Passion and emotion are an enormous political force that can easily override cool calculation. *cough cough* the Holocaust *cough cough*
One might even argue that the desire for a member of the ruling group to maintain his or her position and power counts as an emotion. People only engage in cost/benefit analysis in relationship to some result that they desire, not for the heck of it.
Relatedly, I'm still trying to figure out what distinguishes being antihuman from being immoral.
--- On Wed, 7/29/09, Julio Huato <juliohuato at gmail.com> wrote: The role that passion and emotion, as opposed to cold calculation of costs/benefits, play in prompting people to launch and sustain mass political action has been huge in history.