Mass Panics And Moral Panics

This is only test. This is only test. This is only test. Voluntary cooperation. This station is conducting a test. Hi everybody, welcome back to the Central. I am one of your co-hosts, Elena Papienna. I am here with my ever-so-charming other co-host, Nathan Radke. Nathan Radke. Hello. And Lecuna. Hi. How are you guys doing? I'm doing okay. Yeah. I feel inappropriately. I feel very calm. Why? I feel very calm and relaxed. Oh yes, I see why that's inappropriate because of our topic today. Exactly. Yes. What is our topic today? That was. You were so relaxed. You are? You are? You are? You are? You are so relaxed. I didn't even work on that segue very well. If I had been less relaxed, I would have. Before we started recording, I would have thought, "Okay, we got to think of a good segue." But I was just sitting here in Elena's backyard. We are socially distanced from each other. And I was like, "It's sunny outside." "S sunny, we got cicadas." And now I'm the segue guy, which we know is going to be a disaster. That's so. Actually a good point. The fact that Lees. Oh, the fact that Lees is going to do the segue is making me very nervous now. I can feel it starting to panic. I am feeling a little anxious now. I'm getting the hang of this segue stuff. So, I mean, that was. Yeah, okay, okay. I'm trying here. I'm trying to just leave behind. We are. Are we going to start today? So. We're talking about something. I'm back on. Here we go. Back to my panicky self. Normally, we're recording these in the bunker. And the panic just sort of manifests itself with the cement walls. Yeah. Elena's backyard is too nice. It's too luscious back here. But the cement walls of my headers for the frozen now. This is a topic that we've actually talked around for dozens of episodes. Oh, yeah. This is such an important idea, but we haven't really done a deep dive into this idea itself. And the idea, of course, is this notion of mass panic. Mass panic. Yeah, I think it's interesting for us in the sense that. A lot of what we're going to talk about aren't really conspiracies today. But this is such a central concept for understanding how conspiracies develop as social phenomena, as things that go beyond just one person having an idea, and really kind of infecting large groups of people with fear about some unknown danger, or some vaguely defined danger. And there are some real sociological mechanisms behind that. And that's one of the things we wanted to talk about today. Under the concept of mass panic and also, I think, moral panic. Yeah, because those are two related, but we can still like separate those two concepts. It's an important distinction, even though it's going to seem subtle. Would you say a moral panic is kind of a subset of a mass panic? Or like a version of a mass panic? I think it's going to be even more complicated than that. Yeah, okay. Do we have a ready definition that we could start off the podcast with just so that we have a vague understanding of what we're talking about? Well, a mass panic is exactly what it sounds like. A group of human beings all freaking the hell out over something that they shouldn't be freaking the hell out over. Right. And it's usually fed by certain things, even, well, like the media, we'll see some cases where the media ends up kind of feeding these panics as well, like putting out stories that then put it in this in public sort of consciousness more, and then it then you have more panic around it. Yeah, exactly. If you think about the way humans were for tens of thousands of years, you would get panicky if you saw the person beside you start to panic, which makes perfect sense evolutionarily speaking, because the person beside you maybe just saw a bear. And you didn't see the bear, but you see the person beside you panicking. So it makes sense for the human brain to it's like a kind of empathy. You feel exactly you feel someone else's panic, but as a Lena points out, we now don't exist in a small group of 20, 30 people. We exist in a world of seven billion people who were all connected through mass media. And so that allows what Lee describes, I think, very correctly as the infection of panic to spread instantly because of the collapse of time and space that's caused by communications technologies. Now, I feel like there's a lot of things to panic about. There seems to be something somewhat, I don't want to say quite derogatory, but a bit condescending about calling it a panic. You know, if I don't know, I'm trying to think of an example very far away in a long time ago, so no one gets offended. If you're in England and the Spanish armada is coming, you know, and you're like, oh, we're going to die. Is this, this seems like a lot of people would be freaking out about this and seems very legitimate. I think it's an interesting, again, it's an interesting distinction. When we talk about mass panics, it isn't just a large group of people who are worried about something. Because as you say, there are lots of occasions when large groups of people should be worried about something. You can make the argument that often the problem is people aren't worried enough about something that's happening. But I think the idea of panic is interesting because panic, it does seem kind of derogatory because panic seems sort of useless. What do they always say in any kind of situation? Don't panic, you don't panic. Because it implies you're out of control, you're not thinking rationally, you're not behaving rationally, it's kind of chaotic. There's very few situations that we would come across where afterwards I would say, "Lea, thank goodness you panicked." That's a good point because I'm thinking just as you say this in an emergency situation, let's say you're in a building and a fire starts, I would certainly be very scared under that circumstance and yet freaking out and panicking is not going to make anything any better. I'm going to leave the building, I'll use the emergency exits and all of that so I don't know if my behavior might be that different, but that extra layer of emotional turmoil and fear may in fact, as you say, make me less rationally, certainly doesn't seem to add anything constructive. If you're running around the building, waving your arms in the air screaming, that isn't as useful as figuring out, "Okay, this is a genuine threat, how do we respond to it, pull the alarm, warn everybody else, stay low to the ground, all of these sort of rational responses?" When we say mass panic, it also has this element, this isn't people reacting to a genuine threat in a reasonable way. It's people reacting sometimes to a phantom threat in an absurd way. Or might I also add a distinction potentially a real threat, but in an unreasonable way? Oh yeah, for sure. Now, we've been defining, as I understand it, mass panic is moral panic specifically, does that require at this point a different definition for us to move on? Mass panic is simply a large group of people who are freaking out. Moral panic is specifically that there is a threat to the nature of your society. Mass panic can be something like, "Oh, there's an immediate physical danger to this." There's