How Moral Panic Hijacks Individual Autonomy
(Essay from Rhetoric and Writing, Spring 2023)
(CW: Child abuse, violence, mentions of SA)
Anthony Burgess, author of the infamous 1962 science fiction novel, A Clockwork Orange, wrote in 1986:
[A] human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good
and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork
orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and
juice, but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since
this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State. (Burgess)
While most of popular culture is familiar with A Clockwork Orange primarily through Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film adaptation, the original argument of Burgess’ novel revolves around how regulated or synthetically-enforced morality ceases to be moral in and of itself. Moral panics, such as those in the 1980s, further beg critical reflection upon Burgess’ claim. Government attempts to regulate a designed morality isn’t a new phenomenon.
A brief glance at just the last few hundred years showcases fear over witchcraft in the 1600s, the “Red Scares” over communism of the 1920s and 1950s, the Satanic Panic and “video nasties” epidemics of the 1980s, and the common mantra of “violent video games cause violence” so popular in the 1990s and 2000s. But while, on the surface, protection of “morality” may be well-intentioned, the propaganda that often defines morality tends to lead to further division and discrimination, thus endangering the very communities these laws claim to defend.
Propaganda has been around for as long as people sought to persuade one another of a specific viewpoint. Some of the most recognizable forms of propaganda stem from World War II back in the 1940s. A number of racial slurs were used to define and identify the Japanese, Germans, and other enemies of the USA in posters, cartoons, recruitment flyers, and more. Racial slurs are a very common type of “name-calling” (Jackall) which serves to distance the target of propaganda from their humanity in the eyes and ears of the audience.
And, while name-calling is often viewed as childish, a social reality—a construct of reality where the only input into the group comes from within the group (Pratkanis and Johnson)—that approves of demonizing another group of people runs the risk of causing great harm. Dr. David Eagleman talks about the risks of dehumanization from a neurological perspective in his video, The Brain: Why Do I Need You? According to Eagleman, the human brain is fundamentally wired to need community. This need draws individuals close together into “in- groups” organized by interests, beliefs, and ideologies. But like Isaac Newton’s Third Law in which every action has an equal and opposite reaction, each in-group has an “out-group,” or agroup (or groups) that in some way opposes the values of each in-group (The Brain: Why DoI Need You?).
Christians and Satanists. Liberals and conservatives. Pro-life and pro-choice. Countless examples exist. And while there’s beauty in such diversity of thought and opinion, when unchecked power is given to a specific in-group it can court devastating effects for those on the outside. Eagleman goes on to show how the brain categorizes objects and people differently. When the brain “dehumanizes” a person or group, that person or group is quite literally viewed as an object, or “objectified.” Furthermore, when the brain demotes a person to an object, neurally, the brain’s pain matrix—the connections allowing individuals to feel empathy—is dulled. Simply put, when one group strips the humanity of the other they cannot, on a biological, neurological level, feel the same empathy or sensitivity toward that person (The Brain: Why Do I Need You?).
On an extreme scale, the world has seen this type of objectification in tragedies such as the Holocaust in the 1940s or the Cambodian Massacre in the 1970s, just to name a few. But this sort of in-group versus out-group extremism doesn’t only exist on scales of genocide; it also influences the more concentrated epidemics of moral panic—social phenomenons in which an in-group declares the very idea of right versus wrong to be under attack.
One of the more recent, more famous moral panics is that of the Satanic Panic in the United States in the 1980s. Given the popularity of Netflix’s Stranger Things, American popular culture has experienced an ongoing resurgence of ‘80s nostalgia—but without a whole lot of reflection on the darker aspects of the time. The 1980s gave us Back to the Future, the internet, and popularized Dungeons and Dragons, but it also held the aftermath of the Vietnam War, a truly shocking number of serial killers, and the ongoing, pained shift of American society to adapt in the wake of the Civil Rights and “free love” movements of the 1960s.
In response to the turbulence of the last few decades, a number of Christian denominations put aside minor differences to band together against the seemingly godless direction culture seemed to be evolving toward (Melton). By the 1980s, evangelical Christianity had established a significant foothold in the ear of government. President Ronald Reagan stepped into the oval office in 1981 and would not depart until 1989, during which time he formed a fast friendship with British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. Reagan and Thatcher shared similar values of political conservatism and moral absolution (Young)—the belief that there’s an absolute right and wrong regardless of cultural or social context—thus laying the foundation for even feathery “threats” to morality to be taken with the utmost seriousness.
