Lawrence Wright on Wars, Cults, and Panics

[ndrosen]

There was a podcast (you can read the text or, I presume, listen) on Reason, about America’s wars, cults, and panics. A man named Lawrence Wright talks about foreign interventions, about Scientology, and about the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s. There is much to be learned about human weirdness, and in particular, I might mention Mr. Wright’s take on what brought the Satanic and child molestation panic pretty much to an end: insurance companies refused to pay for extensive therapy for “multiple personality disorder” supposedly caused by ritual abuse, so there were no longer wards full of people bamboozled (at least in some cases they had been bamboozled) by mental health quacks into thinking that any problems in living they had were the result of sexual molestation by Satanists. If so, health insurance companies, which are not universally beloved, may have done some real good in the world, in addition to saving themselves money.