Authority and the Individual (Bertrand Russell)
Escaping the Attention of Tigers & Consciousness of Life’s Ends
Six lectures delivered in 1948, later (posthumously?) published in book form; these 85 pages pack a lot of punch. Similar to Burke, Russell makes the case that the state of nature for man is not that state which civilization gives rise to. The further man gets from “nature,” whatever that is, the more he will suffer in one way or another. It is thus the role of politics to find a way for man to be able to release his creative outlets, those things which gave rise to civilization as it exists, without stifling them; at the same time, it is the role to somehow provide for a social order that allows for the collective wellbeing. While no fan of the Soviets, at the time of these lectures given by Bertrand in 1948, it was still thought by many (including Bertrand) that central planning was the solution to our economic ails; indeed, that the economic “problem” was one which could be “solved.” Nonetheless, many of the observations made in these lectures ring true, and it is without a doubt that Bertrand Russell was a far, far smarter man than I.
· “One of things that cause stress and strain in human social life is that it is possible, up to a point, to become aware of rational grounds for a behaviour not prompted by natural instinct. But when such behaviour strains natural instinct too severely nature takes her revenge by producing either listlessness or destructiveness, either of which may cause a structure inspired by reason to break down.” Thus, what is natural, what is our instinct? Does modernity stray too far from what that is?
· “Always when we pass beyond the limits of the family it is the external enemy which supplies the cohesive force. In times of safety we can afford to hate our neighbour, but in times of danger we must love him. People do not, at most times, love those whom they find sitting next to them in a bus, but during the blitz they did.” As Matt Taibbi says, now it’s us against us, 24/7, on every news channel, with no Communists to fight.
o “In a shipwreck the crew obey orders without the need of reasoning with themselves, because they have a common purpose which is not remote, and the means to its realization are not difficult to understand. But if the captain were obliged, like the government, to explain the principles of currency in order to prove his commands wise, the ship would ink before his lecture was finished.”
· “If we are all children of God, then we are all one family. But in practice those who in theory adopted this creed have always felt that those who did not adopt it were not children of God but children of Satan, and the old mechanism of hatred of those outside the tribe has returned… the old instincts that have come down to us from our tribal ancestors rise up in indignation, feeling that life would lose its savour if there were no one to hate… If the unification of mankind if ever to be realized, it will be necessary to find ways of circumventing our largely unconscious primitive ferocity, partly by establishing a reign of law, and partly by finding innocent outlets for our competitive instincts.” Religion binds and blinds, as Nietzsche mocks the “Brotherly Love” of Christianity.
o “We have all kinds of aggressive impulses, and also creative impulses, which society forbids us to indulge, and the alternatives that it supplies in the shape of football matches and all-in wrestling are hardly adequate. Anyone who hopes that in time it may be possible to abolish war should give serious thought to the problem of satisfying harmlessly the instincts that we inherit form long generations of savages.” Maybe sports spectating isn’t as socially un-useful as it might seem, Noam Chomsky’s lack of affinity for it (and thus really his lack of understanding of the human condition) be damned.
§ “A quiet life may well be a boring life. The unadventurous existence of a well-behaved citizen, engaged in earning a moderate living in a humble capacity, leaves completely unsatisfied all that part of his nature which, if he had lived 400,000 years ago, would have found ample scope in the search for food, in cutting off the heads of enemies, and in escaping the attention of tigers. When war comes the bank clerk may escape and become a commando, and then at last he feels that he is living as nature intended him to live.”
§ “It is no wonder if the religious innovators were execrated in their own day, for they sought to rob men of the joy of battle and the fierce delights of revenge. Primitive ferocity, which had seemed a virtue, was not said to be a sin, and a deep duality was introduced between morality and the life of impulse — or rather between the morality taught by those in whom the impulse of humanity was strong, and the traditional morality that was preferred by those who had no sympathies outside their own herd.”
