No doubt we all remember the Salem Witch Trials as a horrific event filled with wild accusations, brutal trials and executions, and mass hysteria and mob mentality. But the Salem Witch Trials were certainly not the norm or else we would not remember them as well. So what made the Salem Witch Trials possible?
To start, the government in Salem at the time takes some of the blame. The theocracy in charge of Salem and indeed the region made witchcraft a crime that is both heavily punished and yet easy to pin on others. This makes it possible for vengeance to be extracted fairly easily through legal means. Social standards also are a little at fault as the lack of privacy advocated in the community certainly made it easy to feed on the resulting paranoia and convert it to mass hysteria
The most important factor in the creation of the Salem Witch Trials, though, has to be the mob mentality.
As pointed out by John Proctor in Arthur Miller's The Crucible, the accusing party in the Witch Trials is never at fault and is often seen as completing a holy task. Thus, there is a huge incentive to be part of the accusing party -- accusations against you will not be taken seriously. As the mob grew larger and larger the power it wielded grew until the courts began to act like democracies; you won if more people screamed with you. And with the charges more often than not leveled on a single person, it's rather hard for the accused to win such a battle.
This effect can be shown in a segment in the following video clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygEEL57AcZs
Start at about 6 minutes in and end at 7 for the specific segment about a democracy vs a republic.
The powers of democracy and mob mentality made it so that the powerful elite at the head of the mob could charge who they liked of Witchcraft and get many of them to die or lose their reputations. Thus, the Trials could commence in of their grisly glory (or lack of glory thereof).
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