Canceling the Subscription
The pursuit of peace is not merely the pursuit of the absence of violence, because peace is never achieved until justice is achieved. And justice is not achieved until everyone’s interests are addressed. So, you will never actually finish addressing everyone’s issues. There will always be unfinished business. You can’t achieve peace unless it is accompanied by constant striving to address the issues of justice. This means your job will never end.
—The Peacemaker (interpretation by John Mohawk, Akwesasne Notes)
Widespread disinformation on social media and the distrust of more reputable sources share common roots with the cancel culture of the 1980s and 90s. Perhaps there is something we can learn from that comparison.
Both eras featured unsubstantiated claims snowballing into social ostracism. The 80’s had Satanic Panic (a good name for a heavy metal band) with lurid tales of ritual abuse of children in places like churches and day care centers. There are lessons there.
Accusations were made that teachers at the McMartin Preschool in California had sexually abused and tortured children in bizarre Satanic rituals. Between a combination of social workers’ incompetence and leading questions, the children’s accusations grew ever more bizarre. In addition to being molested by Ray Buckey and his mother, Peggy McMartin, the children alleged that they had been made to participate in satanic rites in which they were forced to drink the blood of a baby whom they had witnessed being sacrificed in church. The children also said that they saw witches fly, that they had been abused in a hot air balloon and in tunnels beneath the preschool, and one child claimed to have been sexually molested by actor Chuck Norris.
Other children added that, after being abused in secret rooms, they were flushed down toilets, then cleaned up and presented to their parents. Although the accusations were incredible, they came at a time when the country was in the grip of widespread fears of ritual sexual abuse of children, connected in some way to satanic worship and dark magic rites. With elections drawing near, an ambitious Los Angeles District Attorney unscrupulously capitalized on the public hysteria and charged the McMartin family with 208 counts of child molestation. After a 3-year trial, the allegations were found unfounded, but not before teachers had been jailed, reputations had been ruined, and the school had been destroyed.
Teachers at the Fells Acres Day School in Massachusetts were similarly accused of sexually abusing children and engaging in Satanic rituals. The accusations grew increasingly bizarre. The convictions were eventually overturned after the elderly teachers had served years in jail and their school was financially destroyed, as were 7 other preschools in the area.
At the root of the hysteria were Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and patient Michelle Smith (whom he later married), who co-authored a book during 1977–1978 therapy sessions using now-discredited recovered-memory hypnosis. Smith “recalled” events from age 5 (1954–1955) in Victoria, BC—torture, infant sacrifice, burial alive, and encounters with Satan Himself, facilitated by Smith’s mother and a Church of Satan cult said to predate Christianity.
Published as nonfiction, Michelle Remembers was widely distributed by Pocket Books, and Smith appeared on Oprah (the TikTok of its day), describing multiple personality disorder and repressed horrors, enthralling millions of viewers. Dr. Pazder, who had a Catholic missionary background, was hired as an expert consultant at the McMartin trial, where he described hypnotically “recovered” memories of children and regaled police and PTA with tales of underground tunnels, basement temples and human sacrifice.
It would be funny had it not sent innocent daycare operators to jail for years, and no tunnels were found during extensive excavations. Not to be out-Oprahed, Geraldo (the Snapchat of his day) saturated the AM radio talk-o-sphere and checkout aisles of supermarkets with Satan-hunting stories. He even hosted a primetime special, One Million Satanists. That national frenzy had generated more than 12,000 criminal cases of Satanist cult accusations by 1990. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, maintained by the University of California, the University of Michigan, and Michigan State University, as of 2024, there have been 3,524 exonerations of persons found guilty and imprisoned since 1989. They estimate that more than 31,900 years are lost for victims of false accusations. In the McMartin preschool case, the initial charge came from a psychologically disturbed mother who later committed suicide.
The kind of viewership being garnered by Oprah and Geraldo did not escape the attention of then-President Ronald Reagan, who directed his Attorney General, William French Smith, to lean on FBI Director William Webster to set up a behavioral science task force led by Special Agent Kenneth Lanning, who, between 1984 and 1992, examined over 300 Satanic ritual abuse claims nationwide. His 1992 report concluded that no hard evidence of organized Satanic cults committing ritual abuse existed and most reports stemmed from coercive child interviewing, “recovered memories,” and media hype rather than facts.
