Bill Bonner on crowd behavior and simple narratives

The world never works the way people think it does.  That is not to say that every idea about how the world works is wrong, but that often particular ideas about how it works will prove to be wrong if they are held in common.  For only simple ideas can be held by large groups of people.  Commonly held ideas are almost always dumbed down until they are practically lies... and often dangerous ones.  Once vast numbers of people have come to believe the lie, they adjust their own behavior to bring themselves in sync with it, and thereby change the world itself.  The world, then, no longer resembles the one that gave rise to the original insight.  Soon, a person's situation is so at odds with the world as it really is that a crisis develops, and he or she must seek a new metaphor for explanation and guidance.

~ Bill Bonner, Financial Reckoning Day, p. 3