The best example of human madness is found across the ages.
'Extraordinary Popular Delusions & The Madness Of Crowds' by Charles Mackay is a mammoth examination of the most ridiculous crazes across history, whether they be funny, bad or horrendous. Charles details some of the more well known financial bubbles (South Sea, Mississippi, Tulip Mania) but also catalogues well known alchemists/magnetisers & mob activities (The Crusades, Witch Hunts, etc). The book is split into 15 chapters and I consider it a historical document of sorts.
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Timeline:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:02:32) Themes/Questions
(00:28:09) Author & Extras
(00:35:36) Summary
(00:38:31) Value 4 Value
(00:39:26) What's Coming Up
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Kyrin Down (00:00):
Best example of human madness is found across the ages.
Welcome,
everyone, to another episode of the Mere Mortals book reviews. I'm your host here, Kyrin, and live on the 05/14/2025.
And as you maximize, this is the podcast where I critically examine propositions
(00:24):
from a fundamental philosophical basis.
Okay. No. No. We don't do that here. No. Especially not from this book here. We have extraordinary popular
delusions and the madness of crowds by Charles Mackay.
Pretty thick, handy book here. This is originally published in 1841.
It's 05/1960
(00:44):
pages in length. I'd say it took me nineteen, twenty hours of reading because this thing is dense. It was probably, like, two minutes per page. It is just fraught with information and very little,
images or anything else of that nature. So it's a mammoth examination
of the most ridiculous crazes across history,
(01:05):
whether they be funny,
bad, or straight up just horrendous.
So Charles details some of the more,
well known financial bubbles. So in of this age or at the time that he was writing
was the tulip mania of the Mississippi bubble and of of the South Sea Company.
But he also catalogs some of the more well known alchemists, for example, the magnetizers
(01:29):
and mob like activities,
such like things like the crusades and witch hunts, and even some more humorous stuff, which I wouldn't exactly
categorize as a madness
or a popular delusion,
but things which can be kind of sorta like fashions, like haunted houses, for example,
or of dueling or things like this where it's like, it's not exactly a
(01:52):
popular delusion of the madness of crowds, but, you know, it it is a craze of some sort. So the book is split into 15 chapters,
and I really consider it a historical document of sorts.
The
bulk of the actual writing and stuff is, I think, taken up with things like The Alchemist, for example,
(02:12):
which is just
a huge a huge amount of work going into into that one, and the crusades as well, which may near a little bit as well. But, yeah, you've got popular admiration of great thieves, jewels and ordeals, relics, haunted houses, the slow poisoners, saucy billab, tulip mania, basically all the stuff I explained just then. So let's jump into the actual themes because this is gonna be a weighty one.
(02:35):
What's the difference between individual delusions,
madness,
and follies versus that of a group?
And although the book doesn't split it up into these categories,
it rather emerged from the writing for me,
as a stark contrast between
that of an individual and that of those when they're in a crowd or as as part of a, I guess, a sweeping craze across a nation, for example.
(03:00):
And it's this is somewhat linked between the words themselves, delusion and madness,
something like the false belief despite
external reality,
opinions that are unshakable,
extremely foolish behavior,
and tending towards serious mental illness if you're considering madness on that front.
Delusion is certainly the more lighted, harder of the two, and madness typically has this, I I don't know, this feeling of danger to it. It doesn't necessarily,
(03:28):
conform to that if you're looking up strict definitions of the words,
but that is kind of the feeling that I got. The word folly is also used quite extensively throughout this book,
despite it not being in the title. So we'll go on to, I guess, some of the,
lighter hearted
things and get on to, I guess, the the more egregious. So
(03:49):
I think we start off with pretty light hearted stuff, which is the three financial bubbles.
He covers the big three ones, which I mentioned just before.
And unlike the book, Devil Take the Hindmost, which I reviewed not too long ago, he's really just sticking with these three and had yet to see some of the
even crazier ones in a certain extent of the, you know, modern tech bubbles of
(04:15):
stock companies of Japanese side tech of the railway mania of electricity,
oil, all of these sorts of things. So, you know, he he only covers these three, but I think those three are sufficient enough example to to see the financial folly.
On the whole, these periods of ridiculous, I would say, are more funny than dangerous.
(04:37):
Even though people lost substantial money, I'm sure that impacted their lives. I'm sure there was people who perhaps, you know, lost more than they could afford to and put themselves in serious debt or into very
impoverished
circumstances for perhaps even the rest of their lives.
And there was scammy behavior, but you don't see the physical effect on people's lives so much. So there was only one or two
(05:04):
examples of actual
robbery or deaths related to the financial bubbles. And
for those who didn't get into it, it was essentially when the stock prices of certain companies such as the Mississippi
company in France or the South Sea in,
in England and in
Holland. They had these tulips with, you know, the actual flower of tulips, which people bid up to insane prices, and then the bubble burst.
(05:32):
You know, these these were events which where people lost track of what actual value was in terms of the valuing of things in terms of real money where you could go like, in what
in what case does like this flower that I have,
is this the equivalent of, like, an estate of a person with, you know, houses and servants and things like this? Like, it it makes no sense.
(05:55):
And this is largely what these bubbles were about.
But the mobs in the aftermath didn't commit mass murder or even really destruction.
So despite there being
hardships and stuff like this in the large sway of things, people certainly lost their mind in terms of
financial worth of things, but they didn't lose their their actual minds.
(06:17):
And so, you know, on the that's on the
group side of things on the individual side, it's fucking hilarious. Some of the stories,
John Law, the guy who basically
invented the Mississippi bubble,
who was an, I believe, Scotsman or perhaps Englishman,
who came to France after
(06:38):
kind of gallivanting about all of Europe and gambling away tons of money.
He just fell in over his head. He he wasn't as smart as he thought he was and,
ended up
creating this bubble.
You only needed to see his gambling past to realize that probably something like this was gonna happen.
I love the ingenuity of people trying to see him because he basically courted so much power and money that people were trying to get access to him. So, you know, pretty bad ladies batting an eyelid at him
(07:09):
wasn't gonna,
cut it anymore. And so
crashing your carriage or,
in front of him or creating a fake fire,
you know, essentially
a moral hazard,
is is next level, which is what some of these people were doing to just to be able to talk to him to buy some of the stock.
Some of the other things,
(07:30):
page 47 is probably one of my
favorite quotes of all time. I listed this in the, in the other book review that I did, that I mentioned before, which was linked highly to these financial bubbles.
But this was when there was all of these companies being proposed in England, and one of them was a company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.
(07:54):
So good. So, so funny.
I just love that. I love that.
The other examples that you could perhaps find in here
were on page fifty two fifty four, which was giving off all of these things. So, like, another petition for a Greenland trade
or petition of several merchants of London praying a charter of incorporation
(08:16):
for carrying on assault work. Like, what are what are all of these things? What does this mean?
Absolutely crazy.
And
what we can see, I guess, throughout all of this is that there is just
some
mad, mad behavior.
Another one here, which was on page 55,
which was,
(08:37):
one of the most famous bubbles was Puckle's machine company for discharging round and square cannonballs and bullets and making a total revolution in the art of war. That's it. We're making a total revolution by creating square bullets.
Like, what is this? What is this crazy
crazy crazy craziness? So,
after this, we get into, I guess, what we'd call more squirmy territory,
(09:01):
where the popular delusion is less humorous.
And
because people are really getting fleeced in these circumstances,
a lot of these things
are stuff like,
not just of money, but of health as well. So I'm talking more about the alchemists,
prophecies
and magnetizes,
(09:22):
which were separate check chapters of this book,
where they would promise a lot of things. You know, I'm gonna make you rich.
