Chapter 4
The decision-making process,
or the reign of the irrational

In the previous chapter, we studied dissonance and other cognitive biases, and found that this results in unsatisfactory functioning in companies, namely a formal organization based on myths. In this chapter, through a few examples, we will go into detail about the decision mechanics at work, and then make improvements at the end of chapter 7.

Let's start by laying the foundations, by specifying that a serious decision-making process requires having satisfied four constraints. First of all, that the person leading the decision-making process has the necessary skills. Then, provide the amount of work required by the complexity of the subject. Third, that it be sincere in its conclusions, as opposed to directing them according to a particular interest. Finally, that she is not the victim of beliefs which would lead her to bias her conclusions in good faith.

Some examples

Let us illustrate this through a first example: the different points of the electoral program of a French president, elected by universal suffrage in two rounds. Who guarantees the relevance of each of them, and how robust is the process that led to their development?
If we assume that the seriousness of the program is guaranteed by the candidate and his campaign team, then the third constraint, namely sincerity, poses a serious problem. Indeed, we all know that campaigns now last several months, and that candidates shape their program via a feedback loop based on the polls. In these circumstances, can we say that a particular measure is the result of careful study, or must we admit that it is much more likely to be an element in optimizing marketing positioning.
If we now make the hypothesis that the validation of these points comes from the sovereign choice of voters, then it is even more problematic. Indeed, how can we consider that there was validation by the election of a particular point when, on the one hand, the second round saw a moderate candidate and an extreme candidate oppose each other, and therefore the voters majority took a position based on this single element, and when, on the other hand, the voter does not have the possibility of expressing their opinion individually on the different points of the campaign.
However, once the election is over, recent governments present compliance with campaign commitments as a guarantee of seriousness. This quite simply amounts to abolishing reason in favor of making the voter's vote sacred.
Through this first example, we see that the broad outlines of decisions concerning the community in the medium term were defined by the application of a biased methodology, and validated by a dogmatic methodology.

Now let's take a second example. At the start of the 21st century, at a certain stage of their development, companies feel the need to adopt an integrated management software package (Enterprise Resource Planning in English), to carry out IT monitoring of their entire activity. The choice of this software has major, long-term consequences on the future of the company, because it represents for it an operation as critical as the merger between two companies. Indeed, the company had a culture, that is to say its own way of approaching its activity, resulting from its particular history. On the other hand, ERP involves a standardized way of performing the activity. The challenge will therefore be to bring together these two different visions of activity. In the best of all worlds, the ERP would be adapted to the particularities of the company, but in practice, the cost of adaptations is such that it is only carried out very partially, and it is largely the company which finds itself forced to adopt the logic of the ERP, as if, in fact, it had been absorbed by the company that it symbolically models. This leads to a considerable worsening of the phenomenon of a practical organization, that of operational staff, which is set up alongside the official organization, that of the PGI, as described in Meyer and Rowan, which we have just seen in Chapter 3 .
Let us now come to what interests us more particularly here, namely the process which leads to the choice of the ERP and the anticipation of the adaptations to be made, as well as the visualization of the future organization which will result from it. What practice shows is that the ERP will be 'sold' to the company via an absolutely general presentation, PowerPoint type, the heart of which is, on the one hand the list of ERP references, it is that is to say the resolution through social reinforcement of the cognitive dissonance linked to choice, and on the other hand mythical concepts such as the presumed return on investment.
We are therefore dealing here with an extreme case of what we have just defined, at the end of chapter 3, as the cognitive bias of symbolic evaluation. Indeed, at the company level, apart from the references, the possible comparison work with other ERPs is generally limited to a simplistic list of the respective functionalities of the different software, most often evaluated in the form of a cross or of a digit. When will the company evaluate the cost of adapting to all of its activities as it practices them? Never. When will the company evaluate the effect of the presence of the ERP on its future capacity to adapt its activity? Never.
In the end, we see that the heuristic that governed the decision-making process here is the social reinforcement of cognitive dissonance, or to put it more bluntly, herd behavior. However, knowing that in a company, approximately half of the organization's optimizations involve IT, the choice of ERP has absolutely major consequences on the future of the company. How then can we explain such a casual approach? This is linked to the fact that today, the honest digital man does not exist. A young person leaving a business school, or another large general school, does not have the slightest concrete mastery of the implementation of a computerized process, even a simple one. For him, it is necessary to have specifications drawn up by a specialist. In fact, it has no capacity to anticipate either the complexity that will result, nor the level of adequacy of the final result with respect to the real activity. Consequently, the cognitive bias of overconfidence, explained in Chapter 3, acts very strongly at the moment of decision. If we return to the breakdown of the decision-making process into four stages presented at the beginning of this chapter, we see that, in this case, there are neither the necessary skills nor the sufficient quantity of work, therefore the business launches purely on the basis of 'others have done it', which explains the high number of projects of this type that go off the rails or fail completely. For example the deployment of SAP at DHL (1), or the Chorus and Louvois projects in France (2). The message from Frank Appel, CEO of DHL, following the failure of the deployment is very revealing: “We are taking new measures to ensure that this modernization is focused on business needs.” On the Chorus side, we find the illustration of the second cognitive bias mentioned in chapter 3, very frequent at the level of state projects in which the initial decision-maker is the final arbiter, namely the headlong rush, with the risk of a greater loss than if one had rationally assessed the situation as soon as the unforeseen difficulties became clear.
We will revisit this in Chapter 15, which will present a rational way of understanding the digital revolution.

