The Scientific Outlook was originally published in 1931, although the version I read was printed in 1957 and I do not know if any additions to the 1931 text were made.

It is broken down in three parts; Part one – Scientific Knowledge, Part two – Scientific Technique and Part three – The Scientific Society.

I found Part One to be rather dry and uninteresting with no real revelations, however Parts Two and Three were such that my highlighter pen was in danger of running out of ink. To attempt a review of Parts Two and Three just wouldn’t be good enough and so I’ve chosen to provide several quote and passages from the book so that I do not dilute or exaggerate what Russell has written. So here are just a few interesting snippets:

“We are accustomed, in our own day, to protest against the empire of machinery and eloquent yearning for a return to a simpler day……Return to nature, if it were taken seriously, would involve the death by starvation of some 90 per cent. of the population of civilized countries.”

“One of the scientific possibilities of the future which may have great importance is the control of climate by artificial means.”

“Manipulation and exploitation are the ruling passions of the typical scientific industrialist. The average man may not share this narrow concentration, but for that very reason he fails to acquire a hold on the sources of power, and leaves the practical government of the world to the fanatics of mechanism. The power of producing changes in the world which is possessed by the leaders of big business in the present age far exceeds the power ever possessed by individuals in the past. They may not be as free to cut off the heads as were Nero or Jenghiz Khan, but they can settle who shall starve and who shall become rich, they can divert the course of rivers, and decree the fall of governments. All history shows that great power is intoxicating. Fortunately, the modern holders of power are not yet quite aware how much they could do if they chose, but when this knowledge dawns upon them a new era in human tyranny is to be expected.”

Dave Change note: No thanks to Russell for telling the Elites…

In talking about Technique in Society…. “Very large sums of money are paid to the men who invent good advertisements, and rightly so, for the power to cause large numbers of people to believe what you assert is a very valuable power….Most of the things that we believe we believe because we have heard them affirmed; we do not remember where or why they were affirmed, and we are therefore unable to be critical even when the affirmation was made by a man whose income would be increased by its acceptance and was not backed by any evidence whatever.”

Dave Change note: this is almost identical to what Plato wrote in Republic.

“perhaps the most important of all the modern agents of propaganda is the cinema. Where the cinema is concerned, the technical reasons for large-scale organizations leading to almost world-wide uniformity are overwhelming……. The great majority of young people in almost all civilized countries derive their ideas of love, of honour, of the way to make money, and of the importance of good clothes, from the evenings spent in seeing what Hollywood thinks good for them……The producers of Hollywood are the high-priests of a new religion.”

“In old days it was expected that about half the children in a family would die before they grew up; this involved pain, illness, and sorrow to the mother, often great suffering to the children, and a waste of natural resources in the care of children who never lived to become productive.”

Dave Change note: clearly Russell shows his true feelings in this statement and I’m sure he had to hold himself back from adding the word “slaves” at the end of this sentence. But it certainly proves how differently they think compared to the majority.

In Part Three – Artificially created societies, Russell discusses the “Russian experiment” and how the education system is designed to support the official experiment and how family loyalty would be weakened in favor of loyalty to the system. To be honest this entire chapter is what I would consider a must read, but here again are just a few highlights.

“We must therefore increasingly expect to see government falling into the hands of oligarchies…..In countries long accustomed to democracy, the empire of these oligarchies may be concealed behind democratic forms, as was that of Augustus in Rome, but elsewhere their rule will be undisguised. If there is to be scientific experimentation in the construction of new kinds of societies, the rule of an oligarchy of opinion is essential. It may be expected that there will be conflicts between different oligarchies, but that ultimately some one oligarchy will acquire world dominion.”

Russell discusses the probability of an organized World State…

“Whether men will be happy in this Paradise I do not know. Perhaps biochemistry will show us how to make any man happy, provided he has the necessaries of life; perhaps dangerous sports will be organized for those whom boredom would otherwise turn into anarchists;”

Dave Change note: for those of you who read this and understand what is really going on and still fail to alert your fellow friends and neighbors – congratulations… how does it feel to be admired by the Elites? I Hope they sent you a nice Christmas card.