· In a rebuke to socialists and DSA-members who cry that capitalism “teaches” hierarchy and competitiveness to humans, “I do not think that ordinary human beings can be happy without competition, for competition has been, ever since the origin of Man, the spur to most serious activities. We should not, therefor, attempt to abolish competition, but only see to it that it takes forms which are not too injurious.”
· “The problem of the social reformer, therefore, is not merely to seek means of security, for if these means when found provide no deep satisfaction the security will be thrown away for the glory of adventure.” We must find, “… forms of adventure and danger and contest which are compatible with the civilised way of life… our instincts for both good and evil remain very much what they were when our ancestors’ brains first grew to their present size.” If there cannot be found “… some real outlet for the impulses” which Russell speaks of, “…destructive philosophies will from time to time sweep away the best of human achievements.” One such outlet is the sports competition outlet (Tim Krabbe, “How empty those lives are”, for others it may be a more creative outlet.)
· Formerly stability was provided by the existence of religion, again echoing Burke who says it is a necessary component of social control. “It depended for its stability upon religion and the divinity of the king. Disobedience was impiety, and rebellion was liable to call down the anger of the gods.” And for the lower classes and peasants, there was the stick.
· With the advent of modernity, man is, to a certain extent, governed by forces outside his control, just that now it is not Gods, but other individuals. “All of these modern developments increase the control over the lives of individuals possessed by those who govern large organisations…”
o “Individual initiative is hemmed in either by the State or by powerful corporations, and there is a great danger lest this should produce, as in ancient Rome, a kind of listlessness and fatalism that is disastrous to vigorous life…. As a result of mere size, government becomes increasingly remote from the governed and tends, even in a democracy, to have an independent life of its own.” Through all of this, people lose “the power of initiative”, and the “sense of individual initiative”, reserved for, in Betrand’s 1948 United Kingdom, the titans of industry and the high and mighty bureaucrats; the rest become cogs, necessary for “smooth co-operation.”
§ Bureaucracy kills initiative; government does not have the necessary incentives for innovation. “…those who have nominal initiative are perpetually controlled by a Civil Service which has only a veto and no duty of inauguration, and thus acquires a negative psychology perpetually prone to prohibitions. Under such a system the energetic are reduced to despair; those who might have become energetic in a more hopeful environment tend to be listless and frivolous; and it is not likely that the positive functions of the State will be performed with vigour and competence…”
· He continues with an excellent quip at overprotective parents, “This, needless to say, is the opinion of men who have acquired the habit that one sees in unwise parents of always saying ‘don’t do that,’ without stopping to consider whether ‘that’ does any harm.”
· “Nothing is so damping and deadening to initiative as to have a carefully thought out scheme vetoed by a central authority which knows almost nothing about it and has no sympathy with its objects.”
· Regarding too much individualism, “The greatness of the Greeks in individual achievement was, I think, intimately bound up with their political incompetence, for the strength of individual passion was the source both of individual achievement and of the failure to secure Greek unity.”
o “Rome’s attempt to unify the civilized world came to grief largely because, perhaps through being both remote and alien, it failed to bring any measure of instinctive happiness even to prosperous citizens. In its last centuries there was universal pessimism and lack of vigour. Men felt that life here on earth had little to offer, and this feeling helped Christianity to centre men’s thoughts on the world to come.” It seems, for many, these feelings persist to this day.
· “The impulse towards liberty, however, seems now to have lost much of its force among reformers; it has been replaced by the love of equality, which has been largely stimulated by the rise to affluence and power of new industrial magnates without any traditional claim to superiority.” Is Progressivism in its many modern manifestations just a big way to try to dunk on the Rich? As Pinker says, “Intellectuals who call themselves ‘progressive’ really hate progress.” Echoing Orwell, how dare The Rich outperform intellectuals.
