The Conquest of Happiness — Chapter-by-Chapter Outline

Author: Bertrand Russell First published: 1930 Edition covered: The standard 1930 first edition (London: George Allen & Unwin, first published October 1930), verified chapter-by-chapter against the 1930 first US edition (New York: Horace Liveright, copyright 1930) and the Routledge Classics reissue (paperback, ISBN 978-0-415-37847-5), which reprints the same text. The book has 17 chapters in two parts — Part I "Causes of Unhappiness" (chapters 1–9) and Part II "Causes of Happiness" (chapters 10–17) — preceded by a short Preface and a Walt Whitman epigraph ("I think I could turn and live with animals…"). All chapters were present in both 1930 first editions and in later printings compared; no chapters were added or removed between editions. The chapter list was locked from the printed tables of contents of the two 1930 first editions on the Internet Archive, then cross-checked against Open Library, Google Books, Project Gutenberg, and the Routledge product page.

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Central thesis

Russell argues that most ordinary unhappiness in the modern world is not forced on us by fate but is caused by mistaken views of the world, mistaken ethics, and mistaken habits of life that turn attention inward upon the self. The typical unhappy person is self-absorbed — a "sinner" obsessed with guilt, a narcissist obsessed with admiration, or a megalomaniac obsessed with power — or else has so far despaired of satisfaction that he seeks only distraction and oblivion. The cure is not a change of philosophy but a change of direction: happiness is achieved by directing passions and interests outward, toward other persons and toward the objective world, so that the self is no longer the center of attention.

The book's scope is deliberately individual and practical. Russell sets aside the great social questions — war, economic exploitation, education in cruelty and fear — and asks what a man or woman, here and now, with a sufficient income and ordinary health, can do to escape day-to-day unhappiness. His method is common sense checked by his own experience: he states in the Preface that the recipes offered are "such as are confirmed by my own experience and observation," and that they increased his own happiness whenever he acted on them.

The positive program of Part II is equally simple. Happiness requires zest — a natural appetite for the world; affection — robust, reciprocal, unpossessive love; the family, where it can be made to work; work that exercises skill and builds something; impersonal interests that give the mind rest and a sense of proportion; and a balance of effort and resignation. The happy man is "the man who lives objectively, who has free affections and wide interests," a citizen of the universe who feels himself part of the stream of life rather than a hard separate entity.

What can a man or woman, here and now, in the midst of our nostalgic society, do to achieve happiness for himself or herself? … 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.

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Chapter 1 — What Makes People Unhappy?

Central question

Why are human beings, alone among animals, so widely unhappy even when they have health and enough to eat — and what, in ordinary life, can the individual do about it?

Main argument

The universality of unhappiness. Russell opens with the contrast between animals, "happy so long as they have health and enough to eat," and human beings, who in the modern world mostly are not. He invites the reader to practice "the art of reading faces" and surveys New York crowds: the work-hour crowd shows "anxiety, excessive concentration, dyspepsia, lack of interest in anything but the struggle, incapacity for play"; the weekend motoring crowd pursues pleasure "at the pace of the slowest car in the procession," seized at odd moments by "unutterable boredom"; at a gay evening people get drunk quickly because "drink and petting are the gateways to joy," until alcohol "liberate[s] the sense of sin, which reason suppresses in saner moments."

The book's scope: the individual, not the system. The causes of unhappiness lie partly in the social system and partly in individual psychology. Russell deliberately excludes the social questions (war, economic exploitation, education in cruelty and fear) and confines himself to those not subject to extreme outward misery — assuming sufficient income, health, and no great catastrophes such as the loss of one's children or public disgrace. The target is "the ordinary day-to-day unhappiness from which most people in civilized countries suffer," which appears inescapable precisely because it has no obvious external cause.

Autobiography as evidence. Russell offers his own history: his favourite childhood hymn was "Weary of earth and laden with my sin"; at five he reflected that at seventy he had endured only a fourteenth of his life and found the prospect almost unendurable; in adolescence he hated life and was "continually on the verge of suicide," restrained only by the desire to know more mathematics. Now, he reports, he enjoys life more with every year — partly by acquiring what he most desired, partly by dismissing certain unattainable objects of desire (such as "indubitable knowledge"), but "very largely" by "a diminishing preoccupation with myself." External interests bring their own pains — war, hard knowledge, the death of friends — "but pains of these kinds do not destroy the essential quality of life, as do those that spring from disgust with self." Self-absorption, by contrast, leads to no progressive activity: it may lead to a diary, to psycho-analysis, or to a monastery; and the monk "will not be happy until the routine of the monastery has made him forget his own soul." For the deeply self-absorbed, "external discipline is the only road to happiness."

The three types of self-absorption. Russell analyzes the "sinner," the narcissist, and the megalomaniac:

• The sinner is absorbed in the consciousness of sin, perpetually incurring his own disapproval. He still accepts the prohibitions of infancy — swearing, drinking, business shrewdness, above all sex are wicked — so his pleasures are "all poisoned"; he desires the approving caress of his mother, can accept no woman who is not degraded by sex, becomes cruel, repents, and starts "the dreary round of imagined sin and real remorse."
• The narcissist admires himself and wishes to be admired; in excess this dries up the capacity for love (rich Society women who lose interest in a man once he loves them; the hero of Liaisons Dangereuses). The narcissist can never succeed in work because "all serious success in work depends upon some genuine interest in the material"; the politician's tragedy is the substitution of narcissism for interest in the community.
• The megalomaniac wishes to be powerful rather than charming, feared rather than loved; "to this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men in history." Alexander the Great, "psychologically of the same type as the lunatic," could not achieve his own dream, which "enlarged its scope as his achievement grew"; Napoleon's inferiority at school drove him to humiliate his schoolfellows and led, via the Czar, to Saint Helena. "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 common pattern and the final assumption. All these causes share a pattern: the unhappy man, deprived in youth of some normal satisfaction, comes to value that one satisfaction above all others, giving his life "a one-sided direction" and emphasizing achievement over activity. A further modern development is the man who seeks no satisfaction at all but only "distraction and oblivion" — the devotee of "pleasure," for whom drunkenness is "temporary suicide." Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, "are always proud of the fact," like the fox who had lost his tail; the way to cure them is to show them how to grow a new one. Russell closes by assuming 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."

Key ideas

• Unhappiness in civilized countries is largely due to mistaken views of the world, mistaken ethics, and mistaken habits of life — matters within the individual's power.
• The root of most ordinary unhappiness is self-absorption, which destroys "that natural zest and appetite for possible things" on which all happiness depends.
• Self-absorption takes three typical forms: the sense of sin, narcissism, and megalomania (love of power), each a one-sided exaggeration of a normal element of human nature.
• External interests may bring pain, but their pains do not destroy the quality of life as self-disgust does; every external interest is a preventive of ennui.
• The typical unhappy man overvalues one kind of satisfaction and overemphasizes achievement as opposed to activity; the man who seeks only oblivion has given up hope.
• Unhappy people are proud of their unhappiness, like the fox proud of his lost tail; most would choose happiness if they saw a way of being happy.
• External discipline (the monk's routine, the crossing-sweeper's work) is the only road to happiness for those too deeply self-absorbed to be cured otherwise.

Key takeaway

Ordinary unhappiness is not a fate but a misdirection of attention: the unhappy man is imprisoned in himself, and the first step toward happiness is to get outside the prison.

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Chapter 2 — Byronic Unhappiness

Central question

Is pessimism — the belief that life is empty and nothing worth doing — the only attitude available to the enlightened man, or is it a mood mistaken for a philosophy?

Main argument

The three witnesses for pessimism. Russell takes up the view, "common in our day," that the wise have seen through all the enthusiasms of earlier times and found nothing left to live for. Its exponents are genuinely unhappy, but "proud of their unhappiness," attributing it to the nature of the universe and considering it "the only rational attitude for an enlightened man." He names three spokesmen: Joseph Wood Krutch, whose The Modern Temper represents the mood for modern Americans ("Ours is a lost cause and there is no place for us in the natural universe, but we are not, for all that, sorry to be human. We should rather die as men than live as animals"); Byron, for the previous generation; and Ecclesiastes, for all time.

Mood and its intellectual expression. The decisive distinction is between a mood and its intellectual expression: "There is no arguing with a mood; it can be changed by some fortunate event, or by a change in our bodily condition, but it cannot be changed by argument." Russell has felt the "all is vanity" mood himself and emerged from it "not by means of any philosophy, but owing to some imperative necessity of action" — a sick child, a lost fortune. The feeling is "born of a too easy satisfaction of natural needs": the human animal is adapted to struggle, and the man who can gratify all his whims without effort concludes that attainment does not bring happiness, "forgetting that to be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness."

Ecclesiastes examined as an argument. The intellectual arguments of Ecclesiastes — the rivers run into the sea and the sea is not full; there is no new thing under the sun; no remembrance of former things; the heir reaps what I have labored — are dismantled one by one:

• "No new thing under the sun"? What about skyscrapers, aeroplanes, and the broadcast speeches of politicians? A press-cutting agency and the wireless would have forced Solomon to "give his pessimism a new expression." If both the absence and the presence of novelty are equally annoying, neither can be the true cause of despair.
• The rivers' cycle is only a ground for pessimism "if travel is unpleasant"; people go to health resorts and return, "and this does not prove that it is futile to go to health resorts in the summer."
• Leaving things to one's heir "may be looked at from two points of view: from the point of view of the heir it is distinctly less disastrous."
• That all things pass is no ground for pessimism: if they are succeeded by better things that is a reason for optimism; and if they are succeeded by exactly like things, the process is not futile "unless the various stages of the cycle are themselves painful."

The pernicious habit of living for the future. "The habit of looking to the future and thinking that the whole meaning of the present lies in what it will bring forth is a pernicious one. There can be no value in the whole unless there is value in the parts." Life is not a melodrama in which misfortunes are compensated by a happy ending. If Russell lived forever, "the joys of life would inevitably in the end lose their savour"; mortality keeps them "perennially fresh": "I warmed both hands before the fire of life; / It sinks, and I am ready to depart."

Krutch's pathos and the real causes of despair. The Modern Temper is "pathetic" rather than tragic: Krutch is sad because the medieval certainties have crumbled, and blames science for not fulfilling promises it never made. Russell counters with Roger Bacon's thirteenth century — an age of faith whose literary men found "boundless corruption" everywhere; "few ages have been more despairing than the thirteenth century" despite its faith. The causes of epochal pessimism are "war, poverty, and violence," not metaphysics.

Love, the Victorians, and the sex taboo. Krutch's chapter on love is answered with personal testimony: Russell's two old ladies (the Puritan who found love an uninteresting subject, the Voltairean who preferred breaking the seventh commandment to the sixth because "it requires the consent of the other party") hardly match Krutch's picture; Browning's "two soul-sides" doctrine is "stuffy." Russell's own creed: love is not the Victorian's sanctified refuge but "adventurous and open-eyed," a "source of delight" that "enhances all the best pleasures" and "break[s] down the hard shell of the ego," since it is "a form of biological co-operation." The solitary philosophies — the Stoics, the early Christians, the worshippers of power or personal pleasure — all err, because "man depends upon co-operation." Where modern cynicism about love appears, its causes are "the tyranny of the old ideals over the unconscious, and the absence of a rational ethic."

Tragedy and the size of the modern world. Krutch's claim that Ibsen's Ghosts is inferior to King Lear is conceded — but the reason is democracy, not disillusion: we can no longer regard certain individuals as "the great ones of the earth" whose deaths blaze forth in the heavens while beggars die unmarked. Modern tragedy must concern itself with the community; Russell cites Ernst Toller's The Mass-Man as "justly comparable" to the best tragedy of past ages. The cure for literary despair is contact with real life: to the talented young men who feel there is nothing to do, Russell says — give up trying to write; "become a pirate, a king in Borneo, a labourer in Soviet Russia"; after some years, "the ex-intellectual will find that in spite of his efforts he can no longer refrain from writing, and when this time comes his writing will not seem to him futile."

Key ideas

• The pessimistic pose mistakes a mood for an argument; moods cannot be refuted, but they can be outgrown, and reason "lays no embargo upon happiness."
• Unhappiness is usually prior to the "world-view": those who attribute their sorrows to their views "are putting the cart before the horse."
• Ecclesiastes' pessimism collapses because each of its premises is compatible with enjoyment — the cycle of rivers, the transience of things, the heir who inherits.
• The future-oriented ethic — value only in the outcome — is pernicious; value must reside in the parts of life, not only in the whole.
• Epochal pessimism is caused by war, poverty, and violence, not by the loss of faith; the despairing thirteenth century had faith in plenty.
• Love is a source of delight, an enhancer of all pleasures, and the first form of the biological co-operation on which human happiness depends; solitary philosophies are false to our instincts.
• Modern tragedy is democratic and communal; the "disease" of literary despair is cured by action and contact with the world, not by more introspection.

Key takeaway

Pessimism is not the verdict of reason on the universe but a symptom of misdirected lives, and it dissolves when the pessimist is forced into action and outward interest.

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Chapter 3 — Competition

Central question

Why is the "struggle for life" of the modern business man so destructive of happiness, and what is wrong with the philosophy that makes competitive success the purpose of life?

Main argument

The struggle for success, not for life. The American or English business man names "the struggle for life" as what most interferes with his enjoyment of existence — "he will say this in all sincerity; he will believe it." Russell distinguishes the real struggle (Conrad's hero Falk, on a derelict ship with firearms and nothing to eat but the other men, who won and "was ever after a vegetarian") from what the business man means: "the struggle for success." What men fear is not that they will fail to get their breakfast "but that they will fail to outshine their neighbours."

The treadmill. Men do not realize "that they are not caught in the grip of a mechanism from which there is no escape, but that the treadmill is one upon which they remain merely because they have not noticed that it fails to take them up to a higher level." The portrait of the successful executive: he wakes while his charming wife and children sleep, hurries to the office, cultivates "a firm jaw, a decisive manner of speech, and an air of sagacious reserve"; his working life "has the psychology of a hundred-yards race, but as the race upon which he is engaged is one whose only goal is the grave, the concentration… becomes in the end somewhat excessive." He knows nothing of his children (Sundays are for golf), nothing of his wife, has no real friends, knows springtime and harvest only as they affect the market, finds books futile and music highbrow. On the European holiday with his wife and daughters he is "utterly weary, utterly bored," wondering what is happening at the office.

