The Folk Devils and the Public

I see the work of Stanley Cohen referenced in this opinion piece An Analysis of the Recent Climate Change Hysteria by Tim Ball.

Stanley Cohen? Who he? Rings a bell. Cohen was the author of an influential book, Folk Devils and Moral Panics in 1972. ThoughtCo has a good summary of the premise.

A moral panic is a widespread fear, most often an irrational one, that someone or something is a threat to the values, safety, and interests of a community or society at large. Typically, a moral panic is perpetuated by news media, fueled by politicians, and often results in the passage of new laws or policies that target the source of the panic. In this way, moral panic can foster increased social control.

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The theory of moral panic is prominent within the sociology of deviance and crime, and is related to the labeling theory of deviance.

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Stanley Cohen's Theory of Moral Panics

The phrase "moral panic" and the development of the sociological concept is credited to late South African sociologist Stanley Cohen (1942-2013). Cohen introduced the social theory of moral panic in his 1972 book titled Folk Devils and Moral Panics. In the book, Cohen details his study of the public reaction in England to fights between the "mod" and "rocker" youth subcultures of the 1960s and '70s. Through his study of these youth, and the media and public reaction to them, Cohen developed a theory of moral panic that outlines five stages of the process.

1. Something or someone is perceived and defined as a threat to social norms and the interests of the community or society at large.

2. News media and members of the community/society then depict the threat in simplistic symbolic ways that quickly become recognizable to the greater public.

3. Widespread public concern is aroused by the way news media portrays the symbolic representation of the threat.

4. Authorities and policy makers respond to the threat, be it real or perceived, with new laws or policies.

5. The moral panic and actions by those in power that follows it results in social change within the community.

Cohen suggested that there are five key sets of actors involved in the process of moral panic. They are:

1. The threat that incites the moral panic, which Cohen referred to as "folk devils";

2. Enforcers of rules or laws, like institutional authority figures, police, or armed forces;

3. The news media, which breaks the news about the threat and continues to report on it, thereby setting the agenda for how it is discussed, and attaching visual symbolic images to it;

4. Politicians, who respond to the threat, and sometimes fan the flames of the panic;

5. And the public, who develop focused concern about the threat and demand action in response to it.

Many sociologists have observed that those in power ultimately benefit from moral panics, since they lead to increased control of the population, and the reinforcement of the authority of those in charge. Others have commented that moral panics offer a mutually beneficial relationship between news media and the state. For the media, reporting on threats that become moral panics increases viewership and makes money for news organizations (See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media). For the state, the creation of a moral panic can give it cause to enact legislation and laws that would seem illegitimate without the perceived threat at the center of the moral panic (See Stuart Hall, Policing the Crisis).

A corollary to Moral Panics is that, much like the Streisand Effect, moral panics tend, by defining and bringing attention, to create mountains out of molehills and to exacerbate the original issue and the negative consequences of addressing the issue.

In other words, frequently, the underlying wobble in norms will sort itself out and revert to mean but by bringing attention to it, a real issue is created with real world negative consequences arising from solving problems that, left alone, would sove themselves.

I have argued elsewhere that many if not most (virtually all?) our modern faddish issues are products of prosperity. By which I mean that virtually all our people are so far away from the old survival line of starvation and disease prevalent 150 years ago, that individuals and groups of individuals are able to indulge in far more deviant behavior than could have withstood reality just a couple of centuries ago and indulge in much more non-productive activity than before.

The moral preening of advocacy groups is an example. They live to create a panic around something which does not affect them in order to do good for supposed victims with the conscripted money of taxpayers and others. In older times, people banded together to addressed shared problems with their own resources.

Combine this with universal information access and you get some of the dynamic with which we live today. There are events which are not routine and not Black Swan. I refer to them as long cycle risks. They will happen with some regularity but you cannot know when they will happen except that it will be over a long cycle such as a decade or century.

Between universal access to news, pathological altruism, and the institutionalization of aid through government agencies, we now have a much more toxic and dysfunctional dynamic than in the sixties and seventies when Folk Devils and Moral Panics was first published. We have commodotized and industrialized moral panics.

School shootings, AGW, Income Inequality, Transgenderism, Deadnaming, Racism, Mass shootings - all of them are fodder for moral panics and for "News media and members of the community/society then depict the threat in simplistic symbolic ways that quickly become recognizable to the greater public."

If you no longer read the news from the perspective of "What lie are they trying to sell now", you are the mark.

And look at that list of Cohen's agents. Advocates, Institutions, Mainstream Media, Politicians and the Public. One might argue that there has been a shift since the sixties and seventies. Back then, news environments were local as were most institutions. Each of those groups were generally independent of one another with different agendas.

But we have centralized everything, everyone is connected, news is consolidated. What were five independent agents are now really two. Advocates, Institutions, Mainstream Media and Politicians work together, to push moral panics because it creates the environment for more power, more regulation, more centralization. And then there is the Public, rapidly losing trust in institutions and media and politicians and advocates.

It is an interesting train of thought worth mulling.