What we see from these two examples is that current decision-making processes do not simply need to be improved. They are in fact completely archaic. In other words, in the 17th century, we adopted the scientific method which led to a progressive revolution in our technological know-how, but on the other hand, at the level of decision-making processes, there was no significant improvement compared to the practices of Antiquity or the Middle Ages.

Humans are political before being rational

Let's start again methodically. A rigorous decision-making process requires satisfying four conditions:
1. That the person leading the decision-making process has the necessary skills.
2. That it provides the amount of work required by the complexity of the subject.
3. That it be sincere in its conclusions as opposed to directing them according to a particular interest.
4. That she is not the victim of beliefs which would lead her to bias her conclusions in good faith.

Let us first note that condition no. 3 represents the ability to contain the effects of social ambition seen in chapter 2, and that condition no. 4 represents the ability to contain the effects of cognitive dissonance seen in chapter 3 .

Let us then remember that satisfying three out of four conditions in no way guarantees a rigorous final decision.
Our intuition and our culture lead us to look at what was positive in terms of the means implemented (cognitive bias of symbolic evaluation). For example a large amount of work, or even an illustrious person in charge of the file. But reality works the other way around: a serious decision requires satisfying all four conditions simultaneously. As soon as there is a failure concerning one, the quality of implementation concerning the others becomes irrelevant.
To illustrate this constraint, suppose that we contact our mechanic saying that our car is problematic, because the gear shift gets stuck at times, and that the mechanic instead of dealing with the problem regarding the gear shift, begins to explain to us that it is a great car with fantastic suspension, a very powerful and moreover economical engine, exceptional living space, etc., so that in the end it is overall a good car, and our request is therefore unfounded. We risk taking it badly, because as long as the gear change is stuck, the whole car is unusable, and that's obvious to us.
What is surprising is that the same type of argument provided by a decision-maker to justify a decision taken will very often be seen, neither by him nor by us, as completely inappropriate. A likely explanation is that, as seen in Chapter 2, a human's primary motivation is the game of alliances and not the search for truth. In fact, we favor rhetoric over any serious form of reasoning, because rhetoric reveals the individuals capable of emerging victorious from social contests, therefore the powerful individuals of the group, therefore the individuals with whom it is interesting to ally. In other words, usually, reasoning does not aim so much to establish or simply better approximate a truth as to show the social status of the person who holds it.

At the level of argument production, the natural functioning of humans does not consist of a rigorous analysis of the situation in all its facets, leading to the choice of the necessary decision. It consists of starting from a conclusion, chosen for reasons which will never be explained, and very often are not even conscious due to cognitive dissonance. Starting from the conclusion, all we seek to do is produce a posteriori reasoning which supports it, as credible as possible, not on a scientific basis which we have just mentioned in the form of the four conditions to be met, but on the basis of the culture of our social environment, that is to say by taking as truth all the beliefs which are widely accepted there. Once again, we are only illustrating the cognitive bias of symbolic evaluation here.

