Competition and Morality

Bertrand Russell: Power

Edward Gibbon (1737 – 94):
The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered

• by the people, as equally true;
• by the philosopher, as equally false; and
• by the magistrate, as equally useful.

Walter Bagehot (1826 – 77):
The best reason why Monarchy is a strong government is, that it is an intelligible government.
The mass of mankind understand it …
It is often said that men are ruled by their imaginations …
[But] it would be truer to say that they are governed by the weakness of their imaginations.
(The English Constitution, 1867)

Competition

To the unphilosophical propagandist, there is his own propaganda, which is that of truth, and the opposite propaganda, which is that of falsehood.
If he believes in permitting both, it is only because he fears that his might be the one to suffer prohibition. …

[However, for the philosopher,] any useful purpose which is to be served by propaganda must be not that of causing an almost certainly erroneous opinion to be dogmatically believed, but, on the contrary, that of promoting judgement, rational doubt, and the power of weighing opposing considerations …
[This purpose can only be served] if there is competition among propagandas. …

[The philosopher] will advocate that, as far as possible, everybody should hear all sides of every question.
Instead of different newspapers, each devoted to the interests of one party and encouraging the dogmatism of its readers, he will advocate a single newspaper, in which all parties are represented.
(p 154)

Moral Codes

Morality … has had two divergent aspects.

• [Positive morality] has been a social institution analogous to law …
• [Personal morality] has been a matter for the individual conscience.

(p 156)

[No] nation of antiquity recognised any legal or moral limits to what might be done with defeated populations.
It was customary to exterminate some and sell the rest into slavery. …
The vanquished, having no power, had no claim to mercy.
This view was not abandoned, even in theory, until the coming of Christianity.

Duty to enemies [remains] a difficult conception.
Clemency was recognised as a virtue in antiquity, but only when it was successful, that is to say, when it turned enemies into friends; otherwise, it was condemned as a weakness.
When fear had been aroused, no one expected magnanimity: the Romans showed none towards Hannibal or the followers of Spartacus.

In our day, almost equal ferocity has been shown towards the victims of the white terrors in Finland, Hungary, Germany, and Spain, and hardly any protests have been aroused except among political opponents. …
The terror in Russia, likewise, has been condoned by most of the Left.

Now, as in the days of the Old Testament, no duty to enemies is acknowledged in practice when they are sufficiently formidable to arouse fear.
Positive morality [is] only operative within the social group concerned, and is therefore … in effect, a department of government.
Nothing short of a world government will cause people of pugnacious disposition to admit, except as a counsel of perfection, that moral obligations are not confined to a section of the human race.
(p 164)

Broadly speaking [positive morality …]

• is on the side of the powers that be …
• does not allow a place for revolution, …
• does nothing to mitigate the fierceness of strife, and …
• can find no place for the prophet who proclaims some new moral insight. …

The world owes something to the Gospels [—] though not [as] much as it would if they had had more influence.
It owes something to those who denounced slavery and the subjection of women.
We may hope that in time it will owe something to those who denounce war and economic injustice.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it owed much to the apostles of tolerance [and,] perhaps it will again in some happier age than ours.

Revolutions against the mediaeval Church, the Renaissance monarchies, and the present power of plutocracy, are necessary for the avoidance of stagnation.
Admitting, as we must, that mankind needs revolution and individual morality, the problem is to find a place for these things without plunging the world into anarchy.
(p 165)

Forms of Government

Bertrand Russell: Power

Except when he feels enthusiasm for a leader, the voter in a large democracy has so little sense of power that he often does not think it worth while to use his vote.
If he is not a keen propagandist for one of the parties, the vastness of the forces that decide who shall govern makes his own part in them appear completely negligible.
[All] that he can do … is to vote for one or other of two men, whose programmes may not interest him, and may differ very little, and who, he knows, may with impunity abandon their programmes as soon as they are elected.

If, on the other hand, there is a leader whom he enthusiastically admires, the psychology involved is that which we considered in connection with monarchy: it is that of the tie between a king and the tribe or sect of his active supporters.
Every skilful political agitator or organiser devotes himself to stimulating devotion to an individual.
If the individual is a great leader, the result is one-man government …
[If] he is not, the caucus which has secured his election becomes the real power.

