In 1841, Scottish journalist Charles Mackay detailed how entire nations lose their minds at the same time.
From financial manias to holy wars and everything in between.
His conclusion? Men think in herds. They go mad in herds.
They recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
You think you're too smart to fall for a scam? You aren't. (thread) 🧵
Mackay studied the madness across centuries and cultures. The same mechanism repeated every time.
A nation fixates on one object. Gold. Tulips. Land. Crusade. Witch trials.
Millions become simultaneously impressed with a single delusion and chase it until something shinier comes along.
What does the cycle look like?
The pattern has four stages:
1. A plausible story emerges. Just credible enough to hook the ambitious.
2. Early winners appear. Their success silences the skeptics.
3. The entire population joins. Nobles, merchants, servants, clergy. Nobody wants to be left behind.
4. The floor disappears. Those who got in last are ruined. The few who got out early hide their wealth from their neighbors.
What made these manias so devastating? 👇
In 1720, France went insane over the Mississippi Scheme.
A Scottish gambler named John Law convinced the French government he could pay off the national debt by selling shares in a trading company with supposed access to gold mines in Louisiana.
Three hundred thousand people applied for fifty thousand shares. Dukes and duchesses waited in the streets for hours outside Law's house, desperate to buy in.
The frenzy reached the point where servants spied on masters, neighbors informed on neighbors, and the government made it illegal to possess more than 500 livres in coin.
Paper money flooded the country. 2,600 million livres in notes, less than half that amount in actual coin.
When confidence broke, it broke overnight and Law fled France before the mob could tear him apart.
The English watched all of this happen to France. They saw the destruction in real time.
Then they did the exact same thing.
The South Sea Company promised to absorb the entire national debt. Stock rose from 130 to 1,000. Hundreds of fake companies sprang up alongside it.
One company's entire prospectus read: "For carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is."
People lined up to invest.
At the peak of the South Sea Bubble, a single man named Robert Walpole stood in Parliament and warned that the scheme would "divert the genius of the nation from trade and industry" and "decoy the unwary to their ruin by making them part with the earnings of their labour for a prospect of imaginary wealth."
The benches emptied when he rose to speak.
Nobody wanted to hear it.
Holland had its own version decades earlier.
Tulipomania.
A single tulip bulb sold for the equivalent of twelve acres of building land. Another was purchased for 4,600 florins, a new carriage, two grey horses, and a complete set of harness.
Nobles, farmers, mechanics, servants, chimney sweeps, and old-clothes dealers all gambled everything on flowers.
When the crash came, the courts refused to enforce the contracts. They ruled that gambling debts were not debts in law.
Three different nations. Three different objects of obsession. The same outcome every time.
The sober become gamblers. The prudent become reckless. The intelligent become stupid. Entire populations convert their real property into fantasy and then act shocked when the fantasy evaporates.
Mackay documented this in 1841. He would ample new material if he was writing it today.
Consider what we watched happen in 2021.
Dogecoin. NFTs of cartoon apes selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Teenagers on Reddit driving GameStop stock to the moon while hedge funds scrambled. Crypto exchanges run by twenty-somethings in the Bahamas holding billions in customer funds with no oversight.
People mortgaged their homes, emptied their retirement accounts, and took out loans against assets that existed only as pixels on a screen.
But Mackay also documented how entire nations went mad over ideas. The Crusades. Witch Mania. Hundreds of thousands killed over beliefs that, a generation later, everyone quietly agreed had been insane.
The financial bubbles are dramatic. The ideological ones are lethal.
During the Witch Mania, whole communities turned on their own members. Neighbors accused neighbors. Servants accused masters. Children accused parents.
The accusation was the conviction. Deny it, and your denial was proof of guilt. Confess, and you confirmed what they already believed.
You have watched this exact dynamic play out in your own lifetime. Cancel culture runs on the same operating system.
The accusation is the verdict and the mob does not require evidence.
It only requires a target.
Mackay: "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."
That last phrase is the one that matters. Recovery is always individual. The crowd never wakes up together. Each person has to peel off alone.
Every mania Mackay studied had respectable men at the center of it. Educated men. Clergy. Nobles. Judges. Members of Parliament.
Intelligence does not inoculate you against crowd madness.
If anything, smart people are better at constructing reasons to justify the delusion they already want to believe.
The most dangerous moment in any society is when the sane minority goes quiet.
Walpole warned Parliament about the South Sea Bubble. The few Dutch merchants who saw the tulip crash coming sold in secret and hid their money in English funds.
The people who see clearly always exist.
They just learn very quickly that speaking up costs more than staying silent, and has no upside.
Mackay wrote that popular delusions "began so early, spread so widely, and have lasted so long, that instead of two or three volumes, fifty would scarcely suffice to detail their history."
He wrote that before television, social media, algorithmic feeds, or 24-hour news cycles. He was documenting crowd madness powered by pamphlets and word of mouth.
We have built crowd-formation machines that would have terrified him.
Our attention is auctioned off every hour. Algorithms feed us whatever provokes the strongest emotional reaction. Entire populations can be synchronized into outrage, panic, or euphoria in a single news cycle.
Mackay's crowds moved at the speed of horses and sailing ships. Ours move at the speed of light.
Guard your household against the herd.
Teach your sons and daughters to distrust any idea that everyone suddenly agrees on. Read old books. Study history. Build the kind of family where independent thought is a virtue, not a threat.
No social media until they are 18 is a good start.
Proverbs warns against the crowd and the promise of quick wealth. Repeat these lessons over and over.
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