In 1841, Charles Mackay published Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds; a three-volume work discussing everything from economic bubbles and alchemy to the influence of politics and religion on whether men wear beards. It’s fascinating reading, and available at Project Gutenberg in HTML or plain text format.
Although the book is now 150 years old, and talks about events that happened a long time before that, it still gives some highly relevant insights into human mobthink and just what people are willing to believe. It’s also a fun read for the historical snapshot. (I once read histories of New Amsterdam and San Francisco, written around the turn of the century; as much fun for the style as for the information. I can’t for the life of my find those books right now, though.)
So when the name Popular Delusions was suggested, and I found and read the book, I knew this was a great framework to hang my web site on. I knew that the people I wanted to attract to my site were the same people I like to hang out with – people with interesting viewpoints, unusual ways of seeing the world. As a Soul Hunter once put it on Babylon 5, “only the special ones, leaders, thinkers, poets, dreamers, blessed lunatics.” Nowadays, from my experience, the fun people are more easily found in “microcommunities;” SF conventions, SCA events, pagan gatherings, and Pride Days of various stripes, as examples.
You might even be able to say that the really nifty people are finding their own ways to Popular Delusions that they enjoyed, and enjoyed sharing with others. Whole subcultures, and web communities, have been built on the strength of a shared popular delusion: TheOneRing.Net, around Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth movies, or Starwars.com, around George Lucas’ corner of the multiverse, or those sites that let you post profiles for your pets. Does your poodle need its own MySpace page?
Of course, one person’s delusion is another’s fact; in fact, I’ve found that I believe in most of the things I’ve labeled delusions in my 2Do lists. And a lot of us seem to enjoy the same delusions; con-goers and pagans, to choose two groups at random, both tend to have cats as pets rather than dogs; lots of groups, for completely different reasons, are into costuming. There’s books, movies, music, and . . . an amazing veriety of topics. We’ll discover them together – and I’d love it if you’d let me know your favorites in the Comments!
