Moral panics 101

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I throw the term “moral panic” around a good bit, but I didn’t really understand what it meant until pretty recently. I think before I just kind of assumed it referred to something a lot of people were worried about that the person saying it thought they shouldn’t be worried about.

Then I wrote this thread:

Cathy Reisenwitz (51/100 sketches) @CathyReisenwitz

It becomes less mind-boggling when you realize moral panics are never about protecting the vulnerable. They’re always primarily a pretext for authoritarian homogenization of society and distracting the masses to help leaders escape accountability by scapegoating the marginalized. https://t.co/OFRHSrCPYL

Alejandra Caraballo @Esqueer_

What's mind boggling about insane conspiracy theories about systemic child sexual abuse, is that there have been several institutions that have been guilty of just that. The Catholic Church, Southern Baptist Convention, and the Boy Scouts all had massive child sex abuse scandals.

Once Visa (the thread God) called it “the Gettysburg Address of explaining moral panics” I thought it would be worth sharing a slightly expanded version here.

That people would invent and then freak out about conspiracy theories about child sexual abuse while ignoring real child abuse becomes less mind-boggling when you realize moral panics are never actually aimed at protecting the vulnerable.

Moral panics are always primarily a pretext for authoritarian homogenization of society and distracting the masses to help leaders escape accountability by scapegoating the marginalized.

Abuse requires power. Which means protecting the vulnerable requires making sure people in power are accountable for their actions. People in power don’t want accountability. So they blame the outgroup for the problems they themselves cause.

Moral panics are often incredibly successful for at least two reasons. First, most people prefer scapegoating the outgroup to believing their leaders are capable of the kind of wrongdoing for which they’re trying to escape accountability. Most people really, really don’t want to believe their pastors are raping their kids and their local cops are raping sex workers. It’s less frightening to believe “they” are doing evil than that “we” are doing evil. This is why the average person ignores the reams and reams of evidence against pastors and cops while sharing Wayfair child trafficking stories.

In The United States of Paranoia, author Jesse Walker quotes Jungian psychologist Erich Neumann on why people find scapegoats. Essentially, most people are very loathe to believe that “we,” the ingroup, is capable of evil. It’s much easier, and more pleasant, to project that evildoing onto “them,” the outgroup. Thus, “evil is invariably experienced by mass man as something alien, and the victims of shadow projection are therefore, always and everywhere, the aliens.” 

Second, people with a more authoritarian personality tend to find diversity very uncomfortable and are willing to violently enforce conformity. Moral panics offer them a pretext to try to get rid of outgroups and/or force them to conform to ingroup norms.

When the evidence that the outgroup was wrongly accused piles up to the point it’s overwhelming, people in power simply find a new scapegoat and most people just follow along to the next moral panic.

The only people with a huge incentive to go against the grain, piss off the people in power, and challenge the narrative are the outgroup. Who are, by definition, disbelieved by default and also who are seen as having an incentive to misrepresent reality.

This is why real allies are so essential during moral panics. It can’t be just queers, sex workers, etc. saying “This is a moral panic. Your leaders are playing you.”

Take the Salem Witch Trials as an example. Leaders were corrupt and fucking up and people were pissed.

Suddenly two girls accuse a female Indian slave of witchcraft. Leaders thought: “Hm. We could blame the results of our malfeasance on witchcraft, get the attention off us, and get rid of or control marginalized women!” And boom, the trials started.

Guess when they stopped? When nice, upstanding, non-marginalized people started getting accused.

Don’t fucking wait that long. Call it what it is before it comes after you.

Moral panics are worth watching out for and fighting for because they hurt the scapegoated outgroups, they hurt the victims of the people in power who aren’t held to account, and they hurt everyone forced to live in a more authoritarian, less diverse world with leaders who escape accountability for their actions. Moral panics pit people at the bottom against each other. The only people who win are the worst people at the top.

Moral panics also crowd out solutions that can actually help solve real problems. Sex trafficking is real and real bad. But multi-million-dollar “awareness campaigns” by Evangelicals who hate sex workers don’t help. Decriminalizing sex work is the best solution we have. But the right keeps trying to ban porn by lying about it, because prohibition always works and never creates more violence and exploitation along the way 🙄.

Here’s what helps reduce instances of child and adult sexual abuse and overall violence while also lowering rates of unintended pregnancies and STIs:

• Comprehensive, medically accurate sex ed

• Consent training

• Sexual permissiveness/sex-positive feminism

• More egalitarian gender norms

• Accountability for leadership

To name a few. But the right is too busy picketing drag shows to look into what actually works.

And of course the left has their own moral panics. The left is just as bad and often worse than the right about porn and sex work. In some ways, Trumpism has elements of a moral panic. Too often it’s “Look at these illiterate, evil Trump voters” rather than “Look at the ways people in power in both parties have allowed the vast majority of the prosperity from economic growth accrue to the top 1% while failing to create a functional social safety net and creating enormous amounts of precarity for the bottom half of earners who face declining wages and skyrocketing housing, healthcare, education, and childcare costs.”

The primary lesson from moral panics is this: Look. Up.

To learn more about moral panics, I highly recommend the You’re Wrong About podcast.

Header images come from me putting the headline text into OpenAI’s DALL-E.