Feeling a little foolish because you have 50 pounds of dried beans in the pantry?
Wondering just how much use you'll get from that $2,000 emergency electrical generator in the garage?Relax. The Y2K scare was mild compared to the silly, costly and downright dangerous things people have done during some of the great panics of the past. At least you didn't sink your life savings into a tulip bulb.
"Men go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly and one by one," wrote Scottish journalist Charles MacKay in his influential 1841 book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds."
One of the great themes in the history of hysteria is a notion that the world is going to end soon. Like Y2K, these dark prophesies usually have been associated with a specific date.
"The end of everything has been predicted many, many times," said Paul Kurtz, a professor of philosophy and chairman of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. "The apocalypse seems to be almost a wish fulfillment. The mundane world lacks the drama that a fertile apocalyptic imagination produces."
MacKay devoted an entire chapter to this most terminal of predictions. "As epidemic, terror of the end of the world has several times spread over the nations," he wrote.
Starting around 950 A.D., thousands of pilgrims began attempting dangerous journeys on foot to Jerusalem after vagabond preachers in France, Germany and Italy declared the world would be destroyed a thousand years after the birth of Jesus. The Roman Catholic Church tried to discourage the claim. But the migrations swelled considerably in 999 A.D., leaving some European hamlets virtually deserted.
"Knights, citizens and serfs traveled eastwards in company, taking with them their wives and children, singing psalms as they went and looking with fearful eyes upon the sky, which they expected each minute to open," MacKay wrote.
London experienced a panic in 1761 when mild earthquakes shook the city on Feb. 8 and then again on March 8. Residents decided a third and more dangerous quake was certain to destroy the city the following month.
"As the awful day approached, the excitement became intense and great numbers of credulous people resorted to all the villages within 20 miles, awaiting the doom of London," MacKay wrote. "Panic-stricken fugitives paid exorbitant prices for accommodation."
Americans have little cause to laugh at Old World hysteria, of course. Fear that the Devil was attacking New England in 1692 prompted puritans to execute 20 people for witchcraft in Salem, Mass.
Not all of the unusual panics have been so dark. Some, like the curious investment practices of the Dutch in the 1630s, were simply silly.
Europeans first began importing tulip bulbs from Constantinople in 1559. The perennial flowering plants became an instant hit among the rich and the nobility. "The rage for possessing them soon caught the middle classes of society and merchants and shopkeepers even of moderate means began to vie with each other in the rarity of these flowers and the preposterous prices they paid for them," MacKay wrote in a chapter he entitled "The Tulipomania."
Some bulbs sold for tens of thousands of dollars.
But the bubble burst in 1637 when financially prudent investors began to question the wisdom of assigning such exorbitant value to a plant that can easily be grown. The sudden decline of tulip prices in Germany and the Netherlands prompted one of the greatest market collapses in the history of economics.
"A cry of distress resounded everywhere and each man accused his neighbor," MacKay wrote. "Substantial merchants were reduced almost to beggary, and many a representative of a noble line saw the fortunes of his house ruined beyond redemption."
Thomas Hargrove is a reporter for Scripps Howard News Service.