Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets

Chapter 2. Love in the Time of Viagra

Love is the self‐delusion we manufacture to justify the trouble we take to have sex.

Daniel S. Greenberg

But now we look at our subject from a different angle. We wonder—how unique, after all, are mass political upheavals or financial manias? They may not be very different from a much more everyday phenomenon we all know. When we fall—the word fall is instructive—in love, don't we also take leave of our senses?

Rational men, philosophers say, always pursue their greatest good. And they find their greatest good in life, liberty, and happiness, three things as inextricably linked as Curly, Moe, and Larry. We need life first, of course. But then, according to the preeminent theorist of liberty, the Englishman John Locke, we need liberty to pursue our happiness. And since our happiness is bound up most of all with those whom we love, we cannot have real happiness until we are free to choose the ones we love. The more choices we have, the freer we are, and therefore, the more capable we are of choosing who and what will bring us the greatest happiness. Locke wrote:

God Almighty himself is under the necessity of being happy; and the more any intelligent being is so, the nearer is its approach to infinite perfection and happiness. … Therefore the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness; so the care of ourselves, that we mistake not imaginary for real happiness, is the necessary ...