It didn’t matter. Under White House pressure, the Bureau ran seminars for local police on “Satanic crimes,” trained officers in spotting occult indicators (e.g., black clothing, heavy metal CDs, nose rings), and formed special FBI units. Although he garnered a large evangelical voting bloc for the GOP, President Reagan had fueled a feedback loop in which suspicion became self-fulfilling. It was the Antifa of its day. It was the Cancel Culture.
Social media not only facilitated the creation of self-reinforcing outrage cycles in which denial fuels guilt; it also monetized the medium and minted thousands of influence millionaires.
While Satanism and witches seemed to have run their course by the turn of the century, pedophilia became a bankable standard with the cancel culture and a vote-getter for pandering pols. The new generation of “moral entreprenuers” whether their currency was actual money, grifts, or political points, became the dominant influencers of a Gen Z ethos. Social media not only facilitated the creation of self-reinforcing outrage cycles in which denial fuels guilt; it also monetized the medium and minted thousands of influence millionaires. Ask the average high school student today what they aspire to be. If they are not already an elite athlete or a coding nerd, chances are that “influencer” ranks high.
Where pre-internet panics relied on broadcast gatekeepers (TV, print, federal regulators), limiting speed and scale and taking weeks to months to reach 10 to 20 million people, by 2020, hashtag campaigns that bypassed verification could pawn off fake narratives to a billion eyeballs within hours. Accountability was immediately transformed into punishment, regardless of the accused’s protestations or the facts of the matter. Facts had become unimportant. What mattered was revenue from the attention economy. Securing that revenue required no research or legwork (apart from some syncopated dance steps)—merely a race to the bottom of the brainstem.
QAnon’s “Pizzagate” (2016) explicitly revived 1980s pedophile cults, spreading via Facebook/Reddit before mutating into MAGA narratives. Cancel culture weaponized similar binaries, dropping reconstructed memory in favor of unquestioned belief in the statements of “survivors.”
It might be said that Gen Z is the most socially aware and digitally inclined generation. It could also be said that they are the most easily manipulated by the new media. While most Gen Zers may not identify with cancel culture, they exhibit a similar pattern of virtue signalling. Cancel culture originated with African American empowerment struggles, notably the civil rights boycotts in the 1950s and 1960s. By targeting powerful, influential, and well-insulated individuals and organizations, they exerted economic pressure that, in many cases, was more effective at bringing about change than traditional political tools. (Owens 2023) In its better iterations, cancel culture drew a spotlight to issues such as sexism, racism, and abuse. It encouraged people to become informed about the gravity and nuances of the issue. (Celentano 2021)
The ICE Cloud
There was also a dark side: cancel culture did not afford the niceties of due process, the presumption of innocence, standards of proof, or most of the jurisprudential achievements of truth-finding over the past 5000 years. Its goal was to inflict punishment without any of that, and to add to, rather than heal, collective trauma by eliminating any option for recovery, empathy or forgiveness.
A recent peer-reviewed study in Acta Psychologica (Roldan 2024) reported:
The study found that while the inclination to cancel someone was sometimes balanced by a belief in a just world and desire to see fair procedures and outcomes, “this default response of Gen Zs can be swayed by facilitating conditions, which they are vulnerable to, since they spend at least 3 hours on social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.”
Pedophilia plays an outsized role in contemporary accusations because it makes such visceral political fodder. There is a collective guilt about neglected attention to child abuse that dates back to at least Victorian times; a pressure-cooker atmosphere on the part of the authorities to put a stop to abuse; zealous parental protective instinct; and the susceptibility of children to false memory implantation. These can and do combine to produce social hysteria. Today, obtaining information from increasingly unreliable sources that monetize our news feeds by exploiting our susceptibility to excitement or outrage, we can too easily derive our facts from opinions rather than our opinions from facts.
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| Statistical study by Aella of Fetish Tabooness and Popularity (v.3) Aug 10, 2023 https://substack.com/home/post/p-135913095 |
Once a claim progresses to the stage of social hysteria, it can take on a life of its own. L.D. Spiegel, in “The phenomenon of child abuse hysteria as a social syndrome: The case for a new kind of expert testimony” (Institute of Psychological Therapies, 1990), wrote:
As one might suspect, uncongregated movements can evolve into congregated ones (Light & Keller, 1975). Some of the more common examples are the civil rights and women’s movements of the past two decades. The advent of mass media seems to have aided these transformations. One can only surmise that had there been network news coverage of the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, it may have grown to a national epidemic. Courtrooms all over the country might have been overflowing with witch trials, as they are now with child abuse proceedings.