The religion of money. The business man's torment is compared to suttee: "The business man's religion and glory demand that he should make much money; therefore, like the Hindu widow, he suffers the torment gladly. If the American business man is to be made happier, he must first change his religion." Illustrations:

• Almost every American would rather get 8 per cent from a risky investment than 4 per cent from a safe one — hence "frequent losses of money and continual worry and fret."
• "Money made is the accepted measure of brains": when the market is ticklish, a man "feels the way young people feel during an examination."
• Genuine though irrational fears survive — Arnold Bennett's Clayhanger, however rich, continued to fear dying in the workhouse; those who suffered poverty in childhood are haunted by terrors for their children.

Success is only one ingredient. Russell grants that success makes enjoyment easier (the obscure painter recognized at last) and that money up to a point increases happiness. His claim is narrower: "success can only be one ingredient in happiness, and is too dearly purchased if all the other ingredients have been sacrificed to obtain it."

Why America is the extreme case. In Europe the learned professions, the army and navy, and the aristocracy still command respect "not just success, but that excellence… to which success has been due"; no one respects a scientist more for making money, and poverty in a general is "in a sense, itself an honour." In America the professional man imitates the business man, professors are "the hired servants of business men," and "throughout the well-to-do classes… there is nothing to mitigate the bare undiluted fight for financial success." American boys learn early that education has no value unless pecuniary; the rich man never reads, buys pictures by experts "not the pleasure of looking at them, but the pleasure of preventing some other rich man from having them," and at last "five minutes a day will bring him more than he knows how to spend."

The competitive habit invades everything. Competition poisons even reading: books are read to boast about, and the Book Clubs never select Hamlet or King Lear. The art of conversation, perfected in the eighteenth-century French salons and still alive in China ten years ago, is dying; American students walk through a wood "filled with exquisite wild flowers, but not one of my guides knew the name of even one of them. What use would such knowledge be? It could not add to anybody's income."

The received philosophy of life and its biological verdict. The trouble arises "from the generally received philosophy of life, according to which life is a contest, a competition, in which respect is to be accorded to the victor," which leads to "an undue cultivation of the will at the expense of the senses and the intellect" — a Puritan inheritance. The "modern dinosaurs" who prefer power to intelligence are imitated everywhere, but "the dinosaurs did not ultimately triumph; they killed each other out, and intelligent bystanders inherited their kingdom." Competition as the main thing in life is "too grim, too tenacious, too much a matter of taut muscles and intent will" to last more than a generation or two: it produces nervous fatigue, escape phenomena, tense pleasures, and "in the end a disappearance of the stock through sterility" — the business class does not average two children per marriage. "Those whose outlook on life causes them to feel so little happiness that they do not care to beget children are biologically doomed. Before very long they must be succeeded by something gayer and jollier." The cure is "admitting the part of sane and quiet enjoyment in a balanced ideal of life."

Key ideas

• The "struggle for life" of the business man is really the struggle for success — a fight to outshine neighbours, not to survive.
• Competitive success as the purpose of life is a religion, and the business man, like the Hindu widow, must change his religion before he can be happier.
• Success and money are ingredients of happiness, not its whole; beyond a point money stops increasing happiness.
• The competitive habit invades regions where it does not belong — reading, conversation, art, nature — destroying the capacity for enjoyment and civilized standards.
• America shows the pure form of the disease because nothing mitigates the financial fight there; Europe's professions and services still honor excellence as such.
• A life of taut will at the expense of the senses and intellect (a Puritan legacy) ends in nervous fatigue, escape, and sterility — the "modern dinosaurs" are biologically doomed.
• The remedy is a balanced ideal of life that admits "sane and quiet enjoyment" as a legitimate part.

Key takeaway

Competition is a poison not because success is worthless but because the philosophy that makes it the sole end starves every other ingredient of happiness and finally destroys the stock that lives by it.

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Chapter 4 — Boredom and Excitement

Central question

What role does boredom play in human life, and why has the modern flight from boredom become a source of unhappiness rather than a cure for it?

Main argument

Boredom as a great motive power. Boredom "has been, I believe, one of the great motive powers throughout the historical epoch, and is so at the present day more than ever," yet it has "received far less attention than it deserves." It is distinctively human: animals in nature are busy looking for enemies or food, mating, or keeping warm; they are not bored. Its two essentials are "the contrast between present circumstances and some other more agreeable circumstances" and faculties not fully occupied. Boredom is "a thwarted desire for events, not necessarily pleasant ones… such as will enable the victim of ennui to know one day from another." Hence the definitional turn: "The opposite of boredom, in a word, is not pleasure, but excitement."

The historical decline of boredom. With agriculture, life grew dull; the hunting stage was exciting, war and courtship were exciting. Contrary to the philanthropists, "the machine age has enormously diminished the sum of boredom in the world." The old "happy family time" meant that "paterfamilias went to sleep, his wife knitted, and the daughters wished they were dead or at Timbuktu." Imagine the monotony of a medieval village winter — no reading, only candles, impassable roads — "it must have been boredom as much as anything that led to the practice of witch hunts as the sole sport by which winter evenings could be enlivened." "Wars, pogroms, and persecutions have all been part of the flight from boredom; even quarrels with neighbours have been found better than nothing. Boredom is therefore a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it."

The modern fear of boredom. "We are less bored than our ancestors were, but we are more afraid of boredom." Every housemaid expects weekly as much excitement as would have lasted a Jane Austen heroine "throughout a whole novel." Those who can afford it move perpetually from place to place, "always expecting to enjoy these more in a new place." But "the mornings are boring in proportion as the previous evenings were amusing," and "perhaps some element of boredom is a necessary ingredient in life."

Two kinds of boredom. There are two sorts: the fructifying kind, which "arises from the absence of drugs," and the stultifying kind, which arises "from the absence of vital activities." The craving for drugs (and for every kind of excitement) requires ever stronger stimuli — "a person accustomed to too much excitement is like a person with a morbid craving for pepper." Too much excitement "substitut[es] titillations for profound organic satisfactions, cleverness for wisdom, and jagged surprises for beauty." A certain power of enduring boredom "is one of the things that ought to be taught to the young."

Great books and great lives are mostly quiet. "All great books contain boring portions, and all great lives have contained uninteresting stretches." The modern publisher would demand that the Old Testament "pick out the high lights"; but "a novel which sparkles from the first page to the last is pretty sure not to be a great book." The lives of great men: Socrates, Kant (never more than ten miles from Königsberg), Darwin (all his life in his own house after going round the world), Marx (the British Museum). "No great achievement is possible without persistent work, so absorbing and so difficult that little energy is left over for the more strenuous kinds of amusement."

The education of childhood and the rhythm of the Earth. Children should learn to endure monotony: modern parents provide "far too many passive amusements, such as shows and good things to eat," whereas the pleasures of childhood "should in the main be such as the child extracts himself from his environment by means of some effort and inventiveness." A child develops best "when, like a young plant, he is left undisturbed in the same soil"; Wordsworth's Prelude would have been impossible to "a sophisticated urban youth." "A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow processes of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers, as though they were cut flowers in a vase."

The chapter rises to its most affirmative passage: "we are creatures of Earth; our life is part of the life of the Earth." A two-year-old boy taken from London to winter country "kneeled in the wet ground and put his face in the grass" in "strange ecstasy"; the same joy, in its civilized expression, fills Shakespeare's lyrics — "Hark, hark, the lark." Love "is part of the life of the Earth; sex without love is not." The special boredom of modern urban populations is "intimately bound up with their separation from the life of the Earth," and the rich suffer the worst boredom "due, paradoxical as this may seem, to their fear of boredom": "In flying from the fructifying kind of boredom, they fall a prey to the other far worse kind." Hence the chapter's last word: "A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live."

Key ideas

• Boredom is a thwarted desire for events; its opposite is excitement, not pleasure, and it has been a great historical motive power — half the sins of mankind spring from fear of it.
• The machine age diminished boredom; we are less bored than our ancestors but more afraid of boredom.
• There are two kinds: fructifying boredom (absence of drugs) and stultifying boredom (absence of vital activities); the flight from the first produces the second.
• Excitement is like pepper or a drug: continually stronger stimuli are needed, and the palate for profound pleasures is dulled.
• Enduring monotony is a skill of childhood; passive amusements produce adults incapable of fruitful monotony — "a generation of little men."
• Great achievement requires persistent, absorbing work; great lives are mostly quiet.
• Contact with the life of the Earth — primitive, simple, massive — is a profound organic need, and its starvation is a cause of the modern special boredom.

Key takeaway

Boredom is not an evil to be abolished but a capacity to be cultivated: a happy life must be largely a quiet life, for only in quiet can true joy live.

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Chapter 5 — Fatigue

Central question

Why are modern people so tired, and how much of their fatigue is caused by overwork rather than by worry, fear, and undisciplined thought?

Main argument

Physical versus nervous fatigue. Purely physical fatigue, not excessive, "tends if anything to be a cause of happiness" — sound sleep, good appetite, zest for holidays; excessive physical toil (peasant women old at thirty, children stunted by early industrialism, the same still in China and Japan) is "atrocious torture." But in advanced communities the serious fatigue is nervous fatigue, "most pronounced among the well-to-do" — more among business men and brain-workers than wage-earners.

The unconscious drains on the nerves. Modern urban life fatigues without our noticing:

• Noise, mostly not heard consciously, "wear[s] him out, all the more owing to the subconscious effort involved in not hearing it."
• The constant presence of strangers: the instinct to investigate every stranger must be inhibited in the rush-hour Underground, and "the result of inhibiting it is that they feel a general diffused rage against all the strangers."
• The hurry to catch the morning train, with "the resulting dyspepsia"; the fear of the sack on one side and of bankruptcy on the other.

Worry, not work, is the cause of breakdown. "To a great extent fatigue in such cases is due to worry, and worry could be prevented by a better philosophy of life and a little more mental discipline." Men take their business worries to bed and rehearse them "in that half-insane way that characterizes the troubled meditations of insomnia." The prescriptions:

• The orderly mind: "It is amazing how much both happiness and efficiency can be increased by the cultivation of an orderly mind, which thinks about a matter adequately at the right time rather than inadequately at all times." When a decision must be made, make it once the data are available, and do not revise it unless new facts appear: "Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile."
• The unimportance of our doings: Russell's own cure for stage fright was "to feel that it did not matter whether I spoke well or ill, the universe would remain much the same in either case" — and the less he cared, the less badly he spoke. "Our doings are not so important as we naturally suppose; our successes and failures do not after all matter very much."
• The ego is no very large part of the world: the man who centres his thoughts on something transcending self finds "a certain peace in the ordinary troubles of life which is impossible to the pure egoist."

The hygiene of the nerves and the unconscious. The important kind of fatigue is "always emotional in modern life"; intellectual and muscular fatigue "produces its own remedy in sleep," but emotional fatigue "interferes with rest" — the more tired, the more impossible to stop. A symptom of approaching nervous breakdown is "the belief that one's work is terribly important"; if Russell were a medical man, he would prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important, since breakdown is in every case produced by emotional trouble from which the patient "attempts to escape by means of his work."

The conscious mind can act on the unconscious: a conscious thought "can be planted into the unconscious if a sufficient amount of vigour and intensity is put into it." Russell's own technique for difficult writing is to think with great intensity for a few hours or days, then "give orders, so to speak, that the work is to proceed underground" — and after some months find the work done. For anxieties: "consider seriously and deliberately what is the very worst that could possibly happen," look it in the face, give yourself sound reasons for thinking it no such terrible disaster — "at the worst nothing that happens to oneself has any cosmic importance" — and worry diminishes extraordinarily. "Worry is a form of fear, and all forms of fear produce fatigue"; fear "grows worse by not being looked at," so the proper course is to think about it "rationally and calmly, but with great concentration, until it has become completely familiar" — until the subject becomes boring and the mind turns away of its own accord.

Courage and the defective morality of fear. Modern morality expects physical courage in war of men, and no courage of women; indifference to public opinion is punished. "Every form of courage, whether in men or women, should be admired as much as physical courage is admired in a soldier" — and courage can be produced by a public opinion that demands it. "Given more courage there would be less worry, and therefore less fatigue; for a very large proportion of the nervous fatigues from which men and women suffer at present are due to fears, conscious or unconscious."

Excitement, marriage, and the screen of fatigue. A frequent source of fatigue is the love of excitement — the pleasures easiest to obtain "are mostly of a sort to wear out the nerves," and men often have to postpone marriage so long that "excitement has become a habit." (The reference to Judge Lindsey's attempt to legalize early marriage leads Russell to postpone the topic to the chapter on Envy.) The radical cure is "a change of public morals"; meanwhile "a prudent man can only ration himself." Finally, nervous fatigue acts "as a sort of screen between a man and the outside world": impressions reach him "muffled and muted," he derives no pleasure from meals or sunshine, and rest becomes impossible — "at bottom a penalty for having lost that contact with Earth of which we spoke in the preceding chapter."

Key ideas

• The serious fatigue of modern life is nervous, not muscular or intellectual; physical fatigue is even a cause of happiness.
• Noise, the inhibition of instinct before strangers, and the hurry of commuting are unconscious drains on the nerves.
• The harm attributed to overwork is almost never due to work but to worry and anxiety; emotional fatigue interferes with rest, so the tired man cannot stop.
• An orderly mind — thinking about matters at the right time, deciding once and not revising — cures insomnia, promotes efficiency, and increases happiness.
• The worst-case technique and the deliberate planting of rational convictions into the unconscious are practical cures for worry and fear.
• Fear of every kind produces fatigue; all forms of courage should be cultivated as physical courage is in war.
• The love of excitement is itself a source of fatigue, and nervous fatigue screens a man from the world, ending in loss of contact with Earth.

Key takeaway

Nervous fatigue is worry and fear misdirected through an undisciplined mind, and it is cured by mental discipline, the facing of worst cases, and the realization that our doings are not so important as we suppose.

