Book Review - Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay

      Skepticism is not a new intellectual trend. Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions is an early Victorian treatise on the follies of humankind. Included are chapters on financial disasters, alchemists, witch trials, the Crusades, haunted houses and an assortments of other forms of mass insanity and erroneous thinking. The author’s intentions in writing this book are not made entirely clear but he seemed to be most concerned with documenting these phenomena rather than explaining them.

     Mackay’s writing moves along quickly. The most interesting passages were the best written ones; chapters on the occult and superstitions were entertaining and he obviously took great interest in what he was writing about. Significantly, Mackay’s tone is one of amusement more than disgust. He obviously expressed deep sympathy for the victims of witch hunts as well as the Middle Eastern people who got slaughtered during the Crusades. He does not write favorably about the con-artists and frauds who pray on people in get-rich-quick rip-off schemes or fortune tellers who manipulate people to make money. His contempt is minimal and instead of asking why people are so terrible he appears to be asking why people are so strange and gullible.

     The chapters on financial disasters and duels were slightly less compelling and the writing on those subjects tended to get muddled and long-winded at times. Some of the stories involved rather nondescript people and often veered into redundancy and repetition. The low points did not get too low, however. But Mackay’s selection of topics might leave you wondering what the common theme among them is. The idea of human stupidity is not really strong enough to hold the whole book together; what loosely ties the writings to each other is the thought that humans can ruin themselves because of naivety and greed but that does not fully apply to all the chapters either.

     Overall this book is a good read though. Mackay’s collection of anecdotes serves as an early example of the social sciences. Being an advocate of rationality and human rights and an opponent of superstition and ignorance, Mackay’s heart was in the right place. And this book is entertaining. I could imagine Gabriel Garcia Marquez finding it interesting since some of the prose anticipates the magical-realism style of the 20^th century in the way Mackay writes about how people perceive their situations with rose colored glasses and then then their overblown emotions get deflated when the underlying reality of it all gets exposed. In our age of conspiracy theories, crypto-currencies, white supremacy, Scientology, UFO chasers, prosperity gospel Christianity, the Donald Trump cult of personality and a long list of other idiotic ideas, you might even consider that the human race has not made much intellectual progress since the time this book was written. Maybe it never will.