Welcome back to the Deep Dive. We have a really
fascinating stack of research to get through
today. I want to start by taking you back in
time. Okay. It's Easter weekend, 1964. The location
is Clacton, a small seaside resort town in England.
Now, if you've ever been to the British coast
on a bank holiday, you can probably picture the
scene. Oh, yeah. Gray skies, a biting wind, and
the smell of vinegar on chips. It's not exactly
Ibiza. It's not Ibiza, exactly. It's wet, it's
cold, and frankly, it's boring. Yeah. But in
1964, Clacton was packed with teenagers. Right.
And because it was the 60s, these weren't just
any teenagers. You had two distinct tribes present.
On one side, you had the mods, sharpshoots, Italian
scooters. Modern jazz, amphetamines, very clean
cut, very stylish. And then on the other side,
you had the rockers. The rockers. Leather jackets,
motorcycles, grease in the hair, American rock
and roll, two very, very different uniforms,
two very different philosophies on life. And
naturally, you put two opposing tribes in a boring
town with nothing to do and you're going to get
friction. A few scuffles broke out. A few windows
were smashed. Some deck chairs were thrown around
on the beach. By all historical accounts, if
you actually look at the police logs, it was
minor. It was rowdy, sure, but it wasn't a war.
It was standard holiday misbehavior. A bit of
a dust -up. But if you looked at the newspapers
the next morning, you would think civilization
itself had collapsed. The headlines were just
apocalyptic. Day of terror. Wild Ones beat up
Margate. Battle for the beaches. I mean, the
media painted this picture of a town completely
under siege, overrun by these feral youth gangs
wielding knives and bicycle chains. And that
disconnect, that massive yawning gap between
the boring reality of a rainy Tuesday and the
screaming headlines of Wednesday, that is exactly
where our deep dive begins today. Right. Because
there was a sociologist watching all of this
unfold. His name was Stanley Cohen. And he wasn't
really interested in the fight. He was interested
in the freak out. The freak out. I like that.
He realized that society was doing something
very, very specific. It wasn't just reacting.
It was manufacturing a crisis. And from that
observation, Cohen coined a term that I would
argue is one of the most essential tools we have
for understanding the modern world. He called
it a moral panic. It is, in a way, the operating
system for how society scares itself. I mean,
you hear that phrase thrown around constantly
now. Oh, it's just a moral panic. But today...
We are going to strip that term right down to
the studs. Yeah, let's get into the mechanics
of it. We're going to look at the anatomy of
a panic, how it starts, how it spreads, and,
you know, why we seem addicted to them. We've
got Cohen's original work. We've got the updated
checklists from Goode and Ben Yehuda. And we
have a whole history of everything we've been
terrified of, from comic books to drag queens.
And the goal here is really to understand the
mechanism. Because once you see the gears turning,
you just can't unsee them. It changes how you
see the news. Totally. So let's define the beast.
How do we distinguish a moral panic from, you
know, a legitimate disaster? If a hurricane hits,
that's a panic, but it's not a moral panic. Correct.
The key word is moral. Stanley Cohen's definition
in his book Folk Devils and Moral Panics is still
the gold standard. He wrote that a moral panic
occurs when a condition, episode, person, or
group of persons emerges to become defined as
a threat to societal values and interests. Okay.
Defined as a threat. That feels like the load
-bearing wall of this entire definition. It is.
It absolutely is. Because the threat doesn't
have to be existential. It doesn't even have
to be... objectively real in the way we think
of it. It just has to be defined as a threat
to our values, our way of life. So it's about
perception. It's all about perception. Cohen
pointed out that there is always this this discrepancy.
The issue might be real. The mods and rockers
did throw some punches, but the reaction exaggerates
the seriousness, the extent and the the inevitability
of the harm. So it's a scaling error, a fundamental
miscalculation of risk. We take a chaotic weekend
in Clacton and we treat it like the fall of Rome.
Precisely. And within this drama, Cohn identified
two key archetypes that you see in almost every
single panic. First, you have the moral entrepreneurs.
I love that term. It sounds like a terrible LinkedIn
bio. Hi, I'm a moral entrepreneur looking for
synergy. Who are these people? I mean, it does,
doesn't it? These are the people who start the
fire. They're the rule creators. They are the
editors, the politicians, the bishops, the heads
of pressure groups who stand up and say something
must be done. The ones with the platform. Yes.
They're the ones who feel that a specific value
is being threatened and they sell that fear to
the public. They have a vested interest, conscious
or not, in the panic itself. And who are they
selling this fear against? Well, that's the second
archetype. The folk devils. Right. This is Cohen's
most famous concept. The folk devil is the personification
of the threat. It's the mod, the rocker, the
drug dealer, the single mother on welfare, the
immigrant. The folk devil is the scapegoat onto
whom we project all of our collective anxieties.
It sounds almost theatrical. You have your heroes,
the moral entrepreneurs, and your villains, the
folk devils, and a plot that everyone just sort
of agrees to pretend is real. It is absolutely
theatrical. But it's and this is important. It's
crucial to distinguish this from something like
mass hysteria because people often confuse them.
OK, what's the difference? Mass hysteria is usually
psychological. It's often about physical symptoms
spreading through a group without a biological
cause, like, you know, the fainting spells in
schools or the dancing plagues of the Middle
Ages. It's more of a medical or psychological
event. Exactly. A moral panic is sociological.
It's about power. It's about how society is structured,
how it's controlled. old and who gets to decide
what is good and bad. It's about social boundaries.
Okay, so we have the players. We have the stage.
Let's look at the script. Komen didn't just name
the phenomenon. He actually mapped out the timeline.
He argued these things tend to happen in five
specific stages. Yes, and once you hear these
five stages, you will start seeing them in every
single news cycle. It honestly ruins the nightly
news for you. Let's ruin the news then. I'm ready.
What is stage one? Stage one is the trigger.
Something happens. A specific event. A kid brings
a switchblade to school. A fight breaks out on
a beach. A specific video goes viral on TikTok.
It's the spark. Right. But sparks die out all
the time. To get a real fire, you need fuel.
Which brings us to stage two, amplification.
This is where the media steps in. And this is
the part Cohen was most critical of. The media
doesn't just report the event. They process it.
They frame it. They use what he called simplistic,
symbolic rhetoric. They create a clear us versus
them narrative. This is where the folk devil
gets their costume. Yeah. This is where the image
is created. Exactly. Cohen talks about symbolization.
The media takes a neutral object like a specific
type of jacket or a hairstyle or a scooter and
turns it into a potent symbol of the threat.
Before the panic, a scooter was just a cheap
way to get around clocked in. After the panic,
if you saw a scooter, you didn't see a vehicle.
You saw a symbol of violence, of disorder, of
the mod menace. We see this constantly. A hoodie,
a pitbull, a certain flag. The object itself
becomes radioactive. It's loaded with meaning
that it didn't have before. Precisely. This leads
directly into stage three, anxiety. Public concern
rises and rises rapidly. People start believing
that this isn't just an isolated incident, but
it's a wave of chaos. It's a new trend. The concern
spreads from the moral entrepreneurs to the general
population. The maud menace is coming for your
town. Lock your doors. And that anxiety demands
action. It creates pressure. Which brings us
to stage four, the response. The gatekeepers
step in. Politicians, editors, bishops, police
chiefs. They pronounce their diagnoses and their
solutions. We need to get tough on scooters.
Pretty much. And usually this means new laws,
police crackdowns, or harsh new policies. They
have to be seen doing something to calm the public
anxiety they helped create. And finally, what's
the last stage? Stage five, resolution. The panic
eventually subsides. It either just disappears
because the media gets bored and finds a new
threat, or it results in lasting social change,
like a new law that stays on the books forever.
But often, the panic just submerges, you know?
It goes dormant, waiting for the next trigger.
So it's a cycle. Wash, wince, panic, repeat.
And Cohen really emphasized that for most of
us, the media is the engine that keeps this whole
thing spinning. He argued that for most people,
the media is their primary source of knowledge
about deviance. You probably don't know a mod
or a rocker personally. You only know what the
newspaper tells you about them. So the media
isn't just reflecting reality. They are actively
constructing it. They are setting the agenda.
It's interesting, though, because looking at
the source material, there seems to be a bit
of a split in how experts view this. You have
the British perspective and then the American
perspective. They don't see it in exactly the
same way. Yes, that's a really fascinating divergence.
American sociologists, generally speaking, have
tended to focus more on the psychological factors,
individual anxieties. You know, why is this specific
parent scared of this new music? It's more of
a micro level analysis. But the British school
of thought is different. Very. British sociologists
like Stuart Hall, who is just a giant in this
field viewed moral panics through a much more
political and economic lens. How so? They often
saw moral panics as crises of capitalism or as
tools for social control. You have to look at
Stuart Hall's work on mugging in the 1970s UK.
Mugging wasn't even really a legal term there
at the time. It was an American import. OK. But
the media started screaming about a plague of
mugging and they specifically relentlessly linked
it to young black men. And Hall's argument was
that this wasn't an accident, that there was
a reason for this focus. Right. He argued that
the U .K. was in a deep economic crisis at the
time. Capitalism was struggling. There were strikes,
high inflation. The panic over mugging served
as a distraction. It allowed the state to bring
in aggressive policing. more authoritarian measures.
It justified a crackdown on a specific population.
So in the UK view, the panic is almost a weapon.
A way to keep people in line and distract them
from the fact that, say, the economy is tanking.
In many cases, yes. It focuses public anger on
a convenient folk double rather than on systemic
failures of the economy or the government. That
is, well, it's cynical, but it also makes a lot
of sense. Yeah. Now, Cohen gave us this narrative
process, this five -act play. But later researchers
decided they needed a stricter way to measure
this. They wanted a checklist. You know, is this
a panic or is it a legitimate disaster? Right.
This brings us to the work of Eric Good and Nachman
Ben -Yehuda in 1994. They came along and developed
what's called the attributional model. Basically,
it's the panic checklist. I love a good checklist.
So if we are diagnosing a moral panic in the
wild, what are the symptoms we should be looking
for? Okay, there are five key elements. If you
can tick these boxes, you're very likely in the
middle of a panic. First is concern. There must
be a heightened, measurable level of anxiety
about a specific group's behavior. You can see
this in polls, in lobbying efforts, or just the
sheer volume of news coverage. Okay, check one.
Everyone is worried. Simple enough. Second is
hostility. There has to be a clear us -versus
-them mentality. The group is designated as the
enemy of respectable society. They aren't just
different. Their behavior is framed as fundamentally
wrong and threatening to the moral fabric. Check
two. We hate them. It's not just concern. It's
animosity. Third is consensus. There has to be
widespread agreement that the threat is real
and serious. Now, it doesn't have to be everyone,
not 100%, but a significant moral majority needs
to agree that the folk devils are bad news. Check
three. A lot of people agree we hate them. Exactly.
Now, fourth is the most crucial one, and it's
often the hardest to prove. Disproportionality.
Okay, unpack that for me. This seems like the
most subjective part, especially when you're
in the middle of it. How can you tell if something's
disproportionate if you're also scared? It is.
This is where the reaction soars far beyond the
objective threat. The public concern is orders
of magnitude greater than the actual harm being
caused. Statistics get exaggerated or even fabricated.
Other, much bigger, more common harms are totally
ignored. So we freak out about, I don't know,
sharks. But we ignore heart disease. That is
the perfect analogy. Sharks kill maybe 10 people
a year globally. Heart disease kills millions.
But we have a shark panic every summer, not a
cheeseburger panic. The fear is not proportional
to the statistical risk. Right. Got it. And what's
the last one? The fifth element is volatility.
Panics are explosive, they erupt suddenly, they
burn incredibly hot, and then they disappear
just as fast as public interest wanes, or the
media moves on to the next shiny, scary object.
It's like a firework. A huge bang, bright lights,
a lot of noise, and then nothing. It's gone.
And Good and Ben Yehuda also offer three theories
on where these panics actually come from, because
they don't just appear out of thin air. There's
an origin story. Right. So is this a grassroots
thing coming from the public or is it being pushed
from the top down? Well, that's the debate. The
grassroots model says exactly that. The panic
comes from the general public. It's a reflection
of real widespread anxieties that just bubble
up from below. In this view, the media is just
reflecting what people are already feeling. OK,
so the people are genuinely scared first and
the media follows. Then you have the opposite,
the elite engineered model. This is the Stuart
Hall view we just talked about. This is the wag
the dog theory. Elites in government or corporate
media manufacture a panic to distract from other
problems. If the economy is tanking, make everyone
afraid of a new type of crime. That sounds suspiciously
like modern politics. And the third is the interest
group theory. This is sort of the middle ground.
