This is so true, and goes a long way in explaining the mob hysteria and groupthink on so many fronts. The fact that the book was originally published in 1841 is testimony to the fact that it’s not a new thing either. Whether it be the anti nuclear activism of the 1950’s and 60’s up to the present day in much of the West, Global Cooling, Global Warming, Trump Derangement Syndrome and others down through the years and decades. The Madness of Crowds and What Lies Ahead
“….In his 1841 book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Scottish journalist Charles Mackay chronicled the history of the phenomena we now see gripping the Resistance movement to the Trump presidency. Writing on national delusions, moral panics, economic bubbles, and herd behaviour, Mackay observed, “We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.”
Mackay documents the manias that made traders turn tulips into the most expensive objects on earth in the mid-1600s, caused Christian communities in the American colonies to torture and execute “witches,” and caused European nobles to sponsor alchemists to turn base metals into gold (and imprison them until they succeeded). Of these and many other episodes of mass hysteria, Mackay wrote, “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.”
From Tinseltown (once the domain of Bogart, Hepburn, Garland, and Gable) mentally unstable and narcissistic “celebrities” are going full-bore insane while flooding popular culture with vulgar insults and violent threats against Trump and his supporters. They exhibit severed heads, produce assassination porn, and challenge Trump-supporters to fist fights, all the while dropping a steady stream of F-bombs. Not surprisingly, impressionable young, university-indoctrinated leftists react by donning black clothing and masks to assault normal, sane people in the streets.
Since he announced for president, we’ve seen the Washington establishment corrupt and debase our intelligence and law enforcement agencies in its fevered pursuit of Trump. Now that Democrats have retaken the House, they promise to use their committees to impeach him in a total absence of any evidence of high crimes or misdemeanours. As the president works to keep his campaign promises to secure our borders, realign our trade relationships, create good jobs, and get us out of useless wars, the swamp, whose interests are cheap labour, globalism, and foreign conflict, vows to overturn the voters’ will in 2016.
Gripped by the delusion they helped create, the mainstream media have abandoned all pretence of objectivity and professional ethics to become the fake news for the Resistance. Few news cycles pass where they fail to break a story of Trump’s traitorous exploits while arguing for and predicting his impending removal from office and criminal prosecution. When the stories are promptly debunked by the emerging alternative media, the Resistance journos move shamelessly to the next cycle and repeat. While Trump ridicules them and calls them to return to the higher ideals of their profession, they suffer no consequence for their incompetence and dishonesty.
Fuelled by cultural, media and political elites, it seems likely that the madness of crowds Charles Mackay wrote of 1841 will continue gripping weaker minds as Trump skewers their sacred cows and upends their carefully constructed fantasies. We can only hope enough voters maintain their sanity until November 3, 2020…”