I'm gonna predict the future. I'm going to, you know, attract wealth to you or health to you or things like this.
And other than perhaps some placebo effects,
they very, very rarely delivered. And to whip up this hype, they typically would use trickery such as having
(09:48):
a a crucible where it had a, like, a fake bottom in in it and which would have some gold underneath. So, you know, people would be putting lead into it, and then it would melt and then eventually form this gold looking mixture, which you could say, oh, wow. Amazing. So then they would just chuck money at these people.
The psychology of the nations and courts were probably,
(10:09):
somewhere between delusion and madness. So, you know, people were kind of like,
I know this is a folly, but I'm still gonna
jump into this because other people are doing it as well. And then there was certainly people who believed in these things and were trying to cure themselves of gout and other serious illnesses. So, you know, it was certainly less funny as money and lives were on the line when it comes to this
(10:34):
broad swath of belief in
these things without any
scientific evidence or actually without really any evidence other than hearsay and,
a lot of charm from these people.
But on the individual levels, there's such great stories emerge,
alchemists being imprisoned
until they pay their ransom with millions of gold. So it's kind of like flipped on their head. They think they're fooling everyone, and then it's like, oh, wait, you're getting locked up in a dungeon until you work your magic for me.
(11:05):
So that was one. Finding other impassioned souls to join forces with. There's countless stories of,
a man meeting a woman who was just as unscrupulous as him, and so they would form this bond of
trickery to go around all these different countries and typically like that exhaust their goodwill in Belgium. So then they'd move on to Holland and then they'd move on to France and then they'd move to England and then they'd go back to France after people had forgotten them for a bit.
(11:32):
You know,
obtaining patronage from kings and queens, consulting spirits and fooling even themselves. So they start to believe their own own wise caps and their own remarks. It was a rather dangerous game
for the genuine and the deceivers because,
you know, the people who genuinely thought they were doing this could get blindsided by
(11:55):
a,
a greedy king, an avarice
avaricious king or queen
who would lock them up. And And then the ones who are fooling other people
could, you know, find a genuine person who believed in them and then just fleece them with all their money. And then there'd be highway robberies and all sorts of crazy stuff. So
essentially trickery.
(12:16):
The alchemist section I'll probably focus on here because it it took up probably, I don't know, almost a quarter of the book. And there was some real characters, some real underdogs
who, through persistence, won the crowd.
Mesmer, for example,
needed to go
through many places to promote his animal magnetism
(12:37):
and eventually found, I think it was in France, the kind of audience that he was looking for and hence why we have the term mesmerism to this day because he was
essentially inventing kind of like hypnotism of a sort with these people.
And,
you know, so his name is canonized into,
the English language now, so good on him.
(12:58):
My favorite alchemist is Bernard of Treves Treves,
t r e v e s. His persistence and love of experimentation
is is actually rather admirable.
Some of the qualities of these people were like, sure. They were rather deluded in thinking that they could transmutate
lead into gold.
(13:20):
But, you know, he was doing it for,
I guess, wealth, but almost for the the passion of it because he spent so much money. Like, he basically had a,
he was, I guess, like, what you would call a trust fund baby nowadays.
Obscene amount of wealth, mortgaged his lands, sold them all
to finance his experiments,
(13:41):
and he would travel around Europe
meeting other alchemists and comparing notes and trying out things. And, you know, of course, he never exceeded in in creating gold because we know the physical limitations of that nowadays and how it would require
an immense amount of energy to,
transmutate to transform something like a base metal in into gold.
(14:04):
Yet
I have a fondness for him. There was just a spirit about him where it was like, you're rooting for the guy.
And, you know, he was trying to do it from from mother earth as well. He wasn't trying to steal from other people, you know, stealing from the universe perhaps.
But, unfortunately, there was just
many for every one of him, there would probably be 10 of the Jacques Couers who would hire alchemists to hide his real ability, which was fraud. And so you would see all these people who were just charlatans and stealing from other people.
(14:39):
So, you know, we can see, okay, there's some
things like the financial ones, which are they're kind of funny, but
serious at the same time. Then we get on to the alchemist where it's like, alright, you're promising people, like, a full clean slate of health. You're promising them hope, and you can cure some people with the placebo effect, but that's not really that
(14:59):
noteworthy.
And you're taking them off their money. And at at times, they would be taking them off their health by getting them to, you know, ingest certain things, which were probably not that great.
And then we get on to the stuff which is just terrible for individuals
and groups,
(15:20):
what I would call pure madness.
I think of reading this book, the witch trials would probably be the most disgusting of these, the most egregious.
I can understand
people in the, you know, like, 15 hundreds, 14 hundreds being angry,
scared of plague or bad weather
(15:40):
or bad harvest, poor health.
But the systematic
persecution
over hundreds of years
really surprised me because they had these kind of code of contacts for trials
of witches that included lugar ludicrous stuff, like
always believing kids over parents,
(16:00):
immediately seizing and torturing under any,
someone under any suspicion
of,
muttering and looking at the ground of being positive proof of guilt of someone.
Essentially,
I would say it was a way of getting rid of actual madness and doing it through
(16:21):
many violent means. And this then spread over into
what I would call just sane people and, you know, persecutions for
other sakes such as I don't like this person. I've got a dispute with this person over some land. You know, let me get at him by,
accusing his wife of of, witchcraft and things like this. And so what we saw was how the law
(16:47):
would
work against and, I guess,
incentivize people to essentially just commit murder.
So an old lady,
who'd lived by herself,
she, you know, someone didn't like her or kids down the street
made fun of her as kids tend to do. And then they would do things by, like, alright, well, let's see if she's a witch. We'll,
(17:13):
they would tie, I think it was the
thumb of one hand to the
left big toe of the other. So right thumb to left big toe.
And then
if they could swim and float to the surface, then they're obviously a witch. And if they sank and drowned, well, then they were innocent. But, you know, at least they we know they weren't a witch. And,
(17:36):
you know, what kind of system is this which is determining
guilt or not by killing someone.
And you could also see among these where
the the trials, the the ways of finding out if a person was a witch or not was
just extremely biased.
They would use torture.
If you're torturing someone, they're gonna say anything.
(17:58):
But this would then be positive proof of, like, oh, yeah, this person was a witch because she commit she confessed under torture.
Like, okay.
Well, I
anyone would confess anything under torture if you if you're goading them into saying it. So, you know,
screams on the pyre indicating someone who was guilty, like, oh, yeah, they screamed really loudly while we're burning them alive. That that was a sure, surefire way of proving guilt.
(18:25):
So,
you know, how did so many people lose common sense for so long?
You know, I think it would be interesting to
try and have and I'm sure there's some books out there which are detailing
perhaps other reasons for this. Like, did people actually believe in witches or was it like, okay, you know,
(18:46):
there's
someone who's
autistic
or perhaps has schizophrenia.
We're going to try and redress this and, you know, it's costing the community a lot. We can't really
afford to have, like, a madhouses or anything like this. Like, this is just a way of kind of culling them from society.
(19:07):
I'm not sure.
It would be interesting
to go back to these times
to to see if there was like a an under text.
But from what we're getting from this book, it sounded more like belief. These people believed in witches. And so, like,
they killed a whole lot of, innocent people.
Obviously, innocent for
(19:28):
the crime of witchcraftry, which doesn't exist, but be, you know, perhaps they were,
deleterious to society for other reasons. You know? Who knows?
A sheriff hoped to merit heaven by making earth a hell. That that was the kind of people that you're
encountering who
were enforcing these laws.