The natural human relationship to reasoning can therefore be described as naive, to say the least. It would even be more accurate to describe him as perverse because he amounts to playing smart with the truth. However, we suffer the consequences of the resulting bad decisions, that is to say decisions going against the collective interest and very often against common sense itself. As we are further aware of these consequences, and this does not translate in practice into a questioning of the decision-making process itself as we are doing here, it results in a diffuse feeling of distrust towards screw elites seen as the source of decisions: 'all rotten!' And the problem does not stop there, because this feeling is itself reexploited, not on the basis of serious analysis of its cause as we are doing here, but always using the same rhetorical process, which constitutes the source fueling populism.
In summary, because the decision-making process is faulty, we make bad decisions. As we gradually become aware of bad decisions through their consequences, but we persist in not questioning this decision-making process, we adopt belief-type explanations which are then exploited by populists. From there, the widespread nepotism seen in Chapter 2 is literally unleashed, and social violence gradually spirals out of control.

This first level of analysis therefore shows us a triple methodological deficiency. On the one hand, humans do not naturally understand the basics of logic. On the other hand, our main motivation is the search for a good social position and not the search for the truth. Finally, that in practice, we start from a pre-chosen solution and we simply add a socially plausible argument. This pre-chosen solution is both a conscious reflection of our interests and an unconscious reflection of our beliefs and taboos linked to cognitive dissonance. Let us illustrate all this through a third example.

Rhetoric against a backdrop of beliefs

In 2018, a popular revolt known as the 'yellow vests' broke out in France. One of the reasons was a feeling of fiscal pressure on the most modest when at the same time the tax pressure on the most advantaged had decreased. The measure best symbolizing this policy was the abolition of the wealth tax (ISF), and its replacement by the real estate wealth tax (IFI). The difference between the two is that financial income is no longer taxed.
However, at the heart of the conflict, the President of the Republic announced a major national debate, while excluding from the outset the reestablishment of the ISF, and justified his decision by:
“This tax has been removed for those who invest in our economy, and therefore help create jobs.”
The show Info secrets broadcast on February 23, 2019 on the France inter radio channel under the title ISF: a mixed first assessment presented the results of their in-depth investigation on the subject.
Several elements emerge:
First of all, the beginning of the sentence is simply inaccurate. It is not the fact of investing in our economy that causes tax exemption. The exemption is unconditional. Perhaps we should then take 'Those who invest in our economy' in the broad sense, like the social class of capitalists in the sense of Marx. But in this case, the whole sentence becomes a simple apology for ultra-liberalism.
Then the show shows that the second part of the sentence regarding job creation is a gratuitous statement. Indeed, the abolition of the ISF had the concrete effect of drying up tax loopholes from which certain young innovative companies benefited, so at this stage nothing proves that the additional attractiveness of France vis-à-vis foreign investments resulting of this symbolic measure will result in a greater effect in terms of investments.
Finally, the basic problem with such an approach is that when we move from the ISF to the IFI, we apparently reduce State revenue by 3 billion euros. So if we have not clearly formulated the assessment of what the State can do best for employment with 3 billion euros, whether it be subsidized jobs, support for certain key sectors, or any other form of action, then we have not formulated what we are depriving ourselves of, so emphasizing the hypothetical gain is just not serious.

Let us now examine to what extent the four methodological conditions mentioned above and necessary to produce a serious decision were met in the decision to abolish the ISF defended here.
At the level of competence first of all, the report from France Inter reports that the effects are rather poorly controlled by the Ministry of Finance, but above all that the relevant data have not been made available to researchers, so we do not did not seek to establish optimum competence on this issue.
Concerning the quantity of work, it seems that we did not take care to evaluate the loss on the job market linked to the 3 billion who would no longer be available, so we did not give ourselves the means of serious study.
As for sincerity, the mere fact of presenting the issue in such a biased manner is enough to conclude that there is a lack of sincerity.
Finally, regarding the risk of being a victim of beliefs, when we cross-reference different declarations from the executive, we see that the central point is 'making the country attractive for investors', and that then all decisions are taken based on of this simple belief that if we are attractive to investors, the economy will do well.