an asteroid coming. Yeah, really? For anybody who just tuned in, there's like six minutes in. Well, because we'll talking about War of the Worlds later, I thought there should be a disclaimer here that I just was using a good and making an example. Very responsible of it. Okay, so an asteroid is a real danger and we could all collectively be afraid of it. But it's not a threat to the social fabric of your society. That's where the moral part comes in. It's that, "Oh, wait, there is some kind of agent, there is some kind of group, there is some sort of individual organization that is a threat to the way we do things." So, like, witches or communists? Yeah, those would both be moral panics. Right, it is. Or as a threat of witch. Nuclear destruction. Huh, and now, wait, I'm confused. Is that moral or not moral? If you had a situation, I would say that was not moral panic. If you had a situation where people thought that there was a bud to be a nuclear war but there wasn't, they were incorrect, that would be a mass panic. Okay. But moral panic is more insidious. Mass panic is something is happening right now and we've got to deal with it. Moral panic is there something sneaky going on behind the scenes. Right, spies, subversives, that kind of stuff. Or subtext in something that's meant to poison the minds of the youth. Right, right, right. Okay. Right, like the teletubbies back in the '90s. When everybody got work at work. Wait, weren't they actually meant to poison the minds of the youth? That sounds like an entirely different episode. Maybe the easiest thing to do is if we go through some examples. Okay. That's good. All right. And guys, oh. Yeah, true to form. Sorry, I'm terrible at segues, but true to form. He's going to try again. Yeah. You were a star while I just wanted to set this scene that you're starting us nice and early, like 200 years ago. Yes, that's true. Is that a segway or is it a setup? That's a setup. That's a setup. Set up a mo-cat. So segway would be like speaking of 200 years ago after it had been talked to about something 200 years ago, and then you talked about something else 200 years ago. That is a segway. I'm writing this down. All right. Let me take you guys back 200 years ago. To an area that I actually know really well and love. The little tiny area in London, England, called Hammersmith. One of my favorite spots on Earth. I love it. For our English listeners, I spend a lot of time hanging out. I spend a lot of time hanging out or I used to in the before times, unlike Goldhawk. road and Shepherd's bush market and Ravens Court Park. I just I love that area. Well, in 1803 my beloved area of Hammersmith was in the grips of something terrible. Something was stalking the darkened nighttime streets of Hammersmith. Something terrifying. Now there was a story being passed around that a woman, unnamed woman, which should always make us a little bit suspicious of a story, was taking a shortcut through a church graveyard, not far from Ravens Court Park. When she was grabbed by some kind of spectral figure that was very tall and clad in white, now she fainted and was found later just wandering around the graveyard. But she never recovered and she died two days later. There was a ghost in Hammersmith, a murderous ghost. Now more people started to report disapporation and people started to get pretty frightened. People were afraid to go out at night, but they still wanted to go to the pub. So then how do you do that dilemma? That's quite a dilemma. There's a murderer, but I need to drive that. And so this goes on for three months. The people of Hammersmith are living in absolute terror. There are all sorts of newspaper articles about it. There are stories that are circulating amongst the people who live there. They start to look for explanations for why this is the case. And one of the explanations starts to come out, again, an unnamed man, which is also, again, sort of makes us suspicious, had taken his own life and had been buried in a church cemetery. And because that goes against the religious rules of the society, that caused him to be a ghost, which caused him to walk around going, "Ooh!" So what do you think the response was? There's a ghost. What should we do? They go ghost hunting? They went ghost hunting with things that can't even kill a ghost. Well, guns. They went out with guns. Okay. And the idea was, I don't know much about ghosts, but isn't one of the main things about them is that they can go through stuff? Yes. Well, this accounts for all that silence when you put the question. Yeah. Because clearly I'm like, "Yeah, pitchforks and guns." I mean, that's what we need to do now, but then it's like, "Wait, but it's a ghost." It's not going to work. That's not going to work. Oh, it worked just fine. Because so they formed our militias, and there are our militias now stalking the streets of Hammer Smith looking for this ghost. And on a damp and cold evening, because it was London, in January 1804, there was a militia man named Francis Smith, and he's out on patrol. Again, not too far from Ravens Court Park, he sees the ghost with his own eyes. Tall, clad in white, like giving off this sort of weird glow. And he takes out his gun, and he fires around right into that ghost. And you wouldn't expect this. Totally works. Apparently guns totally work on ghosts. But he just turns somebody into a ghost? Yeah, he forced somebody to give up the ghost. Because what he did was he shot a man named Thomas Millwood, who was a plasterer. Oh, no. Oh, yeah. So he just covered in like white dust. He was covered in white dust. Oh, man. He was wearing the traditional clothing of the plasterer, which are like sort of white, billowy clothes, was shot in the face, and killed. Now, Francis Smith the patrolman, he was charged with murder, and he was found guilty in sentence to hang. But that was commuted because of the odd circumstances, because of the nature of this panic. It was commuted to one year of hard labor. But I mean, it's fascinating because this happens in 1803. In 1803, it's at the dawn of like the Napoleonic Wars in England. This is a scary time. Not only that, you have all this technological change, massive social and economic changes. I mean, what is happening in England in the beginning of the 19th century. We have sort of this drive towards urbanization and industrialization. We're seeing this kind of this moment where your traditional views are clashing with new scientific views. It was a very scary, strange time. And in those scary, strange times were more prone to panics. Now, unfortunately, which in this case resulted in the death of Thomas Milwood. But let's move forward. Let's move forward a hundred years. Now, we're out in the backyard. And one of the things I love about backyard is that they're full of insects. I mean, Elena, you've planted stuff in your garden specifically to attract some insects. Yes, to attract some insects. Yeah. There's a fuzzy caterpillar down on one of those. Oh, I have one of those. The items are with garlic. Yellow fuzzy ones. Yeah. So you want the fuzzy caterpillars. What are the other bugs that you want to get butterflies? Because