Chapter 6 — Envy

Central question

Why is envy so universal and so destructive, and what can be done to diminish it in oneself and in society?

Main argument

Envy as the most unfortunate of human passions. Next to worry, envy is "one of the most potent causes of unhappiness" — "one of the most universal and deep-seated of human passions," visible in children before they are a year old, so that educators must observe "distributive justice, absolute, rigid, and unvarying." Among adults it shows in the maids who would not lift heavy weights once a pregnant colleague was excused; in the Underground, where every well-dressed woman draws "malevolent glances" and scandal is instantly believed; and among men toward rivals in the same profession — praise an artist to another artist, a politician to another politician of the same party, an Egyptologist to another Egyptologist, "and it is a hundred to one that you will have produced an explosion of jealousy." Leibniz and Huyghens wept crocodile tears in their correspondence over Newton's supposed madness — a rumour of eccentric behavior, and "the event which they were hypocritically lamenting had not taken place."

Why it is the worst of vices. "Of all the characteristics of ordinary human nature envy is the most unfortunate; not only does the envious person wish to inflict misfortune and do so whenever he can with impunity, but he is also himself rendered unhappy by envy." He derives pain from what others have instead of pleasure from what he has, and will deprive others of advantages as eagerly as secure them himself. Allowed to run riot, it "becomes fatal to all excellence": why should the medical man have a car while the labourer walks? Fortunately there is "a compensating passion, namely that of admiration. Whoever wishes to increase human happiness must wish to increase admiration and to diminish envy."

The cure for envy. For the saint, selflessness — though "even in the case of saints envy of other saints is by no means impossible" (St. Simeon Stylites on his pillar might not have been pleased to learn of a saint who had stood longer on a narrower one). For ordinary men and women "the only cure for envy… is happiness, and the difficulty is that envy is itself a terrible obstacle to happiness." Envy is immensely promoted by childhood misfortunes — a preferred sibling, parents without much parental feeling — producing the man who looks for injustices, perceives them when they occur and imagines them when they do not, "and having begun by believing that no one likes him, he at last by his behaviour makes his belief true."

To the envious man who objects that he cannot find happiness while he feels envy, Russell answers that "real life is never so logical as this": merely to realize the causes of one's envious feelings "is to take a long step towards curing them." The fatal habit is "thinking in terms of comparisons": the envious man cannot enjoy a sunny day because the springtime in Sicily is a thousand times more beautiful; the wise man's enjoyments do not cease "because someone else has something else." Envy is "one form of a vice, partly moral, partly intellectual, which consists in seeing things never in themselves, but only in their relations" — the salary that grows dim the moment one hears of a better one. Success cannot cure it, since "Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I daresay, envied Hercules, who never existed"; the escape is "enjoying the pleasures that come your way, by doing the work that you have to do, and by avoiding comparisons."

Modesty and the peacocks. "Unnecessary modesty has a great deal to do with envy": modest people believe themselves outshone, and are "particularly prone to envy." Russell would bring up a boy to think himself a fine fellow: "I do not believe that any peacock envies another peacock his tail, because every peacock is persuaded that his own tail is the finest in the world. The consequence of this is that peacocks are peaceable birds." The humble-peacock morality — envy "masquerading as morality" — would end with all the finest birds put to death and "a really splendid tail" only a dim memory.

Envy, democracy, and the modern age. Envy is closely connected with competition: "We do not envy a good fortune which we conceive as quite hopelessly out of our reach" — beggars do not envy millionaires, though they envy other beggars. The instability of social status and the equalitarian doctrines of democracy and socialism "have greatly extended the range of envy"; for the moment this is an evil "which must be endured in order to arrive at a more just social system." Yet "the kind of justice to be expected as a result of envy is likely to be the worst possible kind… rather in diminishing the pleasures of the fortunate than in increasing those of the unfortunate," and "it is not to be supposed that out of something as evil as envy good results will flow."

The deeper diagnosis. All bad things are interconnected: fatigue is a frequent cause of envy (inadequacy to one's work breeds discontent), and "by far the most important thing is to secure a life which is satisfying to instinct" — much professional envy "really has a sexual source," for a man happy in his marriage and children will not envy greater wealth. The English-speaking world lacks instinctive happiness, especially among women; "civilization in this respect appears to have gone astray," and if no remedy is found "our civilization is in danger of going down to destruction in an orgy of hatred." The press, the movies, and propaganda make the envious imagination planetary — and propaganda succeeds because "the human heart as modern civilization has made it is more prone to hatred than to friendship." The chapter ends on its most somber and hopeful note: the strained sadness of the apes at the Zoo is "the pain of those who walk through the night blindly"; "to find the right road out of this despair civilized man must enlarge his heart as he has enlarged his mind. He must learn to transcend self, and in so doing to acquire the freedom of the Universe."

Key ideas

• Envy is one of the most universal and deep-seated of passions, visible in infants and pervasive among adults, especially toward rivals in one's own field.
• The envious man is doubly punished: he wishes misfortune on others and is himself rendered unhappy, deriving pain from what others have.
• Admiration is the compensating passion; whoever wishes to increase human happiness must increase admiration and diminish envy.
• The cure for envy is happiness, approached by realizing its causes, abandoning the habit of comparison, and enjoying what comes one's way.
• Unnecessary modesty breeds envy; the peacock who thinks his own tail finest is peaceable.
• Democracy and social instability extend the range of envy; but justice built on envy diminishes the fortunate rather than raising the unfortunate.
• Envy is fed by fatigue and by instinctive dissatisfaction, and in the modern age it is the root of the hatred on which propaganda thrives.

Key takeaway

Envy is cured not by success — there is always a Caesar above a Napoleon — but by enjoying one's own pleasures, doing one's own work, and transcending self.

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Chapter 7 — The Sense of Sin

Central question

What is the sense of sin really, where does it come from, and why is it one of the most important psychological causes of unhappiness in adult life?

Main argument

Conscience demystified. The traditional religious psychology — that conscience reveals sinfulness and that remorse and repentance follow — is one "no modern psychologist can accept." Psycho-analysis has done its work: "We know that conscience enjoins different acts in different parts of the world, and that broadly speaking it is everywhere in agreement with tribal custom." What actually happens when conscience pricks:

• The simplest component is the fear of being found out — the respectable offender, the bank manager who has embezzled in a moment of stress, repents when discovery seems imminent.
• Allied to it is the fear of becoming an outcast from the herd — the card-cheat who has nothing within himself to stand against herd disapproval, unlike the religious innovator or the revolutionary, who feel the future is with them.
• The most important forms are rooted in the unconscious: acts labelled "Sin" for no reason visible to introspection, producing discomfort and a sense that "the best is not for him."

The infantile origin. "The source of all this in practically every case is the moral teaching which the man received before he was six years old at the hands of his mother or his nurse": swearing is wicked, drinking is wicked, tobacco incompatible with virtue, lying forbidden — "above all he learned that any interest in the sexual parts is an abomination." The child associated "something vaguely awful" with whatever made his mother's approval withdraw, and though he later forgot the origin of the code, "he did not throw off the moral code or cease to feel that something dreadful was liable to happen to him if he infringed it."

The irrationality of infantile morality. Large parts of this teaching "are devoid of all rational foundation." In a rational ethic "it will be held laudable to give pleasure to anyone, even to oneself, provided there is no counter-balancing pain"; the ascetic element — no saint would smoke, no saint would do anything solely because it gave him pleasure — is an unconscious survival. Russell defends his own lie to the fox hunt: "I do not think I should have been a better man if I had told the truth."

The sex taboo. "It is above all in the realm of sex that early moral teaching does harm." The sin–sex association formed by the age of six, reinforced by the Oedipus complex, makes many adult men "feel women to be degraded by sex, and cannot respect their wives unless their wives hate sexual intercourse"; the wife taught to be "pure" holds herself back. "The right rule is simple: until a child is nearing the age of puberty teach him or her no sexual morality whatever."

Compelling the unconscious. The problem is the one met in earlier chapters: compelling "the unconscious to take note of the rational beliefs that govern our conscious thought." Moments of weakness are not revelations — "The devil was sick, the devil a saint would be." The technique: whenever remorse comes for an act your reason does not condemn, "examine the causes of your feeling of remorse, and convince yourself in detail of their absurdity"; make conscious beliefs "so vivid and emphatic that they make an impression upon your unconscious"; do not be afraid of irreverence toward those who controlled your childhood.

The real sins. While imaginary dangers were guarded by "incredibly foolish prohibitions," the real moral dangers were unmentioned: "sharp practice in business of the sort not punished by law, harshness towards employees, cruelty towards wife and children, malevolence towards competitors, ferocity in political conflicts." Yet these are not what make a man feel an outcast when ill. "Our nominal morality has been formulated by priests and mentally enslaved women. It is time that men who have to take a normal part in the normal life of the world learned to rebel against this sickly nonsense." Russell is not proposing that a man be "destitute of morality, I am only suggesting that he should be destitute of superstitious morality, which is a very different thing."

The sense of sin is a cause of badness, not goodness. "The sense of sin, so far from being a cause of a good life, is quite the reverse": it makes a man unhappy and inferior; feeling inferior, "he will have a grudge against those who seem superior," will find admiration difficult and envy easy, and will become "a generally disagreeable person." What is needed is mental integration — "the various layers of a man's nature, conscious, subconscious, and unconscious, work together harmoniously and are not engaged in perpetual battle." Not an hour a day of self-examination, "since it increases self-absorption, which is part of the disease to be cured, for a harmonious personality is directed outward."

Rationality does not kill emotion. The common dislike of rationality rests on "an entirely erroneous conception of the function of reason in human life": "It is not the business of reason to generate emotions," and in passionate love, parental affection, friendship, benevolence, and devotion to science or art "there is nothing that reason should wish to diminish." "Nothing is so dull as to be encased in self, nothing so exhilarating as to have attention and energy directed outwards." The sickness may be "a necessary stage in mental development," and the man who passes beyond it by help of reason has reached a higher level. The touchstone of genuine happiness: "The happiness that is genuinely satisfying is accompanied by the fullest exercise of our faculties, and the fullest realization of the world in which we live."

Key ideas

• Conscience is not the voice of God but tribal custom internalized; its simplest forms are fear of detection and fear of the herd.
• The sense of sin is implanted before the age of six by mother or nurse, and survives in the unconscious long after its rational basis is gone.
• Infantile morality is largely irrational — swearing, alcohol, tobacco, and sex are condemned by ascetic taboos, not reason; the real sins (harshness, cruelty, malevolence, ferocity) go unmentioned.
• The sex taboo poisons the deepest of personal relations; the right rule is no sexual morality until puberty.
• Rational convictions can be planted into the unconscious with sufficient vigour and intensity; moments of weakness are not revelations.
• The sense of sin makes men unhappy, inferior, envious, and disagreeable; it produces bad conduct, not good.
• Mental integration — the harmonious working of all layers of the personality — is the goal, and a harmonious personality is directed outward.
• Reason does not diminish the emotions; the greatest happiness accompanies the fullest exercise of our faculties.

Key takeaway

The sense of sin is an infantile superstition that manufactures unhappiness and badness, and it must be rooted out — not morality, but "superstitious morality" — by compelling the unconscious to accept rational beliefs.

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Chapter 8 — Persecution Mania

Central question

Why do so many ordinarily sane people feel persecuted and unappreciated, and how can the milder forms of persecution mania be detected and cured by the sufferer himself?

Main argument

From insanity to a universal tendency. In its extreme forms persecution mania is a recognized insanity — imagining that others wish to kill, imprison, or injure you, sometimes leading to acts of violence. But it is "only an exaggeration of a tendency not at all uncommon among people who count as normal," and the milder forms, "a very frequent cause of unhappiness," are "still capable of being dealt with by the patient himself, provided he can be induced to diagnose his trouble rightly."

The victim of universal ill-treatment. We all know the person who is "perpetually the victim of ingratitude, unkindness, and treachery" — extraordinarily plausible, each separate story credible; what rouses suspicion is "the multiplicity of villains." By the doctrine of probability, different people in a society meet with about the same amount of bad treatment; if one person receives universal ill-treatment by his own account, "the likelihood is that the cause lies in himself." The disease "is inflamed alike by sympathy and by lack of sympathy": if his hard-luck story is believed he embellishes it; if disbelieved, that is merely another example of human hard-heartedness.

The universal form: malicious gossip. Very few can resist saying malicious things about their acquaintances, yet when people hear anything said against themselves "they are filled with indignant amazement." We expect others to feel toward us "that tender love and that profound respect which we feel towards ourselves" — the same person who remembers his ninety-nine acts of forbearance and forgets his hundredth unguarded word is judged by others only on that hundredth word. "If we were all given by magic the power to read each other's thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be that almost all friendships would be dissolved"; but we know our friends have faults and like them anyway — "we find it, however, intolerable that they should have the same attitude towards us."

The four maxims. Persecution mania is "always rooted in a too exaggerated conception of our own merits." The illustrations — the playwright whose unrecognized masterpieces are boycotted by managers, actors, and critics; the inventor whom manufacturers and learned societies conspire against; the discoverer of a genuine scandal who generalizes his rebuffs into a key to the universe; the philanthropist doing good against people's will and horrified by their ingratitude (the legislators against cigarette smoking who expect a deputation of thanks); the statesman amazed at the ingratitude of the people — yield "four general maxims":

1. "Remember that your motives are not always as altruistic as they seem to yourself." Suspicion of one's own motives is especially necessary for the philanthropist and the executive; "love of power is insidious." Idealism "causes simple motives to wear strange disguises," and conventional morality inculcates "a degree of altruism of which human nature is scarcely capable." It is better to eat because one enjoys one's food than solely from a desire for the public good, and zest is difficult without some self-regarding motive.
2. "Don't over-estimate your own merits." The playwright whose plays never succeed "should consider calmly the hypothesis that they are bad plays." Cases of unrecognized merit exist, "but they are far less numerous than the cases of recognized demerit." The test for the suspected genius: "do you produce because you feel an urgent compulsion to express certain ideas or feelings, or are you actuated by the desire for applause?" In the genuine artist applause is secondary; the man to whom applause is primary "had better give it up." If others do not rate you as you rate yourself, "do not be too sure that it is they who are mistaken."
3. "Don't expect others to take as much interest in you as you do yourself." The invalid ladies who expected a daughter to sacrifice marriage to nursing expected "a degree of altruism which is contrary to reason, since the loss to the altruist is greater than the gain to the egoist." No person should be expected "to distort the main lines of his life for the sake of another individual."
4. "Don't imagine that most people give enough thought to you to have any special desire to persecute you." The insane victim thinks the whole world is occupied with working mischief to him; "in like manner, the comparatively sane victim of persecution mania sees in all kinds of actions a reference to himself which does not, in fact, exist." The omission of your photograph from the picture papers is transformed into "a subtle compliment" — but "no satisfaction based upon self-deception is solid," and the strain of believing increasingly fantastic hypotheses becomes very great. "However unpleasant the truth may be, it is better to face it once for all, to get used to it, and to proceed to build your life in accordance with it."

