ELI5- What caused the satanic panic?
In: Other
Somewhat sensationalized answer:
So this lady goes to her therapist. He says he wants to have her do hypnosis and take drugs to “recover forgotten memories” that her conscious brain is repressing. She “recovers a bunch of memories” about getting taken and abused at satanic rituals with all of these rich and powerful people.
The therapist publishes a book about them. Some people are concerned, but surely that’s not real. Then some movies come out (The Exorcist, The Omen, etc.), bringing more attention to the idea. More people are aware and more people are concerned, and now people start to talk and whisper, but “everybody knows” it’s a joke.
Then in 1971, Charles Manson is put on trial. It comes out that he had this cult of people who called themselves the “Manson Family”, and aside from the murders, they were drugging up, abusing, and prostituting people…
Now suddenly the “crazy people” who were warning them all along suddenly didn’t seem so crazy.
It’s not different than any other moral panic that has happened. We see it happen throughout history: the Salem witch trials could be considered a moral panic, the Red Scare in the 1900’s (everyone was afraid that communists were secretly taking everything over), rock & roll music in the 50’s and 60’s, Dungeons & Dragons, etc. We even see it happening today: the massive fear over immigration, LGBT people being called groomers, book banning, QAnon, etc.
People react to the unknown with fear. It’s an unfortunate function of society. People become afraid of something they don’t know, and they’re convinced it’s harmful.
Sometimes these things just start feeding on themselves and go big without having a real single cause.
You can try to analyze such popular delusions and mass hysteria and look for circumstances that enabled them to grow as they did, but you might as well try to figure out what factors led to the macarena becoming a worldwide hit
This might be as futile as trying to pinpoint the pebble that started an avalanche.
You can point to the religious population being left rudderless in an increasingly secular world. How people who were only ever exposed to one single culture and religion were confronted with culture and religions from around the world encouraging on their communities. How media stroked these feelings by first bringing out movies and shows that planted ideas in people’s minds and then when things started rolling ended up stoaking fears.
Certainly people who had been told all their lives that even fellow Christians who belonged to sightly different sect were “satanic” were not prepared to handle their kids starting Karate and yoga classes while listening to hard rock and playing Dungeon’s and Dragons. Especially not after having seen The Omen or the Exorcist in cinemas.
The world got a lot weirder for lots of people who couldn’t handle it and they sought refuge in the familiarity of religion and started seeing boogie man every where.
It should also be considered in the context of the tail end of the cold war and coming after the hippie years and into the yuppie era.
It might feel more comforting to believe that the neighbor next door was a monster than to feel helpless about the real threats to your lifestyle out there that you couldn’t do anything about.
You could do somebody about the monster next door and doing something made you feel powerful and important and caused people to look up to you.
In the end it was just another with hunt in a long list of similar events throughout history were people fell prey to some *”Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds*, which nobody is really proof against.
Commenters here don’t seem to know what the Satanic panic was (specifically it was about hoaxes in the 80s)
Maybe first read this before answering: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic
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