they're so pretty. They're so pretty. Yeah, bees. Bees for sure. I love bees. Here's what you don't want. You don't want a sassin bugs. A what bug? An assassin bug. Huh. I kind of do actually. Well, you can't train them, though. Never mind that. You can't use them to do your bidding. So the assassin bug is small, slow. It's got long legs. It's got this really long sharp proboscis. That's a nose. Yeah, it's sort of a nose that you eat. I only know that because he was pointing at his nose. Yeah. Yeah, it's like if you ate through your nose and you also stabbed people with your legs. Right. Okay. Okay. And this is what they do. They crawl when you as you're sleeping and they drink blood from your lips and eyelids. Yeah. Where do they live? Well, they actually do live in North America, but the most part they live in Central and South America. Okay. There are some versions of the assassin bug or the kissing bug as sometimes called because it gets you in the lips. In June 20th, 1899, slow news day. The Washington Post has an article called The Bite of a Strange Bug, which explains this this insect and the way that it stalks people and crawls on them in the middle of the night and then drinks out of their eyeballs. What do you think immediately happens after this newspaper article comes out? Like a million reports of people saying that their eyeballs were being a part of what do you call that even? Eyeballs were drunk drunk drunk. They were drink. I don't know. That's why I got stuck there. I'm like, what's the proper grammar? I've never been able to conjugate that. No. Something was drinking out of your eyeball. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. In fact, in the summer of 1899, it was basically the summer of the kissing bug. I came across 60 newspaper articles, contemporary newspaper articles about attacks. There's one from July 6th. Kissing bug made him spit. There was a guy who was arrested for publicly spitting and he said, no, it's because a kissing bug got me. Boston Daily Globe July 6th, same day, fatal bite of a kissing bug. Somebody who was bit by one of these bugs and died killed by kissing bug. The Chicago Daily Tribune July 19th. How did they make that connection though that if they why would they have made that connection? So they're dead. How can they how can you know that they were bitten by this? Well, because you knew from all the newspaper articles that there was like an epidemic of these bugs crawling around. So they just concluded someone died suddenly in their sleep. It must have been the bug. Must have been the bug. Must have been the kissing bug. Weirdly, it sort of grabbed all of society. Fashion. It entered the world of fashion. I found another article, July 16th, in the Washington Post, kissing bug the latest thing in jewelry. Because it did so grabbed everyone's attention. The more daring women were wearing jewelry like long proboscis. Shocking. Yeah. From there. From there. Exactly. It's a good luck. So it was everywhere. There was poems written about it. Wow. And I'll read you one. Yeah. Swift with undecerningly through the land he goes kissing once you on the lips or on the chin or nose. It's got a cute. Yeah. I don't I don't know enough about poetry to know if that's a good poem. Now here's the thing. Now we're going to get into correlation causation. That kind of thing. The cities with the most reported cases and there were so many people showing up at doctors offices with cases of being picked by these bugs. The cities with the most reported cases were on the northeast. Now there aren't a lot of kissing bugs in that area, but there were a lot of competing newspapers. So here we have to ask the question. Were the bug attacks the cause of all the newspaper reports or is it the newspaper reports that's the cause of all of the perceived bug attacks? I mean as you were telling your stories what was coming to mind was just the impact of the media and just like it really drives home the need for responsible reporting on things and like fact checking, getting all the background stories, confirming details, which I know is at least I think is a lot better today. There's a lot more responsibility. But I'm sure there's some you know some publications who don't do their due diligence, but it definitely seems like a media influencing experience kind of phenomena. And at the time newspapers were basically the only form of mass media and they were so competitive. So competitive. They'd say anything. Yeah exactly. I mean we've talked about this. I don't think we've ever talked about it in the podcast. We just talk about it in our daily lives. The destruction of the USS Maine. Right. I mean that was an event where it seemed like newspapers really started pushing this narrative, which was happening about the same time as this kissing box car. Newspapers were pushing the narrative that the Spanish had blown up in American battleship and we needed to go to war. And this was done not because of good journalism, but because of a drive to have sensational headlines. - Right. - Sell more newspapers. - And to jump on the same story, like they're covering it. Now we need to cover, we need to cover our story. So it's like this competitive. - I want to just dwell on this for just a second to strengthen the connection that Nathan made at the beginning that I found for me in learning all about this, made the concept of moral and a mass panic more plausible. And that's just how influenced we are by others and what we believe that they're taken reality is. And so, if one of you two comes up with an idea, a theory, it's not as though I'm going to be completely knocked off my chair and unable to critically reason my way through it and come up with my own opinion. It's very different though. When the sense is that everybody feels one way about something. So, and that's often what the newspapers produce is a feeling that this is how others see the world. And in as much as I'm either just learning about it, or if I disagree with it, I'm kind of on the outside. Now I don't have any reference for that. I might like every other newspaper reader be like, I don't really sure about this. But then another report comes out, and another report and then my neighbor starts talking about my kids start coming home from school with stuff. And at some point, it really does take actual active work not to be bold over by these opinions of others. And I feel like it's almost I think goes beyond just whether it's ethical reporting or not. Because we'll encounter this later that actually, it'll, the articles that will say stuff like, oh, this isn't really a thing, do as much to stoke the sense that something's going on as the articles that said there wasn't something going on there. - Right, because they're feeding the same narrative. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Don't look there. There's nothing to see is still talking about, you know, the last article. - Yeah, that thing. Don't think about that elephant. Don't even think about that elephant. - Exactly. - And then you think about the elephant. - That's exactly it, right? Don't think about the elephant. - But another point, another thing to your point is this, I mean, it's a psychological phenomenon too, where this idea of conforming to other people's ideas, is it the ash line? What's it called, that ash experiment? Where people are all in the same room and they see, there's three different lines of different, or two are the same, right? Two are the same length, one isn't, and they're all asked which ones are the same length. And it's very clear which one is. - It's very clear. And so let's say I'm the person who's like, not in on the experiment and I'm just being experimented on, I might at first be very confident in saying, oh, well, it's for sure be. But then if there's five people ahead of me that say, a, a, a, by the time it gets to me, I'm gonna be second guessing myself. I'm also not gonna wanna feel and look like a big outsider, maybe doesn't know what they're talking about, if I don't say the same one as them. So it's like this, in the same way, you're reading these reports, you don't be that person who's like not subscribing to the same thing. It's harder to do that. - We're such social creatures. - Yeah. - One of the reasons why I think that this kissing bug scare was an example of mass panic rather than an example of an actual bug infestation is if you look at some of the descriptions of the bugs that people said they saw. One man in New Jersey said, it was six inches long. - Huh. - That's not a bug. (laughing) One man in Brooklyn said it had too long fangs and a head like a rat. - Wow. - I'm gonna guess he saw a rat probably. - Yeah. (laughing) - The other thing is interestingly, they did find out that the kissing bug, the assassin bug, can carry a deadly disease, shagas disease, which can kill people. But the thing is, it kills you like decades after you were built. This isn't something that kills you immediately. It is a serious disease and something that people should be, you know, concerned about. But that's not what was happening in 1899 in the American Northeast because those weren't kissing bugs and the people who died, they were not dying from shagas disease. I kind of want one of those little medallions though. That sounds really attractive. - Yeah, I'll look at, maybe Etsy has one somewhere. - So I've got a third one. This one's the most famous one ever, but I think we've got a weird twist on this one. All right, now of course we've all heard of the War of the World's Broadcast. - Yep. - So what's the basic story behind the War of the World's Broadcast by Orson Wells in? - 1912. - 1934 I think. - This feels like the kind of thing we should have looked at before we started. - Of course, look down at my paper, you want the head and right now the date. - No, I don't have the date. Well, isn't it just that he does a radio broadcast? Or yeah, but it's fictional and he's telling a story about aliens invading. - Yeah, based on the very well-known novel by HG Wells, War of the World. - And so, but he's, but it sounds very authentic and very, I don't know, contemporary. It sounds like it's happening. - Yeah, it's set up in a very clever way and that it's set up like a radio broadcast, which is then interrupted by an invasion from Mars. And if you've never listened to it, I highly recommend it. It's pretty riveting. - Well, and just to add to that, what, because we're gonna get to it, what causes the panic is that people tune did late to the radio show. So if you had begun listening to this, you would know that you were listening to a story. And those people didn't freak out as I understood it. But of course, there are people who came late and they turn on the radio in the midst of a news broadcast, broadcasting the arrival of aliens. - It was 1938. - How did you do that so fast? I'm still typing. - Okay, it's because you've got a rotary phone. (laughing) - It takes longer on those, it's true. - Now, even more famous than the broadcast itself, of course, is the response to the broadcast. This is one of the most famous mass panics in American history. Apparently, so famous that it got Stalin to develop a whole new area of spy craft all about disinformation, right? That this information comes from his understanding of the response that Americans had to worry about the world. - Yeah, because Stalin realized, oh, fear, it's so easy to cause fear in people. It's so easy to use the mass media to give people bad information or disinformation. And so it's like a textbook example of a mass panic. But here's the really fascinating thing that I've only recently learned because that's the story as I've always understood it. I'm sure I've even done lectures where I've been talking about mass panic and I've used the idea of war of the worlds. Here's the thing, there doesn't seem to be any evidence that people actually panicked from this story. The one thing that people know about that broadcast is that everybody lost their ever loving minds. There doesn't seem to be any actual evidence for it in police records, in hospital records, in death records, none of it. In fact, only about 2% of the population was even listening to the show. It was based on a very famous book that people would have known. They said several times during the broadcast, this is a radio play of war of the worlds. But what's interesting is the day after it's run, the newspapers are filled with stories. Here's one with the old timey headline, this is The New York Times. Radio listeners in panic, taking war drama in fact. Many flee homes to escape gas raid from Mars. Phone calls, swamp police at broadcast of Wells Fantasy. There were a ton of newspaper articles about how people were losing their minds. But there's no evidence that people actually were. Is that media again? I'm going to shake my fist at them. Media. So here's something-- here's a quote from that article. Should I do the whole thing in the old timey accent? I think you're committed now, boy. Away with massive stare. I'm good at that. Yeah. Away with massive stare, I see thousands of radio listeners between 815 and 930 o'clock last night when a broadcast of a dramatization of HG Wells fantasy in a wall of the worlds. War in particular is fun to say in that accent. War. Let thousands to believe that an interplanetary conflict had started with invading motions, spreading wide death and destruction in New Jersey and New York. It's turning into a different accent. The broadcast, which disrupted household, interrupted religious services, granted traffic jams, and closed communication systems was made by all of them Wells, at least a score of adults required medical treatment for shock and hysteria. How many is a score? 