That’s because fear is a powerful social contagion from which no one is entirely immune. As casual observers of life, our internal instrumentation, our antennae, our infrared understanding of the world, registers the way in which others respond to everyday objects and situations. Fear in particular trades in a unique currency, a kind of superstitious magical thinking that offers people a sense of control in situations that warrant none. It explains why we toss salt over our shoulders. Why we burn effigies.
For the first months after my son was born, his fears were uncomplicated. It occurs to me that the things I fear seem to increase with age, countering the conventional wisdom that states we grow braver with experience and time. Yet, the more time we spend among others, the greater the opportunity emotions like fear have to infiltrate our minds. In the eighties, the researchers Michael Cook and Susan Mineka once compared two groups of monkeys and their responses to snakes. When encountering a snake, the facial expressions of wild rhesus monkeys indicated fear, and most primates fled confrontation. But laboratory-raised monkeys, isolated from fear-based behavior and sheltered from the knowledge of potential danger, remained calm and even became playful around snakes. The fearful monkeys, raised among other primates in the jungle, exposed to their fear-based responses, literally aped others’ dread.
Fear also leaps between people, something I come to see as a communicable bridge between individuals built on terror and forged through expressions, gestures, and tone. While all communicable emotions create in others a kind of feedback loop of memory and feelings, I’ve learned that fear in particular transmits in ways beyond the usual subtle and otherwise imperceptible cues. In 2008, Stony Brook University, endeavoring to discover something exceptional about the social contagion of fear, collected the underarm sweat of inexperienced skydivers after their first jump from an airplane. They then placed two types of sweat into nebulizers—one with fear-based sweat—and tasked experiment volunteers to inhale. The areas of the brain associated with fear, the hypothalamus and the amygdala, lit up when the volunteers unknowingly inhaled the fear-based sweat, indicating to the university lab “that there may be a hidden biological component to human social dynamics.”
Fear, whether transmitted by pheromones or through direct or indirect observation, proves to be one of the more impactful social contagions. I understand this fear. Back home I think we all do. We worry about raising our youth under the specter of dead children and whatever it is that’s led them to choose to take their lives. The stigma now attached to Palo Alto makes us fearful. If viruses are death, then fear is a ghost, roaming, haunting, and possessing us. Here, demise on a singular length of railroad has not stoked enough fear to keep people from seeking out the crossing. Yet there is a stigma to this place now, an undeniable reservation sticking in our chests, as though the spirit of this place might someday take our children from us.
Of course, as Roni Habib once pointed out to me, the reality is that most children are safe from suicidal thinking. Yet sometimes fear has a way of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even if our fears are unreasonable, they can lead us to make choices that will actually cause the thing that we are avoiding. Parks become dangerous places when people avoid them out of fear of being attacked by criminals, yet nothing invites criminals to an area better than an empty park. This effect transpires within us as well. Fear triggers a response in the brain, which is in itself an undesirable outcome. It trips the circuitry in our minds, manipulates the cells, activates neurotransmitter production, and alters hormonal states. The cascade of physiological and behavioral reactions continues, increasing blood flow, activating the limbic system, and awakening the brain’s anterior and medial hypothalamus. Our heart rates increase to pump blood through our bodies, and when all else fails our blood pressure drops, reducing circulation, causing a fainting response akin to playing possum.
It isn’t difficult to allow my thoughts to drift into that small place where fear mutates from sensible into something far more irrational. I tell myself fear is only irrational if the threat isn’t real.
Three hundred miles from Palo Alto rests the site of one of the most damaging fear-based social contagions in modern history. It’s a story I’ve heard, but I’ve never before seen parallels or its significance to my own. Perhaps more important, it’s the site where a social contagion also ended.
It started in a sparse agricultural haven thirty years ago. The differences between the sleepy county of Kern, California, and that of Silicon Valley, in both pace and industry, are vast. Yet back in 1982, Kern County and Silicon Valley had a surprising amount in common. Both valleys were high-density agricultural regions filled with almond groves and orchards of oranges and apricots. The two regions were also about to grow rapidly in population, albeit for different reasons. While Kern County rode high on oil production, Silicon Valley was investing in semiconductors and a trade war with Japan. They diverged even more, however, in terms of the kind of culture these changes nurtured. That same year National Geographic magazine noted that Silicon Valley was suddenly appealing to a tremendously striving, intellectually oriented population of workaholics who risked falling prey to alcoholism, divorce, and depression. “‘Burn out,’” it reported, “has become a common valley syndrome, for not all can maintain the winner profile.”
Far away from these developments, in a quiet Kern County neighborhood, the step-grandmother of two young children leveled gruesome charges against their parents, Debbie and Alvin McCuan. In separate police interviews with the children, both presented investigators with testimony alleging sexual abuse and bizarre details involving satanic cult rituals. Their statements ensnared another local family, too, the Kniffens. The two accused parties stood trial and received a combined sentence of a thousand years in prison.