This last point is crucial. Indeed, investors are not people of extraordinary foresight, but on the contrary people who act in a herd and irresponsible manner, which is demonstrated by periodic economic crises, the most recent being the fall of Lehman Brothers.
So, when we adopt becoming attractive to investors as our guiding principle, we have renounced reason on two levels. First of all, the belief that the influx of capital is enough to create prosperity is dogmatic. This is just a variation of the trickle-down theory, or the Kuznets curve if you prefer (3). Then and above all, we no longer seek to understand the complexity of our social and production system, but simply to move in the direction of a simplistic ideology. In other words, we have just shown that this reasoning is the archetype of reasoning constructed in reverse, where we start from a chosen conclusion, and where we add, a posteriori, a probable reasoning. .. assuming the commonly accepted beliefs of our social environment. What is particular in this example is that a single belief, fairly easy to guess, was enough to determine the conclusion at the starting point. This belief is that if we are attractive to investors, the economy will do well.
The social weakness of such reasoning is equally obvious: this belief is not shared by the entire population.

Therefore, what is interesting to observe is what happens when the crisis arrives, in this case the revolt of the yellow vests and the significant support of the population. Where common sense would have dictated that the rhetoric stop, and that we take up a certain number of issues on the merits to explore them in greater depth, we instead see on the one hand a response with new little sentences, such as we have just seen it, that is to say the inability to integrate cultural difference and to renounce basing oneself on beliefs specific to one's own social environment, and on the other hand the opening of a great debate , that is to say a subject so broad that it too can only be dominated by rhetoric.
How can such biased reasoning, both in substance and in terms of the social support it presupposes, be produced after careful consideration following the crisis? Because the belief that supports it regarding investors who make the economy healthy has not been questioned. This is a perfect illustration of the effects of cognitive dissonance described in Leon Festinger's book. Faced with a challenge by facts, here the belief is not shared by the entire electorate, the individual chooses to reinforce it instead of questioning it. Festinger addresses this more specifically in his chapter 6, drawing on the work of Cooper and Jahoda:
“[…] a person full of prejudices is so imbued with them that his perception of questions having a frame of reference different from his own reshapes them in such a way as to harmonize them with his own convictions. Unaware of contravening the truth, it imposes its own frame of reference on the object of propaganda [p. 20]”
What Festinger, Cooper and Jahoda observe but do not explain is the cause of this reinforcement of the belief specific to a social group, where one would expect a questioning of the belief, or at least its non-existence. -use since it is not shared by the group the message is addressed to at that particular time. This cause must be sought from the other pillar of this book, namely generalized nepotism: in a crisis situation, that is to say social tension, the natural reflex of humans, It's 'us against them', so 'we' close ranks, and therefore there is no longer any question of calling into question what makes us, namely the beliefs of our social group.In other words, the crisis has led to a strengthening of 'us against them' to the detriment of reasoning, and therefore ultimately a strengthening of beliefs on both sides.

Let us continue our exploration of the collective decision-making system currently in place. In 2017, Mr Macron was elected on the basis of 'I want to change the way of doing politics to stop the rise of extremes linked to discredited elites'. In his representation, the discredited elites are the politicians whose main occupation is the conquest of power within the different parties, while his only concern will be to reform the country.
Here we have a new illustration of the effects of cognitive dissonance. Indeed, the discredit of the elites is absolutely not due to the fact that they fight for power, which the majority of people do not care about, but to the fact that their decisions are not credible. Now we have just shown that the new party in power proceeds in exactly the same non-credible way to produce decisions, namely that it obeys dogmas, and we see that the opposition parties, moderate or extremist, also proceed in the same way in the opposition, therefore do not prepare any more to implement any real change of method in the exercise of power. What we are witnessing is simply the struggle between competing ideologies. The new thing in this area is called participatory democracy, which consists of believing that a decision that comes from below, or from consensus, would be better.
Let's return to the basis that serves as our guiding principle: a decision is better if and only if the process which was used to produce it is more rigorous, in the sense of better simultaneously satisfying the four conditions that we explained at the beginning of this chapter. In other words, the only thing that changes something is to move away from ideology and adopt rationality. But for this, it is not enough to affirm that this or that vision is fairer, more effective, more natural, etc. We must move on to methodically constructed and precisely explained decisions.

The habit does not make the monk, but it makes the decision-maker, and breeds the populist

We have just highlighted the ineptitude of the mode of reasoning which supports current decisions. Let us now see why such a system was put in place historically, and continues today.

