Schiller Institute on YouTube Schiller Institute on Facebook RSS

Home >

THE ESSENTIAL TRUTH OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

How Bertrand Russell Made Us
Stupid, Fearful, and Evil

by Paul Glumaz
May 2016

A PDF version of this article appears in the January 29, 2016 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

a2-Russell_bertrand_1907-2.jpg
Oligarch Bertrand Russell in 1907. Publication of Principia Mathematica, written jointly with Alfred North Whitehead, began in 1910. He inherited the family earldom in 1931.

Jan 23—Today as I look around, it is clear to me that the United States is dying—and so are the nations of Europe. Sixty-six years elapsed from the Wright brothers’ first flight in 1903 to the Moon landing. Today, forty-seven years after the Moon landing, an increasing number of people believe that the Moon landing was a staged hoax. Those in our society today who have leisure, are more interested in life-style issues, entertainment, and exploring their “inner space,” than they are about caring for future generations, or even for their own children.

The financial system of North America and Europe is collapsing. It is no longer really a financial system, but a system of gambling. Drug addiction and suicides are dramatically escalating, along with, in the case of the United States, mass murders by random individuals. Perhaps as much as half the population of Europe and North America are either taking some variety of mood-altering prescription drugs or smoking pot, while tens of millions are drowning in drugs or alcohol in order to be able to “cope.”

What happened to us? Are we that stupid? Are we that uncaring? Are we that depraved? Are we that depressed? Are we that evil that we would launch a nuclear war against our “enemies,” Russia and China, if they don’t agree to become like us? Emphatically,— yes, we are all of those things. What happened?

What happened, is that over the course of the Twentieth Century, we came under the influence, primarily, of one man, Bertrand Russell. That single individual has done more by far to shape how we think, what we believe, and the world we are living in, than any individual in modern history. What follows is an explanation of how he accomplished that.

How He Made Us Stupid

As elaborated in Russell’s work with Alfred North Whitehead, Principia Mathematica, which began to appear in 1910, Bertrand Russell attempted to eliminate reality from mathematics (and then from science),—replacing reality with Aristotelean logic.

He began with Arithmetic. Bertrand Russell popularized the false claim—the quackery—that Arithmetic could be deduced from Logic. From there, Russell claimed that all mathematics could be deduced from Arithmetic,—and therefore from Logic. No real scientist could ever believe in either of these hoaxes of Russell’s, but all the resources of the British Empire were used to assert their inevitability. For those who needed a formal refutation of this nonsense, the Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel furnished a formal proof of Russell’s fraud in 1931, which even Russell could not contest.

Gödel proved conclusively that even simple Arithmetic, let alone the rest of Mathematics, could never be deduced from Logic. Unable to reply to Gödel, an enraged Russell persecuted him savagely for the rest of his life.

Bertrand Russell’s consumer fraud in claiming that he had reduced Arithmetic to mere logic, is then used to try to convince people that our knowledge of the universe is derived from the operations of logic on our sensory observations of the world. Anyone familiar with computers can tell you that no matter how complex the computer logic is, it cannot create anything beyond the logic in its program. It cannot make a discovery. It cannot think. This is true with all logic. Discovering things cannot occur in a logical system. The axioms of the system deductively predetermine the outcome. Human thinking is not logical, never has been, and never will be. The only human beings who are logical are the ones who have been taught to be logical. Logic is not natural to human beings. It is not how we make discoveries, nor is it how we really know anything.

In Russell’s Principles of Mathematics (1903) he writes: “The fact that all Mathematics is Symbolic Logic is one of the greatest discoveries of our age; and when this fact has been established, the remainder of the principles of mathematics consists in the analysis of Symbolic Logic itself.” Principles of Mathematics. 1903. See Chap. I: Definition of Pure Mathematics, p. 5. Pure fraud! A long-exploded hoax.

a2-Principia_Mathematica_54-43.png
From the Principia Mathematica, a small portion of the proof that 1 + 1 = 2. Russell created the notation.

