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toongrrl-blog · 4 years

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The Mommy Myth: Threats from Without (Part One)

*TRIGGER WARNING FOR ABUSE*

This will be a doozy folks...

Razor blades in apples and cookies during Halloween. Day cares run by child molesters and Satanists! Flammable pajamas! Car seats not installed properly! Cavities from bottles! Child Porn! Kidnappers! Toys choking kids! Alar in apple juice! Peanuts stuck in windpipes! Stalkers! Rapists! Radiation from household appliances! Murderers! Gangs! Fetal Alcohol Syndrome! Car jacking! Tylenol causes liver damage! Milk Cartons with missing kids! If you fuck up just a little, your kid is screwed!

Welcome to the 1980s where childhood danger became the new obsession along with designer goods, buns of steel, big hair, cell phones, and greed being good. In many decades that traced the growth of mothers in the workplace (check the 1940s), there was moral panic about juvenile delinquents and latchkey kids going bad, there were 19.5 million working mothers by 1984, also 6/10 women with children under eighteen. Mothers of preschool children working had doubled since 1970 and it was 15% higher for African-American women because unemployment for black fathers was 10.2% compared with 5% for white fathers. And these women were not making the big bucks to afford clothes and lifestyles seen on Dynasty and Falcon Crest, where they’d mostly work in retail, clerical, service, or factory positions and daycare workers earned less than most clerks of liquor stores.

In 1984, aside from the fictitious case of the disappearance of Barbara Holland and the re-appearance of the thought to be dead Will Byers the previous year, there were two media events that captured the public fascination with child endangerment: the McMartin daycare scandal and the premiere of The Cosby Show (it was a more naive time) which was a typical sitcom except it featured two parents who worked outside the home in white-collar professions and focused on an African-American family. It showed the contradictions of what 1980s moms lived with: you can’t trust your kids with just anyone or leave them alone, you can have a demanding job and the loving family made for tv, act as paranoid as an FBI agent, be the spontaneous mom, and be constantly aware.

These media panics also happened around the same time the Reagan Administration was a big thing; he was aided by the regressive STOP ERA and Religious Right which led to a huge anti-feminist backlash in policies and the media. Women’s magazines scared moms about what could go wrong with their kids and exploited the fears of the public. Around the same time the McMartin daycare scandal was a thing, the government refused to fund daycare centers for millions of kids and was a result of such coverage. The War Against Women had started and programs benefiting women and children were in it’s crosshairs as being “too expensive” and “trickle down economics” will help anyways. So while the Chrysler Corporation and the Savings and Loans industry were given financial life rafts, programs like WIC (Womens, Infants, and Children) were cut mortality rates for infants of color (which declined in the 1970s) started climbing again and family leave was virtually non-existent. Parents magazine published a later-debunked warning in 1982, that children in daycare will become hoodlums. Moms were also warned kids will pick up lice (also in Little League or in the classroom) from daycares.

The roots of this sensationalization of childhood perils stared in the mid 1970s with it’s peak a decade later, where Ladies Home Journal dumped Bruno Bettelheim for Geraldine Carro’s “Mothering” column where she was a mom giving guidance to other moms where she acknowledged that “motherhood rates mixed reviews” and she promised to offer opinions rather than impose them as “For too long, we’ve been living by other people’s books” and featured short pieces with titles on how to pick a pediatrician or teach the kids to cook safely. What was meant to soothe and offer empowerment ended up striking terror with warnings about all the things that could kill kids and that summer camps were the sources of “close to 100 deaths and 250,000 accidents” in 1974 and moms were urged to investigate the camp’s accreditation, the camper-counselor ratio, the number of life preservers in boats, all the codes were met by state standards, the lifeguards had Red Cross training, and all the counselors were experienced. Imagine what happened when Friday the 13th and Sleepaway Camp came out...

If you tossed your baby in the air, you could risk whiplash and hemorrhage of blood vessels feeding into the brain. But kids can’t get new babysitter and crib on the same day or kid will freak and kids got poisoned a lot from eating plants and flowers. Also kid’s sleepwear had to be flame retardant but washed with warm water, high-phosphate laundry detergent, no soap or bleach, no fabric softener or they will be rendered non-retardant. Ages where kids need to learn swimming was disputed, even Santa was scary or teaches them to lie, buy simple toys, costumes needed to be flame retardant and have reflective tape strips on the costumes and bags, kids needed flashlights or can only trick or treat in the daylight hours, kids can’t wear masks anymore, and all treats need to be examined. Then in 1977, Carro asked how parents can protect kids without making them fearful. Hrrrrmmmmmm......

There have been missing children before in the past, even in that sweet long ago when people hardly bothered to lock their front doors at night, one of the most notorious early cases that have been exploited by the media was the Etan Patz case where 6 year old Etan was kidnapped in downtown New York City on May 1979, before getting on his school bus, there was a huge effort to find him locally and in the media but the case has remained unsolved until 2010 when his killer was found and it was 9 years since he was declared dead. Perhaps the most influential case was that of Adam Walsh, son of John Walsh from America’s Most Wanted, who was kidnapped from the toy department at a Florida store and was made into a TV movie. In March 1984, the missing for a month ten year old Kevin Collins made the cover of Newsweek magazine. The media had exploited these tragic cases with wildly exaggerated figures soon circulated in the media, what was a small number of cases became sensationalized to make people think kids were being snatched every time they took a breath.

On March 28 1984 NBC’s Tom Brokaw reported “The fear is thick around Denver these days. A number of kidnappings have made everyone nervous--parents, children, and police.” Parents were driving their kids to school rather than let them wait on the bus stop and left the school after seeing their kid enter the building, such stories hardly explored what could be done as a society and community to protect children. No you were on your own.

Late March 1984, headlines talked about a daycare on Manhattan Beach, California, this daycare being McMartin Preschool where seven nursery teachers were arraigned on over 100 counts of child molestation. Virginia McMartin, age 76 and on a wheelchair, presided over the day care center where she and her family members allegedly drugged, fondled, and molested at least 125 children and killed cuddly animals in front of them. 90% of Los Angeles residents surveyed believed that Ray Buckey and his grandmother Virginia to be guilty. Children were interviewed by therapists where they were videotaped and used puppets. As it turned out, the children were badgered by therapists who used leading questions and threats to get the kids talking. From 1989 to 1990, California received at least 440, 000 reports of child abuse, 84% deemed to be unfounded, and 8,448 of the cases were defined as sexual abuse. Suddenly, as the media warned, you couldn’t trust very many people with your children. In other news, the founder of Children’s Theater Company in Minneapolis, John Clark Donahue was forced to resign after allegations of molesting three boys and Little Rascals Day Care in North Carolina became notorious when it was the owner and cook (owner’s conviction was overturned). There was news of fathers molesting their daughters. On May 21st, there was a Los Angeles teacher brought to court on charges of molestation at the elementary school and both ABC and CBS reported that a religious boarding school for boys in Walterboro, South Carolina had beaten and abused boys. Then in June, CBS and ABC reported on a fundamentalist commune in Island Pond, Vermont that was raided with 100 children taken from their homes because it was alleged their elders and parents abused them. The FBI got involved, saying groups of people abuse kids and circulate a book titled “How to Have Sex with Kids”. Obviously these stories had the subtext that no place was safe. In 1985, CBS announced that a church run day care had children suffering broken bones linked to violence (a total of eleven broken arms and legs) and Missouri exempted church run centers from licensing.

Even “Rockwellian”, small-town, Christian (and White) American places were dens of abuse. Jordan, Minnesota featured 24 defendants (factory workers, housewives, and a grandma) who were part of a “sex ring” and charged with more than 400 counts of sexually abusing dozens of children including their own kids. As Michaels and Douglas noted, a central theme was the failure of government agencies to oversee day care centers and catch molestation in time but Reagan’s administration kept their fingers in their ears singing “La la la can’t hear you la la la”. Geraldo Rivera did a sensationalist show on Satanism that played on adult fears of their teens. And Priests were being outed as having molested altar boys and other young men, like a priest in Henry, Louisiana where he admitted sexually abusing at least 35 boys and was sentenced to 20 years hard labor. The media was talking childhood abuse more seriously with 22% of adults saying they were victims of sexual abuse as children who never told anyone or when they did, nothing was done to the abuser.

