Science & Tech Quote by Bertrand Russell

Russell is skewering a very modern kind of reverence: the habit of treating human beings as if they were infrastructure. By pairing “the proletariat” with “dams, power stations, and aeroplanes,” he makes the compliment sound faintly absurd, the way it does when a society congratulates itself for “respecting workers” while mainly admiring the scale and efficiency they symbolize. The sentence is engineered to puncture sentimentality. Admiration, in this frame, isn’t moral recognition; it’s a species of techno-aesthetic awe.

The subtext is a warning about how the machine age reshapes political feeling. Industrial modernity doesn’t just build new tools; it builds new idols. Massive projects and mechanized systems demand coordination, hierarchy, and quantification, and they teach the public to value whatever looks large, disciplined, and productive. When that logic migrates into politics, the proletariat becomes a romanticized force of production - an emblem of “history” or “progress” - rather than a class of individuals with varied desires, vulnerabilities, and rights.

Context matters: Russell lived through the cults of modernization that ran across the early 20th century, from Soviet glorification of the worker to broader technocratic fantasies in the West. His line lands as an anti-totalizing move. It’s not anti-worker; it’s anti-idolatry. He’s suspicious of any ideology that praises a class the way it praises a machine: for output, for function, for helping the system feel inevitable. Admiration can be another way of refusing to see people.