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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
We're here because your heightened awareness deserves heightened entertainment. The Last Show with David Cooper. In 1518, in the Holy Roman Empire, hundreds of people danced uncontrollably in the streets. No music, no Wi-Fi, panic in the streets. It was a dance plague. I'm serious. This happened.
But these moments in history of fear, of mass psychogenic illness, they teach us things about what happens today. We are here with Lee Koonlaa. It is Conspiracy Corner, and we're talking dancing until your feet fall off. Lee, welcome to the show.
Chapter 2: What happened during the dancing plague of 1518?
Hi, David. Thanks for having me. Thanks for that intro, because I was thinking to myself, coming on the radio today, I feel like sometimes I need to justify my existence. Like, who is this guy? What is he doing talking about the dancing plague of 1518? Really, I woke up last night with that kind of in my head. And here's the thing.
In the social sciences, we have a problem in that we often don't get to run experiments like the other sciences get to do. You can't generally go to a country's economy and be like, we're just going to destroy your economy to see if our theory of inflation is right or not, you know?
But the thing is that history is our laboratory because no matter what idea you have, no matter what solution or theory or whatever, there's a historical event out there, which basically is your test case where it's like, here's the thing you want to know about. It's happened before.
So this is why sometimes I come on the radio with stories that are six, seven, 800 years old, which I still think might be relevant for us today. So I hope this one is one of those.
Well, there are cases of like mass public panic that can have violence in them. A little bit more recent than the 1500s. I'm thinking like the Salem witch trials, which we'll talk. This is like a horrific mass public panic, which ended up with people being, I guess, murdered. I mean, they were put on trial, but murdered. It happens well into today. But this one, at least, is hilarious.
So let's start with it. It almost sounds unbelievable. It almost sounds like someone made it up.
Yeah, and so much of history does. Like, it's just bizarre. We are weird things. Human beings are weird. And history is great for this. So, yeah, the time is 1518. The place is Strasbourg, as you say, Holy Roman Empire, today France. And it starts, as these things so often do, with one person. There is a woman, her name is Frau Trofea, and she starts to dance sort of uncontrollably.
There's no music. She's doing it outside of her place. And it's not a nice dance. It seems to be sort of like fits and spurts and almost a little like she's possessed. Now, the thing is that the best way to talk about this is really in a kind of an epidemiological model. She seems to infect other people close by, and they start dancing.
So within about a couple of days, you have dozens of people dancing. Within a few weeks, you have almost half a thousand, like 400 people is roughly.
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Chapter 3: How did the dancing plague spread among the people?
He has daughters of his own. They're all about the same age. And this girl, she starts exhibiting some odd symptoms. So she starts having sort of like kind of convulsive fits. She also falls down laughing hysterically. Sometimes she kind of faints. There's dizziness, nausea. And they don't know what to make of this, this kind of very bizarre manifestations.
But what starts to happen is other girls, especially in the Paris household, they start to exhibit the same symptoms. And then it starts to spread throughout the community because a lot of these people are in very close contact with each other. And then it gets out that, oh, this is happening. Maybe they are victims of witchcraft. And boom, off we go.
And we're now into what becomes the Salem Witch Trials, where, as you say, 19 people are murdered, including two dogs. That's on top of the 19 people. And yeah, this is a community that tears itself apart because they believe that they have concrete evidence that they are in the midst of witches taking over their community and they have to fight on the side of God.
And just like folks got swept up in the dancing plague, they get swept up in this. They believe what's going on. Mass panic really sets in. People die.
Yeah. And the thing is, and what's really important to come back to, is the symptoms are real. Like, it's not like these people have made it up. It wasn't like the dancers colluded to create this kind of scam or that the girls in the Salem Witch Trial were... were all organizing this and knew it was fraudulent. The symptoms are very real. They just don't seem to have an organic basis.
They seem to have a kind of a social basis. And so this actually is happening a lot. Once you start looking into this, there are examples all over the place. They come from factories, from schools, from the military. You take any place where you have a sufficient amount of people and... there is like some small segment where you can start noticing this happening.
So what can these panics, the dancing plague, the Salem witch trials, what can they teach us about some behaviors that we see today?
Yes. Good. Make me relevant. Exactly. Let's bring it to today. Okay.
It's got to be educational to meet our regulatory requirement for the news talk format, but just barely educational.
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Chapter 4: What theories exist about the cause of the dancing plague?
They were people just like us. So I think that's a bit of a trap to look at the past and say, oh, they were idiots then. It would never happen to us now because we're smarter, because it does happen to us now.
Yeah, I'm nodding my head very vociferously. I even have it in my notes. We are much more like our ancestors than we think. You're absolutely right. And I think often these kinds of stories make us feel superior. Ha ha, we don't dance in the street like those idiots did. And yet we do, right? The same dynamics are all around us all the time.
And that's why sometimes I find going backwards tells us more than looking at the present.
We couldn't get the rights for Lady Gaga's song, Just Dance, mostly because I didn't try. But just imagine as we go to commercial break here, that's what's playing. Lee Kunle, do check out his podcast. It's called The Uncover Up Conspiracy Cast. It is definitely worth listening to. Lee, it has been a joy having you on the show. You want to go for a quick dance later?
Yeah, let's go dance out to the music.
Let's dance to the music. All right, Dr. Lee Koonla. Oh, he's also a professor of political science at Humber Polytechnic. Look, I'm giving all your credentials. We better go to break. Lee, thank you again.
Thank you, David.
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