A review of “Mania: How Societies Go Crazy” by Lionel Shriver
Lionel Shriver has never been one to avoid uncomfortable subjects. Whether skewering the politics of identity or plumbing the darker corners of family life, her fiction is often a mirror tilted at an angle, reflecting our culture not as we wish it were, but as it is, warped and raw.
In Mania: How Societies Go Crazy, she sets aside fiction entirely and steps into the realm of cultural criticism with the same sharpness and precision that made her novels both admired and divisive.
Shriver’s argument is deceptively simple: that entire societies, like individuals, are susceptible to episodes of collective delusion. We call them moral panics, mass movements, fads. Shriver calls them manias. But unlike trends that come and go with little consequence (pet rocks, say, or powdered wigs) these manias, she argues, grip the cultural psyche with the intensity of a fever and leave real damage in their wake.
What makes Mania so unsettling is not its tone, which remains dryly funny and more curious than furious, but its litany of examples. Shriver traces the outlines of 17th-century witch hunts, 20th-century eugenics, and our more recent flirtations with censorship masquerading as virtue. Her interest isn’t just in what people believed, but in how ordinary, rational people (doctors, teachers, lawmakers) could so easily be swept up in the tide of irrationality. She’s not asking why fringe groups believe strange things. She’s asking why everyone seems to, all at once.
Shriver writes with a novelist’s eye for contradiction. She doesn’t mock her subjects so much as dissect them, peeling back the emotional incentives that make bad ideas so seductive. Fear, of course, plays a starring role. But so does boredom. And loneliness. There’s a passage midway through the book in which she describes the subtle relief of belonging to a moral crusade: how it gives purpose, identity, clarity. The argument is neither scolding nor nostalgic. It is simply observant.
There will be readers who bristle at her choice of examples. Shriver is unafraid to name current phenomena (social media pile-ons, institutional dogmas, and certain forms of symbolic politics) as signs of a culture not just confused, but convinced of its own righteousness while veering into irrationality. Her tone is not unkind, but it is unflinching. Some will call her contrarian. Others will call her brave. She seems unconcerned with either label.
What Mania ultimately offers is not a prescription, but a warning. Societies, like people, are vulnerable to the high of certainty, the thrill of indignation, and the comfort of consensus. The problem, Shriver suggests, is not that we disagree with one another. It’s that we sometimes agree too quickly, too fervently, and with too little scrutiny. And when we do, we become less tolerant, less curious, and, ironically, less sane.
This is not a comforting book. It will not flatter the reader. But it is a necessary one. It reminds us that critical thinking is not a posture, but a habit. And that perhaps the greatest danger of a collective mania is not what it makes us believe, but what it convinces us to silence.
In a time when public conversation feels increasingly hysterical, Mania offers not a cure, but a clear diagnosis. And sometimes, that’s the more honest place to begin.
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