Key ideas

• Milder persecution mania is a very frequent cause of unhappiness and can be cured by the patient himself once he diagnoses the trouble as internal.
• By the doctrine of probability, the man who is always ill-treated is likely the cause; the disease is inflamed by both sympathy and its lack.
• Gossip is universal, yet everyone expects exemption from it for himself; friendship survives knowing faults, but not being seen to have them.
• Persecution mania is rooted in an exaggerated conception of one's own merits.
• The four preventive maxims: question your own altruism, do not over-estimate your merits, do not expect too much interest from others, and do not imagine others think about you at all.
• The desire for applause, not the compulsion to express, marks the false artist; unrecognized merit is rarer than recognized demerit.
• Self-deception can never yield solid happiness; the truth, faced once and for all, is the only foundation.

Key takeaway

Persecution mania is vanity's escape hatch — the belief that the world is conspiring against you flatters the ego — and it is cured by applying the four maxims and facing the truth without flinching.

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Chapter 9 — Fear of Public Opinion

Central question

How much of our unhappiness is caused by the fear of what others will think, and how can the tyranny of public opinion be lessened or evaded?

Main argument

The modern division into sets. "Very few people can be happy unless on the whole their way of life and their outlook on the world is approved by those with whom they have social relations." Since the Reformation and Renaissance, modern communities are "divided into sets which differ profoundly in their morals and in their beliefs" — Protestants and Catholics, aristocrats and bourgeoisie, socialists and others, and in the English-speaking world a dozen further divisions (art admired or of the devil; the Empire the supreme virtue or a vice; adultery the worst of crimes or excusable; divorce forbidden or necessary). Consequently "a person of given tastes and convictions may find himself practically an outcast while he lives in one set, although in another set he would be accepted as an entirely ordinary human being."

The misery of the young. A very great deal of unhappiness, especially among the young, arises in this way: the young "can scarcely believe that in another place or another set the views which they dare not avow for fear of being thought utterly perverse would be accepted as the ordinary commonplaces of the age." The isolation is not only a source of pain; it dissipates energy "in the unnecessary task of maintaining mental independence against hostile surroundings" and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred produces "a certain timidity in following out ideas to their logical conclusions." The Brontës never met congenial people until their books were published — Emily was "heroic and in the grand manner," but Charlotte's outlook "remained always to a large extent that of a governess." Blake endured extreme mental isolation "since he never doubted that he was right and his critics wrong"; but "there are not many who have this degree of force in their inner life."

The tyranny of the herd and how to meet it. Public opinion is "always more tyrannical towards those who obviously fear it than towards those who feel indifferent to it": "a dog will bark more loudly and bite more readily when people are afraid of him." Mild lapses from convention — failure to dress correctly, to belong to a Church, to abstain from intelligent books — "if they are done with gaiety and insouciance, not defiantly but spontaneously, will come to be tolerated even in the most conventional society"; gradually one may acquire "the position of licensed lunatic, to whom things are permitted which in another man would be thought unforgivable." Conventional people are roused to fury because departures seem a criticism of themselves; they pardon much "in a man who has enough jollity and friendliness to make it clear, even to the stupidest, that he is not engaged in criticizing them." People out of harmony with their set tend to be "prickly and uncomfortable"; transported into a congenial set they change character entirely.

Practical prescriptions. Young people out of harmony with their surroundings should, wherever possible, choose a profession "which will give them a chance of congenial companionship, even if this should entail a considerable loss of income." Contrary to the psycho-analytic fashion, being out of harmony with one's environment is not always a psychological disorder: "Where the environment is stupid or prejudiced or cruel, it is a sign of merit to be out of harmony with it" — Galileo and Kepler had "dangerous thoughts." The doctrine that genius will always make its way "is like the theory that murder will out": all the murders we know of have been discovered, "but who knows how many there may be which have never been heard of?" The way of youth should not be made too hard.

The rights of youth. "While it is desirable that the old should treat with respect the wishes of the young, it is not desirable that the young should treat with respect the wishes of the old" — because "in either case it is the lives of the young that are concerned." The young person who wishes to go on the stage against his parents' opposition should try: if he has no talent he will soon discover it from theatrical people, and "the arguments of parents should not be a sufficient reason for relinquishing the attempt" — they will soon come round. Professional opinion, however, "must always be treated with respect by beginners."

Genuine indifference. "Apart from expert opinion, there is too much respect paid to the opinions of others." One should as a rule respect public opinion "in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny." People spend money "merely because they feel that the respect of their neighbours depends upon their possession of a good car," while any man who obviously can afford a car but prefers travel or a library "will in the end be much more respected." There is no point in deliberately flouting opinion — "this is still to be under its domination, though in a topsy-turvy way"; what is wanted is to be "genuinely indifferent to it," which "is both a strength and a source of happiness." The lesson: "Where each person's character is developed individually, differences of type are preserved," and society is more interesting; one should be natural, following spontaneous tastes "in so far as these are not definitely anti-social."

The new fear: the newspapers. Locomotion has freed people from their geographically nearest neighbours — anyone within twenty miles may be a companion, and "happiness is promoted by associations of persons with similar tastes and similar opinions." But a new fear has arisen: "the fear of what newspapers may say," "quite as terrifying as anything connected with mediaeval witch-hunts"; when the newspaper makes a scapegoat of a harmless person the results "may be very terrible." The ultimate cure is "an increase of toleration on the part of the public," best promoted by "multiply[ing] the number of individuals who enjoy real happiness and do not therefore find their chief pleasure in the infliction of pain upon their fellow-men."

Key ideas

• Modern life is divided into sets with profoundly different morals and beliefs; the same person is an outcast in one set and ordinary in another.
• Unnecessary misery comes from ignorance of the world — believing one's own milieu is the whole world — and from the dissipation of energy in maintaining mental independence.
• Public opinion is more tyrannical toward those who fear it; gaiety and insouciance, even the position of "licensed lunatic," disarm the herd.
• Being out of harmony with a stupid, prejudiced, or cruel environment is a sign of merit; the doctrine that genius will always make its way is like "murder will out."
• The old should respect the wishes of the young; the young should not respect the wishes of the old, since it is the young's lives that are concerned.
• One should respect public opinion only so far as needed to avoid starvation and prison; genuine indifference is a strength and a source of happiness.
• The fear of what newspapers may say is the modern witch-hunt; the cure is toleration, promoted by real happiness.

Key takeaway

The tyranny of public opinion is largely voluntary: it rules only those who fear it, and the free man, while avoiding starvation and prison, is genuinely indifferent to it.

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Chapter 10 — Is Happiness Still Possible?

Central question

Granted all the causes of unhappiness surveyed so far, are there still happy people in the modern world, and what are the sources of their happiness?

Main argument

The survey of happy people. Russell begins Part II with "the pleasanter task of considering the happy man." The claim that happiness in the modern world has become impossible is "dissipated by introspection, foreign travel, and the conversation of my gardener." Happiness is of two sorts, "plain and fancy, or animal and spiritual, or of the heart and of the head" — one open to any human being, the other only to those who can read and write:

• The well-digger of Russell's boyhood, "bursting with happiness," who could neither read nor write and learned of Parliament only when he got a vote in 1885: his happiness was based on "physical vigour, a sufficiency of work, and the overcoming of not insuperable obstacles in the shape of rock."
• The gardener, over seventy, works all day and bicycles sixteen hilly miles, waging "a perennial war against rabbits," slain daily like the Valhalla boar and resurrected daily; "the fount of joy is inexhaustible."

To the objection that such simple delights are beneath superior people: "A rabbit is very much larger than a yellow-fever bacillus, and yet a superior person can find happiness in making war upon the latter." What education changes is only the activities by which the pleasures are obtained. Pleasures of achievement "demand difficulties such that beforehand success seems doubtful although in the end it is usually achieved" — hence a not excessive estimate of one's powers is a source of happiness: the man who underestimates himself is perpetually surprised by success, the man who overestimates himself by failure.

The happiest of the educated: men of science. "Of the more highly educated sections of the community, the happiest in the present day are the men of science": emotionally simple, they obtain from work "a satisfaction so profound that they can derive pleasure from eating and even marrying," while artists and literary men "consider it de rigueur to be unhappy in their marriages." "Complexity in emotions is like foam in a river. It is produced by obstacles which break the smoothly flowing current." The man of science achieves results "which appear important not only to himself but to the general public, even when it cannot in the smallest degree understand them" — Einstein is honoured, while the best painters starve in garrets, since the public concludes it cannot understand relativity but that an incomprehensible picture is a bad picture. The artist is forced to choose "between being despised and being despicable."

The East and the cynicism of comfort plus powerlessness. The most intelligent young in the West suffer the unhappiness of finding "no adequate employment for their best talents"; in Russia the young are "creating a new world," and the old have been "executed, starved, exiled, or in some other way disinfected." "Cynicism such as one finds very frequently among the most highly educated young men and women of the West results from the combination of comfort with powerlessness": powerlessness makes people feel that nothing is worth doing, and comfort makes the painfulness of that feeling just endurable. The young Chinese visitor going home to found a school in a reactionary region expected his head to be cut off, "nevertheless he enjoyed a quiet happiness that I could only envy."

The pleasure of work is open to many. Not only eminent scientists: the pleasure of work is open "to anyone who can develop some specialized skill, provided that he can get satisfaction from the exercise of his skill without demanding universal applause" — the man who lost both legs in youth and wrote five volumes on rose blight, "on which I always understood he was the leading expert"; conchologists; the best compositor in the world, whose joy came "from the actual delight in the exercise of his craft." The machine age has not destroyed the craftsman's joy: "the more uninteresting the work becomes, the more possible it is to get it performed by a machine," and the ultimate goal is a system in which everything uninteresting is done by machines. Agriculture was mankind's "long period of meanness, misery, and madness"; "the one desire of every young man in the countryside is to find work in towns," since "companionship and co-operation are essential elements in the happiness of the average man."

Causes, hobbies, and friendly interest. Belief in a cause is a source of happiness — the men who believed the English were the lost ten tribes "were almost invariably happy," and the Ephraim-and-Manasseh believers enjoyed bliss without bounds — though Russell "cannot advocate any happiness based upon what seem to me to be false beliefs." Hobbies console: the eminent mathematician who divides his time between mathematics and stamp-collecting; old china, snuff-boxes, Roman coins, arrow-heads; Russell himself "collects rivers" (the Volga, the Yangtse; he regrets never having seen the Amazon); the melancholy American man of letters who "yelled with joy" as the baseball results came through on the radio. But "fads and hobbies… are in many cases, perhaps most, not a source of fundamental happiness, but a means of escape from reality." "Fundamental happiness depends more than anything else upon what may be called a friendly interest in persons and things":

• A friendly interest in persons is affectionateness "not the form which is grasping and possessive"; it "likes to observe people and finds pleasure in their individual traits," without desiring power over them or their enthusiastic admiration. Such a person "will not be soured by ingratitude"; "a sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations"; "to like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness."
• A friendly interest in things is the geologist's interest in rocks, the archaeologist's in ruins — an interest which is friendly, not hostile (the man who collected facts about spiders because he hated them would not get the same satisfaction). "If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give. And to demand too much is the surest way of getting even less than is possible."

The chapter's summary sentence is the book's central recipe: "The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile."

Key ideas

• Happiness is of two sorts — plain and fancy, animal and spiritual — and the simpler sort is open to everyone who has health, work, and obstacles to overcome.
• The happiest educated men are men of science, whose intelligence is wholly absorbed by work that is progressive, powerful, and respected.
• Western cynicism results from comfort combined with powerlessness; belief in a cause and the chance of employment for one's best talents make for happiness.
• The pleasure of skilled work is open to all who can develop a specialty without demanding universal applause; the machine age is freeing man from uninteresting work.
• Hobbies and fads are usually escapes from reality, not sources of fundamental happiness.
• Fundamental happiness depends on a friendly interest in persons and things — unpossessive, observant, free from the sense of duty.
• The secret of happiness: make your interests as wide as possible, and your reactions as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.

Key takeaway

Happiness is still possible — plainly or spiritually — and its secret is the width of one's interests and the friendliness of one's reactions.

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Chapter 11 — Zest

Central question

What is zest, why is it "the most universal and distinctive mark of happy men," and how is it retained or lost in civilized life?

Main argument

The banquet of life. Russell defines zest by the different ways men behave at a meal: there are those to whom a meal is merely a bore; the invalids who eat from a sense of duty; the epicures who find nothing quite well enough cooked; the gormandizers who fall upon their food with eager rapacity; and "those who begin with a sound appetite, are glad of their food, eat until they have had enough, and then stop." These correspond to types of life: the bored correspond to Byronic unhappiness, the dutiful to the ascetic, the gormandizer to the voluptuary, the epicure to the fastidious. "What hunger is in relation to food, zest is in relation to life." All the types, except possibly the gormandizer, feel contempt for the man of healthy appetite — "all disenchantment is to me a malady."