So that was probably, like, the most egregious where the madness
(19:51):
you can certainly see it existing within people, but then it spread over into the crowds, and then the crowds were just
killing a lot. And so, you know, it was hundreds
per year in many of these locations, and it would spread from country to country. It would sometimes be in Germany. It would have a lull there and then pop up in England Thirty Years later.
(20:12):
And he
this this book doesn't detail
in a kind of, like, statistical manner,
the amount of deaths, and I'll touch upon perhaps some of the errors that you might be finding in this book and things like this. It was more about the stories. You know, here's the story of this person. Here's the story of that person.
And sometimes this would be backed up with, like, a reference to another book.
(20:36):
And
at other times, it would be like, I'm okay. I'm not sure where the author got this in information, this being Charles Mackay, but,
you know, he he was certainly doing things and and, and writing about these things, so he must have had some sources somewhere. So
the the last section, I guess, getting into the the madness, the follies,
(20:56):
was there was stuff that was included in this book, which was,
I guess, you know, sure, it's not rational
in
in certain terms, in terms of, like,
you know, how do you define rationality is is hard.
Fashion, for example, is a is a very tricky one.
We know that humans
(21:17):
value certain things. We know that,
craze has come through. So he had a very, very small section on the,
it was I'll see if I can find it exactly, but it was bay basically about the beards
in in
the court,
influence of politics and religions on the hair and beard.
And it was only,
(21:38):
what, seven pages long,
but talked about how certain monarchs would go through this phase of this fashion. And then others were like, oh, no. Religion dictates that you shouldn't have your beard a certain length, so you should be clean shaven and things like this. You know, that's fashion. And certainly it
was
influential and people would change their attire, their look based on what this monarch thought or what this pope or ecclesial person said.
(22:07):
But, you know, is that truly
irrational in certain extents?
It's it's hard to say.
There was other things which were more like, I would say, frenzies or just enabling of the worst parts of ourselves. So the Crusades were calamitous
and basically armies of of just the worst people. But that's falls more under the definition of just war in general. I feel,
(22:32):
slow poisoning was just sneaky murder. So
sure, people were were doing these slow poisonings where they'd poison someone to death over a period of weeks or months, maybe even a year.
Dueling became a sport and a social event.
The punishment of death was not enough to stop people from duelling
and whether this be through pistols,
(22:54):
through lances,
on horsebacks or via swords and daggers.
So because they were obviously willing to throw their lives away. So the death of punishment,
punishment of death was not enough.
It really needed shame, which was the reason why these people were fighting for for honor, for for status and things like this. So, you know, if there are public whipping, for for example, was a more effective punishment than death itself,
(23:20):
relics of the past,
where people would collect, you know, the toenails of
John the
Baptist or something or of the cross that Jesus died on, that would be enough wood to furnish a full cathedral. So, obviously,
there wasn't that much wood,
is more akin, I guess, to collecting nowadays. So there's things which I say, like, okay. You know, how are you exactly
(23:47):
defining human rationality?
Because there are things like fashion, like collecting, like,
you know, fads,
which,
yes, I guess they can fall under the
popular delusion,
madness of crowd. It's a hard thing. War, you know, that's just a constant thing throughout human history.
(24:09):
Is that a madness of sorts?
If it happens so often, you gotta say, like, oh, maybe that's not a madness, and that's just part of our default
makeup. So, you know, I asked the question at the start
or or was looking at the effect of madness between
individuals and groups.
(24:30):
And from what I could kind of gather from this book,
most of it's got to start with an individual somewhere,
unless
perhaps it starts with
multiple individuals in discussion and
a thing form. So you could kind of see, like, okay. You know, you hear this knocking in a house.
What was the reason for that? Well, you could use some rationality,
(24:54):
but
some some things don't make intuitive sense,
such as, like,
he gave an example of a
house with this knocking. And,
you know, it was a series of circumstances
which are of, like, a broken window on the of the latch of this door, which would blow and then reopen it in a certain manner to make it then be able to slam again.
(25:17):
You know, is that more
feasible to think up of,
versus
ghosts
in conversation with other people, perhaps if you're a little bit drunk, perhaps if you're, you know, trying to one up each other or something like this. Yeah. You know, you could start the rumor of a haunted house, and then next thing you know, that's just spread across to a a city, a village and into an entire country.
(25:42):
I tend to think that there's a,
it it probably mostly starts with individuals, and a lot of times they will do this for their particular advantage.
The haunted houses were done for the advantage of these
tricksters who like to play mayhem
or perhaps even for monetary purposes to, you know, try and sue someone or to try and make an attraction that people would pay for.
(26:06):
Jeweling
was done for
a social status and to climb up the ranks in in the courts of kings and queens and things like this.
The alchem
alchemists, the magnetizers,
most of almost all of this is done for
some sort of benefit, which is a rational thing. Okay? I would like to have more money. I would like to live and eat and not need to, you know, bake my break my back,
(26:33):
toiling
for for a living.
But,
you know, there are there is a certain thing about groups of people together which changes actions. I can give a easy example from last night. I was in a Pilates class, and the teacher said, you know, like, you know, bring your right foot forward and your left is gonna go behind. And just the way she said it was, like, slightly confusing, but it's like, okay. Alright. I'm doing this with my right leg. And I look at the the girls in front of me, and all of them were doing it with their left leg. And I was like, oh, did I misunderstand that?
(27:04):
Well, alright. I'll just copy what they did. So I I was copying them.
I thought originally it was the other thing. If I was at the front of the class, I would have done it the opposite way. But it was like, alright, I'm just gonna follow these these people. I fit into the group then,
and you do both legs, so there's no
weirdness about it. It's not like you're going to end up with one jacked leg or something.
(27:26):
A very simple example of how I conform to a group
despite my own,
rationale,
my own reasoning.
And
I can see that when it comes to groups of people
where death is involved, where there is a frenzy of emotions,
people get
into a similar state. It's like an infectious type of thing and how that can spread
(27:51):
very dependent on time and circumstances,
I guess. And this is why you would see it occur only in certain countries at certain times.
But I think it's undeniable that there is
popular delusions and madness of crowds
and of individuals as well. So let's jump on to the author himself. Some extra details.
(28:13):
Charles Mackay, Scottish author, poet, journalist, born in 1814, died in 1889.
So he would have wrote this when he was
30, 20 seven, something like that.
This was pub originally published in three volumes, but seems to have been reorganized,
edited over the years. I have a version which was based on the 1851
(28:33):
manuscript,
and it says it has some minor corrections to that as well.
There was nothing really notable about him other than he traveled,
went to America, participated in some of the bubbles such as the railway one.
And I believe
it wasn't mentioned in this book, but perhaps other versions of this had an addendum
talking about the railways as another
(28:55):
popular delusion.
What I really liked about this book was the small details.
Learning that stock job is in England and France tried to stir up a tulip mania similar to the Dutch
was kind of an unexpected insight because
you you can get the feeling that these madness and crazes just they appear from nowhere. They are just this crazy, like, man, how did this thing happen? Rumor that the rumor mill was what stirred this up. But
(29:24):
there was enough little examples in here where I'm like, okay. I think a lot of this is
done with a an intent of some sorts. You could trace its origin to a certain person,
whether they're doing it from malicious intent, whether they're doing it just for the fun of it.
Who knows?
Whether they're doing it for profit or perhaps they even think they're doing a good thing by
(29:46):
creating this rumor or starting up this craze.
It comes to show that these things can be stoked, that the follies
are are not just
out of nowhere. And,
another example was,
probably one of the chapters I didn't talk about
was in,
(30:07):
I think he called it like the the craze of of nations or the craze of countries or cities.
