Four Human Desires. (Bertrand Russell).

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All human activity is prompted by desire.
There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be dutiful.

But other desires kept them active: four in particular, which we can label acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power.

But great as is the influence of the motives we have been considering, there is one which outweighs them all. I mean the love of power.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1950/russell/lecture/
 
"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. The broad instinctive mechanism upon which political edifices have to be built is one of cooperation within the herd and hostility towards other herds. The co-operation within the herd is never perfect. There are members who do not conform, who are, in the etymological sense, «egregious», that is to say, outside the flock. These members are those who have fallen below, or risen above, the ordinary level. They are: idiots, criminals, prophets, and discoverers. A wise herd will learn to tolerate the eccentricity of those who rise above the average, and to treat with a minimum of ferocity those who fall below it.
 
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