· Regarding non-conformity and social progress, “… a community needs, if it is to prosper, a certain number of individuals who do not wholly conform to the general type. Practically all progress, artistic, moral, and intellectual, has depended upon such individuals, who have been a decisive factor in the transition from barbarism to civilization. If a community is to make progress, it needs exceptional individuals whose activities, though useful, are not of a sort that ought to be general. There is always a tendency in a highly organized society for the activities of such individuals to be unduly hampered, but on the other hand, if the community exercises no control, the same kind of individual initiative which may produce a valuable innovator may also produce a criminal. The problem, like all those with which we are concerned, is one of balance; too little liberty brings stagnation, and too much brings chaos.”
o “But all these men [Lenin, Robespierre, Genghis Khan], good and bad alike, had a quality which I should not wish to see disappear from the world — a quality of energy and personal initiative, of independence of mind, and of imaginative vision. A man who possesses these qualities if capable of doing much good, or of doing great harm, and if mankind is not to sink into dullness such exceptional men must find scope, though one could wish that the scope they find should be for the benefit of mankind.” Are these people simply the product of good, non-alcoholic, non-abusive, non-overly protective parents?
· “…spontaneous delight is no longer felt as something which it is important to be able to enjoy. Among comparatively unsophisticated populations folk dances and popular music still flourish… But as men grow more industrialised and regimented, the kind of delight that is common in children becomes impossible to adults, because they are always thinking of the next thing, and cannot let themselves be absorbed in the moment.” People have to eat, but they lose sight of also having fun in life.
o “The modern man lives a very different life. If he sings in the street he will be thought to be drunk, and if he dances a policeman will reprove him for impeding the traffic.”
o “Everything is organized, nothing is spontaneous. The Nazis organized “Strength Through Joy’, but joy prescribed by the government is likely to be not very joyful.”
· In an increasingly connected and more populous World, there are many to whom people can compare themselves. “If you wish to be a painter you will not be content to pit yourself against the men with similar desires in your own town; you will go to some school of painting in a metropolis where you will probably conclude that you are mediocre… you may be so discouraged that you are tempted to throw away your paint-brushes… for a certain degree of self confidence is essential to achievement….”
o “We know too much and feel too little. At least we feel too little of those creative emotions from which a good life springs. In regard to what is important we are passive; where we are active it is over trivialities. If life is to be saved from boredom relieved only by disaster, means must be found of restoring individual initiative, not only in things that are trivial, but in the things that really matter. I do not mean that we should destroy those parts of modern organization upon which the very existence of large populations depends, but I do mean that organization should be much more flexible, more relieved by local autonomy, and less oppressive to the human spirit through its impersonal vastness, than it has become through its unbearably rapid growth and centralization, with which our ways of thought and feeling have been able to keep pace.” We cannot throw out the baby with the bathwater, but people must find ways to pursue goals with things that matter to them, in a World which is impersonal.
· “Man differs from other animals in many ways. One of these is that he is willing to engage in activities that are unpleasant in themselves, because they are means to ends that he desires… [Animals] do not practise self-control or prudence or foresight or restraint of impulses by the will. Human beings do all these things. When they do more of them than human nature can endure, they suffer a psychological penalty. Part of this penalty is unavoidable in a civilized way of life, but much of it is unnecessary…” Some people are more willing than others to drive the garbage truck.
o “A boy will toil up hill with a toboggan for the sake of the few brief moments of bliss during the descent; no one has to urge him to be industrious, and however he may puff and pant he is still happy. But if instead of the immediate reward you promised him an old-age pension at seventy, his energy would very quickly flag… A man may spend years of hardship, danger, and poverty in attempts to climb Everest or reach the South Pole or make a scientific discovery, and live all the while as much in harmony with his own impulses as the boy with the toboggan, provided he ardently desires the end and puts his pride into overcoming obstacles. As the Red Indian said, ‘there’s glory in it’.”
