Life in The Age of Moral Panics

We keep doing the same thing.

Grandfailure

There was something about Mary.

She was too attractive. She was too wealthy. She had too many kids. They were too healthy. So in 1674, Mary Bliss Parson's friends and neighbors started accusing her of witchcraft. The local court brought her up on charges, then acquitted her. But the accusations and rumors just kept coming.

The Parsons had to move.

It was strange living in early Puritan America. If you were rich, it meant God liked you. If you were too rich, and nobody liked you very much, it meant you had some secret deal with the devil. If you were too outspoken or independent, then someone needed to hang you. It’s no accident that the way to dispose of a witch became the default method to dispose of other vulnerable groups.

Right now, the current administration is operating in outright defiance of our federal courts and declaring them powerless. By all marks, we’ve entered the early stages of full-blown fascism. And if there’s one thing we know about fascism, it’s that wars on the vulnerable keep them fired up. You’re already seeing so many pundits and opinion columnists scratching their heads, wondering how we got here. When you look at the history of this country, there’s not much of a difference between 17th-century puritanical America and fascism.

We didn’t “get” anywhere.

We were always like this. We’re a country of moral panics and scapegoating. We didn’t learn from Hitler. It was the other way around. He studied our history and built Nazi power using us for inspiration. If you’d like to know a little more about the history and psychology behind moral panics in America, and how the elite have always used scapegoats in order to consolidate their power and keep the public distracted from real threats, I’ve got quite a post for you.

Now, here's some irony:

In the 1980s, while American schools presumably tried to educate kids about the mistakes of the past via Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, they were repeating history all over again by fanning the great satanic panic. Nobody talks much about the satanic panic, probably because it’s still a source of great shame and embarrassment. How could a large majority of Americans and their beloved daytime talk show hosts and major media outlets indulge such a bonkers conspiracy theory, with zero evidence? How could they ruin so many lives, and never face any accountability for it?

That’s just how they roll, baby.

As adults talked about the unreliability of child testimonies during the Salem Witch Trials, lawyers spent nearly a decade literally coaching kids to rat out their babysitters, teachers, and daycare moms as satanists who practiced ritualistic sacrifice and cannibalism. I mean, it's really something to behold. Americans excel at promising to do better next time while learning absolutely nothing. We’re merely living at the end of this cycle.

Where did the great satanic panic start?

Believe it or not, Canada.

Canada's CBC News produced a great documentary on the North American satanic panic. It began with Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder's 1980 book Michelle Remembers, now widely discredited as a piece of fearmongering pulp psychology trash. In fact, it was debunked pretty quick by real journalists.

That didn't stop American magazines and newspapers from publishing sensational reviews and think pieces on the book. They jumped on the satanic bandwagon with full force. It was such a juicy story.

They didn’t care if it was true.

Pazder capitalized on his fame, consulting on "Satanic abuse cases" that started popping up all over the country. It’s not hard to see why. Americans were scared out of their minds about nuclear war, and Reagonomics wasn’t exactly going well. They were eager for a distraction. They wanted somewhere to displace all their pent up anxiety, without actually taking on the rich and powerful. So instead of going after the elite, they ganged up on the vulnerable. It was way more fun to pretend your babysitter was a satanist.

Lawrence Pazder appeared on multiple television news shows, warning everyone about the occult. Everyone couldn't wait to accuse someone they knew of running a secret suburban satanic cabal in their basement.

From there, corporate media nurtured the idea of a vast, coordinated network of satanists trying to take over the world while, ironically, CEOs and lobbyists were consolidating their grip over politics. They spread conspiracies like peanut butter. Glorified tabloid reporters like Geraldo Rivera made their name by making outlandish claims, telling their audiences about secret societies with hundreds of thousands of members operating everywhere from small towns to major cities. Oprah got in on the action too. It was great for her ratings.

The suburbs ate it up.

Parents like Patricia Pulling built entire careers out of the satanic panic. As the worst example of posthoc helicopter parenting, Pulling built the organization BADD (Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons) and spent nearly a decade lobbying against the game and its creators. After contributing to the mental anguish that drove her son to suicide, Pulling tried to blame it on the school principal, suing him for "cursing" her son by running a game club to keep kids out of trouble. She seemed to honestly believe the principal cursed him during a game, and the curse carried over into real life. She spawned the rumor that once you died in D&D, you had to kill yourself for realsies, and that kids actually believed they could summon demons in their bedrooms that possessed their souls.

Pulling tried to sue the game designers and then the company that sold the game. Courts dismissed all of the lawsuits. Nonetheless, Pulling managed to command significant media attention and found herself consulting on criminal cases everywhere. She had no credentials at all.

And yet, she sent people to jail.

Ironically, she broke multiple trespassing and harassment laws on her own, stalking anyone she linked to the game and trying to ruin their lives. Although real authors, journalists, game designers, and advocates eventually discredited Pulling, she was never arrested, tried, sued, or held responsible.

It figures, doesn't it?

The corporate news media did absolutely nothing to fact-check or temper the satanic panic. They fed it for ratings. Even shows like 60 Minutes platformed deranged far-right Christians and treated their views as plausible.

Thanks to constant, irresponsible reporting and movies like Mazes & Monsters, half the country thought a board game was driving waves of breakdowns and suicides in teenagers. In reality, these teens were struggling with mental and emotional health problems brought on by bullying and abusive, religious parents who looked for excuses that fit their preconceived narratives and prejudices. As one documentary puts it, mental health came in the form of the attitude: "If you can stop them from playing Dungeons & Dragons and take them to church enough, they'll be fine." Forty years later, we replaced church with goop.

