I'm reading Harari's new Nexus book and I love it.

I'm only a third of the way through currently.

One big idea is the tension between order and truth.

They can co-occur, but they are actually orthogonal, and often at odds.

In one of the chapters I just read, he talks about the auto-catalyzing behaviors unleashed by the Malleus Maleficarum.

It was a particularly virulent idea.

The techniques it proposed for interrogating a suspected witch guaranteed that you'd get a confession.

If the suspect didn't confess, you tortured them in heinous ways until they did, and when they confessed, you killed them.

This guaranteed that every suspicion would find confirming evidence.

Often in the confession they'd be tortured until they named accomplices… which were a fresh round of suspects to go torture and find even more confirming evidence.

As the virus spread in people's minds, the scale of the confessions being uncovered showed that the problem was a significant and large-scale one, meaning it was incredibly important.

Anyone who tried to stop the madness or question the tactics would be labeled a sympathizer and tortured.

A collective delusion that was auto-catalyzing and led to extraordinary numbers of horrendous deaths.