This is where professional associations, religious
groups or nonprofits launch crusades. They do
it to gain status, to raise money or to enforce
their specific brand of morality. They act as
the moral entrepreneurs. So it could be parents
genuinely concerned about their kids or politicians
who want votes or an organization that needs
a cause to fight for to justify its existence.
Or more often than not, it's a perfect storm
of all three at once. That's usually when you
get the really big defining panics that last.
for years let's put this model to the test then
i want to look at the greatest hits of moral
panic because when you look back at history some
of the things we collectively panicked about
seem absolutely ridiculous now they do but at
the time they felt deadly serious the threat
felt real okay let's start in the 1950s the era
of white picket fences sock hops and apparently
deadly toys The switchblade panic. The switchblade.
Now, I know these knives are illegal in a lot
of places even today, but why the switchblade
specifically? A kitchen knife is just as sharp,
if not sharper. It's a perfect example of Cohen's
idea of symbolization. In 1950, a very respectable
magazine called Women's Home Companion published
an article with the incredible title, The Toy
That Kills. The Toy That Kills. I mean, that
is a hook. You can't not read that. It was a
brilliant piece of panic mongering. The narrative
was that the switchblade wasn't just a knife.
It was a symbol of youth violence, of sex, of
delinquency. It was the weapon of the gang. And
Hollywood just poured gasoline on this fire.
Movies like Rebel Without a Cause and West Side
Story put the switchblade in the hands of the
cool, dangerous rebels. The knife became a prop
that signified a threat. So if you were a teenager
and you had a switchblade, you weren't just,
I don't know, peeling an apple. You were signaling
that you were a delinquent. You were part of
the problem. Exactly. And the result of that
panic was a wave of laws banning this specific
mechanism of opening a knife. Interestingly,
many of those laws persist today, even though
a modern lockblade knife that you can open with
your thumb is functionally identical and just
as dangerous. The panic solidified into law.
But the 50s had another target, didn't they?
Yeah. Something even more insidious than knives.
It was just paper and ink. Ah, the comic book
panic. This is a classic. A true Hall of Famer.
I really can't imagine looking at a comic book
today and seeing the downfall of Western civilization.
In the 50s, though, there was a psychologist
named Frederick Wortham. He wrote a book that
became a bestseller called Seduction of the Innocent.
Great title. He really went for the jugular with
these titles. He was a master of the panic narrative.
He claimed that comic books, specifically the
popular horror and crime comics from publishers
like EC Comics, were a direct cause of juvenile
delinquency. He argued they predispose children
to violence, sexual deviancy, all sorts of things.
Did he have any data to back this up? His data
was largely anecdotal and has been widely criticized
and debunked since. He treated correlation as
causation. He'd interview kids in reform school,
find out they read comics, and conclude the comics
put them there. But almost every kid read comics
back then. Exactly. It's like blaming delinquency
on drinking milk. Yeah. But the consensus was
there. The public was terrified. And it got serious.
Oh, absolutely. There were congressional hearings.
There were literal public book burnings where
community organizations, Boy Scout troops, church
groups would gather up piles of comic books and
set them on fire in the streets. Book burnings.
In 1950s America. over comic books. That's stunning.
And the industry, facing government regulation,
capitulated. They created the Comics Code Authority,
a self -censorship body which sterilized the
content of comics for decades. It banned gore.
It banned disrespect for authority figures. It
basically mandated that good guys always had
to win. It fundamentally changed the entire medium
because of a moral panic. It's just amazing how
we always think the medium is the message. If
the kids are reading it or watching it or listening
to it, it must be brainwashing them. Which brings
us to music. The devil's music. This is a panic
that spans generations. It's a shapeshifter.
It just keeps coming back in a new costume. And
it started way before rock and roll, right? This
isn't just about Elvis. Oh, yes. In the 1920s,
it was jazz and blues. Traditionalists and a
lot of the mainstream press labeled it. disreputable
or often use the racist term Negro music. The
claim was that the improvised rhythms and the
syncopation promoted promiscuity and a breakdown
of morality. Syncopation causes promiscuity.