The winds of hysteria stirred. Just south, in Los Angeles County, the mother of a toddler accused a McMartin preschool worker named Raymond Buckey of killing animals, satanic worship, and hosting orgies involving the molestation of her young son. This led to the longest and most expensive trial in US history up until that time. Police sent a form letter to McMartin parents encouraging them to quiz their children about possible abuse they may have experienced. The investigation led to another 360 individual counts of satanic cult ritual abuse.
Parents accused a day care center handyman in Malden, Massachusetts, named Gerald Amirault of molesting their son. Nine other children came forward about a secret room in the child care center where the handyman made them watch him perpetrate animal sacrifices. Testimony led to Amirault receiving a forty-year sentence in state prison. Detectives did not have to look far to find more cases in the state. In nearby Pittsfield, Bernard Baran Jr. was arrested in October 1984 and sentenced to three life terms based on similar charges.
That same year, in Miami, Florida, a court convicted a man named Frank Fuster for sexually molesting children in his care. Nineteen other children came forward with stories involving snakes and abusers wearing scary masks. Janet Reno, then the Dade County state attorney, landed a conviction and life sentence for the accused.
Devil worshippers were discovered operating in day care centers in the Bronx; in Maplewood, New Jersey; in Great Neck, Long Island; in Spring Valley, California. Seven adults in Edenton, North Carolina, were arrested in 1989 after child rape and satanic ritual abuse allegations surfaced, leading to sentencing of all defendants. A gruesome account in Austin, Texas, led to the conviction of Frances and Dan Keller, accused of offering blood-laced Kool-Aid to children, exhuming bodies in cemeteries, and dismembering a cadaver. For these abuses, all too insane to be believed, the Kellers served twenty-one years in prison. The plague of ritual devil worship and child sex abuse then hit Martensville, Saskatchewan, where a woman who ran a babysitting service and day care center was accused of sexually abusing more than a dozen children in connection with running a satanic cult called the Brotherhood of the Ram. Authorities uncovered similar cases in São Paulo, Brazil, and then in communities in France,
Italy, and New Zealand.
Back in Kern County, a task force continued to land dozens of convictions. By the time witnesses started recanting their stories, some defendants had already spent decades behind bars.
As it happened, just prior to the first accusations leveled against the McCuans and the Kniffens, county social workers received dubious training materials that erroneously suggested satanic ritual abuse was also a factor in child sexual abuse. This is a fairly natural response, the kind of phenomenon that commonly plays out whenever personal bias clouds our judgment of someone or a situation. That is, it’s easy to see signs when you know what you’re looking for, even if there’s nothing there to see.
In the Los Angeles McMartin preschool case, the original accuser was later diagnosed with acute schizophrenia, and one of the children involved in the case later retracted his testimony. The charges against Gerald Amirault relied on testimony from children coerced by questionable and highly suggestive interrogation techniques, as was testimony in the case against Frank Fuster in Miami that invited suggestible children to make believe. In other cases, the accusations stemmed from interpersonal disputes among neighbors as well as testimonies that relied on paranoia cascading across the community.
Courts later determined that charges and convictions were obtained because of the prominent force of hysteria. From such inauspicious beginnings sprung a contagion of fear that contaminated populations the world over. And yet, somehow, the world managed to bring this terrifying chapter to a close.
In determining how the country dampened the contagion of fear-based hysteria, I discover something rather surprising. While a strange contagion is perfectly capable of causing contagious hysteria, hysteria itself causes strange contagions. It happened in Fishers. It happened in Kern. And it’s happening in Palo Alto.
Chapter 10
Discovering the Wrong Responders
A line from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time keeps running through my mind: “Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.” At the start of my investigation, Nicholas Christakis told me that if his experiences studying social contagions have taught him anything, it’s that, given their great power to influence people, we have an even greater responsibility to be mindful and take care of one another. What matters more, however, is how we manage to do that. Sometimes going after the source of hysteria is the very thing that perpetuates it.
To make his point, Christakis told me about a case of hysteria that happened in Tanzania in the early sixties. The symptoms manifested within a mission-run boarding school where girls, for no apparent reason, started laughing and couldn’t stop. This was no mere schoolroom disruption, Christakis said. The condition moved from classrooms to dormitories, infecting students throughout the academy without prejudice. The story illustrates the devastating swiftness with which anxiety-based, tic-like mass psychogenic illnesses can grip ordinary, everyday people. Three months after the onset of symptoms, the social contagion of unbridled, impulsive laughter swept up 60 percent of the school. As for how to care for the students, the academy was at a loss.
With no idea what to do to stop the spread and save their children, administrators closed the academy. The strategy accomplished two things, Christakis said, neither of which was stopping the outbreak. Instead, its drastic response convinced the country that the affliction was genuinely dangerous. Moreover, by sending frightened students home, the hysterical laughter was free to spread. Ten days after the school’s closure, the first of two hundred cases of the laughter contagion caught in the Nshamba village complex and, later, at a girls’ middle school in the village of Ramashenye. Medical investigators descended into these hot zones, testing for toxins and infections. The Uganda Virus Research Institute at Entebbe examined blood for biochemical, bacteriological, and microscopic abnormalities and assessed for the creation of viral antibodies. Scientists also collected rainwater from local wells and streams and examined bananas, beans, and meat sources. These avenues of inquiry led nowhere. But the Central African Journal of Medicine continued to chart the laughter epidemic’s rapid spread, along with a “considerable fear among the village communities.”
