Maxims.

The statesman who has gradually concentrated all power within himself in order that he may be able to carry out the high and noble aims which have led him to eschew comfort and enter the arena of public life, is amazed at the ingratitude of the people when they turn against him. It never occurs to him that his work may have had anything but a public motive, or that the pleasure of controlling affairs may have in any degree inspired his activities. The phrases which are customary on the platform and in the Party Press have gradually come to him to seem to express truths, and he mistakes the rhetoric of partisanship for a genuine analysis of motives. Disgusted and disillusioned, he retires from the world after the world has retired from him, and regrets that he ever attempted so thankless a task as the pursuit of the public good.

These illustrations suggest four general maxims, which will prove an adequate preventive of persecution mania if their truth is sufficiently realised. The first is: remember that your motives are not always as altruistic as they seem to yourself. The second is: don't over-estimate your own merits. The third is: don't expect others to take as much interest in you as you do yourself. And the fourth is: don't imagine that most people give enough thought to you to have any special desire to persecute you. I shall say a few words about each of these maxims in turn.

Suspicion of one's own motives is especially necessary for the philanthropist and the executive; such people have a vision of how the world, or some part of it, should be, and they feel, sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly, that in realising their vision they will be conferring a boon upon mankind or some section of it. They do not, however, adequately realise that the individuals afected by their operations have each an equal right to his own view as to the sort of world he wants. A man of the executive type is quite sure that his vision is right, and that any contrary one is wrong. But his subjective certainly afords no proof that he is objectively right. Moreover, his belief is very often only a camouflage for the pleasure that he derives from contemplating changes of which he is the cause. And in addition to love of power there is another motive, namely vanity, which operates strongly in such cases. Idealism causes simple motives to wear strange disguises, and therefore some dash of realistic cynicism does not come amiss in our public men.

Bertrand Russell, from The Conquest of Happiness