THE CONQUEST OF HAPPINESS
_Other Books by the same Author_
PHILOSOPHY
THE ANALYSIS OF MIND
INTRODUCTION TO MATHEMATICAL PHILOSOPHY
OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE EXTERNAL WORLD
AN OUTLINE OF PHILOSOPHY
SCEPTICAL ESSAYS
SOCIAL SCIENCE
PRINCIPLES OF SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION
ROADS TO FREEDOM
JUSTICE IN WAR-TIME
FREE THOUGHT AND OFFICIAL PROPAGANDA
MARRIAGE AND MORALS
EDUCATIONAL
ON EDUCATION: ESPECIALLY IN EARLY CHILDHOOD
INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
THE PROBLEM OF CHINA
WITH DORA RUSSELL:
THE PROSPECTS OF INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION
WITH SCOTT NEARING:
BOLSHEVISM AND THE WEST
BERTRAND RUSSELL
THE CONQUEST
OF
HAPPINESS
LONDON
GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD
MUSEUM STREET
FIRST PUBLISHED OCTOBER 1930
SECOND IMPRESSION NOVEMBER 1930
THIRD IMPRESSION DECEMBER 1930
_All rights reserved_
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
UNWIN BROTHERS LTD., WOKING
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and
self-contained,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands
of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
WALT WHITMAN
PREFACE
This book is not addressed to the learned, or to those who regard a
practical problem merely as something to be talked about. No profound
philosophy or deep erudition will be found in the following pages. I
have aimed only at putting together some remarks which are inspired
by what I hope is common sense. All that I claim for the recipes
offered to the reader is that they are such as are confirmed by my
own experience and observation, and that they have increased my own
happiness whenever I have acted in accordance with them. On this ground
I venture to hope that some among those multitudes of men and women
who suffer unhappiness without enjoying it, may find their situation
diagnosed and a method of escape suggested. It is in the belief that
many people who are unhappy could become happy by well-directed effort
that I have written this book.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
PREFACE 9
PART I.--CAUSES OF UNHAPPINESS
I. WHAT MAKES PEOPLE UNHAPPY? 15
II. BYRONIC UNHAPPINESS 27
III. COMPETITION 45
IV. BOREDOM AND EXCITEMENT 57
V. FATIGUE 69
VI. ENVY 83
VII. THE SENSE OF SIN 96
VIII. PERSECUTION MANIA 111
IX. FEAR OF PUBLIC OPINION 126
PART II.--CAUSES OF HAPPINESS
X. IS HAPPINESS STILL POSSIBLE? 143
XI. ZEST 158
XII. AFFECTION 175
XIII. THE FAMILY 186
XIV. WORK 208
XV. IMPERSONAL INTERESTS 219
XVI. EFFORT AND RESIGNATION 230
XVII. THE HAPPY MAN 241
INDEX 249
PART I
CAUSES OF UNHAPPINESS
CHAPTER I
WHAT MAKES PEOPLE UNHAPPY?
Animals are happy so long as they have health and enough to eat. Human
beings, one feels, ought to be, but in the modern world they are not,
at least in a great majority of cases. If you are unhappy yourself,
you will probably be prepared to admit that you are not exceptional
in this. If you are happy, ask yourself how many of your friends are
so. And when you have reviewed your friends, teach yourself the art of
reading faces; make yourself receptive to the moods of those whom you
meet in the course of an ordinary day.
A mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe
says Blake. Though the kinds are different, you will find that
unhappiness meets you everywhere. Let us suppose that you are in New
York, the most typically modern of great cities. Stand in a busy
street during working hours, or on a main thoroughfare at a week-end,
or at a dance of an evening; empty your mind of your own ego, and let
the personalities of the strangers about you take possession of you
one after another. You will find that each of these different crowds
has its own trouble. In the work-hour crowd you will see anxiety,
excessive concentration, dyspepsia, lack of interest in anything but
the struggle, incapacity for play, unconsciousness of their fellow
creatures. On a main road at the week-end you will see men and women,
all comfortably off, and some very rich, engaged in the pursuit of
pleasure. This pursuit is conducted by all at a uniform pace, that of
the slowest car in the procession; it is impossible to see the road for
the cars, or the scenery since looking aside would cause an accident;
all the occupants of all the cars are absorbed in the desire to pass
other cars, which they cannot do on account of the crowd; if their
minds wander from this preoccupation, as will happen occasionally to
those who are not themselves driving, unutterable boredom seizes upon
them and stamps their features with trivial discontent. Once in a way a
car-load of coloured people will show genuine enjoyment, but will cause
indignation by erratic behaviour, and ultimately get into the hands of
the police owing to an accident: enjoyment in holiday time is illegal.
Or, again, watch people at a gay evening. All come determined to be
happy, with the kind of grim resolve with which one determines not to
make a fuss at the dentist’s. It is held that drink and petting are the
gateways to joy, so people get drunk quickly, and try not to notice how
much their partners disgust them. After a sufficient amount of drink,
men begin to weep, and to lament how unworthy they are, morally, of
the devotion of their mothers. All that alcohol does for them is to
liberate the sense of sin, which reason suppresses in saner moments.
The causes of these various kinds of unhappiness lie partly in the
social system, partly in individual psychology--which, of course, is
itself to a considerable extent a product of the social system. I
have written before about the changes in the social system required
to promote happiness. Concerning the abolition of war, of economic
exploitation, of education in cruelty and fear, it is not my intention
to speak in this volume. To discover a system for the avoidance of war
is a vital need of our civilization; but no such system has a chance
while men are so unhappy that mutual extermination seems to them less
dreadful than continued endurance of the light of day. To prevent
the perpetuation of poverty is necessary if the benefits of machine
production are to accrue in any degree to those most in need of them;
but what is the use of making everybody rich if the rich themselves
are miserable? Education in cruelty and fear is bad, but no other kind
can be given by those who are themselves the slaves of these passions.
These considerations lead us to the problem of the individual: what can
a man or woman, here and now, in the midst of our nostalgic society,
do to achieve happiness for himself or herself? In discussing this
problem, I shall confine my attention to those who are not subject to
any extreme cause of outward misery. I shall assume a sufficient income
to secure food and shelter, sufficient health to make ordinary bodily
activities possible. I shall not consider the great catastrophes, such
as loss of all one’s children, or public disgrace. There are things to
be said about such matters, and they are important things, but they
belong to a different order from the things that I wish to say. My
purpose is to suggest a cure for the ordinary day-to-day unhappiness
from which most people in civilized countries suffer, and which is
all the more unbearable because, having no obvious external cause, it
appears inescapable. I believe this unhappiness to be very largely
due to mistaken views of the world, mistaken ethics, mistaken habits
of life, leading to destruction of that natural zest and appetite for
possible things upon which all happiness, whether of men or animals,
ultimately depends. These are matters which lie within the power of
the individual, and I propose to suggest the changes by which his
happiness, given average good fortune, may be achieved.
Perhaps the best introduction to the philosophy which I wish to
advocate will be a few words of autobiography. I was not born happy. As
a child, my favourite hymn was: “Weary of earth and laden with my sin.”
At the age of five, I reflected that, if I should live to be seventy,
I had only endured, so far, a fourteenth part of my whole life, and I
felt the long-spread-out boredom ahead of me to be almost unendurable.
In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of
suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know
more mathematics. Now, on the contrary, I enjoy life; I might almost
say that with every year that passes I enjoy it more. This is due
partly to having discovered what were the things that I most desired,
and having gradually acquired many of these things. Partly it is due
to having successfully dismissed certain objects of desire--such as
the acquisition of indubitable knowledge about something or other--as
essentially unattainable. But very largely it is due to a diminishing
preoccupation with myself. Like others who had a Puritan education,
I had the habit of meditating on my sins, follies, and shortcomings.