Back to old Virginia McMartin, follow-up stories assuring people that child care centers weren’t dens of rampant abuse weren’t publicized for example. Raymond Buckey’s defense attorney found two doctors who said that one of the children told them that it was his own father who “poked” him in the anus and the boy’s mother Judy Johnson who circulated the charges against them was known to be mentally ill and had trouble distinguishing between what’s real and what’s not. She also accused a Los Angeles school board member of molesting her son and claimed kid was injured by an elephant and forced to drink baby’s blood. The children initially denied abuse, Kee MacFarlane the therapist had the kids name gas station attendants, community leaders, and store clerks as molesters and she came up with the name “naked movie star” for a game the teachers supposedly made the kids play. Jurors viewing the tapes of the interviews were appalled and it turned out Kee had an affair with Wayne Satz, television reporter for KABC who broke the McMartin story. After nearly 6 years and $15 million, Ray Buckey and his mother were found not guilty and there was a hung jury and still not found guilty. Sadly he was viewed as a loner who liked to go commando in shorts and a mama’s boy with more shorts than brains. Virginia died in 1995, Peggy McMartin Buckey died in 2000, and Ray Buckey who was incarcerated for five years during the trials later went to law school and changed his name and moved elsewhere to have a family. Meanwhile in Jordan, cases were falling apart with one couple getting aquitted and vowed to regain custody of their three sons. Only one person plead guilty: James Rud, who lied and implicated others.

“It was all Momma’s fault!” I’m exaggerating but the public imagination linked day care centers with child sexual abuse, molesters targeted kids from “broken homes” (read single moms not like dysfunctional families with distant parents) and you couldn’t trust Mr. Wilson next door. The subtext clearly targeting working mothers or moms considering going into the workplace and leaving their kids in programs after school before picking them up. Of course Susan Faludi in her book Backlash, revealed that kids were twice as likely to be abused at home than in day care but media panics tend to focus on what’s juicy rather than facts. In her study of working moms in magazines, Kathryn Keller stated:

Each negative image of day care and the implication behind it that women should not be working but should be at home with their children was countered by a positive image.

Moms were surrounded by mixed messages that served them guilt and paranoia, it was nice that issues that were swept under the rug were given the attention they deserved, but it was used as an indictment of non-traditional family structures and women not feeling they have to sacrifice their autonomy at the service of their families or stay in terrible marriages for “the good of the children”. It’s best I leave this dreary part (before heading to sitcoms and humor and magazines) with Tamme Dawson from GLOW to empower all women and snap back at the powers that be.

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thehundredplusone · 4 years

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Infodump: The Satanic Panic & Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA)

GRAPHIC CONTENT AHEAD! STRONG CONTENT WARNINGS FOR THE FOLLOWING:

Child abuse

Murder

Police abuse

Satanism

Mental illness

Cannibalism

TL;DR at the bottom.

I'm autistic and my "focus" or specialist subject is extreme religion, cults, and religious abuse. The subset I've been most interested in for several years is the satanic panic of America in the 1980s and 90s. This is the period of time which the idea of satanic ritual abuse comes out of. For those who don’t know, satanic ritual abuse or SRA is purported to be an organized form of child abuse and murder conducted by underground rings of “satanists”.

An important bit of context around these events: it was around this time that the fact that child abuse existed first entered the public consciousness. It's weird to think that child abuse wasn't considered a 'thing' at any point because we're so aware of it today but up until the 1970s, at least in the USA, no one really considered it. People ignored physical, mental, and sexual abuse in the home, considering it a private matter. "We believe the children" was such an important mantra during this time and so key to the SRA movement precisely because they were coming out of a period in which children were never believed about abuse at home and there was a major push to be aware of the symptoms of abuse.

The first ideas of SRA initially came from a book called Michelle Remembers, which is purportedly true account of a woman surfacing memories of SRA with her therapist. The book was a cultural hit and spread like wildfire, leading the authors, Dr. Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith (soon to be Dr and Mrs Pazder, as they both left their spouses and got married), to go touring the country to speak at psychology conferences, to newspapers, and on TV shows. They claimed that there were underground rings of satanists going around abusing children.

Interestingly, as people dug into Michelle's history to make sense of how this horrible abuse had happened to her, some inconsistencies showed up, like the fact that she had perfect attendance at school during the periods which she was supposedly being held captive by satanists. Michelle also claimed to have been directly healed by religious figures like Mary and the Archangel Michael, which was why she bore no physical marks from her abuse. Some have speculated that Michelle’s trauma was actually related to repeated miscarriages and the medical procedures she went through surrounding them. There are a number of elements which make the story suspect but they were brushed aside during that time.

Soon enough self-titled experts on SRA with no real qualifications other than attending a conference began to offer training sessions about recognizing the signs of satanic activity and abuse to police departments and teachers. Among their claimed signs that satanism was active in a community was one particularly dangerous suggestion. These experts, who often had little training in child psychology, claimed that while children never lie about being abused, children who were victims of SRA may lie and claim that they weren't abused. It was important, they said, to keep asking and make it clear that they didn't have to protect their abusers.

If you know anything about about psychology, your red flags might be going up right now, and with very good reason. Children are highly susceptible to suggestion and pressure. If they are asked a question over and over again by an adult who is pushing them to give a certain answer, they generally will. Adults are susceptible to this as well but to a lesser degree, which is part of why you see people confessing to crimes they never committed. Hold a person in a room for hours and hours, asking them constantly about something they want you to confess to and many people will eventually confess falsely just to get out of the room.

This is exactly what happened once things really took off. If you ask Americans about the satanic panic, those who know of it will often point to one key trial set right in the midst of the most frantic part of this cultural hysteria. That would be the McMartin preschool trial. So the McMartin preschool was a daycare in California run by a family, the McMartins. They were well regarded in the community and had quite a few kids attending their center. One day, a mother noticed an odd mark on her son's bottom and became concerned that he was being abused. After questioning him repeatedly, he finally said that his father, who was a teacher at his preschool, had hurt him. She contacted the police, and the police, seemingly knowing exactly what would send the community into a fervor, sent a letter to every parent at the preschool urging them to talk with their children and find out if they were being abused. More parents insistently questioned their children until they too confessed to abuse of all stripes. Another interesting note here: The mother who initially made the complaint had a history of mental illness and of suspecting others of abusing her son. She checked him for marks regularly and questioned him about possible abuse. While we can't say for certain this is what led to his confession, knowing that he'd had this line of questioning before makes it more likely he could have been coerced into a false confession.

The daycare teachers were arrested and all of the children were brought in to be questioned by social workers and police. They used the same tactics as described above, holding children in rooms for extended periods of time, asking them over and over about the same things until they agreed, telling them that other children had confessed to acts which they hadn't confessed to, and describing explicit, leading scenarios. The children questioned were very young, as young as two in some cases, and they were being prompted to agree with trained adults.

The adults also took any fantastical statement the child made as fact, going on the premise that they should believe the children. Claims taken seriously included dozens of babies being butchered and eaten, being flushed down a toilet into a secret room, and flying through the air. The daycare's entire building and property were dismantled and searched for hidden compartments or rooms and remains of the children supposedly killed. Nothing was ever found. The parents and children also met with Dr Pazder and Michelle in the run-up to the trial and it's believed that this influenced their testimony. SRA claims were also heavy in the medial around this time through a number of other cases and it's likely that children picked up on the stories and them subconsciously used what they'd heard from the TV or their parents in their own accounts. Ultimately, most of the charges were dismissed due to a lack of evidence. The few which went forward were eventually reversed, in some cases after the defendant served time in jail.

