Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) endures as one of humanity's clearest and brightest minds—a timeless voice of wisdom on everything from what the “good life” really means to why “fruitful monotony” is essential to happiness in love, sex, and our moral beliefs. In 1950, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his varied and important writings in which he fights for the principles of humanity and freedom of thought.” On December 11 of that year, 78-year-old Russell took the stage in Stockholm to great acclaim.
Later included Nobel Prize winners for writing (public library) – which also gave us Pearl S. Buck, the youngest woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, art, writing, and creativity – her acceptance speech is one of the most beautiful packages of human thought ever brought to the stage.
Russell begins by looking at the primary motivation driving human behavior:
All human activities are driven by desire. There is a completely false theory developed by some honest behavioral researchers that it is possible to resist desire because of the demands of work and moral code. I say this is cheating, not because no one ever does something out of obligation, but because the duty is not binding on him unless he wishes to be honest. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only, or principally, their physical circumstances, but rather the whole system of their desires and their limited powers.
[…]
Man differs from other animals in one very important respect, namely that he has certain desires, so to speak, endless, which can never be completely satisfied, and which would keep him unstable even in Paradise. The boa constrictor, when it has eaten enough, goes to sleep, and does not wake up until it needs more food. People, in particular, are not like this.
Russell identifies four eternal desires— to gain, conflict, vanityagain the love of power – and check them in order:
Acquiring – the desire to have as much property as possible, or the title of property – is a motive that, I think, originates from the combination of fear and desire for needs. I once befriended two little girls from Estonia, who had barely survived the famine. They lived with my family, and they certainly had plenty of food. But they spent all their leisure time visiting neighboring farms and stealing potatoes, which they hoarded. Rockefeller, who experienced extreme poverty in his childhood, spent his adult life in a similar fashion.
[…]
No matter how much you can earn, you will always want to earn more; satiating a dream that will always elude you.
In 1938, Henry Miller also identified this basic driver in his brilliant meditation on how money became a human fixation. Decades later, today's psychologists would call this idea the “hedonic treadmill.” But for Russell, this primary driver is overshadowed by an even stronger one – our competitive instincts:
The world would be a much happier place than it is if profit always prevailed over competition. But in truth, most people will gladly face poverty if they can spare their rivals total ruin. So the current tax rate.
He says that the conflict is increased by people's indifference. With a doubly poignant sentiment in today's social media context, he notes:
It is the motive force of great power. Anyone who is closely related to children knows how they always act, and say “Look at me.” “Look at me” is one of the basic desires of the human heart. It can take countless forms, from buffoonery to the pursuit of fame after death.
[…]
It is not easy to exaggerate the influence that has come to the whole range of human life, from the child of three children to the one who has the power to shake his face in the world.
But the most powerful of the four forces, Russell says, is the love of power:
Ambition is closely related to vanity, but it is not the same in any way. What vanity needs to be satisfied is glory, and it is easy to have glory without power… Many people prefer glory to power, but all these people have less influence on the course of events than those who prefer power to glory… Power, like vanity, is insatiable. Nothing more than omnipotence would completely satisfy me. And as it is especially the habit of energetic men, the success which is the cause of the love of power is above all the period of its frequency. Indeed, it is the most powerful motivation in the lives of important men.
[…]
The love of power is greatly increased by the knowledge of power, and this applies to the lesser powers as well as to the powerful ones.
Anyone who has ever suffered at the hands of a superior – something Hannah Arendt suddenly denounced as a special kind of violence – can attest to the authenticity of this feeling. Russell adds:
In any dictatorship, the power holders become more and more ruthless because of the pleasure that power can bring. Since power over people is manifested by making them do what they want to do, a man motivated by the love of power is more ready to inflict pain than to allow pleasure.
But Russell, a thinker with a unique sensitivity to the diversity and duality of the woven life, warns against dismissing the love of power as a negative driver – from the idea of unknown governance, he points out, to express the desired as the pursuit of knowledge and all scientific progress. Consider its fruitful manifestations:
It would be a complete mistake to condemn the love of power entirely as a motive. Whether you will be led by this reason to useful actions, or to harmful actions, depends on the social system, and on your abilities. If your skills are theoretical or technical, you will contribute to knowledge or techniques, and, as a rule, your work will be useful. If you are a politician you may be motivated by the love of power, but as a rule this motive will be associated with the desire to see a certain situation come true, which, for some reason, you prefer the status quo.
Russell then turns to a set of secondary motivations. Echoing his enduring ideas about the intersection of boredom and happiness in human life, he begins with the idea that the love of happiness:
Humans show their superiority over predators by their ability to be bored, although I have sometimes thought, when examining monkeys in the zoo, that, perhaps, they have the beginnings of this annoying emotion. However, experience shows that escaping boredom is one of the most powerful desires of almost all people.
Olimpia Zagnoli's illustration of Mister Horizontal & Miss Vertical by Noémie RévahHe says this intoxicating love of pleasure is only fueled by the sedentary nature of modern life, which has broken the natural bond between body and mind. A century after Thoreau laid out his eloquent case against the sedentary lifestyle, Russell writes:
Our mental makeup goes hand in hand with a life of physical exertion. I used to, when I was young, take my holidays on foot. I walked twenty-five kilometers a day, and when evening came I needed nothing to stop me, because the joy of sitting was enough. But modern life cannot be run on these physically demanding principles. Most work is sedentary, and most manual work tests a few specialized muscles. When crowds gathered in Trafalgar Square to cheer the announcement that the government had decided to kill them, they would not have done so if they had all walked twenty-five miles that day. However, this solution to bellicosity is not possible, and if the human race is to survive – something, perhaps, undesirable – other means must be found to find an innocent place for the unused physical energy that expresses the love of joy … I have never heard of a war that comes out of dance halls.
[…]
Civilized life has grown too tame, and, if it is to be stable, it must provide the harmless places of vision that our distant ancestors contented themselves with hunting… I think that every great city should have artificial waterfalls down which people can descend in very flimsy boats, and should have swimming pools full of mechanical sharks. Any person found advocating a preventive war should be sentenced to two hours a day with these intelligent monsters. More importantly, pains should be taken to provide constructive environments for joyful love. There is nothing in the world more exciting than a moment of discovery or discovery, and more people are able to cope with such moments than is sometimes thought.
He is a completer Nobel Prize winners for writing with the best Nobel Prize acceptance speeches – William Faulkner on the artist as a motivator of the human heart, Ernest Hemingway on writing and solitude, Alice Munro on the secret of telling a great story, and Saul Bellow on how books raise the human spirit – then revisits Russell on immortality and why science is the key to democracy.
