“It is a fact of human psychology that there are types of personalities simply incapable of participating in a collective effort, especially if that effort requires them to subordinate their own preferences in any serious degree. Worse yet, there are individuals who are simply unable to endure the experience, or even the prospect, of victory: people … for whom the thrill of political action lies, not in the possibility of success, but in the struggle itself, or even in defeat. There are large unconscious elements of sadism and masochism in such personalities, and their impact upon healthier forms of political action can be (and historically often has been) catastrophic. The Independence Party should avoid like the proverbial plague their predictable efforts to use it to serve their self-defeating purposes.”
Source: The Making of the New Majority Party (1975)
Keywords: biography,elections,public-discourse
