The Three Laws of Moral Panics

Real or confirmation bias?

I’ve noticed some properties of contemporary moral panics. Three in particular. I’m calling them the GLOMP, MLOMP, and HLOMP respectively.

The GLOMP

GLOMP stands for “Girl Law of Moral Panics.” What I noticed is all moral panics in the modern world are centered around girls being allegedly harmed. They’re fueled by girl-tears and people that show others girl tears.

And I say “girls” instead of women because in every example I can think of, the emphasis is on girls and not women. Women might sometimes be the moral entrepreneurs fueling some of the panic, but they talk about girl tears. Girl is defined expansively to mean females younger than about 20 years of age.

The MLOMP

The MLOMP is the Misinformation Law of Moral Panics. Moral panics always thrive on misinformation. Usually there’s a kernel of truth in it, but a large part of the fire is misinformation. The truth-kernel about harms to girls is the tender and the misinformation is the kindling.

The misinformation usually sounds true enough and is hard to debunk. It sounds important because it has to do with girl-tears and people who criticize it can be shut down as assholes who don’t care about girls enough. Basically, if something has a 40% chance of being true for and average person, it will be taken as true because the downsides of a false negative to girls are seen as too great by the activated mob, which can’t parse information at high levels.

The MLOMP causes moral panics to outrun fact audits. It discourages careful people from doing the fact auditing, because they will face harsh criticism for doing so, by many people who care a lot more than they know.

The HLOMP

The HLOMP is the Hysteria Law of Moral Panics. It says that moral panics lead to extremely aggressive, yet often ineffective, actions based on the panic. If the GLOMP is the tender, and the MLOMP is the kindling, then the HLOMP is the logging of the moral panic fire.

Hysteria is defined as “a state of violent mental agitation.” The HLOMP is when panicers start behaving as if they are in a psychiatric episode of hysteria. It leads to violence which, in today’s world, is usually done through regulated channels, since the panic affects enough people to gain a conferable democratic legitimacy.

In modern times the HLOMP is usually expressed as some kind of overly-harsh, unjust law enforcement action, either criminal or civil. It may also be legislative if this fails, meaning that new laws are passed based on the moral panic. It may result in all three.

You can bet civil liberties are abridged when HLOMP time comes and that any decent people in the future will look at the actions like contemporary people look at the Salem Witch Trials.

Examples

The quintessential example of the moral panic is the Salem Witch Trials. While I consider it to have happened somewhat outside of the temporal scope of the “laws” I hypothesize here, it actually fits quite well. Wikipedia says:

The trials began after a few local women in Salem Village were accused of witchcraft by four young girls, Betty Parris (9), Abigail Williams (11), Ann Putnam Jr. (12), and Elizabeth Hubbard (17)

There’s the GLOMP! The MLOMP is believing witchcraft is real and the HLOMP is when they started hanging “witches.” There you go.

The example that inspired this is from Gwern:

NYT and Vaping: How to Lie By Saying Only True Things

This essay looks at a 2022 New York Times article about teenage vaping which juxtaposes synthetic nicotine, flavored vapes, Lizzie Burgess’s hospitalization, and nicotine addiction without ever quite saying that legal flavored nicotine vapes caused her lung injury.

There’s the GLOMP.

Sentence by sentence, the article’s misleading effect comes from technically true phrasing: “vaping”, “vaping THC and nicotine”, “vaping-related lung injury”, and post-hoc narrative order.

The case is a useful example because the ground truth is clear, the article was high-profile and edited, and the manipulation is grammatical and selection rather than simple falsehoods.

There’s the MLOMP. The tender is that vitamin E THC vapes cause lung damage when excessively used. The kindling is the NYT running an article blaming normal nicotine vapes. You’re an asshole who wants to destroy the lungs of girls if you criticize this.

This article appears to have been successful in persuading readers. In the NYT comment section (mirrored below in full), most comments agreed with the article, often going as far as to claim that “addict and kill people—including children”/“here they are exploiting a legal loophole to addict millions more young adults to their lethal products” or “Young people especially become easily addicted to the nicotine…The damage to their lungs resembles the worst pneumonia you can get and still be alive.” or “The purveyors of these drug delivery systems are killing our children with intent. They should all be thrown in jail, and the import of these products should be banned.” (The import of THC vapes contaminated with vitamin E acetate is, of course, already banned or adult ID required etc.) Indeed, only a single NYT commenter (who no one responded to) appeared to get it right in their reply a quarter down the comment section:

Here’s the HLOMP. Criminal procedures usually only happen in one subtype of modern moral panic, and this is not that type, but there are active legislative and regulatory law enforcement actions taking place:

“It’s a whack-a-mole situation”, said Shusterman, whose state banned all flavored e-cigarettes, except in licensed smoking bars. “They’re not following any of the laws.”

Mitch Zeller, director of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products, said the agency recognized the problem.

“Disposable e-cigarettes made only with synthetic nicotine pose a particular challenge for the FDA when it comes to our tobacco authorities”, Zeller said in an email. “The FDA is actively investigating this issue and considering how to best address such products.”

[photo of young woman in ICU with face covered by a medical ventilation mask]

All a waste of money of course. Vaping rates aren’t down enough to improve girl health. Taxpayers lose money and freedom due to expensive enforcement from the HLOMP.

Epistemic status

Epistemic status is, statistical study needed, but seems like a good heuristic. I don’t know of any counter examples at the moment, but every moral panic I know seems to fit. There are 2 high profile ones active right now, that I can think of. The ones from the 20th century seem to fit.