How many people reading this have been taught to believe that reasoning is logic, and that to learn how to think, you need to learn logic? The confusion of logic with reason and reason with logic is probably the greatest cause of the inability of our population to have confidence in the power of their own minds to discover and solve problems. From a political standpoint it is probably the greatest cause of why most people abandon their responsibility to think, or cannot challenge the obvious false axioms they are told to think in, because they believe that rational human thinking only occurs as logic.

It is worse than that. All things that are not logical are relegated to the realm of the “not scientific.” All issues involving creativity in the universe, whether by man or the universe as a whole, are not scientific. All issues involving intention in the universe, are outside of logic, and are not scientific. All issues involving principles that are metaphysical, that is directing the physical, are not scientific. All matters involving a direct relationship of the macrocosm, or the whole, to the microcosm, the part, cannot be logically explained and therefore are not scientific.

It is even much worse than that. Since thinking as a human is “not science,” then only those trained in logic are qualified to be experts, or to know anything. These properly trained individuals then set the standard of what forms of explanation are allowed in science. This means all discoveries that may be made in science, discoveries that could not have been made by logic, must be explained in a logical form, as if they were derived from that logical form. This not only obscures the method by which the discoveries are made, but on the deepest level creates a situation where the population becomes susceptible to all forms of phantasms, since there is no visible process by which the population can see by example, truthfully, scientifically, the actual process of thought that led to the discovery. This also has both a serious negative effect on the education process, as well as undermining the intellectual confidence of those trying to use their mind in a human way.

a2-Einstein_Albert-4.jpg
Library of Congress
The most notable individual who resisted the pretended reduction of science to logic was Albert Einstein.

So then, what is human reason? Human reason takes the form not of logic, but of a dialogue. There are no pre-existing first principles from which everything is derived, or deduced, while everything outside of that is excluded. Rather, reason involves the dialogue that asks the question of what must be, that we cannot see, if what we know must be this, as well as the alternative that. Reason, as Einstein has said, involves first and foremost the imagination: imagining that which is outside of what is seen, heard or felt, etc.,—which is as it were the heretofore-hidden ground for these,— which was not previously conceived, and which cannot be known from the senses.

The most notable individual who resisted this reduction of science to mere logic was Albert Einstein. All the other scientists of this period in Europe and the United States did not challenge it as a fundamental point of supposed agreement. Russell retaliated against Einstein’s resistance by virtually mugging him: he forced almost every other well-known “scientist” to publicly gang up against Einstein, and then,— when he still refused to submit,— to slander and shun him. As a result, Einstein was essentially banned from scientific dialog for the last twenty years of his life. Einstein said that his “scientific colleagues” considered him a “mountebank,”—i.e., a charlatan or a quack. This is what Russell did to the greatest scientist of the Twentieth Century.

Why Bertrand Russell Made Us Stupid

Bertrand Russell made us stupid because he was the leading intellect of the aristocracy which informed the leading empire of the world, the British Empire. It was the spreading global effect of the industrial revolution that had occurred during the civil war in the United States, and its subsequent consequences, that motivated Bertrand Russell. There was no way of stopping the industrial revolution from conquering the world and ending the rule of aristocracies for all time. Russell’s genius is that he understood that to retard that process, the methods by which discoveries were made had to be attacked. He also recognized that the population that was starting to experience the leisure, and education, that comes with an industrial revolution needed to be drastically dumbed down and made to conform.

In his 1931 book, The Scientific Outlook, Russell says, ‘Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless, and contented. Of these qualities probably contentment will be considered the most important. In order to produce it, all the researches of psycho-analysis, behaviourism, and biochemistry will be brought into play . . . . All the boys and girls will learn from an early age to be what is called ‘co-operative,’ i.e., to do exactly what everybody is doing. Initiative will be discouraged in these children, and insubordination, without being punished, will be scientifically trained out of them.’ For the children chosen to be among the scientific ruling class, education was to be quite different. ‘Except for the one matter of loyalty to the world State and to their own order,’ Russell explained, ‘members of the governing class will be encouraged to be adventurous and full of initiative. It will be recognized that it is their business to improve scientific technique, and to keep the manual workers contented by means of continual new amusements’.” (Jeffrey Steinberg, “From Cybernetics to Littleton,” EIR, May 5, 2000)

