Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Authority and the Individual： an Overview

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Aug. 3, 2017 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

21:50

Authority and the Individual： an Overview

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	Authority in the Individual is a series of six lectures written by British philosopher Bertrand Russell.
	Originally broadcast by the BBC, Russell's lectures were compiled into a short book and first published in 1949.
	The main thrust of the lectures is to establish the parameters of the necessary, desirable, and undesirable relations between the individual, the state, and industry.
	Once defined, Russell argues that the capitalist order of his day, and one that is not so different to what the West experiences now, is not optimal for either efficiency or human happiness, despite having marked superiority over contemporary planned economies.
	His thoughts on this can be summarised as too little liberty brings stagnation, and too much brings chaos.
	Russell believed that too much control inhibited societal development by stifling the agency of the individual, but too little social control created anarchy in which degrading social cohesion would cause societal collapse.
	He argues that man is a creature that has inherited many traits from its savage past, and one of those traits is competitiveness, which manifests in what he calls the energetic people of society.
	These are the high-accomplishing folk, driven by a multitude of reasons toward the end effect, if not the goal, of having a transformative effect on society as a whole.
	They could be reformers, prophets, business magnates, military leaders, philosophers, completely unrelated beside the restless energy that drives them on and makes them notable.
	Russell observes that these are the people who pushed forward the scientific and social development of a civilization and keep it healthy, and their freedom of expression must be independent of a central power.
	Everything concerned with opinion such as newspapers, books and political propaganda must be left to genuine competition and carefully safeguarded from government control, as well as from every other form of monopoly.
	But the competition must be cultural and intellectual, not economic, and still less military or by means of criminal law.
	Russell finds the advent of the world government inevitable for two reasons.
	Advances in technology provide the physical ability to control and communicate across vast distances, and cites the ever-increasing size of empire until the modern day.
	When combined with universal morality, it creates a moral franchise that encompasses all mankind, that will create the impetus for reformers to extend the human rights of the West to everyone.
	He thought a world state desirable as a means to end war, which a world state must inevitably do, as it would be in command of the armed forces of the entire planet.
	He finds it probable that the world state would have significant difficulty in maintaining its own social cohesion, without an external alien enemy for a rival.
	The energetic people would hunger for adventure and destabilise the unity of the world state.
	The problem of the social reformer, therefore, is not merely to seek means of security, for if these means, when found, provide no deep satisfaction, the security will be thrown away for the glory of adventure.
	The problem is rather to combine that degree of security which is essential to the species with forms of adventure and danger and contest which are compatible with the civilized way of life.
	Russell believed that tribalism was the natural state of man, concluding that each tribe had a moral franchise, that it extended only to members of their own tribe, and that from this sprung wars of conquest and subjugation.
	The conquerors did not believe they had to extend their moral consideration to the conquered, and so didn't.
	He states the Stoics taught that there should be sympathy for people beyond the Greeks, and the moral franchise should be extended to barbarians and slaves.
	This principle was also present in the later religions of Buddhism and Christianity, which disseminated it from Ireland to Japan.
	It is no wonder if the religious innovators were execrated in their own day, for they sought to rob men of the joy of battle and the fierce delights of revenge.
	Primitive ferocity, which had seemed a virtue, was now said to be a sin, and a deep duality was introduced between morality and the life of impulse.
	Russell approved of the moral innovators who attempted to make morality universal, and he claims these were responsible for the ever-improving condition of man's humanity to man.
	Without the extension of the moral franchise to all men, there would be no disapproval of slavery, no protection of prisoners of war, no limitation of the powers of men over women, and exploitation of the subject races of his day would be considered a virtue.
	The purpose of Russell's hypothetical world state is one of the core themes of his thesis.
	He believed that the driving force of the world state would not be patriotism, as patriotism requires a dichotomy between us and them.
	The cohesive elements must, in Russell's opinion, be found in both self-interest and benevolence, without the potent incentives of hate and fear.
	One theme running through the lectures is an adversity to totalitarianism.
