Reading Russell: Happiness and the Greed for Freedom

The education I received from childhood onward consistently emphasized learning from advanced individuals and aspiring to be a useful person. So, looking back now, my reflections on role models, life goals, and even the meaning of life started very early.

From middle school, I envisioned myself as a scientist, politician, or entrepreneur. I read biographies, thinking about who I most wanted to become. Then I developed a strong interest in philosophy, contemplating questions like “I think, therefore I am.” In short, it feels like since I learned to read, I’ve been constantly setting goals for myself and finding optimal paths to achieve those goals and my understanding of life’s grand objective.

It wasn't until much later, after I had been an entrepreneur for several years, that I began to realize that achieving goals and happiness aren’t necessarily the same thing. My reflections, understanding, and exploration of happiness came very late.

Initially, I read Tal Ben-Shahar’s Happier, which is said to be a very famous course at Harvard. It had some short-term impact on me, but it wasn’t lasting. After a period of pondering this topic and some challenging practice, I feel like I’m slowly starting to understand.

Then I read Bertrand Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness. This book isn’t long, but it explains things very clearly, using accessible language. It felt like it had already articulated all my thoughts on this topic, and it seems the happiness issues faced by different professions and social classes a hundred years ago are no different from today’s. In Charlie Munger’s classic words, “I have nothing to add.”

So why am I still writing about it? There are two main reasons: First, I want to create a “summary” of the book’s content from memory for my own review in the future or for comparison when I reread the book. Second, I want to write a little about the contrast I see between Russell’s life and his own theory of happiness, because this is something Russell’s own book can’t really cover. These two points make up the title of this post.

I. Russell’s “Happiness”

After reading The Conquest of Happiness, my own summary is roughly these few sentences:

1. Have the courage to face common sense, use common sense to make rational judgments, and use rational thoughts to guide your actions.
2. Shift your interest from achieving an infinitely perfect self to an interest in external objective things.
3. Be willing to give up on things that cannot be changed or conquered.

The first sentence is the core, because the latter two are actually natural results of practicing the first. For the first sentence, the two key words are “rationality” and “common sense.” Please allow me to offer some rather informal “excerpts” about the interpretation of these two words from the book and my own embellished memories.

Common Sense

• Humans are a very, very tiny existence in the universe, and the time of human life is incredibly short. What we can do and change is extremely limited. This should be the background we should always be aware of.
• People’s thinking and concepts largely depend on their background, the education they received in their youth, and their current role and interests. So, when judging an authoritative view, or judging a common worldly view, or a parent’s expectations, you must be able to understand their background and consider their background role and interests. Based on these background facts, what is often needed is just common sense for judgment. What is needed more is not wisdom, but the courage to still pursue rationality when facing the facts. (Common sense is actually obvious and very easy to understand, but various inherited biases and biases caused by personal interests blind us, making us ignore these common senses. Isn’t this very similar to what is said in Buddhist scriptures?)
• The values of different regions and different groups of people are different. What is non-mainstream in one place is very likely mainstream in another. In Russell’s view at the time in Britain, the mainstream value in America was comparing wealth. And in Britain, when there was an aristocratic class, what the aristocratic class compared more was non-wealth things, such as art.
• “One of the most unfortunate characteristics of human nature is envy; a man who acquires something does not find happiness by looking at what he has, but by looking at what others have.” Envy is the main driving force for fairness between different classes, countries, and genders. At the same time, expecting to achieve that kind of fairness through envy will be the worst kind of fairness. It reduces the happiness of the fortunate rather than increasing the happiness of the unfortunate.
• “It is a characteristic of human nature to give affections more readily to those who appear not to need them than to those who do.” (Like banks are more willing to lend money to those who don’t need it.)
• “Your motives are not always as altruistic as you think.”
• “Don’t overestimate your own value.”
• “Don’t expect others to value you as much as you value yourself.”
• “All unhappiness depends upon some kind of disintegration or lack of integration; there is disintegration within the self when there is no coordination between conscious and unconscious mind; there is lack of integration between the self and society when it is not possible for the individual to unite himself with the outer world through objective interests and affections.”

Rationality

• “It is not the business of reason to generate emotions, though part of its business is to discover ways of preventing emotions that are harmful to well-being.”
• At the same time, “reason does not wish to diminish the intensity of feeling. When they are good or partially good, the rational man will be glad that he can feel them, and will not try to restrain them.”

II. The Greed for Freedom

Russell himself said, “Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.” These overwhelming pursuits of his not only brought us influential works like Principia Mathematica, which had a huge impact on mathematics and philosophy, but also brought us “diverse and important” Nobel Prize-winning works, The Conquest of Happiness being one of them.

At the same time, these overwhelming pursuits also brought him four marriages. What I haven’t quite figured out is that his four marriages and his “overly open” behavior at the time should have also brought pain to some people. This pain should in turn affect him. This should not be conducive to joy or happiness. Can these three overwhelming pursuits also be understood as a greed for freedom?

Russell himself said in the “Effort and Resignation” section of The Conquest of Happiness, “The doctrine of the golden mean is a dull one, yet it can be proved true in a very large number of cases.” So, should the pursuit of knowledge and freedom also involve some resignation? For example, giving up the endless pursuit of whether God exists and simply believing in his existence, would that be happier? If one can willingly give up part of freedom and firmly believe that being in one country, one place, and with one person is good, would that be happier?

Of course, Russell’s longevity, to some extent, also makes me question whether my speculation about his life lacks sufficient factual basis. After all, it’s hard for me to believe that a very unhappy person or someone who lives a life of extreme indulgence can live to ninety-eight.