Psychologists later noted something unusual, Christakis continued, a direct connection between the school closure, these formal investigations, and the laughing symptoms themselves. “How we respond and care for each other matters,” he said. “Hysteria in particular spreads by the way we witness authority figures responding to it.”
Investigators would later run into the same problem in Fishers, Indiana, where the town was preparing to defend itself against what they feared to be an imminent terrorist attack. They called in the FBI and analysts from the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence, which dispatched counterterrorism experts to Fishers. The local police chief, Homeland Security officials, the Secret Service, and other federal, state and local law enforcement agencies led public hearings. If there was ever any doubt that terrorists were plotting against Fishers, these overblown countermeasures suggested that maybe the danger wasn’t so unfounded after all. Administrators attempting to show that they were taking the threat seriously, by virtue of their presence, only wound up confirming for the worried populace that there was something truly wrong, and signaled a legitimacy to their concerns. The most logical response to squelching hysteria merely hastened its dispersion.
In Kern County, each guilty verdict validated the belief that these fears were not only real but also necessary. Not that I can blame the community members. Placed in their position, I might have succumbed to the same hysteria, an automatic reaction to protect my son. I realize that the tissue connecting all of these stories, in fact, is fashioned out of the most natural of instincts: to look after our children. This impulse impelled me to pull my son from the Google child care facility for reasons innocuous and rather tame.
We respond to these dangers, real or otherwise, by throwing all of our resources at the problem—calling in the CIA, the EPA, the FBI, perhaps even the CDC—and hoping that one of these Hail Mary measures works. Only in the end do we come to find that there was nothing wrong to begin with, and that these overblown responses have done little but fan the flames. There was nothing wrong in Tanzania. A handful of girls took on somatic symptoms of stress. There was no terror threat in Indiana, just heightened speculation. And there was never any danger of running afoul of satanic cults in Kern County child care centers, only hypervigilance and volumes of misinformation.
The historian Norman Cohn writes that true believers can endow hysteria with such confidence, energy, and ruthlessness that it will attract into its wake vast multitudes of people who are themselves not at all paranoid but simply harassed, hungry, or frightened. I believe this is true. Yet, to really understand mass hysteria, we have to look at the nature of human behavior, the way logical people become overwhelmed by fear and caught up in the snare of excitement, how easily we can fashion and twist frenzy, how effortlessly it moves from person to person, untethering the most stable of us, cracking the foundations on which we so heavily rely. Hysteria legitimizes the improbable and supersedes the logical. In so doing, it becomes a self-replicating system. A day care crisis creates the need for an organized response. It generates jail sentences and produces media attention. It creates hysteria that reinforces a belief in a problem that never existed in the first place. The process cascades in a never-ending loop, a mirror-like recursion.
Our responsibility to one another is to seek out the facts rather than so easily give in to the frenzy. The fix is logic over myth. In Tanzania, the investigators could go home. The CIA and Homeland Security officials could stay in Washington, DC, instead of visiting Indiana. The task forces hunting and prosecuting innocent people in Kern County and other places could disband. With no evidence to believe symptoms are real, they will completely vanish. Evidence supersedes fear. A contagion is eradicated.
I’ve filled the gas tank of my Mazda, cleaned the windows
with three swipes of the windshield mop, and am headed into the Central Valley. I drive through the towns of Wasco and Buttonwillow here in Kern County. It is an exercise in examining a place’s extraordinary banality: the houses are plain and the lawns well tended. One house has a basketball hoop in its driveway. On the next block, a line of parked minivans distinguishes the street. A high school football field’s tall turf lights rise in the distance. At the same time, I see nothing extraordinary here that even hints it possessed a unique ability to scuttle such a destructive social contagion, though clearly all traces of it are long gone. Nothing about this place suggests to me it was once the progenitor of a vicious plague of panic.
During the two days I spend in Kern County, the people I meet here—those who are old enough to remember living through that period of heightened paranoia and those who concede that it happened with low, knowing nods—often state their belief that this dark chapter is far behind them. Nothing like this mindless fear, the kind that sets a system on autopilot and then takes a hammer to the control panel, has happened in the county in decades. There’s no reason to suspect that it will ever happen here again.
Yet, thirty years after the child care hysteria in Kern County was put to rest, an understated distrust continues to thrive under the surface, as noted by one mother who discloses to me that she still hesitated before putting her child into day care only a year ago. A land assessor I speak to remembers an uncle and aunt of his who fell under suspicion of being cult members in the eighties. To avoid jail, they skipped town and joined the circus. On some level he’s always known the accusations were bogus. And yet there is, he says, a suspicion within the family. What if it is even a little bit true?
Strange Contagion Page 6
