Success Quote by Bertrand Russell

Russell’s question lands like a polite scalpel: not a slogan, not a warning siren, but a cool diagnosis of a dirty political fact. He frames propaganda’s “success” as a measurable outcome, then quietly indicts the audience as much as the propagandist. If hatred is the more reliable accelerant, it’s because it requires less imagination than solidarity and offers cleaner emotional payoffs: an enemy you can point at, a story you can simplify, a sense of righteousness you can borrow without doing the work of thinking.

The subtext is bleakly modern. “Friendly feeling” is vague, slow, and cognitively expensive; it asks people to tolerate ambiguity, to see rivals as complicated humans, to accept trade-offs. Hatred, by contrast, is a shortcut that collapses the world into a cartoon map of “us” and “them.” It also feels like insight. Propaganda that inflames disgust or fear doesn’t just persuade; it creates identity. Once you’ve joined the tribe, counterevidence reads like betrayal.

Context matters: Russell lived through the industrial-scale persuasion of the early 20th century, when mass media, nationalist mythmaking, and wartime messaging fused into something newly efficient. His own pacifism and skepticism toward state power sharpened his sense that “stirring up” is the whole game: propaganda isn’t primarily about facts, it’s about emotional engineering. The question is rhetorical, but it’s not academic. It’s a challenge: if hatred is easier to market, what does that say about the ethical burden on citizens in a mass democracy?