The argument from strawberries. If one man likes strawberries and another does not, "the man who likes them has a pleasure which the other does not have; to that extent his life is more enjoyable and he is better adapted to the world." The man who enjoys watching football is superior to the man who does not; the man who enjoys reading "still more superior," since opportunities are more frequent. "The more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness he has, and the less he is at the mercy of fate, since if he loses one thing he can fall back upon another."

The sausage machines. Two sausage machines, exquisitely constructed for turning pig into sausages: one "retained his zest for pig and produced sausages innumerable"; the other studied its own inside until it stood still. "The mind is a strange machine which can combine the materials offered to it in the most astonishing ways, but without materials from the external world it is powerless" — and unlike the sausage machine "it must seize its materials for itself, since events only become experiences through the interest that we take in them." The introvert, "with the manifold spectacle of the world spread out before him, turns away and gazes only upon the emptiness within."

The forms of zest. Zest is innumerable in form: Sherlock Holmes and the hat; the country walk (birds, vegetation, geology, agriculture — "any one of these things is interesting if it interests you"); the train journey (one man fails to observe his fellow travellers, another sums them all up); travel (the man who sees what is characteristic versus the man who goes to the same hotels and eats the same food). Even unpleasant experiences have their uses: Russell is glad to have smelt a Chinese crowd and a Sicilian village; adventurous men enjoy shipwrecks, mutinies, earthquakes, conflagrations. Zest survives even slow torture — "I have known men die at the end of years of slow torture, and yet retain their zest almost till the last moment." Some day biochemistry may give us tablets to ensure interest in everything; until then we depend on common sense.

Specialized zest. Zest may be very specialized: the tea merchant in Borrow's Lavengro who, to endure the loss of his wife, taught himself to read the Chinese inscriptions on the tea-chests and in the end "began to study with avidity everything that concerned China"; the men absorbed in the Gnostic heresy; the collators of Hobbes manuscripts. But "very specialized interests are… a less satisfactory source of happiness than a general zest for life, since they can hardly fill the whole of a man's time."

Zest versus gormandizing: moderation. The distinction from the gormandizer is defined by the ancient doctrine of moderation: "In the good life there must be a balance between different activities, and no one of them must be carried so far as to make the others impossible." Josephine's passion for clothes cost the French Genoa; dipsomaniacs and nymphomaniacs are obvious excesses; the chess player with wife and children must restrict his passion; Tolstoy, absorbed in chess, decided not to go to receive his military cross — "in a lesser man such an act would have been one of folly." All our tastes must fit "into the general framework of life" — compatible with health, with the affection of those we love, and with the respect of society; some performances (dying for one's country, great scientific experiments) are considered "so essentially noble as to justify the sacrifice of everything else."

The psychological root of excess. "There is always some deep-seated psychological difference between the gormandizer and the man of healthy appetite. The man in whom one desire runs to excess at the expense of all others is usually a man with some deep-seated trouble, who is seeking to escape from a spectre": "Me no drinkee for drinkee, me drinkee for drunkee." But oblivion sought in the exercise of faculties (Borrow's friend learning Chinese) is harmless and improving; oblivion sought in drink, gambling, or unprofitable excitement is not; the man who runs mad risks in aeroplanes because life is irksome is "only slightly above the gambler and drunkard."

Zest and civilization. Genuine zest "is part of the natural make-up of human beings except in so far as it has been destroyed by unfortunate circumstances": young children are interested in everything; a cat in an unfamiliar room sniffs every corner. "Loss of zest in civilized society is very largely due to the restrictions upon liberty which are essential to our way of life": the savage hunts when he is hungry, obeying a direct impulse; the civilized man's impulse "operates indirectly through abstractions, beliefs and volitions" — he goes to work because hunger will recur. "Impulses are irregular, whereas habits, in a civilized society, have to be regular"; a train cannot be started by barbaric music. To rise above these obstacles a man needs health and superabundant energy, "or else… work that he finds interesting on its own account"; zest demands energy more than sufficient for the necessary work, and that "demands the smooth working of the psychological machine."

Women and respectability. Zest in women has been "greatly diminished by a mistaken conception of respectability": taught not to take an obvious interest in men or display vivacity, they learned "very frequently to be interested in nothing." The respectable woman keeps herself to herself, cares nothing for sport or politics, regards other women with "veiled hostility," and in politics "loves repressive legislation." Russell's test: "go the round of a number of lodging-houses seeking a lodging, and take note of the landladies." "Between male and female excellence rightly conceived there is no difference"; "for women as for men zest is the secret of happiness and well-being."

Key ideas

• Zest is the most universal and distinctive mark of happy men; what hunger is to food, zest is to life.
• The more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness he has and the less he is at the mercy of fate.
• The mind without external materials is powerless; events only become experiences through the interest we take in them.
• Zest survives even ill-health and torture; unpleasant experiences have their uses to the adventurous.
• Zest must be distinguished from the gormandizer's excess by the Greek formula of moderation — every passion must fit the framework of health, affection, and social respect.
• Excessive one-sided passions are flights from a spectre — the search for oblivion; oblivion sought in the exercise of faculties is innocent, in drugs and excitement it is not.
• Zest is natural to children and animals; civilized restraint of impulse tends to wear it away, and it demands surplus energy and smooth working of the psychological machine.
• A mistaken conception of respectability has destroyed zest in women; for women as for men, zest is the secret of happiness.

Key takeaway

Zest — a sound appetite for the feast of life, balanced by moderation and directed outward — is the most universal mark of the happy man and the secret of happiness for both sexes.

Chapter 12 — Affection

Central question

What role does the feeling of being loved — and the capacity to give affection — play in zest and happiness, and what is the best kind of affection?

Main argument

The feeling of being unloved. "One of the chief causes of lack of zest is the feeling that one is unloved, whereas conversely the feeling of being loved promotes zest more than anything else does." The man who feels himself unloved may make "desperate efforts to win affection, probably by means of exceptional acts of kindness" — but "human nature is so constructed that it gives affection most readily to those who seem least to demand it," so the buyer of affection is "disillusioned by experience of human ingratitude." Or he may seek revenge upon the world — "by stirring up wars and revolutions, or by a pen dipped in gall, like Dean Swift." Most, however, "sink into a timid despair relieved only by occasional gleams of envy and malice," become self-centred, and escape their sense of insecurity by letting "habit dominate their lives utterly and completely" — the slaves of unvarying routine "are generally actuated by fear of a cold outer world."

Affection received as security. "Those who face life with a feeling of security are much happier than those who face it with a feeling of insecurity" — the walker on a narrow plank over a chasm is more likely to fall if he feels fear. "General self-confidence towards life comes more than anything else from being accustomed to receive as much of the right sort of affection as one has need for." It is "affection received, not affection given, that causes this sense of security, though it arises most of all from affection which is reciprocal"; admiration works likewise for those whose trade is public applause — actors, preachers, speakers, politicians, who depend more and more upon applause. The child whose parents are fond of him "accepts their affection as a law of nature"; the child from whom parental affection is withdrawn becomes "timid and unadventurous," meditates on life and death, and becomes an introvert seeking "the unreal consolations of some system of philosophy or theology" — a kind of "agoraphobia or dread of open spaces."

Robust affection, not timid. Not all affection has this effect: "the affection given must be itself robust rather than timid, desiring excellence even more than safety." The timid mother who thinks every dog will bite and every cow is a bull produces timidity; the possessive mother "may desire his dependence upon herself more than his capacity to cope with the world," and "in that case her child is probably worse off in the long run than he would be if he were not loved at all." "Apprehension of misfortune, as opposed to sympathy with a misfortune that has actually occurred, should play as small a part as possible in affection. Fear for others is only a shade better than fear for ourselves. Moreover, it is very often a camouflage for possessiveness."

The biological purpose. Affection received has a twofold function: security, and — "even more essential" in adult life — "parenthood," for "to be unable to inspire sex love is a grave misfortune." Russell adds a digression on the sexes: "women tend to love men for their character while men tend to love women for their appearance. In this respect… men show themselves the inferiors of women," though it may be easier to acquire a good appearance than a good character.

Affection given: the two kinds. The affection a person gives is also of two kinds, "one of which is perhaps the most important expression of a zest for life, while the other is an expression of fear." The sailing-ship image: if you sail along a beautiful coast on a fine day you admire it, and "this pleasure is one derived entirely from looking outward"; if your ship is wrecked and you swim toward the coast, you acquire for it "a new kind of love: it represents security against the waves." The better sort of affection is that of the man whose ship is secure; the less excellent sort, that of the shipwrecked swimmer, values the loved person "for services rendered, not for intrinsic qualities" and is "more self-centred." "In the best kind of affection a man hopes for a new happiness rather than for escape from an old unhappiness."

The best type of affection. "The best type of affection is reciprocally life-giving; each receives affection with joy and gives it without effort, and each finds the whole world more interesting in consequence of the existence of this reciprocal happiness." Its opposite is the "bloodsucking" type, which "extracts the vitality from one victim after another, but while they prosper and grow interesting, those upon whom they live grow pale and dim and dull" — people who "use others as means to their own ends," a type "frequently associated with great ambition." "Affection… as a genuine reciprocal interest of two persons in each other… is one of the most important elements of real happiness, and the man whose ego is so enclosed within steel walls that this enlargement of it is impossible misses the best that life has to offer." "A capacity for genuine affection is one of the marks of the man who has escaped from this prison of self"; "to receive affection is by no means enough; affection which is received should liberate the affection which is to be given."

The obstacles and the conclusion. People are slow to give admiration for fear it should be misplaced, and slow to bestow affection "for fear that they should be made to suffer"; caution is enjoined "both in the name of morality and in the name of worldly wisdom." In sex relations "there is very often almost nothing that can be called real affection; not infrequently there is even a fundamental hostility," each preserving "fundamental loneliness." The only sex relations that have real value are those "in which there is no reticence and in which the whole personality of both becomes merged in a new collective personality." Final sentence: "Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness."

Key ideas

• The feeling of being loved promotes zest more than anything else; the feeling of being unloved breeds desperate kindness, revenge, or timid despair.
• Affection received (especially reciprocal) is the chief source of general self-confidence — the "narrow plank over the chasm" of life.
• The affection that encourages adventurousness must be robust, desiring excellence even more than safety; timid and possessive affection does more harm than no love at all.
• Affection received serves security and the biological end of parenthood; the best affection is reciprocally life-giving, each giving without effort.
• The affection given is of two kinds: the outward-looking joy of the secure sailor and the self-centred need of the shipwrecked swimmer; the latter is at best a consolation.
• The "bloodsucking" type uses others as means and never as ends, extracting vitality and leaving its victims "pale and dim and dull."
• A capacity for genuine affection is the mark of the man who has escaped the prison of self; received affection should liberate the affection to be given.
• Caution in love — in the name of morality or worldly wisdom — is the most fatal obstacle to happiness.

Key takeaway

The best affection is reciprocal and life-giving — each gives without effort and receives with joy — and the caution that withholds affection is the most fatal enemy of happiness.

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Chapter 13 — The Family

Central question

Why has the family, potentially "one of the greatest sources of happiness," become in practice a source of unhappiness to nearly everyone in it — and what can the individual parent do?

Main argument

The failure of the family. "Of all the institutions that have come down to us from the past none is in the present day so disorganized and derailed as the family." Parent–child affection is capable of being one of the greatest sources of happiness, "but in fact at the present day the relations of parents and children are, in nine cases out of ten, a source of unhappiness to both parties, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred a source of unhappiness to at least one of the two parties." This failure "is one of the most deep-seated causes of the discontent which is prevalent in our age."

The economic causes. For well-to-do women, two causes have made parenthood a heavier burden than ever before: "the opening of careers to single women" and "the decay of domestic service." The old spinster was driven into marriage by "the intolerable conditions of life for the spinster" (the Vicar of Wakefield verse: "The only art her guilt to cover… is — to die"); the modern spinster earns a comfortable living and is independent of parental approval — but if the desire for children overwhelms her, "she is compelled to marry, and almost certainly to lose her job." Having taken the plunge, she is tied to the house, compelled to perform "a thousand trivial tasks quite unworthy of her ability and training," and "too often through the mere performance of necessary duties such women become wearisome to their husbands and a nuisance to their children." The most pernicious injustice: "in consequence of doing her duty by her family she has lost their affection, whereas if she had neglected them and remained gay and charming they would probably have loved her." (Russell cites Jean Ayling's The Retreat from Parenthood.) Housing compounds the problem: urban flats with no soil, suburbs that add fatigue and diminish the father's part in the family.

The psychological causes: democracy at home. "These… are really part of the problems raised by democracy." As with masters and slaves, the spread of democratic theory has made parents "hesitant and uncertain," children no longer feel they owe respect: "the virtue of obedience… has become unfashionable, and rightly so." Psycho-analysis "has terrified educated parents with the fear of the harm they may unwittingly do their children": kissing may produce an Oedipus complex, not kissing a fury of jealousy; ordering a sense of sin, not ordering bad habits; thumb-sucking draws terrifying inferences. "Parenthood, which used to be a triumphant exercise of power, has become timid, anxious, and filled with conscientious doubts." The result: "conscientious mothers ask too little of their children, and unconscientious mothers ask too much" — in one case the child's affections are starved, in the other over-stimulated.

The decline of the birth-rate. Given all these troubles, "is it any wonder that the birth-rate declines?" Among the well-to-do the point of population decline is long past: in Stockholm (1919–22) the fertility of professional women was one-third of the population at large; the four thousand graduates of Wellesley (1896–1913) had about three thousand children where eight thousand were needed. "The most civilized are the most sterile"; the white races are dying out, and a civilization with this characteristic is unstable. Exhortation and sentimentality cannot mend it: the divines' hell-fire no longer works, the State's cannon-fodder argument is "altogether too ferocious," and "very few men or women will have children from a sense of public duty." "It is necessary, therefore, if the white races are to survive, that parenthood should again become capable of yielding happiness to parents."

Parenthood as the greatest happiness. "When one considers human nature apart from the circumstances of the present day, it is clear… that parenthood is psychologically capable of providing the greatest and most enduring happiness that life has to offer" — Hecuba cares more for her children than for Priam, MacDuff for his children than his wife; ancestor worship in China and Japan is a reflection, not a cause, of family feeling. Russell's personal testimony: "I have found the happiness of parenthood greater than any other that I have experienced." To be happy past youth "it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be over, but part of the stream of life flowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future"; those who let their procreative impulses atrophy "have separated themselves from the stream of life, and in so doing have run a grave risk of becoming desiccated." Like Abraham, the parent "will derive satisfaction from the thought that his seed are to inherit the promised land."

