(See part 1: False Witnesses<\/a>.)<\/p>\n \u201cIf you want to look thin, you hang out with fat people.\u201d Commenters on the previous post about this rumor<\/a> were right to argue that I overstated the case in saying that there could be no \u201cinnocent dupes\u201d involved in its spread. That\u2019s too categorical. But those few who may have been innocently duped by such an unbelievable tale \u2014 the very young, the very old, the very insular \u2014 weren\u2019t also among those most active in spreading<\/em> the rumor. They heard it, and they may have believed it, but believing false witness and bearing<\/em> false witness are not the same thing. It is those bearers of false witness I\u2019m interested in here.<\/p>\n Those spreading this rumor can be divided into two categories: Those who know it to be false, but spread it anyway, and those who suspect<\/em> it might be false, but spread it anyway. The latter may be dupes, but they are not innocent. We might think of them as complicit<\/em> dupes. The former group, the deliberate liars, are making an explicit choice to spread what they know to be lies. The complicit dupes are making a subtler choice \u2014 choosing to ignore their suspicion that this story just doesn\u2019t add up and then choosing to pass it along anyway because confirming that it\u2019s not true would be somehow disappointing and would prevent them from passing it along without explicitly becoming deliberate liars, which would make them uncomfortable.<\/p>\n What I want to explore here is why anyone would make either of those choices. In both cases, the spreading of this rumor seems less an attempt to deceive others than a kind of invitation to participate<\/em> in deception. The enduring popularity of this rumor shows that many people see this invitation as something attractive and choose to accept it, so I also want to explore why anyone would choose to do that.<\/p>\n To briefly review the details of this absurd rumor, the claim was that some nameless CEO of Procter & Gamble appeared on some daytime talk show and declared his allegiance to Satan. This unidentified and unidentifiable Fortune 100 executive told Donahue\/Oprah\/Sally Jesse that he belonged to a Church of Satan, and that a portion of the company\u2019s profits \u2014 every dollar collected from the sale of Tide and Dawn and Crest \u2014 went to support its evil agenda.<\/p>\n The origin and organization of this slanderous tale seems to trace back to P&G\u2019s would-be rivals in a cult-like multi-level marketing scheme that coveted the Cincinnati-based company\u2019s market share. That\u2019s a sleazy tactic \u2014 marketing by smear campaign \u2014 and it betrays a lack of confidence in the quality of the rival product line, but one can appreciate the perverse logic at work. There was money at stake. If the rivals could create a negative association with P&G\u2019s product line, then it would make their own products seem more attractive by contrast.<\/p>\n Such whisper campaigns needn\u2019t be terribly plausible. They work by connotation and association. For every possible X number of people who actually come to believe that P&G supports the work of Satan there will be 3X people who come away with some dim, unexplored sense that the company is \u201ccontroversial\u201d or vaguely associated with something unsavory (think \u201cSwift Boat\u201d).<\/p>\n The motive of this small core-group of rumor-mongers is thus not terribly complicated or difficult to understand. It\u2019s not even terribly interesting. They were lying for the sake of money. Nothing novel or remarkable about that.<\/p>\n Far more interesting than those greedy sleazeballs, though, are the members of the much larger group of gossips who enthusiastically spread this malicious and obviously false story. This larger group has no financial interest at stake, so what\u2019s in it for them? What motivates someone to accept the invitation to participate in deception, to accept an obvious lie and then to voluntarily tie their own credibility to something so incredible?<\/p>\n To try to understand these cheerful gossips, I\u2019d like to turn to an equally strange, if less malicious, group of enthusiasts \u2014 the Anti Kitten-Burning Coalition.<\/p>\n Every once in a while, I am sorry to say, some sick bastard sets fire to a kitten. This is something that happens. Like all crimes, it shouldn\u2019t happen, but it does. And like most crimes, it makes the paper. The effects of this appalling cruelty are not far-reaching, but the incidents are reported in the papers because the cruelty is so flagrant and acute that it seems newsworthy.<\/p>\n The response to such reports is horror and indignation, which is both natural and appropriate. But the expression of that horror and indignation also produces something strange.<\/p>\n A few years ago there was a particularly horrifying kitten-burning incident involving a barbecue grill and, astonishingly, a video camera.<\/span> That sordid episode took place far from the place where I work, yet the paper\u2019s editorial board nonetheless felt compelled to editorialize on the subject. They were, happily, against<\/span> it. Unambiguously so. It\u2019s one of the very few instances I recall when that timidly Broderian bunch took an unambiguous stance without their habitual on-the-other-hand qualifications.