Of a Mind

I was reading a blog post that set out to explain the dangers of groupthink, as seen through the lens of the beginning of the Satanic Panic in the early 1980s, specifically the connections that people made to Dungeons and Dragons. The author identifies four factors that they feel "contributed to the escalation of fear and the adoption of unfounded beliefs."

• Confirmation Bias
• Illusion of Invulnerability
• Pressure to Conform
• Outgroup Stereotypes

I can see the reasoning here, but these factors are present in a lot of different contexts, like organized religion, where one wouldn't say that the phenomenon as a whole is an example of groupthink.

I think that fear, rather than being a part of the groupthink phenomenon once it begins, is one of the major contributing factors to starting it. One of the important pieces of the Satanic Panic phenomenon is the idea that Satan was powerful, and sought human agents to act against the legitimate divine order. And it was fear of that which lead to people getting on board with the panic. And I suspect that this goes a long way towards explaining why it wasn't much of a thing were I lived at the time; the local religious landscape simply didn't take the idea of Satan, or Satanism, very seriously. I can't think of a single person I knew at the time who would have told you that the occult was real. So the sense of an external threat, or of being unsafe, that people needed to band together to fight wasn't there.

Similarly, I think another thing that drove the Satanic Panic (other than alliteration) was the fact that for many people, Dungeons and Dragons (and the occult), offered simple answers to otherwise complicated questions. When Patricia Pullen, founder of Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons (B.A.D.D.), claimed that an in-game curse caused her son Irving to kill himself, she now had a direct answer to what many people find an intricate, and often unanswerable, question. One that moved her son's suicide from a mystery to a problem with a clear solution. And I think that when a group feels that they have answers to difficult questions, there is an incentive to simply go with those answers, rather than hold out for something else that may never come. And again, where I grew up, there was no difficult question that "evil supernatural forces" was a workable answer to. And so that specific incentive, to go along with the answer provided rather than put effort into a new one, wasn't present.

A lot of time has passed since that particular episode of the Satanic Panic. Enough so that it's easy to forget that it never entirely died out; the QAnon set of conspiracies, with its belief in the ritualistic abuse of children and Satanic overtones, keeps the moral panic alive, although at a much lower level than I remember it from my adolescence. Human nature, however, takes quite some time to change, and so the exercise of seeking to understand it in order to create a better present is a worthwhile one.