If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years.

We'd rather win than be happy

There's a dark thread running through human nature that Russell is pointing at here—the suspicion that we sometimes enjoy others' misfortune as much as we enjoy our own gain. Not always consciously, of course. But notice how quickly we perk up at gossip, how satisfying it can feel when someone who annoyed us stumbles, how much energy we pour into being right rather than being happy. We're willing to trade our own peace of mind for the chance to prove someone else wrong.

The strange part is that this preference barely requires malice. It doesn't take cartoonish villains to keep the world stuck. Just ordinary people who care more about winning arguments with their partners than building closeness, or who'd rather see a rival fail than succeed themselves. Multiply that across workplaces, families, and nations, and you get our current arrangements—where enormous energy goes into keeping score instead of building things that actually work.

What makes Russell's observation cut so deep is that he's not describing an unsolvable problem. He's saying paradise isn't locked behind some impossible moral standard. It's just waiting for a shift in what we actually want. The weird hope hidden in the quote is that this shift is technically within reach. We're choosing, mostly without noticing, to keep things this way.