And he was talking about how phrases like in England,
quas,
for example, was a huge craze for a bit
or flare up, which was kind of to indicate
someone who has
just got into a fight or is like flare up or someone who or there's a disagreement and they're flaring up.
(30:32):
You know, that is just indicative of the current languages now is where people will talk about chat
or, Riz
or something like that.
And these go in and out of favor. Cool used to be the thing. Sweet, rad.
You know, go back in time and you'll see these words merge.
What a shocking bad hat, for example, was one.
(30:53):
All of these things were
crazes and stuff that
appear, but they they don't really have a lasting power, a lot of them.
Although some do. Mesmer, as I mentioned, is now a word in the English language, pretty well established. And it was from one dude who was convincing enough with his animal magnetism to have made it into
(31:15):
a word somehow.
So
one thing I guess I should just note with this book is
it'll be very hard
to tell of the veracity of a lot of these stories. You know, he's presenting them as fact,
and his style was was relatively neutral. I would say he wasn't adding, I don't think, on to any of these things. He was simply trying to retell many stories.
(31:39):
Any individual story in this, I'm sure, is distorted
and is not indicative of what actually happened.
It's more a
retelling from some point of view, but isn't that all,
stories in essence? So, you know, no no real detractions here from him.
What I liked about it was the the style that he gave was very
(32:03):
matter of the fact he'd add some humor into it.
And then typically, you'd talk about maybe, the problem and the solution right at the end of the chapter. But it was it was more of a historical
telling rather than an examination
and analysis
of these crazes throughout history. And so, you know, all of this, I feel, is ultimately goes to show that humans are still humaning. Perhaps you're of the opinion that,
(32:27):
oh, witch hunts. We never believe in that anymore. Like, we wouldn't kill people just because we think they're a witch,
nowadays in this modern society, things like this.
No way, man. Crazy beliefs are propagated just as much
during those times as as these times now. So, you know, did we fare much better during COVID, for example,
(32:49):
with the amount of
worrying and crazy behavior that people were doing? You know,
we
now have the photos of people wearing buckets on their heads, going into supermarkets
of things like this.
How could you look at that and not say that is exactly the same as the crazy shit that people were doing two hundred five hundred years ago.
(33:13):
Magnetizers
are now kind of people like crystalizers,
perhaps faith healers,
modern prophets
now become either yoga gurus or perhaps like the twenty twelve
doomsayers or perhaps preppers,
alchemists. Perhaps you'd probably call them psychonauts nowadays,
people who experiment radically with psychedelics and things like that.
(33:36):
Witch hunts have become things like perhaps the lynching of African Americans
in the in the last century
or the satanic panic in the 1980s in North America
where, you know, people thought there was kindergarten devil worship going on and stuff like that.
Thankfully, the killings, I would say, have diminished over time. You could probably read some of Steven Pinker's books to see, I think, the effect of of that as well, that
(34:03):
individual
murder, whether it be for vengeance, whether it be for profit,
whether it be out of fear of the unknown,
I believe that has
dramatically
lessened. And
thank you. Thank thank human society for that. But you can still go to many rural places,
(34:24):
rural China for rhino horn,
meta medical things,
of many parts of Africa. You'll still have the prejudice against albinos.
Belief that white farmers are using black magic or things like this.
And you can see these superstitions
in Australia, in Asia, in
(34:46):
Europe, in North America, in Central America, Latin America, it doesn't matter where you go. You'll find superstitions in people who believe certain things that
are untrue, that are maybe true, that
are contradictory
perhaps to
to what is real. And the
yeah. It's it's very hard sorting out truth and belief from what is real.
(35:10):
Guessing, I guess, going back, I guess, to external reality,
everything that we have nowadays is magic
to people from a hundred years ago, five hundred years ago.
So the stuff in the future that we would then say is like, that's superstition.
That's ridiculous.
That is magic. That is not real.
(35:30):
There's people who could do that, I'm sure, in a couple of hundred years time. So fascinating all around.
Let's get into some of the summary similar book recommendations.
Look, overall, it's kind of bleak reading, to be honest.
But there are moments of real levity
throughout as well.
It certainly doesn't give me faith in human rationality.
Certainly,
(35:51):
I would say is a rather strong argument against it,
if only by providing examples throughout history.
If you can get past these suffering from financial folly, for example, it's rather humorous.
But then you have to contend with, like, the false medical hope of quacks
until you just have, like, the straight up
guise of,
(36:13):
murder under the guise of religion or faith or something like this. So, you know, I liked his style of writing. It was to the point with some humor,
and
I found rather informative.
But, you know, the book itself is massive, and there is a bit of a feeling of slogging through
yet another story of yet another alchemist who lived in this time where you're like, okay. I don't really care about this. But,
(36:38):
I believe it's worth the effort. The small nuances,
the
individual stories, the things that jump out at you, the character of some of these people, the highlighting of just how
bizarre
the human experience can be, especially of an individual and then in groups is is pretty wonderful. So, overall,
(36:59):
I would give the book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay, a very solid seven and a half out of 10. It's a slog, but I I think it's worth it.
Now I've already mentioned,
Edward Chancellor's book, The Devil Take the Hindmost. Highly recommend reading that. That is a great book.
Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test, for example,
(37:22):
is perhaps more the clinical side of madness.
He doesn't talk particularly about the madness in terms of,
in in this book here of the
individual illnesses
of because they just didn't really know at the time, you know, what is schizophrenia?
What is autism?
What is
certain of these, like, delusions
(37:44):
and how they are actually, you know,
rewiring
of the brain that has gone awry rather than
an actual
real person whose beliefs have changed. It's hard hard to say.
Michael Lewis has lauded the financial sections of his books if you like that. Mark Twain in
the,
(38:06):
was it,
Pilgrim Abroad or, Abroad,
The Innocents Abroad,
book review of that I've done where he goes to he talks about some of the crusade stuff because he goes to Palestine
of the relic stuff because he goes over that
A couple of different books there,
in terms of more around the topics and themes that you'll find within here rather than the style of the book. So, yeah, that is there for you there.
(38:31):
Final little sections here, value for value podcast. I do all of this upfront. It's available for anyone, anytime, anywhere.
And I just ask that you return some shape or form of value,
many different ways of doing this time, simply clicking the like button of sharing this with someone, word-of-mouth,
Really important for a podcast like this. So tell your friend, hey, minimalist book reviews. Really good good podcast.
(38:55):
Available both on audio and video.
Of talent. I wanna hear your book recommendations. Did you like this? What other books did you like
with regards to that, what would you love to see me cover on this channel? And then finally, some treasure. There's PayPal link down below. And if you go to me and mortalspodcast.com/support,
you can also see other ways of, supporting us financially over here,
(39:18):
much like Martin Lindeskog did on some of the recent episodes by streaming and some Satoshis. Big, big shout out to Martin. Thank you for that. Final one. What's coming up
in the future? And I guess, like, the live.
Well, this I'm heading off to Europe tomorrow.
My first time there is gonna be rather exciting. I'll see if I can see any of the witch hunts or any of the crazy stuff that this book covers because it was written from a European perspective. So, it was
(39:45):
all about the the Europeans.
So what that means is I'm probably not gonna be doing any book reviews
whilst traveling,
maybe, but unlikely.
I really wanna focus on getting the most out of, my first time in Europe, and I'm only gonna be there for about two months. So, yeah, I really wanna make the most of it.
(40:08):
I know Juan is doing a couple of book reviews,
preps already ready to go for the next couple of weeks. So that all should be releasing on Wednesdays as usual.
