18. Untrue Beliefs Can Produce Profound Consequences
Sometimes the belief in untrue things could lead to profound, history-altering consequences. For example, Ancien regime France’s peasants and urban poor, abused for centuries, came to see their aristocratic oppressors as more than a parasitic class that lived in luxury off their toil and sweat. The part about a patristic class was not the untrue bit – it was very much true. Where things began to go off the rails is when many of France’s oppressed began to see the nobility as demonic figures who did evil for the sake of evil.
Conspiracy theories abounded about what the elites were up to, and chief among them was the Pacte de Famine, or Famine Plot. It was born of a poor understanding of the economics of supply and demand. From 1715 – 1789, France’s population had increased by 6 million, from 22 million to 28 million, without a similar increase in grain output. Higher demand for the same amount of grain led to higher prices. However, many attributed the price increases not to basic economics, but to a plot by the elites to deliberately withhold grain in order to starve the poor into subservience. As seen below, things spiraled from there in ways few could have predicted.