	Russell describes the tyrannical socialist states of the East, observing that then recent technological advancements had provided a level of omniscience to the state that enabled it to oppress a population with far greater efficacy than ever before.
	He observes that nationalizing industry is not a panacea, citing the concern that the relation of the workers to private owners would likely be replicated with the state.
	In addition, the fear of empowering the state by giving it a monopoly over the science, technology, and the manufacturing base of the nation made him justifiably fearful of the unprecedented level of control that it was now possible for the state to have over the lives of man.
	Modern techniques have made possible a new intensity of government control, and this possibility has been exploited very fully in totalitarian states.
	It may be under the stress of war or the fear of war, or as a result of totalitarian conquest, the parts of the world where some degree of individual liberty survives may grow fewer, and even in them, liberty may be more and more restricted.
	There is not much reason to suppose that the resulting system would be unstable, but it would almost certainly be static and unprogressive, and it would bring with it a recruites of ancient evils, slavery, bigotry, intolerance, and abject misery for the majority of mankind.
	Russell believed that restricting a people's liberty to innovate is an inevitability under any amount of governmental control, but restricting it lightly is not too great a hindrance that will hold back advancements.
	In Russell's view, the necessary inertia of totalitarian states compels them to oppress any would-be reformer.
	In a totalitarian state, an innovator whose ideas are disliked by the government is not merely put to death, which is a matter to which a brave man may remain indifferent, but totally prevented from causing his doctrine to be known.
	Innovations in such a community can only come from the government, and the government now, as in the past, is not likely to approve anything contrary to its immediate interests.
	Russell believed that one of the most revolting aspects of tyrannical regimes was their ability to persuade those trapped within the system to praise their captors.
	He believed that democratic governments would avoid these grosser forms of self-abasement and offered the opportunity for the preservation of one's self-respect, if not the guarantee of it.
	He warns against a cult of democracy, in which the vox populi becomes akin to the voice of God, in which popular opinion is considered sacrosanct and infallible, causing dissenting opinions to become a form of impiety and viewed as a revolt against the legitimate authority of the herd.
	This will only be avoided if liberty is valued as much as democracy, and it is realized that a society in which the slave of all is only a little better than one in which each is the slave of a despot.
	There is equality where all are slaves, as well as where all are free.
	This shows that equality, by itself, is not enough to make a good society.
	Russell addressed the issue of intellectual uniformity under totalitarianism using the example of fascism.
	He observed that intellectual diversity prevented societal stagnation, setting the stage for a Darwinian competition between ideas.
	This desirable form of diversity is inconvenient for totalitarian regimes, as it inevitably leads to a revolution.
	Like many intellectuals of his time, Russell was well disposed to the spirit of socialism, but also understood that all the dangers of it were being acted out in the Soviet Union as he put pen to paper.
	As he previously stated in Proposed Roads to Freedom, Russell believed that all socialist reformers were acting from good intent, but did not, at the time, understand what chain of events would be set into motion.
	I do not see how any Roman at the time of Julius Caesar could have predicted anything at all like the Catholic Church, and no one in the 19th century, not even Marx, foresaw the Soviet Union.
	It was not the dangerous excesses of socialism alone that caused Russell to object to socialism, but the inevitable lethargy caused by the suppression of the energetic people and the disincentivization of competition.
	He notes that Stalin's Communist Party restored competitiveness to the Soviet Union during the Second Five-Year Plan by promoting the Starkanovite movement, in which exceptional workers were rewarded for exceptional work.
	Russell believed that even if the material conditions between people were even, humans had inherited an inbuilt psychological need for competition from their cave-dwelling ancestors that required them to compete.
	He believed that societies that removed incentives towards competitiveness became listless and stagnant and required an oppressive totalitarian state to establish.
	Although competition in many forms is gravely objectionable, it has, I think, an essential part to play in the promotion of necessary effort and in some spheres affords a comparatively harmless outlet for the kind of impulses that might otherwise lead to war.