And yeah. So we're just gonna leave it here for the for the time being. There's probably gonna be some gaps.
I will be back at some point in July,
August, and probably recommencing the book reviews then. So until then, enjoy this little break. Hope you're having a fantastic day wherever you are in the world, and chat for now. Karen out. Bye.
Best example of human madness is found across the ages.
Welcome,
everyone, to another episode of the Mere Mortals book reviews. I'm your host here, Kyrin, and live on the 05/14/2025.
And as you maximize, this is the podcast where I critically examine propositions
(00:24):
from a fundamental philosophical basis.
Okay. No. No. We don't do that here. No. Especially not from this book here. We have extraordinary popular
delusions and the madness of crowds by Charles Mackay.
Pretty thick, handy book here. This is originally published in 1841.
It's 05/1960
(00:44):
pages in length. I'd say it took me nineteen, twenty hours of reading because this thing is dense. It was probably, like, two minutes per page. It is just fraught with information and very little,
images or anything else of that nature. So it's a mammoth examination
of the most ridiculous crazes across history,
(01:05):
whether they be funny,
bad, or straight up just horrendous.
So Charles details some of the more,
well known financial bubbles. So in of this age or at the time that he was writing
was the tulip mania of the Mississippi bubble and of of the South Sea Company.
But he also catalogs some of the more well known alchemists, for example, the magnetizers
(01:29):
and mob like activities,
such like things like the crusades and witch hunts, and even some more humorous stuff, which I wouldn't exactly
categorize as a madness
or a popular delusion,
but things which can be kind of sorta like fashions, like haunted houses, for example,
or of dueling or things like this where it's like, it's not exactly a
(01:52):
popular delusion of the madness of crowds, but, you know, it it is a craze of some sort. So the book is split into 15 chapters,
and I really consider it a historical document of sorts.
The
bulk of the actual writing and stuff is, I think, taken up with things like The Alchemist, for example,
(02:12):
which is just
a huge a huge amount of work going into into that one, and the crusades as well, which may near a little bit as well. But, yeah, you've got popular admiration of great thieves, jewels and ordeals, relics, haunted houses, the slow poisoners, saucy billab, tulip mania, basically all the stuff I explained just then. So let's jump into the actual themes because this is gonna be a weighty one.
(02:35):
What's the difference between individual delusions,
madness,
and follies versus that of a group?
And although the book doesn't split it up into these categories,
it rather emerged from the writing for me,
as a stark contrast between
that of an individual and that of those when they're in a crowd or as as part of a, I guess, a sweeping craze across a nation, for example.
(03:00):
And it's this is somewhat linked between the words themselves, delusion and madness,
something like the false belief despite
external reality,
opinions that are unshakable,
extremely foolish behavior,
and tending towards serious mental illness if you're considering madness on that front.
Delusion is certainly the more lighted, harder of the two, and madness typically has this, I I don't know, this feeling of danger to it. It doesn't necessarily,
(03:28):
conform to that if you're looking up strict definitions of the words,
but that is kind of the feeling that I got. The word folly is also used quite extensively throughout this book,
despite it not being in the title. So we'll go on to, I guess, some of the,
lighter hearted
things and get on to, I guess, the the more egregious. So
(03:49):
I think we start off with pretty light hearted stuff, which is the three financial bubbles.
He covers the big three ones, which I mentioned just before.
And unlike the book, Devil Take the Hindmost, which I reviewed not too long ago, he's really just sticking with these three and had yet to see some of the
even crazier ones in a certain extent of the, you know, modern tech bubbles of
(04:15):
stock companies of Japanese side tech of the railway mania of electricity,
oil, all of these sorts of things. So, you know, he he only covers these three, but I think those three are sufficient enough example to to see the financial folly.
On the whole, these periods of ridiculous, I would say, are more funny than dangerous.
(04:37):
Even though people lost substantial money, I'm sure that impacted their lives. I'm sure there was people who perhaps, you know, lost more than they could afford to and put themselves in serious debt or into very
impoverished
circumstances for perhaps even the rest of their lives.
And there was scammy behavior, but you don't see the physical effect on people's lives so much. So there was only one or two
(05:04):
examples of actual
robbery or deaths related to the financial bubbles. And
for those who didn't get into it, it was essentially when the stock prices of certain companies such as the Mississippi
company in France or the South Sea in,
in England and in
Holland. They had these tulips with, you know, the actual flower of tulips, which people bid up to insane prices, and then the bubble burst.
(05:32):
You know, these these were events which where people lost track of what actual value was in terms of the valuing of things in terms of real money where you could go like, in what
in what case does like this flower that I have,
is this the equivalent of, like, an estate of a person with, you know, houses and servants and things like this? Like, it it makes no sense.
(05:55):
And this is largely what these bubbles were about.
But the mobs in the aftermath didn't commit mass murder or even really destruction.
So despite there being
hardships and stuff like this in the large sway of things, people certainly lost their mind in terms of
financial worth of things, but they didn't lose their their actual minds.
(06:17):
And so, you know, on the that's on the
group side of things on the individual side, it's fucking hilarious. Some of the stories,
John Law, the guy who basically
invented the Mississippi bubble,
who was an, I believe, Scotsman or perhaps Englishman,
who came to France after
(06:38):
kind of gallivanting about all of Europe and gambling away tons of money.
He just fell in over his head. He he wasn't as smart as he thought he was and,
ended up
creating this bubble.
You only needed to see his gambling past to realize that probably something like this was gonna happen.
I love the ingenuity of people trying to see him because he basically courted so much power and money that people were trying to get access to him. So, you know, pretty bad ladies batting an eyelid at him
(07:09):
wasn't gonna,
cut it anymore. And so
crashing your carriage or,
in front of him or creating a fake fire,
you know, essentially
a moral hazard,
is is next level, which is what some of these people were doing to just to be able to talk to him to buy some of the stock.
Some of the other things,
(07:30):
page 47 is probably one of my
favorite quotes of all time. I listed this in the, in the other book review that I did, that I mentioned before, which was linked highly to these financial bubbles.
But this was when there was all of these companies being proposed in England, and one of them was a company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.
(07:54):
So good. So, so funny.
I just love that. I love that.
The other examples that you could perhaps find in here
were on page fifty two fifty four, which was giving off all of these things. So, like, another petition for a Greenland trade
or petition of several merchants of London praying a charter of incorporation
(08:16):
for carrying on assault work. Like, what are what are all of these things? What does this mean?
Absolutely crazy.
And
what we can see, I guess, throughout all of this is that there is just
some
mad, mad behavior.
Another one here, which was on page 55,
which was,
(08:37):
one of the most famous bubbles was Puckle's machine company for discharging round and square cannonballs and bullets and making a total revolution in the art of war. That's it. We're making a total revolution by creating square bullets.
Like, what is this? What is this crazy
crazy crazy craziness? So,
after this, we get into, I guess, what we'd call more squirmy territory,
(09:01):
where the popular delusion is less humorous.
And
because people are really getting fleeced in these circumstances,
a lot of these things
are stuff like,
not just of money, but of health as well. So I'm talking more about the alchemists,
prophecies
and magnetizes,
(09:22):
which were separate check chapters of this book,
where they would promise a lot of things. You know, I'm gonna make you rich.
I'm gonna predict the future. I'm going to, you know, attract wealth to you or health to you or things like this.
