I recently bought a history book about King John, an addition to the three or four I’ve read over the years. I’m not enormously interested in King John, nor the wider history of the Angevins, but it’s one of those casual interests which seem to pop up out of nothing much.
Maybe it’s the prominence of Magna Carta, childhood memories of Robin Hood, an equally casual interest in castles or merely a desire to put aside our present miscellany of delusions for a few hours.
Yes it's probably that, putting aside our miscellany of delusions for a while.
The present may be considered more of a miscellany of delusions than a history—a chapter only in the great and awful book of human folly which yet remains to be written, and which Porson once jestingly said he would write in five hundred volumes!
Charles Mackay - Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)
Charles Mackay - Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)
2 comments:
At least Mackay was lucky enough to live in a time when popular delusions were extraordinary. Now they all seem to be entirely ordinary.
And Mackay takes a series of examples from over a lengthy historical period. Today, they seem to have all come at once, and are wall-to-wall. Perhaps that's the trouble. We could shrug off one or two, as the rest of reality would be discernible and would provide some sort of balance. But with them all coming at once (woke nonsense, gender insanity, climate opinionology, daft economics, no borders, relativism, governmental cretinism, etc., etc.) it's like having several different illnesses at once. The body is overwhelmed, and can't recover.
Sam - yes that's it, the delusions have come all at once and it is overwhelming. We even vote for people who intend to peddle them, pump money into them and teach them in schools. We need the pendulum to swing back, which it may be doing, but it has a long way to go.
Post a Comment