Let us note that the social structure which frames the current mode of reasoning is based on three pillars. The first is the statutory competence of the person making the decision. This mode of organization, which seems absurd to us in relation to the rationality expressed at the beginning of this chapter in the form of four conditions, takes on its full meaning when we place ourselves in a social environment in which it is belief which takes precedence and not scientific reason, that is to say a world before the 17th century. Indeed, in a world of beliefs the statutory distribution of power makes it possible to effectively limit the effect of generalized nepotism: to each their own prerogatives.
However, once the rules of the scientific approach are well established, and mass education is effective, the decisions which result from a simple statutory distribution of power cease to be credible for a large part of the population.
Indeed, one might have believed that the myths which elites use to build their decisions on simplistic heuristics are shared by everyone, which would have the effect of creating a broad consensus, and therefore making decisions acceptable. However, the interviews reported in the book The stupidity paradox: The power and pitfalls of functional stupidity at work show that the situation is asymmetrical. Only decision-makers believe myths; the people who are subject to the decisions are not fools. The recent so-called yellow vest revolt is another illustration of this.

The second pillar, namely the strength of the social group that supports a decision, ensured the stability of the social system. Since decisions are supported by the most powerful groups, any hint of dissent can be nipped in the bud.
Here again, democracy, which emerged in multiple countries following the technological revolution, has gradually undermined this foundation. Indeed, using troops to put down collective protest against a decision is no longer considered an acceptable mode of government in a democracy.

Finally, the third pillar is repetition. This may eventually take the form of a big book in which each argument is weak, but which acquires a certain credibility by simple accumulation, because the person who wrote it all gives the impression of knowing a lot about the subject.
This can especially take the form of a few arguments repeated over time, and repeated again, which although being myths, end up appearing as true, at least partially, because gradually anchored in our memory under the effect of repetition, therefore merging with, or progressively biasing, our own experience (4). Let us give as examples the argument of trickle-down capitalism (5), and the various 'problems' linked to immigration (6).

Ultimately, we maintained a decision-making system without realizing that its first two pillars were no longer based on solid cultural foundations. In other words, the crisis which began in Marx's time, due to the technological revolution produced by the implementation of the scientific method, is a crisis of credibility of the decision-making method. This crisis has persisted for several centuries, simply masked by repression in the 19th century, then the years of reconstruction following the wars in the 20th century. It will only find its outcome following the adoption of a decision-making process in line with our new technological capabilities, that is to say credible for current citizens.
At this point we can complete the critique we began in Chapter 2 regarding Hannah Arendt's explanation of the origins of totalitarianism. Indeed, she seeks the explanation in terms of the content of ideologies (7). What we are highlighting here is, on the one hand, that once we have produced distrust in the decision-making system, it is illusory to think that no populist group will form in the aim to unscrupulously exploit this resentment to gain power. It will do this by channeling through myth the powerful 'us versus them' instinct mentioned in Chapter 2. On the other hand, combating through reason or morality the myth itself, whether it is the fear of an invasion by foreigners or the rejection of a social group identified by its morals, its physical appearance or its religious beliefs, is practically impossible. Indeed, adherence to the proposed myth is the result of the work of cognitive dissonance seen in chapter 3, that is to say the materialization of another but unexpressed anxiety. Accepting that the myth is false means that the person finds themselves with anxiety that can no longer find an explanation. The person does not believe the myth: they need it to explain their anxiety. For details, see Chapter 10 of Festinger's book regarding the emergence of rumors following earthquakes. If it is largely illusory to want to fight the content, as the progressives seek to do, what it is important to fight, and which Hannah Arendt does not address, is the source of this diffuse anxiety, which is lack of confidence in collective decisions.
The divorce at this level between the elites and the population is absolutely not linked to the fact that the elites are less inclined to believe populist myths because they are better educated, contrary to what is too often asserted. It is linked to the asymmetry mentioned above: as the elites are more involved in the decision-making system, they lie more to themselves regarding its relevance, therefore they have less need for other mythical justifications. Put bluntly, elites are not more open; their myths are simply aimed more at justifying the decision-making system rather than explaining the anxiety linked to not believing in the relevance of its functioning.
In summary, by relying on the third pillar (repetition), populism creates myths based on the principle of 'us against them' to channel, for the purposes of accessing power, the anxiety linked to non-existence. -confidence in decisions.