This is the future that Bertrand Russell envisioned for an aristocracy facing the challenge of both the industrial revolution as well as future scientific and technological revolutions, revolutions which would lead to the “horrid” development of the lower classes to a level of intellect far surpassing that of the aristocracy. In a pre-industrial society it is not necessary to have all the various biochemical, psychoanalytic, pharmaceutical means of control, because the scarcity of means is the control. Russell’s idea of science is not industrial and productive development. It is the science of dumbing down the masses and increasing the means “to keep the manual workers contented by means of continual new amusements.”

The techniques for dumbing down the population that were proposed by H.G. Wells in his Open Conspiracy, which Bertrand Russell wholeheartedly supported and endorsed, included the following important key aspects:

All this has happened. In this respect we are now living the very future that Bertrand Russell had envisaged for us.

Systems Analysis, the Ultimate Form of Stupidity

Bertrand Russell was the principal leader promoting what is called “systems analysis” as a tool for predicting future outcomes, and of dealing with complex variables to make a scientific analysis of a situation by either breaking something down and analyzing its components, or taking the components and analyzing the whole, based on those components.

This appears to be very scientific and very useful. Bertrand Russell advocated that this be used in a universal way to integrate all the sciences, in a system-of-systems manner. This method of analysis, as it was used beyond very limited and specific situations, is the ultimate form of stupidity. It is totally divorced from reality, and seeks to impose on reality the construct created by the systems analyst. Reality is not a system of logic; reality is governed by physical principles.

It was primarily the introduction of systems analysis, by Bertrand Russell and his associates, into the Soviet Union, through the Laxenburg, Austria-based International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) that caused the Soviet economy to collapse.

Systems analysis has no way of measuring the effect in an economy of a qualitative increase, or decrease in energy flux density, or in the level of infrastructure, or in the increase, or decrease of the cognitive level of the population. This is because those changes change all the variables in ways that are outside of the “system” being analyzed.

It is the use of system analysis, by substituting systems analysis for real science in closed earth-climate computer models, which leads to the absurd, “all the scientists agree..,” or “the science is settled. . .” in matters like climate change, without any regard to the profound macroscopic physical effects coming from the Solar System and the Galaxy. It is the devotees of systems analysis who believe that you can successfully carry out global depopulation to a permanent equilibrium, without acknowledging the physical impossibility of maintaining such an equilibrium in the real physical universe.

It is the use of systems analysis that encourages the devotees of Russell’s logic to believe they can account for all the variables sufficiently to launch a first strike and win a nuclear war. This happens to be the basis of the Prompt Global Strike Doctrine, the current U.S. doctrine for nuclear war. If the human race becomes extinct in the near term because of nuclear war, the stupidity of systems analysis may be one of the most important contributing factors.

The practical man is a stupid man. The reason the practical man is a stupid man, is because he has lost the ability to imagine what could be, or what could have been. The practical man can only know what is, or know “how things work.” As society collapses the practical man cannot conceive of how it could be otherwise, let alone believe that it could be possible to alter the course of the collapse of things. Worse, the practical man will assault the visionary who tries to create a better future for the practical man. The Twentieth Century is the century of the emergence of the practical man, as made stupid by Bertrand Russell.

How Bertrand Russell Made Us Fearful

The potential for humanity to enter into a nuclear age, far superseding the age of the chemical industrial revolution, began in the early Twentieth Century with the work of individuals such as Madame Curie, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, and others. Over one hundred years later, though the nuclear age is with us in part, the full promise of the nuclear age has not been anywhere near realized. Instead, North America’s, Europe’s and Japan’s populations are dominated by an unscientific hysterical fear of nuclear power and science in general. How did this happen? It happened because of Bertrand Russell.

a2-nuclear_explosion.jpg
Russell proposed the pre-emptive use of nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union to compel the Soviets to submit to a world government. Here, a nuclear test explosion.