And other than perhaps some placebo effects,
they very, very rarely delivered. And to whip up this hype, they typically would use trickery such as having
(09:48):
a a crucible where it had a, like, a fake bottom in in it and which would have some gold underneath. So, you know, people would be putting lead into it, and then it would melt and then eventually form this gold looking mixture, which you could say, oh, wow. Amazing. So then they would just chuck money at these people.
The psychology of the nations and courts were probably,
(10:09):
somewhere between delusion and madness. So, you know, people were kind of like,
I know this is a folly, but I'm still gonna
jump into this because other people are doing it as well. And then there was certainly people who believed in these things and were trying to cure themselves of gout and other serious illnesses. So, you know, it was certainly less funny as money and lives were on the line when it comes to this
(10:34):
broad swath of belief in
these things without any
scientific evidence or actually without really any evidence other than hearsay and,
a lot of charm from these people.
But on the individual levels, there's such great stories emerge,
alchemists being imprisoned
until they pay their ransom with millions of gold. So it's kind of like flipped on their head. They think they're fooling everyone, and then it's like, oh, wait, you're getting locked up in a dungeon until you work your magic for me.
(11:05):
So that was one. Finding other impassioned souls to join forces with. There's countless stories of,
a man meeting a woman who was just as unscrupulous as him, and so they would form this bond of
trickery to go around all these different countries and typically like that exhaust their goodwill in Belgium. So then they'd move on to Holland and then they'd move on to France and then they'd move to England and then they'd go back to France after people had forgotten them for a bit.
(11:32):
You know,
obtaining patronage from kings and queens, consulting spirits and fooling even themselves. So they start to believe their own own wise caps and their own remarks. It was a rather dangerous game
for the genuine and the deceivers because,
you know, the people who genuinely thought they were doing this could get blindsided by
(11:55):
a,
a greedy king, an avarice
avaricious king or queen
who would lock them up. And And then the ones who are fooling other people
could, you know, find a genuine person who believed in them and then just fleece them with all their money. And then there'd be highway robberies and all sorts of crazy stuff. So
essentially trickery.
(12:16):
The alchemist section I'll probably focus on here because it it took up probably, I don't know, almost a quarter of the book. And there was some real characters, some real underdogs
who, through persistence, won the crowd.
Mesmer, for example,
needed to go
through many places to promote his animal magnetism
(12:37):
and eventually found, I think it was in France, the kind of audience that he was looking for and hence why we have the term mesmerism to this day because he was
essentially inventing kind of like hypnotism of a sort with these people.
And,
you know, so his name is canonized into,
the English language now, so good on him.
(12:58):
My favorite alchemist is Bernard of Treves Treves,
t r e v e s. His persistence and love of experimentation
is is actually rather admirable.
Some of the qualities of these people were like, sure. They were rather deluded in thinking that they could transmutate
lead into gold.
(13:20):
But, you know, he was doing it for,
I guess, wealth, but almost for the the passion of it because he spent so much money. Like, he basically had a,
he was, I guess, like, what you would call a trust fund baby nowadays.
Obscene amount of wealth, mortgaged his lands, sold them all
to finance his experiments,
(13:41):
and he would travel around Europe
meeting other alchemists and comparing notes and trying out things. And, you know, of course, he never exceeded in in creating gold because we know the physical limitations of that nowadays and how it would require
an immense amount of energy to,
transmutate to transform something like a base metal in into gold.
(14:04):
Yet
I have a fondness for him. There was just a spirit about him where it was like, you're rooting for the guy.
And, you know, he was trying to do it from from mother earth as well. He wasn't trying to steal from other people, you know, stealing from the universe perhaps.
But, unfortunately, there was just
many for every one of him, there would probably be 10 of the Jacques Couers who would hire alchemists to hide his real ability, which was fraud. And so you would see all these people who were just charlatans and stealing from other people.
(14:39):
So, you know, we can see, okay, there's some
things like the financial ones, which are they're kind of funny, but
serious at the same time. Then we get on to the alchemist where it's like, alright, you're promising people, like, a full clean slate of health. You're promising them hope, and you can cure some people with the placebo effect, but that's not really that
(14:59):
noteworthy.
And you're taking them off their money. And at at times, they would be taking them off their health by getting them to, you know, ingest certain things, which were probably not that great.
And then we get on to the stuff which is just terrible for individuals
and groups,
(15:20):
what I would call pure madness.
I think of reading this book, the witch trials would probably be the most disgusting of these, the most egregious.
I can understand
people in the, you know, like, 15 hundreds, 14 hundreds being angry,
scared of plague or bad weather
(15:40):
or bad harvest, poor health.
But the systematic
persecution
over hundreds of years
really surprised me because they had these kind of code of contacts for trials
of witches that included lugar ludicrous stuff, like
always believing kids over parents,
(16:00):
immediately seizing and torturing under any,
someone under any suspicion
of,
muttering and looking at the ground of being positive proof of guilt of someone.
Essentially,
I would say it was a way of getting rid of actual madness and doing it through
(16:21):
many violent means. And this then spread over into
what I would call just sane people and, you know, persecutions for
other sakes such as I don't like this person. I've got a dispute with this person over some land. You know, let me get at him by,
accusing his wife of of, witchcraft and things like this. And so what we saw was how the law
(16:47):
would
work against and, I guess,
incentivize people to essentially just commit murder.
So an old lady,
who'd lived by herself,
she, you know, someone didn't like her or kids down the street
made fun of her as kids tend to do. And then they would do things by, like, alright, well, let's see if she's a witch. We'll,
(17:13):
they would tie, I think it was the
thumb of one hand to the
left big toe of the other. So right thumb to left big toe.
And then
if they could swim and float to the surface, then they're obviously a witch. And if they sank and drowned, well, then they were innocent. But, you know, at least they we know they weren't a witch. And,
(17:36):
you know, what kind of system is this which is determining
guilt or not by killing someone.
And you could also see among these where
the the trials, the the ways of finding out if a person was a witch or not was
just extremely biased.
They would use torture.
If you're torturing someone, they're gonna say anything.
(17:58):
But this would then be positive proof of, like, oh, yeah, this person was a witch because she commit she confessed under torture.
Like, okay.
Well, I
anyone would confess anything under torture if you if you're goading them into saying it. So, you know,
screams on the pyre indicating someone who was guilty, like, oh, yeah, they screamed really loudly while we're burning them alive. That that was a sure, surefire way of proving guilt.
(18:25):
So,
you know, how did so many people lose common sense for so long?
You know, I think it would be interesting to
try and have and I'm sure there's some books out there which are detailing
perhaps other reasons for this. Like, did people actually believe in witches or was it like, okay, you know,
(18:46):
there's
someone who's
autistic
or perhaps has schizophrenia.
We're going to try and redress this and, you know, it's costing the community a lot. We can't really
afford to have, like, a madhouses or anything like this. Like, this is just a way of kind of culling them from society.
(19:07):
I'm not sure.
It would be interesting
to go back to these times
to to see if there was like a an under text.
But from what we're getting from this book, it sounded more like belief. These people believed in witches. And so, like,
they killed a whole lot of, innocent people.
Obviously, innocent for
(19:28):
the crime of witchcraftry, which doesn't exist, but be, you know, perhaps they were,
deleterious to society for other reasons. You know? Who knows?
A sheriff hoped to merit heaven by making earth a hell. That that was the kind of people that you're
encountering who
were enforcing these laws.
So that was probably, like, the most egregious where the madness
(19:51):
you can certainly see it existing within people, but then it spread over into the crowds, and then the crowds were just
killing a lot. And so, you know, it was hundreds
per year in many of these locations, and it would spread from country to country. It would sometimes be in Germany. It would have a lull there and then pop up in England Thirty Years later.