I seemed to myself--no doubt justly--a miserable specimen. Gradually
I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to
centre my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state
of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I
felt affection. External interests, it is true, bring each its own
possibility of pain: the world may be plunged in war, knowledge in
some direction may be hard to achieve, friends may die. But pains
of these kinds do not destroy the essential quality of life, as do
those that spring from disgust with self. And every external interest
inspires some activity which, so long as the interest remains alive,
is a complete preventive of _ennui_. Interest in oneself, on the
contrary, leads to no activity of a progressive kind. It may lead to
the keeping of a diary, to getting psycho-analysed, or perhaps to
becoming a monk. But the monk will not be happy until the routine of
the monastery has made him forget his own soul. The happiness which
he attributes to religion he could have obtained from becoming a
crossing-sweeper, provided he were compelled to remain one. External
discipline is the only road to happiness for those unfortunates whose
self-absorption is too profound to be cured in any other way.
Self-absorption is of various kinds. We may take the sinner, the
narcissist, and the megalomaniac as three very common types.
When I speak of “the sinner”, I do not mean the man who commits sins:
sins are committed by everyone or no one, according to our definition
of the word. I mean the man who is absorbed in the consciousness of
sin. This man is perpetually incurring his own disapproval, which, if
he is religious, he interprets as the disapproval of God. He has an
image of himself as he thinks he ought to be, which is in continual
conflict with his knowledge of himself as he is. If, in his conscious
thought, he has long since discarded the maxims that he was taught
at his mother’s knee, his sense of sin may be buried deep in his
unconscious, and only emerge when he is drunk or asleep. Nevertheless,
it may suffice to take the savour out of everything. At bottom he still
accepts all the prohibitions he was taught in infancy. Swearing is
wicked; drinking is wicked; ordinary business shrewdness is wicked;
above all, sex is wicked. He does not, of course, abstain from any
of these pleasures, but they are all poisoned for him by the feeling
that they degrade him. The one pleasure that he desires with his whole
soul is that of being approvingly caressed by his mother, which he can
remember having experienced in childhood. This pleasure being no longer
open to him, he feels that nothing matters; since he _must_ sin,
he decides to sin deeply. When he falls in love he looks for maternal
tenderness, but cannot accept it, because, owing to the mother-image,
he feels no respect for any woman with whom he has sexual relations.
Then, in his disappointment, he becomes cruel, repents of his cruelty,
and starts afresh on the dreary round of imagined sin and real remorse.
This is the psychology of very many apparently hard-boiled reprobates.
What drives them astray is devotion to an unattainable object (mother
or mother-substitute) together with the inculcation, in early years, of
a ridiculous ethical code. Liberation from the tyranny of early beliefs
and affections is the first step towards happiness for these victims of
maternal “virtue”.
Narcissism is, in a sense, the converse of an habitual sense of sin; it
consists in the habit of admiring oneself and wishing to be admired.
Up to a point it is, of course, normal, and not to be deplored; it
is only in its excesses that it becomes a grave evil. In many women,
especially rich Society women, the capacity for feeling love is
completely dried up, and is replaced by a powerful desire that all
men should love them. When a woman of this kind is sure that a man
loves her, she has no further use for him. The same thing occurs,
though less frequently, with men; the classic example is the hero of
_Liaisons Dangereuses_. When vanity is carried to this height,
there is no genuine interest in any other person, and therefore no real
satisfaction to be obtained from love. Other interests fail even more
disastrously. A narcissist, for example, inspired by the homage paid
to great painters, may become an art student; but, as painting is for
him a mere means to an end, the technique never becomes interesting,
and no subject can be seen except in relation to self. The result is
failure and disappointment, with ridicule instead of the expected
adulation. The same thing applies to those novelists whose novels
always have themselves idealized as heroines. All serious success in
work depends upon some genuine interest in the material with which
the work is concerned. The tragedy of one successful politician after
another is the gradual substitution of narcissism for an interest in
the community and the measures for which he stands. The man who is
only interested in himself is not admirable, and is not felt to be so.