That's not the end of the story on SRA though. Remember the kids going through this? The kids who were trapped in rooms, separated from their families, forced to confess to graphic details of abuse which no child should ever have to hear, not allowed to leave until they told the police or psychologists what they wanted? That is scarring for a child. While some kids had enough of a sense of self to realize that none of it happened, many others had their very fragile sense of self ripped to shreds and tainted with the ideas people pushed onto them. They developed false memories of their childhoods. Normal scenes of happy families, playing with friends, going to preschool, were tainted by the anxiety and fear they were put through by people who should have been protecting them.

One story highlighted in a podcast I listened to highlighted a young man named J and his father, M. M was accused of satanic abuse by his ex-wife and ended up in jail. J and his siblings were sent to a therapist who convinced them that they were abused. The therapist told him he'd never be able to hold down a job, that he'd be stalked all his life by the satanic cult, and if he tried to be normal, he'd wind up abusing children the way his father did. J wound up depressed and involved in drugs but did eventually stop therapy and managed to pull together a life for himself.

When he was in his 30s, still fully believing that his father had abused him, his younger brother made contact with their dad. M sent the brother a long letter explaining what he remembered of the events and apologizing for them, which was forwarded to J. The letter ultimately helped J find cracks in the abuse memories which his mother and therapist had created and he began to question everything. He had been traumatized as a very young child into believing he was abused, but that itself was ultimately the abuse. Nothing had happened to him but a mentally ill mother and a manipulative, unethical therapist, but those were enough to leave him with years of scars and problems to work through.

I want to be clear that I’m not trying to discredit or harm people who have memories of SRA. While the acts never happened in nearly every case, the pain and trauma inflicted by being made to agree to graphic descriptions of abuse is very real. Their suffering is real. The blame for that suffering should be placed where it belongs. The only way we prevent something like this from happening again is to have accurate accounts of how it happened the first time. If you believe yourself to be an SRA victim, my heart goes out to you. I hope you’re able to heal in time and piece yourself back together.

TL;DR: SRA came out of a weird period of botched child psychology and hysteria. It's not likely anyone was ever ritualistically abused by satanists. People with memories from SRA cases have had false memories imprinted on them through repeated questioning by police, social workers, therapists, and parents. These people were their abusers, not satanists. They are abuse victims and they may have very real mental illnesses due to trauma.

If you want more info about this topic, I recommend checking out the podcasts "Conviction" (Season 2), "You're Wrong About" (Michelle Remembers episodes) and "The Satanic Panic".

#sra #satanic ritual abuse #cw child abuse #cw murder #cw police abuse #cw mental heath #graphic #michelle remembers #ritual abuse #infodump

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scottadamsblog · 7 years

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How To Know You’re In a Mass Hysteria Bubble

History is full of examples of Mass Hysterias. They happen fairly often. The cool thing about mass hysterias is that you don’t know when you are in one. But sometimes the people who are not experiencing the mass hysteria can recognize when others are experiencing one, if they know what to look for.

I’ll teach you what to look for.

A mass hysteria happens when the public gets a wrong idea about something that has strong emotional content and it triggers cognitive dissonance that is often supported by confirmation bias. In other words, people spontaneously hallucinate a whole new (and usually crazy-sounding) reality and believe they see plenty of evidence for it. The Salem Witch Trials are the best-known example of mass hysteria. The McMartin Pre-School case and the Tulip Bulb hysteria are others. The dotcom bubble probably qualifies. We might soon learn that the Russian Collusion story was mass hysteria in hindsight. The curious lack of solid evidence for Russian collusion is a red flag. But we’ll see how that plays out.

The most visible Mass Hysteria of the moment involves the idea that the United States intentionally elected a racist President. If that statement just triggered you, it might mean you are in the Mass Hysteria bubble. The cool part is that you can’t fact-check my claim you are hallucinating if you are actually hallucinating. But you can read my description of the signs of mass hysteria and see if you check off the boxes.

If you’re in the mass hysteria, recognizing you have all the symptoms of hysteria won’t help you be aware you are in it. That’s not how hallucinations work. Instead, your hallucination will automatically rewrite itself to expel any new data that conflicts with its illusions.

But if you are not experiencing mass hysteria, you might be totally confused by the actions of the people who are. They appear to be irrational, but in ways that are hard to define. You can’t tell if they are stupid, unscrupulous, ignorant, mentally ill, emotionally unstable or what. It just looks frickin’ crazy.

The reason you can’t easily identify what-the-hell is going on in the country right now is that a powerful mass hysteria is in play. If you see the signs after I point them out, you’re probably not in the hysteria bubble. If you read this and do NOT see the signs, it probably means you’re trapped inside the mass hysteria bubble.

Here are some signs of mass hysteria. This is my own take on it, but I welcome you to fact-check it with experts on mass hysteria.

1. The trigger event for cognitive dissonance

On November 8th of 2016, half the country learned that everything they believed to be both true and obvious turned out to be wrong. The people who thought Trump had no chance of winning were under the impression they were smart people who understood their country, and politics, and how things work in general. When Trump won, they learned they were wrong. They were so very wrong that they reflexively (because this is how all brains work) rewrote the scripts they were seeing in their minds until it all made sense again. The wrong-about-everything crowd decided that the only way their world made sense, with their egos intact, is that either the Russians helped Trump win or there are far more racists in the country than they imagined, and he is their king. Those were the seeds of the two mass hysterias we witness today.

Trump supporters experienced no trigger event for cognitive dissonance when Trump won. Their worldview was confirmed by observed events.

2. The Ridiculousness of it

One sign of a good mass hysteria is that it sounds bonkers to anyone who is not experiencing it. Imagine your neighbor telling you he thinks the other neighbor is a witch. Or imagine someone saying the local daycare provider is a satanic temple in disguise. Or imagine someone telling you tulip bulbs are more valuable than gold. Crazy stuff.

Compare that to the idea that our president is a Russian puppet. Or that the country accidentally elected a racist who thinks the KKK and Nazis are “fine people.” Crazy stuff.

If you think those examples don’t sound crazy -- regardless of the reality -- you are probably inside the mass hysteria bubble.

3. The Confirmation Bias

If you are inside the mass hysteria bubble, you probably interpreted President Trump’s initial statement on Charlottesville -- which was politically imperfect to say the least -- as proof-positive he is a damned racist.

If you are outside the mass hysteria bubble you might have noticed that President Trump never campaigned to be our moral leader. He presented himself as -- in his own words “no angel” -- with a set of skills he offered to use in the public’s interest. He was big on law and order, and equal justice under the law. But he never offered moral leadership. Voters elected him with that knowledge. Evidently, Republicans don’t depend on politicians for moral leadership. That’s probably a good call.

When the horror in Charlottesville shocked the country, citizens instinctively looked to their president for moral leadership. The president instead provided a generic law and order statement. Under pressure, he later named specific groups and disavowed the racists. He was clearly uncomfortable being our moral lighthouse. That’s probably why he never described his moral leadership as an asset when running for office. We observe that he has never been shy about any other skill he brings to the job, so it probably isn’t an accident when he avoids mentioning any ambitions for moral leadership. If he wanted us to know he would provide that service, I think he would have mentioned it by now.

If you already believed President Trump is a racist, his weak statement about Charlottesville seems like confirmation. But if you believe he never offered moral leadership, only equal treatment under the law, that’s what you saw instead. And you made up your own mind about the morality.

The tricky part here is that any interpretation of what happened could be confirmation bias. But ask yourself which one of these versions sounds less crazy:

1. A sitting president, who is a branding expert, thought it would be a good idea to go easy on murderous Nazis as a way to improve his popularity.

or...

2. The country elected a racist leader who is winking to the KKK and White Supremacists that they have a free pass to start a race war now.

or...

3. A mentally unstable racist clown with conman skills (mostly just lying) eviscerated the Republican primary field and won the presidency. He keeps doing crazy, impulsive racist stuff. But for some reason, the economy is going well, jobs are looking good, North Korea blinked, ISIS is on the ropes, and the Supreme Court got a qualified judge. It was mostly luck.

or...

4. The guy who didn’t offer to be your moral leader didn’t offer any moral leadership, just law and order, applied equally. His critics cleverly and predictably framed it as being soft on Nazis.

