Be thou not pilled

A Scottish journalist named Charles Mackay published a book about the way crowds lose their minds. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841) catalogued tulip speculation, alchemy, the South Sea Bubble, witch hunts, and the slow-burn lunacy of people who grow so attached to an idea that they can no longer see around it. It's worth a read. A few of the ideas Mackay catalogued were stupid. But most of them weren't, and people got captured anyway. People, in fact, get captured quite easily by any idea that arrives polished enough, at the right moment, to do their thinking for them. The quality of the idea barely matters next to the timing // need.We have a word for this now, thanks to the Wachowskis, and that word is pilled - which seems appropriate. A pill is something you swallow; it dissolves into you and changes your chemistry, and after a while you can't point to where the substance ends and you begin. To be pilled is to hand a chunk of your perception to a…