Top Three Extraordinary Popular Delusions of the Modern Day

In 1841, journalist Charles Mackay wrote a remarkable book titled Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, one of my favourite books. In it he examined what happens when nations and even continents go mad so that ‘millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first’.

The delusions he detailed included historical financial crashes such as the Dutch Tulipomania speculative bubble that occurred in the 1630s. He also described the crusading madness of the Middle Ages as European armies swarmed across the Holy Land driven by a bloodthirsty sanctimonious fire. Then there was the witch mania – trials and persecutions of supposed witches in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe when communities inflicted enormous cruelty on those they deemed heretical, different or suspicious. All that craziness was enthusiastically supported by normal people from all walks of life.

Of course, such things as Mackay described would never happen in modern times… Or would they?

Imagine Charles Mackay came across a steam punk time machine and travelled to the present day in order to update his classic book on weird history and crowd psychology. What are the extraordinary popular delusions and examples of crowd madness that infect the world today?

Here are my suggestions for the top three Extraordinary Popular Delusions and Madness of Crowds happening in the twenty first century: Covid Hysteria, the Trans Delusion and Russophobia…

3. Covid Hysteria

Let’s start with a fairy tale:

Once upon a time there was an evil invisible demon that came from the east. If it possessed you, you were doomed. The demon could be hiding in anyone and everyone you met, waiting to possess your soul. However, the demon was rendered powerless by magic face shields, but just to be on the safe side everyone in the kingdom was confined to a dungeon. Luckily, wise men created a safe and effective magic potion that defeated the demon and everyone lived happily ever after.

During the dystopian covid era, I got used to being in a minority of one – the only person in the train carriage or the shop not wearing a face mask. I wasn’t exempt. I refused because they don’t work, they’re dehumanising, unhygienic and a highly visible symbol of compliance and conformity.[i] Occasionally seeing another bare-faced refusenik gave me some faith in humanity – perhaps we would recover from the mass hysteria that was our grotesque overreaction to the pandemic.

Covid had an infection fatality rate that was similar to a bad flu and was mostly a risk to the very old or very ill. It quickly became known that the risk to the young and the middle aged was vanishingly small.[ii] And yet people shut themselves in their homes, left the elderly to die alone, stopped living, loving, learning, singing, dancing and covered their faces with ineffective gob-nappies before queuing up time and again to be injected with an experimental drug… and they still got covid.

‘I had three doses of the vaccine then I caught covid, which shows how good the vaccines really are,’ said a friend of mine in all seriousness.

I still find it hard to believe the hysterical authoritarian turn the world took over a virus that, whatever its origin, was virtually unstoppable and highly likely to only cause mild symptoms in most people.

Of course the doctors or academics who argued for a realistic and measured approach were vilified, demonised or cancelled. The scientists from the universities of Harvard, Stanford and Oxford who signed the Great Barrington Declaration calling for a rational approach to the pandemic being a case in point.[iii]

Did social distancing and groups of six stop the virus? No. Did lockdown stop the virus? No. Did school closures stop the virus? No. Did face masks stop the virus? No. Did the jabs stop the virus? No. Did the sinister and cynical use of covid fear porn by the government stop the virus?  No. We witnessed an unholy confluence of big pharma mendacity, technocratic authoritarianism, hypocritical fearmongering, political cowardice and unquestioning public compliance with all of the above.

Covid Hysteria gets a place among the Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds of the 21^st century.

2. The Trans Delusion

Sitting comfortably? Another fairy tale:

Once upon a time there were knights and princesses. However, there came a time when some of the knights thought they were princesses and some of the princesses thought they were knights. So the princesses put on the knights’ shining armour and the knights put on the princesses’ beautiful pink dresses and lo and behold the knights were magically transformed into princesses and the princesses were magically transformed into knights. Just to be on the safe side, the wise men invented magic potions to help the transformations along, and the process was completed with a few chops of a magic sword and then everyone lived happily ever after.

Over recent years there’s been a marked increase in the number of children identifying as transgender. This is especially true of young girls.[iv] These children may be put on a pathway that includes puberty blockers in childhood, followed by treatment with cross-sex hormones in their teens and may result in gruesome life-changing surgery. All of these interventions have their dangers and long-term, sometimes life-shortening consequences.[v] It’s rational, reasonable and compassionate to be sceptical of them, especially in the case of children and young adults.

This isn’t to say people who identify as trans shouldn’t be treated with the same respect and consideration as everyone else. Of course they should.

Children growing up may display non-conforming gender behaviour – just as they may pretend to be a dinosaur or a superhero. For many it will just be a phase they will grow out of. In fact, research suggests over 80% of children who identify as the other sex will eventually revert to identifying with their real sex. Many will turn out to be homosexual.[vi] Viewing non-gender conforming behaviours of children as evidence for the need for life-changing, risky and invasive medical interventions is grotesque. It’s the sinister medicalisation of the normal spectrum of human behaviour.

