which winds up costing the individual investor more money...