Ep 37 - Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

Hardcore Literature

Benjamin McEvoy

Studyguide, Arts, Literature, Bookclub, Alevel, Courses, Bookreview, Books, Gcse, Education

4.8 • 606 Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2021

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to Hardcore Literature. I'm your host, Benjamin McAvoy, and today we're going to talk
0:06.3	about a book that has influenced my thinking more than almost any other book. It's up there with
0:12.4	Aristotle's ethics. It's up there with Nietzsche's, thus spoke, Zarathustra, and indeed it's up
0:19.2	there with Joseph Campbell's, the hero with a thousand faces,
0:22.9	and Sir James Fraser's The Golden Bough. The book in question is the 1841, Charles McKay book,
0:31.3	extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. The book is a study into crowd psychology and examines why we do what we do.
0:41.5	Why do we act irrationally en masse? Indeed, when people get frustrated with the crowd, with the
0:49.1	common group, with society at large, for not acting rationally, and I get caught up in this trap as well.
0:56.9	Ah, why is everyone acting so insane? Why is that? Why is everyone acting so irrationally?
1:01.6	I often have to gently remind myself, this is par for the course in regards to human nature.
1:08.3	It always has been this way. And unfortunately, unless something
1:14.3	drastic happens in our evolution, which I cannot foresee anytime soon, it always will be this way.
1:21.0	This book, as I said, was written in 1841, and it catalogs some of the most popular delusions
1:26.6	and extraordinary instances of mass hysteria
1:30.0	in history up until that point. McKay goes into and debunks a few myths such as the idea of alchemy,
1:38.2	fortune tellers. He talks about the Crusades. He talks about economic bubbles. You may already
1:43.2	be familiar with the idea of tulip mania,
1:46.0	where once upon a time the value of one tulip soars to the price of a house. Similarly, the South Sea bubble.
1:52.0	He also goes into witch mania. Now McKay is quite shrewd because actually I don't know if this is by virtue of the fact that this was a very
2:00.9	early study into crowd psychology, but he doesn't really unpick or analyze. He just supplies
2:07.4	the historical insight. He just tells you stories. So when he talks about the alchemists
2:12.4	and those men who believe they really could create the philosopher's stone, they could turn one substance
	...

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