All
human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory
advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist
desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious,
not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold
on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do,
you must know not only, or principally, their material circumstances, but
rather the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths.
Man
differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is that he
has some desires which are, so to speak, infinite, which can never be fully
gratified, and which would keep him restless even in Paradise. The boa
constrictor, when he has had an adequate meal, goes to sleep, and does not wake
until he needs another meal. Human beings, for the most part, are not like
this.
Russell points to four
such infinite desires — acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power — and examines them in order:
Acquisitiveness
— the wish to possess as much as possible of goods, or the title to goods — is
a motive which, I suppose, has its origin in a combination of fear with the
desire for necessaries. I once befriended two little girls from Estonia, who
had narrowly escaped death from starvation in a famine. They lived in my
family, and of course had plenty to eat. But they spent all their leisure
visiting neighbouring farms and stealing potatoes, which they hoarded.
Rockefeller, who in his infancy had experienced great poverty, spent his adult
life in a similar manner.
However
much you may acquire, you will always wish to acquire more; satiety is a dream
which will always elude you.
In 1938, Henry Miller
also articulated this fundamental driver in his brilliant meditation on how money became a human fixation. Decades later, modern
psychologists would term this notion “the hedonic treadmill.” But for Russell, this elemental
driver is eclipsed by an even stronger one — our propensity for rivalry:
The
world would be a happier place than it is if acquisitiveness were always
stronger than rivalry. But in fact, a great many men will cheerfully face
impoverishment if they can thereby secure complete ruin for their rivals. Hence
the present level of taxation.
Rivalry,
he argues, is in turn upstaged by human narcissism. In a sentiment doubly
poignant in the context of today’s social media, he observes:
Vanity
is a motive of immense potency. Anyone who has much to do with children knows
how they are constantly performing some antic, and saying “Look at me.” “Look
at me” is one of the most fundamental desires of the human heart. It can take
innumerable forms, from buffoonery to the pursuit of posthumous fame.
It
is scarcely possible to exaggerate the influence of vanity throughout the range
of human life, from the child of three to the potentate at whose frown the
world trembles.
But
the most potent of the four impulses, Russell argues, is the love of power:
Love
of power is closely akin to vanity, but it is not by any means the same thing.
What vanity needs for its satisfaction is glory, and it is easy to have glory
without power… Many people prefer glory to power, but on the whole these people
have less effect upon the course of events than those who prefer power to
glory… Power, like vanity, is insatiable. Nothing short of omnipotence could
satisfy it completely. And as it is especially the vice of energetic men, the
causal efficacy of love of power is out of all proportion to its frequency. It
is, indeed, by far the strongest motive in the lives of important men.
Love
of power is greatly increased by the experience of power, and this applies to
petty power as well as to that of potentates.
Anyone who has ever
agonized in the hands of a petty bureaucrat — something Hannah Arendt
unforgettably censured as a special kind of violence — can attest to the veracity
of this sentiment. Russell adds:
In
any autocratic regime, the holders of power become increasingly tyrannical with
experience of the delights that power can afford. Since power over human beings
is shown in making them do what they would rather not do, the man who is
actuated by love of power is more apt to inflict pain than to permit pleasure.
But
Russell, a thinker of exceptional sensitivity to nuance and to the dualities of
which life is woven, cautions against dismissing the love of power as a wholesale
negative driver — from the impulse to dominate the unknown, he points out,
spring such desirables as the pursuit of knowledge and all scientific progress.
He considers its fruitful manifestations:
It
would be a complete mistake to decry love of power altogether as a motive.
Whether you will be led by this motive to actions which are useful, or to
actions which are pernicious, depends upon the social system, and upon your
capacities. If your capacities are theoretical or technical, you will contribute
to knowledge or technique, and, as a rule, your activity will be useful. If you
are a politician you may be actuated by love of power, but as a rule this
motive will join itself on to the desire to see some state of affairs realized
which, for some reason, you prefer to the status quo.
Russell then turns to
a set of secondary motives. Echoing his enduring ideas on the interplay of boredom and excitement in human life, he
begins with the notion of love of excitement:
Human
beings show their superiority to the brutes by their capacity for boredom,
though I have sometimes thought, in examining the apes at the zoo, that they,
perhaps, have the rudiments of this tiresome emotion. However that may be,
experience shows that escape from boredom is one of the really powerful desires
of almost all human beings.
He argues that this
intoxicating love of excitement is only amplified by the sedentary nature of
modern life, which has fractured the natural bond between body and mind. A
century after Thoreau made his exquisite case against the sedentary lifestyle, Russell
writes:
Our
mental make-up is suited to a life of very severe physical labor. I used, when
I was younger, to take my holidays walking. I would cover twenty-five miles a
day, and when the evening came I had no need of anything to keep me from
boredom, since the delight of sitting amply sufficed. But modern life cannot be
conducted on these physically strenuous principles. A great deal of work is
sedentary, and most manual work exercises only a few specialized muscles. When
crowds assemble in Trafalgar Square to cheer to the echo an announcement that
the government has decided to have them killed, they would not do so if they
had all walked twenty-five miles that day. This cure for bellicosity is,
however, impracticable, and if the human race is to survive — a thing which is,
perhaps, undesirable — other means must be found for securing an innocent
outlet for the unused physical energy that produces love of excitement… I have
never heard of a war that proceeded from dance halls.
Civilized
life has grown altogether too tame, and, if it is to be stable, it must provide
harmless outlets for the impulses which our remote ancestors satisfied in
hunting… I think every big town should contain artificial waterfalls that
people could descend in very fragile canoes, and they should contain bathing
pools full of mechanical sharks. Any person found advocating a preventive war
should be condemned to two hours a day with these ingenious monsters. More
seriously, pains should be taken to provide constructive outlets for the love
of excitement. Nothing in the world is more exciting than a moment of sudden
discovery or invention, and many more people are capable of experiencing such
moments than is sometimes thought.
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