Could It Be...Satan?
April 8, 2021 by Maggie McNeill
Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil. - Eric Hoffer
To paraphrase Baudelaire, the loveliest trick of religion is to convince people that the Devil exists. Humans have never been fond of admitting blame for anything, but when someone is caught red-handed committing some evil and therefore cannot blame any other human, the truly devout buck-passer blames an invisible, intangible, supernatural force. Authoritarians, too, love their devils; what better way to convince the Great Unwashed to render their obedience and surrender their liberty than to convince them of the existence of super-powerful evil spirits who cannot be stopped except by whatever snake oil those authoritarians are selling? Over the past couple of centuries, belief in actual anthropomorphic deities of evil has slowly been replaced by belief in more tangible devils such as "criminals", "terrorists", "pimps", and "people who vote differently than I do", but as we head into a new dark age belief in a literal red guy with horns, hooves, a tail and a pitchfork has once again become popular in the Underdeveloped States of America. The occult boom of the early '70s (heralded by movies like The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby) paved the way for the Satanic panic of the '80s and early '90s, which after an implosion around 1994 soon returned as the "sex trafficking" hysteria; its roots in the older, more openly-religious hysteria are clearly visible in its QAnon branch and in persistent nonsense about the supposed magical powers of "pimps". And every so often, people whose entire understanding of how the universe works could be crammed into a chicken's brain pan and still leave room for a politician's moral compass, shit all over themselves because some musician employs "Satanic" imagery comparable in sophistication to that in a US television show from the 1950s. Every society has throwbacks like this; the difference is that in America, we pretend they're adults and let them decide who's going to run things.
