Seventy-six Years Ago, Bertrand Russell Described Donald Trump

 

I just stumbled across a talk by Bertrand Russell from December of 1950. It is in acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature that year.

 Russell, who died in 1970 at age 97, was a renowned British philosopher and mathematician.  One web site describes him as “one of humanity’s most lucid and luminous minds — an oracle of timeless wisdom …”

And, as you see from the photo below, the guy even looked like he ought to be smart.

British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic, political activist and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell, 17 June 1957

 

Anyway, in this talk, Russell posits that four things drive human behavior in “politically important” ways. They are:

(1) Acquisitiveness – the desire to acquire things, with greed being the logical extreme. (Not to be confused with inquisitiveness, ie. curiosity.)

(2) Rivalry – ie. competition

(3) Vanity – with narcissism being the logical extreme

(4) Love of power

Seventy-six years after Russell’s speech, it seems obvious he was correct. People who end up at the top of many modern organizations are disproportionately driven by Russell’s four motivators. Our highly structured, highly competitive, highly bureaucratic societies seem to produce “leaders” who are driven by them to the point of mental ill-health.

 

Exhibit A:  Trump

What scares me profoundly is the extreme degree to which – 76 years after Russell pointed them out -- these four motives define the current president of the United States. Russell, in effect, predicted Trump.

Consider:

Donald Trump’s greed is so legendary that to call it acquisitiveness would be a gross understatement.

He takes “rivalry” to absurd levels, seeking vengeance on anyone who crosses him.

His vanity seems boundless, what with the tanning-booth face, the strangely quaffed hair, the bottomless craving for attention, and the neurotic drive to have his name put on things.

And finally, his love of power, by all indications, is up there with the worst tyrants in world history.

This last – the love of power – is certainly the scariest trait in anyone who happens to find himself in charge of something as potentially destructive as the U.S. Empire. Even scarier, as Russell notes, is that:

 Power, like vanity, is insatiable. Nothing short of omnipotence could satisfy it completely. … It is, indeed, by far the strongest motive in the lives of important men.

In other words, it is profoundly addictive, as the love of it “is greatly increased by the experience of power.”

This all begs the question: is Trump the fundamental problem or is he merely a symptom of a culture that reinforces the four motives identified by Russell 75 years ago? Or, as Christopher Hedges puts it, is Trump merely “something vomited up” by an unhealthy system?

The answer is probably both. Getting rid of Trump may not solve our societal ills. But leaving him in charge will absolutely make them worse.

After all, when somebody tosses their cookies, the first thing to do is clean up the vomit.

End