Some examples is the first chapter of Chris Pallis' 1970 book The Irrational in Politics, it is preceded by the introduction and followed by the second chapter 'Some Inadequate Explanations'.
Some examples
For anyone interested in politics the "irrational" behaviour of individuals, groups or large sections of the population looms as an unpleasant, frightening, but incontrovertible fact. Here are a few examples.
Between 1914 and 1918 millions of working people slaughtered one another in the "war to end wars". They died for ends which were not theirs, defending the interests of their respective rulers. Those who had nothing rallied to their respective flags and butchered one another in the name of "Kaiser" or "King and Country". Twenty years later the process was repeated, on an even vaster scale.
In the early 1930s the economic crisis hit Germany. Hundreds of thousands were out of work and many were hungry. Bourgeois society revealed its utter incapacity even to provide the elementary material needs of men. The time was ripe for radical change. Yet at this critical juncture millions of men and women (including very substantial sections of the German working class) preferred to follow the crudely nationalistic, self-contradictory (anti-capitalist and anti-communist) exhortations of a reactionary demagogue, preaching a mixture of racial hatred, puritanism and ethnological nonsense, rather than embark on the unknown road of social revolution.[1]
In New Delhi in 1966 hundreds of thousands of half-starving Indian peasants and urban poor actively participated in the biggest and most militant demonstration the town had ever known. Whole sections of the city were occupied, policemen attacked, cars and buses burnt. The object of this massive action was not, however, to protest against the social system which maintained the vast mass of the people in a state of permanent poverty and made a mockery of their lives. It was to denounce some contemplated legislation permitting cow slaughter under specific circumstances. Indian "revolutionaries" meanwhile were in no position to make meaningful comment. Did they not still allow their parents to fix their marriages for them and considerations of caste repeatedly to colour their politics?
In Britain several million working people, disappointed with the record of the present Labour Government, with its wage freeze and attempted assault on the unions, will vote Conservative within the next few weeks. As they did in 1930. And in 1950-51. Or, to the unheard tune of encouragement from self-styled revolutionaries, they will vote Labour, expecting (or not) that things will be "different next time".
At a more mundane level the behaviour of consumers today is no more "rational" than that of voters or of the oppressed classes in history. Those who understand the roots of popular preference know how easily demand can be manipulated. Advertizing experts are fully aware that rational choice has little to do with consumer preferences. When a housewife is asked why she prefers one product to another the reasons she gives are seldom the real ones (even if she is answering in total good faith).
Largely unconscious motives even influence the ideas of revolutionaries and the type of organization in which they choose to be active. At first sight it might appear paradoxical that those aspiring to a non-alienated and creative society based on equality and freedom should "break" with bourgeois conceptions ... only to espouse the hierarchical, dogmatic, manipulatory and puritanical ideas of Leninism. It might appear odd that their "rejection" of the irrational and arbitrarily imposed behaviour patterns of bourgeois society, with its demands for uncritical obedience and acceptance of authority, should take the form of that epitome of alienated activity: following the tortuous "line" of a vanguard Party. It might seem strange that those who urge people to think for themselves and to resist the brainwashing of the mass media should be filled with anxiety whenever new ideas raise their troublesome heads within their own ranks.[2] Or that revolutionaries today should still seek to settle personal scores through resort to the methods prevailing in the bourgeois jungle outside. But, as we shall show, there is an internal coherence in all this apparent irrationality.
Notes
- ↑ The popular vote for Nazi candidates in the last stages of the Weimar Republic increased from 800,000 to 6.5 millions in September 1930. See A Rosenberg, A History of the German Republic (London: Methuen, 1936), pp. 275, 304.
- ↑ We have recently heard it quite seriously proposed in an allegedly libertarian organization - our own - that no one should speak on behalf of the organization before submitting the substance of his proposed comments to a "meetings committee", lest anything new be suddenly sprung on the unsuspecting and presumably defenceless ranks of the ideologically emancipated.