Contrary to popular opinion, lemmings (the cute arctic hamster-like rodents) don’t suffer mass hysteria and jump into the sea in vast numbers to drown. It was an early example of fake news spread by Walt Disney Productions in a 1950s movie called White Wilderness.
However, history is packed with stories of mass hysteria by humans. While tulip mania was relatively harmless, the majority of other instances, including preacher Jim Jones’s poison party in Guyana, or all those otherwise reasonable Germans who followed a psychopath to the very gates of hell, were not...
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