As World War II was coming to a close, Franklin Delano Roosevelt died. His successor, Harry Truman, followed the advice of the British Empire, advice in which Bertrand Russell had a major influence. That advice was to lead to the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This bombing was unnecessary and was done to terrorize the world. Japan was already negotiating a surrender through private channels.

With the dropping of the atomic bombs and the launching of the Cold War, both of which Russell had a major part in, Russell became an advocate of three movements.

This entire strategy was put forward in a six-page document by Russell which was published Oct. 1, 1946 in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, entitled “The Atomic Bomb and the Prevention of War.” In that document the entire following 70 years were foretold, including the crisis the world is in now. The following are some of the features of that document:

Since the Soviet Union did develop atomic weapons before the United States was able to have the means to sufficiently, pre-emptively, use nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union, Russell describes the nuclear and technological arms race that would ensue. In Russell’s view, one of the main collateral benefits of the nuclear arms race would be the need for secrecy. Such secrecy and extreme security was seen by Russell as a means to compartmentalize and thereby contain, as well as suppress, the dissemination of science to the rest of the world. This is how Russell proposed controlling science and scientists, or in Russell’s own words: “It will be necessary to keep their location secret, which will mean virtually a prison camp for those who work in connection with them. It will involve a constant suspicion of treachery . . . It will involve a complete cessation of freedom for all scientific workers whose activities have any bearing on the war-like utilization of nuclear energy.”

Throughout the document, Russell asserts that peace can only come through the installation of a world government. Until that world government comes into place, Russell says, the threat of annihilation through nuclear war will not only always be present, but given human nature, nuclear war would ultimately become inevitable. It is in this document that Russell makes clear that this terror, the terror of nuclear war, is the most efficient means for controlling the world and its politics. It is only for this reason that Bertrand Russell considers the advent of nuclear power to have any good to it. Rather than a belief in progress, as characterized by Franklin Roosevelt’s intention, it is the fear of nuclear war which Russell establishes as the controlling feature of the post-World War II period. It is the use and manipulation of this fear that has defined everything that has happened since the death of FDR and the Cold War, to the present current emerging nuclear confrontation between NATO and Russia.

Russell addresses the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Trafalgar Square in 1959. He used the fear of nuclear war to vilify nuclear power and science in general.

With the establishment of the Pugwash Conference, which began in the mid-1950s, in which Henry Kissinger and many others like him were involved, Bertrand Russell set the stage for establishing the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. This is where the populations of nations are held hostage to nuclear war as a means to keep the peace. It was Bertrand Russell who played a key role in initiating the actions of Nikita Khrushchov which led to the Cuban missile crisis. The Cuban missile crisis was used to terrorize the world, especially for those born after World War II. Those born after World War II, the “baby boomers,” were at that time children, or young adolescents, who did not have the emotional maturity to deal with this terror. As a result, an indelible imprint of sheer terror has warped the minds and souls of the generation now entering retirement.

This terror, deep in the psyche of the “boomers,” has been extended to everything scientific, especially to nuclear power, whose extensive future use is our future, if we are to have a future. This was a key aspect of what Ronald Reagan’s LaRouche-initiated Strategic Defense Initiative was designed to change, by creating with the Soviet Union the joint venture of developing the technologies of defense that would make nuclear missiles obsolete. The combination of the end of the era of nuclear terror, and the benefit of the new technologies created, could have begun an economic and scientific renaissance. This did not happen. Why? It did not happen because the then-incoming Soviet leadership under Yuri Andropov, had been heavily influenced by Bertrand Russell and systems analysis, and because of that, Andropov rejected this incredible opportunity to get out from under the hellish world that Bertrand Russell had created for us.

Most importantly, this terror has created a sense that at any time the future will end. That leaves only the present in which to live. As a result, the “boomers” and the subsequent generations after the “boomers” have ceased to orient themselves to a future that may not exist. In this context, it is the perpetuation of the permanent threat of nuclear annihilation that is the continuing, most significant corrosive psychological factor in destroying the morality of the individual in our society.