§ “Cottage gardens in county villages are often lovely, and may have cost much labour, but are not intended to bring any monetary reward… a money economy has replaced an economy in which things were produced for the use of the producer, and this change has caused commodities to be viewed as useful rather than delightful.” Through the (ever necessary) cult of the practical, we lose touch with the things that may brings us joy; the “Joyless Economy.”
o “Forethought, which involves doing unpleasant things now for the sake of pleasant things in the future, is one of the most essential marks of mental development. Since forethought is difficult and requires control of impulse, moralists stress its necessity, and lay more stress on the virtue of present sacrifice than on the pleasantness of the subsequent reward.”
· On incentives of organizations, similar to Sowell, “Moreover, it would be unduly optimistic to expect that governments, even if democratic, will always do what is best in the public interest. I have spoken before of some evils connected with bureaucracy; I wish now to consider those involved in the relation of the official to the public. In a highly organised community those who exercise governmental functions, from Ministers down to the most junior employees in local offices, have their own private interests, which by no means coincide with those of the community. Of these love of power and dislike of work are the chief… so he comes to seem, and to a certain extent to be, the enemy of those whom he is supposed to serve.”
o “Competition, where it exists, is an immensely powerful incentive. It has been generally decried by socialists as one of the evil things in a capitalist society, but the Soviet Government has restored it to a very important place in the organisation of industry.” Humans are naturally competitive.
§ “But although competition, in many forms, is gravely objectionable, it has, I think, an essential part to play in the promotion of necessary effort, and in some spheres affords a comparatively harmless outlet for the kind of impulses that might otherwise lead to war… If two hitherto rival football teams, under the influence of brotherly love, decided to cooperate in placing the football first beyond one goal and then beyond the other, no one’s happiness would be increased… But if competition is not to become ruthless and harmful, the penalty for failure must not be disaster, as in war, or starvation, as in unregulated economic competition, but only loss of glory. Football would not be a desirable sport if defeated teams were put to death or left to starve.” Some might argue that our existing social safety nets ensure the penalty for failure is not starvation, but loss of glory. Markets and competition are the only way to organize complex human societies.
o “[John Spedan Lewis] has arguments against equality of remuneration, not only on the ground that those who difficult work deserve better pay, but, on the converse ground, that better pay is a cause of better work.” The ability as well as the will to use it vary, and are influenced by level of pay.
· Regarding duty and a sense of national duty, Russell makes remarks that pertain to all forms of duty, “[Duty] involves a sense of strain, and a constant resistance to natural impulses, which, if contained, must be exhausting and productive of a diminution of natural energy. If it is urged, not on the basis of some simple traditional ethic such as the Ten Commandments, but on complicated economic and political grounds, weariness will lead to scepticism as to the arguments involved, and many people will either become simply indifferent or adopt some probably untrue theory suggesting that there is a short cut to prosperity. Men can be stimulated by hope or driven by fear, but the hope and the fear must be vivid and immediate if they are to be effective without producing weariness.” People do not like complicated arguments why a thing is so. Thus the appeal of populists.
o “It is partly for this reason that hysterical propaganda, or at least propaganda intended to cause hysteria, has such widespread influence in the modern world. People are aware, in a general way, that their daily lives are affected by things that happen in distant parts of the world, but they have not the knowledge to understand how this happens, except in the case of a small number of experts. Why is there no rice? Why are bananas so rare? Why have oxen apparently ceased to have tails? If you lay the blame on India, or red tape, or the capitalist system, or the socialist State, you conjure up in people’s minds a mythical personified devil whom it is easy to hate. In every misfortune it is a natural impulse to look for an enemy upon whom to lay the blame; savages attribute all illness to hostile magic. Whenever the causes of our troubles are too difficult to be understood, we tend to fall back upon this primitive kind of explanation. A newspaper which offers us a villain to hate is much more appealing than one which goes into all the intricacies of dollar shortages. When the Germans suffered after the first world war, many of them were easily persuade that the Jews were to blame.” You can see here a lot of the influence made on a modern Thomas Sowell by Bertrand Russell, despite the latter’s affinity for central planning. Sowell asserts that what happened with the Nazis and the Germans could happen in an country. When there is no bread, burn the bakeries (Ortega Y Gasset). Sowell illustrates how people like to place the blame for their problems on “Middleman Minorities,” who often times created the very industries in which they cause “problems”
§ “The appeal to hatred of a supposed enemy as the explanation of whatever is painful in our lives is usually destructive and disastrous; it stimulates primitive instinctive energy, but in ways the effects of which are catastrophic…” Barring the ability to “[C]ure the evils,” “…[I]t may sometimes be possible to disseminate widely a true understanding of the causes that are producing our misfortune. But this is difficult so long as there are powerful forces in politics and in the Press which flourish by the encouragement of hysteria.”
