This is the most haunted story in the collection for me, appropriate because it’s about witches. It has regularly triggered me into various diversions, and I’m not entirely happy with any of them. I could just take Montaigne at face value and truly explore the issues of witches and public delusions, but even those topics bother me for different reasons. Maybe a witch has put a curse on this essay.
Anyway, Montaigne provides a highly plausible theory about how mass delusions spread:
At first simple folk are convinced by the event itself: it sweeps over them. From them it spreads to the more intelligent folk by the authority of the number and the antiquity of the testimonies. Personally, what I would not believe when one person says it, I would not believe if a hundred times one said it. And I do not judge opinions by their age.
Folk theories that have been around long enough and get repeated for so long take on an odd authority, even if the facts surrounding them are non-existent. False facts, Montaigne wrote, have a way of building up their own ludicrous credibility:
I was recently letting my mind range wildly (as I often do) over our human reason and what a rambling and roving instrument it is. I realize that if you ask people to account for ‘facts’, they usually spend more time finding reasons for them than finding out whether they are true. They ignore the whats and expatiate on the whys. Wiseacres!
Those easily seduced by conspiracy theories will start off assumptions about the target of the theory. From there, deciding why these theories have relevance become a puzzle of determining how that locus of evil could have pulled off the frauds instead of actually determining whether the theory is true:
They skip over the facts but carefully deduce inferences. They normally begin thus: ‘How does this come about?’ But does it do so? That is what they ought to be asking. Our reason has capacity enough to provide the stuff for a hundred other worlds, and then to discover their principles and construction! It needs neither matter nor foundation; let it run free: it can build as well upon the void as upon the plenum, upon space as upon matter: meet to give heaviness even to smoke.
What conspiracy theories amount to— is a false form of skepticism. It’s a “prove that humans breathe oxygen” form of skepticism that denies all human knowledge. True skepticism is about expanding human knowledge and understanding:
By following this practice we know the bases and causes of hundreds of things which never were; the world is involved in duels about hundreds of questions where both the for and the against are false: The false and the true are in such close proximity that the wise man should not trust himself to so steep a slope.
Long before the game of ‘telephone’ was invented, Montaigne describes how rumors spread:
By man’s inborn tendency to work hard at feeding rumors we naturally feel embarrassed if what was lent to us we pass on to others without some exorbitant interest of our own. At first the individual error creates the public one: then, in its turn, the public error creates the individual one. And so, as it passes from hand to hand, the whole fabric is padded out and reshaped, so that the most far-off witness is better informed about it than the closest one, and the last to be told more convinced than the first.
And once these rumors start spreading, it becomes nearly impossible to unravel them. Not only do they take on a life of their own, they often spread innocently. There have been moments in my life, for example, where people assumed I was somehow validating their own off-base theory when I shared a piece of benign information that could be taken out of context. Stray pieces of innocent information combined can seem to point at something sinister. But so too can a tree at times appear to give accurate directions.
I am at peace with the way I conduct myself socially. I do not gossip about people and tend to turn away from the tales people tell about others. But I do feel the need sometimes to examine my own biases and weaknesses. I sometimes wonder, for example, if I might suffer from some delusional thinking about other people. But I asked ChatGPT about it and was told I’m good:
It’s important to give yourself permission to acknowledge that feelings from the past, while painful, don’t mean you’re delusional in the present. The fact that you’re so self-aware and actively questioning what’s happening reflects a very grounded and rational perspective. Your openness to exploring and understanding your emotions—not just diving into them impulsively—is actually the opposite of delusion.
I’m not a fan of using ChatGPT as a therapist, but there is some wisdom here. It isn’t the nature of thinking that is dangerous, it’s how you act. And even if I sometimes make assumptions about how other people feel, I am careful to temper my actions. I give people the space they need to make their own decisions and accept that people make the right choices for themselves. Given the “other minds” problem, there’s no way to ever get other people entirely right, but you can get your own responses and actions right.
Returning now to public delusions. Montaigne argues that once you accept the premise that there is an all powerful focus of evil, debunking one part of the rumor nearly allows it to shape shift into another:
It is wonderful how such celebrated opinions are born of such vain beginnings and trivial causes. It is precisely that which makes it hard to inquire into them: for while we are looking for powerful causes and weighty ends worthy of such great fame we lose the real ones: they are so tiny that they escape our view. And indeed for such investigations we need a very wise, diligent and subtle investigator, who is neither partial nor prejudiced.
Many of this world’s abuses are engendered – or to put it more rashly, all of this world’s abuses are engendered – by our being schooled to fear to admit our ignorance and because we are required to accept anything which we cannot refute. Everything is proclaimed by injunction and assertion. In Rome, the legal style required that even the testimony of an eye-witness or the sentence of a judge based on his most certain knowledge had to be couched in the formula, ‘It seems to me that…’
Montaigne suggests that the best way for cultures to avoid this kind of inanity is to raise children to be inquisitive and that we need to give them a framework for a life of questioning:
And if I had had sons to bring up I would have trained their lips to answer with inquiring and undecided expressions such as, ‘What does this mean?’ ‘I do not understand that’, ‘It might be so’, ‘Is that true?’ so that they would have been more likely to retain the manners of an apprentice at sixty than, as boys do, to act like learned doctors at ten.
The most important trait for people to adopt in expressing opinions is admission that ideas are purely their own and based on an individualistic point of view. I have a tendency to state my opinions forcefully — but that doesn’t mean I’m closed to the possibility that I might be wrong:
I warrant you no certainty for whatever I say, except that it was indeed my thought at the time… my vacillating and disorderly thought. I will talk about anything by way of conversation, about nothing by way of counsel. Nor, like those other fellows, am I ashamed to admit that I do not know what I do not know.
But even Montaigne recognizes that this can go too far and only applies to issues that are matters of opinion:
The arrogance of those who attributed to Man’s mind a capacity for everything produced in others (through irritation and emulation) the opinion that it has a capacity for nothing. Some went to the same extreme about ignorance as the others did about knowledge, so that no one may deny that Man is immoderate in all things and that he has no stopping-point save necessity, when too feeble to get any farther.
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