(20:12):
And he
this this book doesn't detail
in a kind of, like, statistical manner,
the amount of deaths, and I'll touch upon perhaps some of the errors that you might be finding in this book and things like this. It was more about the stories. You know, here's the story of this person. Here's the story of that person.
And sometimes this would be backed up with, like, a reference to another book.
(20:36):
And
at other times, it would be like, I'm okay. I'm not sure where the author got this in information, this being Charles Mackay, but,
you know, he he was certainly doing things and and, and writing about these things, so he must have had some sources somewhere. So
the the last section, I guess, getting into the the madness, the follies,
(20:56):
was there was stuff that was included in this book, which was,
I guess, you know, sure, it's not rational
in
in certain terms, in terms of, like,
you know, how do you define rationality is is hard.
Fashion, for example, is a is a very tricky one.
We know that humans
(21:17):
value certain things. We know that,
craze has come through. So he had a very, very small section on the,
it was I'll see if I can find it exactly, but it was bay basically about the beards
in in
the court,
influence of politics and religions on the hair and beard.
And it was only,
(21:38):
what, seven pages long,
but talked about how certain monarchs would go through this phase of this fashion. And then others were like, oh, no. Religion dictates that you shouldn't have your beard a certain length, so you should be clean shaven and things like this. You know, that's fashion. And certainly it
was
influential and people would change their attire, their look based on what this monarch thought or what this pope or ecclesial person said.
(22:07):
But, you know, is that truly
irrational in certain extents?
It's it's hard to say.
There was other things which were more like, I would say, frenzies or just enabling of the worst parts of ourselves. So the Crusades were calamitous
and basically armies of of just the worst people. But that's falls more under the definition of just war in general. I feel,
(22:32):
slow poisoning was just sneaky murder. So
sure, people were were doing these slow poisonings where they'd poison someone to death over a period of weeks or months, maybe even a year.
Dueling became a sport and a social event.
The punishment of death was not enough to stop people from duelling
and whether this be through pistols,
(22:54):
through lances,
on horsebacks or via swords and daggers.
So because they were obviously willing to throw their lives away. So the death of punishment,
punishment of death was not enough.
It really needed shame, which was the reason why these people were fighting for for honor, for for status and things like this. So, you know, if there are public whipping, for for example, was a more effective punishment than death itself,
(23:20):
relics of the past,
where people would collect, you know, the toenails of
John the
Baptist or something or of the cross that Jesus died on, that would be enough wood to furnish a full cathedral. So, obviously,
there wasn't that much wood,
is more akin, I guess, to collecting nowadays. So there's things which I say, like, okay. You know, how are you exactly
(23:47):
defining human rationality?
Because there are things like fashion, like collecting, like,
you know, fads,
which,
yes, I guess they can fall under the
popular delusion,
madness of crowd. It's a hard thing. War, you know, that's just a constant thing throughout human history.
(24:09):
Is that a madness of sorts?
If it happens so often, you gotta say, like, oh, maybe that's not a madness, and that's just part of our default
makeup. So, you know, I asked the question at the start
or or was looking at the effect of madness between
individuals and groups.
(24:30):
And from what I could kind of gather from this book,
most of it's got to start with an individual somewhere,
unless
perhaps it starts with
multiple individuals in discussion and
a thing form. So you could kind of see, like, okay. You know, you hear this knocking in a house.
What was the reason for that? Well, you could use some rationality,
(24:54):
but
some some things don't make intuitive sense,
such as, like,
he gave an example of a
house with this knocking. And,
you know, it was a series of circumstances
which are of, like, a broken window on the of the latch of this door, which would blow and then reopen it in a certain manner to make it then be able to slam again.
(25:17):
You know, is that more
feasible to think up of,
versus
ghosts
in conversation with other people, perhaps if you're a little bit drunk, perhaps if you're, you know, trying to one up each other or something like this. Yeah. You know, you could start the rumor of a haunted house, and then next thing you know, that's just spread across to a a city, a village and into an entire country.
(25:42):
I tend to think that there's a,
it it probably mostly starts with individuals, and a lot of times they will do this for their particular advantage.
The haunted houses were done for the advantage of these
tricksters who like to play mayhem
or perhaps even for monetary purposes to, you know, try and sue someone or to try and make an attraction that people would pay for.
(26:06):
Jeweling
was done for
a social status and to climb up the ranks in in the courts of kings and queens and things like this.
The alchem
alchemists, the magnetizers,
most of almost all of this is done for
some sort of benefit, which is a rational thing. Okay? I would like to have more money. I would like to live and eat and not need to, you know, bake my break my back,
(26:33):
toiling
for for a living.
But,
you know, there are there is a certain thing about groups of people together which changes actions. I can give a easy example from last night. I was in a Pilates class, and the teacher said, you know, like, you know, bring your right foot forward and your left is gonna go behind. And just the way she said it was, like, slightly confusing, but it's like, okay. Alright. I'm doing this with my right leg. And I look at the the girls in front of me, and all of them were doing it with their left leg. And I was like, oh, did I misunderstand that?
(27:04):
Well, alright. I'll just copy what they did. So I I was copying them.
I thought originally it was the other thing. If I was at the front of the class, I would have done it the opposite way. But it was like, alright, I'm just gonna follow these these people. I fit into the group then,
and you do both legs, so there's no
weirdness about it. It's not like you're going to end up with one jacked leg or something.
(27:26):
A very simple example of how I conform to a group
despite my own,
rationale,
my own reasoning.
And
I can see that when it comes to groups of people
where death is involved, where there is a frenzy of emotions,
people get
into a similar state. It's like an infectious type of thing and how that can spread
(27:51):
very dependent on time and circumstances,
I guess. And this is why you would see it occur only in certain countries at certain times.
But I think it's undeniable that there is
popular delusions and madness of crowds
and of individuals as well. So let's jump on to the author himself. Some extra details.
(28:13):
Charles Mackay, Scottish author, poet, journalist, born in 1814, died in 1889.
So he would have wrote this when he was
30, 20 seven, something like that.
This was pub originally published in three volumes, but seems to have been reorganized,
edited over the years. I have a version which was based on the 1851
(28:33):
manuscript,
and it says it has some minor corrections to that as well.
There was nothing really notable about him other than he traveled,
went to America, participated in some of the bubbles such as the railway one.
And I believe
it wasn't mentioned in this book, but perhaps other versions of this had an addendum
talking about the railways as another
(28:55):
popular delusion.
What I really liked about this book was the small details.
Learning that stock job is in England and France tried to stir up a tulip mania similar to the Dutch
was kind of an unexpected insight because
you you can get the feeling that these madness and crazes just they appear from nowhere. They are just this crazy, like, man, how did this thing happen? Rumor that the rumor mill was what stirred this up. But
(29:24):
there was enough little examples in here where I'm like, okay. I think a lot of this is
done with a an intent of some sorts. You could trace its origin to a certain person,
whether they're doing it from malicious intent, whether they're doing it just for the fun of it.
Who knows?
Whether they're doing it for profit or perhaps they even think they're doing a good thing by
(29:46):
creating this rumor or starting up this craze.
It comes to show that these things can be stoked, that the follies
are are not just
out of nowhere. And,
another example was,
probably one of the chapters I didn't talk about
was in,
(30:07):
I think he called it like the the craze of of nations or the craze of countries or cities.
And he was talking about how phrases like in England,
quas,
for example, was a huge craze for a bit
or flare up, which was kind of to indicate
someone who has
just got into a fight or is like flare up or someone who or there's a disagreement and they're flaring up.
(30:32):
You know, that is just indicative of the current languages now is where people will talk about chat
or, Riz
or something like that.
And these go in and out of favor. Cool used to be the thing. Sweet, rad.
You know, go back in time and you'll see these words merge.
What a shocking bad hat, for example, was one.
(30:53):
All of these things were
crazes and stuff that
appear, but they they don't really have a lasting power, a lot of them.
Although some do. Mesmer, as I mentioned, is now a word in the English language, pretty well established. And it was from one dude who was convincing enough with his animal magnetism to have made it into
(31:15):
a word somehow.
So
one thing I guess I should just note with this book is
it'll be very hard
to tell of the veracity of a lot of these stories. You know, he's presenting them as fact,
and his style was was relatively neutral. I would say he wasn't adding, I don't think, on to any of these things. He was simply trying to retell many stories.
(31:39):
Any individual story in this, I'm sure, is distorted
and is not indicative of what actually happened.
It's more a
retelling from some point of view, but isn't that all,
stories in essence? So, you know, no no real detractions here from him.
What I liked about it was the the style that he gave was very
(32:03):
matter of the fact he'd add some humor into it.
And then typically, you'd talk about maybe, the problem and the solution right at the end of the chapter. But it was it was more of a historical
telling rather than an examination
and analysis
of these crazes throughout history. And so, you know, all of this, I feel, is ultimately goes to show that humans are still humaning. Perhaps you're of the opinion that,
(32:27):
oh, witch hunts. We never believe in that anymore. Like, we wouldn't kill people just because we think they're a witch,
nowadays in this modern society, things like this.
No way, man. Crazy beliefs are propagated just as much
during those times as as these times now. So, you know, did we fare much better during COVID, for example,
(32:49):
with the amount of
worrying and crazy behavior that people were doing? You know,
we
now have the photos of people wearing buckets on their heads, going into supermarkets
of things like this.
How could you look at that and not say that is exactly the same as the crazy shit that people were doing two hundred five hundred years ago.
(33:13):
Magnetizers
are now kind of people like crystalizers,
perhaps faith healers,
modern prophets
now become either yoga gurus or perhaps like the twenty twelve
doomsayers or perhaps preppers,
alchemists. Perhaps you'd probably call them psychonauts nowadays,
people who experiment radically with psychedelics and things like that.
(33:36):
Witch hunts have become things like perhaps the lynching of African Americans
in the in the last century
or the satanic panic in the 1980s in North America
where, you know, people thought there was kindergarten devil worship going on and stuff like that.
Thankfully, the killings, I would say, have diminished over time. You could probably read some of Steven Pinker's books to see, I think, the effect of of that as well, that
(34:03):
individual
murder, whether it be for vengeance, whether it be for profit,
whether it be out of fear of the unknown,
I believe that has
dramatically
lessened. And
thank you. Thank thank human society for that. But you can still go to many rural places,
(34:24):
rural China for rhino horn,
meta medical things,
of many parts of Africa. You'll still have the prejudice against albinos.
Belief that white farmers are using black magic or things like this.
And you can see these superstitions
in Australia, in Asia, in
(34:46):
Europe, in North America, in Central America, Latin America, it doesn't matter where you go. You'll find superstitions in people who believe certain things that
are untrue, that are maybe true, that
are contradictory
perhaps to
to what is real. And the
yeah. It's it's very hard sorting out truth and belief from what is real.
(35:10):
Guessing, I guess, going back, I guess, to external reality,
everything that we have nowadays is magic
to people from a hundred years ago, five hundred years ago.
So the stuff in the future that we would then say is like, that's superstition.
That's ridiculous.
That is magic. That is not real.
(35:30):
There's people who could do that, I'm sure, in a couple of hundred years time. So fascinating all around.
Let's get into some of the summary similar book recommendations.
Look, overall, it's kind of bleak reading, to be honest.
But there are moments of real levity
throughout as well.
It certainly doesn't give me faith in human rationality.
Certainly,
(35:51):
I would say is a rather strong argument against it,
if only by providing examples throughout history.
If you can get past these suffering from financial folly, for example, it's rather humorous.
But then you have to contend with, like, the false medical hope of quacks
until you just have, like, the straight up
guise of,
(36:13):
murder under the guise of religion or faith or something like this. So, you know, I liked his style of writing. It was to the point with some humor,
and
I found rather informative.
But, you know, the book itself is massive, and there is a bit of a feeling of slogging through
yet another story of yet another alchemist who lived in this time where you're like, okay. I don't really care about this. But,
(36:38):
I believe it's worth the effort. The small nuances,
the
individual stories, the things that jump out at you, the character of some of these people, the highlighting of just how
bizarre
the human experience can be, especially of an individual and then in groups is is pretty wonderful. So, overall,
(36:59):
I would give the book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay, a very solid seven and a half out of 10. It's a slog, but I I think it's worth it.
Now I've already mentioned,
Edward Chancellor's book, The Devil Take the Hindmost. Highly recommend reading that. That is a great book.
Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test, for example,
(37:22):
is perhaps more the clinical side of madness.
He doesn't talk particularly about the madness in terms of,
in in this book here of the
individual illnesses
of because they just didn't really know at the time, you know, what is schizophrenia?
What is autism?
What is
certain of these, like, delusions
(37:44):
and how they are actually, you know,
rewiring
of the brain that has gone awry rather than
an actual
real person whose beliefs have changed. It's hard hard to say.
Michael Lewis has lauded the financial sections of his books if you like that. Mark Twain in
the,
(38:06):
was it,
Pilgrim Abroad or, Abroad,
The Innocents Abroad,
book review of that I've done where he goes to he talks about some of the crusade stuff because he goes to Palestine
of the relic stuff because he goes over that
A couple of different books there,
in terms of more around the topics and themes that you'll find within here rather than the style of the book. So, yeah, that is there for you there.
(38:31):
Final little sections here, value for value podcast. I do all of this upfront. It's available for anyone, anytime, anywhere.
And I just ask that you return some shape or form of value,
many different ways of doing this time, simply clicking the like button of sharing this with someone, word-of-mouth,
Really important for a podcast like this. So tell your friend, hey, minimalist book reviews. Really good good podcast.
(38:55):
Available both on audio and video.
Of talent. I wanna hear your book recommendations. Did you like this? What other books did you like
with regards to that, what would you love to see me cover on this channel? And then finally, some treasure. There's PayPal link down below. And if you go to me and mortalspodcast.com/support,
you can also see other ways of, supporting us financially over here,
(39:18):
much like Martin Lindeskog did on some of the recent episodes by streaming and some Satoshis. Big, big shout out to Martin. Thank you for that. Final one. What's coming up
in the future? And I guess, like, the live.
Well, this I'm heading off to Europe tomorrow.
My first time there is gonna be rather exciting. I'll see if I can see any of the witch hunts or any of the crazy stuff that this book covers because it was written from a European perspective. So, it was
(39:45):
all about the the Europeans.
So what that means is I'm probably not gonna be doing any book reviews
whilst traveling,
maybe, but unlikely.
I really wanna focus on getting the most out of, my first time in Europe, and I'm only gonna be there for about two months. So, yeah, I really wanna make the most of it.
(40:08):
I know Juan is doing a couple of book reviews,
preps already ready to go for the next couple of weeks. So that all should be releasing on Wednesdays as usual.
And yeah. So we're just gonna leave it here for the for the time being. There's probably gonna be some gaps.
I will be back at some point in July,
August, and probably recommencing the book reviews then. So until then, enjoy this little break. Hope you're having a fantastic day wherever you are in the world, and chat for now. Karen out. Bye.
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