We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.
—Richard Dawkins913
Were Charles Mackay able to journey through time to the present day, the stories of the 1844 Great Disappointment, of the stock bubbles of the 1920s and 1990s, and of the rise of the recent end-times delusions of all three Abrahamic religions would not surprise him in the least. He would, at the same time, be riveted by Darwin’s exposition of human evolution, described a generation after the 1841 publication of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, and wonder how it applied to the episodes he wrote about. And he would be just as fascinated, for the same reason, by twentieth-century psychology and social psychology research.
First and foremost, Mackay would have been fascinated to learn that we are the slaves of the hardwired instincts of our Stone Age ancestors, who depended on mutual cooperation, communication, and, above all, mimicry, to survive in an environment of scarce food, poisonous berries, venomous snakes, and faster-footed and bigger-toothed predators.
We are only about three hundred generations removed from the end of the Stone Age and are still driven by these ancient survival instincts. Not only have those three hundred generations not been long enough to evolve more analytical cognition, but it’s doubtful whether such improved mental abilities would even confer a survival advantage to the individuals that possessed them in a relatively more humane industrial or postindustrial world. In other words, we’re likely doomed to limp along with our Stone Age minds on a space-age planet.
Indeed, much of our behavior has far more ancient roots; we share many genes that are hundreds of millions of years old, such as those that regulate appetite, with earthworms.914 Our evolutionary fondness for energy-laden sweet and fatty foods, which likely originated in our vertebrate ancestors eons before our species evolved, has become profoundly maladaptive in a modern world saturated with cheap sugar and lipids.
From the perspective of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, mimicry is probably the most important of our hardwired evolutionary characteristics. Besides our advanced cognitive and language ability, the human capacity to rapidly learn through imitation new skill sets—kayaks in the arctic, bison-hunting on the Great Plains, and blowguns in the Amazon Basin—has allowed us to thrive in most places on the planet. Sadly, our proclivity toward mimicry applies equally to maladaptive, and ofttimes abhorrent, behavior.
Probably the most famous experimental demonstrations of this unfortunate phenomenon were Stanley Milgram’s “obedience” and Philip Zimbardo’s “Stanford Prison” studies. In Milgram’s study, subjects (the “teachers”) were frequently persuaded by the “experimenters” to deliver “lethal” shocks to “learners” for incorrect answers.915 Similarly, the Stanford Prison Experiment divided the subjects between “prisoners” and “guards.” Within a few days, both groups mimicked and internalized their roles to the point that violence broke out between the two groups.916
While both of these studies have attracted serious criticism, the contagion of moral and intellectual rot is hardly a theoretical or experimental issue, for the real world abounds with far better examples of how aberrant behavior spreads among apparently normal, well-adjusted people.917 The Enron scandal of the 1990s, for example, demonstrated just how contagious both irrationality and moral corruption could be. None of the protagonists—Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, and Andrew Fastow—considered themselves unethical or immoral; after all, everyone around them told them they were fine, highly intelligent people who were revolutionizing the American economy. And, similar to the subjects exposed by psychologist Solomon Asch to the erroneous line measurements of tablemates, Enron’s personnel accepted the nearly unanimous but incorrect judgments of their colleagues and of journalists.
Perhaps the most spectacular examples of aberrant moral contagion manifested themselves in totalitarian societies such as the Cambodia of Pol Pot, the China of the Cultural Revolution and, of course, the Germany of Hitler. When historian Laurence Rees interviewed Nazi death camp guards and administrative personnel near the end of their lives, he found them more open about their work than they had been decades before. He was stunned to find that, rather than evil robots who blindly followed orders, these Germans, almost to a man and woman, were normal-appearing, intelligent individuals who considered themselves ethical participants in a worthy enterprise, namely, ridding the world of Jewish vermin. Like junior executives at an elite firm, they competed and innovated to complete their horrific tasks with maximum efficiency.918
Still, there were limits to the Germans’ peer-driven inhumanity, particularly when it came to machine-gunning thousands of Jews at a time, which produced psychological distress even among hardened SS troops. Consequently, the most “efficient” death camps at Sobibór, Belźec, Treblinka, and Birkenau (Auschwitz) relied on the labors of non-German prisoners for the dirtiest work, and required only relatively small numbers of German personnel—approximately twenty at Belźec, for example, at which six hundred thousand were murdered.919
It is hard to avoid the dark conclusion that if enough of our peers deem genocide desirable, many, if not most, of us are capable of it. Those who still think that German exceptionalism was a major factor in the Holocaust should consider the behavior of English officials on the German-occupied channel islands of Jersey and Guernsey, who willingly cooperated in sending their Jewish residents to the camps. In the words of one former Nazi official, “The trouble with the world today is that people who have never been tested go around making judgments about people who have.”920 Or, more succinctly, one should never underestimate the human tendency toward mimicry, and especially of how the everyday beneficial mass delusions that help businesses and whole societies function smoothly can rapidly mutate into fraudulent or genocidal mass delusions.
