The Idler

Bertrand Russell on the Chinese

11 August 2005

I’ve just come across this great passage from a 1928 essay by Russell called “Eastern and Western Ideals of Happiness”.

I MUST confess that, since I came to know China, I have regarded laziness as one of the best qualities of which men in the mass are capable. We achieve certain things by being energetic, but it may be questioned whether, on balance, the things that we achieve are of any value. We develop wonderful skills in manufacture, part of which we devote to making ships, automobiles, telephones and other means of living luxuriously at high pressure, while another part is devoted to making guns, poison gases and aeroplanes for the purpose of killing each other wholesale. We have a first-class system of administration and taxation, part of which is devoted to education, sanitation and such useful objects, while the rest is devoted to war. In England at the present day most of the national revenue is spent on past and future wars and only in residue on useful objects. On the Continent, in most countries, the proportion is even worse. We have a police system of unexampled efficiency, part of which is devoted to the detection and prevention of crime and part to imprisoning anybody who has new constructive political ideas. In China, until recently, they had none of these things. Industry was too inefficient to produce either automobiles or bombs; the State was too inefficient to catch either bandits or Bolsheviks. The result was that in China, as compared to any white man’s country, there was freedom for all, and a degree of diffused happiness which was amazing in view of the poverty of all but a tiny minority.