One of those narratives is less crazy-sounding than the others. That doesn’t mean the less-crazy one has to be true. But normal stuff happens far more often than crazy stuff. And critics will frame normal stuff as crazy whenever they get a chance.

4. The Oversized Reaction

It would be hard to overreact to a Nazi murder, or to racists marching in the streets with torches. That stuff demands a strong reaction. But if a Republican agrees with you that Nazis are the worst, and you threaten to punch that Republican for not agreeing with you exactly the right way, that might be an oversized reaction.

5. The Insult without supporting argument

When people have actual reasons for disagreeing with you, they offer those reasons without hesitation. Strangers on social media will cheerfully check your facts, your logic, and your assumptions. But when you start seeing ad hominem attacks that offer no reasons at all, that might be a sign that people in the mass hysteria bubble don’t understand what is wrong with your point of view except that it sounds more sensible than their own.

For the past two days I have been disavowing Nazis on Twitter. The most common response from the people who agree with me is that my comic strip sucks and I am ugly.

The mass hysteria signals I described here are not settled science, or anything like it. This is only my take on the topic, based on personal observation and years of experience with hypnosis and other forms of persuasion. I present this filter on the situation as the first step in dissolving the mass hysteria. It isn’t enough, but more persuasion is coming. If you are outside the mass hysteria bubble, you might see what I am doing in this blog as a valuable public service. If you are inside the mass hysteria bubble, I look like a Nazi collaborator.

How do I look to you?

---

I wrote a book about how to persuade yourself to success. Based on reader comments, it is working.

My upcoming book, Win Bigly, tells you how to persuade others. (For good.) That comes out October 31st.

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memecucker · 7 years

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like one of the claims being made about the mcmartin daycare “satanic sacrifice” panic was that they were transporting the kids to secret satanic cult sites by through sewer pipes by flushing them in the toilet

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aboriginalnewswire · 7 years

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youtube

Cults That Never Were: The Satanic Ritual Abuse Scare (SRAS) > Introduction The satanic ritual abuse scare was a moral panic that began in the 1980’s in North America and lasted throughout much of the 1990’s. It was fueled by claims of Satan worship made up of several components: Child and sexual abuse Human ritual sacrifice Teenage abduction rumors Animal Mutilation Claims of actual Satanists (The Church of Satan and Temple of Set) Heavy metal rock and horrorcore music Violent and fantasy games During its time, the SRAS led to many criminal investigations based on little or no evidence of an actual occurrence of satanic activity or any criminal activity whatsoever. Although there are many components to the satanic ritual abuse scare, the incidents of sexual child abuse and abduction related to rumors of satanic cult activity will be the focus of this review. History and Evidence Since there were several components that led to the satanic ritual abuse scare, it is important to explore their individual histories in order to understand how they jointly created a moral panic in North America. History of the Church of Satan 1930 - Anton LaVey is born in Chicago, Illinois on 11 April. 1966 - Anton LaVey founds the church of Satan in San Francisco, California, and proclaims that the year 1966 is “the year one,” or Anno Satanas- the first year of the Age of Satan. 1967 - The Church of Satan performs a wedding ceremony for journalist, John Raymond, and socialite Judith Case, which prompts media interest in the group. 1969 - LaVey writes the Satanic Bible, which outlines the principles of LaVeyan Satanism and rituals. 1970 - LaVey appears in the documentary, Satanis: The Devil’s Mass, provoking more media attention and providing a vision of “Satanic rituals.” History of the Temple of Set 1975 - Michael Aquino, former member of the Church of Satan, founded the Temple of Set based on organizational and philosophical differences with Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan. The Church of Satan and Temple of Set provided evidence of actual “Satanists” living in North America. Although the actions of these groups did not qualify as Satanic Ritual Abuse, their mere association with devil worship made them a contributor to the Satanic Ritual Abuse Scare. History and Evidence of Animal Mutilation For the past several decades, animal mutilations have occurred all over North America. In the past, the mutilations were sometimes attributed to UFO’s. With the rise of all other contributing factors of the SRAS, conspiracy theories of animal mutilation began to become more frequent and were now attributed to satanic activity. Listed are only a couple of towns in the United States where animal mutilations were recorded. 1984 - Rumors of animal sacrifices in Edinburg, Illinois are attributed to teenage “devil worshipping” cult. 1986 - Mutilated animals found in Modesto, California are attributed to “devil worshipping” cult. History and Evidence of Satanic Rock Music 1985 - Police raid a suspected “cult house” in Holland, Ohio and confiscate rock music records, claiming they promote satanic activity. Rock musicians such as Ozzy Osbourne and ACDC are accused of contributing to satanic activity. History and Evidence of Violent or Fantasy Games 1988 - Teenage Dungeons and Dragons participants in Lancaster, Wisconsin are accused of animal mutilation and planned baby sacrifices in satanic ritual context. History and Evidence of “Recovered Memories” of Sexual/Child Abuse and Ritual Sacrifice Claims of sexual and child abuse are seen throughout history. Rumors of the abduction of a young female are classic urban legends. With the 1980’s, several other components contributed to this type of abuse being attributed to Satanism: The appearance of the child abuse industry The idea of posttraumatic stress disorder With the advent of the 1980’s, a change in home life occurred in the United States when both parents in a household began working full time. This left more children in daycare centers than there ever had been prior to this generation. For the first time, many children were left under the care of strangers. 1980 - Michelle Remembers, a supposedly true account of a young girl's torture at the hands of a secret coven of Satanists in Victoria, BC, is published. Michelle Smith "recovered" her memories while in therapy and under hypnosis by a therapist whom she later married. 1982 - Mary Ann Barbour believed her two young step-granddaughters were being sexually abused and eventually the children accused their father, Alvin McCuan. The girls were placed in the Barbour's care. Relentlessly grilling her two charges, Mary Ann Barbour reported that they had been used in prostitution and pornography, tortured, made to watch snuff films, and forced to allow animals to eat pet food out of their vaginas. Rumors in Victoria, BC spread about the planned kidnapping of a newborn baby by Satanists for sacrifice. 1983 - Judy Johnson accuses Ray Buckey – a 25-year-old worker at the McMartin preschool in Manhattan Beach, California – of sodomizing her two-year-old pre-verbal son. 1984- 208 counts of child abuse involving 40 children are laid against Ray Buckey, the owners of the McMartin School, and four teachers. Preschool children in a Miami daycare accused Frank Fuster and his 17-year-old wife of abusing them. Allegations included pornography, the drinking of urine, eating of feces, etc. Clinton attorney-General Janet Reno was involved in this case. Frank Fuster is still in prison. | Two children in Richmond, Virginia accuse family members of killing a child and cannibalizing it during a satanic rite. 1985- Daycare operator Sandra Craig is accused of assaulting children with a screwdriver and a stick, animal torture and taking nude photographs. She is sentenced to ten years in prison. James Rodriguez and five others are charged and convicted of sexual abuse of two young brothers in California. Accusations include infanticide. 1986 - James Watt goes on trial charged with multiple counts of child abuse at a private daycare. 18 children testified to various acts of abuse. Defense lawyers said that children initially denied abuse but told "bizarre" stories after repeated interviews. Watt is sentenced to 165 years. Daycare workers in Carson City are accused of abusing 14 children. Children told of the murders of adults, animal killings, drinking blood and other rituals. 1987 - A workshop about the dangers of Satanism is presented in City of Rockford, Illinois after a son is accused of murdering his father and fellow teenager in a satanic ritual. 1989 - Little Rascals Daycare in Edonton, NC becomes one of the most famous ritual abuse cases in North America when several of the daycare’s employees were charged with several counts of sexual child abuse. Paul Ingram of Washington is accused by his two daughters of satanic ritual abuse. Devoutly religious, he believes he must have been influenced by Satan and repressed the memories of what he'd done. He pleads guilty, and then retracts his confession when he begins to doubt the truth of the accusations. Two teenage girls are murdered in Pennsylvania, and teenage boy accused of murders is suspected of doing so due to satanic cult activity. Rumor panic spreads throughout state, with many children being kept home from school. The Creation of the Satanic Cult With allegations of so many “evil” acts throughout the country, they all became attributed to a hypothetical “satanic cult.” All of these rumors merged in order to form one elaborate story. The social condition that emerged in the 1980’s produced an environment for these very different rumors to create one plausible story about an underground Satanic Cult that was operating secretly throughout the nation. Through media involvement and growing panic among concerned citizens, the “Satanic cult panic” grew into a North American pandemic. Several criminal charges were brought upon those accused of involvement in satanic cult activity, provoking national media coverage with a salacious position. By the mid-1990’s, skepticism grew concerning the realities of these allegations, and the rumors were eventually proven false. Myth The existence of a Satanic Cult was the biggest component of the myth. The cult was comprised of Satan worshippers who operate in underground networks and perform sacrificial rituals. The rituals and organization were the major components of the cult’s myth. Ritual The killing ritual is central to the idea of the Satanic Cult. Rituals of human and animal sacrifice are most prevalent. The abduction of newborn babies, usually from hospitals, for the purpose of ritually sacrificing a pure human being. The abduction of a blonde, blue-eyed virgin for the purpose of ritual sacrifice usually performed on Halloween or Friday the 13th. Animal mutilation and sacrifice, with body parts used in offerings for Satan. The sexual abuse of young children. The consumption of sacrificial blood from humans and animals. Organization and Leadership Tightly structured and secretive underground organization of Satanists throughout North America. The highest and most affluent members of society were accused of being involved in a Satanic Cult. Numbers of members are thought to be in the thousands, inferred from the number of alleged victims. Clergy members are often thought to be leaders of cult. Police implicated as members of cult. Because of this type of organization, the plausibility of Satanic Cult activity being able to occur in secret is accepted. The Rise and Fall of the Satanic Ritual Abuse Scare The Rise - Controversies and Media Coverage The establishment of Fundamental Christianity in North America and the Moral Majority political organization contributed to the growing controversy of the existence of a Satanic Cult. Also, several prominent figures in the media contributed to the rumor panic, creating more controversy than any of the alleged accusations. Adding to the controversy, citizens across the nation banded together to create organizations with an effort to stop the supposed satanic cult activity. 1983 - Dr. Roland Summit publishes an article about Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome, which convinces many therapists and prosecutors that if a child denies that anything happened to him or her, they are hiding the truth. Geraldo Rivera's special, "Satanic Cults and Children," airs on television. 1985 - 20/20 segment "The Devil Worshippers" airs. 1988 - Journalists Tom Charlier and Shirley Downing write a series of articles for the Memphis Commercial-Appeal, documenting over 100 ritual abuse cases across the country. Geraldo Rivera's special, "Devil Worship: Exploring Satan's Underground", airs on television. The “Lost Child Network” is established in Kansas City to investigate satanic cult activity. 1989 - Oprah Winfrey hosts a show on “Child sacrifice,” feeding into the SRAS. Sally Jesse Raphael airs a story on “Baby Breeders.” 1991 - Sally Jesse Raphael airs a story on “Devil Babies.” 1992 - Police patrol the streets of Martensville, Saskatchewan, Canada, with assault rifles because of rumors that Satanists are coming to attack the town. 1993 - HBO’s "Search for Deadly Memories" airs, a documentary that shows techniques used in efforts to find memories that are unknown to the patient. The program features many doctors and “experts,” who provide credibility for the notions. The Fall- Skepticism and Conclusions Although some skepticism of the Satanic Ritual Abuse Scare and the idea of a “Satanic Cult” began during its highest panic in the 1980’s, it was not until the mid-1990’s that skeptics became more frequent than believers. There were several SRA criminal trials in which those accused were acquitted of all charges due to lack of evidence. Many previous convictions were also overturned at this time. Toward the middle of the 1990’s, there was a shift in media coverage from that which supported the rumor panic to that which was skeptical of all SRA. Public media figures that had previously supported the rumor panics and contributed to their spread began apologizing for such oversights. 1987 - Journalist Debbie Nathan publishes "The Making of a Modern Witch Trial," in The Village Voice about a daycare case in El Paso, Texas. Nathan is the first prominent journalist to raise the national alarm about the injustices resulting from the daycare witch hunts. 1990 - After three years of testimony and nine weeks of deliberation (the longest and most expensive criminal trial in US history, costing California taxpayers 15 million dollars) the jury in the McMartin case acquits Peggy Buckey and her son Ray. The prosecution decides to retry Ray Buckey. District Attorney Alan Rubenstein, conducting an independent investigation of ritual abuse allegations against the staff of Breezy Point Day Care in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, concludes that "none of this ever happened," and drops all charges. 1992 - The FBI writes a formal report discrediting the Satanic Ritual Abuse Scare. 1993 - 20/20 show on suggestibility of children in accepting and believing stories. 1994- 60 Minutes looks at false/recovered memories. A jury awards damages to Gary Ramona, who sued his daughter's therapists for accusing them of implanting false memories of sexual abuse in her when she went to them for counseling for her eating disorder. 1995- Geraldo Rivera apologizes for promoting the satanic ritual abuse and recovered memory panics: "I want to announce publicly that as a firm believer of the 'Believe The Children' movement of the 1980's, that started with the McMartin trials in CA, but NOW I am convinced that I was terribly wrong... and many innocent people were convicted and went to prison as a result....AND I am equally positive [that the] 'Repressed Memory Therapy Movement' is also a bunch of CRAP..." HBO produces Indictment: The McMartin Trial, painting Ray Buckey as the victim of a rumor panic for the first time. Skepticism of allegations in the SRAS began with this film. 1997 - A long-buried tape recording of a child's interview with social worker Velda Murillo, in which Murillo pressures the little girl to accuse her relatives of molesting her, is turned over to the defense team for Jeff Modahl in Bakersfield, California. The tape establishes what the defense said all along -- that children had been coerced into making accusations. 1999 - All charges in the Little Rascals Daycare case were dropped. 2004 - The two boys whose accusations sent James Rodriguez and five others to prison recant their testimony, saying they were forced to make false accusations by their aunt. 2005- Kyle Zirpolo, one of the children in the infamous McMartin Preschool case, comes forward as an adult and says that his testimony was a lie. Zirpolo told journalist Debbie Nathan in the Los Angeles Times that he was pressured to make false accusations of ritual abuse. Virtually no evidence was ever discovered to support the allegations of satanic cult activity by the components that made up the SRAS. hat constituted “satanic ritual abuse” was never clearly defined in North America. By the mid-1990’s, those previously portrayed as criminals during the SRAS were now portrayed as victims of a severe rumor panic. The idea of a “Satanic Cult” created a much scarier threat for the nation than individual incidents that were not connected to Satanism. After almost two decades of allegations of satanic cult ritual abuse, the SRAS seemed to be completely fabricated in the end. Throughout the rumor panic, many lives were ruined through false accusations, and many still remain in prison for crimes that were never committed. The SRAS created a “cult that never was” in the form of satanic activity.

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donman2112 · 7 years

Text

Mass Hysteria Bubble

SCOTT ADAMS' BLOG

TOP TECH

How To Know You’re In a Mass Hysteria Bubble

Posted August 17th, 2017 @ 12:36pm

I’ll teach you what to look for.

Here are some signs of mass hysteria. This is my own take on it, but I welcome you to fact-check it with experts on mass hysteria.

1. The trigger event for cognitive dissonance

Trump supporters experienced no trigger event for cognitive dissonance when Trump won. Their worldview was confirmed by observed events.

2. The Ridiculousness of it

Compare that to the idea that our president is a Russian puppet. Or that the country accidentally elected a racist who thinks the KKK and Nazis are “fine people.” Crazy stuff.

If you think those examples don’t sound crazy – regardless of the reality – you are probably inside the mass hysteria bubble.

3. The Confirmation Bias

If you are inside the mass hysteria bubble, you probably interpreted President Trump’s initial statement on Charlottesville – which was politically imperfect to say the least – as proof-positive he is a damned racist.

