The Phantom Menace.

In the year 1692 the little town of Salem, Massachusetts had a problem; the deep socio-economic division between the haves and have-nots threatened to fracture an already fragile society. Unfortunately, that was the year they figured the real danger was witches.

This happens more often than you might think; international efforts to stop the spread of Ebola through West Africa in 2014 hit a wall when locals rejected offers of modern medicine, believing the real problem to be sorcerers.

That’s the real tragedy of a Phantom Menace; it makes us afraid of the wrong thing.

Our self-generated terrors can sometimes even manifest into genuine crises: fearing a shortage of toilet paper, we rush out and buy way too much toilet paper, thereby creating a real shortage of toilet paper. Or soap. Or rice, pasta or alcohol.

The human imagination is a powerful thing; it makes dreams come true.

And does the same for our nightmares.

That’s how we got the 1518 Great Dancing Plague of Strasbourg, the Irish Fright of 1688, the supposed crimes of London’s Spring-heeled Jack in 1837, the Halifax Slasher of 1938 and the Mad Gasser of Mattoon (1940). Our runaway imaginations gave us The Red Scare of the 1940’s, the Switchblade gangs of the 50’s and the dreaded June Bug Epidemic of 1962. 

Oh, and the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, the Jenkem drug crisis of 2000 and – I kid you not – the Great Clown Panic of 2016. (Seriously, look it up. It was a thing for a while there.)

Fortunately, public hysteria is hard to maintain (even Salem calmed down after a year) but the time and energy and resources it wastes are lost and with them, the opportunity to solve the problems we haven’t created ourselves.