24. Is that a four score in seven? I thought a score was 12. But whatever score is, a score of people did not freak out. Yeah. Like I said, the hospitals reported no influx of cases. There was no deaths reported, even though I swear I have heard when this is-- I've heard of one, too. I've heard of one as well. Yeah. It was like a heart attack or like some-- I can't remember, but I've heard of one as well. Yeah. And I'm sure that probably between 815 and 930 o'clock, as I said in the newsfeed vertical, somebody probably did die of a heart attack. Somebody died, for sure. But unless they yelled out, this is because of the march and you can't kill over. We can't be sure it was because of the actual broadcast. Sorry, fact check, a score is 20. OK. OK. OK. Makes sense. All right, so why do we believe this then? Why do we believe that this caused such panic? I'm going to make the argument. The newspapers had a bit of an interest in slagging radio in the late 1930s. Radio was a new medium. Yes. Totally competing medium. Yeah. And you can read all these articles from the time where newspapers, newspaper were saying things like clearly radio has some growing up to do before we can trust it as a resource like you can trust us right right right so it's setting it up as kind of a threat in a way saying like look what happened here all these people panic it was a disaster I could imagine there were a couple of people even back then the United States is a large country and even 2% that's a lot of people so I'm sure there's somebody who turned it tuned in late heard what was going on shut off the you know phone by friends and that like you know ran to a bombshell terror something but I'm also sure that the Coast Guard and I've actually I have read this the Coast Guard back in the 1960s would occasionally get a phone call from somebody saying listen there's a bunch of shipwrecked people on an island you've got to go save them there's the skipper of the ship and his first star and there's a millionaire in his wife and the rest oh my god that really happened that really happened but not very often right right but yeah of course I'm sure there were some people but the story is that like the thing that we know about world is it caused mass panic but it did not yeah there's no evidence for it so I'm gonna make the argument and this is a segue here we go I'm gonna make the argument that what happened with world the world wasn't a mass panic it was a moral panic about the dangers of radio I'm into that I see it I'm really into that mic drop yeah okay all right so I mean the thing with a segue that good yeah you guys it's actually difficult to follow yeah we don't know and stunned yeah I mean that's the irony of the really good segue take my jaw up from the ground and try and carry on so I'll do an awkward segue instead hey Lee yes Nathan who's Stanley Cohen well okay that was awful so to answer Nathan's question Stanley Cohen is was in the 1960s a PhD student who develops a concept of moral panics that he's published in a book that we have read and we're basing this podcast on the book is called moral panic and folk devils and or sorry it's actually folk devils and moral panics and he he's the one who really brings this as a concept into the world now I'm actually in order to talk about him I'm going to talk about a panic that he was interested in because it was happening around the time that or it happened shortly before he's doing his dissertation in England and so this becomes his subject and I found it really interesting so anyway it starts in May 1964 there are these bank holidays so they're like extended weekends that happen well everywhere but also in England and it seems that the thing to do was if you were a young person old enough to sort of you know go out like a late teenager early 20s you could write the train by yourself you could write the train by yourself you could overnight somewhere you know that kind of stuff so what what people of this age were doing college students say as they were going to seaside resort towns in Brighton and Margate and places like that and these are kind of old school I mean I like Agatha Christie and a lot of her murder mysteries are set in places like this which are these sort of like seaside resorts where you would go with your family I love Brighton imagine just English people in striped chairs yes exactly yes and it's quite cold very cold but they're making the rocks they're making the best of it you know and so apparently our in the 60s in England you have as you had before but they're maybe more pronounced in there what they're wearing you have very distinctive youth cultures and specifically you have the rockers and this is basically like young men mostly who are into motorcycles and they wear their they're they seem to be mostly from working class backgrounds and they wear their motorcycle gear also when they're not on motorcycles so leather jackets jeans steel toe boots that kind of thing so you have the rockers on the one hand and you have the mods on the other now I've often I've been into mod inspired music for a long time and I was only actually reading this that I learned that mod is a short form for modernist they were these very hip urban often a bit more affluent kids who were the real the Vanguard you think of the early Beatles real fashion forward real fashion for I mean if you dress up like a mod today you're still hip right yeah so anyway now quick interruption Lee you're clearly a mod a Lennard are you more of a mod or more of a rocker um do you have a leather jacket I do have a leather jacket oh he's a rocker well apparently at these seaside resorts on these bank holidays starting around May of 1964 there are these violent clashes which break out like like youth riots mods and rockers sort of standing opposed to each other on either side of the street yelling obscenities at passers by throwing deck chairs and lawn chairs and you know looting shops and all of this kind of stuff now I actually my mom grew up in England she grew up in a small mining town called Hartleypool in the northeast very small pretty much unknown but anyway she was there in the 60s so I asked her just recently I phone to up I said do you know about this thing with the mods and the rockers she's oh yes she wasn't part of it she didn't go to these seaside resorts at that time but she certainly remembers hearing about it reading about it in the newspapers well the funny thing is and this is what brings me to Cohen and his dissertation is that this never happened I mean what did happen was the bank holidays happened and like in all the other bank holidays young kids went up to these towns and of course of course there was some horse play surely there was a fight that broke out here there surely people were rude to you know some adults you know trying to do their thing during the day and you get some kids coming up and say stuff there's nothing scarier than like group of kids no I know I know the younger they are the scarier have you got that age oh yeah I think you're the youngest of us have you hit the I'm there I mean as a family you're always kind of there yeah but that what was so amazing about this was it was basically a complete concoction of the media now most people weren't there at the seaside resorts so what they read in their morning paper is massive clash at bright and massive clash at clax that massive clash at wherever and this is not just one bank holiday the next bank holiday the newspapers all show up and are expecting stuff and are even in fact generating the pictures like paying kids to pose throw that straight picture right exactly and so Stanley Cohen uses this as his test case for this concept of a moral panic