	As a prolific writer, Russell may have rescinded his position on socialism as stated in Authority and the Individual, but I'm not aware of it.
	He seems to have somewhat soured his opinion on the concept of equality of outcome.
	As an authority in the individual, Russell laments the lack of competitive drive that made up the zeitgeist of his day.
	The impulse towards liberty, however, seems to now have lost much of its force among reformers and has been replaced with a love of equality, which has been largely stimulated by the rise to affluence and power of new industrial magnates without any traditional claim to superiority.
	This observation could be made with equal accuracy today.
	Russell acknowledged that governmental control had done much to improve the material condition of people in his day, providing a greatly increased amount of physical and economic security from his comparison to the 18th century.
	In spite of this, he was keenly aware of the limits to which economic justice and equality could be pursued, understanding that it was only by increment that British society had been made safer, happier and more prosperous, and that this method was the most sure way of relieving the misery and poverty of the third world.
	He believed an artificial levelling of the wealth of the world would simply drag down the wealthy nations with no appreciable benefit to the impoverished ones.
	Although critical of the state socialist regimes of his day, Russell was no ardent devotee of capitalism.
	He seems to have recognised it as the superior system, but also recognised that it was far from perfect.
	He found the sheer size and worldwide scale to which the institutions could grow worrisome, concerned about the psychological state of the individual within a system every bit as impersonal as a totalitarian one, if not every bit as oppressive.
	The problem, he observed, was that industrialization had turned the individual labourer into an interchangeable cog in a vast, indifferent machine.
	The factory process upended the old order of skilled craftsmen who took pride in their work, reducing the required skill set of a worker to a single place on a factory line.
	He was concerned that the requisites for the work had changed.
	No longer was the worker challenged and given opportunity to be creative and show initiative.
	Steadiness and reliability are certainly very useful qualities, but if they are all a man's work demands of him, it is not likely that he will find his work interesting, and it is pretty certain that such satisfaction as his life may offer him will have to be found outside working hours.
	In Russell's view, the nature of such labour over an extended period of time would become a burden on the worker and drive down his self-esteem.
	He believed the pride of the worker would diminish, as the industrial worker had no actual ownership over the product of his labour.
	Russell placed a great deal of importance on a man's self-respect, noting that in previous eras, self-respect as a virtue was a privilege available only to the aristocratic minority.
	Among the things which are in danger of being unnecessarily sacrificed to democratic equality, perhaps the most important is self-respect.
	By self-respect, I mean the good half of pride, what is called proper pride.
	The bad half is a sense of superiority.
	Self-respect will keep a man from being abject when he is in the power of his enemies, and will enable him to feel that he may be in the right when the world is against him.
	If a man has not this quality, he will feel that majority opinion, or governmental opinion, is to be treated as infallible, and such a way of feeling, if it is general, makes both moral and intellectual progress impossible.
	The disconnect between the worker and the product of his labour would be a persistent problem with industrial societies, causing workers to become disinterested in their work and listless in their lives, losing their sense of self-respect and causing stagnation and societal malaise.
	Russell argued that perhaps the most important problem would be making the work itself interesting to the worker.
	The low barrier to entry for such work and the overall monotony of the job creates a non-dependence on any one labour force, disenfranchising the worker from the business and forcing him to search outside of work for satisfaction, turning his livelihood into a burden and depriving him of professional pride.
	The disconnect between the managers and the workers divides them into two separate classes with opposing objectives, the managers attempting to extract the maximum amount of work for the minimum expense with no care of the workers' incentives to spend the least amount of time at work and no care that the work is done beyond the minimum requirements.
	Russell observes that this effect occurs whether the industry is privately or publicly owned, because it is an expression of the working conditions and not the ideological framework in which it operates.
	What is needed is local, small-scale democracy in all internal affairs.
	Foremen and managers should be elected by those over whom they have authority.
	The impersonal and remote character of those in authority over an industrial undertaking is fatal to any proprietorial interest on the part of the ordinary employee.