Consequently the man whose sole concern with the world is that it shall
admire him is not likely to achieve his object. But even if he does, he
will not be completely happy, since human instinct is never completely
self-centred, and the narcissist is limiting himself artificially just
as truly as is the man dominated by a sense of sin. The primitive man
might be proud of being a good hunter, but he also enjoyed the activity
of the chase. Vanity, when it passes beyond a point, kills pleasure
in every activity for its own sake, and thus leads inevitably to
listlessness and boredom. Often its source is diffidence, and its cure
lies in the growth of self-respect. But this is only to be gained by
successful activity inspired by objective interests.
The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes
to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than
loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men in
history. Love of power, like vanity, is a strong element in normal
human nature, and as such is to be accepted; it becomes deplorable
only when it is excessive or associated with an insufficient sense of
reality. Where this occurs it makes a man unhappy or foolish, if not
both. The lunatic who thinks he is a crowned head may be, in a sense,
happy, but his happiness is not of a kind that any sane person would
envy. Alexander the Great was psychologically of the same type as
the lunatic, though he possessed the talent to achieve the lunatic’s
dream. He could not, however, achieve his own dream, which enlarged its
scope as his achievement grew. When it became clear that he was the
greatest conqueror known to fame, he decided that he was a God. Was he
a happy man? His drunkenness, his furious rages, his indifference to
women, and his claim to divinity, suggest that he was not. There is
no ultimate satisfaction in the cultivation of one element of human
nature at the expense of all the others, nor in viewing all the world
as raw material for the magnificence of one’s own ego. Usually the
megalomaniac, whether insane or nominally sane, is the product of some
excessive humiliation. Napoleon suffered at school from inferiority to
his schoolfellows, who were rich aristocrats, while he was a penurious
scholarship boy. When he allowed the return of the _émigrés_, he
had the satisfaction of seeing his former schoolfellows bowing down
before him. What bliss! Yet it led to the wish to obtain a similar
satisfaction at the expense of the Czar, and this led to Saint Helena.
Since no man can be omnipotent, a life dominated wholly by love of
power can hardly fail, sooner or later, to meet with obstacles that
cannot be overcome. The knowledge that this is so can only be prevented
from obtruding on consciousness by some form of lunacy, though if a man
is sufficiently great he can imprison or execute those who point this
out to him. Repressions in the political and in the psycho-analytic
senses thus go hand in hand. And wherever psycho-analytic repression in
any marked form takes place, there is no genuine happiness. Power kept
within its proper bounds may add greatly to happiness, but as the sole
end of life it leads to disaster, inwardly if not outwardly.
The psychological causes of unhappiness, it is clear, are many and
various. But all have something in common. The typical unhappy man is
one who, having been deprived in youth of some normal satisfaction,
has come to value this one kind of satisfaction more than any other,
and has therefore given to his life a one-sided direction, together
with a quite undue emphasis upon the achievement as opposed to the
activities connected with it. There is, however, a further development
which is very common in the present day. A man may feel so completely
thwarted that he seeks no form of satisfaction, but only distraction
and oblivion. He then becomes a devotee of “pleasure”. That is to say,
he seeks to make life bearable by becoming less alive. Drunkenness, for
example, is temporary suicide; the happiness that it brings is merely
negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness. The narcissist and the
megalomaniac believe that happiness is possible, though they may adopt
mistaken means of achieving it; but the man who seeks intoxication, in
whatever form, has given up hope except in oblivion. In his case, the
first thing to be done is to persuade him that happiness is desirable.
Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the
fact. Perhaps their pride is like that of the fox who had lost his
tail; if so, the way to cure it is to point out to them how they can
grow a new tail. Very few men, I believe, will deliberately choose
unhappiness if they see a way of being happy. I do not deny that such
men exist, but they are not sufficiently numerous to be important.
I shall therefore assume that the reader would rather be happy than
unhappy. Whether I can help him to realize this wish, I do not know;
but at any rate the attempt can do no harm.