A Scottish journalist named Charles Mackay published a book about the way crowds lose their minds. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841) catalogued tulip speculation, alchemy, the South Sea Bubble, witch hunts, and the slow-burn lunacy of people who grow so attached to an idea that they can no longer see around it.

It's worth a read.

A few of the ideas Mackay catalogued were stupid. But most of them weren't, and people got captured anyway.

People, in fact, get captured quite easily by any idea that arrives polished enough, at the right moment, to do their thinking for them. The quality of the idea barely matters next to the timing // need.

We have a word for this now, thanks to the Wachowskis, and that word is pilled - which seems appropriate. A pill is something you swallow; it dissolves into you and changes your chemistry, and after a while you can't point to where the substance ends and you begin. To be pilled is to hand a chunk of your perception to a belief system that runs without your supervision. You take the red pill, the black pill, the doomer pill, the trad pill, the e/acc pill etc.

I'm not arguing against having strong views.

Strong views are how you get anything done.

But you run into all sorts of trouble when the view begins holding you instead of the other way around.

You can test for it, actually: when you meet a new fact, do you ask what it means, or do you ask what your framework says about it? If the framework answers first, every time, before you've actually looked, you've stopped using the idea, and the idea has started using you.

Eric Hoffer saw this in 1951. He was a longshoreman who wrote philosophy on the docks, and he understood how easily fanatics could move between opposing causes. A communist could become a fascist overnight, and a fascist could become a communist. The doctrine changed, while the appetite stayed the same: belonging to something total, surrendering judgment, and feeling the relief of never having to weigh the world again.

The strength of your conviction tells you almost nothing about whether you're wrong or right. Rather, it tells you about your appetite. Hoffer had watched it from up close, among dockworkers and drifters during the Depression. He understood the converts without sneering at them - the pull he described is the pull toward a self that finally makes sense. A loose, uncertain, contradictory person joins a movement and is made whole, with a villain to blame and a future to march toward. But the price of a self that makes sense is a self that can't change its mind.

The internet industrialised our appetites. A meme, in the sense Dawkins gave the word in The Selfish Gene in 1976, is a unit of culture that replicates by getting copied through human minds. The stickiest ideas spread furthest - and the truest go approximately nowhere. The winners simply grab onto some emotional circuit and ride it. Which means the ideas competing for room in your head are rarely selected for accuracy; they're selected for transmissibility, which is a different thing entirely.

Clever people who forget the difference end up sounding like a forwarded email chain from the late 90's. I've watched it happen to folks a good deal smarter than me, and I'll watch it again. Someone reads a few good threads on a subject, and within a week they're deploying the vocabulary like they were born to it: the cadence, the in-group references, the ready-made counterarguments, the jargon etc. They sound incredibly fluent; but all they've done is download a script.

But fluency in a worldview is not the same as understanding the world.

Frequently it's quite the opposite.

You can see it on every timeline. The same arguments arrive in the same order with the same emphasis. Thousands of people are convinced they reasoned their way to a conclusion that was (in fact) installed in them last week by an account they've already forgotten - but they'll defend that conclusion like it's in their blood.

In Orwell's 1946 essay on politics and language he showed how a captured mind stops generating sentences and starts assembling them from prefab parts. The phrases come pre-stacked - you reach for the slogan before you reach for the thought. He'd seen it on his own side, among people fighting for things he himself actually believed in. People fall for a "good" cause at the same rate they fall for a "bad" one. The test: can you state your own position in plain words you built yourself, right now, without any of the movement's stock phrases? If you can't, you may not actually hold the position. It may be holding you.

A few things help.

1. Keep company with at least one person who disagrees with you and whom you still respect anyway. Not a strawman, and certainly not a useful idiot you keep around to feel superior. You need a sharp mind who still thinks you're wrong about something that matters and still pokes back. As long as they're in your orbit, you know the question is still open. Most of the pilled have purged everyone like that from their lives - which is why they feel so certain. Certainty is relatively easy to maintain, once you've removed every voice that might puncture it.
2. Read the strongest version of the thing you reject - the book your smarter opponents cite, not the dumbest tweet you can find from the other side. If you can't argue their case well enough that they'd nod along, you don't understand your own position either. You simply understand a cartoon of both.
3. Watch your own vocabulary. When you catch yourself reaching for the same five phrases your tribe uses, stop and force yourself to say it differently. If you can't, you might be borrowing the thought underneath.
4. And keep a record of what you predict. The captured mind never tracks its predictions, but it's the only way you discover that your beautiful framework has been wrong for two years. Write down what you expect to happen and check later. Nothing dissolves a pill faster than a record of its failures.

I think it's worth remembering: the un-pilled state isn't actually natural.

We didn't evolve to seek truth. We evolved to stay in the group, win arguments, and feel certain enough to act. You were never built to prize accuracy. You were built to prize belonging, and a totalising idea hands you exactly that.

You have to keep re-earning your state, daily, against your own wiring and against an information system built to capture you for profit. The platforms want you pilled, because a captured user is a predictable user, and a predictable user pays in a way a thoughtful one never does. Right now thousands of people whose whole job is to install a worldview in you and keep it running are aiming at your attention. Some sell politics. Some sell crypto or wellness or productivity or a well-honed flavour of nihilism. The pill varies from seller to seller. The business model underneath stays suspiciously stable.

Change your mind all you want, but stay the person who decides, whose judgment hasn't been subcontracted to a meme. People go mad in herds and recover their senses slowly, one by one. Mackay was right about the slowness and right about the one by one. No crowd recovers from capture all at once. You swallowed the pill to stop being one and join the herd.

Hold your ideas in your hand where you can see them, instead of letting them see for you. Learn to love a framework while staying willing to break it. And never mistake the cheap (and getting cheaper) relief of certainty for proof.

Be thou not pilled. The only conviction worth having is the kind you could lose tomorrow and survive the loss of it.