· Ever since the dawn of civilisation most people in civilized communities have led lives full of misery; glory, adventure, initiative were for the privileged few, while for the multitude there was a life of severe toil with occasional harsh cruelty… We are no longer content that the few should enjoy all the good things while the many are wretched.” As Popper points out, it is our impatience to improve the lives of our brethren that oftentimes leads to disaster (Stalin, etc).
o “There is a risk that, in the pursuit of equality, good things which there is difficulty in distributing evenly may not be admitted to be good. Some of the unjust societies of the past gave to a minority opportunities which, if we are not careful the new society that we seek to build may give to no one…” We must, “…make sure that what was good in the past should be carried over into the future… some things must be remembered which are apt to be forgotten in the blue-prints of Utopia.” This, the “Progressive” impulse that no one may have anything nice, no one can preserve capital, elsewise they are the Enemies of Happiness.
§ “Among the things which are in danger of being unnecessarily sacrificed to democratic equality, perhaps the most important is self-respect. By self-respect I mean the good half of pride — what is called ‘proper pride’. The bad half is a sense of superiority. Self-respect will keep a man from being abject when he is in the power of enemies, and will enable him to feel that he may be in the right when the world is against him. If a man has not this quality, he will feel that majority opinion, or governmental opinion, is to be treated as infallible, and such a way of feeling, if it is general, makes both moral and intellectual progress impossible.”
· “Self-respect has been hitherto, of necessity, a virtue of the minority. Wherever there is inequality of power, it is not likely to be found among those who are subject to the rule of others… And those who believe that the voice of the people is the voice of God may infer that any unusual opinion or peculiar taste is almost a form of impiety, and is to be viewed as culpable rebellion against the legitimate authority of the herd. This will only be avoided if liberty is as much valued as democracy, and it is realized that a society in which each is the slave of all is only a little better than one in which each is the slave of a despot. There is equality where all are slaves, as well as where all are free. This shows that equality, by itself, is not enough to make a good society.”
o “… it would seem fruitless to make the rich poorer if this was not going to make the poor richer. The case against justice is even stronger if, in the pursuit of equality, it is going to make even the poor poorer than before… If there had not been economic injustice in Egypt and Babylon, the art of writing would never have been invented.” Thus, what is justice, really? The word is loaded.
· “…where Authority controls all the means of publicity, a man of marked originality is likely to suffer this worse fate [of being prevented from doing his work]: whether or not he is subjected to legal penalties, he is unable to make his ideas known. When this happens in a community, it cannot any longer contribute anything of value to the collective life of mankind.” This now happens today in the form of information distribution monopolies (YouTube, Google, Facebook, etc).
o “Everything concerned with opinion… must be left to genuine competition, and carefully safeguarded from governmental control, as well as from every other form of monopoly.”
· While it is the role of the state to provide security, it cannot provide security if there is none against the State. “Wherever there is arrest by administrative order, and punishment without due process of law, private people have no security, however firmly the State may be established… It is only in the West that this liberty and these rights have been secured.” Duterte offers no security from Duterte; no liberty, no rights.
o “Security, though undoubtedly a good thing, may be sought excessively and become a fetish. A secure life is not necessarily a happy life; it may be rendered dismal by boredom and monotony… Security by itself is a negative aim inspired by fear; a satisfactory life must have a positive aim inspired by hope.” We must move towards goals.
