Human nature does not change. 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.
Charles 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. It illustrates our enduring credulity, covering such follies as alchemy, financial bubbles, the Crusades, fortune-telling, false prophesy, witchcraft, and witch hunts. 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. Such hysterical contagion continues in modern times, merely taking on new forms.
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. Yet the ancient belief in transmutation is still with us. Current popular delusions are aspirations not to turn base metals into gold, but rather to transcend the laws of biology and transmute human nature. Among them is the popular belief that gender is fungible, so that whether we are born male or female is of no consequence.