Mackay would also agree with the observation that we are the apes who tell stories—he was a master narrator himself. When our remote ancestors needed to communicate with each other to survive, they did not do so with syllogisms, numerical data, or mathematical formulae. The primary mode of that communication was, and still is, narration: “You go right, I’ll go left, and we’ll spear the mastodon from both sides.” Humans are narrative animals, and no matter how misleading the narrative, if it is compelling enough it will nearly always trump the facts, at least until those facts cause great pain or, as in the case of the Islamic State forces in the Middle East and the Münster Anabaptists, the facts decimate the believers themselves.
Further, we listen to stories not only because we enjoy them for their own sake, but also because we want to know their ending, and no story compels and transports more than that of the world’s ultimate fate. The more a narrative transports someone, the more it corrodes their analytical skills; a skillfully crafted end-times narrative can convince men to give away all their worldly goods or to happily send their wives and daughters to the storyteller’s bed.
Mackay would concur that we mold the facts to fit our preexisting opinions, and not the other way around. Everywhere and always, we fall prey to confirmation bias and cling to those facts most consistent with our beliefs and intentionally ignore those that disconfirm them.
In technical terms, were we truly rational, we would formulate our opinions about the world according to “Bayesian inference,” a method of analysis invented by Thomas Bayes, an eighteenth-century English philosopher who invented a mathematical rule for altering our forecasts in the face of new data. If one thinks that there is a 50 percent chance that a politician one dislikes is guilty of criminal behavior, and then a new and powerful piece of exculpatory evidence appears, according to Bayesian inference, one’s estimate of the probability of his or her guilt should now fall below 50 percent.
But that’s not how people behave; when we hold strong opinions on a topic, we intentionally avoid exposing ourselves to contrary data, and when disconfirming information can no longer be ignored, it can trigger the proselytization of delusional beliefs, as happened with Dorothy Martin’s flying saucer sect. Human beings, far from being rational Bayesians, are indeed often “anti-Bayesians,” a fact that serves to spread delusional beliefs.
Mackay undoubtedly understood that a compelling narrative can act as a contagious pathogen that rapidly spreads through a given population in the same exponential fashion, as when a COVID-19 virus super-spreader infects a large number of contacts. Moreover, as Asch’s experiments illustrated, if an incorrect belief becomes prevalent enough, it acquires a critical mass.
As ever more of those around us share the same delusion, the more likely we are to believe in it, and so the more likely those around us will do so as well, a vicious cycle for which we lack an analytical emergency brake. In the presence of delusional contagion for which no effective defenses exist, runaway manias gain ever more momentum until they finally smash into the brick wall of reality.
Finally, Mackay described time and again the human tendency to view life in Manichean terms—a stark black-and-white struggle between good and evil—and had Darwin’s On the Origin of Species been published a generation earlier, he would have understood this as yet one more piece of our Stone Age evolutionary baggage. He would further have realized that the near universal human tendency toward overconfidence both enables our survival and also leads us to assume that we sit on the right side of the moral fence: Both this book and Mackay’s fairly burst with religious multitudes who believed that those not sharing their worldview were hell-bound, and in extreme cases, deserved to die.