If you are outside the mass hysteria bubble you might have noticed that President Trump never campaigned to be our moral leader. He presented himself as – in his own words “no angel” – with a set of skills he offered to use in the public’s interest. He was big on law and order, and equal justice under the law. But he never offered moral leadership. Voters elected him with that knowledge. Evidently, Republicans don’t depend on politicians for moral leadership. That’s probably a good call.

The tricky part here is that any interpretation of what happened could be confirmation bias. But ask yourself which one of these versions sounds less crazy:

1. A sitting president, who is a branding expert, thought it would be a good idea to go easy on murderous Nazis as a way to improve his popularity.

or…

2. The country elected a racist leader who is winking to the KKK and White Supremacists that they have a free pass to start a race war now.

or…

4. The guy who didn’t offer to be your moral leader didn’t offer any moral leadership, just law and order, applied equally. His critics cleverly and predictably framed it as being soft on Nazis.

4. The Oversized Reaction

5. The Insult without supporting argument

For the past two days I have been disavowing Nazis on Twitter. The most common response from the people who agree with me is that my comic strip sucks and I am ugly.

How do I look to you?

—

I wrote a book about how to persuade yourself to success. Based on reader comments, it is working.

My upcoming book, Win Bigly, tells you how to persuade others. (For good.) That comes out October 31st.

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maximuswolf · 4 years

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A History of SRA Victims via /r/satanism

A History of SRA Victims

Below is a list of victims from the SRA panic. By victims I mean people who were accused of abusing children, usually as part of Satanic rituals, and were arrested and/or convicted. There are important patterns to take note of here.

There's almost no physical evidence. These convictions are largely based on testimony by children after leading questions were asked. The children were fed Satanic ritual stories (by parents, police, social workers, therapists) and then repeated them. Prosecutors sometimes engaged in illegal actions to obtain convictions. Even when convictions were overturned, several people spent years in prison.

There are still law enforcement officials, therapists, and politicians that believe in SRA. Grey Faction of the TST keeps a list of therapists. It should be clear which politicians still believe in this nonsense. My point being is that the culprits are not gone. They're all still there after ruining lives.

The Victims:

Alvin McCuan Debbie McCuan Scott Kniffen Brenda Kniffen

Convicted in 1984, released from prison in 1996. 12 years

Http://www.religioustolerance.org/ra_baker.htm

John Stoll. Imprisoned for 19 years before his conviction was reversed.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-may-01-me-stoll1-story.html

Ray Buckey, though acquitted, spent five years imprisoned during the McMartin trials.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/fuster/lessons/outcomes.html

Dan Keller Fran Keller

Convicted in 1991 and freed in 2013, after being declared innocent. 17 years in prison.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Hill_satanic_ritual_abuse_trial

Frank Fuster remains in prison, since 1985. His conviction was based on a dubious gonorrhea test and his wife testifying against him, after she was tortured by contractors called "Behavior Changers." She was literally hypnotized on the stand. His son, who he was accused of molesting, still says nothing happened.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_Walk_case

The "Little Rascals" case is messier because two individuals pleaded no contest after waiting in jail for their trials. Certain convictions were reversed outright.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rascals_day_care_sexual_abuse_trial

The Fells Acres Daycare case is another messy one in that convictions weren't reversed outright, but no physical evidence was found confirming abuse. Violet Amirault died in prison. A judge reviewing the case ruled that the testimony of the children that made the convictions was tainted by parents, counselors, and prosecutors. Gerald Amirault was in prison from 1986 to 2004.18 years.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fells_Acres_Day_Care_Center_preschool_trial

It's also worth noting Michael Aquino and the Presidio abuse scandal, as he is one of the few Satanists to be caught up in this. He was not imprisoned, but police searched his home after an Army Chaplain coached his stepdaughter into saying Aquino abused her. Aquino was on orders across the country at the time.

The police eventually declined to prosecute. The Army initiated a separate investigation, altering facts to try and fit into the story at the behest of Jesse Helms who took offense at Aquino being an open Satanist in the military. He was ultimately denied promotion and his full time contract was illegally terminated.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Set

https://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Prejudice-Presidio-Satanic-Abuse/dp/1500159247

Submitted August 06, 2020 at 12:37AM by dynakinesis via reddit https://ift.tt/39ZkMte

0 notes

ah17hh · 4 years

Text

A History of SRA Victims via /r/satanism

A History of SRA Victims

The Victims:

Alvin McCuan Debbie McCuan Scott Kniffen Brenda Kniffen

Convicted in 1984, released from prison in 1996. 12 years

Http://www.religioustolerance.org/ra_baker.htm

John Stoll. Imprisoned for 19 years before his conviction was reversed.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-may-01-me-stoll1-story.html

Ray Buckey, though acquitted, spent five years imprisoned during the McMartin trials.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/fuster/lessons/outcomes.html

Dan Keller Fran Keller

Convicted in 1991 and freed in 2013, after being declared innocent. 17 years in prison.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Hill_satanic_ritual_abuse_trial

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_Walk_case

The "Little Rascals" case is messier because two individuals pleaded no contest after waiting in jail for their trials. Certain convictions were reversed outright.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rascals_day_care_sexual_abuse_trial

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fells_Acres_Day_Care_Center_preschool_trial

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Set

https://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Prejudice-Presidio-Satanic-Abuse/dp/1500159247

Submitted August 05, 2020 at 11:37PM by dynakinesis via reddit https://ift.tt/39ZkMte

#IFTTT #reddit

0 notes

lindseyvalois · 7 years

Photo

In the 1980’s, a massive case of hysteria, known as “satanic panic,” swept the nation. Many people were paranoid due to false reports of sexual and physical abuse by people participating in satanic rituals and cult activities. This paranoia sparked rumors and allegations of satanic ritual abuse in daycare centers across the country. The widespread fear that occultist daycare owners were performing acts of sexual and physical abuse on children led to notorious criminal trials and the conviction of some innocent people.

The fear of the occult and satanism began in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Charles Manson’s cult members committed nine murders in 1969. The release of the 1971 novel, The Exorcist, as well as the 1973 film adaptation, sparked America’s fear of demons when it claimed to be based on a real story. In 1972, Mike Warnke released a false memoir, titled Satan Seller, in which he claimed to have participated in satanic sex origies when he was younger. Many other examples of cult activity followed in the 70’s and interest in the occult was rising. American’s were also in a frenzy over taunting serial killers, such as the Zodiac killer and the Alphabet killer, who used ritualistic patterns in their murders and both of whom were never caught. The media played a big role in the fear of satanic ritual abuse and was the biggest fuel of the mass panic, including documentaries on satanism and a broadcast of a “live exorcism.” Paranoia caused parents to find ludacris scapegoats in things such as rock n’ roll music and even the game Dungeons and Dragons.

In 1980, psychologist, Lawrence Pazder, and his wife Michelle Smith released a fabricated memoir, titled Michelle Remembers. The bestselling book tells a tale, that claimed to be true, in which Pazder hypnotized his wife into recalling her childhood spent in the Church of Satan and participating in sex origies. Many others came out with similar books that told similar tales, which were all equally false. However, paranoia took the nation by storm and, soon enough, dramatic accusations were being made against daycares across America saying that the employees were satan worshipers who performed occultist acts of child abuse. Social workers in Bakersfield, California had a group of children come to them claiming that they were molested by local cult members. One of the children was coaxed into reporting this false accusation by her mentally ill grandmother. From there, the children reported wildly fabricated stories of satanic rituals that they participated in and this resulted in 26 convictions without any physical evidence. The longest and most expensive trial in California history was the McMartin trial, in which a parent accused a preschool staff member of abuse. Interviews were conducted on children by unlicensed therapists and accusations were made that the preschool members not only abused the children but also flushed children down the toilet, had underground tunnels, and could fly and turn into witches. The case evaporated due to lack of evidence. Many of the cases in which innocent people were convicted were overturned, however, some of the accused were failed by the justice system.

Fear is very powerful and can make people do some crazy things. When we are faced with uncertainty, it is normal to want explanations. When we feel out of control, we can become stressed and scared. Other cases of mass paranoia besides this one, such as the Salem Witch Trials, have also caused people to turn on each other out of pure fear. The scary part is that mass hysteria can strike anyone at anytime, and anyone can end up as the one who is being accused even if they are not guilty. In this particular case, the media played a big role in the “satanic panic” craze and continues to play a big role in everyday fear.

https://www.vox.com/2016/10/30/13413864/satanic-panic-ritual-abuse-history-explained

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse

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bluewatsons · 7 years

Text

Tara Isabella Burton, What Is a Cult?, Aeon (June 7, 2017)

Cults are exploitative, weird groups with strange beliefs and practices, right? So what about regular religions then?

Cults, generally speaking, are a lot like pornography: you know them when you see them. It would be hard to avoid the label on encountering (as I did, carrying out field work last year) 20 people toiling unpaid on a Christian farming compound in rural Wisconsin – people who venerated their leader as the closest thing to God’s representative on Earth. Of course, they argued vehemently that they were not a cult. Ditto for the 2,000-member church I visited outside Nashville, whose parishioners had been convinced by an ostensibly Christian diet programme to sell their houses and move to the ‘one square mile’ of the New Jerusalem promised by their charismatic church leader. Here they could eat – and live – in accordance with God and their leader’s commands. It’s easy enough, as an outsider, to say, instinctively: yes, this is a cult.

Less easy, though, is identifying why. Knee-jerk reactions make for poor sociology, and delineating what, exactly, makes a cult (as opposed to a ‘proper’ religious movement) often comes down to judgment calls based on perceived legitimacy. Prod that perception of legitimacy, however, and you find value judgments based on age, tradition or ‘respectability’ (that nice middle-class couple down the street, say, as opposed to Tom Cruise jumping up and down on a couch). At the same time, the markers of cultism as applied more theoretically – a single charismatic leader, an insular structure, seeming religious ecstasy, a financial burden on members – can also be applied to any number of new or burgeoning religious movements that we don’t call cults.

Often (just as with pornography), what we choose to see as a cult tells us as much about ourselves as about what we’re looking at.

Historically, our obsession with cults seems to thrive in periods of wider religious uncertainty, with ‘anti-cult’ activism in the United States peaking in the 1960s and ’70s, when the US religious landscape was growing more diverse, and the sway of traditional institutions of religious power was eroding. This period, dubbed by the economic historian Robert Fogel as the ‘Fourth Great Awakening’, saw interest in personal spiritual and religious practice spike alongside a decline in mainline Protestantism, giving rise to numerous new movements. Some of these were Christian in nature, for example the ‘Jesus Movement’; others were heavily influenced by the pop-cultural ubiquity of pseudo-Eastern and New Age thought: the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (aka the Hare Krishna), modern Wicca, Scientology. Plenty of these movements were associated with young people – especially young counter-cultural people with suspicious politics – adding a particular political tenor to the discourse surrounding them.

Against these there sprang a network of ‘anti-cult’ movements uniting former members of sects, their families and other objectors. Institutions such as the Cult Awareness Network (CAN) formed in 1978 after the poison fruit-drink (urban legend says Kool-Aid) suicides of Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple. The anti-cult networks believed that cults brainwashed their members (the idea of mind control, as scholars such as Margaret Singer point out, originated in media coverage of torture techniques supposedly used by North Korea during the Korean War). To counter brainwashing, activists controversially abducted and forcibly ‘deprogrammed’ members who’d fallen under a cult’s sway. CAN itself was co-founded by a professional deprogrammer, Ted Patrick, who later faced scrutiny for accepting $27,000 from the concerned parents of a woman involved in Leftist politics to, essentially, handcuff her to a bed for two weeks.

But that wasn’t all. An equal and no less fervent network of what became known as counter-cult activists emerged among Christians who opposed cults on theological grounds, and who were as worried about the state of adherent’s souls as of their psyches. The Baptist pastor Walter Ralston Martin was sufficiently disturbed by the proliferation of religious pluralism in the US to write The Kingdom of the Cults (1965), which delineated in detail the theologies of those religious movements Martin identified as toxic, and provided Biblical avenues for the enterprising mainstream Christian minister to oppose them. With more than half a million copies sold, it was one of the top-selling spiritual books of the era.

Writing the history of cults in the US, therefore, is also writing the history of a discourse of fear: of the unknown, of the decline in mainstream institutions, of change.

Every cultish upsurge – the Mansons, the Peoples Temple, the Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church (or Moonies) – met with an equal and opposite wave of hysteria. In 1979, the US sociologists Anson D Shupe, J C Ventimiglia and David G Bromley coined the term ‘atrocity tale’ to describe lurid media narratives about the Moonies. Particularly gruesome anecdotes (often told by emotionally compromised former members) worked to place the entire religious movement beyond the bounds of cultural legitimacy and to justify extreme measures – from deprogramming to robust conservatorship laws – to prevent vulnerable people falling victim to the cultic peril. True or not, the ‘atrocity tale’ allowed anti-cult activists and families worried about their children’s wellbeing (or their suspicious politics) to replace sociological or legal arguments with emotional ones.

This terror peaked when atrocity tales began outnumbering genuine horrors. The ‘Satanic panic’ of the 1980s brought with it a wave of mass hysteria over cult Satanists ritually abusing children in daycare centres, something that seems entirely to have been the product of false memories. In the now-discredited bestselling book Michelle Remembers (1980) by the psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and his patient Michelle Smith (later, Mrs Lawrence Pazder), the lead author relates how he unlocked Smith’s memories of Satanic childhood. This influential atrocity tale influenced the three-year case in the 1980s against an administrator of the McMartin Preschool in Los Angeles and her son, a teacher, that racked up 65 crimes. The prosecution spun a fear-stoking narrative around outlandish claims, including bloody animal mutilations. The number of convictions? Zero. But mass-media hysteria made Satanic panic a national crisis, and a pastime.

And yet it is impossible to dismiss anti-cult work as pure hysteria. There might not be Satanists lurking round every corner, lying in wait to kidnap children or sacrifice bunny rabbits to Satan, but the dangers of spiritual, emotional and sexual abuse in small-scale, unsupervised religious communities, particularly those isolated from the mainstream or dominant culture, is real enough.

It is also keenly contemporary. The de-centred quality of the US religious landscape, the proliferation of storefront churches and ‘home churches’, not to mention the potential of the internet, makes it easier than ever for groups to splinter and fragment without the oversight of a particular religious or spiritual tradition. And some groups are, without a doubt, toxic. I’ve been to compounds, home churches and private churches where children are taught to obey community leaders so unquestioningly that they have no contact with the outside world; where the death of some children as a result of corporal punishment has gone unacknowledged by church hierarchy; or where members have died because group leaders discouraged them from seeking medical treatment. I’ve spoken to people who have left some of these movements utterly broken – having lost jobs, savings, their sense of self, and even their children (powerful religious groups frequently use child custody battles to maintain a hold over members).

In one Reddit post, James Chatham, formerly a member of the Remnant Fellowship, a controversial church founded by the Christian diet guru Gwen Shamblin, listed every reason he’d been punished as a child:

Allow me to give you a short list of the super-crazy [discipline] I recieved [sic] ‘Gods loving discipline’ for. Opening my eyes during a prayer Joking with adults (That joked back with me) … Saying that i don’t trust ‘Leaders’ (Their name for those that run the church) Asking almost any question about the bible. Trying to stop another kid from beating my skull in … Sneezing … Not being able to stand for 30 minutes straight with no break. Asking if my mother loved me more than god.

Does such extreme disciplinarianism make the Remnant Fellowship a cult? Or does the question of labelling distract us from wider issues at hand?

The historian J Gordon Melton of Baylor University in Texas says that the word ‘cult’ is meaningless: it merely assumes a normative framework that legitimises some exertions of religious power – those associated with mainstream organisations – while condemning others. Groups that have approved, ‘orthodox’ beliefs are considered legitimate, while groups whose interpretation of a sacred text differs from established norms are delegitimised on that basis alone. Such definitions also depend on who is doing the defining. Plenty of ‘cults’ identified by anti-cult and counter-cult groups, particularly Christian counter-cult groups such as the EMNR (Evangelical Ministries to New Religions), are recognised elsewhere as ‘legitimate’ religions: Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, even the Catholic Church have all come under fire, alongside the Moonies or the Peoples Temple.