(Power, 1938, p 133)

Money, Propaganda and Fanaticism

Bertrand Russell: Power

Ideology and Fanaticism

To understand Marx psychologically, one should use the following dictionary:

Yahweh	Dialectical Materialism
The Messiah	Marx
The Elect	The Proletariat
The Church	The Communist Party
The Second Coming	The Revolution
Hell	Punishment of the Capitalists
The Millennium	The Communist Commonwealth

(p 361)

In the welter of conflicting fanaticisms, one of the few unifying forces is scientific truthfulness, by which I mean the habit of basing our beliefs upon observations and inferences as impersonal, and as much divested of local and temperamental bias, as is possible for human beings. …
The habit of careful veracity acquired in the practice of this philosophical method can be extended to the whole sphere of human activity, producing, wherever it exists, a lessening of fanaticism with an increasing capacity of sympathy and mutual understanding.
In abandoning a part of its dogmatic pretensions, philosophy does not cease to suggest and inspire a way of life.

(A History of Western Philosophy, 1961, p 789)


Would you like to know more?

Propaganda

Belief, when it is not simply traditional, is a product of several factors:

• desire,
• evidence, and
• iteration. …

[When] there is no outside assertion, belief will only arise in exceptional characters, such as founders of religions, scientific discoverers, and lunatics. …
More propaganda is necessary to cause acceptance of a belief for which there is little evidence than of one for which the evidence is strong …

One of the advantages of democracy, from the governmental point of view, is that it makes the average citizen easier to deceive, since he regards the government as his government.
(p 96)

In the totalitarian countries, the State is virtually the sole propagandist.
(p 97)

The effect of organisation and unification, in the matter of propaganda as in other matters, is to delay revolution, but to make it more violent when it comes.
When only one doctrine is officially allowed, men get no practice in thinking or in weighing alternatives …
[Consequently,] only a great wave of passionate revolt can dethrone orthodoxy …
[Therefore] revolution in a totalitarian State is not necessarily a ground for rejoicing.
What is more to be desired is a gradual increase in the sense of security, leading to a lessening of zeal, and giving an opening for laziness — the greatest of all virtues in the ruler of a totalitarian State, with the sole exception of non-existence.
(p 98)

Tyrants and Revolutionaries

Bertrand Russell: Power

Naked Power

[If] human life is to be … anything better than a dull misery punctuated with moments of sharp horror, there must be as little naked power as possible.
The exercise of power, if it is to be something better than the infliction of wanton torture, must be hedged round by safeguards of law and custom, permitted only after due deliberation, and entrusted to men who are closely supervised in the interests of those who are subjected to them. …

It involves …

• the elimination of war, for all war is an exercise of naked power. …
• a world free from those intolerable oppressions that give rise to rebellions. …
• the raising of the standard of life throughout the world …
• some institution analogous to the Roman tribunes … for every section that is liable to oppression, such as minorities and criminals [and]
• above all, a watchful public opinion, with opportunities of ascertaining the facts.

It is useless to trust in the virtue of some individual or set of individuals. …
No real solution of the problem of power is to be found in irresponsible government by a minority …
(p 71)

Revolutionary Power

A government without psychological authority must be a tyranny.
(p 80)

The decay of Liberalism has many causes, both technical and psychological.
They are to be found

• in the technique of war,
• in the technique of production,
• in the increased facilities for propaganda, and
• in nationalism, which is itself an outcome of Liberal doctrines.

All these causes, especially where the State has economic as well as political power, have immensely increased the power of governments. …
A modern community, just as much as those of the eighteenth century, requires, if it is to remain happy and prosperous, a sphere for individual initiative, but this sphere must be defined afresh, and safeguarded by new methods.
(p 81)

Priests and Kings

Bertrand Russell: Power

Both religious and secular innovators … have appealed, as far as they could, to tradition, and [sought] to minimise the elements of novelty in their system.
The usual plan is to invent a more or less fictitious past and pretend to be restoring its institutions.
(p 39)

In the United States at the present day, the reverence which the Greeks gave to oracles and the Middle Ages to the Pope is given to the Supreme Court [— which] is part of the forces engaged in the protection of the plutocracy.
(p 49)

Power

Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970):
[In ancient times a] man who took no interest in politics was frowned upon, and was called an 'idiot', which is Greek for 'given over to private interests'.
(Wisdom of the West, 1959, p 11)

It is not ultimately by violence that men are ruled, but by the wisdom of those who appeal to the common desires of mankind,

• for happiness,
• for inward and outward peace, and
• for the understanding of the world in which, by no choice of our own, we [all] have to live.

