The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray

metaphysics are precarious and the presumptions that we are being asked to follow seem subtly wrong, then it is the addition into the mix of the communications revolution that is causing the conditions for a crowd madness. If we are already running in the wrong direction then tech helps us to run there exponentially faster. It is this ingredient that is causing the sensation of the treadmill running faster than our feet can carry us. In 1933 James Thurber published ‘The Day the Dam Broke’, recalling his memories of 12 March 1913 when the whole of his town in Ohio went for a run. Thurber recalled how the rumour began that the dam had broken. Around noon ‘Suddenly somebody began to run. It may be that he had simply remembered, all of a moment, an engagement to meet his wife, for which he was now frightfully late.’ Soon somebody else began to run, ‘perhaps a newsboy in high spirits. Another man, a portly gentleman of affairs, broke into a trot’: