Are We In The Midst Of A Moral Panic?
Starting to seem that way to me.
Not sure how cogent the concept is, but I guess it'll do for now.
It's starting to seem to me that racism is now being treated a bit like witchcraft or demonic possession. Anybody might be one (or be infected by it). Accusations fly in every direction--and the truth of the accusations doesn't matter or barely matters. The best way to avoid being accused is to be fanatical in your opposition to the evil...and, of course, to accuse others liberally, and believe accusations readily. If you're accused, denial is fruitless, and only shows that you're both guilty and a liar. Best to fess up and be seen as guilty and repentant. Concern about the truth of accusations is a sign of insufficient persecutory enthusiasm.
To me, it seems like mass hysteria--online and in the media, anyway. IRL I'm not seeing any uptick, though, in academia, things have been moving in this direction for quite awhile. Maybe I'll see something when the semester starts.
Not sure how cogent the concept is, but I guess it'll do for now.
It's starting to seem to me that racism is now being treated a bit like witchcraft or demonic possession. Anybody might be one (or be infected by it). Accusations fly in every direction--and the truth of the accusations doesn't matter or barely matters. The best way to avoid being accused is to be fanatical in your opposition to the evil...and, of course, to accuse others liberally, and believe accusations readily. If you're accused, denial is fruitless, and only shows that you're both guilty and a liar. Best to fess up and be seen as guilty and repentant. Concern about the truth of accusations is a sign of insufficient persecutory enthusiasm.
To me, it seems like mass hysteria--online and in the media, anyway. IRL I'm not seeing any uptick, though, in academia, things have been moving in this direction for quite awhile. Maybe I'll see something when the semester starts.
posted by Winston Smith at
2:27 PM
1 Comments:
Other interesting quality suggestive of moral panic: people conflate the immorality of racism with literal disease subconsciously. So the accusation becomes contagious, if someone you know or have associated with is racist, you are racist as well (unless you perform the appropriate cleansing rituals, usually in the form of gratuitous denunciations of the disease, which really means gratuitous denunciations of the people accused). The witch trials seemed to have spread like this, and I have been seeing the start of this with C'Ville.
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