According to Sarah Hughes’ essay, “American Monsters: Tabloid Media and the
Satanic Panic, 1970-2000,” the Satanic Panic began to take root when Ray Buckey, a member of the McMartin preschool staff, was accused of child molestation (Hughes). Hughes states that “[i]n part, the panic stemmed from national anxieties surrounding the recently articulated problem of child abuse” since President Nixon signed an act acknowledging the reality of child abuse (Hughes). This fear mixed with the ongoing instability of the nation from constant social change, war, and competing morality was planted into the fertile ground of evangelical Christianity’s presidentially-supported pressure to reclaim an increasingly “godless” nation. These various factors created the perfect storm for demons to be spotted behind every unfamiliar tree.
Evangelicals and President Reagan alike leaned heavily into the dialogue of persecuted Christianity within the United States, which gave clout to the rumors that satanic cults were running rampant in secret tunnels sacrificing the country’s children. While ideas of free love, anti-war, and carnality presided in droves throughout the sixties, conservatives didn’t seem to recognize that the political climate had pendulumed in their favor by the mid-1970s and 1980s. With Reagan’s rhetorical power—likely further honed due to his prior career as an actor—any narrative that involved a threat to good, god-fearing folk carried weight on a national level.
In Ronald Reagan’s 1984 speech, “Politics and Morality Are Inseparable”, he highlights to the nation how, “We even had to pass…a special law in the Congress just a few weeks ago—to allow student prayer groups the same access to school rooms after classes that a Young Marxist Society, for example, would already enjoy with no opposition” (Reagan). By this point, the largest “in-group” of the nation had become that of evangelical Christianity, helmed by the United States president himself. Evangelical Christianity gradually became synonymous with Christian nationalism due to misunderstanding between “fundamentalism” and “evangelicalism” within the public lexicon. Christianity, by the 1980s, had largely shifted to a crusader mindset where anything outside of a Christian worldview presented a moral threat to the very soul of society.
While Reagan claimed, “[w]e establish no religion in this country nor will we ever; we command no worship, we mandate no belief” (Reagan), he contradicts this statement by immediately following up with, “But we poison our society when we remove its theological underpinnings; we court corruption when we leave it bereft of belief” (Reagan). In this way, Reagan “transfers” a sense of integrity and divine authority from the Christian church and presents himself as representing the interests of God Himself (Jackall). This type of transfer works in tandem with multiple propaganda techniques. Glittering generalities displays itself where Reagan dims the light of atheism with terms like “poison” and “court corruption,” while showering Christian ideology with ties to morality, integrity, and profundity (Jackall).
Transfer also plays with a version of the “plain folk” technique, in which Reagan infers how everyone is “in this together” when talking about our society and how we court corruption (Jackall). While propaganda, just like any other tool, is morally neutral, its usage should always be critically examined—especially when utilized at a high level of power to herd others toward a specific morality. This type of moral absolutism may have been intended to herd the masses toward something objectively “good,” but it instead empowered one very large group to ostracize other, smaller groups through the lens of moral superiority.
Chas Critcher goes a step further in defining this type of propaganda in his article
“Widening the Focus: Moral Panic as Moral Regulation” published in the British Journal of Criminology. Critcher states, “We call this moral regulation: a project of normalizing, rendering natural, taken for granted, in a word ‘obvious,’ what are in fact ontological and epistemological premises of a particular and historical form of social order” (Critcher). In short, moral regulation nurtures specific definitions of “good” and “bad” as absolute regardless of cultural context or background. This conversation would never end if expanded to the nuances of the Third World (a term which is problematic in its own right), however even in the context of First World countries like the United States and Great Britain there exists a number of epistemological difficulties.
For example, “don’t kill people” may be seen as common sense. However, when someone is faced with an assailant, what is the “right” choice? To die at the hands of a murderer? Or to kill him first? Of course, this is an extremely simplified perspective on a dilemma covered by multitudes of laws, philosophers, and theologians, but it presents the question over how even something that may seem “obvious” has countless layers.