Many teenagers – especially girls – experience discomfort with their bodies during adolescence. It seems that gender reassignment is being offered as a panacea for this psychological pain. Once they change their pronouns, or get puberty blockers, or get hormone treatment, or their breasts removed… all their problems will be over, or so they may be led to believe. The danger, it is often argued, is that if a child is not put on the pathway to transitioning, they are at risk of committing suicide. By questioning this, you’re actually killing people.

But here’s an inconvenient fact. Studies have shown that people who transition are still much more likely to kill themselves than the general population.[vii] In many cases, transitioning may be a tragic case of treating the symptom rather than the cause…

What’s behind the rise of children and young people wanting to transition?

Surely, social media plays a large role. Young girls who are feeling the common discomfort with their body that puberty brings are able to access thousands of affirming videos that tell them they may be a person of the opposite sex trapped in the wrong body. Their feelings are confirmed and amplified by supportive activists and therapists and a clear pathway to a ‘solution’ for their woes is offered.

These well-meaning therapists and activists play a role in this delusion. If a child presents as transgender, this self-diagnosis will be affirmed without sufficient consideration of whether the child’s issues are the result of mental illness, common teenage anxieties about gender and physical development, an emerging awareness of homosexuality or hysterical social contagion.[viii]

What does it even mean to be born into the wrong body? We are our body. We are not some gendered soul floating round in the ether waiting to be born into either the correct or incorrect body like an Amazon parcel delivered to the wrong address. It makes no logical or philosophical sense because it’s a metaphysical delusion of the early 21^st century. And when metaphysical delusions and mass hysteria are medicalised, the results can be tragic.

In the past, deluded conservatives tried to ‘cure’ gay people with pseudoscientific psychological conversion therapies. Nowadays, compassionate liberals cure gayness by pumping confused children full of drugs and hormones and grooming them for having their tits or balls chopped off.

The trans delusion also earns its place among the great insanities of the century.

1. Russophobia

All right, just one more fairy tale before the lights go out:

Once upon a time there was an Evil King who ruled an Evil Kingdom with an iron fist. One day, he decided to show the world how evil he was by conquering the neighbouring Borderland Kingdom. However, all the good kingdoms of the world came together and presented the Borderland Kingdom with magic wonder swords and the Evil Kingdom was defeated. The people of the Evil Kingdom then deposed their Evil King, and the Evil Kingdom was no more and all the lands of the world gave praise to the Good Kingdoms for bringing peace and prosperity to all and everyone lived happily ever after.

Are you still burning with righteous hatred of Vladimir Putin and all that he stands for? Are you still filled with gushing admiration for brave Zelensky and his photogenic defiance of the Russian invaders? Of course you are because that’s what all good people think and feel, isn’t it? But doesn’t it ever seem to you that we’ve been corralled into some kind of Orwellian two-minute hate? Could the western world be in the grip of Russophobic hysteria?

The same media and political class that sold us the war against Afghanistan, the war against Iraq and the war against Libya are also selling us our proxy war against Russia. If you didn’t question those wars, you owe it to yourself to question this one. Heroic Zelensky (always winning but never victorious), Evil Putin (always losing but never defeated), blue and yellow flags, the Ghost of Kiev, David and Goliath, Good versus Evil, democracy versus tyranny… it was easy to see how people got emotionally swept up in the fairy story, especially so soon after the delirium of the covid era.

The story the media has told us in the West is that the Ukraine war was an act of unprovoked aggression by Putin’s Russia. The word ‘unprovoked’ was repeated as a mantra by politicians and pundits to drive this point home. Poor little Ukraine. Big bad Russia. Putin invaded because he’s evil. Or he’s the new Hitler. Or he wanted to revive the Soviet Union. Or he wanted to reprise the Tsarist empire. Or he’s mad. Or he’s dying….

These are the shamefully shallow analyses we’ve been given. The complex geopolitical conflict is treated as a Manichean pantomime. Putin’s behind you. Boo, hiss.

However, the war was knowingly and deliberately provoked by the West. The first provocation was the reckless expansion of NATO to encircle Russia, despite agreements not to do so as the Soviet Union was dissolved. For some unfathomable reason, Russia sees being surrounded by an anti-Russian military alliance despite promises to the contrary as an existential threat – just as the US saw Soviet missiles in Cuba in the early 60s as an existential threat which nearly led to nuclear Armageddon.

The Ukraine war is surely one of the dumbest wars in history and one of the easiest to have avoided. When William Burns, the director of the CIA, was ambassador to Moscow, he told the US government that expanding NATO to Ukraine was a red line for Russia – Nyet means Nyet, he said. The words of his famous cable sent to the US government after being called in to see Sergei Lavrov in early 2008 are particularly prescient:

Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.[ix]

We knew Russia would see NATO expansion to Ukraine as a declaration of war, because that’s what it was. All we had to do was say ‘Sorry, Ukraine. You can’t join NATO. Ever.’ Done. The war – and the Ukrainian civil war that had been boiling since the violent far-right overthrow of the democratically elected government in 2014 – would have been avoided. Hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved and it would have cost us nothing.

