Dall’alveare di Mandeville allo sciame digitale: considerazioni su conoscenza, politica e irrazionalismo

Irrationality and political behavior have always lived in a complicated relationship. The paper will explore how irrationality and rationality have acquired new meanings concerning the current forms of political participation and their relationship with digital technologies. It will draw upon two very different conceptual metaphors (even chronologically) –Bernard Mandeville’s The Grumbling Hive and Byung-Chul Han's Swarm – to focus on some features of the current public political arena, namely its increasing polarization and fragmentation and the adoption of irrational behaviors by its public. Ultimately, it will show that they should be addressed as an epistemic problem connected to the widespread bias but, above all, the holding of bad beliefs, which is symptomatic of a “cognitive failure” of the democratic public.