Witch hunts and hysteria have a natural history that repeated itself much like viral infections.

From American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America by Edmund S. Morgan. Page 122.

The New England ministers surely deserve credit for having spoken up to stop the trials, however belatedly. But if we look at the way the trials ended by comparison with the witch hunts that had afflicted German towns during the preceding century, it becomes apparent that the Salem trials were reaching the point where the civil authorities would probably have called a halt to them within a short time anyhow. A study of German witchcraft in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries suggests that witch hunts had a natural history that repeated itself in each of them.

At the beginning we may expect the persons accused to have been generally poor and helpless, persons whose age and poverty and manner of living placed them outside the web of human relations that initially protected other members of a community against irresponsible charges. But as the confessions of the accused widened, the circle necessarily spread beyond the immediate neighborhood. The accused, pressed for more names, probably did not know the names of ordinary people outside their immediate neighborhood. The only names they could come up with would have been those of more prominent people, people known to them not by virtue of personal acquaintance but by social standing or political position in the province at large.

As the accusations thus spread upward as well as outward, two powerful motives for doubt began to work. First, it became more and more difficult for anyone to believe that the devil had actually succeeded in confederating with such a large proportion of the population. And second, it became particularly difficult for those in power to believe accusations that touched their wives and friends and even themselves. If the trials proceeded, the whole structure of society as well as their own place in it would be threatened. Up to this point most trials would end in convictions. As doubts began to seize the members of the tribunal, acquittals would become more frequent and then suddenly become universal. Accusations and confessions would cease, and society would return to normal and lick its wounds. No one would have stopped believing in the devil or in the reality of witchcraft, but the authorities would have come to doubt the validity of their own methods of coping with it.

The Salem horror came to an end in precisely this way, which again confirms the resemblance of the Salem trials to the continental rather than the English model. The accusations were reaching way beyond Salem and were beginning to extend to men and women of some prominence in the colony. They even reached to the wife of Governor Phips himself. Huge numbers of people were under suspicion. When Phips got the signal from the ministers, it served to crystallize a conviction that must surely have come to him shortly in any case. The colony he was charged to govern would have destroyed itself if the trials had been allowed to continue much longer.

This essay joined two things together for me.

One is that it reinforces the fact that there is a cyclicality of hysteria, originating in the public sometimes, among the Mandarin Class at others, but always eventually threatening to overwhelm the established norms of the Enlightenment and the foundation principles of freedom, consent, etc. When the Mandarin Class themselves become infected by the hysteria, it is a time of troubles.

That is also the second point. We are in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic and academia, government, and the mainstream media all threaten to overturn established principles on the basis of so far unjustified fear. Hysteria itself is an infection and when it infects the Mandarin Class, that is when we are in greatest danger.

And hysteria, like a virus, burns itself out. Better, though, to have the courage of convictions and never let it take hold in the first place. We have a huge job in front of us to slowly weed out and mitigate all the conveyers of Mandarin Class hysteria.

The rest of the essay is interesting. At the end of it all, as the populace and leadership came to their senses, the courage of a few was recognized and a day of contrition and fasting was held to acknowledge the collective community's descent into hysteria and judicial murder. Morgan tells the tale of two heroes who were true to their beliefs and accepted their fates with astonishing equanimity while knowing they were the victims of a cruel institutional crime.

But it is striking how the patterns of dissociation between the populace and the Mandarin Class, the subordination of evidence and reason to hysteria, and the willingness to commit great evils (whether against persons or against human rights) remains common across the centuries even in a country so wedded to Rights and Justice.

It is also striking how academia and the media are always as much a part of the cruel hysteria as the populace.