The Conquest of Unhappiness

Date

February 8, 2021

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In the first part of this post, we talked about what are, for Bertrand Russell (The Conquest of Happiness, 1930) some of the reasons people are unhappy: fashionable pessimism, competition, boredom, and fatigue that comes from anxiety. In this second part, we will examine four more factors that contribute to unhappiness: envy, the sense of sin, persecution mania and the fear of public opinion.

The Conquest of Happiness and Why It Matters Today

Bertrand Russell’s book ‘The Conquest of Happiness’ (1930) attempts to analyse the conditions for happiness in our modern world, focusing on the different mindsets of the unhappy and the happy person.

Unhappiness from envy

“Of all the characteristics of ordinary human nature,” Russell writes, “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. Instead of deriving pleasure from what he has, he derives pain from what others have. If he can, he deprives others of their advantages, which to him is as desirable as it would be to secure the same advantages himself.”

This is an irrational behaviour that causes the envious person to invest effort not into improving their own condition but into making others worse off. If nothing is done to control and limit envy, Russel believes, envy might affect the whole of society and bring it into a downward spiral where, in the end, everyone is equally miserable.

How then, can we get rid of envy?

Russell proposes happiness as an antidote to envy. Someone who is happy will be content with what they have and will not be looking to compare themselves with others.

“With the wise man, what he has does not cease to be enjoyable because someone else has something else. Envy, in fact, is one form of a vice, partly moral, partly intellectual, which consists in seeing things never in themselves, but only in their relations.”

So when we have a salary that is sufficient for us, we should not look to compare it with the salary of others. Doing so would not increase our own salary, but merely remove the happiness that we can gain from it and replace it with sadness.

For Russell, the source of envy goes back to childhood. If the parents seem to prefer one child over another, this, he believes, will cause the less advantaged one to develop a disposition to envy. Unnecessary modesty also leads to envy, he believes, and so the way to best raise children would be to teach them that they are the best just as they are. We see echoes of that in many of today’s pedagogical methods:

“For my part, I think there is much to be said for bringing 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 …

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