To deny a so-called ‘cult’ legitimacy based on its size, or beliefs, or on atrocity tales alone is, for Melton, to play straight into normative definitions of power. We label cults ‘cults’ because they’re easy pickings, in a sense; even if their beliefs are no more outlandish, in theory, than reincarnation or the transubstantiation of the wafer in the Catholic Eucharist.

In a paper delivered at the Center for Study of New Religions in Pennsylvania in 1999, Melton said: ‘we have reached a general consensus that New Religions are genuine and valid religions. A few may be bad religion and some may be led by evil people, but they are religions.’ To call a group – be it Scientology or the Moonies, or the Peoples Church – a cult is to obscure the fact that to study it and understand it properly, both sociologically and theologically, we must treat it like any other religion (Melton prefers the term ‘New Religious Movements’). His point underscores the fact that questions of legitimacy, authority and hierarchy, and of delineation between inner and outer circles, are as much the provenance of ‘classical’ religious studies as of any analysis of cults.

Whatever our knee-jerk reaction to Scientology, say, and however much we know that compounds where members voluntarily hand over their savings to charismatic leaders are creepy and/or wrong, we cannot forget that the history of Christianity (and other faiths) is no less pockmarked by accusations of cultism. Each wave of so-called ‘heresy’ in the chaotic and contradictory history of the Christian churches was accompanied by a host of atrocity tales that served to legitimise one or another form of practice. This was hardly one-sided. Charges were levied against groups we might now see as ‘orthodox’ as well as at groups that history consigns to the dustbin of heresy: issues of ecclesiastical management (as in the Donatist controversy) or semantics (the heresies of Arianism, for example) could – and did – result in mutual anathema: we are the true church; you are a cult.

Of course, the uncomfortable truth here is that even true church (large, established, tradition-claiming church) and cult aren’t so far apart – at least when it comes to counting up red flags. The presence of a charismatic leader? What was John Calvin? (Heck, what was Jesus Christ?) A tradition of secrecy around specialised texts or practices divulged only to select initiates? Just look at the practitioners of the Eleusinian mysteries in Ancient Greece, or contemporary mystics in a variety of spiritual traditions, from the Jewish Kabbalah to the Vajrayāna Buddhist tradition. Isolated living on a compound? Consider contemporary convents or monasteries. A financial obligation? Christianity, Judaism and Islam all promote regular tithing back into the religious community. A toxic relationship of abuse between spiritual leaders and their flock? The instances are too numerous and obvious to list.

If we refuse any neat separation between cult and religion, aren’t we therefore obligated to condemn both? Only ontological metaphysical truth can possibly justify the demands that any religion makes upon its adherents. And if we take as writ the proposition that God isn’t real (or that we can never know what God wants), it’s easy to collapse the distinction with a wave of a hand: all religions are cults, and all are probably pretty bad for you. The problem with this argument is that it, too, falls down when it comes to creating labels. If we take Melton’s argument further, the debate over what makes a cult, writ large, might just as easily be relabelled: what makes a religion?

Besides, accusations of cultism have been levelled at secular or semi-secular organisations as well as metaphysically inclined ones. Any organisation offering identity-building rituals and a coherent narrative of the world and how to live in it is a target, from Alcoholics Anonymous to the vegan restaurant chain the Loving Hut, founded by the Vietnamese entrepreneur-cum-spiritual leader Ching Hai, to the practice of yoga (itself rife with structural issues of spiritual and sexual abuse), to the modern phenomenon of the popular, paleo-associated sport-exercise programme CrossFit, which a Harvard Divinity School study used as an example of contemporary ‘religious’ identity. If the boundaries between cult and religion are already slippery, those between religion and culture are more porous still.

In his seminal book on religion, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), the anthropologist Clifford Geertz denies that human beings can live outside culture (what he calls the capital-M ‘Man’). Everything about how we see the world and ascribe meanings to symbols, at a linguistic as well as a spiritual level, is mediated by the semiotic network in which we operate. Religion, too, functions within culture as a series of ascriptions of meaning that define how we see ourselves, others, and the world. Geertz writes:

Without further ado, then, a religion is: (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.

Such a definition of religion isn’t limited to groups with formal doctrines about ‘God’, but encompasses any wider cultural narrative of the self in the world.

Geertz’s definition – somewhat dated now – has been updated: most notably by postcolonial thinkers such as Talal Asad, who argue that Geertz overlooks one of the most significant mechanisms for meaning-making: power. How we conceive of God, our world, our spiritual values (a hunger for ‘cleansing’ in yoga, or for proof of strength, as in CrossFit, or for salvific grace) is inextricable both from our own identities and our position within a group in which questions of power are never, can never be, absent.

Even the narratives that many religions, cults and religious-type groups promulgate – that they are in some sense separate from ‘the others’ (the Hebrew word for ‘holiness’, qadosh, derives from the word for separation) – are themselves tragically flawed: they are both apart from and firmly within the problems of a wider culture.

Take, for example, the cultural pervasiveness of ideals of female thinness. It is precisely the aspirational desire to be Kate-Moss skinny that allows a Christian diet programme such as Remnant to attract members in the first place (don’t eat too much; it’s a sin!). So too does it allow cults of ‘wellness’ to take hold: a woman who is already obsessed with cleansing toxins, making her body ‘perfect’ and ‘clean’, and ‘purifying’ herself is more likely to get involved with a cult-like yoga practice and/or be susceptible to sexual abuse by her guru (a not uncommon occurrence).

Likewise, the no less culturally pervasive failure of mainstream institutions – from the healthcare system to mainline Protestant churches – to address the needs of their members gives rise, with equal potency, to individuals susceptible to conspiracy theories, or cultish behaviours: to anything that might provide them with meaningfulness.

The very collapse of wider religious narratives – an established cultural collectivism – seems inevitably to leave space for smaller, more intense, and often more toxic groups to reconfigure those Geertzian symbols as they see fit. Cults don’t come out of nowhere; they fill a vacuum, for individuals and, as we’ve seen, for society at large. Even Christianity itself proliferated most widely as a result of a similar vacuum: the relative decline of state religious observance, and political hegemony, in the Roman Empire.

After all, the converse of the argument ‘If God isn’t real then all religions are probably cults’ is this: if a given religion or cult is right, metaphysically speaking, then that rightness is the most important thing in the universe. If a deity really, truly wants you to, say, flagellate yourself with a whip (as Catholic penitents once did), or burn yourself on your husband’s funeral pyre, then no amount of commonsense reasoning can amount to a legitimate deterrent: the ultimate cosmic meaningfulness of one’s actions transcends any other potential need. And to be in a community of people who can help reinforce that truth, whose rituals and discourse and symbols help not only to strengthen a sense of meaningfulness but also to ground it in a sense of collective purpose, then that meaningfulness becomes more vital still: it sits at the core of what it is to be human.

To talk about religion as a de facto abuse-vector of hierarchical power (in other words, a cult writ large) is a meaningless oversimplification. It’s less an arrow than a circle: a cycle of power, meaning, identity, and ritual. We define ourselves by participating in something, just as we define ourselves against those who don’t participate in something. Our understanding of ourselves – whether we’re cradle Catholics, newly joined-up members of the Hare Krishna, or members of a particularly rabid internet fandom – as people whose actions have cosmic if not metaphysical significance gives us a symbolic framework in which to live our lives, even as it proscribes our options. Every time we repeat a ritual, from the Catholic Mass to a prayer circle on a farm compound to a CrossFit workout, it defines us – and we define the people around us.

Today’s cults might be secular, or they might be theistic. But they arise from the same place of need, and from the failure of other, more ‘mainstream’ cultural institutions to fill it. If God did not exist, as Voltaire said, we would have to invent him. The same is true for cults.

#subcultures #religion #values and beliefs #cults #spirituality #society

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