The basis of the family and its value to children. The basis of the family is the special affection parents feel for their own children — "an emotion which we inherit from our animal ancestors"; Russell faults Freud for not being "sufficiently biological." Its value to children lies in being "more reliable than any other affection": friends like one for one's merits, lovers for one's charms, and may vanish; "our parents love us because we are their children, and this is an unalterable fact, so that we feel more safe with them than with anyone else" — above all "in times of failure."

The conflict of power and tenderness. The primitive root of parental pleasure is twofold: the feeling of "part of one's own body externalized, prolonging its life beyond the death of the rest of one's body" (the immortality of the germ-plasm), and "an intimate blend of power and tenderness." Hence a conflict: "while power over the child is to a certain extent decreed by the nature of things, it is nevertheless desirable that the child should as soon as possible learn to be independent," which is "unpleasant to the power impulse in a parent." Some parents remain tyrants until the children rebel; others become "a prey to conflicting emotions," and their parental happiness is lost (Tolstoy wanted his son a pacifist; the son joined the Black Hundreds). The possessiveness shows in small things — feeding an infant who can feed himself, making dangers too vivid, demanding a response to demonstrative affection. "Modern parents, aware of these dangers, sometimes lose confidence in handling their children… for nothing causes so much worry in a child's mind as lack of certainty and self-confidence on the part of an adult. Better than being careful, therefore, is to be pure in heart." What is demanded is "a respect for the personality of the child… deeply felt with almost mystical conviction," which makes "possessiveness and oppression utterly impossible." For the parent who has it, there is "more joy in parenthood than ever was possible to the despot in the hey-day of parental power": love purged of tyranny "can give a joy more exquisite, more tender, more capable of transmuting the base metal of daily life into the pure gold of mystic ecstasy."

Mothers need not do everything. Russell refuses the inference "that mothers should do as much as possible themselves for their children": no one expects a mother to teach her son the calculus, and "there is no heaven-sent instinct which teaches women the right thing to do by their children — solicitude when it goes beyond a point is a camouflage for possessiveness." A professional woman should be free to continue her skill after motherhood; a child over nine months old "ought not to form an insuperable barrier"; "the mother who is conventionally called self-sacrificing is, in a great majority of cases, exceptionally selfish towards her children," and "the unsatisfied parent is likely to be an emotionally grasping parent." The relation of mother to child "will have in future to resemble more and more that which at present the father has."

Key ideas

• The family is the most disorganized and derailed of inherited institutions, and its failure is a deep-seated cause of modern discontent.
• Economic changes — careers for single women, the decay of domestic service, urban housing — have made maternity a burden for well-to-do women.
• The democratization of the family, compounded by psycho-analytic terror, has made parenthood timid and anxious; conscientious mothers ask too little, unconscientious too much.
• The decline of the birth-rate among the civilized is a symptom of family unhappiness; only restored parental happiness can save the stock.
• Parenthood is psychologically capable of the greatest and most enduring happiness life offers; it ties the parent to the stream of life and saves him from futility.
• Parental affection is more reliable than any other and is most needed in times of failure.
• The primitive root of parenthood is an externalized body and a blend of power and tenderness; the parent must resolve the conflict by respecting the child's personality.
• Mothers should not do everything themselves; the "self-sacrificing" mother is usually selfish, and motherhood should not cut a woman off from all other pursuits.

Key takeaway

The family fails because power-love and timidity corrupt parental affection, and it can be saved only by a robust, unpossessive love that respects the child's personality as an end.

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Chapter 14 — Work

Central question

Should work be counted among the causes of happiness, and what makes work — from the dullest to the most absorbing — a source of satisfaction?

Main argument

Work versus idleness. "There is certainly much work which is exceedingly irksome, and an excess of work is always very painful. I think, however, that, provided work is not excessive in amount, even the dullest work is to most people less painful than idleness." There are "in work all grades, from mere relief of tedium up to the profoundest delights." Even uninteresting work has great advantages: it "fills a good many hours of the day without the need of deciding what one shall do" — "the exercise of choice is in itself tiresome," and "most of the idle rich suffer unspeakable boredom as the price of their freedom from drudgery." (Big-game hunting in Africa and flying round the world are limited in number, "especially after youth is past"; hence the more intelligent rich men work nearly as hard as if they were poor.) Work is desirable "first and foremost, as a preventive of boredom," and it "makes holidays much more delicious when they come."

Success and ambition. "The second advantage of most paid work and of some unpaid work is that it gives chances of success and opportunities for ambition." Success is measured by income, "and while our capitalistic society continues, this is inevitable"; the desire to increase income "is quite as much a desire for success as for the extra comforts." However dull, work "becomes bearable if it is a means of building up a reputation." "Continuity of purpose is one of the most essential ingredients of happiness in the long run, and for most men this comes chiefly through their work." Housework is the great exception: the domesticated wife "does not receive wages, has no means of bettering herself, is taken for granted by her husband… and is valued by him not for her house-work but for quite other qualities."

The hierarchy of interesting work: skill. Two chief elements make work interesting: "first, the exercise of skill, and second, construction." Every man who has acquired unusual skill enjoys exercising it — the boy who can stand on his head is reluctant to stand on his feet; the lawyer's or politician's work "must contain… a great deal of the same pleasure that is to be derived from playing bridge"; the aeroplane stuntman risks his life for it; the able surgeon "derives satisfaction from the exquisite precision of his operations"; "I have even heard of plumbers who enjoyed their work, though I have never had the good fortune to meet one." Skill must be "either variable or capable of indefinite improvement" — the three-mile runner ceases to enjoy it when he can no longer beat his own record — and politics is the profession where men are at their best between sixty and seventy, since "a wide experience of other men is essential"; "successful politicians are apt to be happier at the age of seventy than any other men of equal age."

The element of construction. Construction is distinguished from destruction by a criterion: "In construction the initial state of affairs is comparatively haphazard, while the final state of affairs embodies a purpose; in destruction the reverse is the case." Destruction is often necessary as preliminary to construction, but the man whose purpose is destructive without regard to what comes after — many revolutionaries and militarists, "apostles of violence" actuated by hatred — speaks vaguely of the construction to follow and precisely of the destruction. "The work of construction, when completed, is delightful to contemplate, and moreover is never so fully completed that there is nothing further to do about it"; "the most satisfactory purposes are those that lead on indefinitely from one success to another without ever coming to a dead end." Few things cure hatred so well "as the opportunity to do constructive work of an important kind": the man who by irrigation "has caused the wilderness to blossom like the rose," the creator of an organization, the statesman who produces order out of chaos (Lenin as "the supreme type in our day"), the artist and the man of science — Shakespeare's "So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, so long lives this." Even so, work cannot guarantee happiness: Michael Angelo "was a profoundly unhappy man"; "we can only maintain that it must make him less unhappy." Men of science, however, "are far less often temperamentally unhappy than artists are."

The intellectuals' disease. A cause of unhappiness among intellectuals is the lack of "opportunity for the independent exercise of their talents": journalists who do not believe in the policy of the newspaper for which they work "prostitute their skill to purposes which they believe to be harmful," and "in the course of reconciling himself to the doing of it a man has to make himself so cynical that he can no longer derive whole-hearted satisfaction from anything whatever." Russell cannot condemn them — "starvation is too serious an alternative" — but where possible "do work that is satisfactory to a man's constructive impulses without entirely starving… will be well advised from the point of view of his own happiness." "Without self-respect genuine happiness is scarcely possible. And the man who is ashamed of his work can hardly achieve self-respect."

Life as a whole. Human beings differ in "the tendency to regard their lives as a whole": to some, life is a series of detached incidents "without directed movement and without unity"; to others it has a pattern. "The former sort are more likely to achieve happiness than the latter… The habit of viewing life as a whole is an essential part both of wisdom and of true morality, and is one of the things which ought to be encouraged in education. Consistent purpose is not enough to make life happy, but it is an almost indispensable condition of a happy life. And consistent purpose embodies itself mainly in work."

Key ideas

• Work is desirable chiefly as a preventive of boredom and as a giver of holidays their deliciousness; even the dullest work is less painful than idleness.
• Work gives chances of success and ambition, and continuity of purpose — the main ingredient of lasting happiness — comes for most men through work.
• Two elements make work interesting: the exercise of skill (which must be variable or improvable) and construction (building from haphazard to purpose).
• Construction satisfies more profoundly than destruction; destructive passion is a disguise for hatred, and the satisfactory purposes lead on indefinitely.
• Intellectuals who must prostitute their skill lose self-respect, and without self-respect genuine happiness is scarcely possible.
• Great work cannot guarantee happiness (Michael Angelo) but makes a man less unhappy; men of science are the happiest of the great.
• The habit of viewing life as a whole is essential to wisdom and morality; consistent purpose embodies itself mainly in work.

Key takeaway

Work is the preventive of boredom, the vehicle of ambition, and the chief embodiment of consistent purpose; its deepest joy lies in construction, which gives self-respect and a sense of mastery over the world.

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Chapter 15 — Impersonal Interests

Central question

Why does the modern inability to be interested in anything outside one's own practical concerns breed fatigue and unhappiness, and what do minor impersonal interests contribute to a happy life?

Main argument

Interests beyond the main activities. The chapter concerns "those minor interests which fill his leisure and afford relaxation from the tenseness of his more serious pre-occupations" — the man of science who reads about research in another science "not professionally, less critically, more disinterestedly." "One of the sources of unhappiness, fatigue, and nervous strain is inability to be interested in anything that is not of practical importance in one's own life": the conscious mind gets no rest, the subconscious never matures its "gradual wisdom," and the result is "excitability, lack of sagacity, irritability, and a loss of sense of proportion," all "both causes and effects of fatigue" — a vicious circle ending in breakdown.

Why they rest us. "What is restful about external interests is the fact that they do not call for any action. Making decisions and exercising volition are very fatiguing." The man who can forget his work when it is over "is likely to do his work far better than the man who worries about it throughout the intervening hours." But the interests "should not exercise those very faculties which have been exhausted by his day's work": no will and quick decision, no financial element (gambling is excluded), nothing so exciting as to preoccupy the subconscious. Watching games, the theatre, golf, and reading unconnected with one's profession all qualify.

Men and women. Men find it much easier to forget their work than women do — the woman whose work is in the home lacks the change of place, and women whose work is outside the home "differ from men… almost as much." In a woman's college the women teachers talk shop in the evening, while men do not; this "appears to women as a higher degree of conscientiousness," but "it tends to produce a certain narrowness of outlook leading not infrequently to a kind of fanaticism."

Sense of proportion. Impersonal interests "help a man to retain his sense of proportion": it is easy to forget "how small a part this is of the total of human activity." The world "is full of things that are tragic or comic, heroic or bizarre or surprising, and those who fail to be interested in the spectacle that it offers are forgoing one of the privileges that life has to offer." A sense of proportion is "very valuable and at times very consoling": "We are all inclined to get unduly excited, unduly strained, unduly impressed with the importance of the little corner of the world in which we live." The apostles of the strenuous life think a great deal of work for a bad end better than a little for a good end — they are wrong. "Those who care much for their work are always in danger of falling into fanaticism, which consists essentially in remembering one or two desirable things while forgetting all the rest"; the prophylactic is "a large conception of the life of man and his place in the universe."

Education as enlargement. Modern higher education has become "too much a training in the acquisition of certain kinds of skill, and too little an enlargement of the mind and heart by an impartial survey of the world." The political contest that can only be won by insulting a foreign nation: if your mental purview is limited to the present, you will adopt such means and lose the more distant ends; if you carry in your mind "the past ages of man, his slow and partial emergence out of barbarism, and the brevity of his total existence in comparison with astronomical epochs," you will see that "the momentary battle upon which you are engaged cannot be of such importance as to risk a backward step towards the darkness." And if you suffer defeat, "you will be sustained by the same sense of its momentariness": "a certain deep happiness will never leave you, whatever your personal fate may be. Life will become a communion with the great of all ages, and personal death no more than a negligible incident."

Russell would reorganize higher education to focus attention "upon well-ascertained facts" — the immeasurable length of man's future, the minuteness of the planet, the fact that life on it is "only a temporary incident" — together with "quite another set of facts" about "the greatness of which the individual is capable": "throughout all the depths of stellar space nothing of equal value is known to us." This is the essence of what Spinoza wrote "of human bondage and human freedom." "The man whose mind mirrors the world becomes in a sense as great as the world," and "in emancipation from the fears that beset the slave of circumstance he will experience a profound joy."

Misfortune and grief. Even in the most fortunate lives things go wrong — quarrels with wives, illnesses of children, financial stress, failure staring one in the face. "At such times a capacity to become interested in something outside the cause of anxiety is an immense boon": one man plays chess, another reads detective stories, a third becomes absorbed in popular astronomy, a fourth reads about the excavations at Ur of the Chaldees — and "any one of these four is acting wisely." Grief for the irreparable is unavoidable, but "everything that can be done should be done to minimize it": "It is mere sentimentality to aim, as some do, at extracting the very uttermost drop of misery from misfortune." The harmful escapes are those whose purpose "is to destroy thought" — drunkenness and drugs; the proper course is "not to destroy thought but to turn it into new channels." Hence the wisdom of cultivating in happier times "a certain width of interests, so that the mind may find prepared for it some undisturbed place" when sorrow comes. "To be defeated by one loss or even by several is not something to be admired as a proof of sensibility, but something to be deplored as a failure in vitality": all our affections are at the mercy of death, "it is therefore necessary that our lives should not have that narrow intensity which puts the whole meaning and purpose of our life at the mercy of accident." Conclusion: "the man who pursues happiness wisely will aim at the possession of a number of subsidiary interests in addition to those central ones upon which his life is built."

