The previous post got me playing again with the Google Ngram viewer, which is a total time suck if you let yourself get dragged into it. But writing about stress got me curious about the use of the word crisis. Here it is:
Look at the left edge of the chart. We managed to get through World War II, the Marshall Plan, Russia getting the bomb, Communists taking over China, McCarthyism, and Sputnik without calling everything a crisis. Then, suddenly, in the mid '50s, everything became a crisis. We had the Cuban Missile Crisis; the Middle East crisis; the drug crisis; the oil crisis; the inflation crisis; the Iranian hostage crisis; the AIDS crisis; another drug crisis; the climate crisis; the 9/11 crisis; the obesity crisis; the banking crisis; the mass-shooting crisis; the COVID crisis; the replication crisis; yet another drug crisis; the homelessness crisis; the social media crisis; humanitarian crises everywhere; and finally, because a simple crisis wasn't enough anymore, the world fell into a polycrisis. And then there's the language of personal crisis: mid-life crisis; loneliness crisis; mental health crisis; crisis of conscience; identity crisis; and crisis of confidence.
The use of the word crisis tripled between 1955 and 1975 and then nearly doubled again to the present day. Its share of the language has gone up almost 5x in the past 70 years.
It's no wonder we all feel so overwhelmed. Everything is a crisis. Or so you'd think if you inhaled television and magazines and online media. But who knows. Maybe everything isn't a crisis. Maybe—just maybe—the world is safer than it was during World War II. If we took a more clearheaded view of things, perhaps we'd decide that the world isn't in a perpetual crisis after all.
"f we took a more clearheaded view of things, perhaps we'd decide that the world isn't in a perpetual crisis after all."
May be we should call a 'crisis' a banana. It's been done before.
Now I'm interested in what prompted the panic.
Crises are profitable.
bingo...
They get clicks.
And so many on the Left seem to think that facing a crisis makes their life meaningful. Gives them a tribe an an enemy. The Dogma of Doom.
Hell, they've even created a new term: "Polycrisis."
🙁
Yeah, maybe. But it's now also part of the 'conservative' psyche. I used to kid my Republican friends that there side used to be the cool-headed, institutional types. Now they want to overturn the Republic because 'something something, stop-the-steal, Fauci, groomers, blah, blah'. Bunch of idiocy.
I blame misused boredom. In the old days, people talked to one another, got drunk, shot pool, went bowling, to fix being bored rather than watch Fox news and read facebook. Now my friggin lawn mowing guy has an opinion about what the Fed should do about interest rates. Oh and about the stop the steal. The left does hyperventilate but it has fewer crackpot hyperventilators (like RFK).
Also most reporters are statistically illiterate so they are easily manipulated. I would bet most of them really believe the hype. I will never forget the stranger danger panic the media caused in the 80s. It is still causing parents to keep their kids under surveillance and restrict their freedom even though that freak out has been thoroughly debunked.
Another factor in my opinion is our society has become more and more focused on emotional issues and too often gets carried away with that focus. I don’t want to see us go back to the way things were in the 50s and 60s when I was growing up. Back then even serious mental illnesses like postpartum depression and PTSD often got swept under the rug or even worse, stigmatized as proof of weakness of character.
People criticize Trump supporters for yearning for mythical good old days but our mainstream media seems to have the same problem. The most recent report about parents reporting being stressed was particularly ridiculous. That’s as normal as the sun coming up every morning.
Kevin could rename his site “The Chicken Little Watch” since he does such a good job of puncturing the media’s “the sky is falling and we’re all gonna die” narratives.
Maybe the concept of "crisis" has been devalued.
Somehow journalism used to be tasked with informing people. Now it is about drawing eyeballs. On cable news it is all breaking news with dramatic music pumping up your adrenaline. In economic news it is someone predicting the coming stock market crash or the next depression.
Curious to see how the chart of the increased use of crisis overlaps with the penetration of television into people’s homes and the need to draw viewers. Somehow newspapers aren’t quite as good as electronic media at instigating a crisis. I wonder why radio didn’t do this?
I answered my own question and found a chart showing that TV ownership in the grew almost as a step function starting around 1955. By 1960 87% or so households had a TV. Curious that this corresponds to the start of the rise of the use of the word crisis.
The mass adoption of television was my first thought.
The first use I remember of a capital-C crisis was the Suez Crisis in 1956. Oh, and we didn’t have TV until late 1957, so it must have been radio or newspapers. Anybody have an earlier instance?
Nothing comes to mind. Good observation. We were on the cusp of television.
While I don't disagree that ""crisis" is invoked way too much and is primarily used to grab attention (click-bait), if we're just going based on usage count of "crisis" then we should absolutely see growth due to the proliferation of platform channels.
