Lucid analysis of the Salem Witch Trials

Via Pop Occulture:

The Salem Witch trials took place within a small community that was trying to purge itself of certain elements. What they were trying to get rid of was a sort of Jungian shadow version of Christianity, except inverted into witchcraft, Satanism, etc. Whether that stuff was really going on at all, or to what extent is open to debate. People say maybe ergot poisoning was actually involved instead (poisoning from exposure to a fungus in rye, similar in makeup to the compounds in LSD). In any case, what you had was a community which operated according to an overtly religious story-system. When that story-system was threatened by strange behavior - whatever it’s cause - there was a reaction against it. This happens again and again in orthodox religion and ideology. If everybody’s working under a tight set of ethical rules and guiding myths, you typically don’t have a lot of wiggle room on how you interpret that stuff. If everybody’s version is a little bit different, it’s difficult to bind people together or “control” them using those stories. So you have to get rid of the ones which don’t fit in with it.

From that perspective, we could open this debate up to modern times and look for people who are persecuted because they don’t fit neatly into our modern story-system. One good place to look might be at the Anti-Psychiatry movement of the 1970’s, which basically said that mental illness wasn’t really an illness at all; instead, we were merely persecuting people who saw reality differently from us. That’s not talked about so much now, but it’s going to become an even bigger issue today with things like forced medication of kids who are probably erroneously considered ADD, or any number of other disorders which didn’t exist before they were created by pharmaceutical companies as marketing opportunities. Now, we have parents whose children are diagnosed with these disorders, and told that their kids can’t be in school unless they take these mind-altering drugs with no long-term testing. It’s a fucking scary situation, especially for people who don’t have any alternative opportunities when it comes to schooling.