	Russell believed that the sheer extent of the modern state and its mechanisms stifle the ability and the will of the individual to innovate, both morally and scientifically.
	This is not restricted to totalitarian states, only exemplified in them in its most diabolically perfect form.
	Any state of great size, even the freedom-loving Western democracies, contain expanding private and government institutions run by sluggish bureaucracies that cause society to stagnate.
	As its institutions become ossified and oppressive, ever more ready to serve their own interests before the interest of the public, they turn public servants into the enemy of the individual after the individual willingly put himself at the mercy of the public servants.
	In a highly organized community, those who exercise governmental functions, from ministers down to the most junior employees in local offices, have their own private interests, which by no means coincide with those of the community.
	Of these, love of power and dislike of work are the chief.
	A civil servant who says no to a project satisfies at once his pleasure in exercising authority and his disinclination for effort, and so he comes to seem, and to a certain extent be, the enemy of those whom he is supposed to serve.
	To the ordinary voter, so far from finding himself the source of all of the power of the army, navy, police, and civil service, feels himself their humble subject, whose duty is, as the Chinese used to say, to tremble and obey.
	The scale of modern society had reached a point beyond the individual's capacity to have any particular effect.
	Whereas in previous eras, a lone genius could create a work of art or scientific discovery that would forever alter the course of human history, the world of Russell's time had become scientifically advanced enough that this was no longer possible.
	The energetic people are therefore forced to join an institution to realize their desires.
	This puts the individual in a position where, to reach their goal, they must labour on projects not their own, and increases the size and importance of the institution and its bureaucracy.
	This is a cause of Russell's contention that the scale of society is escaping the power of the common man to influence.
	In the modern world, and still more, so far as can be guessed, in the world of the near future, important achievement is and will be almost impossible to an individual if he cannot dominate some vast organization.
	But the man who works without the help of an organization, like a Hebrew prophet, a poet, or a solitary philosopher such as Spinoza, can no longer hope for the kind of importance such men had in former days.
	The importance of great individuals being able to achieve without heading a great institution was that the great individual was usually at the head of a community of like-minded people of a similar stripe.
	Russell believed that to achieve the spirit of competitiveness, it was necessary to have local rivalry amongst the men of energy.
	He considered the competition of a wide variety of lesser men to be invaluable in honing the perfection of the craft.
	Not only were there opportunities for talented men of less than exceptional ability to express their energy, but these communities became an environment in which creativity could flourish and upon which the great men honed their craft.
	Russell noted that there was a tendency for those in control of a system to regard the system as an end in and of itself, and to regard the people operating within the system to have a purpose beyond serving their own needs and living happy lives.
	This is counter to the individualist view of society that he held, in which society should be the means to achieve the satisfaction of the people who comprise it.
	Our political and social thinking is prone to what may be called the administrator's fallacy, by which I mean the habit of looking upon a society as a systematic whole, of a sort that is thought good if it is pleasant to contemplate as a model of order, a planned organism, with parts that neatly dovetailed into each other.
	But a society does not, or at least should not, exist to satisfy an external survey, but to bring a good life to the individuals who compose it.
	He binds his thesis together with a call for a new order, which he summarizes in the final lecture.
	Russell believed that the most effective way to combine security with ingenuity was through a stable democratic world government, in which power was highly devolved to a municipal level.
	Security and justice require centralized governmental control, which must extend to the creation of a world government if it is to be effective.
	Progress, on the contrary, requires the utmost scope for personal initiative that is compatible with social order.
	The method of securing as much as possible of both of these aims is devolution.
	The world government must leave national governments free in everything not involved in the prevention of war.
	National governments, in their turn, must leave as much scope as possible to local authorities.
	Russell was one of the premier English intellectuals of his day, and authority in the individual is written in unpretentious language, evidently Born from a desire to clearly transmit robust ideas to an audience of laymen.
	Though barely breaking 100 pages, these lectures are packed with complex multi-dimensional ideas laid out in a simple but persuasive manner, and at once a refutation of continental collectivism for its brutish means and calamitous ends,

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