> This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been disastrous. Let us take an illustration. Suppose that at a given moment a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?
This has been a fantastic read. Thanks for sharing!
I will add that I recommend the whole "In Praise of Idleness" book from Russell, it's a collection of essays and lots of them are interesting 70-80 years later.
A personal favourite of mine is "The Ancestry of Fascism", delineating social movements in history through the perspective of a constant pendulum pushing/pulling from opposite directions for any kind of social movement (political, artistic, etc.).
Bertrand Russell wrote about this in In Praise of Idleness