“Hereditary”
“Belief in the devil (and all his works) is, I believe, an attempt to grapple with the same fear that drives and sustains Pizzagate and The Storm, the same fear that drove the Satanic Panic and the Salem trials, and the blood libel, and all of the other expressions of that same fear that are re-emerging now “in 2010s clothing.”
That fear is something like the question posed in a classic Mitchell and Webb sketch: “Are we the baddies?” It’s the fear, the ever-present suspicion, that we’re not good.
We’re not afraid that there might be monsters out there in the dark, we’re afraid that there might not be. We need those monsters. We want them to be there because without them, without their superlative, extravagant, ridiculous-on-its-face evil to contrast ourselves favorably against, we would be forced to reckon with ourselves as we are. As long as there are Satanic baby-killers, we can think of ourselves as relatively good.”
Related: “Innocence Abroad”; “Moral Dispute or Cultural Difference?”; “Black Pathology and the Closing of the Progressive Mind”; “Behind 2016’s Turmoil, a Crisis of White Identity”; “(Not) All Men”
