Similarly, the recovered-memory hysteria, in which false “memories” of childhood sexual abuse ruined the lives of alleged abusers, was fostered by mental health professionals-the very people who should have known better. Innocent people were prosecuted and jailed. By contrast, during the widespread “satanic ritual abuse” hysteria of the 1980s, people believed bizarre accusations of child abuse, which were being perpetuated by credulous social workers and psychotherapists. When the delusional group is small and composed of socially marginalized people with an impoverished sense of self, who relinquish personal autonomy to a charismatic and mentally unstable leader (such as occurred in the 1978 Jonestown, Guyana, mass suicides), there is little danger of delusional contagion beyond the cult. Popular delusions are usually false beliefs that fly in the face of common sense, rational thinking, and even scientific evidence. Among them is the popular belief that gender is fungible, so that whether we are born male or female is of no consequence. Current popular delusions are aspirations not to turn base metals into gold, but rather to transcend the laws of biology and transmute human nature. Yet the ancient belief in transmutation is still with us. The medieval field of alchemy-the attempt to change base metals into gold and to find the philosopher’s stone capable of bringing about human perfection, even immortality-is ludicrous to the modern mind, a relic of a prescientific time. Such hysterical contagion continues in modern times, merely taking on new forms.

Mackay’s account of the Dutch tulip mania, in which people lost fortunes by bidding up the price of tulip bulbs to ridiculous levels, anticipates the recurrent cycles of boom and bust that have plagued nations’ economies since his book was first published. It illustrates our enduring credulity, covering such follies as alchemy, financial bubbles, the Crusades, fortune-telling, false prophesy, witchcraft, and witch hunts.

Despite our postmodern sophistication and our wishful thinking about perfectibility, our nature is immutable-not least in its fickleness, its embrace of irrational ideas and practices, and its suggestibility.Ĭharles Mackay’s classic work, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), chronicles the fads and follies of humankind, our epidemics of irrational groupthink.

The gender delusion