Key ideas

• Inability to be interested in anything outside one's practical concerns is a source of unhappiness, fatigue, and nervous strain — a vicious circle ending in breakdown.
• Impersonal interests rest the mind because they call for no action and no decision; they must not exercise the faculties exhausted by the day's work.
• They help a man retain his sense of proportion and are the prophylactic against fanaticism — remembering one or two desirable things and forgetting all the rest.
• Education should be an enlargement of the mind by an impartial survey of the world, not merely a training in skill; the individual who mirrors the world becomes as great as the world.
• At times of misfortune and grief, interests cultivated earlier provide "some undisturbed place" for the mind; to be defeated by one loss is a failure in vitality, not a proof of sensibility.
• The harmful escapes destroy thought; the right course is to turn thought into new channels.
• The wise man possesses a number of subsidiary interests in addition to those central ones on which his life is built.

Key takeaway

Minor impersonal interests are the mind's resting places and proportion-keeper — they relax the tired faculties, cure fanaticism, and prepare an undisturbed refuge for times of grief.

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Chapter 16 — Effort and Resignation

Central question

How much of happiness is an achievement requiring effort, and how much requires resignation — and how are the two to be balanced?

Main argument

The golden mean. "The golden mean is an uninteresting doctrine," which Russell rejected in youth for heroic extremes, "but in a very great many matters it is a true one." The needed balance is "between effort and resignation": "The doctrine of resignation has been preached by saints and mystics; the doctrine of effort has been preached by efficiency experts and muscular Christians. Each of these opposing schools has had a part of the truth, but not the whole."

The case for effort. "Happiness is not, except in very rare cases, something that drops into the mouth, like a ripe fruit, by the mere operation of fortunate circumstances. That is why I have called this book The Conquest of Happiness." In a world "so full of avoidable and unavoidable misfortunes… the man or woman who is to be happy must find ways of coping with the multitudinous causes of unhappiness." The exceptional cases — the easy-natured heir with ample fortune, the good-looking indolent woman married to a well-to-do husband — prove the rule: "happiness must be, for most men and women, an achievement rather than a gift of the gods, and in this achievement effort, both inward and outward, must play a great part." The need of outward effort for those who work for a living is obvious; the Indian fakir's alms-bowl is not a Western road to fortune. Beyond a bare living, most men desire "the feeling of being successful," and since "in a competitive world conspicuous success is possible only for a minority," "an element of resignation is desirable in most cases." Effort is needed in marriage (where one sex is in the majority) and in the rearing of children — "countries which believe in resignation and what is mistakenly called a 'spiritual' view of life are countries with a high infant mortality"; "those who think that matter is an illusion are apt to think the same of dirt."

The legitimate desire for power. "Some kind of power forms the normal and legitimate aim of every person whose natural desires are not atrophied": power over the actions, thoughts, or emotions of men; power to change the material environment; intellectual mastery. "Every kind of public work involves desire for some kind of power"; "the only man totally indifferent to power is the man totally indifferent to his fellow-men." The chapter is aimed partly at those in the West who "coquette with what is called 'the wisdom of the East' just at the moment when the East is abandoning it."

The case for resignation. "Resignation, however, has also its part to play… no less essential than that played by effort. The wise man, though he will not sit down under preventable misfortunes, will not waste time and emotion upon such as are unavoidable." Even avoidable misfortunes are to be submitted to "if the time and labour required to avoid them would interfere with the pursuit of some more important object." Christianity taught submission to the will of God, "and even for those who cannot accept this phraseology there should be something of the same kind pervading all their activities." "Efficiency in a practical task is not proportional to the emotion that we put into it"; what is required is "that of doing one's best while leaving the issue to fate."

Two sorts of resignation. "Resignation is of two sorts, one rooted in despair, the other in unconquerable hope. The first is bad; the second is good." The resignation of despair abandons all serious activity and camouflages defeat with religious phrases or the doctrine that contemplation is the true end of man; "whatever disguise he may adopt… he will remain essentially useless and fundamentally unhappy." "Hope which is to be unconquerable must be large and impersonal": the man of science who desires the progress of science and not merely his own contribution; the reformer whose work is side-tracked by a war, "provided that he is interested in the future of mankind apart from his own participation in it." Where only subsidiary purposes are checked — the man engaged in important work distracted by matrimonial unhappiness — the failure is "in the desirable kind of resignation": he "should regard such incidental troubles in the way in which one regards a wet day, that is to say, as a nuisance about which it would be foolish to make a fuss."

Minor troubles and the gallery of selves. Some people cannot bear even minor troubles: "furious when they miss a train, transported with rage if their dinner is badly cooked, sunk in despair if the chimney smokes." "The energy that such people waste on trivial troubles would be sufficient, if more wisely directed, to make and unmake empires. The wise man fails to observe the dust that the housemaid has not dusted." Worry, fret, and irritation "serve no purpose," and their cure is the "fundamental resignation" of concentration upon large impersonal hopes. The emancipated man is amused rather than maddened: when Mr. A. relates the anecdote of the Bishop of Tierra del Fuego for the three hundred and forty-seventh time, "he amuses himself by noting the score"; a broken bootlace "in the history of the cosmos… has no very great importance"; being interrupted in a proposal of marriage by a tedious neighbour — "all mankind have been liable to this disaster, with the exception of Adam, and… even he had his troubles." The cure for the picture of oneself spoiled by events is "to have not only one picture, but a whole gallery, and to select the one appropriate to the incident in question"; "if some of the portraits are a trifle laughable, so much the better; it is not wise to see oneself all day long as a hero of high tragedy" — nor always as a clown; "if you can forget yourself and not play a part at all, that is admirable."

Truth instead of self-deception. Active people think resignation and humour would destroy their energy — "in my opinion, mistaken." "Work that is worth doing can be done even by those who do not deceive themselves either as to its importance or as to the ease with which it can be done"; those who need self-deception as a stimulant "had better first take a course in learning to endure the truth." "It is better to do nothing than to do harm. Half the useful work in the world consists of combating the harmful work." "A certain kind of resignation is involved in willingness to face the truth about ourselves," the only protection against the disillusionments to which the self-deceiver is liable: "Nothing is more fatiguing nor, in the long run, more exasperating than the daily effort to believe things which daily become more incredible. To be done with this effort is an indispensable condition of secure and lasting happiness."

Key ideas

• The golden mean between effort and resignation is true; the saints and mystics and the efficiency experts each held half the truth.
• Happiness is an achievement, not a gift: hence "the conquest of happiness" — effort both inward and outward is required.
• Some desire for power is normal and legitimate; the man indifferent to power is indifferent to his fellow-men.
• The wise man does not sit down under preventable misfortunes but does not waste emotion on the unavoidable; the attitude required is doing one's best while leaving the issue to fate.
• Resignation rooted in despair is bad and abandons activity; resignation rooted in unconquerable, large, and impersonal hope is good.
• Minor troubles are to be treated without emotion, like a wet day; worry, fret, and irritation serve no purpose.
• A gallery of self-portraits, some laughable, cures the annoyance of a spoiled self-image; forgetting oneself entirely is best of all.
• Work done under self-deception becomes harmful; facing the truth about ourselves is the only protection against disillusionment.

Key takeaway

Happiness is conquered by balanced effort and resignation: struggle against what can be changed, do one's best while leaving the issue to fate, and be done with the fatiguing effort of believing the incredible.

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Chapter 17 — The Happy Man

Central question

What is the recipe for happiness within one's own power, and what does the happy man actually look like?

Main argument

The simple recipe. "Happiness, as is evident, depends partly upon external circumstances and partly upon oneself." The part depending on oneself yields "a very simple" recipe. The belief that happiness is impossible without a religious creed (Mr. Krutch's view) is wrong, as is the belief of the unhappy that their sorrows have "complicated and highly intellectualized sources": "I think they are only symptoms." "The man who is unhappy will, as a rule, adopt an unhappy creed, while the man who is happy will adopt a happy creed; each may attribute his happiness or unhappiness to his beliefs, while the real causation is the other way round."

The indispensable simple things. "Certain things are indispensable to the happiness of most men, but these are simple things: food and shelter, health, love, successful work and the respect of one's own herd. To some people parenthood also is essential." Where these are lacking, only the exceptional man can be happy; where they are enjoyed "or can be obtained by well-directed effort," the man who is still unhappy "is suffering from some psychological maladjustment" which "can in ordinary cases be cured by the patient himself." "Where outward circumstances are not definitely unfortunate, a man should be able to achieve happiness, provided that his passions and interests are directed outward, not inward."

The prisons of self. The passions that shut us up in ourselves "constitute one of the worst kinds of prisons": "fear, envy, the sense of sin, self-pity and self-admiration." In all of these "our desires are centred upon ourselves." "Fear is the principal reason why men are so unwilling to admit facts and so anxious to wrap themselves round in a warm garment of myth," and the man accustomed to the garment's warmth "suffers far more from these blasts than a man who has hardened himself to them from the first" — and knows at bottom that he is deceiving himself. Self-centred passions also "afford so little variety in life": the man who loves only himself "is bound in the end to suffer intolerable boredom from the invariable sameness of the object of his devotion," and "the man who suffers from a sense of sin is suffering from a particular kind of self-love" — in this universe the thing of most importance to him "is that he himself should be virtuous."

The happy man defined. "The happy man is the man who lives objectively, who has free affections and wide interests, who secures his happiness through these interests and affections and through the fact that they, in turn, make him an object of interest and affection to many others." "To be the recipient of affection is a potent cause of happiness, but the man who demands affection is not the man upon whom it is bestowed. The man who receives affection is, speaking broadly, the man who gives it. But it is useless to attempt to give it as a calculation, in the way in which one might lend money at interest."

What the self-absorbed man can do. "So long as he continues to think about the causes of his unhappiness, he continues to be self-centred and therefore does not get outside the vicious circle; if he is to get outside it, it must be by genuine interests, not by simulated interests adopted merely as a medicine." For the sense of sin: persuade the conscious mind that there is no reason to feel sinful, plant the rational conviction in the unconscious by the technique of earlier chapters, and "concerning himself meanwhile with some more or less neutral activity." For self-pity: persuade yourself "that there is nothing extraordinarily unfortunate in your circumstances." For fear: "practise exercises designed to give courage" — moral and intellectual courage have their technique no less than physical: "Admit to yourself every day at least one painful truth; you will find this quite as useful as the Boy Scout's daily kind action. Teach yourself to feel that life would still be worth living even if you were not, as of course you are, immeasurably superior to all your friends in virtue and in intelligence." The objective interests themselves "must be left to the spontaneous workings of your nature and of external circumstances" — "do not say to yourself in advance, 'I should be happy if I could become absorbed in stamp-collecting'"; genuine interests "will grow up as soon as you have learnt not to be immersed in self."

The happy life is the good life. "The happy life is to an extraordinary extent the same as the good life." "Professional moralists have made too much of self-denial": conscious self-denial "leaves a man self-absorbed and vividly aware of what he has sacrificed," so that "it fails often of its immediate object and almost always of its ultimate purpose." What is needed is "that kind of direction of interest outward which will lead spontaneously and naturally to the same acts that a person absorbed in the pursuit of his own virtue could only perform by means of conscious self-denial." Russell writes "as a hedonist, that is to say, as one who regards happiness as the good, but the acts to be recommended from the point of view of the hedonist are on the whole the same as those to be recommended by the sane moralist." The drowning child: saved by a direct impulse to bring help you emerge "none the worse morally"; saved because "it is the part of virtue to succour the helpless," "you will be an even worse man afterwards than you were before." The traditional moralist says love should be unselfish — right up to a point, "but it should undoubtedly be of such a nature that one's own happiness is bound up in its success"; the man who proposes marriage on the ground that he ardently desires her happiness and offers ideal opportunities of self-abnegation may be doubted to please. "The whole antithesis between self and the rest of the world, which is implied in the doctrine of self-denial, disappears as soon as we have any genuine interest in persons or things outside ourselves": through such interests a man "comes to feel himself part of the stream of life, not a hard separate entity like a billiard-ball, which can have no relation with other such entities except that of collision."

The final definition. "All unhappiness depends upon some kind of disintegration or lack of integration": within the self, through "lack of co-ordination between the conscious and the unconscious mind"; between the self and society, where the two "are not knit together by the force of objective interests and affections." "The happy man is the man who does not suffer from either of these failures of unity, whose personality is neither divided against itself nor pitted against the world. Such a man feels himself a citizen of the universe, enjoying freely the spectacle that it offers and the joys that it affords, untroubled by the thought of death because he feels himself not really separate from those who will come after him. It is in such profound instinctive union with the stream of life that the greatest joy is to be found."

Key ideas

• Unhappy creeds are symptoms, not causes: the unhappy man adopts an unhappy creed and mistakes the causation.
• The indispensable conditions of happiness are simple: food and shelter, health, love, successful work, and the respect of one's own herd — parenthood to some.
• The passions that imprison us in self are fear, envy, the sense of sin, self-pity, and self-admiration; the sense of sin is itself a form of self-love.
• The happy man lives objectively, with free affections and wide interests, and becomes thereby an object of interest and affection to others.
• The self-absorbed must escape the vicious circle by genuine, not simulated, interests; daily admission of one painful truth is the exercise for courage.
• The happy life is to an extraordinary extent the same as the good life; conscious self-denial fails of its object, while outward-directed interest produces the same acts spontaneously.
• All unhappiness is a failure of integration — within the self or between self and society; the happy man's personality is neither divided against itself nor pitted against the world.
• The greatest joy is found in "profound instinctive union with the stream of life."

Key takeaway

The happy man is the integrated man: free affections and wide interests directed outward, at one with himself and with the stream of life — and his recipe is simple because the obstacles to it are simply misdirected attention.