I would love to see the peer reviewed study on
that one. It sounds funny now, but it was taken
very seriously. Interestingly, even some middle
-class African Americans worried about it, fearing
it reflected poorly on the community. But this
fear just morphed over time. It went from jazz
to rock and roll in the 50s to heavy metal in
the 80s. And eventually, that fear of metal music
fed directly into the satanic panic. But before
we get there, we have to talk about a game. A
game played with dice and graph paper in basements.
Dungeons and Dragons. I grew up hearing about
this. My parents were worried about it. The idea
that D &D wasn't just a game, but it was a recruitment
tool for, well, for what exactly? What was the
fear? For Satanism, witchcraft, suicide, and
murder. That was the core accusation. In the
80s and 90s, fundamentalist Christian groups
were absolutely convinced that role -playing
games were a gateway drug to the occult. They
believed kids were learning to cast actual spells
and venerate demons. I played a lot of D &D.
I never managed to cast a real spell. I tried.
That's the disproportionality again, isn't it?
But connect this to the bigger picture. This
fits into a theme that the writer Benjamin Radford
identified in a lot of modern panics. The fear
of a hidden world of evil that's affecting our
children. Right. Parents looked at their kids
talking about dungeons and demons and spells.
And because they didn't understand the game,
they filled in the blanks with their absolute
worst nightmares. That theme, the hidden world
of evil, it really just. explodes in our next
section. We have to talk about the Save the Children
cluster. Yeah. Because this is where moral panic
stops being a sort of funny historical anecdote
and starts ruining people's lives. Yes. The satanic
panic of the 1980s and 90s is perhaps the darkest
and most destructive example of this entire phenomenon.
For those who weren't there or are too young
to remember, just describe the scale of this.
How widespread was this belief? It was a massive
transnational panic. The core belief was that
there was a widespread, highly organized secret
network of satanic cults that were ritually abusing
children and not just abusing them. They were
supposedly breeding them for sacrifice, brainwashing
them, all sorts of horrific things. And this
wasn't just on the fringe on late night radio
shows. This was on the nightly news. This was
on Oprah. It was everywhere. It was fueled by
a therapeutic technique called recovered memory
therapy, which has since been widely and thoroughly
discredited. Therapists would essentially guide
suggestible patients into remembering horrific
abuse that never actually happened. And the consequences
of this fantasy were very, very real. They were
horrific, wrongful convictions. People went to
prison for decades based on zero physical evidence.
We have to mention the West Memphis Three. A
truly tragic case. Three teenagers in West Memphis,
Arkansas, were accused of murdering three young
boys as part of a satanic ritual. There was no
physical evidence linking them to the crime.
None. But they wore black, they listened to heavy
metal music, and one of them had an interest
in Wicca. They were the perfect folk devils.
They looked the part. They fit the profile of
what the panic said a satanic killer looked like.
And so they were convicted. One, Damien Echols,
was sentenced to death. They spent 18 years in
prison before finally being released after new
evidence emerged. 18 years. Because a community
was so gripped by a baseless fear that they couldn't
see the facts right in front of them. And then
there was the McMartin preschool trial. The longest
and most expensive criminal trial in American
history. It started with a single bizarre claim
of abuse at a daycare in California. It spiraled
into accusations of secret tunnels under the
school, of teachers flying, of animal sacrifice,
of ritual abuse involving hundreds of children.
Flying witches. People actually believed this
in court. They did. The children's testimony,
which was produced after months of highly suggestive
questioning, was taken as fact. In the end, no
evidence of tunnels or any use was ever found.
But the lives of the teachers were utterly destroyed.
The school was demolished. The panic left a crater
in that community. It just seems like when children
are involved, our ability to think critically
just shuts down completely. It does. The child
in danger is the ultimate emotional trigger.
And that leads right into the concept of stranger
danger. We all grew up with it. Don't take candy
from strangers. It was drill into us. And that
panic really solidified after the tragic abduction
and murder of a little boy named Adam Walsh in
1981. It was a horrific, heartbreaking crime.
And it created, as one criminologist put it,
a nation of petrified kids and paranoid parents.
