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The Rationality of Collective Suicide
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
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Surveying the historical record, we can find examples of societies so organized that they drifted towards catastrophe with a certain inevitability, systematically avoiding steps that could have changed this course. Our own society is an example, except that in this case the catastrophe that lies ahead involves national and perhaps global suicide. It is hardly unrealistic to surmise that we may be entering the terminal phase of history.
The course that we pursue is deeply rooted in our social institutions and relatively independent of the choice of individuals who happen to fill institutional roles in the political or economic system. Furthermore, the steps taken towards destruction have a certain short-term rationality within the framework of existing institutions and the kind of planning they engender. Such planning is largely a matter of short-term calculation of gain; this is entirely natural in competitive societies, where those who contemplate the longer term are unlikely to be in the competition when it arrives, and this natural framework of planning carries over to the political system that is, overwhelmingly, under the influence of those who own and manage the private society.
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- Copyright © The Authors 1986
References
1 For documentation and more extensive discussion, see my Turning the Tide (Boston, MA: South End Press 1985) and ‘The Drift Towards Global War,’ Studies in Political Economy (Canada) 1985.
2 Jeffrey S. Duncan, ‘How Many Soviet Tests Make a Flurry?’ Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, October 1985, 8-9
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