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The Four Desires Driving All Human Behavior: Bertrand Russell's Magnificent Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
The love of excitement
The desire to escape from boredom is very powerful to almost all human beings.
But a great deal of modern work is sedentary so we most find other means to use our physical energy that produces love of excitement. And nothing is more exciting than a moment of sudden discovery or invention.
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Key Ideas
Infinite desires
Bertrand Russell, at his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, pointed out that all human activity is prompted by desire. If you want to know what man will do, you must know the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths.
Humans have some infinite desires, which can never be fully gratified. The four endless desires are acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power.
Acquisitiveness
Acquisitiveness is the desire to possess as much as possible of goods, or the title of goods.
Regardless of how much you acquire, you will always wish for more.
Vanity
People desire to be admired. Vanity needs glory for its satisfaction.
Even from childhood, children are always performing some antic, and demand to be looked at.
The love of power
Power is insatiable: the vice of energetic men and the strongest drive in the lives of important men. The more power is experienced, the greater the love of power.
In an autocratic regime, the holders of power become more tyrannical when they experience the delights that power brings. The man who moves from the love of power is more willing to inflict pain than to permit pleasure.
Love of power is not always negative
From the need to dominate the unknown comes the desires like the pursuit of knowledge and all scientific progress.
How you use this power depends upon the social system and your abilities.
The love of excitement
The desire to escape from boredom is very powerful to almost all human beings.
But a great deal of modern work is sedentary so we most find other means to use our physical energy that produces love of excitement. And nothing is more exciting than a moment of sudden discovery or invention.
SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Key Ideas
Polymaths and mastery
Polymaths manage to achieve mastery across multiple industries, arts, or fields of study. What sets them apart? The willingness and drive to learn new.
Aristotle (382 BC–322 BC)
A polymath that made fundamental contributions to diverse fields of study, including logic, rhetoric, ethics, physics, story, poetry, government, metaphysics, geology and zoology.
Aristotle believed that we should strive to live a life of moderation, nurturing the virtues within ourselves and avoiding the vices on either extreme end.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)
H was the father of the High Renaissance style. Da Vinci made contributions to many other fields: urban planning, mathematics, botany, astronomy, invention, history, sculpting and cartography.
- He introduced the idea of painting with aerial perspective (painting faraway objects less distinctly and with less vibrant colors).
- He was also interested in anatomy. He used his skills as an artist to create the Vitruvian Man, a study on body proportion and an exemplar of the intersection of math and art common in the Renaissance era.
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Key Ideas
Finding meaning above happiness
For many people, the pursuit of happiness is the meaning of life itself.
However, Friedrich Nietzsche saw the pursuit of happiness as a pointless waste of human life. He was instead dedicate...
The key to good living
Psychology agrees that the key to good living is to find meaning. For Nietzsche, those who do great things suffer greatly. Those who do small things suffer trivially.
Herein lies the paradox of happiness. Activities directly focused to increase pleasure are unlikely to have a high payoff. Happiness is a side effect.
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Key Ideas
Describing wonder
Wonder is said to be a childish emotion. However, as adults, we experience it when gaping at something unexpectedly spectacular.
Adam Smith, an 18th-century moral philosopher, describes wond...
Bodily symptoms
The bodily symptoms of this strange appearance point to three dimensions:
- Sensory: The marvelous things take hold of our senses - we stare and widen our eyes.
- Cognitive: We are perplexed because we don't have a past experience to understand them. It leads to a suspension of breath, similar to when we are startled.
- Spiritual: We look upwards in veneration, which makes our heart swell.
The scale of wonder
At the mild end of this emotion, we talk about things being marvelous. More intense emotions might be described as astonishing. The extreme of this experiences is met with expressions of awe.
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