and he broadens it out to talk about all kinds of things that we've seen in the 70s 80s 90s he actually says that there there tend to be a bunch sort of a cluster of very typical tropes that reemerge over and over again one of them being violent men another one being school bullying another one being the wrong drugs done by the wrong people at the wrong time so that is to say alcohol is a drug but if you have a beer and you're a middle class family home owner if you have a sherry at the club exactly it is totally legitimate but should you have a joint or whatever okay child abuse sex and violence freeloaders so if you were around in the early 90s who would have heard this whole to do about welfare mothers that was like a thing that there was a certain segment of working class American women who were getting pregnant in order to free load off the state and refugees and so he talks about how there's a kind of hyperbolic representation of a threat by these groups in the media sometimes started by something so let's say you know with this mods and rockers affair maybe there wasn't fight and maybe it really was witnessed by but one fight does cannot be generalized into a mass movement in fact he is quite a careful researcher and actually talks to these people and the distinction that mods and rockers were different like that they were opposing youth groups was something that becomes important later but at that time was not apparent it was just like you just just different because you're writing a motorcycle so the media was trying to set up this kind of culture and class war maybe in a way between these two groups yeah or pretending that it existed right and then it sort of became reality after that is what you're saying pretend yeah so after the fact after it all dies down there then like subsequent youth groups that like have heard about this and bought into it and then go and try and reenact these events as though they are real. I actually remember growing up in the late 80s, early 90s, where this stuff was taken as very serious. You were a mod or you were a rocker. And if you were one, you would chosen a certain allegiance and could no longer fraternize with the others. - Right. - Well, it makes sense. I mean, Cohen says in the book, the social reaction not only increases the deviance chance of acting at all. It also provides him with his lines and stage directions. - Right, totally. - Yeah, exactly. So you would read these newspaper articles about the mods and rockers. You'd look at your leather jacket. Like Elena would look at her leather jacket and say, well, I guess I'm a rocker. And then she would see Lee with his modern clothing and she'd think, I guess I got to hit Lee with a chain. That's right. So right in this article. - It's like it gives you an identity and a history that sort of reinforces that identity. - Yeah. And I want to actually go back to a point, Cohen makes right, and this is actually in the introduction to the third edition. - So this is a direct quote, and I'm no good at accent. So you're just gonna have to bear with me. Quote, calling something a moral panic does not imply that this something does not exist or happen at all and that reaction is based on fantasy, hysteria, delusion, and illusion, or being duped by the powerful. Too related assumptions though require attention. That the attribution of the moral panic label means that the things extend and significant has been exaggerated. A, in itself, compared with other more reliable, valid, and objective sources, and or B, compared with other more serious problems. So that is to say that the thing, whatever the thing is, the event is probably a thing. It's real, you know? Maybe somebody did freak out with War of the Worlds and maybe somebody did get sick after being bitten by the assassin bug. And maybe there was a fight with the mods and the rockers. But already, and this is something I actually became much more sensitive to upon reading his analysis, merely by mentioning it in the newspaper. It elevates it to this really public level. It's again like a police officer saying, there's nothing to see here. Now, if I was passing by and wasn't going to look there and he says that, now I'm looking, right? So there are, then actually, what I like about his work is that he is, as a sociologist, goes through trying to understand what are the social mechanisms. How does this actually happen across the board? So when we go from mods and rockers to, we didn't talk about the Seattle windshield experiment. Sorry, a scare. - Economic, yeah. - That'll be its own minisode. - There's the satanic panic of the early 80s. - The Dungeons and Dragons panic of the 1980s. And that's such a good example, because did you play Dungeons and Dragons Lee? - Not really. - I'm just gonna assume a little you did. - I didn't, one of my sisters did. - Oh, yeah. - Because there was such a panic in the 1980s, especially from some church organizations, that Dungeons and Dragons was going to cause people to become satanic, to murder, to lose track of what's real and what isn't real. Now, what makes that so fascinating to me is that I grew up in Orangeville, Ontario. And in Orangeville, Ontario, we actually had a double murder. Where two children, two children were killed with a sword. - Oh my God. - By somebody who was a player of Dungeons and Dragons. Like that did happen, unfortunately, and tragically. But that didn't mean that the moral panic about Dungeons and Dragons wasn't absurd and overblown and ridiculous. - Okay. So exactly, so Cohen then goes through five steps of turning an event, something that has happened, into something that actually we become collectively afraid of and stop reasoning coherently about. - Right, it's like a distinct event that happens, but then is taken to seem like some sort of general pattern. - Exactly. - And he actually says that, that this is, it's the, there's a phrase that I wish I had at the tip of my tongue. It's not just this. - Right. - That this is in fact just a symbol for the larger cultural change that's happening. You can't see that larger change, but here's the evidence of it happening. So step number one in creating a moral panic is to define a threat. Yeah, so here it is, free loading, welfare, mothers, or, and often we have to look at how it is that the language, and he talks about this too, when newspapers define refugees as threats, what's the language they use? Things like flooded, you know, we are flooded with refugees, there's an, - Like it's a natural disaster. - Trump and he's talking about Mexico as well, using what kind of language was he using? - Talking about animals, talking about. - And did he say infested or use some sort of-- - Yeah, infested. - Yeah, so these terms are very evocative. - Yeah, absolutely. - Well they're very visceral. - Yeah. - And so that's, we define a threat. - The threat becomes in some way depicted symbolized. So for example, one way to do this might be through, so for example, after 9/11, the outward appearance of being Muslim, you know, things like a head scarf, you know, now become, now become a kind of a symbol for a larger change in society about Islamic