Moral regulation leads to a curated and, for lack of better wording, “groomed” populace who believes a culturally or religiously-defined set of guidelines define “good” and “bad” in the eyes of all worldviews. And, while the United States was doing an excellent impression of a national dumpster fire during the 1980s in response to the fear of a non-existing threat of satanic cults, Great Britain experienced its own panic under Margaret Thatcher’s very similar set of values.
In 1959 Britain updated the Obscene Publications Act, a law originally instituted back in 1857 to moderate publications for objectionable content (“Obscene Publications Act”). The 1959 updates loosened the corset of the initial law, thus allowing British citizens to peek out from under the skirt of the Victorian Era and create less restricted works without threat of conviction “if publication was ‘in the interests of science, literature, art or learning’” (“Obscene Publications Act”). Of course, in the wake of relaxed censorship came the Swinging Sixties—a period where youthful rebellion became mainstream, The Beatles changed the course of music, and “fun” became the lifestyle of choice (Green). The 1960s gave the world James Bond films and the United States the MPAA rating system, which is still used today. The 1970s and 1980s, in turn, brought about what some consider to be the Golden Age of Horror (Navarro) and, in Britain, a list of “video nasties.”
By 1984, the fear of children grabbing hold of freshly-minted, unregulated VHS copies of depraved films like The Evil Dead (1981) or Possession (1981) or some Dario Argento Italian giallo flick hit peak panic. The British Board of Film Certification, or BBFC, was put in charge of screening, rating, and censoring films in accordance with the new Video Recordings Act. In collaboration with the Obscene Publications Act, this gave the British government the power to prosecute film creators and distributors who put forth works deemed “obscene.” This “unofficial” list of “video nasties” allegedly added up to seventy-two films, though not all were prosecuted (Whitworth, Hutchinson). However, in an effort to regulate the morality of media, video nasties gained their own underground, cult following of gritty film buffs. And while a number of the films are intended as trashy schlock intended to entertain as self-proclaimed garbage, others remain classics to this day.
Censorship never has the intended effect of minimizing interest and distribution. Chas Critcher argues in his article on moral regulation that “what the state effectively does, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, is to seek to remake the citizen as a subject and thus to create new kinds of subjectivity” (Critcher). Critcher examines various theories that put forth the idea that moral panic scapegoats an undesirable group as a threat to what the government wants society to, in turn, believe is actually desirable. This is the very idea Anthony Burgess explores in A Clockwork Orange, even as he himself despises his own novel as “as odorous as a crateful of bad eggs with the miasma of original sin” (Burgess).
Burgess shows that having a sharp moral line oneself doesn’t grant one permission to remake others in that very image. Critcher states that the moral regulation “involves changing the behavior and identity of the perpetrators. Indirectly, it may also require this of the regulators themselves” (Critcher). To indulge in moral panic is to establish its own, cult-like “bandwagon” (Jackall) lifeboat for people clamor aboard—even if that involves renovating ones personal identity and values.
Regulating morality on such a superficial level as film may seem small, however even that tiny wave can lead to unintended—but massive—consequences for society as a whole. Julian Petley wrote for a 1994 edition of the British Journal Review on “In Defence of Video Nasties.” Here, Petley argues that there’s a “worrying prevalence of attempts to hitch the ‘nasty’ bandwagon to now-fashionable ideas about the ‘underclass,’ or the ‘undeserving poor,’ as they used to be called in Victorian times.” He expands on this idea in the rest of his paper to warn of a trend where “nasty” media became associated with poverty and, thus, further dehumanized those already impoverished as equally unpleasant.
According to Petley, this link between unpleasant people and unpleasant media was being utilized as an excuse to strip governmental support for the underprivileged (Petley). Here, again, is another example of “transferring” the ideas of one thing (fictional, violent film) onto the face of another (those who are unpleasant to look at according to the uppercrust) (Jackall). It likely cannot be overstated how such “small” decisions as film censorship can snowball into the dangerously large-scale in-group and out-group dynamics Eagleman warns about in The Brain: Why Do I Need You?
While Petley argues that equating certain media material as “nasty” threatens to empower a trend of associating unpleasant fiction with underprivileged reality, there are other consequences to such fierce demonization of interests, story types, and more. From a strictly technical perspective, one famous video nasty is Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980) which, while not a defense for its real-life killing of animals, introduced a fresh form of storytelling via the “mockumentary” or “found footage” style. This has continued to evolve over the years giving us a whole new subset of filmic art.
