Page 184 - Morgan Housel - The Psychology of Money_ Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness-Harriman House Limited (2020)

World War II began 21 years later, killing 75 million people.

COBACOBA
There are many things in life that we think are true because we desperately
want them to be true.

I call these things “appealing fictions.” They have a big impact on how we
think about money—particularly investments and the economy.

An appealing fiction happens when you are smart, you want to find

solutions, but face a combination of limited control and high stakes.

They are extremely powerful. They can make you believe just about
anything.

Take a short example.

Ali Hajaji’s son was sick. Elders in his Yemeni village proposed a folk
remedy: shove the tip of a burning stick through his son’s chest to drain the
sickness from his body.

After the procedure, Hajaji told The New York Times: “When you have no

money, and your son is sick, you’ll believe anything.”⁶⁴

Medicine predates useful medicine by thousands of years. Before the
scientific method and the discovery of germs there was blood-letting,
starvation therapy, cutting holes in your body to let the evils out, and other

treatments that did nothing but hasten your demise.

It seems crazy. But if you desperately need a solution and a good one isn’t
known or readily available to you, the path of least resistance is toward
Hajaji’s reasoning: willing to believe anything. Not just try anything, but
believe it.

Chronicling the Great Plague of London, Daniel Defoe wrote in 1722: