Paradoxes of Rationality: How Rational Individuals Produce Irrational Societies

This paper explores the paradox that societies composed of rational individuals often act irrationally at the collective level. While rationality guides individual decision-making, aggregation produces systemic distortions, coordination failures, and unconscious dynamics that undermine collective coherence. The study begins with an intellectual history of attempts to explain collective irrationality, from crowd psychology and social choice theory to economic sociology and the concept of the social unconscious. It then proposes a holistic categorization of mechanisms by which rationality collapses in the aggregate. Finally, three case studies—the collapse of the Soviet Union, contemporary apocalyptic dynamics, and the Middle East scenario—illustrate how rational actors, guided by both conscious and unconscious motives, can collectively generate irrational outcomes.