They go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one

From Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds by Charles Mackay (1841). From his introduction.

Money, again, has often been a cause of the delusion of multitudes. Sober nations have all at once become desperate gamblers, and risked almost their existence upon the turn of a piece of paper. To trace the history of the most prominent of these delusions is the object of the present pages. 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.

I became aware of this book in university while studying international economic development. I don't recall which professor brought it to my attention but it certainly was part of that larger education that takes place outside of the classroom. I heard it being referenced in a positive way. Some time later I came across, and purchased, my first copy at the old Second Story Bookstore at their Dupont Circle location. Oh, the days when major cities had plenty of used bookstores.

I really ought to sit down and read Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds as a whole text at some point but I have been dipping in to it for decades.

I hadn't really considered it in a long time but Mackay's book is wholly compatible with my ongoing theme of cognitive pollution. Mackay has suitable words of caution.

Popular delusions began so early, spread so widely, and have lasted so long, that instead of two or three volumes, fifty would scarcely suffice to detail their history. 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! Interspersed are sketches of some lighter matters,—amusing instances of the imitativeness and wrongheadedness of the people, rather than examples of folly and delusion.

When I think of the contemporary Extraordinary Popular Delusions (anthropogenic global warming, 71 cents on the dollar, Hands Up Don't Shoot, microaggressions, trigger warnings, education decline, war on women, campus rape epidemic, etc.) it seems Mackay might be evergreen. There is something in the mind of man that wants an issue, no matter how grave or trivial, to be a crisis in order to justify it as an issue.

Social Justice Warriors seem to have such an ever renewing supply of hysterical issues that it feels sometimes as if the world has gone mad. But as Mackay says, "They go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one." Faster please.