It is the electronic media which has provided the vehicle to transform uncongregated movements into a congregated mass media audience. The medium is, in part, the message. (McLuhan, 1967). One could make a case for the fact that the current child abuse phenomenon has resulted from just that.
There really is child abuse on a vast scale going on in society, but not where most expect to find it, Epstein Island notwithstanding. Children who came of age with the web, social media, and smartphones show measurable changes in social behavior and brain development, and some signs of epigenetic modulation, but the evidence is mixed, often correlational, and does not always justify sweeping causal claims. In high‑income countries, smartphone ownership and daily internet use have now become common. We are in the midst of a vast social experiment. Our children are the caged lab mice. Talk about child abuse?
As the youth of the 2010s enter their twenties in the 2020s and thirties in the 2030s, we are witnessing the accession to power and control within society of the first generations to have survived these experiments. The changes wrought are largely unknown, but the coming generations of those who will govern us will have had networked screens present throughout their key developmental period.
Studies of constant connectivity and rapid responsiveness to stimuli from smart devices point to the role of social pressures. These may be mimetic (copying elders or peers), coercive (expectations from peers, schools, or parents), or normative (perceived standards set by respected persons). The tendency is to reinforce persistent, sticky use of devices and associated conformity, such as dependence on particular media platforms from pre-teen through college age. The more time adolescents spend on smartphones, the greater the coercive and normative pressures to conform to groupthink and, paradoxically, the greater the pressure to spend more time on the devices. It’s a self-reinforcing loop.
Combine these trends—device addiction; mass hysteria ginned up by misinformation; vast, almost inconceivable, enrichment of the unscrupulous purveyors of the technology; real world consequences of that monetary concentration such as rigged elections, deregulated A.I., nuclear weapons, public health epidemic protection, environmental poisoning and climate change (exacerbated by data centers and rocket flights)—and you have all the ingredients for near-term human extinction.
In Goliath’s Curse, Luke Kemp provides numerous examples of harmonious societies that withstood droughts, pestilence, foreign invasions, and plagues—often for many centuries—only to be brought low when climate change or a viral outbreak coincided with unchecked political corruption and income inequality.
Hubris is a theme as ancient as literature and drama. In the early days of the World Wide Web, there was no shortage of grandiose optimism emanating from Silicon Valley about how liberating it would be to society to have unlimited, free access to all the world’s knowledge. To a degree, that happened. Software such as search engines and now chatbots provides us with easy tools to overcome barriers across languages, cultures, and physical libraries. Most of us carry a thousand Libraries of Alexandria in our pockets.
We are like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. No special training or certification is required. Any child with a smartphone can access the master’s universe of knowledge, most of it good, but some of it evil. Whether we naked apes with all our genetic and epigenetic drives survive this great gift is an open question. We have sown the wind. We will reap the whirlwind.
What is the way back?
The Satanist pedophile cults meme of the 1980s did not entirely disappear, but it diminished, in large part because it got stale. People were overexposed, realized it was a ruse, and moved on to other cultural narratives.
I sometimes compare Donald Trump to pus. The modern science of immunization began when pus from pox wounds, or the dried scabs, were scratched into the skin or blown into the noses of healthy people. By “variolation,” hosts would build immunity while they were fit and best able to fend off the more debilitating effects of the infectious disease. Variolation was practiced in China and India from at least the 15th century, spread by the Silk Road to the Ottoman Empire, and reached Europe and North America in the 1600s–1700s. Modern vaccination (from Latin vacca, “cow”) began in 1796, when English physician Edward Jenner used cowpox sores to immunize an 8‑year‑old boy.
In my analogy, the immediate disease is viral disinformation. Symptoms include mass hysterias, unfettered persecutions, and a breakdown of the social contract. The causes are multiferious and that is the discussion we have been having. I am not suggesting that all of those causes can be eliminated, or even addressed, by the societal immune system as it currently exists. The treatment I prescribe is an injection of pus; ie, Donald Trump.
