His 1950 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech.
Innumerable, interesting historical and cultural allusions.
Some political incorrectness and frequently irreverent.
Full of insights and much relevance to today‘s world.
He begins by outlining human nature’s basic acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and power.
Eventually gets to enlightened self-interest and intelligence as a +ve ways forward.
Quotes from the speech:
If one man offers you democracy and another offers you a bag of grain, at what stage of starvation will you prefer the grain to the vote?
All human activity is prompted by desire.
Undoubtedly the desire for food has been, and still is, one of the main causes of great political events.
However much you may acquire, you will always wish to acquire more; satiety is a dream which will always elude you.
Vanity is a motive of immense potency.
“Look at me” is one of the fundamental desires of the human heart.
The more you are talked about, the more you will wish to be talked about.
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.
Experience shows that escape from boredom is one of the really powerful desires of almost all human beings.
The pleasure of gambling consists almost entirely in excitement.
And is not condemnation perhaps merely a form of excitement appropriate to old age?
What is serious about excitement is that so many of its forms are destructive….And above all it is destructive when it leads to war.
Nothing in the world is more exciting than a moment of sudden discovery or invention, and many people are capable of experiencing such moments than is sometimes thought.
We love to hate our enemies, and if we had no enemies there would be very few people whom we should love.
…schools are out to teach patriotism, newspapers are out to stir up excitement, and politicians are out to get re-elected.
Fear is in itself degrading; it easily becomes an obsession; it produces hate of that which is feared, and it leads to excesses of cruelty.
If matters are to improve, the first and essential step is to find a way of diminishing fear.
Ideologies, in fact, are one of the methods by which herds are created, and the psychology is much the same however the herd may have been generated.
I do not think it can be questioned that sympathy is a genuine motive, and that some people at some times are made somewhat uncomfortable by the sufferings of some other people. It is sympathy that has produced the many humanitarian advances of the last hundred years.
Perhaps the best hope for the future of mankind is that ways will be found of increasing the scope and intensity of sympathy.
Politics is concerned with herds rather than with individuals, and the passions which are important in politics are, therefore those in which the various members of a given herd can feel alike.
Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.
The main thing needed to make the world happy is intelligence.
Intelligence is a thing that can be fostered by known methods of education.