I’ve been mulling over a wholesale revision of this essay for about a week. And then my country goes out and decides to decisively return Donald Trump to the presidency. So, many of the ideas I’ve been trying on seem newly relevant.
In this essay, Montaigne takes on mass delusions, tying them to hysteria over witches. It’s an appropriate connection. In the early 1950s, the red scare in Washington that spilled over into Hollywood, was referred to by its opponents as a witch hunt, inspiring the Arthur Miller play The Crucible. But I like to think Montaigne was onto something a little closer to the mark.
The category of witches is just one way that men define, degrade and control women. Men have endless categories for women. We like to rate them, assign numbers based on their desirability, relentlessly pursue them sexually, then call them sluts if they also enjoy it. We’ll call them bitches, whores, cunts, dykes, whatever word will inflict the most harm in the moment. Elon Musk’s SuperPAC ran web ads during the recently past campaign where he called Kamala Harris “the c-word” … later revealing that c to be communist. Haha, so clever Elon. If people misunderstood, it’s on them, right?
But this is just the most audible form of misogyny. You see, men don’t really hate women. Donald Trump loudly and regularly declares how much he looooooves women. Yeah, we get it Donald. And it’s true, he doesn’t hate women. He’s just deeply threatened by them.
And there’s a reason why men are incredibly threatened by women. And no, I don’t mean by some Freudian analysis related to fear of their mothers. Rather, there is nothing that deflates the very concept of masculinity, as it has been defined traditionally and apparently is still pervasive today, than a strong willed, intelligent woman. It’s almost intolerable for men, especially those who refer to themselves as Alpha.
Just look at Donald Trump. The people who elected him—and it’s a majority of the American electorate—believe he is a strong leader. They consider him decisive, courageous, willing to speak his mind. They assume, because he’s rich and played a successful business man on a reality show, that he knows how to manage all things money. But it’s all a delusion.
Donald Trump is a success the way Tony Soprano is a success, he asserts it. The fascinating thing about “The Sopranos” is the way it consistently reveals Tony to be a terrible leader, in charge of a crime family in steep decline, unable to control his worst impulses. But he skates free of it all without consequence. And Donald Trump is exactly the same. He’s been sold to America as a bad man doing good things. But it’s all a lie. He supports deeply unpopular policies and implements them in the most chaotic, ineffective manner possible. He creates drama for himself and everyone else, and yes he always comes out on top, but when it’s all over, what will the country point back to and claim to have gained from it? No wall, no infrastructure, no manufacturing plant in Wisconsin. Just his loud, self-aggrandizing show.
Here’s what is most distressing, though. This is nothing new. This is what the world perceives masculinity and all of those tangential positive traits — leadership, courage, conviction — to mean. Still to most of the world, leader=man=someone who selfishly does crazy things and somehow never gets held responsible for it.
All of this is exactly what Etienne de la Boetie was getting at in his treatise on involuntary servitude. We willingly bow down to the most craven, incompetent fools simply because of the position they hold. And while that somewhat made sense in the era of monarchies, it’s complete insanity in a democratic age. But here we are.
So bear all of this in mind as Montaigne discusses delusions. He couching all of these thoughts in the language of witches and rumors, but I believe what he really has in mind is the greatest delusion of all, that of power.
To begin, 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. 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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