<\/p>\n I agreed<\/span> with that stance, of course. Who doesn\u2019t? But despite agreeing with the side they took, I couldn\u2019t help but be amused by the editorial\u2019s inordinately proud<\/span> pose of courageous truth-telling. The lowest common denominator of minimal morality was being held up as though it were a prophetic example of speaking truth to power.<\/p>\n That same posturing resurfaced in a big way earlier this year when the kitten-burners struck again, much closer to home. A group of disturbed and disturbing children doused a kitten with lighter fluid and set it on fire just a few miles from the paper\u2019s offices.<\/p>\n The paper covered the story, of course, and our readers ate it up.<\/p>\n People loved<\/span> that story. It became one of the most-read and most-e-mailed stories on our Web site. Online readers left dozens of comments and we got letters to the editor on the subject for months afterward.<\/p>\n Those letters and comments were uniformly and universally opposed to kitten-burning. Opinon on that question was unanimous and vehement.<\/p>\n But here was the weird part: Most of the commenters and letter-writers didn\u2019t seem to notice<\/span> that they were expressing a unanimous and noncontroversial sentiment. Their comments and letters were contentious and sort of aggressively defensive. Or maybe defensively aggressive. They were angry, and that anger didn\u2019t seem to be directed only at the kitten-burners, but also at some larger group of others whom they imagined must condone this sort of thing.<\/p>\n If you jumped into the comments thread and started reading at any random point in the middle, you\u2019d get the impression that the comments immediately preceding must have offered a vigorous defense of kitten-burning. No such comments offering any such defense existed, and yet reader after reader seemed to be responding to or anticipating this phantom kitten-burning advocacy group.<\/p>\n One came away from that comment thread with the unsurprising but reassuring sense that the good people reading the paper\u2019s Web site did not approve of burning kittens alive. Kitten-burning, they all insisted, was just plain wrong.<\/span><\/p>\n But one also came away from reading that thread with the sense that people seemed to think this ultra-minimal moral stance made them exceptional<\/span> and exceptionally righteous. Like the earlier editorial writers, they seemed to think they were exhibiting courage by taking a bold position on a matter of great controversy. Whatever comfort might be gleaned from the reaffirmation that most people were right about this non-issue issue was overshadowed by the discomfiting realization that so many people also seemed to want or need most others to be wrong.<\/span><\/p>\n The kitten-burners seem to fulfill some urgent need. They give us someone we can clearly and correctly say we\u2019re better<\/span> than. Their extravagant cruelty makes us feel better about ourselves because we know that we would never do what they have done. They thus function as signposts of depravity, reassuring the rest of us that we\u2019re Not As Bad As them, and thus letting us tell ourselves that this is the same thing as us being good.<\/span><\/p>\n Kitten-burners are particularly useful in this role because their atrocious behavior seems wholly alien and without any discernible motive that we might recognize in ourselves. We\u2019re all at least dimly aware of our own potential capacity for the seven deadlies, so crimes motivated by lust, greed, gluttony, etc. \u2014 even when those crimes are particularly extreme \u2014 still contain the seed of something recognizable. People like Ken Lay or Hugh Hefner don\u2019t work as signposts of depravity because we\u2019re capable, on some level, of envying<\/span> them for their greed and their hedonism. But we\u2019re not the least bit jealous of the kitten-burners. Their cruelty seems both arbitrary and unrewarding, allowing us to condemn it without reservation.<\/p>\n Again, I whole-heartedly agree that kitten-burning is really, really bad.<\/span> But the leap from \u201cthat\u2019s bad\u201d to \u201cI\u2019m<\/span> not that bad\u201d is dangerous and corrosive. I like to call this Thornton Melon morality. Melon was the character played by Rodney Dangerfield in the movie Back to School,<\/span> the wealthy owner of a chain of \u201cTall & Fat\u201d clothing stores whose motto was \u201cIf you want to look thin, you hang out with fat people.\u201d That approach \u2014 finding people we can compare-down to \u2014 might make us feel a little better about ourselves, but it doesn\u2019t change who or what we really are. The Thornton Melon approach might make us look<\/span> thin, but it won\u2019t help us become so. Melon morality is never anything more than an optical illusion.<\/p>\n This comparing-down is ultimately corrosive because it bases our sense of morality in pride rather than in love \u2014 in the cardinal vice instead of the cardinal virtue. And to fuel that pride, we end up looking for ever-more extreme and exotically awful people to compare ourselves favorably against, people whose freakish cruelty makes our own mediocrity show more goodly and attract more eyes than that which hath no foil to set it off.