Irrational is the only thing irrational

One of the greatest myths of our time is this notion that certain people behave in ways that are “irrational”. I don’t think such a thing exists. We tend to use the term often to discredit people who disagree with us, or disagree with what is widely socially accepted – our use of the term is almost a tool for social control, or a means to get people in line. Sometimes, we use it to justify our inability to predict others’ actions, as obvious as those actions might be – if we can label those actions as nonsensical, then we absolve ourselves of the responsibility for having predicted them or dealing with their fall-out. And the use of the term certainly doesn’t help advance the cause of understanding why people feel or behave in certain ways.

I was having a conversation with a fellow Stanford Graduate student, who is actually going on to do some fairly high profile and important work in security and international relations – we seem to share a common vision for a safer, more prosperous and more egalitarian world. We were discussing how military weapons systems are going to shape up in our ever flattening and technologically advancing world, which I find to be a fascinating topic – this is when she mentioned all these “irrational” people, and how hard it is going to be to live in this world and deal with such “irrational” actors.

But it’s not just my Stanford Graduate student friend. Condi (Condoleezza Rice, the former US Secretary of State) teaches a popular course at Stanford, which it titled “Challenges and dilemmas in American Foreign Policy” – the course description specifically calls out “irrational” actors. May be they’re “irrational” because they made Condi’s job really hard. But I personally think that it’s both intellectually lazy and cowardly of Condi to use such a term.

As we label things rational and irrational, let’s keep in mind the Socratic claim that “no one willingly does wrong”. It’s fairly self-explanatory, and at the heart of it is the notion of self-interest. Enough said.

And we know both from real world observation and from social science, that people will willingly inflict damage upon themselves, in order to also inflict damage onto others, or for what they perceive to be higher and more important causes. The “Ultimatum Game”, which is one of the great discoveries in social science over the past 30 or so years, shows this clearly.

In this game, two players, who cannot see one another or communicate, have to split $10 among themselves. The first player proposes a split, any split, and the second player can either accept or reject the split – if the second player accepts the split, then both players end up getting the money in the proposed split. But if the second player rejects the split, then both players end up with nothing.

The ultimatum game has taught us, and it has been proven to hold across cultures, ethnicities, socio-economic classes, education levels, different sizes of money being split, or whichever other way you might choose to draw up the experiment or cut up humanity, that people will inflict damage upon themselves in order to impose justice on others. Irrational? Enough said.

I hope that the most educated and savvy among us will start to realize that the only thing that is irrational about notions of rational and irrational is believing that others can actually be irrational.