All of a sudden, these girls in the village were pointing their finger and crying “Witch.” They said they saw the devil in the shadows; they’d seen some local people signing the devil’s book, drinking the blood of children, all this kind of stuff.
It only lasted from Feb 1692 to May 1693 — just over a year —a very short-lived bout of hysteria in this small Puritan village in New England. These were God-fearing, decent people. They weren’t “witch hunters” — this isn’t something they normally did — this was an aberration. Twenty people were executed. Another five died in jail.
When anyone said, “I don’t think this is real,” that person was accused next. This is how hysteria works.
—Andrew Doyle, discussing his book ‘The New Puritans’
As I was reading (okay fine: ‘listening to’) The New Puritans, which I highly recommend doing, I was surprised to find the people of Salem circa 1693 weirdly recognizable. Yes, their actions were seriously deranged, yet their motivations are clearly legible to me now. Not the teenage girls, but the other ones.
As the author tells us, witch hunting hadn’t been ‘a thing’ in Salem. This was an aberration, something novel, so people came to it with no studied opinions, just their own internal ‘priors’ about people and human nature.
The accusers were a group of young girls, not just one, so their reports came with the authority of multiple confirmed sources. These girls weren’t known liars or deviants. Would they suddenly make up stories targeting innocents? That would make no sense. Moreover, the accused tended to be people on the margins of society, whereas the accusers had parents and extended families with their own reputational interests in the girls’ accusations being seen as truthful.
As for the magistrates: condemning a few pitiful souls, guilty or not, would cost them nothing, whereas siding with the devil has always been a bad look. Better safe than sorry, surely. After the first few guilty verdicts, the subsequent defendants must have been pretty pessimistic about their chances in court, even though it would seem obvious that their very imprisonment proved their innocence of witchy powers, am I right? Awaiting their ghastly fate, they must have sensed that each incremental witch-hanging would tend to increase Salem’s need to believe in the righteous necessity of witch-hanging.
The ‘capture’ of belief makes human dramas such as that true story possible. Capture can begin with seduction, as when a lost soul encounters a charismatic Scientology salesman. It can be a calculated transaction, like when a Supreme Court nominee testifies that it takes a biologist to define the word ‘woman.’ And it can be a strategy for social approval, as in every time I’ve ever jumped up and down over a touchdown or a home run that really only mildly pleased me.
When whole organizations are captured, the results are far more consequential. The American Academy of Pediatrics gave us a textbook example, detailed in this post, when it pledged its unearned allegiance to what it calls ‘affirmative care’ for ‘pediatric transgender patients.’ For reasons that seem both social-approval and calculated-transaction driven, the AAP adopted, sans due diligence, a radical policy written by a single true believer (seduction-type) in medical body-modifications for ‘trans’ kids. That policy instructed, and continues to instruct, tens of thousands of American pediatricians that ‘best practice’ requires them to invite their young patients to choose their own gender and with it any desired medical treatments, so long as parents ‘affirm’ their selections.
The young author of AAP’s position statement on the treatment of ‘trans kids’ didn’t invent the protocol himself, of course. He learned it from WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health: they invented it. Because ‘transgender health’ hadn’t always been ‘a thing’ — this isn’t something they normally did; it was an aberration — regular doctors came to it without any preconceived opinions, just their ‘priors’ about people and human nature, combined with their formal medical training.
As we’ve seen, lawsuits disputing AAP’s received wisdom are now piling up, but before that began to happen, the other leading medical societies were also called to take a stand. The Endocrine Society, being epi-central to the medical ‘transition’ of both children and adults since hormones and puberty blockers act on the human endocrine system, performed a skillful jujitsu move in response. Refusing to get bogged down by the thornier questions, like, “What is a ‘transgender’ child, and how do we know when we’re looking at one?” or, “Can a ten-year-old give informed consent to sterility and loss of sexual response?” or, “Should we sterilize healthy ten-year-olds, though?” the Endocrine Society opted to stick to just the medical praxis: here’s how these treatments could be done if they’re deemed necessary and appropriate. By someone else. Not us.1
That careful framing might help it dodge payouts to future victims, but for the purposes of ‘trans’ lawfare, it landed the Endocrine Society just as squarely in the ‘captured’ column as the AAP. From there, the other dominoes fell effortlessly, so the American Medical Association, the American Psychological and Psychiatric Associations, and all the rest can now legitimately be claimed by ‘trans rights’ attorneys as A Unanimous Expert Consensus endorsing the new regime, i.e.: affirming the self-diagnoses of children who say they feel ‘transgender,’ proceeding to chemical puberty blockade, exogenous sex hormones and surgeries as needed to support ‘gender congruence,’ because it is all ‘life-saving’ and thus medically necessary.
Once you’ve arrived there, it’s a short hop to cheering on boys in girls’ sports and men in women’s sports, which strengthens the cognitive-dissonance muscles needed to resist noticing men in women’s prisons, bathrooms, changing rooms and rape-crisis shelters.
Here’s how Dr. Leor Sapir explained it in a podcast conversation:
“I think it's important, at minimum, that the public understand what medical associations are, how they operate, what their incentives are, and what the nature of the consensus on gender medicine is.
“If you take a citizen off the street who has heard that there's a consensus of medical associations in support of gender affirming care, I assure you that that person is going to assume that experts at all of these medical associations have independently, carefully combed through all the research. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. You basically have three medical groups — the AAP, Endocrine Society and WPATH — that have issued research-based statements on this issue. All other associations are relying on these three. The AAP’s statement is not even a medical guideline. They say that explicitly. We know the problems with all three of their statements, but this is a very shallow, carefully, cleverly crafted pseudo-consensus.
“It's important for Americans to understand that these groups are first and foremost trade associations, trade unions, much like the teachers’ unions, the NEA. To assume that everything the teachers’ unions do is in the interest of students and learning is absurd. I don't think anybody believes that. That doesn't mean that teachers and teachers unions don't care about education. It just means that in situations where the interests of the students are in competition with the interests of the teachers, the unions will side with the teachers 100% of the time, because they have to. That's what their incentive structure forces them to do. In a similar way, if there's ever a situation in which the interests of patients contradict the interests of doctors, the medical associations are always or almost always going to side with the doctors. We have precedent for that. The associations are never going to advocate for anything that runs afoul of the doctors who have built a career on these practices and benefitted from them financially.”
Andrew Doyle brings it full circle with the last word:2
We all know what a woman is, but we all know too that if we go online and say that there are only two biological sexes, we could be kicked off. We could have our livelihood attacked, we could have activists going after our employer and saying “You shouldn’t hire this hateful transphobe”; so everyone keeps quiet. In Salem, it went on as long as it did because people kept quiet for reasons of self-preservation. The analogy is really really clear, but also, I think it tells us the way out of this. It came to an end when sufficient numbers of people stood up and said, “No. There are no witches. This isn’t real; this is a fantasy.”
Next week: the anatomy of a civil right
a discussion of the Endocrine Society’s statement on ‘affirming care’ by Dr Julia Mason in conversation with Wesley Yang
both Andrew Doyle quotes are from this episode of Conversations with Peter Boghossian
The New Puritans is also on Audible, brilliantly narrated by the author
I approached thus subject from the political end but its quite unique to connect political paranoias to religious ones. The conduct of extreme left today reminds me strongly of the revolutionary terror in France and Bolshevik equivalent in Russia. The saving grace is that today the social engineering jacobins don't have the power to kill. Perhaps all these phenomena are actually coming from the same place with collective psychology, whether political or religious. The moral weigh of some great apparent wrong combined by an artificial sense of urgency and sense that we are at some significant point in history - and bang you have what we have.
Great essay! I use the Salem Witch Trials analogy a lot when speaking to people about transgenderism. Other parallels include the 1980s Satanic Panic and the Spanish Inquisition. What all these madnesses have in common - before they were over, people’s lives were destroyed. We are sadly witnessing a repeat of this destructive cycle.