But our Russophobic elites wanted this war, and got it. Way back in April 2022, shortly after the invasion, Boris Johnson scuppered negotiations that almost led to peace breaking out in discussions brokered by Turkey and Israel. Keep fighting, our Prime Minister told Zelensky, because we won’t support a peace agreement.[x] This makes it OUR war. The SAS being on the ground in Ukraine – as recent leaks revealed – also makes this is OUR war. Our contribution of depleted uranium and long-range weapons make this OUR war.[xi] The Conservative government and its Labour mini-me is using the Ukrainian conflict as a bloody but highly profitable advertisement for our weapons industry.[xii]

However, it’s not turning out how we imagined.

We thought the rouble would turn to rubble because of our sanctions. Delusion. It’s our own economies that are tanking. Sanctions have backfired.

We thought the Russian people would turn against Putin and drive him from power in a glorious colour revolution, replacing him with a pliable liberal westerniser. Delusion. If anything, many Russians feel Putin has been too cautious. Our attempt to engineer a regime change in Moscow has backfired.

We thought our weapons, intelligence and military assistance would win the war for Ukraine. Delusion. Ukraine is kidnapping children and old men and sending them to the front where they will die over whether a village you can’t even pronounce is in Ukraine or Russia. Our military strategy has backfired – Ukraine and the West are being demilitarised.

The truth is that western political elites don’t care about Ukraine. If they did, this war would have been avoided. We aren’t saving Ukraine. We’re sacrificing Ukraine in our war against Russia. Our rabidly Russophobic elites only care about harming Russia, and Ukraine is a tool for doing this. A proxy. A pawn in geopolitical chess, the aim being that a defeated, weakened Russia will disintegrate as Yugoslavia did. The western world has been seized by a hysterical Russophobia. The rest of the world looks on aghast as our hypocritical, sanctimonious, profiteering brings chaos wherever it goes.

But sanctions didn’t destroy the Russian economy. So we imposed more. That didn’t work, so we imposed more. And more. All the money and weapons we sent to Ukraine haven’t saved it, so we sent more. That didn’t work, so we sent more. And more. The much-hyped Ukrainian spring-cum-summer-cum-autumn offensive has done little except kill Ukrainian teenagers and pensioners fighting on the front line, so let’s send more… If something doesn’t work – keep doing it!

We all know what Einstein said about this. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is insanity.

The logic is inescapable. Russia’s victory is all but inevitable. It always has been. It’s bigger than Ukraine, has a bigger population, has a bigger and more sophisticated military. The maths is grim but obvious. We knew this from the start.

This is a time for realism, not idealism.

Or you could just go back to your daily two-minute hate of Putin and hope it all ends happily ever after.

If Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds were updated to include the twenty-first century, Russophobia may well be the final chapter.

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[i] See here for a summary of the evidence: https://www.hartgroup.org/masks-do-more-harm-than-good/

[ii] John P. A. Ioannidis, ‘Infection fatality rate of COVID-19 inferred from seroprevalence data’, Bull World Health Organ 99(19) doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.2471/BLT.20.265892; A.M. Pezzullo, C. Axfors, DG Contopoulos-Ioannidis, A. Apostolatos, J.P.A. Ioannidis, ‘Age-stratified infection fatality rate of COVID-19 in the non-elderly population’, Environmental Research. 2023 Jan 1(216) (Pt 3):114655. doi: 10.1016/j.envres.2022.114655. Epub 2022 Oct 28. PMID: 36341800; PMCID: PMC9613797.

[iii] https://gbdeclaration.org/

[iv] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-31120152

[v] Lisa Marchiano (2017) ‘Outbreak: On Transgender Teens and Psychic Epidemics’, Psychological Perspectives, 60(3), pp.345-366, doi: 10.1080/00332925.2017.1350804

[vi] Jesse Singal, (2016) ‘What’s Missing from the Conversation about Transgender Kids’, The Cut, available at: https://www.thecut.com/2016/07/whats-missing-from-the-conversation-about-transgender-kids.html

[vii] C. Dhejne, P. Lichtenstein, M. Boman, ALV Johansson, N. Långström, et al. (2011) ‘Long-Term Follow-Up of Transsexual Persons Undergoing Sex Reassignment Surgery: Cohort Study in Sweden’, PLOS ONE 6(2), e16885. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0016885

[viii] Lisa Marchiano (2017) ‘Outbreak: On Transgender Teens and Psychic Epidemics’, Psychological Perspectives, 60(3), pp.345-366, doi: 10.1080/00332925.2017.1350804

[ix] https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW265_a.html

[x] https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/05/5/7344206/; Also see this interview with Israeli PM about 2.5 hours in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qK9tLDeWBzs

[xi] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/apr/11/up-to-50-uk-special-forces-present-in-ukraine-this-year-us-leak-suggests

[xii] https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/london-arms-fair-global-war-fears-good-business-2023-09-15/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Artwork: Bob Moran