A finance professional once remarked to me, “Money is also a madness.” I have returned to that sentence more often than I expected. Not because money is imaginary in its consequences—it buys medicine, pays rent, creates security and changes lives—but because its power depends partly on a remarkable human achievement: shared belief.
The same species that agrees on the value of a currency also agrees on what counts as respectable work, legitimate knowledge, sensible ambition and acceptable difference. Most such agreements make cooperation possible. Some become so familiar that we forget they were agreements at all.
This essay uses madness as a literary question about collective behaviour, not as a description of a person, a diagnosis, or a substitute for clinical terminology. Psychological suffering deserves care and accuracy. Unconventionality is not itself evidence of illness; neither is unconventionality proof of superior insight. The subject here is the curious distance between what a group accepts and what its members have independently examined.
The normal is not a single thing.
Consider the word normal. Sometimes it means statistically common. Sometimes it means socially approved. Sometimes it refers to a clinical judgment about health, functioning, suffering or risk. These meanings overlap, but they are not interchangeable. Being unusual in a population does not by itself make an experience unhealthy, just as being widespread does not automatically make a habit beneficial.
Georges Canguilhem, the physician and philosopher, challenged attempts to reduce the pathological to a simple departure from a statistical average. Health and illness must also be understood in relation to a living person’s capacities, circumstances and experience. That does not abolish medicine; it makes the question more precise. READ CANGUILHEM COMMENTARY ↗
Michel Foucault, especially in History of Madness, pursued a different kind of question: how have institutions, forms of knowledge, and ideas about reason shaped the treatment and classification of people across time? His work invites us to examine the history of categories we may have inherited without noticing. It does not follow that all categories are arbitrary, that medical care is merely social control, or that objective evidence can be dismissed at will. The useful question is how evidence, judgment and institutional power interact. FOUCAULT / STANFORD ↗
A majority can describe what is common. It cannot, by itself, settle what is true, healthy or good.A distinction worth keeping
Some hoard money. Others, certainty.
One person builds a balance sheet. Another accumulates books, credentials, concepts and the reassuring feeling of knowing more. A third identifies so strongly with a single explanatory framework that every new event becomes further proof of it. There is nothing inherently suspect about saving, studying or maintaining convictions. Each can represent prudence, curiosity or hard-won understanding. The trouble begins when a useful instrument becomes the entire measure of a life.
Money is powerful partly because people can coordinate around it; knowledge matters because it improves how we encounter the world. But monetary accumulation is not the same as security, just as possession of information is not the same as good judgment. A bookshelf can become a sanctuary or a trophy cabinet. A theory can illuminate new evidence or become immune to it. The distinction is often less visible from the outside than from the habits of its owner.
Perhaps the stranger question is why we need everything to become a collection: assets, citations, followers, completed projects, even proof of personal growth. Each count tells us something. None tells us everything. A method becomes difficult to question when the scoreboard begins to feel like reality itself.
Is there a collective mind?
Émile Durkheim used the language of collective consciousness or collective conscience to describe shared beliefs and moral sentiments that help hold social groups together. This is a sociological idea: the patterns of meaning and obligation that can exist beyond any one individual. It is not a claim that society literally possesses a single brain, and it differs from Carl Jung’s more speculative concept of a collective unconscious.
Language, trust, scientific communities, professional standards and everyday social norms show why shared frameworks matter. We could hardly negotiate every traffic rule or rediscover every piece of mathematics from first principles. Much of civilisation depends on people accepting carefully accumulated knowledge that they did not personally generate. Reliance on others is not a failure of intellect; it is often the only rational way to live in a complex world.
But reliance requires judgment about who knows, how they know, and how an error would be corrected. When belonging becomes dependent on repeating the same answers, collective understanding can harden into collective overconfidence. The quality of shared consciousness depends partly on whether disagreement is still allowed to inform it.
When does thinking together stop thinking?
