by Matt Patterson –
In 1841 a Scottish journalist named Charles Mackay published a study of mass hysteria titled “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.”
Mackay analyzed a wide variety of popular pathologies in his entertaining tome, including financial panics, medical quackery, alchemy, and witch crazes. He wanted to know why so many people choose to believe so much that is false and potentially deadly. His answer:
“We go out of our course to make ourselves uncomfortable; the cup of life is not bitter enough to our palate, and we distill superfluous poison to put into it, or conjure up hideous things to frighten ourselves at, which would never exist if we did not make them.”
I could not help but think of global warming as I was re-reading Mackay’s words. He would have recognized it as kin to his own numerous and insidious subjects—superstition masked as science; Western guilt over having conquered the world manifesting itself as hatred for the technologies that made it possible; apocalyptic yearning in the guise of political enlightenment. [Read more…]