This was Bertrand Russell’s intention, to keep us in such perpetual fear, that in order to escape that fear, we had to abandon any concern for future generations. But after freeing ourselves from the burden of the future, we have no reason to exist, other than to exist for our momentary experiences. That doesn’t give us much to exist for. This has shaped the psyche of our population in North America and Europe to such a degree that there is no way for most people to visualize a future other than the implicit coming doom that we are trying not to think about.

As a result, the West has lost its passion for progress. It has lost its passion for a better future. The brutal assassination of Kennedy and King, wherein a frail glitter of the future still existed, along with the Vietnam War consolidated a malaise which is the core of what afflicts us today. That affliction has a name: Bertrand Russell.

How Bertrand Russell Made Us Evil:
Why We Hate the Human Race

It is quite probable that a large minority, if not the majority of North Americans and Europeans, given their decline into degeneracy under the influence of Bertrand Russell, hate humanity and would like to see the human race exterminated. This view is probably more prevalent among the most educated parts of those regions. The only problem that this large minority, or majority, would have with exterminating the human race is purely personal. This view is widely expressed in the culture and in many current practices. It is expressed in everything from the very popular statement, subscribed to almost universally, that “the world is overpopulated, and population needs to be reduced;” to the environmentalist movement’s view of humanity as a blight on “mother nature,” a blight which “mother nature” will soon eliminate; to the religious fundamentalists who are waiting for the extermination of hated mankind in the end times (except, of course, the chosen); to the explicit death-worship in much of the popular culture; to the plethora of mass shootings; and to the rapidly expanding suicide and drug epidemics. This hatred of humanity was virulently expressed by Bertrand Russell:

“I hate the world and almost all the people in it. . . . I hate the planet and the human race. I am ashamed to belong to such a species,” wrote Russell to Colette (Lady Constance Malleson) in 1916, expressing the view he sought to propagate.

This hatred of humanity is not shared by the rest of the world outside of North America and Europe. China, Russia, India, the rest of Asia, South America, and Africa do not share this view. Despite the depredations of war, colonialism, and other horrors, the people of these regions want a future, the future that Bertrand Russell wished to prevent.

For that reason, what has emerged there is a new economic system committed to this future, centered on China, Russia, and India, which is now being implemented. This is something that the Bertrand Russell still living in us will not tolerate. This is why, as a last resort, we can be expected, given the Bertrand Russell in us, to support, at least in spirit, the launching of nuclear war against these nations because they do wish to develop and have a future; because they do wish to develop nuclear power; because they do want to improve the conditions of life for their people; because they do believe humanity is essentially good; and most of all because they do have the happiness in seeking to bring that future into being that we no longer have.

Why do we hate the human race? We hate the human race because we have allowed Bertrand Russell’s hatred of humanity to penetrate the very essence of our being. This is how we were made evil.

Extirpating the Ghost of Bertrand Russell
Through the Revival of Classical Culture

For those who are reading this, who have not completely succumbed to spirit of Bertrand Russell, and who, given the circumstances, still miraculously care about the human race, it is time for some serious spiritual house-cleaning. It is also time to become active. It is misery not to become active in this period.

In all of this, the author is recommending the following steps be taken. First, locate in yourself the spirit of the Bertrand Russell movement. Second, extirpate that spirit by becoming involved in classical music and classical culture, and also in the political process which does represent a future. This is what the LaRouche movement is reviving in New York City with what is called the “Manhattan Project.” Try to find others who want to do the same. Contact the LaRouche movement at its various locations to see where you can fit into this. Classical music in particular does not involve logic. Classical music is not stupid. Its creators, like Bach and Beethoven, were real scientists. Their creating of classical music involves the kind of methods that are the same as the methods involved in making scientific discoveries. Discovering classical music is in essence discovering your own mind, not the mind of Bertrand Russell.