While The Evil Dead (1980) is certainly not everyone’s cup of tea (it is not mine), it did shoot today’s director Sam Raimi into the spotlight where he has gone on to even contribute to the Marvel cinematic universe. But on a more personal and intimate level, Andrzej Żuławski’s film, Possession (1981) offers something thematically weightier.
While it certainly fits the category for “body horror,” its story places the horrors of broken marriage in a material form. As cliche as it may sound, the real monster in Possession isn’t the monster itself but the destructive grief and guilt and anger swirling within the hearts of the unhappy and increasingly-violent couple (Hutchinson). Even the notorious brutality of Last House on the Left (1972) has been tied to the fears of American society around Vietnam (Berlatsky). In horror film, bad things happen, but oftentimes those bad things have a reason—and often those bad things are relatable to more people than just those who speak their minds.
In Xavier Burgen’s documentary, Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror, Oscar- winning director Jordan Peele states, “I think anything we suppress as people, anything that we push down and hold deep is going to explode. It’s going to come out in a nasty way if it’s held on to long enough” (Burgin). Films, books, music, any kind of art, really, all offer safe spaces for pain to be seen, shared, and healed. For example, while some people will see Żuławski’s Possession as repugnant and glorifying the messiness of divorce, others going through separation may find solace in the fact their internal pain can be seen, visually, through the film’s story.
Even today, more and more people are coming forward to speak of their experiences of using horror film to process trauma, grief, loss, and more (Millar and Lee). Like Peele stated earlier, people who don’t have a safe outlet to express their pain will often turn to expressing that very pain in much darker ways than by watching a film. That’s not to say that film is innocent from seeking to drive people to their own filmic ideas of morality, but a fictional film has less legal and social consequence than a governmental narrative. Returning to Anthony Burgess’ hated work offers a study in how easy it is to shift a thematic message.
A Clockwork Orange received a film adaptation by the legendary Stanley Kubrick in 1971—fifteen years before Burgess wrote his angry forward A Clockwork Orange Resucked to open his novel. Burgess uses the roughly-seven-page essay to catalog the journey of A Clockwork Orange to publication in the United States—a journey that happened to end in a different version of the novel altogether. While the international release of A Clockwork Orange included twenty-one chapters, the American release only included twenty. Kubrick’s film was adapted from the American release, thus leaving Americans with a very different imprint of the story of A Clockwork Orange than Burgess intended.
While both Kubrick’s film and Burgess’ book follow the violent adventures of the hooligan Alex in a dystopian future where he and his gang murder, rape, and beat whomever they desire, Kubrick’s film ends with Alex returning to a life of violence after breaking the forcibly-installed brainwashing done to him by the government. However, Burgess’ book originally ended with Alex finding the emptiness in his violent, immoral lifestyle and “recognises that human energy is better expended on creation than destruction” (Burgess). According to Burgess, his New York publisher viewed Americans as tougher than the British; Americans were more willing to handle a very hard truth: people sucked. While Burgess’ original ending encapsulated his hope for humanity, the bandwagon of American grit declared all they wanted was more edge to their literature, thus alienating any sense of hope amidst an already hopeless time.
Critcher states how “there is an unclear boundary between the moral and the cultural” (Critcher). Oftentimes society will project their own evolved idea of what is good for them onto other groups. All of humanity needs a spot to belong, however by pressuring, manipulating, and herding others toward a narrow idea of “good” or “respectful” or “moral” only serves to ostracize others who are uninterested—or incapable—of fitting into a specific box. When we call other groups names, we dehumanize them, thus setting a standard for how a good and just society is only open to the subjectively good and just people. Studying propaganda, studying the patterns in which something as basic as protection of the innocent (the Satanic Panic) or protection of purity (the Video Nasties Panic) lead to something ever- so-slightly twisted as to suggest damage equips us to become better people.
Nuance is the key to true grace, to true tolerance, and to true community with each other. But when all is said and done, each person must choose how hard they are willing to work to understand and care for and love their neighbor. Will they kneel to regulated morality? Will they abandon the responsibility of autonomy? In the words of Anthony Burgess, “Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.”
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