The Love of the Marvelous

And the Disbelief of the True

Bryan J. Kaus

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

- Charles Mackay

Watch enough financial news and you stop hearing the content. You start hearing the appetite underneath it. The same story, told with the same conviction, by the same people who were selling a different story with the same conviction a quarter ago. Nobody sounds unsure. Everybody sounds early. And the room leans in, not because the argument is sound, but because it is exciting, and because everyone else is already leaning in.

Last week I wrote about the ways we misread the past. Survivor bias, confirmation bias, the quiet editing that turns a lucky run into a law. If it survived, we tell ourselves, it must be so. That sentence is comfortable. It is also the machinery that has emptied fortunes for four hundred years. This week I want to follow it one layer down, to the thing that makes the machinery run. Not the error itself, but the hunger for it.

Charles Mackay catalogued the wreckage in 1841. Holland lost its head over tulip bulbs, a few of them briefly priced above a working man’s house. France handed its economy to John Law and his Mississippi paper, and the crowd pressed so hard into the Rue de Quincampoix that a hunchbacked man made a living renting out his back as a writing desk. England answered with the South Sea Bubble. Mackay’s subject was never really the flowers or the shares. It was the crowd, and the fact that the same fever kept finding new hosts. The costumes change. The disease does not.

Error, the oldest acquaintance

The chapter of Mackay that stays with me is not the bubble arithmetic. It is a quieter one he called the love of the marvelous and the disbelief of the true. He put the mechanism plainly. Of all the offspring of Time, error is the most ancient, so old and familiar an acquaintance that Truth, when she finally arrives, is met like an intruder.

Read that twice. It is not that people are stupid. It is that a thrilling falsehood and a dull fact never compete on level ground. The falsehood is already seated at the table, comfortable, welcome, wearing the face of a friend. The fact knocks at the door and is asked to explain itself. We do not weigh the two. We carry a standing preference for the one that flatters us, moves fast, and promises more than any ledger can support.

That preference is not a relic of a credulous age. It is human wiring, and it sits in the analyst and the allocator as surely as it sat in the tulip trader. We like to think we retired it with data. We mostly just gave it faster tools.

The warrant does the work

You do not have to reach back to Holland for the pattern. Look at the last decade.

Theranos told the world that a single drop of blood could run hundreds of tests, and the world believed it, not because the machines worked, but because the story arrived with a warrant. The board was a wall of statesmen and generals: two former secretaries of state, two former secretaries of defense, a former senator. At its peak the company was valued near nine billion dollars. What it lacked was a device that did what it claimed, and the people saying so, a young whistleblower and a reporter, were disbelieved and pressured long before they were believed. The marvelous claim carried a warrant. The plain truth did not. Holmes is now serving more than eleven years.

FTX ran the same play in a different market. A rumpled young founder who had supposedly cracked crypto, wrapped in the language of doing the most good, on the magazine covers and the conference stages, courting regulators with a reformer’s smile. The warrant was the halo. The dull truth was that customer money was not where he said it was. The crowd disbelieved that until the withdrawals could not be met and the whole thing came apart in a week. He is serving twenty-five years.

WeWork is the quieter case, and maybe the more instructive, because no one went to prison. It leased office space and lost money doing it. That is a dull, true sentence. The marvelous version, that it was a technology company elevating the world’s consciousness, carried it to a forty-seven billion dollar valuation, right up until the prospectus forced the plain numbers into daylight and the offering collapsed in about six weeks.

Notice what these share. None of them was unknowable. In every case someone was saying the true thing out loud, and sophisticated boards and famous investors disbelieved it, because it lacked a warrant and because it was not the exciting story. That is not a failure of information. It is the love of the marvelous, wearing this decade’s suit.

The efficient sameness

Individual frauds are the loud version, and they are almost comforting, because they come with villains and verdicts. The version I actually watch for is quieter, and it has no perpetrator at all. It looks like efficiency.

The mania of this moment is not one wrong idea held by everyone. It is the decision, made by nearly all of us at once, to outsource judgment to the same source and call the result thinking. The tools are genuinely capable. They can rationalize a position faster than most of us can frame the question. That speed is real, and I will use it. But speed is not sense, and a confident answer is not a considered one.