The book's overall argument

1. Chapter 1 (What Makes People Unhappy?) — establishes that ordinary unhappiness is widespread, largely self-inflicted through self-absorption (sin, narcissism, megalomania), and curable by directing attention outward.
2. Chapter 2 (Byronic Unhappiness) — establishes that pessimism is a mood mistaken for a philosophy: reason lays no embargo upon happiness, and the despair of Ecclesiastes, Byron, and Krutch collapses under examination.
3. Chapter 3 (Competition) — establishes that the "struggle for life" is really a struggle for success, a religion of competitive victory that poisons work, leisure, and finally the stock itself.
4. Chapter 4 (Boredom and Excitement) — establishes that boredom is a great historical motive power, that the flight from it produces the worst boredom, and that the capacity to endure monotony and contact with the Earth are necessary to joy.
5. Chapter 5 (Fatigue) — establishes that the serious fatigue of modern life is nervous fatigue caused by worry and fear, curable by mental discipline, the worst-case technique, and courage.
6. Chapter 6 (Envy) — establishes that envy is the most unfortunate of passions, fatal to excellence and to the envious man himself, and curable only by happiness, which means abandoning comparison and transcending self.
7. Chapter 7 (The Sense of Sin) — establishes that conscience is tribal custom, that the infantile sense of sin poisons sex and personality, and that it must be uprooted in favor of a rational ethic and mental integration.
8. Chapter 8 (Persecution Mania) — establishes that the sense of being persecuted is rooted in an exaggerated conception of one's merits, and that four maxims — question your altruism, your merits, your expected interest, and others' attention — prevent it.
9. Chapter 9 (Fear of Public Opinion) — establishes that the tyranny of the herd is largely voluntary, that genuine indifference (short of starvation and prison) is a strength, and that the young should seek congenial surroundings.
10. Chapter 10 (Is Happiness Still Possible?) — establishes that happiness is possible in two grades — plain and spiritual — and that its secret is wide interests and friendly reactions to persons and things.
11. Chapter 11 (Zest) — establishes that zest is the most universal mark of happy men, a natural appetite for the world that civilization's restraints and mistaken respectability tend to destroy, and that moderation keeps it healthy.
12. Chapter 12 (Affection) — establishes that the feeling of being loved gives the security on which zest rests, that the best affection is reciprocally life-giving, and that caution in love is the most fatal enemy of happiness.
13. Chapter 13 (The Family) — establishes that the family, potentially the greatest source of happiness, fails through economic strains and the corruption of parental love by power and timidity, and that respect for the child's personality restores it.
14. Chapter 14 (Work) — establishes that work is the preventive of boredom, the vehicle of ambition and consistent purpose, and that its deepest satisfactions lie in skill and construction.
15. Chapter 15 (Impersonal Interests) — establishes that minor interests outside one's main concerns rest the mind, keep a sense of proportion, cure fanaticism, and provide an undisturbed refuge in grief.
16. Chapter 16 (Effort and Resignation) — establishes that happiness is an achievement balancing effort against resignation — resignation rooted in unconquerable, impersonal hope, never in despair.
17. Chapter 17 (The Happy Man) — establishes the final synthesis: the happy man lives objectively with free affections and wide interests; his personality is neither divided against itself nor pitted against the world, and he is united with the stream of life.

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Common misunderstandings

Misunderstanding: The book is a superficial self-help manual that tells you to cheer up. It demands the opposite of cheerfulness: "happiness must be, for most men and women, an achievement rather than a gift of the gods," requiring effort both inward and outward — mental discipline, the facing of worst cases, the rooting out of infantile beliefs, and the balancing of effort with resignation. The "conquest" in the title is literal.

Misunderstanding: Russell recommends selfish hedonism. He declares himself "a hedonist" — happiness is the good — but insists that "the acts to be recommended from the point of view of the hedonist are on the whole the same as those to be recommended by the sane moralist." His whole argument is that happiness comes from outward direction: affection, family, work, and interests beyond the self. The unselfishness of the "sane moralist" is achieved spontaneously by the outward-directed man, not by conscious self-denial.

Misunderstanding: The book is anti-religious in the sense of dismissing all seriousness. Russell attacks "superstitious morality" and the sense of sin, but he writes of "profound instinctive union with the stream of life," "greatness of soul," "communion with the great of all ages," and the value of a creed that focuses attention on well-ascertained facts. He says explicitly that he wants a man destitute "of superstitious morality," not "of morality."

Misunderstanding: The book promises happiness to everyone regardless of circumstances. The Preface and Chapter 1 restrict the claim: Russell assumes a sufficient income, sufficient health, and the absence of great catastrophes such as the loss of all one's children or public disgrace. Where food, shelter, health, love, successful work, and the respect of one's herd are lacking, "only the exceptional man can achieve happiness."

Misunderstanding: The book is a collection of essays that has no unified thesis. The 17 chapters form one argument: Part I diagnoses the psychological causes of unhappiness (self-absorption in its many disguises), Part II prescribes the causes of happiness (zest, affection, family, work, impersonal interests, effort and resignation), and Chapter 17 states the single synthesis: the happy man lives objectively, and all unhappiness is a failure of integration.

Misunderstanding: Russell is hostile to work, the machine age, or modern civilization. He argues the reverse: "even the dullest work is to most people less painful than idleness," work is desirable as a preventive of boredom, and the machine age "has enormously diminished the sum of boredom in the world." What he attacks is not work but the philosophy that makes competitive success the purpose of life.

Misunderstanding: "Resignation" means passive acceptance of everything. Russell distinguishes two kinds: resignation rooted in despair (bad, useless, unhappy) and resignation rooted in "unconquerable hope" (good). The wise man "will not sit down under preventable misfortunes"; he merely refuses to waste emotion on the unavoidable and on trivia.

Misunderstanding: The sense of sin is needed to keep people moral. The book argues the exact reverse: "the sense of sin, so far from being a cause of a good life, is quite the reverse" — it makes men unhappy, inferior, envious, and disagreeable, while the real sins (harshness, cruelty, malevolence, ferocity) go unpunished by conscience.

Misunderstanding: It is dated 1930s commentary of no contemporary relevance. Russell's examples are period pieces (motor cars on Sunday, the wireless), but the mechanisms he analyzes — competitive pressure, envy as the engine of democratic politics, the fear of what newspapers may say, the flight from boredom, the institutional collapse of the family — are the arguments of the book, and they were deliberately framed as the psychology of "the modern world" in general.

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Central paradox / key insight

The book's most counterintuitive idea is that self-absorption is the root of unhappiness even when it takes the form of pursuing virtue or salvation — and that happiness cannot be pursued directly at all. The man who seeks happiness as pleasure becomes a devotee of distraction; the man who seeks it as success becomes a competitor; the man who seeks it as moral perfection becomes the slave of the sense of sin; the man who seeks it as power becomes a megalomaniac. Each is "encased in self," and the more intently he aims at his own happiness, the more certainly he misses it. Happiness is a by-product of attention directed outward — to persons, to work, to the world — and it is secured "through these interests and affections and through the fact that they, in turn, make him an object of interest and affection to many others."

The paradox has a second face: the unhappy man is proud of his unhappiness (like the fox proud of his lost tail), the pessimist mistakes a mood for a philosophy, and "the man who suffers from a sense of sin is suffering from a particular kind of self-love" — in all this vast universe the thing of most importance to him "is that he himself should be virtuous." Even the pursuit of the good life, when conducted as conscious self-denial, keeps the self at the center and fails "of its immediate object and almost always of its ultimate purpose."

The happy man is the man who lives objectively, who has free affections and wide interests, who secures his happiness through these interests and affections and through the fact that they, in turn, make him an object of interest and affection to many others.

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Important concepts

Zest — "What hunger is in relation to food, zest is in relation to life": the natural appetite for the world, the most universal and distinctive mark of happy men. It is retained by directing attention outward, demands surplus energy, and can be specialized (a hobby) or general; moderation keeps it from degenerating into gormandizing or flight.

Self-absorption — Attention turned inward upon the self, the root of ordinary unhappiness. Its three typical forms are the sinner (absorption in the consciousness of sin), the narcissist (absorption in being admired), and the megalomaniac (absorption in power). It leads to no progressive activity and destroys the "natural zest and appetite for possible things" on which all happiness depends.

Byronic unhappiness — The fashionable pessimism that mistakes a mood for an argument; the belief that wisdom consists in seeing through everything and finding nothing worth living for. Russell's reply: there is no arguing with a mood, reason lays no embargo upon happiness, and the unhappy adopt an unhappy creed because they are unhappy, not vice versa.

Struggle for success — What the business man really means by "the struggle for life": not the fear of missing breakfast but "the fear of failing to outshine their neighbours." It is the religion of a life lived as a competitive contest, poisoning work and leisure alike.

Fructifying and stultifying boredom — The two kinds of boredom: the fructifying kind arises from the absence of drugs (a natural, productive restlessness), the stultifying from the absence of vital activities. The flight from the first produces the second: "In flying from the fructifying kind of boredom, they fall a prey to the other far worse kind."

Contact with the Earth — The organic need to remain in touch with "the ebb and flow of terrestrial life" — the rhythm of seasons, soil, and the natural world. Its starvation produces the special boredom of modern urban populations, and it is the root of the "profoundly satisfying" pleasures that leave happiness behind when they cease.

Nervous fatigue — The serious fatigue of modern life, most pronounced among the well-to-do and brain-workers: emotional rather than intellectual or muscular in origin, caused by worry and fear, interfering with rest, and curable by mental discipline, the worst-case technique, and courage.

Orderly mind — The mental discipline of thinking about a matter adequately at the right time rather than inadequately at all times: deciding once when the data are available and not revising without new facts. "Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile."

Envy — "One of the most universal and deep-seated of human passions" and "the most unfortunate" of ordinary characteristics: the envious man derives pain from what others have and wishes to inflict misfortune. Its cure is happiness — realized by abandoning comparison — and its compensating passion is admiration.

Sense of sin — The internalized infantile moral code (swearing, drink, tobacco, lying, sex) that survives in the unconscious as irrational guilt. A form of self-love; the cause of badness rather than goodness; curable by planting rational convictions into the unconscious. Opposed to "superstitious morality" as distinct from morality.

Mental integration — The harmonious working of the conscious, subconscious, and unconscious layers of a man's nature, the condition of the expansive, generous attitude to others; a harmonious personality "is directed outward."

Persecution mania — The tendency, universal in milder degree, to feel ill-treated and unrecognized, rooted in "a too exaggerated conception of our own merits." Prevented by four maxims: doubt your own altruism, do not over-estimate your merits, do not expect others to take as much interest in you as you do yourself, and do not imagine that most people think about you at all.

Licensed lunatic — The position a mildly unconventional person can acquire by defying convention "with gaiety and insouciance," so that departures are tolerated: conventional people pardon much in a man whose jollity makes clear that he is not criticizing them.

Friendly interest in persons and things — The secret of happiness: affectionateness that observes and enjoys people's individual traits without grasping at power over them, and interest in the objective world (rocks, ruins, the Council of Trent, the stars) that is friendly rather than hostile, giving the mind poise and proportion.

Plain and fancy happiness — The two grades of happiness: the animal or plain sort open to any human being with health, work, and obstacles overcome (the well-digger, the gardener), and the spiritual or fancy sort open to those who can read and write.

Stream of life — The felt continuity of the individual with past and future generations — "from the first germ to the remote and unknown future." To feel oneself "part of the stream of life, not a hard separate entity like a billiard-ball" is the emotional basis of parenthood, of participation in civilization, and of the greatest joy; its absence produces futility and desiccation.

Construction — The element of the best work: an initial haphazard state transformed into a final state that embodies a purpose (as in building, irrigation, organization, art, science). Its satisfactions lead on indefinitely; destruction, whose end state is haphazard, gives only "a fiercer joy" that fades.

Impersonal interests — Minor interests outside one's central activities, resting the mind because they demand no action, preserving the sense of proportion, curing fanaticism, and providing "an undisturbed place" for the mind in grief.

Resignation of unconquerable hope — The good kind of resignation: doing one's best while leaving the issue to fate, rooted in hope that is "large and impersonal" — the man of science who desires the progress of science, the reformer who is interested in the future of mankind apart from his own participation in it. Contrasted with the resignation of despair, which abandons all serious activity.

External discipline — The only road to happiness for those whose self-absorption is too profound for any other cure: the monk's routine, the crossing-sweeper's compulsory work, "external discipline" that makes a man forget his own soul.

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References and Web Links

Primary texts (full text, public domain)

• Internet Archive scan of the 1930 first edition (London: George Allen & Unwin) — the edition this outline follows; contains the printed table of contents with all 17 chapters — https://archive.org/details/conquest_happiness
• Internet Archive scan of the 1930 first US edition (New York: Horace Liveright) — independent confirmation of the same 17-chapter table of contents — https://archive.org/details/conquestofhappin0000bert_s7t7
• Project Gutenberg: The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell, eBook #77894 — full text in the public domain — https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77894
• Internet Archive, 1958 Liveright printing (ISBN 0-87140-051-0) — the standard post-war text, 249 pages — https://archive.org/details/conquestofhappin0000bert

Editions and publisher pages

• Routledge Classics paperback (1st edition, ISBN 978-0-415-37847-5) — the current standard reissue, reprinting the same text and chapter sequence — https://www.routledge.com/The-Conquest-of-Happiness/Russell/p/book/9780415378475
• Open Library work record (OL1088568W, first published 1930, 17 editions listed) — https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1088568W/The_conquest_of_happiness
• Open Library edition record for the 1958 Liveright printing (OL16509118M) — https://openlibrary.org/books/OL16509118M/The_conquest_of_happiness
• Google Books "About" page for The Conquest of Happiness — https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Conquest_of_Happiness.html?id=PZLXEn5ekwEC
• WorldCat record (OCLC 135579) for the 1958 Liveright edition — https://worldcat.org/oclc/135579
• Goodreads edition record — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1107787
• LibraryThing work record — https://www.librarything.com/work/12986

Author and context

• Wikipedia: "Bertrand Russell" — the book's Wikipedia article redirects here; the biography covers the book's context and Russell's popular philosophical writings — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell

Verification note

The chapter list in this outline was locked by reading the printed tables of contents of the two 1930 first editions scanned at the Internet Archive (links above), and confirmed against Project Gutenberg's full text. Popular study-guide pages (e.g. LitCharts, SuperSummary) could not be verified to exist for this title at the time of writing and are therefore omitted: every link above was fetched and confirmed reachable during research. Where a general reader wants a supplement to the primary text, the Project Gutenberg full text is the recommended companion.