The Islamic State is only the latest float in this parade of the Manichean delusion; for a while, the Islamist group commanded the most compelling and agreeable narrative available to those suffering from poverty, war, and oppression: that the afflicted were engaged in a black-and-white struggle as the forces of righteousness, and that Allah would sooner or later deliver them final and everlasting victory over oppressors who embodied the essence of evil. This Islamic apocalyptic twenty-first-century narrative is thus little different from John Bockelson’s sixteenth-century narrative, or from Hal Lindsey’s twentieth-century one. (Although Lindsey’s post-communist opponents—socialists, Satanists, and astrologers—are weak tea indeed compared with the Habsburg Empire or the might of the Israeli and Western militaries.)
The descriptions of delusional financial manias in this book and in Mackay’s differ only in quality from their end-times ones. In both cases, the narratives are highly agreeable: in the latter case, the promise of membership in an elect that will be spared life’s tribulations through miraculous spiritual means, and in the former case, by miraculous financial means. And in both cases, confirmation bias and human mimicry play starring roles as well.
The main difference is that financial delusions largely lack the Manichean element that is front and center in religious ones. But even this lack isn’t total. Recall that one of the cardinal diagnostic features of a bubble is a vehement response to skepticism. As I write these words, the excitement surrounding cryptocurrencies, of which bitcoin is the exemplar, seem to exhibit all of the signs and symptoms of earlier financial manias. Perhaps the most famous endorsement of bitcoin came from antivirus entrepreneur John McAfee, who opined that if bitcoin’s price did not reach $500,000 within three years, “I’ll eat my dick on national television,” the implication being that anyone who doubted bitcoin’s value was, if not evil, at least an idiot.921 (Having reached a price of $20,000 in late 2017, by mid-2020 it was trading at $11,800.)
Just as Mackay would have been fascinated with modern psychological and evolutionary insights into mass delusional behavior in general, he would also have learned a great deal from recent research by economists such as Hyman Minsky and Charles Kindleberger specific to financial manias, work that clearly demonstrates that these episodes revolve around the explosive combination of exciting new technologies, the loosening of credit, amnesia, and the abandonment of time-tested financial analysis. And once again, cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin are instructive; while it seems likely that few will grow wealthy from direct investment in these instruments, the so-called blockchain technology underlying them may well benefit society at large by revolutionizing both banking and government finance.
Mackay, while a consummate storyteller, was hobbled by his era’s lack of scientific knowledge about human behavior, genetics, and natural selection, and his marvelous descriptions of mass delusions, while enormously instructive, took him only so far. But Mackay must surely have suspected that mankind is condemned to step repeatedly on the same financial and religious rakes even if he did not know, as we now do, the reasons why.
913. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), vii.
914. David Sloan Wilson, Evolution for Everyone (New York: Delta Trade Paperbacks, 2007), 70.
915. Stanley Milgram, “Behavioral Study of Obedience,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology Vol. 67, No. 4 (1963): 371–378; and Milgram, “Some Conditions of Obedience and Disobedience to Authority,” Human Relations Vol. 18, No. 1 (February, 1965): 57–76.
916. C. Haney et al., “Interpersonal Dynamics in a Simulated Prison,” International Journal of Criminology and Penology Vol. 1 (1973): 69–97.
917. For a detailed and scathing analysis of the Stanford Prison Experiment, see Ben Blum, “The Lifespan of a Lie,” https://medium.com/s/trustissues/the-lifespan-of-a-lie-d869212b1f62.
918. Laurence Rees, Auschwitz: A New History (New York: Public Affairs, 2005).
919. The Nazis discovered early on that separating parents and children created disturbances that slowed down the process. Rees, perhaps the only researcher to have interviewed camp guards from all three of the Second World War’s totalitarian powers—Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union—noted that, by contrast with German camp personnel, Soviet and Japanese guards were largely driven by fear, and not ideological commitment.
920. Ibid. On channel island deportations, see 135–139; killing at Belźec, 149–150, quote 203.
921. Lionel Laurent, “What Bitcoin Is Really Worth May No Longer Be Such a Mystery,” https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-04-19/what-bitcoin-is-really-worth-may-no-longer-be-such-a-mystery, accessed July 25, 2018.