In the Chapter titled “The individual and the whole”, Russell talks about population control and explains:

“An international government, if it ever comes into being, will have to take account of such matters, and just as there is at present a quota of national immigrants into the United States, so in future there will be a quota of national immigrants into the world. Children in excess of the licensed figure will presumably be subjected to infacticide. This would be less cruel than the present method, which is to kill them by war or starvation.”

“…scientific technique is likely to lead to a governmental tyranny which may in time prove disastrous.”

“..an oligarchy is unlikely to consider the true interests of its slaves”

In his chapter titled “Scientific Government”

“The society of experts will control propaganda and education. It will teach loyalty to the world government, and make nationalism high treason. The government, being an oligarchy, will instill submissiveness into the great bulk of the population, confining initiative and the habit of command to its own members. It is possible that it may invent ingenious ways of concealing its own power, leaving the forms of democracy intact, and allowing the plutocrats to imagine that they are cleverly controlling these forms. Gradually, however, as the plutocrats become stupid through laziness, they will lose their wealth; it will pass more and more into public ownership and be controlled by the government of experts. Thus, whatever the outward forms may be, all real power will come to be concentrated in the hands of those who understand the art of scientific manipulation.”

“For entirely inferior work negroes will be employed wherever possible.”

“Ever since civilization began men have been seeking security more avidly than they have sought anything else. In such a world they will have it, but I am not quite sure whether they will think it worth the price that they will have paid for it.”

“Education has two purposes; on the one hand to form the mind, on the other hand to train the citizen.”

“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 in-subordination, without being punished, will be scientifically trained out of them.”

“Those children, on the other hand, who are destined to become members of the governing class will have a very different education. They will be selected, some before birth…..the best known science will be applied to the simultaneous development of intelligence and will-power”

Dave Change note: Once again another example of Russell using Plato’s Republic as a guide.

“A great deal of scientific knowledge will be concealed from all but a few. There will be arcana reserved for a priestly class of researchers, who will be carefully selected for their combination of brains with loyalty.”

“We may, I think, assume that both the quantity and the quality of the population will be carefully regulated by the State”

“I shall, however, assume that, in normal times, the world government will decree a stationary population.”

“If the simultaneous regulation of quantity and quality is taken seriously in the future, we may expect that in each generation some 25 per cent. of women and some 5 per cent. of men will be selected to be the parents of the next generation, while the remainder of the population will be sterilized, which will in no way interfere with their sexual pleasures, but will merely render these pleasures destitute of social importance.”

Dave Change note: isn’t that a very pleasant way of saying don’t worry, keep drinking from those lovely plastic bottles that leach estrogen – you can have all the fun you want but we’ve determined that you won’t be raising any of your own children who will only become a waste of valuable resources….

“Mothers would be selected by the eugenic qualities……Fathers would, of course, have nothing to do with their own children…..Children who showed any special affection for a particular adult would be separated from that adult.”

“Just as the sun worship of the Aztecs demanded the painful death of thousands of human beings annually, so the new scientific religion will demand its holocausts of sacred victims. Gradually the world will grow more dark and more terrible.”

“Perhaps by means of injections and drugs and chemicals the population could be induced to bear whatever its scientific masters may decide to be for its good.”

“the man drunk with power is destitute of wisdom, and so long as he rules the world, the world will be a place devoid of beauty and joy.”

In his conclusion, Bertrand Russell surprises me with the following:

“The lover, the poet and the mystic find a fuller satisfaction that the seeker after power can ever know, since they can rest in the object of their love, whereas the seeker after power must be perpetually engaged in some fresh manipulation if he is not to suffer from a sense of emptiness. I think therefore that the satisfaction of the lover, using that word in its broadest sense, exceed the satisfaction of the tyrant, and deserve a higher place among the ends of life.”

I’d like to conclude my thoughts on the quotes taken from this book by reminding everyone that they should not fear standing up to the controlling elites. It is them that fear us – we have the numbers – but we must all stand together now before it’s too late.

As a young boy I was captivated by a TV show called “The Flashing Blade” – the lyrics used in the introduction of the show goes something like this: