A short review on “The Madness of Crowds” by Douglas Murray (2019).

I have read the “Madness of Crowds”. It is a book about several kinds of inequalities in the society, to which a lot of effort has been paid in order to compensate for them, and although up to a certain point a lot of this effort paid off, recently the effects became more controversial than working.

Douglas discusses four big (in the amount of text dedicated to them) inequalities, and many more small ones.

I think that the main point that should be taken away from the text is that much more thinking needs to be done before deciding on an important issue, even if this issue may seem perfectly obvious to the referential group. If someone is offering you a “clear solution” to an issue, doubt it even if it is a direct extrapolation of the solution to the same issue as it used to be in the past. Doubt it if is the same solution to a different issue, no matter how similar it may look. Doubt it in any circumstances.

Another thing that I take out of his book is: read the classics. Not the classical fiction, but the classical thought. The older guys, like Democritus, Protagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Confucius, Babylonians, they have been outdated and superseded… but it is astonishing to see how slowly the process of change goes in the human nature, compared to the human tools.

There is also one thought that is not terribly new, at least I heard it several times from different people, but which, I tell myself, is worth repeating. When listening to people giving advice, try to distinguish the people who are giving you good advice because they want you to become better from people who give you bad advice because they want you to fail.

The book is not too long, a native speaker can probably get through it in a couple of evenings.