My hope is that global society will develop, by ultimate recognition and rejection of this monster, herd immunity in the form of a healthy skepticism of social media, algorithms, A.I. overlords, nuclear power and weapons (a coupled pair), billionaire wealth, influence in elections, concentration of power, and the robustness of our constitutional safeguards. This blog is my substitute for the jab queue at Walgreens. The mRNA vaccine is tricky but doable: recode the algorithms to favor social harmony, truth-seeking, peace, justice, and the better angels of our nature. It will need to be universal—which is the role of consensus multilateralism at the United Nations. According to UNESCO:
The protection of human rights and dignity is the cornerstone of the Recommendation, based on the advancement of fundamental principles such as transparency and fairness, always remembering the importance of human oversight of AI systems.
However, what makes the Recommendation exceptionally applicable are its extensive Policy Action Areas, which allow policymakers to translate the core values and principles into action with respect to data governance, environment and ecosystems, gender, education and research, and health and social wellbeing, among many other spheres.
The benefit of this approach is that this same one-shot treatment will work to address climate change, nuclear disarmament, forever chemicals, biodiversity loss, and the entire host of threats we have to confront if we intend to survive. UNESCO has said as much, and is working in all those areas. You can call it social engineering, a la B.F. Skinner, but would you rather have a random behavioral program or would you prefer something akin to the Zeroth Law of Robotics — “A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm”?
References
Asimov, I., Prelude to Foundation (1988).
Brenner, G.H. (2021). Gen Z and workplace bullying, ghosting, and cancel culture Psychology Today (July, 2021)
Celentano D. (2021). Cancel Culture: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, The Science Survey (April, 2021).
Dershowitz, A. (2023). Cancel Culture: The Latest Attack on Free Speech and Due Process (Skyhorse: 2023).
Kaplan, S. L., & Kaplan, S. J. (1981). The child’s accusation of sexual abuse during a divorce and custody struggle. The Hillside Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 3(1), 81-95.
Light, D. Jr., & Keller, S. (1975). Sociology (pp. 520-543). New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
McLuhan, M. (1967). The Medium is the Message. New York: Bantam Books.
Meerloo Joost. The Rape of the Mind. New York: Grosset & Dunlap; 1961.
Mulroy. C. (2023). How old is gen Z? These are the years that the generation was born. USA Today (June 13, 2023).
Owens, E. (2023). Why cancel culture is good for democracy, Rolling Stone (February 20, 2023).
Tondo M. (2023). The “cancel culture” trend: LGBTQ+, call for accountability or a social punishment? Lampoon Magazine
Rabinowitz, D., (2004). No crueler tyrannies: Accusation, false witness, and other terrors of our times. Simon and Schuster.
Roldan, C. J. L., Ong, A. K. S., & Tomas, D. Q. (2024). Cancel culture in a developing country: A belief in a just world behavioral analysis among generation Z. Acta Psychologica, 248, 104378.
Stelzmann, D., Jahnke, S. and Kuhle, L.F., 2020. Media coverage of pedophilia: Benefits and risks from healthcare practitioners’ point of view. International journal of environmental research and public health, 17(16), p.5739.
Victor, Jeffrey S., Moral panics and the social construction of deviant behavior: A theory and application to the case of ritual child abuse. Sociological Perspectives 41.3 (1998): 541-565.
World Health Organization (WHO), A Brief History of Vaccination
Meanwhile, let’s end these wars. We support peace in the West Bank and Gaza and the efforts to end the war in Ukraine immediately. Global Village Institute’s Peace Thru Permaculture initiative has sponsored the Green Kibbutz network in Israel and the Marda Permaculture Farm in the West Bank for over 30 years. It will continue to do so with your assistance. We support Ukrainian families seeking refuge in ecovillages and permaculture farms along the Green Road, and we work to heal collective trauma worldwide through the Pocket Project. You can read about it on the Global Village Institute website (GVIx.org). I appreciate your support.
And speaking of resettling refugees, did you know? A study by Poland’s National Development Bank found that the influx of Ukrainians added between 0.5% and 2.5% to GDP growth and paid more in taxes than they received in benefits.
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#RestorationGeneration.
We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the tremendous old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. Coral reefs rebuilt with biorock build beaches faster than the seas are rising. It is not too late. All of these great works of nature are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize rather than destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.
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