Charles Mackay

It's a book that's a hundred and fifty years old.

It's actually by Charles Mackay.

And what he looked at were big bubbles from the sixteen hundreds, the tulip bubble, the, the, the tulip bulbs in the-- in Holland actually, you know, went up in price a hundred thousand percent, the South Sea bubble.

And he talked about how crowds can do incredibly crazy things.

But now let's go backward again and talk about how marketing and sales developed in the financial services industry.

The first reference we have there is Charles Mackay's great book or series of books called Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, which was published in 1841 and talked about all kinds of crowd behaviors from the tulip bubbles to witchcraft to dueling to many other things.

Are you a good witch or a bad

witch? Who, me? I'm not a witch at all.

"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." That's attributed to the great Marcus Aurelius.

Charles Mackay wrote, "Men," it has well ...

It has been well said, "think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one." And Nietzsche put it this way: "The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe." And that's what I wanna talk about today.

I want to talk about raising strong sons and daughters, not physically strong, although I think that that's a really important thing, and not strong in the sense that they're loud, argumentative, disagreeable, or stubborn or rude.

And honestly, I hope I should have hit it.

dickens says in great expectations that we need never be ashamed of our tears for they are like rain upon the blinding dust of earth i look back across the years at that far-off day among the daffodils and most certainly i am not ashamed of the tears that i then shed really if we are not to cry over spilt milk what are we to cry over if it is wrong to cry over spilt milk i can conceive of no conditions under which weeping is excusable if we are not to cry over spilt milk there can be no justification for tears at all charles mackay says that there are no eyes so pathetic as tearless eyes oh ye tears oh ye tears i am thankful that you run though you trickle in the darkness you shall glitter in the sun the rainbow cannot shine if the rain refuse to fall and the eyes that cannot weep are the saddest eyes of all but if fred townsend's flippantly quoted imposture were not false but true all eyes would be tearless and all faces would be sad the tears that we shed over spilt milk are the tribute that we pay to the irrevocabilities of life and so far from being of no use i shall show that they serve a sublime and noble end there is all the difference in the world between spilt milk and spilt water it is not merely a difference in their respective commercial values the water spilt upon the ground is no real loss at all it is merely soaked into the filtering earth it will find its way back into the hidden springs and secret fountains and will in due course reappear to refresh and satisfy some other thirsty soul.

But with spilt milk it is otherwise.

The spilt milk does not flow back to the dairy to replenish the milkmaid's cans.

By the 19th century, the tone had changed for good.

Charles Mackay, in his famous 1841 book on the delusions of crowds, listed the case among the outright frauds, accomplices of the drummer plus a gullible master of the house.

Earlier still, the painter William Hogarth had mocked the whole of English ghost belief, Tedworth included, in a biting engraving.

And when the early ghost hunters of the Society for Psychical Research finally re-examined the case, they turned their suspicion no longer on the beggar, but inward on the children of the house.

While his miners mine and his engines work through all our happy land, we shall flourish fair in the morning light, and our name and our fame and our might and our right in the front of the world shall stand.

By Charles Mackay.

End of Front Matter.

Section One of Stories of the Coal Mine by Frank Mundell.

The book is called The Madness of Markets.

And of course, it brings to mind Charles Mackay's famous book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, a book also about bubbles, the South Sea bubble, the tulip craze in 17th century Holland.

Should we be, are you arguing in the madness of markets that we need to, particularly in our social media age, where we all seem to be intoxicated by one kind of crowd or another, we need to shut us, if we want to be a smart investor, we need to shut ourselves away in a room, away from the crowds?

Yes, because often we think that crowds may be wise.