Your Inner Mob
September 06, 2005
The mind is like a town meeting: lots of people, lots of different opinions. Sometimes the town meeting is well run — people are reasonable, courteous — but often it goes out of control. People start shouting, and a kind of mob psychology takes over. If you’re standing outside the mob, it’s easy enough to see that the people are crazy, but if you get down in a mob with enough people who believe, say, that somebody’s a witch, you can end up setting her on fire. And then after it’s all over you say, “Gee, how did that happen?”