Psychologist Irving Janis introduced groupthink in the early 1970s to describe a particular danger in group decision-making: pressure for consensus can discourage dissent, limit the consideration of alternatives and produce an illusion that everybody independently agrees. Picture a meeting where several competent people notice a weakness, but each assumes the others have already considered it. Silence becomes apparent unanimity. The same story can be repeated for days without anyone formally lying.
Yet agreement is not the enemy. When a group has relevant expertise, independent observations, a common objective and a genuine way to correct mistakes, coordination is extraordinarily useful. A medical team, orchestra or emergency response unit may depend on swift shared action. The important distinction is between earned coordination and unexamined conformity. Groups need not argue forever to think well, but they should be able to identify what evidence could change a consequential decision.
Janis’s framework is influential but not an established universal explanation of every failed group decision. Research has challenged its predictive power, and some groups fail because of fragmentation, hierarchy, missing information or incentives that have little to do with closeness. Calling any unpopular consensus “groupthink” simply creates a new shortcut around analysis. JANIS FRAMEWORK ↗ CRITICAL REAPPRAISAL ↗
Twelve people agree. What do we know?
Imagine a room where twelve individuals support the same conclusion. You do not know what information they saw before speaking.
Research on the wisdom of crowds helps explain why the room’s history matters. Combining reasonably independent judgments can improve accuracy on some tasks; exposing people to others’ answers too early can reduce that independence. In other words, the crowd can be wise precisely because its members did not begin by imitating the crowd. SOCIAL INFLUENCE STUDY ↗
When a crowd acquires a price.
Financial markets offer a particularly vivid theatre for social belief. Prices are influenced by expected cash flows, interest rates, risk, liquidity and countless judgments about the future. They can also be influenced by what investors believe other investors will believe. It is possible to buy an asset not because one trusts its underlying value but because one expects somebody else to value it more tomorrow. That does not make markets irrational by definition; it makes them places where information, incentives and imitation interact.
Charles Mackay’s nineteenth-century book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds made financial enthusiasm into an enduring literary subject. It remains fascinating, especially on the South Sea Bubble and Dutch tulips, but should be read as a historical artifact rather than an unquestioned database of facts. Historian Anne Goldgar revisited Dutch archival records and found that the legendary story of nationwide ruin following tulip speculation had been greatly amplified in retelling. That correction matters: a book about crowd error can itself become a crowd’s favourite oversimplification. READ MACKAY ↗ READ GOLDGAR ↗
Economists Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer and Ivo Welch formalised how informational cascades can develop. If earlier people appear to possess information, later observers may rationally copy their behaviour even when their own evidence points elsewhere. What looks like a robust consensus can therefore rest on surprisingly few independent signals. The problem is not simply foolish investors; it is how sensible individual decisions can combine into fragile collective patterns. ORIGINAL PAPER / 1992 ↗
Sometimes we do not believe an idea because everybody has examined it. We believe it because everybody seems to believe it.A hypothesis about cascades, not a verdict on every crowd
Strasbourg, 1518.
In the summer of 1518, chronicles describe an extraordinary episode in Strasbourg: people dancing compulsively in streets and public spaces, with reports of prolonged exhaustion and some deaths. The event is often called the dancing plague. It invites lurid contemporary headlines about a city that suddenly lost its mind, but those headlines travel much further than the historical evidence permits.
An event, several explanations.
Researchers have discussed severe distress, social contagion, culturally patterned behaviour, ritual contexts, and possible medical or environmental factors. Historians disagree about causes and the reliability of individual claims. We cannot retrospectively establish that the participants all experienced psychosis—or that one psychological mechanism explains every reported act.
VIEW A PERIOD DOCUMENT ↗ · START WITH JOHN WALLER’S HISTORICAL REVIEW ↗ · COMPARE A BROADER REVIEW ↗The more interesting question for this essay is how communities interpret events for which they lack an adequate model. An unfamiliar phenomenon demands an explanation; available traditions, institutions and fears influence which explanation feels plausible. That does not mean any explanation is as good as another. It means that explanations, too, have histories. One reason to study extraordinary events is to understand why the ordinary act of making sense can be so difficult.
