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, it meant you had some secret deal with the devil. If you were too outspoken or independent, it meant you were in cohorts with Satan.

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. As adults talked about the unreliability of child testimonies during the Salem Witch Trials, they were 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.

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. Pazder capitalized on his fame, consulting on "Satanic abuse cases" that started popping up all over the country. He 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 that ate children.

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.

Meanwhile, 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 broke multiple trespassing and harassment laws, 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 herself was never arrested, tried, sued, or held responsible for the lives she ruined.

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. Big surprise there.

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.

Not really...

Various experts have weighed in on what drove the satanic panics. Well, Americans apparently love freaking out over witches and demons. Horror movies and satanic branding in early heavy metal during the 1970s, along with some intense serial killer activity, primed the cultural imagination for going to some dark places. If you were tired of freaking out over actual threats like nuclear war or perceived threats like a Soviet invasion, then you could take a break and freak out over completely imaginary but really exciting threats like your local neighborhood satanists, who were really just Eddie Munson from Stranger Things. Heavy metal totally contained demonic lyrics, even though Metallica wound up writing countless blue collar anthems that blast out of monster trucks everywhere now.

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 tells 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 of satanic rituals.

I have a daughter.

She's six.

Do you know how easy it is to get her to narrate an entire string of events as if they happened in real life, when they didn't? That's how kids play, and they often don't know when to turn off their imaginations, not on their own. If you feed their fantasies, they'll tell you all kinds of insane stories, as if they're real.

Anyway, that's how our institutions of authority spent the Reagan years, stoking public fear over drug dealers, gangs, and satanists, while corporations formed monopolies and began dismantling social support systems and the CIA overthrew governments they didn't like in favor of military regimes. American mass media was thrilled at all the ad revenue they made off covering these bogus stories.

See how it works?

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.

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 just 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. 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.

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.

We live in an age of simultaneous moral panics.

People are freaking out over doomers. They're freaking out over maskers. They're freaking out over transgender athletes. They're freaking out over immigrants.

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. They get angry at us for bringing it up.

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.

As Taylor Lorenz points out, moral panic over teens and smartphones has raged for years now. It's an easy target if you want something to blame for the general bad vibes we're seeing in young people. Of course, nobody's really talking to teens about what's got them so down. If you really listened to them, you'd hear cogent arguments about corporate greed destroying what's left of the planet with reckless consumption while driving genocide and tearing apart public health. You know, their concerns happen to overlap heavily with us doomers.

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 an airborne virus that spreads all year, dismantling our brains and bodies with each infection.

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.

It's nonstop moral panic.

24/7.

In the 1980s, a range of groups from overbearing parents and narcissistic pastors to greedy politicians and reckless news media ganged up on a bunch of weird kids who were trying to build a community around a board game. They fomented a moral panic to distract the public from corporate consolidation of wealth, political failings on drug addiction and public health (HIV), and growing economic inequality. They colluded to profit off the mental anguish of teenagers, doing absolutely nothing that would actually improve their health. Meanwhile, they suppressed reports that role-playing games actually appear to improve your mental health, by connecting people with similar interests and personalities.

What a thing to behold.

Now we're watching the same thing play out again. Our governments are stoking moral panics to distract from their own negligence and incompetence. They want to take away a tool that young people are using to build communities and express themselves and their thoughts about the state of the world, while staying informed about real threats to their lives. Influencers and mass media are happy to help.

It's the height of irony that a group of elite influencers and politicians are using social media to drive moral panics about doomscrolling teens and 20-somethings on social media, isn't it? It's the great satanic panic and the witch trials all over again, a supercharged recombinant moral panic replete with cinematic conspiracy theories to keep everyone on the edge of their seats in suspense, wondering what's true and what they simply want to be true, because it's fun to suspect someone you know might be murdering children next door or committing hate crimes on subways. It beats the hell out of coming up with a plan to stop a virus.

Who wants to act like an actual adult?

Snooze.

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