Analysis and Commentary of Fantasyland chapters 37-38
During the 1980's and 90's, mass hysteria was abundant. It didn't help that authority figures and members of the media were continually telling a false narrative that hundreds of thousands of children were being abducted each year. In fact, when we tell kids about "stranger danger," it came directly from this time.
The Denver Post wrote a Pulitzer-prize winning article that debunked this theory, they wrote, “The FBI reports that it had 67 cases of children kidnaped by strangers in 1984. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children says that it has firm records on 142 cases,”
Of course though, this was only just a tiny fraction of the hysteria that was prevalent in eighties America. This doesn't even scratch the surface.
In this time too, there was a wake-up call that childhood rape by figures of authority was more prevalent than ever realised. Now, this too, was taken a stretch over the top. Indeed, a handful of psychologists claimed that they could recover the the recovered repressed memories of childhood abuse victims. This too, however, was just another incarnation of the hysteria that surrounded the child abduction panic. Anyone who suffers could be a victim of childhood sexual abuse, and therefore, if they felt they were victims, in short, then they must be one, was the thought process of these so-called clinicians.
If someone had thought that someone else had abused them, without any evidence, they would be believed because this idea of recovered memories gave fuel to the hysteria that surrounded this time period.
And the last prevalent theory that fuelled mass-hysteria, I will mention, is the idea that Satanic cults were running rampant in every corner of the nation, abusing children, and doing all sorts of horrific crimes that you can think of. The Satanic Panic as it's called.
Rock and Roll was seen as a Satanic plot to corrupt the minds of the youth, and so, in 1983, the band Styx parodied these fears in their album Kilroy Was Here, which tells the story of a Dr. Everett Righteous who is part of the Majority for Music Morality who has entirely banned rock music and thrown all rock performers in prison. Here's the film that accompanied their album if you'd like to get an idea of what it's about:
So, with the idea of recovered memories combined with Satanic fears, a psycologist in Seattle had convinced a woman by the name of Michelle Proby recount memories of her mother being part of a Satanic cult that would torture her for months on end, cage her with snakes, and kill kittens in front of her. Of course, none of it was real, but if sold. It played on the mass hysteria that people had in this time.
After Michelle's story went public, other Americans started claiming the same things had happened to them. But ultimately after enough case studies, clinicians determined that these episodes were caused by a mental disorder that they named Multiple Personality Disorder.
Moving on from the mass hysteria of the eighties, in Chapter 38, it is mentioned that after the release of films such as Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial, many Americans had claimed to have been visited, probed, and temporarily taken away by extra-terrestrial, alien forces. And the claims gained substantial following after a Harvard professor known as John Mack had attended a small conference of alternative physicians, where he learned of a method to recount supernatural consciousness. He claimed to have remembered a past life in Russia and when he was abducted by aliens in a UFO.
Mack, as a psychiatrist, visited patients who had claimed to have been abducted. He called them experiencers instead of patients, and were actively encouraged and believed. He used hypnosis to make his patients recount their abduction memories, many claiming to have had sexual relations with the aliens. According to Mack, humanity had messed the world up so much, and superbeings, either inter-planetary or inter-dimensional angels have come to fix us. More about his work and life here.
So overall, a lot of the hysteria and widespread conspiracy theories we see in American society aren't a relatively new phenomena. Indeed, they have been prevalent since the Salem Witch Trials, and were made widespread, and almost, mainstream during the eighties and early nineties. So the next time you think to yourself about how American society may be on a decline, remember that they are just a sympton of a more underlying problem. Maybe it could be the education system, perhaps the culture. But most importantly, it is always best to educate those who may be misinformed. Allow those who have been swallowed up by hysteria and conspiracy theories a chance to think about what they truly and really think is rational.
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