We no longer encounter an unselected world.
We never did. Editors, teachers, publishers, friends and institutions have always helped determine which information reaches us. The contemporary difference is partly one of scale, speed and incentives. A television programme passes through commercial and editorial choices. A social feed may be ranked by a platform designed to optimise particular measures of engagement. Both kinds of system can inform, entertain and reveal something important; both can also leave large portions of reality outside the frame.
It is tempting to respond with a single theory of manipulation. That would be too simple. Media ownership is not uniform, editorial independence varies, recommendation systems have multiple objectives, and people are not helpless receivers of information. Yet it is reasonable to ask who chooses what is displayed, what receives repetition, which signals advertisers reward, and whether the most engaging account is also the most informative.
Herbert Simon pointed toward this problem in 1971: when information becomes plentiful, the attention required to process it becomes scarce. In a commercial environment, capturing attention can be valuable independently of improving understanding. A claim may become familiar because it is repeated; familiar because it is repeatedly recommended; or recommended because it already holds attention. None of these processes alone proves the claim true. SIMON’S ATTENTION ARGUMENT ↗
Sensemaking is consequently a double task. We must interpret the world, and we must interpret the machinery that selects which fragments of the world become available to us. Intellectual humility is not the refusal to reach conclusions. It is the discipline of remembering that a conclusion may depend on a sample we did not choose.
And sometimes, there is music.
At the edge of these abstract arguments sits something much less academic: gratitude. There have been periods when music felt less like entertainment and more like company. Eminem’s work is part of that personal history. It offered a language for intensity, contradiction, dark humour, endurance and the possibility of remaining present through difficult stretches. That is a statement of what the music meant to one listener, not a clinical claim and not an endorsement of every lyric, persona or idea.
We often expect intellectually serious people to maintain a tidy separation between philosophical inquiry and popular culture. Yet a song can help a person articulate an experience that a paragraph in a textbook has not reached. That does not make the artist an authority on all subjects. It simply leaves room for gratitude without surrendering judgment. We can appreciate what helps us live, and still choose our own values.
Perhaps that is relevant here: normality need not be enforced by a cultural dress code. A researcher can enjoy an unruly verse. A finance professional can question the strange poetry of money. A person can think carefully without pretending to have no contradictions.
Do not confuse consensus with reality.
This is not an argument to distrust everyone, reject expertise or celebrate every outsider. It is an argument for more exact questions. When a group agrees, ask whether the members reached their conclusions independently. When a theory explains everything, ask what could disconfirm it. When a market price climbs, distinguish information about value from information about enthusiasm. When a headline dominates the screen, remember that visibility has a production process.
Collective life works because we can coordinate. It fails in characteristic ways when coordination makes correction socially expensive. The solution is neither permanent rebellion nor obedient conformity. It is to keep the channels between belief, evidence and revision open. That is less dramatic than declaring a society mad, but substantially more useful.
There is also a limit to perpetual suspicion. A person cannot independently audit every institution, scientific paper, market or conversation. We need well-designed trust: trust capable of being questioned, supported by transparent methods and revised when the evidence demands it. The point is not to live in permanent doubt. It is to know which kinds of confidence we have earned.
The opposite of unthinking conformity is not endless contrarianism. It is judgment.Working conclusion · October 2026
↗ A skeptic’s objection: doesn’t this argument undermine itself?
Yes, it could. An essay warning about consensus can become its own flattering identity: the supposed independent thinker who assumes that disagreement guarantees insight. Nothing in the evidence licenses that shortcut. Expertise can be trustworthy, established norms can be humane, and conventional conclusions can be correct. The test is whether the reasoning survives scrutiny, not whether it feels rebellious.
An independent essay, not a diagnostic guide, investment recommendation or comprehensive review of these literatures. The word “madness” in the title is literary; the historical example is not a retrospective medical diagnosis. Sources are linked so that readers can evaluate and disagree.