by Nomad
Meet Mr. MacKay.
Charles MacKay was, intellectually, a man of varied pursuits. Born in Perth, Scotland in 1814, MacKay was, in his time, a poet, journalist, author, anthologist, novelist, and even songwriter.
Today, if he is remembered at all, he is remembered for his early study of crowd psychology entitled Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
Charles MacKay was, intellectually, a man of varied pursuits. Born in Perth, Scotland in 1814, MacKay was, in his time, a poet, journalist, author, anthologist, novelist, and even songwriter.
This entertaining work was published in three volumes: "National Delusions", "Peculiar Follies", and "Philosophical Delusions". (When it comes to public insanity, there are categories but not degrees.)
As a first-rate storyteller. MacKay covers such diverse topics as economic bubbles, alchemy (the imaginary science of transforming worthless metals into gold), haunted houses, fortune-telling, and the mania for murder through slow poisoning. (It was apparently the thing to do.)
Add the political factor, social media and disinformative news networks and society never really has a chance of recovery.
Persons who would have revolted at the idea of stabbing a man to the heart, drugged his potage without scruple. Ladies of gentle birth and manners caught the contagion of murder, until poisoning, under their auspices, became quite fashionable.Looking over MacKay's collection of tales, it might be easy enough for us to smirk and roll our eyes at the Dutch tulip mania of the early seventeenth century. Or the pointlessness of the Crusades of the Middle Ages. Or the Witch trials in 16th- and 17th-century Western Europe.
Yet, we ourselves are apparently living in a world gone mad.
Is the public mania for battlefield weapons any more sensible or rational? Especially after we witness every week the tragedy and mayhem they produce?
What about the insanity of allowing a well-known con artist / failed businessman / malignant narcissist in control of a nuclear-armed superpower? Still worse, continuing to support him after launching a violent attempted overthrow of the country.
Those are just a few examples but we nomads could make a list. (In fact, we do, every day in the comment section.)
As MacKay noted:
"Every age has its peculiar folly; some scheme, project, or phantasy into which it plunges, spurred on by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the mere force of imitation."
So I will close this post with an excerpt from the preface of the 1856 edition of MacKay's book.
In reading the history of nations we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do.
We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.
We see one nation suddenly seized, from its highest to its lowest members, with a fierce desire of military glory; another as suddenly becoming crazed upon a religious scruple; and neither of them recovering its senses until it has shed rivers of blood and sowed a harvest of groans and tears, to be reaped by its posterity....
Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.