Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets

Basic Instincts

The point is not that people do not think. It is that they cannot stop thinking. Only what they take for thought is most often delusion compounded by the contagion of others’ opinions. Which is why most people would be better off not thinking at all but going on their instincts. Ask any really successful man and he will tell you his success comes as much from his intuition as from his brain.⁸

Yet, intuition is generally dismissed—as though it were no more than myth. This is remarkable to us, for, if you were to ask the average man for an intuition, it would almost invariably be reasonable, far more than anything produced by his reason. “The weather is turning bad,” he would say. “That marriage is bound for trouble,” he might guess. “There's a young man who will go places,” he would venture.

Yet, were you to ask the same man to use his brain to produce a compound logical thought about a public matter, the result would likely be preposterous or simply incomprehensible: “The rich should pay more taxes because the poor need the money more than they do.” “Stocks will go up because more people want them.” “We have to defend ourselves against terrorists; therefore, we have no choice but to go to war.”

Each of these statements is bundled up with a mass of ideas, prejudices, assumptions, metaphors, and delusions. And if you were to strip them off, you would find such a scrawny skeleton of a real idea underneath that if it were not propped up artificially, it would fall ...