Ignorance, Collective Hysteria and The Salem Witch Trial (for dummies)

I always found people complaining about the present day saying that the old days were better and I'm like "Bitch, the past sucked, they didn't even have WC what are you talking about?" For real, in this wonderful, stress plagued pre-dystopia we call the present you could be actually be sitting in the WC while connected to the internet via radio waves (yeah, wi-fi are radio waves, look it up, don't be lazy... like me) if you took a crap in say, the 17th century, you could catch cholera in the long run, those time were riddled with hysteria, panic, ignorance and violence, you could literally begin a witch hunt based on superstition... WAIT THAT HAPPENED!!! THEY CALLED IT...

THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS!!!

Source: Baker, Joseph E. | Wikimedia Commons

A really REALLY bad trend

The Salem Witch Trials were a series of really unfortunate events occurred in Massachusetts and Connecticut between 1692 and 1693, but you don't think people just got up one morning and start burning witches right? (I know they seem that stupid, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt, ok?). Hunting and killing witches was a really known activity in Europe because of th...

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Well, not exactly the spanish one (but I bet you didn't expect that), but all of the religious inquisitions had a campaign of pursuing and punish devilish behaviors and links, these were not exactly one event but many, they spawned from decade to decade and of course they were used to convict and neutralize political and economical competitions to the popes or religious organizations, humans being humans, you know how it is.

It only takes one asshole

Source: William Faithorne | Wikimedia Commons

And we have the name of ours, Joseph Glanvill, who in his Wikipedia page clearly states that he's "Not himself a scientist" claimed in his work Against Modern Sadducism from 1668 that he could prove that things like angels, demons and spirits are alive AND EVERYONE WHO DENIES THAT IS A HERETIC!! Of course, everyone believed him (the age of smartness and science for sure), not only that this text was used as a prove later in the Salem Trials almost ten years later, good job guys, I know he's a pretty face, but lets not give ourselves to the desires of the flesh... you know, because of the demons and shit.

But we need more than one dumb fucker to achieve this level of clusterfuck

Let us say that being a rational person in 1692 wasn't fashionable and everything could be a threat and when I say everything it was EVERYTHING from possible Indian attacks to the fear of a punishment from a higher being, you could be justifiable (or not) for anything you could see or imagine in the new world. And all of this paranoid hysteria was very present in Salem, there were rumors not only of Indians nearby but witchcraft, the devil and very bad omens, the population of Salem being Puritans, of course, were in panic, all of this is added that the social situation of the village was dedicated because of several disputes between the important families set the stage for a crisis to snowball with a little push (did you get that reference guys, haha pretty funny right?... guys? Ok, here you go).