In this chapter, we have just illustrated how the collective decision-making process works. If the citizen tends to perceive it as unsatisfactory because of a lack of concern for the general interest of leaders, which the most moderate attribute to a simple relaxation of moral values, and the most extreme summarize in the expression 'all rotten', it now seems more accurate to describe him as inept.
From there, it becomes clear that the main characteristic of any system of social organization which aims to put progress at the service of all can only be its capacity to produce decisions consistent with the common interest, based on humans who are and will remain biased by widespread nepotism and cognitive dissonance.
In the next two chapters, we will provide some additional details no longer concerning human nature, but our cultural environment, and above all we will specify what characterizes our era, to finally be able to lay down in chapter 7 the broad outlines of this new social organization.

 

(1)
The transport company DHL had planned to adopt the integrated SAP software, but ended up abandoning the project, resulting in a loss estimated at €345 million.

(2)
Chrorus is a platform for managing electronic invoices in administration.
Louvois is centralized payroll software for the French army, the cost of malfunctions of which is estimated in hundreds of millions of euros. See the investigation by the France Inter investigation unit exposed in the show Info secrets of June 22, 2018.
In both cases, it is not the choice of modernization that is criticized, but the initial decision process, in particular at the level of the evaluation of needs and foreseeable difficulties linked to the local variability of needs and constraints at the level of large structures, and especially that of taking into account the difficulties encountered.

(3)
The trickle-down theory is not strictly speaking an economic theory, but an image that entered public discourse with the advent of ultra-liberalism in the 1980s. It conveys the idea that if the richest become richer, they will invest in the economy, and as a result, the entire population will benefit in the long term.
Simon Kuznets affirms that in the case of economic growth, even if initially inequalities increase, “The fruits of growth subsequently extend to other sectors of the economy”. Hence the expression inverted U curve concerning the evolution of inequalities. This theory has been called into question by the work of Thomas Piketty who shows that the progress in the distribution of wealth in the first two thirds of the 20th century is more of a positive effect of the two world wars.

(4)
The propaganda of totalitarian countries uses an even more effective version of the repetition system. Indeed, if we get the individual to carry out an action, for example attend a national demonstration, cognitive dissonance then pushes him to adhere to the principles that he endorsed by participating, even if it is against his will. Festinger also teaches us that the effect obtained is all the greater the lower the pressure exerted on the individual to obtain his participation, because the individual can then more difficultly justify his action by a simple 'I had no choice'.

(5)
See the article 'Runoff theory' on Wikipedia:
"The Merriam-Webster Dictionary notes that the first use of the word 'trickle down' in the economic sense was in 1944, and that of 'trickle down theory' in 1954.
The trickle-down theory appeared in public debate in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. »
Then, the term evolves according to political positioning objectives.
“Emmanuel Macron, for his part, defends the metaphor of 'first in line'. »

(6)
The French political party 'National Front', created in 1972, owes its rise in large part to the hammering in public debate of phantasmagorical problems linked to immigration, and above all to its capacity to finally make this question omnipotent.
For example, during the political program 'Political Questions' on April 2, 2017, Stéphane Ravier, Front-National Senator, stated: "I remind you, for example, that in this country there is a massive immigration policy which is costing the French around 70 billion euros per year »
It is interesting to compare this assertion with the article in the Journal du CNRS entitled 'On the beneficial effect of migration on the economy': "Our work suggests precisely that the political debate on immigration focuses far too much on the supposed 'economic cost' of migrants. We show that their presence, whether permanent migrants or asylum seekers, does not have negative economic impacts. »

(7)
We chose to take Hannah Arendt as a reference not so much out of support for or opposition to her theses, but because of the importance of the work she devoted to researching the causes that led to the Shoah.
It should be clarified that looking for causes from the side of ideological content and historical conditions refers to his great book The origins of totalitarianism, and that Hannah Arendt's work does not stop there. Indeed, after having attended the trial of the Nazi Adolph Eichmann, she affirmed that the accused was dominated by his objective of social ascension and not by personal convictions, and above all that from a certain stage he had simply stopped thinking about the moral aspect of his personal involvement. She then forges the concept of "banality of evil", which will be controversial, because it goes against the reassuring conviction that a horror such as the Shoah can only be perpetuated by monsters fundamentally different from us, particularly at higher hierarchical levels.
However, Hannah Arendt does not make the connection with cognitive dissonance as the main tool of personal blindness, nor with generalized nepotism which leads to 'us against them' as a toxic by-product of social ambition, and even less with lack of confidence in the decisions taken by elites to explain the first phase, namely the rise of populism.