Every Generation Has a Mass Moral Panic
The Internet is putting rocket fuel into ours
We’re teaching history wrong. I love history but we’re not learning the things we’re supposed to learn from it. Everyone knows we study it so that we can learn from it but the trouble is that kids are only learning places, dates and names. They aren’t learning the why. Why did the early American colonialists kill accused whiches? Why did the Spanish inquisition happen? Why did Senator McCarthy have hearings and trials for accused communists in the 50's? Why did we have the satanic panic in the 1980s?
Every generation seems to have this mob-style mass panic in which there’s this general hysteria arises, pushing the notion that there are evil people hiding amongst us and we have to root them out and put them on trial. Witches, pagans, communists, devil worshippers; the group changes, the attitude does not. Find the bad people hiding among us and expose them so that we can get rid of them. We never learn. Why? That’s a different article entirely but the 21st century has brought this in like a hurricane. The internet fuels it.
Another Day, Another Outrage
Our daily routine seems to go basically like this, we roll out of bed, take a shower, do some pushups, brew some coffee, have a bit of breakfast and get online to see what the outrage of the week is. Who is this weeks designated villain? What is the “ism” of the week? What is phobic of the week? What is the outrage of the week? Honestly, it’s exhausting.
COVID 19 showed up in 2020 and the outrage mobs are combing the internet so they can click their angry emoji at the villains de jour; anyone that doesn’t think we should just remain in quarantine for the next 18 months. I guess on a positive note we’re not singling out the people with “the Rona” and persecuting them. At least not yet. The rabbit hole fueled by human hysteria knows no bottom.
Our generations moral panic is about racism. The bad guys are definitely the racists. They are hidden among us. We must find them hiding among us and get rid of them. No wait, my bad, the moral panic is definitely the sexists. They are the bad guys. We must find them and get rid of them. Wait wait, no, my bad, it’s the people that don’t like LGBTQ folks. They are definitely the bad guys. We need to find them and we need to get rid of them. I’m sorry, did I say that it was any of those, I was wrong. It’s the people breaking social distancing. They are the bad people hiding amongst us. We must find them and get rid of them.
Back and forth, to and fro. Run over this way and freak out then run back the other way and freak out. The internet has put rocket fuel into the tanks of the moral panic motor in our brains. When you start keeping score, the contradictions and paradoxes keep piling up and the moral compass has gone completely haywire. It’s spinning like a flywheel but that’s the nature emotionally driven mob mentality.
Logic and Emotion Don’t Coexist
We have to be more rational and we have to be more reasonable. There’s one important factor that most people don’t understand. Logic, reason and rationale can’t exist as the same space as strong emotions. Anger, panic, anxiety, outrage, disgust and so on; it’s not just they can’t coexist with logic, it overrides it. Strong emotions completely hijack the brain so I just don’t believe people when they’re red in the face with veins bulging out and trying to pass themselves off as being “logical.”
Social psychologists have known for decades that mob mentality is bad and that’s an understatement. It’s when we see the individual identity fade into the mob that the individual becomes obscured. It’s a dark rabbit hole and an area of study I would recommend for people who have a stomach for the demons hiding inside of their own psyche. There’s a scary phenomenon that we don’t understand but it exists in stark reality. The fastest way to see a person capable of understanding, logic and empathy and turn them into a monster is to add them to an angry mob. Our empathy and our ability to see ourselves in other people skips town.
Anger, panic, anxiety, outrage, disgust and so on; it’s not just they can’t coexist with logic, it overrides it
Social media is also an empathy killer. The ego tricks us into thinking that the person on the other side of this is just a monster. We don’t have empathy for them and it makes otherwise good people into something ugly. Social media also emboldens us. We can say whatever we want with little or no consequence. We can hide behind anonymity and portray ourselves however we want. We become a virtual Wizard of Oz, hiding behind the curtain like a coward while we pull the levers and turn up the volume on the speakers.
How quick would we be to attack people if we couldn’t hide behind the internet? How fast would the mob shrink if we had to look people in the eyes? The internet is a powerful tool and an insidious enabler of bad behavior. It’s just too easy to get caught up in the constant power struggles and finger pointing and it’s easy to forget that each us is 100% responsible for our own emotions and our own behavior.
We can hide behind anonymity and portray ourselves however we want. We become a virtual Wizard of Oz, hiding behind the curtain like a coward while we pull the levers and turn up the volume on the speakers
We have to be honest with ourselves when we find ourselves losing our humanity when we’re behind the keyboard. That’s nobody’s fault but our own. If anything, we owe it to ourselves to make efforts to avoid the pitfalls of the black and white tribalism that can lead us into the irrational throws of moral panic.
I make the argument that there is no problem or issue in society that can’t be made worse by our hysteria and outrage. Historians argue that the great depression, for example, might not have had the catastrophic effects that it had if people hadn’t flooded the banks and taken all of their money out. It was just one domino in the line but an extremely crucial one. I am absolutely convinced that historical events like this could have potentially been nothing but a small hiccup if people hadn’t completely freaked out.
There would have probably been less people killed during the witch trials and they definitely wouldn’t have thrown daycare workers behind bars during the 80s if it wasn’t for our tendency towards moral panic.
If You Have to Blame Something, Blame Social Media
I recently heard that corporate executives with large social media companies don’t want their kids using social media. In other words, they don’t want their children being exposed to their product. The science behind the “like” button is a bit terrifying as well. Social media is a toxic wasteland and a breeding ground for moral panic and outrage mob mentality. I have decided that I don’t want to spend time online losing empathy and being sucked into narrow mindedness based on tiny snapshots about a person or an issue.
If you find ourself huddled over your phone, jumping at chances to use the like button or the angry icon maybe you should think about just going for a walk or something. Read a book. Make some delicious chocolate chip cookies. Being locked into social media is a vehicle to personal misery. We need less online hamster wheel style morality.
