In the dystopic classic titled Nineteen-Eighty-Four, George Orwell writes of a daily ritual called “Two Minutes Hate.” Every day, at a very precise time, the country would stop for two minutes, to experience hate.
He says in part: The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within 30 seconds, any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against their will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.