[malandrew]

The older I get the more I see very real parallels between maladies of the human brain and maladies of human society.

The way I see it, all this weird and baseless moral panic you've identified tends to resemble clinical depression in an individual. People through their own analysis abstract out what they perceive to be problems, then they market and promote their perceived problems to others and all the hope and despair that comes from learning to perceive those things as problems. Next thing you know, society starts looking like it is clinically depressed and you get people spouting viewpoints like "this is the worst time ever to raise children".

In a similar vein, the experience of schizophrenia seems to parallel the authoritative information "dilemma" known as "fake news" that we're struggling with as a society. Fake news is now pervasive on both the left and the right either in the form of outright lies at worst to deliberate omission of counterbalancing information to serve and agenda. I'm reminded of this Quora question where people with schizophrenia describe what it's like to be schizophrenic:

https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-have-schizophrenia-...