0050 // Folk Devil: Weak Ties in Fragile Society

Folk Devil
Weak Ties in Fragile Society
In 1955, three days before the Labor Day weekend, a round-faced man with no luggage checked himself into the Taft Hotel in New York City under the name ‘Fred Lang’. Had the desk clerk understood German, they might have caught the obtuse almost-translation in that name – ‘long peace’.

The man trudged upstairs and over the next day made many calls to friends and family, some innocuous and some deadly serious. A day later, the man was found dead from an overdose of pills. An obvious suicide.

The man was actually Philip Loeb, an American stage, film and TV actor, and a victim of one of America’s darkest periods, when numerous American citizens were falsely accused of being communists and traitors – a period colloquially known as McCarthyism, but not limited to the activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

In his sociological study Folk Devils and Moral Panics, published in 1972, author Stanley Cohen coined the phrase ‘moral panic’ to describe when “a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests.”

The work, while justifiably criticized for some overbroad definitions, managed to offer a set of defined stages for the phenomenon:
• Someone or a group is defined as a threat to social norms or community interests;
• The threat is then depicted in a simple and recognizable symbol/form by the media;
• The portrayal of this symbol arouses public concern;
• There is a response from authorities and policy makers;
• The moral panic over the issue results in social changes within the community.
He termed the unfortunate targets of this phenomenon “folk devils”.

Let’s go back: when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began to take shape in May 1938, tensions were high in America.

The Great Depression still had its hold on the people. World War II was looming in Europe — the Nazis had just annexed Austria and would soon sign the Munich Agreement that enabled them to take over parts of Czechoslovakia — and HUAC was formed to root out enemy agents and their sympathizers residing in the US.

Following the end of World War II in 1945 and the dissolution of the Allies into Cold War enemies, the tensions at home found their shape in a lens that magnified a long-perceived threat to the American way of life: Communism.

McCarthyism gripped the United States in a type of fear-born fever that implicated many innocents (and a few guilty) of treasonous behavior, and in the process, coined a term still synonymous with a modern political witch hunt. McCarthy’s senate hearings fell apart in the mid-1950s when he went after members of the Army, and was famously accused of having “no sense of decency”.

Poor Philip Loeb was one of many who felt overwhelmed by accusations of passive association, one of the main components of the campaign of persecution, a social disease that crops up from time to time throughout history, provided the right elements align.

Mark Granovetter’s seminal 1973 sociological work, The Strength of Weak Ties applies here; he argues that an individual or ‘node’ within a social web is defined by its ties to the others in that web, and what’s more, that nodes can be further ranked by the strength of their threshold – what it takes to make someone act in an antisocial way.
A node with with a weak threshold? Easy to incite to riot. A node with a strong threshold would be much harder to incite to the same action.
Granovetter found that the strength of a node’s ties are far more likely to be predictive of a node’s actions. What’s more, a web made of nodes with weak thresholds is far easier to “flip” than a web of nodes with strong thresholds.
In plain English, the people we have strong connections with are far more likely to influence our behavior than any type of free-floating lofty ideals we ascribe to our society and country.

Benjamin Franklin’s take was that “the rotten apple spoils his companion”, an observation of the power of pressure from known associates to overturn previously held norms that might keep a society in check.

This tells us that the strength of ideals in a society can in fact come from individual actors. Contrary to the commonly held idea that an individual makes little difference in a huge society, the micro-actions single citizens take, according to this theory, have a vast and reverberating effect, especially if, like most of us, they run in a number of circles.

The period during and after World War II in the US witnessed a seemingly shocking incidence of campaigns of persecution, spiking in spectacular and shameful fashion with the internment of Japanese Americans following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In every instance, Cohen’s stages of moral panic took place. And in every instance, balance was ultimately restored, though not without excruciating delay and immense damage.

More recently, sociologists Angela McRobbie and Sarah Thornton have argued, in "Rethinking 'Moral Panic' for Multi-Mediated Social Worlds,” that “folk devils” can be deployed more forcefully and with greater vigor in a social media world – there’s little gatekeeping any more to keep the most pernicious untruths at bay, meaning that every accusation and rumor, no matter how outrageous, gains validity.

It’s much easier to tar a group now as ‘the ultimate danger’. Democracies have been upended by this, and populations decimated. Because of that ease of branding, it’s more important than ever to be vigilant when we see these folk devils being invented.

The flames of fear are a strong motivator, and the ‘folk devil’ adds fuel to the fire.

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Slice 3 photograph credit, the amazing Koci Hernandez. Thanks Koci!

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