What makes this passage worth lingering over is that Marcus Aurelius—a man literally crowned by the majority—isn't rejecting popularity itself, but rather suggesting that conformity and sanity are often mistaken for one another. He's warning against a subtler trap than mere peer pressure: the way societies can collectively agree on falsehoods so persuasive that questioning them feels like madness. Consider how during financial bubbles, entire markets of intelligent people convince themselves that unsustainable prices are rational—the heresy becomes the truth only in retrospect. The Stoic emperor understood that real independence means thinking clearly enough to recognize when the crowd has accepted something false, even (especially) when that recognition isolates you temporarily.