Some Inadequate Explanations (The Irrational in Politics)

Confronted with disturbing facts like mass popular support for imperialist wars or the rise of fascism a certain type of traditional revolutionary can be guaranteed to provide a stereotyped answer. He will automatically stress the "betrayal" or "inadequacy" of the Second or Third Internationals, or of the German Communist Party ... or of this or that leadership which, for some reason or another, failed to rise to the historical occasion. (People who argue this way don't even seem to appreciate that the repeated tolerance by the masses of such "betrayals" or "inadequacies" itself warrants a serious explanation.)

Most sophisticated revolutionaries will lay the blame elsewhere. The means of moulding public opinion (press, radio, TV, churches, schools and universities) are in the hands of the ruling class. These media consequently disseminate ruling-class ideas, values and priorities - day in, day out. What is disseminated affects all layers of the population, contaminating everyone. Is it surprising, these revolutionaries will ask with a withering smile, that under such circumstances the mass of people still retain reactionary ideas?

This explanation, although partially correct, is insufficient. In the long run it will not explain the continued acceptance by the working class of bourgeois rule - or that such rule has only been overthrown to be replaced by institutions of state capitalist type, embodying fundamentally similar hierarchical relationships (cult of leader, total delegation of authority to an "elite" Party, worship of revealed truth to be found in sacred texts or in the edicts of the Central Committee). If - both East and West - millions of people cannot face up to [the] implications of their exploitation, if they cannot perceive their enforced intellectual and personal underdevelopment, if they are unaware of the intrinsically repressive character of so much that they consider "rational", "commonsense", "obvious", or "natural" (hierarchy, inequality and the puritan ethos, for instance), if they are afraid of initiative and of self-activity, afraid of thinking new thoughts and of treading new paths, and if they are ever ready to follow this leader or that (promising them the moon), or this Party or that (undertaking to change the world "on their behalf"), it is because there are powerful factors conditioning their behaviour from a very early age and inhibiting their accession to a different kind of consciousness.

Let us consider for a moment - and not through rose-tinted spectacles - the average middle-aged working-class voter today (it matters little in this respect whether he votes "Conservative" or "Labour"). He is probably hierarchy-conscious, xenophobic, racially-prejudiced, pro-monarchy, pro-capital-punishment, pro-law-and-order, anti-demonstrator, anti-longhaired students and anti-dropout. He is almost certainly sexually repressed (and hence an avid, if vicarious, consumer of the distorted sexuality endlessly depicted in the pages of the News of the World). No "practical" Party (aiming at power through the ballot-box) would ever dream of appealing to him through the advocacy of wage equality, workers' management of production, racial integration, penal reform, abolition of the monarchy, dissolution of the police, sexual freedom for adolescents or the legalization of pot. Anyone proclaiming this kind of "transitional programme" would not only fail to get support but would probably be considered some kind of a nut.

But there is an even more important fact. Anyone trying to discuss matters of this kind will almost certainly meet not only with disbelief but also that positive hostility that often denotes latent anxiety. One doesn't meet this kind of response if one argues various meaningless or downright ludicrous propositions. Certain subjects are clearly emotionally loaded. Discussing them generates peculiar resistances that are hardly amenable to rational argument.

It is the purpose of this pamphlet to explore the nature and cause of these resistances and to point out that they are not innate but socially determined. (If they were innate, there would be no rational or socialist perspective whatsoever.) We will be led to conclude that these resistances are the result of a long-standing conditioning, going back to earliest childhood, and that this conditioning is mediated through the whole institution of the patriarchal family. The net result is a powerful reinforcement and perpetuation of the dominant ideology and the mass production of individuals with slavery built into them, individuals ready at a later stage to accept the authority of schoolteacher, priest, employer and politician (and to endorse the prevailing pattern of "rationality"). Understanding this collective character structure gives one new insight into the frequently "irrational" behaviour of individuals or social groups and into the "irrational in politics". It might also provide mankind with new means of transcending these obstacles.