Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

[Bootstrap]

That said, delusions don't visit masses of a people all at once, only a few here and there.

I've studied just enough history to question the veracity of that statement.

Would you mind expounding on this?

Facebook makes this much more efficient, but here's an old starting point.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

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.

[slaveofone]

This reminds me of the runs on toilet paper in stores throughout the states. There was never a shortage of TP, but the massive hording brought the supply chain to a crawl since it could not deliver the TP as fast as people were stockpiling. The even stranger thing is that this was not the first time the US had a sudden mass run on TP! That's some really weird and baseless fear that held sway over HUGE MASSES.

[PetrChelcicky]

Social psychology is full of derogatory concepts and terms ("moral panic", "conspiration theory" etc.) My question is always: Is such a concept used (or usable) in a bipartisan way? Can "we" use it to question ourselves? Can others use it to question "us"? Or is it only a way for "us" to signal our superiority in comparison to "them"?
For example, in the case of financial bubbles the term is quite useful, because we would normally control ourselves by asking ourselves if we lean into a delusion. In the case of politics, things are more difficult.