But isn't it good to be cautious? To teach kids
about danger? Of course, caution is good. Panic,
however, makes for bad policy. The media narrative
focused entirely on the predatory stranger lurking
in the bushes or in a white van. But the data,
the actual statistics, show that the vast, vast
majority of child abuse and abduction is committed
by family members or people the child knows and
trusts. So by focusing all our energy and fear
on the stranger, we're actually looking in the
wrong direction most of the time. Exactly. We
built an entire legislative framework, things
like sex offender registries. based on this image
of the predatory stranger who will always strike
again. But the data on recidivism, the likelihood
of reoffending, shows that contrary to popular
belief, sex offenders actually have lower recidivism
rates compared to many other types of criminals
like burglars or thieves. Really, that goes against
everything we are told. That's the power of the
panic. The fear becomes the fact and it ignores
the data. Paradoxically, by focusing on the monster
in the bushes, we often overlook the more common,
mundane, and therefore maybe more terrifying
reality of domestic abuse happening inside the
home. The exceptional rare case drives the policy
while the common reality is ignored. That is
a very sobering thought. We're so busy fighting
the imaginary monster that we miss the real one
next door. Let's shift gears a bit to another
area where panic often overrides facts. Health
and social order. This is a really fertile ground
for panic because it involves the safety of our
bodies and the safety of our streets. It feels
very personal. Take the HIV AIDS crisis in the
80s, a textbook example of a moral panic layered
on top of a real epidemic. In the early 80s,
the media almost universally labeled it the gay
plague. Which is an incredibly stigmatizing and
just... factually wrong label it did two things
first it stigmatized the disease framing it as
a moral failing rather than just a virus it was
a punishment and second it created a false and
dangerous sense of security for heterosexuals
this can't happen to me Right. When it became
undeniable that heterosexuals were also at risk,
the panic shifted. Suddenly, it wasn't just about
gay men. It was about the negligence of the younger
generation generally. It became a commentary
on youth morality all over again. The same script.
Exactly. And as some scholars at the time noted,
the cultural homophobia was so strong that the
media effectively blocked out any public health
approach that didn't treat gay men as not fully
human. The panic prevented a rational, effective
public health response. for years. Fear over
facts. We see this in legal systems, too. Let's
talk about the Dangerous Dogs Act in the UK.
This one is fascinating to me because the folk
devil isn't even a person. It's a dog. It is,
but it's not really about dogs. In 1991, there
were a series of high profile, horrible dog attacks
on children in the UK. The press went into an
absolute frenzy. The devil dogs. I'm sure they
call them something like that. Pretty much. The
government, under intense media pressure, rushed
through the Dangerous Dogs Act. And it specifically
targeted and effectively banned certain breeds,
most famously the pit bull terrier. But here
is the sociological twist. Okay. At the time,
pit bulls were strongly associated with the working
class, with council estates, with the lower social
strata. Meanwhile, other powerful breeds like
Rottweilers and Dobermans, which can also be
dangerous, were largely owned by richer, more
suburban groups. Those breeds were mostly ignored
by the legislation. So the law wasn't really
about the bite of the dog. It was about the class
of the owner. That's the argument. Critics argue
it was a classic displacement of class anxiety.
The fear of the subproletarian. violent youth
was projected onto their dogs. It was a knee
-jerk law that punished a breed to try and solve
a social problem they didn't want to name. That
is wild. We project our class issues onto our
pets. And of course, we can't talk about social
order without talking about the biggest one of
all, the war on drugs. A massive ongoing moral
panic for over a century. Numerous commissions
have found that laws like the UK Misuse of Drugs
Act were driven more by moral panic and racial
anxiety than by practical harm reduction. But
a specific sub panic here is the date rape drug
scare of the late 90s. OK, wait. Date rape drugs
aren't a panic, are they? That's a real thing.
People do get drugged. The crime is absolutely
real. Spiking happens and it's horrific. But
the scale of the specific spiking phenomenon
was heavily, heavily exaggerated by the media,
creating a disproportionate level of fear. Okay,
so give me the numbers. What did the research
find? Well, a 2009 Australian study is often
cited. They looked at 97 patients who were admitted
to the hospital emergency room believing their
drinks had been spiked. They ran full toxicology
panels on all of them. Yeah. They found zero
instances of sedative drugs commonly associated
with spiking like Rohypnol or GHB. Zero out of
97. Zero. Now, this does not mean spiking never
happens. It just means that the public fear of
drink spiking as a pervasive constant threat
was disproportionate to the actual frequency.
