Insane people have committed criminal acts they believed Satan wanted them to commit, and children are sometimes victimized in Grand Guignol fashion by sadists and lunatics. But this satanic crime spree and profusion of secret death cults did not exist. It was a mass delusion. Why did it happen at that moment? The precipitous rise in violent crime that began in the 1960s had not yet peaked. The supply of clinical psychologists, caregivers desperate to find the secret source of their clients’ unhappiness, tripled from the mid-1970s to 1990. The national fantasy-industrial complex was giving
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