Moving Out #046

Bertrand Russell on Unhappiness and Competition

Hello and welcome again to Every Dawn!

Today we continue to talk about Bertrand Russell and his idea of why we are unhappy. Last time we said that one of the reasons for unhappiness is that we don't engage enough with the world. When we have a reason to engage—a sick child, or even some other less dramatic thing like a pottery class or a charity—then immediately, all our worries are erased and we are engaged in the world. And then we forget this boredom and this meaninglessness of our lives.

The second factor for our unhappiness, according to Russell, is competition. This is something that we can all probably verify from our own experience. Our societies are very much based on competition. We have an abundance of material goods, but we have organized society on the idea of scarcity, on the idea of competition instead of everybody receiving what they need and what they desire, which we could do with the material affluence that we have as humanity. We have managed to make our societies, especially capitalist societies in the west, into this cutthroat competition arena where we are fighting over everything—positions, money, salary increases, prestige, a bigger car, a bigger house, and so on. And even among academics—I mean I'm not excluding myself from this—philosophers are perhaps even more cutthroat than many others because we have publications. You have to publish more and the more you publish, the better you are, or the higher kind of philosopher you are. And so this is all a way to be unhappy according to Russell.

It is difficult to get out of this, of course, because this is so ingrained in us, this idea that we need to be the best, that if you're not the best then you are a loser and nobody wants to be a loser. But perhaps we need to accustom ourselves to the idea that leaving the competition does not necessarily make you into a loser because if you see life as valued only along one axis of value—if you say, "The whole of life, I judge it only according to money"—then of course, if you don't have this amount of money and you fall back, then you are a loser. But you don't need to see life as valued only along this one axis of money; you can, for example, take another axis. You can say, "How is it with family life? Family satisfaction?" And then suddenly you have another way to judge who is better and who is the loser. And perhaps the person who earns the most money turns out to be a loser in terms of family values, and perhaps somebody who is poor, who is officially a loser because they don't have a flashy career or a big house, perhaps they have a much happier family.

So this is in the end this competition is the result of some shortsightedness regarding the values that we apply to judge in this competition who is ahead and who is not. But Russell thinks that even more, we should completely abandon this competition. We should find our value in ourselves and we should say that instead of trying to compete with others, I just do whatever makes me happy, whatever I feel is valuable. And so instead of feeling that I have to write a better paper than my fellow professor or I have to you know stamp more forms than the guy in the office next to me, or I have to get the corner office, or I have to have a car that has you know a few hundred cubic cm more in the engine, instead of accepting these value measurements, I can just say, "Leave all these things and I will spend an afternoon in some charitable thing helping the poor," and this will be my value scale, this will be the thing how I judge my own contribution to society. And this person who has a bigger engine in their car is not actually contributing anything to society; they're only contributing pollution. While if I help in a charity for an hour a week or two hours a week or however much it is that I can afford, then I am actually contributing something much more valuable.

So refusing to compete, not even starting, and this doesn't make you into a loser. This makes you into somebody who is not competing. The idea is if you have, let's say if you have runners—this is now my interpretation, it's not Russell's words—but if you have because we just said the Olympics, if you have an Olympic runner field and these people are running 100 meters and you start, you are at the start line, and you are running, and you fall back, and you finish last, yes then you are the loser. But if you never even step onto the field, if you're sitting outside and watching the race then you're not a loser, you're not winning but you're not a loser, you're a spectator. You are actually something better, you are the one for whose sake these runners are running. By stepping out of the race, you're actually above the race. By stepping out of this competition in society, you find a position that does not make you a loser; it makes you something different, it makes you somebody who is outside of that.

And perhaps you can try to find this in your life. You can try to see where in your life you are most attached to this race, where you are most suffering because you feel that you're losing in this race, and then perhaps find a way to completely step out of it and replace this race with some other activity that is more meaningful and that perhaps even provides more opportunities for future happiness than the thing you have been doing before.

Let's think about it and see you tomorrow. Thank you.