<\/p>\n Melon morality is why if the kitten-burners didn\u2019t already exist, we would have to invent them.<\/p>\n And, of course, we do<\/span> invent them. After a while the buzz of pride we get from comparing ourselves to the kitten-burners begins to fade and we start looking for a stronger drug. Who could possibly be even worse than the kitten-burners?<\/p>\n How about Satan-worshippers?<\/p>\n In the first post on this topic, I mentioned that the Church of Satan aspect of the Procter & Gamble rumor seemed a bit too outrageous and over-the-top. But while that outrageousness makes the story less plausible, it\u2019s also what makes it so compelling. The pride that fuels Melon morality is an addictive drug, and the mythological Satan-worshippers of the P&G rumor offer that drug in its purest form.<\/p>\n Whether or not there actually is any such thing as the or a Church of Satan needn\u2019t concern us here. This story has nothing to do with any actual religion or cult or the actual doctrines espoused by Anton LaVey or any other publicity-seeking character who has claimed the name of Satanism. This story isn\u2019t about that. It\u2019s about the idea<\/span> of Satanism \u2014 the lore and legends of this enduringly popular bogeyman.<\/p>\n That lore does not arise from or relate to any actual belief system or actual believers. It is, rather, the stuff of legend as recounted in a hundred Jack Chick tracts<\/a> and heavy metal album covers, in urban legends and campfire stories, in the flim-flammery of Mike Warnke<\/a> and Bob Larson<\/a>, and in low-budget Z-movies like the classic Satan\u2019s Cheerleaders<\/a>.<\/em> This is what \u201cSatanist\u201d signifies in the P&G rumor. It means people who kill babies \u2014 sweet, innocent, adorable little <\/span>babies. Here, from the article linked above, is an excerpt from a 1991 fundraising letter from the Anti-Satanist \u201cministry\u201d of con artist Bob Larson:<\/span><\/p>\n I watched them rip apart a newborn baby and take the heart while it was still beating. I can\u2019t forget the screams. I still hear them every night!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n That\u2019s supposedly eyewitness testimony from someone saved out of the depraved Church of Satan thanks to the ministry of Bob Larson.\u00a0It reads more like something out of a horror story than like something out of a fundraising solicitation for a Christian ministry. It\u2019s not quite a horror story, but it works in a similar way.<\/p>\n Satanist stories, much like stories about ghosts or vampires, tap into big mythic fears \u2014\u00a0the sense that there is real evil in the world, that the innocent often suffer, that we may be powerless against the powerful. We tell such stories because we are afraid \u2014 reasonably<\/span> afraid \u2014 of powerful, unnameable things. These stories give those fears a shape and a name and a horrifying face, and somehow that can be more reassuring than allowing such fears to remain amorphous and existential.<\/p>\n And just like vampire and ghost stories, Satanist stories have their own sets of rules, details and basic outlines with which we\u2019re all familiar. These give the stories their own kind of reality. (Ask most people, \u201cDo you believe in vampires?\u201d and they will answer No. But ask those same people if vampires can be killed with a wooden stake and they\u2019ll tell you Yes.)<\/p>\n None of these stories work as stories<\/span> if we undercut their impact by acknowledging that there\u2019s no such thing as ghosts or vampires or Satanic detergent executives. To tell these stories well, we have to pretend these things are real. To hear these stories well, our readers have to agree to go along. This is a familiar, but dramatically necessary, convention in horror stories from Sleepy Hollow to Amityville. This conceit usually involves only the willing suspension of disbelief, but for those who really get caught up in them \u2014 those particularly afraid already \u2014 that storytelling suspension of disbelief can turn into the expulsion of disbelief, the abandonment of skepticism in real life. The fearful and the fear-prone come to almost believe<\/span> that the ghost stories and urban legends are really true. They come to almost really believe that someone out there is really killing the innocent little babies. (Almost.)<\/p>\n
\n\u2014 Thornton Melon<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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\nFrom sources like those, you already know the basic outlines of \u201cSatanist\u201d lore. Black robes, candles, pentagrams and strangely shaped knives feature prominently. Those knives, of course, are used for ritual human sacrifice.<\/span>
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\nThe very idea of ritual human sacrifice is shocking and horrifying, which is why it tends to be included in stories told by people seeking to shock and horrify. When that is your aim as a storyteller the tendency is to constantly up the ante. What could be more shocking and horrifying than ritual human sacrifice? How about the torturous ritual sacrifice of children? And what could be even worse than <\/span>that?\u00a0The sacrifice of <\/span>babies.<\/p>\n