It could be that by far the main corruptor of rationality, which does by far the most damage however you want to measure it, is the struggle for political power. If that's the case, then it may be unavoidable to discuss power and therefore politics.

The high point of human rationality is science, but as it happens, the scientific establishment has been so thoroughly dominated by the government (government supports much of academia, government supports much of science through grants, government passes laws which make it difficult to conduct science without official government approval, government controls the dissemination of scientific claims) that corruption of science by politics seems inevitable. If in fact science is corrupt from top to bottom (as it may be), then such corruption is almost certainly almost entirely at the hands of the state, and is therefore almost certainly political. So, if science is thoroughly corrupt, then it is almost certainly virtually impossible to discuss that corruption at all seriously without getting heavily into politics.