Charlie Mackay was right!
October 6th, 2008
Charlie Mackay was right!
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In 1841 Charles Mackay published Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Though its style may seem archaic to the modern reader, its content is utterly relevant, particularly in light of current events.
You may think what is happening at the moment is a new departure, yet such folly has been the stablemate of human culture and societies since the beginning. In recent times there is the Y2K fiasco, remember planes dropping out of the sky, nuclear power stations going into meltdown, the world’s computer network resetting itself to ‘0000? and so on? The dot.com bubble, and the Ponzi or pyramid schemes that took Albania and parts of south eastern Europe to financial and political meltdown. Do the research and the list of gullible, duped and confidence tricked individuals is pretty extensive.
Why do I mention these things in this context? It’s very simple really, true development is something that occurs outside the corral of what is happening n the world at any given time. While world events may flavour your experience of the culture you are in, they must never drive your personal assembly or come to dominate what you think about or how you think. That is, of its nature a huge study in itself. Happiness, as I mentioned earlier, is not a matter of finance or acquisition of material possessions, yet somehow it has metamorphosed into contemporary shorthand for just that.
Charles Mackay refers to the following schemes, manias, delusions and scams:
The Mississippi scheme — The south-sea bubble — The tulipomania — The alchymists — Modern prophecies — Fortune-telling — The magnetisers — Influence of politics and religion on the hair and beard — The crusades — The witch mania — The slow poisoners — Haunted houses — Popular follies of great cities — Popular admiration of great thieves — Duels and ordeals — Relics
Each of which demonstrates the susceptibility that we all experience to a greater or lesser degree to a good yarn, a charismatic individual or plain and simple greed - by which I mean the perceiving of an opportunity to gain a greater return than is necessarily reasonable for whatever investment of whatever commodity one is prepared to make.
Some fifteen years ago I heard of an individual whom I knew by acquaintance with a somewhat chequered past making a living by ‘arranging’ mortgages for people who would otherwise have not been considered suitable candidates following the usual routes. These were things done on the QT, a nod’s as good as a wink, and no questions asked.
It transpires that around the developed world there was a growing network of Mr Fix-its undermining the financial stability of blue chip institutions and the, so called, Dogs of the Dow. Many of those institutions whose pedigree was considered beyond question are now wrecked upon the rocky coastline of the new topography that was being created by the Mr Fix-its and bag men.
If you’re adversely affected by all this, then commiserations. Remember you can’t take any of it with you and true happiness is not within the gift of the world’s economy. Houses built on shifting sands will always collapse, Ponzi and those of his parasitic inclination will always prevail for a short time while there is a gullible and uneducated constituency upon which they can prey and then others will have to rebuild the havoc they have wrought.