Now instead of games, we blame phones and apps.

Big surprise there.

How many lives were ruined?

The great satanic panic generated more than 12,000 documented accusations of ritualistic sacrifice and abuse. The vast majority, probably all of them, turned out to be fake. While some of the cases involved dysfunctional families in need of therapy and social services, those problems had nothing to do with ritualistic child sacrifice. These cases destroyed countless families and ruined countless lives, and the media was never held accountable for their complicity.

In the end, almost every single one of the satanic abuse cases that wound up in court, despite garnering endless news media coverage and Oprah specials, dissolved under scrutiny. Just like the kids in the Salem Witch Trials had been coached, encouraged, or rewarded for telling fantastic tales of witches making them hallucinate and speak in tongues (which sounds cool actually), so too were the kids of the 1980s conditioned to tell heavily embellished stories.

The satanic panic has deep roots in American puritanical culture, alive and well today. It matters because these panics continue to manifest in all kinds of forms, including the current social stigma surrounding masks, transgender care, immigration, and anything else our government deems a threat.

For centuries, western societies used witchcraft as an excuse to persecute powerless women, especially wealthy widows. You didn't want to make too much trouble in the 1400s, the 1500s, the 1600s, or the 1700s. If your social standing fell too far, and someone wanted your stuff, they could simply start spreading rumors about you. Eventually, the court would haul you in for a trial and hang you. Back then, a witch was just someone nobody liked and wanted to get rid of. Most of the time, it was a woman. But it was often just anyone who salted the vibes.

Witches. Vampires. Werewolves. Socialists. Communists. Rockers. Doomers. Maskers. The neurodiverse. Immigrants. Transgender kids.

They all have something in common.

They're different.

The satanic panic of the 1980s offers just one vivid example of moral anxiety in America. Stanley Cohen introduced the term "moral panic" in his 1972 book Folk Devils and Moral Panics. He spent most of his time talking about rock music, the moral panic of his time. According to Cohen, moral panics happen in five stages.

1. Society identifies a group of moral scapegoats.

2. Media outlets amplify the perceived threat.

3. Thought leaders fan social anxiety.

4. Politicians start passing laws.

5. Things go wild.

Cohen identified a special group of "moral gatekeepers" who engineer these moral panics, including politicians, pastors, editors, pundits, columnists, talk show hosts, and so on. These days, you can include podcast bros, authors, and influencers.

Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda developed Cohen's model further in their 1994 book, Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance.

1. Thought leaders collude with mass media to stoke a "heightened level of concern over the behavior of a certain group."

2. They ramp up hostility toward that group.

3. They build consensus against them.

4. They drive a disproportionate response.

5. Volatility ensues.

It's eerie how well the current moral panics over masks and social media fit this outline. Two years ago, the media was driving "concern" over doomscrollers and people who still took Covid precautions. That concern has morphed into outright demonization and criminalization. Last year, the mayor of New York was "encouraging" stores to pressure their customers to unmask. Now we're in the fourth stage of moral panic, when policies and laws seek to take masks and "dangerous" apps away from us, threatening violators with fines and jail. Meanwhile, the guy who tried to overthrow the government lives in luxury.

We’re beginning to enter the fifth stage.

Once upon a time, moral panics came and went relatively quickly, but they left scars on the scapegoated groups. You don't exactly recover from being hanged for witchcraft or fired and jailed for communism.

It doesn't seem to matter how much history or social psychology we pile up on this phenomenon, or how educated someone perceives themselves. We keep going through this cycle of moral panics. We'll throw a moral panic even while talking about the dangers of moral panics and reading about previous ones.

We seem to have several ongoing ones.

Strangely, they're not freaking out over viruses. They're not freaking out over incompetent health agencies. They're not freaking out over oil executives. They're not freaking out over corporate greed.

That's the point.

These days, moral panics work to displace actual threats that societies should be taking seriously. In fact, it's often the true threats to society who cook up moral panics as a distraction from their own moral crimes. While everyone's persecuting the scapegoated group, the real moral criminals get away with social murder and evade any accountability.

They profit.

Social psychologists have identified a revolving set of topics and themes that generate moral panics. They include deviant music, political ideologies, religious cults, sexual behavior, gang violence, crime, immigration, and new technologies.

Rather than deal with the actual threats, the public is latching onto moral panics. They don't want to think about the collapse of our ecosystems or looming pandemics. The more intense our actual threats become, the more panic our leaders require to keep everyone occupied. Back in the 1400s, you could displace anxiety over bad crops or a repressive, corrupt government by hanging a few witches. As our entire society itself begins to collapse, you need more marginalized groups to do the job. You have to keep them in rotation.

The end result:

When people aren't freaking out over doomscrolling, they're freaking out over masks. When they're not freaking out over masks, they're freaking out over socialists. When they're not freaking out over socialists, they're freaking out over transgender athletes. When they're not freaking out over transgender athletes, they're freaking out over immigrants. When they're not freaking out over immigrants, they're freaking out over child trafickers. And lately, they’re freaking out about all of them all the time, and they believe the country needs a good cleanse.

It's nonstop moral panic. 24/7.

And that’s dangerous.

Very dangerous.