The four desires driving all Human Behaviour
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Jun 19, 2021
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Exploring the four infinite desires that drive human behaviour: acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and power.
Last updated
Dec 19, 2023 12:43 PM
Bertrand Russell’s Magnificent Noble Prize Acceptance speech.
Bertrand Russell is considered as one of humanity's most lucid and luminous minds. In 1950, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for “his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought.” On December 11 of that year, 78-year-old Russell took the podium in Stockholm to receive the grand accolade. His acceptance speech is one of the finest packets of human thought ever delivered from a stage.
Russell begins by considering the central motive driving human behaviour:
All human activity is prompted by desire.
He acknowledges the existence of a mistaken theory followed by some committed moralist which showcases that is is possible to resist desire in the interest of duty and moral principe. He adds that the above theory is incorrect, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only about their material circumstances, but rather the whole system of their desire with their relative strength.
Desire is what differentiates Man from other animals, which are, so to speak, infinite and can never be fully satisfied and which would keep him restless even in Paradise. The boa constrictor, when he has had an adequate meal, goes to sleep, and does not wake until he needs another meal. Human beings, for the most part are not like this.
Russell points to four such infinite desires:
Acquisitiveness
the wish to possess as much as possible of goods, or the title to goods - a motive which has its origin in a combination of fear with desire for necessaries.
He explains how he had befriended two little girls from Estonia, who had narrowly escaped death from starvation in a famine. They lived with his family and of-course had plenty to eat. But they spend all their leisure visiting neighbouring farms and stealing potatoes, which they hoarded. John D. Rockefeller considered as the wealthiest American of all time, who in his infancy had experienced great poverty, had spend his adult life in a similar manner.
However much you may acquire, you will always wish to acquire more; satiety is a dream which will always elude you.
Rivalry
The world would be a happier place than it is if acquisitiveness were always stronger than rivalry. But in fact, a great many men will cheerfully face impoverishment if they can thereby secure complete ruin for their rivals. Hence the present level of taxation.
Vanity
Rivalry, he argues, is in turn upstaged by human narcissism. Narcissism or vanity often described as extreme self-involvement to the degree that it makes a person ignore the needs of those around them is a motive of immense power. Anyone who has anything to do with children knows how they are constantly performing some antic, and saying “Look at me.”
“Look at me” is one of the most fundamental desires of the human heart.
It can take innumerable forms, from buffoonery to the pursuit of posthumous fame.
Power
The most potent of the four impulses, Russell argues is the love of power.
Love of power is closely related to vanity, but it is not by any means the same thing. What vanity needs for its satisfaction is glory, and it is easy to have glory without power.
Many people prefer glory to power, but on the whole these people have less effect upon the course of events than those who prefer power to glory… Power, like vanity, is insatiable. Nothing short of omnipotence could satisfy it completely. It is, indeed, by far the strongest motive in the lives of important men.
In any autocratic regime, the holders of power become increasingly tyrannical with experience of the delights that power can afford. Since power over human beings is shown in making them do what they would rather not do, the man who is actuated by love of power is more apt to inflict pain than to permit pleasure.