Book

The Delusions of Crowds Why People Go Mad in Groups

William J. Bernstein

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What this book knows

Financial and religious manias share identical neural and social roots: imitation, narrative hunger, and reason's fragility under crowd pressure.

Sex: Absent
Work: Present
Learning: Present
Religion: Primary

faith-and-doubtmind-and-cognitionobedience-and-authority

faith-and-doubt

The desire to improve one's well-being in this life or the next drives both financial and religious mass delusions through identical amplifying forces.
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More than a third of Americans believe Jesus will return in their lifetime; even Ronald Reagan could discourse knowledgeably on Armageddon.
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mind-and-cognition

Human 'rationality' constitutes a fragile lid perilously balanced on the bubbling cauldron of artifice and self-delusion.
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Human beings intuitively seek outcomes with very high but very rare payoffs, tantalized by the chimera of unimaginable wealth.
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obedience-and-authority

Robertson has misheard God with some frequency — predicting world's end in 1982, a Pacific Northwest tsunami in 2006, mass terrorist killings in 2007.
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Seventy-six Davidians perished in the blaze; at least twenty had been shot, including Koresh, apparently to escape burning to death.
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