culture, undermining Western civilization. Obviously, I don't believe any of this stuff. I'm trying to suggest this is how it can be depicted. - That's a little more opanic starts to emerge in the social consciousness. - Exactly. Then this generates public concern, which is legitimate if I don't have direct experience with the larger Muslim community or with young kids reading comic books or whatever. I mean, the whole thing about the newspapers that mediates or news as such is that mediates our reality for us. And so I'm trying to find out what's going on with those other seven billion people out there that Nathan mentioned. I don't know. So here I have this apparently objective source telling me what's up and they have identified a threat. They've symbolized it and now I get concerned. Right? I mean, I as an individual, I remember right after 9/11, I'm just coming up with some examples in my own life. Right after 9/11, I was living in Germany at that time. I got a call from my grandmother who warned me not to go to any public spaces. Yeah, and it's just like, she's just concerned because of a generalized threat that was out there. It's from her perspective, legitimate. I don't think it was if you do a critical analysis of it, but based on just opening in the news, it could be like, ah, there's something scary. Now here's what I find interesting. In for the moral panic to really get going, you need an official response. You need the kind of adults in the room to get on board, the law courts, the police officers, the journalists, the politicians, and what they then do is they create an official response here. A task force, a policy change, a legal change, whatever it is, which actually changes the community through legislation. Through legislation, but maybe also through the effects of the legislation or goodness knows. It could also be somebody rides into power and an election on the wave of the moral panic. There you go. By proclaiming themselves to be the crusader against that moral panic. Right, only I can fix this. Or like building a wall, for example. Like building a wall, for example. Yeah. So these seem to be the stages that all of these panics, and it's easy, I like Nathan your approach of starting 200 years ago, where we have so much distance to this stuff that we can be a lot more critical about it and kind of laugh at the assassin bug panic, you know, is something that's kind of silly. It's a lot harder though when you're in the midst of it. Totally. I mean, just right after 9/11, it's hard when every single newspaper report is about tragedy, about death, about the generalized state of danger that we are. Well, do you remember the anthrax scare? Yes. Came right after September 11th. Yup, right. And there was some guy somewhere who was mailing little bits of anthrax to newspapers. I mean, that guy did exist, but it was seen as this widespread phenomenon to the point that I remember there was a mall close down in the United States after a white powder was found on a baby changing table. Uh-oh. Now when they tested that powder, it was-- Baby powder. Yeah. Wow. So do we need to do a follow-up episode where we talk about some of these ones we've referred to, but we haven't gone in depth about in terms of-- I think so, because we're actually-- We're getting along in time. Like, this seems like a good-- Why don't I just start-- I know. I know. I'm just picking my shoes off of just where I'm going to get going. Because we want to talk about the Seattle windshield epidemic. We got to talk about that because it evinces all of this stuff. Yep. We got to talk about-- I want to talk about the seduction of the innocent. Oh, yeah, we didn't even get the comic book scare. The comic book scare. So I think we'll just have to do some mini-sodes on this. OK. A couple of things that I would like to say, though, before we wrap this up. Now, we're putting this out, this episode on MassPanix. Sure. Yes, during a MassPanix. Well, during an epidemic. An epidemic, it's true. Like, I don't want to say that the COVID situation is a MassPanick or a moral panic. It's an epidemic. I will say the backlash against mask wearing. is a moral panic. - Yes, that's a good point. - I'm gonna make that argument. What do you guys think about that? - Yeah, hold on, I had another thought as you were saying that. I mean, not only the anti-maskers, but some of the other conspiracy theories coming out of this, like with the idea of having to be microchipped to see if you have a vaccine or not, those also feel like moral panic, ask, because this fear to like the way things are done or control of my body or too much information or lack of privacy, that seems like they all kind of fit with the anti-masking in a way to me. - Yeah, because again, the idea of a loss of personal information, that's a significant and genuine issue. But it then gets spun out into, oh, Bill Gates is going to give us vaccines, which then have microchips in them, and it gets spiraled off into a kind of moral panic. - Yeah. - Two, I have to admit, okay, well, before I get myself into any trouble, I'm going to start with-- - I could tell from his expression that he was about to get himself in trouble. - I got to get myself into trouble, so I've got to stop and say, and just start with saying that, I didn't want to talk about the pandemic that we're in right now. I mean, you can hear noises in the background because we are outside or social distancing, we haven't been able to be anywhere close to a studio in a long time because of the pandemic restrictions. I'm no epidemiologist, and if experts in the room say that this is going to keep me and other people safe, I am the first person who will follow along. However, having said that, I think it is monstrously difficult when you're in the midst of one of these events to know whether it is or is not a panic. - Yeah. - And it actually is that it brings up this broader question about decision making without all the information. I mean, I have a lot of information. Again, this is why I turn to experts, the WHO, and whoever else, and they have qualified experts there to tell me stuff. But let us imagine, let us imagine, just in the realm of fantasy, that it turns out that we actually overreacted over the last six months. - Right. - Now, was that a bad decision? Was it the wrong thing to do then to shut things down, to shut schools down, to have people? I'm not sure. - Yeah, I mean, you can bring that back to the idea that if you overreact, you're out in early humans out there in the wilderness somewhere, overreacting to a noise in the bushes, we've given this example before. You're safe for overreacting because you survived versus saying, "Oh, it's probably nothing and dying." - Exactly, maybe witches are all baloney, but maybe they're not. - Yeah. - But then it depends what is the impact of the overreaction? - Yes. - Like if you're scared of something in the bushes or you jump off a cliff, that's a problem. - Right. - And so if you're scared of witches and so you set a bunch of humans on fire, that's a problem. - Yeah. - And of course, there has been such a massive impact. I mean, we have all been extremely