Hysteria

• In The Crucible, neighbors suddenly turn on each other and accuse people they've known for years of practicing witchcraft and devil-worship.
• The town of Salem falls into mass hysteria, a condition in which community-wide fear overwhelms logic and individual thought and ends up justifying its own existence.
• Fear feeds fear: in order to explain to itself why so many people are afraid, the community begins to believe that the fear must have legitimate origins.
• In The Crucible, hysterical fear becomes an unconscious means of expressing the resentment and anger suppressed by strict Puritan society.
• Some citizens of Salem use the charge of witchcraft willfully and for personal gain, but most are genuinely overcome by the town's collective hysteria: they believe the devil is attacking Salem.
• And if the devil is attacking your town, then ensuring that your neighbor is punished for selling you a sick pig suddenly becomes a religious necessity, a righteous act that protects the God you love and proves that you're not a witch or a devil-worshipper.
• The Crucible shows how religious fervor fuels hysteria and leads to conditions that sacrifice justice and reason.