· Ethics is not concerned solely with duty to my neighbour… there is also the pursuit of private excellence. For man, though partly social, is not wholly so… if his life is to be tolerable, there must be scope. For although few men can be happy in solitude, still fewer can be happy in a community which allows no freedom of individual action.” Life must strike a balance.
o “All great religious leaders, and also all great artists and intellectual discoverers, have shown a sense of moral compulsion to fulfill their creative impulses, and a sense of moral exaltation wen they have one so… If I have a profound conscientious conviction that I ought to act in a way that is condemned by governmental authority, I ought to follow my conviction… prophets, mystics, poets, scientific discoverers, are men whose lives are dominated by a vision; they are essentially solitary men… improvements in the sense of social obligation, as in everything else, have been largely due to solitary men whose thoughts and emotions were not subject to the dominion of the herd.”
· “Without some consciousness of ends, life becomes dismal and colourless; ultimately the need for excitement too often finds a worse outlet than it would otherwise have done, in war or cruelty or intrigue or some other destructive activity.”
o “We ask no longer: what have the producers produced, and what has consumption enabled the consumers in their turn to produce? We ask instead: what has there been in the lived of consumers and producers to make them glad to be alive? What have they felt or known or done that could justify their creation?… Have they known love and friendship.?… Have they felt the joy of life that simple communities express in dance and song? Once in Los Angeles I was taken to see the Mexican colony –idle vagabonds, I was told, but to me they seemed to be enjoying more of what makes life a boon and not a curse than fell to the lot of my anxious hard-working hosts. When I tried to explain this feeling, however, I was met with a blank and total lack of comprehension.” In the pursuit of all those things that make the modern life so comparatively great to all of history, people lose sight of any why for having done it at all.
o “It is true, of course, that survival is the necessary condition for everything else, but it is only a condition of what has value, and may have no value on its own account. Survival, in the world that modern science and technique have produced, demands a great deal of government. But what is to give value to survival must come mainly from sources that lie outside government. The reconciling of these two opposite requisites has been our problem in these discussions.”
· “One of the advantages to be gained from decentralisation is that it provides new opportunities for hopefulness and for individual activities that embody hopes. If our political thoughts are all concerned with vast problems and dangers of world catastrophe, it is easy to become despairing… But in relation to smaller problems… you can hope to have a successful influence. This will engender a hopeful spirit, and a hopeful spirit is what is needed if a way is to be found of dealing successfully with larger problems… Success, even if, at first, it is on a small scale, is the best cure for this mood of pessimistic weariness. And success, for most people, means breaking up our problems, and being free to concentrate those that are not too desperately large.” This last part for all walks of life, not just political organization.
o “We are oppressed also by the great impersonal forces that govern our daily life, making us still slaves of circumstance though no longer slaves in law… Energetic men have worshipped power rather than simple happiness and friendliness; men of less energy have acquiesced, or have been deceived by a wrong diagnosis of the sources of sorrow.” Is this really so? Is this worship of the god of power not human nature, for some? For those not as able to be as happy or as friendly as Bertrand Russell, arguably a great genius.
o “Daily joys, times of liberation from care, adventure, and opportunity for creative activities, are at least as important as justice in bringing about a life that men can feel to be worth living. Monotony may be more deadening than an alternation of delight and agony. The men who think out administrative reforms and schemes of social amelioration are for the most part earnest men who are no longer young. Too often they have forgotten that to most people not only spontaneity but some kind of personal pride is necessary for happiness.” People are not robots. They do not fall into schemes of social amelioration and produce happiness. What cannot be attained by ones self produces Envy (Helmut Schoeck).
