"This condition of unintelligent respect on the part
of the general public is exactly what the financier needs in
order to remain unfettered by the democracy. He has, of course,
many other advantages in dealing with opinion. Being immensely
rich, he can endow universities, and secure that the most in-
fluential part of academic opinion shall be subservient to him.
Being at the head of the plutocracy, he is the natural leader
of all those whose political thought is dominated by fear of
Communism. Being the possessor of economic power, he can dis-
tribute prosperity or ruin to whole nations as he chooses. But
I doubt whether any of these weapons would suffice without the
aid of superstition. It is a remarkable fact that, in spite
of the importance of economics to every man, woman, and child,
the subject is almost never taught in schools and even in uni-
versities is learnt by a minority. Moreover, that minority do
not learn the subject as it would be learnt if no political
interests were at stake. There are a few institutions which
teach it without plutocratic bias, but they are very few; as a
rule, the subject is so taught as to glorify the economic status
quo. All this, I fancy, is connected with the fact that super-
stition and mystery are useful to the holders of financial power.
"Finance, like war, suffers from the fact that almost
all those who have technical competence also have a bias which
is contrary to the interest of the community. When Disarmament
Conferences take place, the naval and military experts are the
chief obstacle to their success. It is not that these men are
dishonest, but that their habitual preoccupations prevent them
from seeing questions concerning armaments in their proper per-
spective. Exactly the same thing applies to finance. Hardly
anybody knows about it in detail except those who are engaged
in making money out of the present system, who naturally cannot
take wholly impartial views. It will be necessary, if this
state of affairs is to be remedied, to make the democracies of
the world aware of the importance of finance, and to find ways
of simplifying the principles of finance so that they can be
widely understood. It must be admitted that this is not easy,
but I do not believe that it is impossible. One of the impedi-
ments to successful democracy in our age is the complexity of
the modern world, which makes it increasingly difficult for
ordinary men and women to form an intelligent opinion on po-
litical questions, or even to decide whose expert judgment de-
serves the most respect. The cure for this trouble is to im-
prove education, and to find ways of explaining the structure
of society which are easier to understand than those presently
in vogue. Every believer in effective democracy must be in
favour of this reform. But perhaps there are no believers in
democracy left except in Siam and the remoter parts of Mongolia."
--Bertrand Russell, "In Praise of
Idleness" (1932), pp. 79-81.
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