When everyone reaches for the same easy button, the outputs converge. Every memo reads well. Every deck lands. None of it is anyone’s own. Follow that out a few orders and you arrive at the part that should worry anyone who cares about growth rather than the next quarter. Innovation is a function of divergence. It comes from the outliers who trust their own ground truth over the confident consensus, the ones willing to be wrong in a direction no one else is looking. Flatten that variance and you do not get a boom. You get a very efficient sameness.

The image is the monoculture. A single crop, bred for yield, planted fence to fence, posts the best numbers per acre anyone has seen, right until one pathogen finds the weakness they all share. The field traded adaptive variety for short-run efficiency, and the trade looked brilliant until it wasn’t. Homogenized judgment is the same bargain. High yield now, thin resilience later, and a slower arrival of whatever was supposed to come next.

There is an optimistic case, and I want to be fair to it. Perhaps a few crack the code, build enormous winners, and the losers fall away. Even then I am not comforted. If novelty concentrates into a single winning source, you have built something efficient and fragile at the same moment. Growth over decades is a recombination problem. It needs many independent experiments to draw from. Narrow the pool to one and you have not secured the future. You have mortgaged it.

The worship of the thief

Mackay has a chapter that reads strangely until you sit with it. He called it the popular admiration for great thieves. His subject was the highwayman and the robber, the bandit the public did not condemn but celebrated, cheered toward the gallows and sung about in ballads for a generation. The crowd did not merely tolerate the man who took what was not his. It admired him for the taking.

We have not outgrown this. We have only refined it. Before the verdicts came in, we put these same founders on the covers and the stages and asked them how they did it. We reserve a particular reverence for the one who seems to have cracked the code, who games a structure everyone else agreed to play straight and narrates the extraction as vision. A dull edge does not draw a crowd. A daring theft does.

The reason this matters, beyond the moral of it, is that the admired thief is usually the same figure as the single winning source from a moment ago. When a crowd decides in advance to worship whoever cracks the code, it has already handed concentration its warrant. The applause is not incidental to the flattening. It is the mechanism that licenses it.

One by one

There is a trap in writing any of this, and it is worth naming before it swallows the argument.

Mackay is the herd’s favorite book. Everyone who has ever quoted the line about men thinking in herds pictures himself as the lone sane figure watching the stampede thunder past. That is the comfortable read, and it is the wrong one. The delusion is never the other crowd. The discipline Mackay is actually asking for is harder and lonelier: not diagnosing someone else’s tribe, but dissenting from your own.

Look again at his line on recovery. Crowds go mad together, all at once, for free. They come to their senses slowly, and one by one. That asymmetry is the whole argument. Madness is collective and costs nothing. Sense is individual and costs something every time. It means cultivating your own knowledge past the base you were handed, doing the work when the easy button is right there, and holding a boring true thing while the room celebrates an exciting false one. Nobody hands you that. You build it alone, or you do not have it.

That is the part I will not surrender. The tools are marvelous and I will use them. But this is still our world to reason about, and reasoning is not something you can outsource without eventually forgetting how it was done.

The Point Taken

Mackay borrowed a small story from Lord Bacon that says more than any bubble ledger.

An old woman refuses to believe her sailor son could have seen a flying fish. Her Bible makes no mention of such a creature, so it cannot be. In the same breath she gladly believes he hauled a golden, jewel-encrusted wheel up out of the Red Sea, because her Bible tells her Pharaoh drowned there, and a sensible captain confirmed it. The marvelous falsehood arrived with a warrant, so she welcomed it. The plain truth arrived without one, so she turned it away.

That old woman is every board that waved through the statesmen and disbelieved the whistleblower. We accept the marvelous when it carries a stamp of authority and reject the true when it shows up unaccredited and inconvenient. It is the same appetite that priced a tulip above a house, and it has not aged a day.

The crowd will always love the marvelous. It costs nothing to join and it feels like insight. The only defense anyone has ever found is unfashionable, unscalable, and entirely your own.

Recover your senses one by one, and do not wait for the herd to go first.

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