fortunate. I know people who have lost their jobs because of what's been going on with the reaction to this. I will say this, that's a question that I would maybe have asked myself a couple months ago. But at this point, I feel like the stats are in and we've seen what has happened when we haven't reacted. We've seen what's happened to the death rate. We've seen what it's done, even places like swinging. - Like a Sweden, yes, Sweden is outside of control. - Where they have a very high death rate and the economy has also crashed. - 'Cause they took no precautions. - Yeah. - Literally. - Please think, you gotta think of it. - I gotta think, I should not think of it, so I'm just gonna stop. - I'm gonna take a picture of it and say, "Can't face me can post it." - Do it again, think again. - I don't know, I don't think again. - I think that I agree with what you're saying and I think it's always a question that we should be asking. Always. - I just, again, I don't disagree with anything that you've said and I keep reiterating that I'm fully playing along, following the rules and all of that. But I always, I come back to 9/11 for me a lot. And, you know, those terrorist attacks were real. And Islamic fundamentalism is real. And Islamic fundamentalist terrorism is scary as hell and was increasing and all of those things. At that time, I would have, I look back at it now. And I'm like, that is a moral panic up and down, even though the terrorist attacks were real, all of the restrictions that were put into place. I mean, you know, nothing was ever gonna catch another terrorist. And I know, and like, not only that, but the wars, the Iraq war, which resulted in the deaths of conservatively hundreds of thousands of human beings has made the terrorism worse. - Yeah. And that was entirely made possible. That illegal disgusting war was made possible because of the moral panic that happened after September 11th. September 11th was a real, awful terrifying event. The resultant of the deaths of thousands of innocent people. But could I see it at the time? I don't know. And this is where I just, I guess I'm just slightly agnostic where I have often said off camera, off microphone. I've said, I don't wanna talk about it because it's news. And I don't understand-- - We like having the distance. - Exactly. - We like having the distance. - Exactly. - We like having the history of being future people. Exactly. 30 years later, I could laugh at this stupid thing as you guys did. While I'm in the midst of it personally, I don't wanna have a-- - I don't know. I guess I don't know. - Yes. - That's what I'm saying. - No, I think that's totally for it. I think that's very smart of you. - And I think it makes sense to ask the question. But as you point out, as you're asking the question, you're also listening to the experts. You're also saying, I am going to social distance. I am gonna wear a mask. I am going to shut things down. - Yeah, no, it's not a critique of what's going on. It's just a question for me about, I am just not sure if there's an element of panic or not. And I don't know until we're out of the situation and I can look back on it with that kind of calmness of 10 years distance. - I like the future smug. - Yeah. - But I also think Nathan, your point was really good. It's like, well, what is the impact of that panic or that response? Is it taking precautions or in the case of 9/11, is it like soul searching as a country and saying, how could something like this happen? Maybe there's some history we need to resolve. Maybe there's some relationships we need to fix instead of waging false wars. - Or having a legislation that says things like we should have locking cockpit doors. - Right. - That was very reasonable. It was a very reasonable response. - So it depends what your response is. Like in this case, taking precautions versus becoming showing racism against people from China because you're worried that they're bringing it here. - Or drinking bleach. - Right, or drinking bleach. So I think our response does matter as well in sort of evaluating it. - So we come to Douglas Adams constant refrain in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Don't panic. - But sometimes be afraid. (laughing) - But sometimes better. - Like you should still dread. But when you dread, dread sharp. (laughing) - Real sharp. - So clearly we have to revisit a bunch of these these things and we will. We've got a lot of episodes lined up now in this area where we can revisit this important idea of the mass panic and the moral panic. In the meantime, let's talk social media. We have a new thing that I wanna talk about. Which is a Lena has started to TikTok. - Yes, you leave on even no other that is. - And I think the way I used it in that sentence was completely incorrect. - I'll show you my TikTok videos later. But yeah, I'm on TikTok and I do direct people to our podcast Instagram. So maybe we'll have some new listeners from that as well. - Yes, so I'm gonna direct people from the podcast to a Lena's TikTok. - Oh, well thank you. - So, Elena, do you wanna explain how people can find you? - Oh, it's just my personal Instagram, which is the handle is AMPAPAYA. It's like M papaya. So yeah, you can find me there. - Cool. - It's really fun. - We have an email address. - Which is? - Not doing it. - Pod, oh my god. - Podcast. - The podcast at theuncoverup.com? - Yes. - Yes. - Podcast at theuncoverup.com. - I should have just gone with confidence. - Yeah. - Okay, so email us and actually can I give a shout out to our fan in Japan? - Yeah. - Because we got a lovely email from George. And it was a real pleasure to read. - It was. - I think motivated us to do this episode a little earlier that we might have. Just, you know, happy fan mail really does reach us. It makes us feel good. So, thank you. - Thank you George. - We're the best fans. - I do. - All of the messages that we get sent from people I really enjoy listening. - Yeah. - And some of them actually, like that, remember Sockfoot? - Sockfoot? - We've been cryptid. - Yeah, we went on like a three episode binge. - Oh my god. - Yeah. - We're already on episode four of our three part cryptid series. - Yeah. I know we still are missing the new Jersey devil. - No, he did one. - Oh. - He doesn't listen to this podcast. - I totally do. But I missed it. - Nathan was just like motivated one day and just did it himself. - Okay. - Well I live in the bunker. So it's easier. Okay, so that was email, TikTok, Instagram. - Instagram. - Instagram. - We're getting very close to me having to put a tattoo. - Really? - Yes we are. - Really? The more people we get on Instagram, the closer we get to me having to get a tattoo on my arm of a UFO. - All right, so more people get on there at the uncover up on Instagram. - Yeah. And we have contests and stuff and like postcard giveaways. - Yeah. - Okay, cool. - And you can see what we all look like. - Yeah. I was going to make a bad joke about the contest how we could send them a letter in the mail with just flower inside but I appreciate that joke So what are listeners? We're not going to do that but I do like my idea Yeah, I like it too [Music]