Collective delusions stay socially normal when culture gives them a legitimized outlet.

Evidence

Anti-Semitism, as part of the cultural climate, offered a kind of recognized red-light district of legitimatized psychotic distortions' to those who were threatened by madness in such conflicts, since they had had no opportunity to develop a strong ego in the course of their socialization. This was an interesting attempt to explain the normality’ of certain collective delusions by pointing out their functionality within the existing culture. Delusions of this sort managed to remain normal because they were merely emphasizing the current cultural clichés of prejudice more clearly, in contrast to the officially dominant standards of democracy, although without abandoning those standards as rationalizations. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 442

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘recognized red-light district’ formulation explains how delusion and normality coexist without either displacing the other — a genuinely dense account of the functionality of prejudice within democratic culture.
• XREF: Feeds directly into Adorno’s later Authoritarian Personality typology and the ‘sham trial of rationalizations’ argument.