Big important stuff, or little insignificant stuff, the majority is always wrong.
The majority is always made up of people who join the herd after it has stampeded, thinking that if everybody’s doing it, it must be the thing to do. It starts with kids, right? “All my friends have one, so why can’t I.” And that tips the balance. Mom buys one. Can’t have her kids behind the trend. Why? Because mom’s grown-up friends will hear from their kids that mom’s kids aren’t up to the trendline. And that makes mom something less, so she runs out and buys this latest whatever so her kid has everything, and therefore so does mom. That puts mom in the majority of everything seekers, therefore smart and cool.
The stock market. Same deal. Last days of the bull finds everybody jumping in. Headlines about how great the market is attracts money in droves. Mutual funds swell after a great year when they have nowhere to go but down. The majority jumps in. There are whole theories, said to be successful, that bet on the majority being wrong. But most people believe that’s wrong… of course.
The lonely inventor of great new stuff is a joke. Until heshe comes up with a runaway winner, then everybody wants in. Or says something like “I remember when I could have gotten in that for peanuts.”
Same with that huge real estate deal. The closer we get to the crash, when everybody’s doing it, everybody else wants to do it. But the real money is already made by the time the crowd gets in.
But whoa! What does that say for this American democracy? The majority rules, we say. And that’s good? Our leaders got there by some semblance of majority vote. And are they right in the way they’ve been running this country?
So how do they get there? Could it be the herd mentality again? Like, “I don’t want to throw away my vote, so I’m not voting for that one. Shehe can’t win.”
Must be somebody up there looking out for us. And that “up there” can’t be Washington.
Which brings us again to the one-size-fits-all quote for these times. “…we men… find reality generally quite unsatisfactory” – Sigmund Freud, Psychoanalysis (1910)