The panic made people believe it was happening
in every bar every night when the far more common
issue was simply excessive alcohol consumption.
It creates a culture of fear. And speaking of
culture, let's move into the modern era, technology.
It seems like every time a new screen lights
up, a new moral panic is born. It's the media
panic cycle. We saw it with the radio, then with
TV, and now with the Internet. But video games
have been a special, long -running target. Since
the 70s. I mean, Death Race. Death Race. A pixelated
black -and -white arcade game where you ran over
little stick figures called gremlins. But the
outcry was massive. It was on the news. Then
in the 90s, you got the one -two punch of Mortal
Kombat and Doom. And then Columbine happened.
That was the turning point. The media, desperate
for a simple explanation for a complex tragedy,
fixated on the fact that the perpetrators played
Doom. They created a simple causal link in the
public's mind. Played Doom committed massacre.
It seems so logical to so many people at the
time. Murder simulators, they called them. But
the research on the link between violent games
and real world violence has been incredibly conflicting
and for the most part has failed to establish
a causal link. Some experts, like Christopher
Ferguson, argued that the media and even some
scientists unintentionally worked together to
promote unreasonable fear. They ignored the millions
upon millions of kids who played Doom and didn't
hurt anyone. And the law stepped in again. Or
at least it tried to. Yes, the state of California
tried to pass a law banning the sale of violent
games to minors. It went all the way to the U
.S. Supreme Court in a case called Brown v. Entertainment
Merchants Association. And the court struck the
law down. They basically said the research wasn't
persuasive enough to override the First Amendment
right to free speech. It was a rare victory for
evidence over panic in the legal system. But
the panic just moved online. Social media. Do
you remember the MySpace panic? The deleting
online predators act. It sounds so ancient now.
It sounds so archaic now. But in 2005, 2006,
MySpace was this terrifying new world. The narrative
was that it was just a hunting ground for online
predators. And what's fascinating is what happened.
The panic didn't vanish because we solved the
problem of online predators. It vanished because
everyone moved to Facebook. Which was perceived
as safer because it used real names. Exactly.
The fear was attached to the platform, not the
underlying issue. And now we have the viral panics,
the blue whale challenge, the Momo challenge.
That creepy face that was supposed to be hacking
into kids' videos and telling them to hurt themselves.
And largely it was a hoax, or at least the challenge
aspect of it was. A few scary images got amplified
by concerned parents and local news until it
became a global phenomenon. But the themes are
so consistent with older panics. As Benjamin
Radford pointed out, it's always... about an
evil stranger manipulating the innocent through
a hidden channel. It's the pied piper for the
digital age. And that connects directly to something
like QAnon, doesn't it? It feels like the ultimate
evolution of this. QAnon is essentially the satanic
panic of the 1980s rebooted for the 2020s with
a political overlay. The core belief is a secret
cabal of Satan -worshipping pedophiles who run
the world. It hits all the same notes. Save the
children, a hidden evil, a vast elite conspiracy.
It's a moral panic that ate a conspiracy theory.
It really shows that these scripts, these narratives,
they don't change. We just change the actors
in the stage. Which brings us to our final section
here. Political weaponization. Because these
panics aren't just accidents. Sometimes they
are very, very useful tools. Absolutely. The
most recurring and politically potent panic is
almost certainly immigration. This one goes back
centuries. This isn't a new phenomenon at all.
Not at all. Look at the Know -Nothing Party in
the 1850s United States. They were a major political
force. They won governorships. And their entire
platform was a moral panic against Irish Catholic
immigrants. What was the specific fear there?
They feared the Pope. They genuinely believed
that Irish immigrants were not loyal to America,
but were secret agents of a foreign power, the
Vatican, who would destroy American democracy
from within. They were the folk devils of the
19th century. And the arguments they used...
That immigrants were failing to integrate, that
they were straining welfare, that they brought
crime and disease are the exact same arguments
we hear today about different groups. It's the
same song, just a different remix every few decades.