(Power, 1938, p 185)

The Taming of Power

[It] must be evident that democracy … is an essential part of the solution [to the problem of the taming of power.]
[However, the] complete solution is not to be found by confining ourselves to political conditions …
[We] must take account also of economics, of propaganda, and of psychology as affected by circumstances and education.
(p 187)

[There] should be toleration of all propaganda not involving incitement to break the law …
[And] the law, should be as tolerant as is compatible with technical efficiency and the maintenance of order.
(p 189)

If there were ever an international government, it would obviously have to be a federation of national governments, with strictly defined powers.
(p 191)

[As] a result of modern technique, organisations tend to grow and to coalesce and to increase their scope …
[Hence,] the political State must either increasingly take over economic functions, or partially abdicate in favour of vast private enterprises which are sufficiently powerful to defy or control it.
If the State does not acquire supremacy over such enterprises, it becomes their puppet, and they become the real State.
(p 194)

[And, if] concentration of power in a single organisation — the State — is not to produce the evils of despotism in an extreme form, it is essential that power within that organisation should be widely distributed, and that subordinate groups should have a large measure of autonomy.
Without democracy, devolution, and immunity from extra-legal punishment, the coalescence of economic and political power is nothing but a new and appalling instrument of tyranny.
(p 198)

[Fear,] rage, and all kinds of violent collective excitement, tend to make men blindly follow a leader, who, in most cases, takes advantage of their trust to establish himself as a tyrant. …
[And where] a spirit of ferocious dogmatism prevails, any opinion with which men disagree is liable to provoke a breach of the peace.
(p 200)

Revivalist enthusiasm, such as that of the Nazis, rouses admiration in many through the energy and apparent self-abnegation that it generates.
Collective excitement, involving indifference to pain and even to death, is historically not uncommon.
Where it exists, liberty is impossible. …

To admire collective enthusiasm is reckless and irresponsible, for its fruits are fierceness, war, death, and slavery.
War is the chief promoter of despotism …
[If,] once the world were freed from the fear of war, under no matter what form of government or what economic system, it would in time find ways of curbing the ferocity of its rulers.
On the other hand, all war, but especially modern war, promotes dictatorship by causing the timid to seek a leader and by converting the bolder spirits from a society into a pack.

The risk of war causes a certain kind of mass psychology, and reciprocally this kind, where it exists, increases the risk of war, as well as the likelihood of despotism.
(p 201)

The temper required to make a success of democracy is, in the practical life, exactly what the scientific temper is in the intellectual life; it is a half-way house between scepticism and dogmatism.
Truth, it holds, is neither completely attainable nor completely unattainable …
[It] is attainable to a certain degree, and that only with difficulty. …

Wherever there is autocracy, a set of beliefs is instilled into the minds of the young before they are capable of thinking, and these beliefs are taught so constantly and so persistently that it is hoped the pupils will never afterwards be able to escape from the hypnotic effect of their early lessons.
(p 203)

To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy.
Modern propagandists have learnt from advertisers, who led the way in the technique of producing irrational belief.
Education should be designed to counteract the natural credulity and the natural incredulity of the uneducated:
[The] habit

• of believing an emphatic statement without reasons, and
• of disbelieving an unemphatic statement even when accompanied by the best of reasons. …

There have been in the past eminent orators and writers who defended, with an appearance of great wisdom, positions which no one now holds: the reality of witchcraft, the beneficence of slavery, and so on.
(p 204)

[Wisdom] is not merely intellectual …
[Intellect] may guide and direct, but [it] does not generate the force that leads to action.
[That] force must be derived from the emotions.
Emotions that have desirable social consequences are not so easily generated as hate and rage and fear.
(p 205)