snitsnat wrote:
>
>
>> Alvin Gouldner wrote about it in _The Crisis of Western Sociology_ and I'm
> certain that others wrote about it before him. Just no time to go to the
> files to see:
>
> "sociologists keep two sets of books, one for the study of 'laymen' and
> another when he thinks about himself....the sociologist believes himself
> capable of making hundreds of purely rational decisions....he thinks of
> these as free technical decisions and of himself as acting in autonomous
> conformity with technical standards, rather than as a creature molded by
> social structure and culture. if he finds he has gone wrong, he thinks of
> himself as having made a mistake. a mistake is an outcome produced not by
> any social necessity, but by a corrigible ignorance, a lack of careful
> thought....
How would this apply to the endless whining on lbo-talk about republican voters, fundamentalists, "white trash," et al.?
One cannot understand a population except on the premise that (with demographically insignificant exceptions) that popoulace makes its decisions on rational grounds. The appearance of irrationality is a measure of the observer's ignorance of the conditions under which the decisions are made.
Carrol