Yeah. And speaking of crime, there's this weird
thing that the research calls the crime drop
paradox. This drives criminologists absolutely
crazy. OK, lay it on me. Since the early 1990s,
crime rates in the U .S., the U .K., and most
of Europe have dropped significantly. In some
cases, precipitously. We are living in one of
the safest times in recorded history. But if
you ask people, if you look at the polls... They
will tell you that crime is out of control and
worse than it's ever been. Public fear of crime
often increases even as the actual rate of crime
drops. Why? What causes that disconnect? A few
things. Herd mentality. And again, media consumption.
If it bleeds, it leads. Local news thrives on
crime stories, and sometimes it's just a data
artifact. For example, Japan had a moral panic
in the 90s about the collapse of their famously
safe society because crime stats were going up.
But it turned out they had just changed how they
recorded crime, making it look like it was rising,
but it was just a paperwork change. That is wild.
We scare ourselves with our own spreadsheets.
Yeah. And we can't ignore the contemporary grooming
narratives that we are seeing right now. Since
the early 2020s, we've seen this massive resurgence
of the groomer accusation, and it's being targeted
specifically at LGBTQ plus people, drag performers
and even educators who discuss gender or sexuality.
And scholars are classifying this as a panic.
Yes. Scholars characterize this as a classic
moral panic. It recycles older homophobic tropes,
the long discredited idea that gay people are
an inherent danger to children, and it amplifies
them through social media misinformation campaigns.
It's the save the children trigger again. Always.
It is the most powerful emotional lever you can
possibly pull in politics. Now, before we wrap
this all up, we have to look at the critics.
Because not everyone agrees that moral panic
is the perfect all -encompassing theory. Right.
It's a powerful tool, but it has its limitations.
Some, like the sociologist Steve Hall, argue
that the very term panic is misleading. He thinks
it might be a category error. How so? I mean,
panic implies a loss of control. Chaos. Exactly.
And Hall argues that the state doesn't actually
want real panic. It wants to soothe anxiety.
He suggests that these panics are actually whipped
up by the media only to be calmly soothed by
the government saying, don't worry, we're in
control. We've passed a new law. It creates complacency,
not true panic. It makes us feel like the authorities
are taking care of it. So it's a performance.
a piece of political theater designed to reassure
us. And other critics, like Yvonne Jukes, argue
that we have to be careful not to dismiss everything
as a panic. There's a very real difference between
crimes that rightly offend our collective morality
-like murder or child abuse and those panics
that just serve to demonize minorities. We shouldn't
use the term moral panic to brush aside legitimate
moral outrage. That's a very fair point. We don't
want to become so cynical that we think nothing
is a real threat. And finally, a really interesting
point was made by McRobbie and Thornton about
the modern media age. In the 60s, the folk devils,
the mods and rockers, had no voice. They couldn't
fight back against the newspapers that were demonizing
them. But today... Today, the folk devils have
TikTok. They have YouTube. They have their own
media platforms. They can fight back against
the narrative. They aren't just silent victims
of the process anymore. So the panic is messier
now. It's not a one -way street of... condemnation.
It's a two -way street of argument. Exactly.
It's a much more contested space. This has been,
frankly, a little exhausting, but in a good way.
It's a lot to process. So what is the big takeaway
here? Why does knowing all this matter to the
person listening on their commute right now?
It matters because moral panics are a cycle.
They are a recurring glitch in our collective
social software. We identify a threat, we exaggerate
it, we demonize a group, and then we pass laws
that often don't work, all while ignoring the
actual data. So understanding this is a way to
protect ourselves from being manipulated by that
cycle. Yes. The next time you see a headline
that makes you terrified, the next time you feel
that powerful urge that something must be done
immediately, just pause, take a breath. And ask
the checklist questions. Right. Is this reaction
proportional to the actual harm? Who is the folk
devil being created here? Is there real evidence
for this, or is it just a powerful symbol being
pushed on me? I want to leave you with a final
thought. In the 1870s, there was a moral panic
about the tramp menace. People were terrified
of homeless travelers. Then it was switchblades.
Then it was Dungeons and Dragons. And today,
those fears seem almost quaint, almost laughable.
Exactly. So I want you to ask yourself, What
is today's switchblade? What is the thing we
are collectively terrified of right now that
in 50 years people will look back on and say,
can you believe they burned books over that?
Or can you believe they passed laws about that?
Critical thinking is the only vaccine against
the panic. Don't just consume the fear. Analyze
the source. Thanks for diving deep with us. We'll
see you next time.