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Let's just say that it is pretty clear to me that a lot of non-rational stuff is happening in human behavior.
Was Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky a rational thing? Do people ever makes decisions based upon pride/arrogance? Do we ever act from fear, or overconfidence? Do we ever let ourselves be influenced by a crowd of advisors or public opinion? Do we ever act from hatred or contempt, or compassion? Some people (like G Bush) say they make decisions based upon a "gut" feeling or instinct. Maybe sometimes we act out of habit, convention or social expectation. And yes, sometimes people do act out of spiritual conviction, or some other closely held ideal.
But there is another question. Are decisions most always "pure" in the sense that we can almost always identify a single reason why we made a particular decision? Or, are there lots of subtle and sometimes even unconscious factors that come together to shape a final action? It is now a scientific fact that the human brain often makes a decision even before the conscious brain is aware of that decision. How can we be sure what is the basis for a pre-conscious decision? It is certainly possible to retrospectively examine a set of events and assign a logical ordering to those events. In fact, much of written history is precisely that sort of exercise. Astrology is a similar effort in struggling to identify patterns in the stars. Our brains are exquisite pattern finding machines. Our brains are so good at this, that we even find patterns that do not exist. We find patterns that justify hating people, or loving them, or enslaving them, or killing them.
We imagine things; we make false assumptions. Our thinking is subject to an endless number of documented forms of bias, logical fallacy and errors of all types.
Individuals are clearly complicated, error prone, and not nearly as rational as we would like to pretend. And I have a hard time buying the idea that if you combine a large number of such people into a political group, the result will be an entirely rational decision making process based upon an assessment of the economic variables involved in that decision.
