Collective Delusion Quotes

The horror of Communism, Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things -- they always do. It's that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great.

It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.

Wherever there is a crowd there is untruth.

Who’s to say that it takes something like a drug to mess with your perception of reality? How did Hitler deceive a nation? How can one group of people look at the world and see one thing, and another see something completely different? One sees a town, another sees a desert. One sees beauty, another sees chaos.” The skin of this world,” he said quietly.

Collective madness is called sanity.

I am fascinated by these ocean-grown folks. On the coast, there's all this cross-pollination of ideas. Someone thinks they saw something. One person's madness is reiterated by another, and a story is born. The rumour becomes a substitute for news.

You have seen it: You can put something into the world, and all of a sudden, everybody believes that. Like throwing a fishing rod and the fish bite into.

What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.

All humanity could share a common insanity and be immersed in a common illusion while living in a common chaos. That can't be disproved, but we have no choice but to follow our senses.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination.

It may well be that a societys greatest madness seems normal to itself.

We're hallucinating. And that's what this world is: a mass hallucination, where fear seems more real than love. Fear is an illusion. Our craziness, paranoia, anxiety and trauma are literally all imagined.

They were told what they wanted and they believed it. They can only keep their dream alive by being with others like themselves who will mirror their illusions.

When you're surrounded by people who share the same set of assumptions as you, you start to think that's reality.

The whole organization seemed to be in free fall, indulging in a collective fantasy in which experienced colleagues refused to admit that their every movement, every decision that was made and implemented, only led them one step closer to the abyss.

Doubts are suppressed by groups... But remember that the internal incentives that shape how the group perceives risks and rewards may be very different from the reality of the risks and rewards in the external marketplace. Those incentives can distort risk perception.

But in the Middle Ages people were convinced there were witches. They looked for them and they certainly found them.

They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.

But they had, perversely, been living among people who were peering into the wrong end of the telescope, or something, and who had convinced themselves that the opposite was true - that the world had once been a splendid, orderly place...and that everything had been slowly, relentlessly falling apart ever since.

How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline: the sociology of error.

In reading The History of Nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities, their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.

Often the mass emotions are those which seem the noblest, best and most beautiful. And yet, inside a year, five years, a decade, five decades, people will be asking, "How could you have believed that?" because events will have taken place that will have banished the said mass emotions to the dustbin of history.

Whether a belief is considered to be a delusion or not depends partly upon the intensity with which it is defended, and partly upon the numbers of people subscribing to it.

Faking is a social activity in which people act together to draw a veil over unwanted realities and encourage each other in the exercise of their illusory powers.

I don't believe my house was haunted. I think I had an overactive imagination, and I was so convinced that those around me became convinced, too.