The text The conquest of happiness, published in 1930 and from 4 June on newsstands with the Corriere, is one of the so-called popular writings of the neo-positivist philosopher and Nobel Prize for Literature Bertrand Russell, alongside others such as The education of our children (1926), Marriage and morals (1929) e Religion and science (1935).
It was an Enlightenment ideal to create educational tools and technicians to improve individual and collective happiness as the ultimate goal of human action. But since the first reflections on the subject, and persisted even after the birth of psychology, the problem that this objective posed was how to register individual happiness, which always appeared to be something elusive and very different from the evident social progress of the last centuries. Are we happier than a medieval monk, with an average life of 45 years, who believed that eternal salvation awaited him?
Russell evades this question and puts the issue on a pragmatic level, as an operational critic, facing it in a negative way: he records what, in his opinion, are the situations that make you unhappy and proposes suggestions to overcome them, that is the remedies for unhappiness. The only theoretical starting point is the underlying criticism of the naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch, who in the essay Modern Temper (1929) had basically considered rationality, somewhat in the wake of the biblical book ofEcclesiastes, a brake on happiness. Russell diagnoses a myriad of causes of unhappiness in modern life and traces a path out of the seemingly inevitable malaise common in Western societies.
One of the recurring causes of unhappiness is the struggle for success, aspiration to go further and further, which would then be the very spring of capitalism (Russell has the American financial world in mind). Whoever is inserted into this cog of insane competition to the detriment of feelings and intellect loses the taste for healthy life and engages in an unbridled race that leads him to the grave. The productive-consumerist ethic does not make individuals happy also because, as economists argue, acquired goods never end up satisfying. Instead, one must free oneself from envy, enjoying the joys that one encounters on one’s path without making comparisons. For Russell, however, even modesty or false modesty similar to or leads to envy.
The reason is the tool to overcome the feelings of guilt that, due to a moral traditional predominating over the ego, they make us unhappy. Otherwise we always remain closed in on ourselves and, as we feel guilty, we feel a sense of inferiority and envy towards the other.
Persecution mania afflicts all who feel (or sometimes are) mistreated or victims of ingratitude. Many times, the persecution mania is produced by the belief that we move for altruistic reasons and because we expect others to care about us as much as we do. A conviction summarized in a flash by the writer Sandro Veronesi in Calm chaos: People think of us infinitely less than we think.
To make us unhappy, says Russell, even the fear of public opinion, an observation, this, outdated by the times. The individual, especially the young person, object of disapproval ends up in isolation (the case of the Bront sisters). In this case you have to overcome shyness and the community will gradually come to tolerate your behavior. Today intolerance is so banished that the only fear one can have is to have an opinion.
Narcissism, megalomania and boredom are also causes of unhappiness, which is the opposite of excitement: one should be able to live moments of tranquility without excitement. The alternation of fatigue and rest is also the way to a happier life. The obsession with work generates physical fatigue, nervousness and anxiety: it can reassure us to think that I am just a very important fragment of the world….
Many of these causes, as we can see, are those included in the various ones versions of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) used by psychologists to help overcome behavioral disorders. From this it follows that, for Russell, unhappiness is mostly caused by behavioral disturbances of the individual himself. The basic remedy is to engage in constructive activities and openness to others, without turning in on oneself: to love the activity without competition, narcissism, megalomania.
The book written in simple language without philosophical terminology. It is addressed to the common reader with the purpose of helping to approach happiness, an element not present in itself in our lives and not given by right or forever, but to be conquered every day.
Second volume. The pragmatic vision of an Anglo-Saxon thinker
Bertrand Russell’s book is out on newsstands today with Corriere della SeraThe conquest of happiness, at the price of e 7.90 plus the cost of the newspaper. This is the second issue of the Biblioteca della felicit series created in collaboration with Io Donna, the women’s weekly supplement of the via Solferino newspaper: a review of twenty works, released every week (the first fifteen issues in the graph on the right), which deal with the question from the most varied perspectives. After the reflections of Seneca, a thinker of antiquity, we move on to those of a philosopher of the twentieth century, demonstrating the fact that the problem of how to live a peaceful and satisfying existence remains an obsession for centuries after they questioned the human condition. Russell’s book, which came out in original edition in 1930, proposed in the translation by Giuliana Pozzo Galeazzi. The author, born in 1872 and died in 1970, is one of the most significant figures of contemporary Anglo-Saxon thought, a scholar of logic, mathematics and epistemology, a long-time member of the House of Lords as an aristocrat, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, icon of the battles for peace and atomic disarmament.The third issue of the series, on newsstands with Corriere from 11 June, will be Peace of mind of the Dalai Lama. They will follow: Moments of happiness by Marc Aug (June 18); Congratulations – Freedom of Sant’Agostino (June 25); Emotional intelligenceby Daniel Goleman (July 2); Letters about happiness, the sky and physics of Epicurus (July 9).
June 3, 2021 (change June 3, 2021 | 22:10)
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