Jul 25, 2022, 7:45 PM

@Ghost said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

the mass hysteria that comes with normalizing this sort of "witch hunt" behavior.

I find it fascinating that the last two years of the MU hobby, and this board in particular, have been showing all the classical signs of a Moral Panic, "a public mass movement, based on false or exaggerated perceptions or information that exceeds the actual threat society is facing. Moral panic is a widespread fear and often an irrational threat to society's values, interests, and safety."

  1. Concern - MSB displays a heightened concern about certain groups or categories. Namely, the already-mentioned ten-or-so bad actors that crop up occasionally, and people that they assume are 'like them' based on some characteristic or another.

  2. Hostility -The group experiencing the moral panic starts to identify people that think or act differently than they do, and start expressing increased aggression and antagonism toward them, often using hyperbole and inflammatory language to draw attention to what they feel is an issue.

  3. Consensus - The group experiencing the moral panic, even if in a minority, starts to cross-talk to try to come up with a definition of Deviants. This becomes the target group, and while there can be minor dissent among the ranks, major dissent labels you another part of the Deviants, which is a socially damaging thing to do.

  4. Disproportionality - Given the consequences of being labelled a Deviant, the calls for actions to be taken continue to escalate. This is where we start to see some of the performative nonsense that we've been seeing on this board in the not-too-distant past, with people making sure to be very visible and very seen despite their calls not passing any test related to common sense, so the definition of Deviant gets broader and the calls for action get harsher. You start attributing the label of Deviant to people just for the social capital that it gets you with the in-group, and since you bear absolutely no consequences for being wrong, there is nothing to stop you from doing it.

  5. Volatility - It comes in fits and starts. It's not a sustained effort save in the case of a scant few people who constantly beat that drum. It can flare up again with some provocation, but for the most part it burns itself out in time. But the extremity of the situation goes down at a much slower rate, and people are quick to jump all the way up to 11 when it flares up again.

I really do think that a lot of this is just pearl-clutching in the vein of the classic moral panics. You might catch a few bad actors but at the expense of dragnetting your shit through society (see: Rock and Roll, Communists, Satanic Panic, Think of the Children, Pit Bulls, Black Crime, War on Drugs, Obesity/Fat, I could list these for days...)