Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of t... — Bertrand Russell

Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.

Author: Bertrand Russell

Insight: There's something Russell catches here about how every era mistakes its tools for its values. We look at the working class the way medieval people looked at knights—as symbols of virtue itself, not just people doing jobs. Add in our current obsession with "hustling," grinding, and productivity, and you see the same pattern: we've made labor into a kind of moral perfection rather than just, well, work that needs doing. The sharper insight is that admiration of machines—dams, power stations, aeroplanes—and admiration of the people who operate them often go together. We get swept up in the romance of progress and efficiency, then project that onto the people caught in the system. It's a way of making peace with things we'd otherwise question. Why question a factory if the workers toiling in it are noble and resilient? This matters now because we do it constantly, just with different machinery. We romanticize startup founders and nurses and soldiers, often to avoid uncomfortable questions about wages, working conditions, or whether the systems themselves need rethinking. The admiration itself can become a way of avoiding change. Real respect for people might sometimes mean questioning the machines they're stuck operating, not celebrating their ability to operate them perfectly.

Source: In Praise of Idleness, p. 37, 1935