March 2, 2015--Manias

Manias of the historical kind are a form of collective mental illness with some of the same characteristics of the classic psychological state in individuals where manias include periods of great excitement, euphoria, hyperactivity, and delusions. A full blown cultural mania sees these characteristics generalized to affect hundreds, thousands, even millions and can crop up periodically over centuries.

I find these mass manias to be fascinating, where desires become uncontrollable and otherwise simple interests become obsessive. Not only do they often have an amusing side (for example, the Dancing Mania of the early Renaissance), but they also give us insight about the human capacity to be drawn into collective or mass movements of all sorts, from global religious extremism to obsession about things as seemingly meaningless as tulip bulbs and blue and black or white and gold dresses.

Among my favorite historical manias is the Dancing Mania that reached its peak in 1518 in Strasbourg, Alsace and was so pervasive that it was called the Dancing Plague.

It broke out through a wide swarth of Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries. It attracted thousands of participants including men, women, and children who danced until they collapsed.

One notable outbreak occurred in Strasbourg in July 1518. There, hundreds took to dancing for days without rest and many died of heart attacks, strokes, or exhaustion. Musicians typically accompanied the dancers in an attempt to distract them but their presence only made matters worse.

Though the St. Vitus' Dance, as it was described, was widely reported at the time it was poorly understood. No one then or since has come up with a convincing analysis of what brought it on and what inner human sources it tapped. Some who studied the mania suggest that it emerged from religious cults that were widespread but, for that matter, there is no generally agreed-upon theory as to what attracts people so totally to cults or religious movements. So the mystery remains as to the origins or human proclivity to participate in what some have labelled mass psychogenic illness.

Of a very different sort, but at least as intriguing, is the Tulip Mania that occurred in Holland between 1636 and 1637. It was the Dutch Golden Age and financial investments and instruments of various kinds were proliferating. None more inexplicable or as widespread among most classes, including the Dutch royals, was the one that saw the recently-introduced tulip soar in value to the extent that some individual tulips were traded for the equivalent of 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman.

And just as quickly as the tulip craze inflated it collapsed. Some economists consider this to be the first speculative bubble, not entirely unlike the real estate bubble of recent years that burst in 2007-8 and brought about the Great Recession.

Others, mainly conservative economists who dismiss psychological impulses as affecting economic behavior, see it as an example of the efficient-market hypothesis, where tulip trading was just as much an expression of rational investing as buying and selling Apple or Exxon stock.

I have a very different view, seeing the tulip market to be very much like the Dance Plague where inner emotional forces took control and overrode rational thought and constraint.