(print > radio > tv > email/web > mobile phones/social media/streaming/etc)
---see also Chondrite23 tv comment---
Not sure how you could count the volume of channels by type and periods, but that should give a relative impact against the norm versus a flat count.
It’s not a count, it’s a proportion; the y-axis is labeled “Share of language …”.
Now do words with the suffix "gate"
What Chondrite23 and samgamgee said.
The chart seems to correlate to the spread of televised news coverage: first everyone had to get a set to watch network news, which happened by the 1960s (first jump in "crisis" usage). Then everyone had to get cable with its 24/7 news channels, which happened by the 1990s (second jump). Then everybody had to get the internet so that they could never escape whatever the 24/7 news channels were covering even if they weren't near a TV set, which happened by the 2000s (third jump). And finally everybody had to get smartphones to be alerted to televised news even if they weren't near a computer, which happened in the 2010s (fourth jump).
Each time, people eventually get used to and tune out the news alerts... unless they get more dramatic in some way to grab their attention. So the use of "crisis" went way up, to snag those monetizable eyeballs and clicks. We didn't see this prior to TV, because newspapers and magazines have a lot less incentive to call things crises unless they actually are crises: the lag time in writing, printing and distributing those news articles is so long that most real crises are over with before the reader even heard about any of the crises.
Consider this a thumbs up.
Cultural and social institutions have been crumbling since the 70's and 80's. Why do you think people like Jerry Seinfeld are pining for the 60's (ugh!).
According to my second-most-favorite crackpot theory, the process has reached the point of no return and we will have build new institutions once a "Crisis" has swept the board clean. We are in the midst of a Great Sweeping.
https://www.amazon.com/Fourth-Turning-Here-Seasons-History/dp/1982173734
Not Space Balls and the great Sucking?
Missed the energy crisis, and Crisis on Infinite Earths.
Were the headlines not always crisis and fear mongering, this would pass. The media wants a catchy headline and sends the public into crisis.
Mo ppl, mo problems.
Mo connectedness, mo conflict.
Mo knowledge, mo opinions.
Mo platforms, mo noise.
But AIDS was a crisis for the gay community, the banking crisis drove the second worst recession in the history of capitalism, the COVID crisis did kill 0.01% of the population globally in a year despite widespread shutdowns, and the climate crisis is real and an existential threat to billions of people which will require mitigation in the trillions of dollars globally.
Or maybe, you know, language changes and while the word "crisis" has become more common, another synonym (calamity, quandary, adversity) is used less frequently. So maybe the volume of things we identify as problems is exactly the same.
True. 1792, 1796, 1819, 1825, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1884, 1896, 1901, 1910, 1930. A few of the years known to have financial crises that were called panics. Some were brief, some lasted decades. Today they're typically called a financial crisis or market crash or the economic equivalent recession.
Yes, although Kevin is familiar with the concept of experimental control, he ignores it in this case. Was Pearl Harbor a crisis or just an dastardly attack? How was the invasion of South Korea by North Korea referred to in the media? Was it the invasion crisis? How about the Soviet H-bomb development, or the Sputnik flight? Was there a "red crisis" because of the supposed presence of agents and sympathizers? Maybe the word "crisis" just became appended to the more particular terms.
Just counting words may not resolve this question.
The conservative catholics even named their entire magazine Crisis .
And also this:
Crisis is a live album by the American jazz saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman recorded at New York University in 1969
Also… experts fear. They are so afraid. 😱
"If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs... maybe you don't understand the situation" (-- apologies to Rudyard)
"disaster" has a similar plot, increasing 270% since 1940
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=disaster&year_start=1940&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=false
Likewise 'impending',
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=impending&year_start=1940&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3
Yikes! This impending disaster is a crisis.
As would probably any of the available synonyms. Before click-bait there was "eyeballs". Before that there was radio listeners. Before that, newspaper circulation. In every case, crisis sells, while "everything is fine" doesn't. It was probably not any different when news was printed on papyrus rolls. This is not the same as saying people were consumed with crises.
Yep, I blame TV. It isn't just "crisis" that gets overworked. Not a day goes by when the national news is not full of words like "stunning" and "skyrocketing," even about things that are neither stunning nor skyrocketing. Journalists used to have harder bark on them.
WTF is 100% in this graph? When percentages >100 appear we deserve to be told.
I can think of no better illustration of how we are living in the Age of Hyperbole.
That thing you're worried about (literally everything)? It's not a big deal to Kevin Drum, the most relaxed man on the internet.
We're having a crisis crisis?