Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

by Rory Sutherland

Imagine you came home to find a dog turd on the floor of your kitchen; you would find it repellent, and would remove it immediately. Having disposed of it, you would wipe the floor with water and detergent, and if I asked you why you were doing those things, you would answer ‘because it’s unhygienic, of course; it’s a source of germs’. But here’s the thing; an early Victorian would have experienced exactly the same emotions and performed exactly the same actions, but they didn’t know about germs. They were, technically speaking, irrational in their dislike of faeces, which was ‘purely emotional’. Nowadays, if someone started flinging faeces around, we would describe him as a public-health hazard, while in the eighteenth century they would have called the practice ‘ungodly’ and in the fifteenth they might have burned him at the stake. So the dislike of faeces was not originally based on sound reasoning – it was rather a sound instinct the reason for which had not yet been discovered.