01/01/2023
A Russell thought experiment* — you are a visitor from another planet
"Suppose you were a visitor from another planet able to observe the actions of men, but not knowing their languages and, therefore, impervious to their propagandas, their ideologies, and their myths. And suppose that you could only observe them in large masses, so that your view of their proceedings would be summary and statistical.
What, broadly speaking, would you see? You would see two vast collections of human beings, the one on the whole prosperous, healthy, not over-worked, more or less educated, the other very poor, often starving, mostly dying in infancy, and working such long hours at purely physical toil that no leisure remained for anything mental.
You would observe, after a time, that these two opposing groups hate and fear each other and are preparing, with extraordinary skill, schemes of mutual extermination which are only too likely to be successful on both sides.
If after a time, you learned their languages, you would be told by the richer group that the poorer group have no idealism, that they care only about material things, that they are destructive from envy, and that all that we hold precious can only be preserved if the poorer group lives in constant terror of extermination. On the other side you will be told that all the troubles of the world spring from the greedy possessiveness of the richer group, and that if they were willing to share equally with the victims of poverty, all would be well.
Neither side would be telling you quite the truth. It is not merely greed that makes the richer group cling to its advantages. If there were sudden economic equality at the present moment, the result would be that happy populations would be reduced to the level of the unhappy, not that the unhappy would be raised to the level of the happy. To raise the level of the poorer populations is a task which must take time, and which will require skills only likely to be developed where there are many people not on the verge of starvation. It is true, however, that so long as glaring economic inequality exists between one part of the world and another, there will be envy on the one side and fear on the other, so that genuine co-operation will remain difficult.
What I most wish to emphasize is that the obstacles to universal happiness in the present day are, at bottom, psychological, not physical, and that this is a new fact in human history. If it were possible for the poorer groups not to feel envy and the richer groups not to feel fear, a rapid advance on the part of the poorer groups would be possible without any damage to the well-being of the richer groups."
— Bertrand Russell, Fact and Fiction(1961), Part I. The Books that Influenced Me, Essay 7: The world I should like to live in, pp. 126-7
* A thought experiment is a hypothetical situation in which a hypothesis, theory, or principle is laid out for the purpose of thinking through its consequences. In philosophy, this typically presents an imagined scenario with the intention of eliciting an intuitive or reasoned response about the way things are presented in the experiment (philosophers might also supplement their thought experiments with theoretical reasoning designed to support the desired intuitive response). The scenario is typically designed to target a particular philosophical concept, such as morality, or the nature of the mind or linguistic reference. The response to the imagined scenario should inform us concerning any ideas in the experiment, real or imagined.
Two highly well known thought experiments, and much more elaborate than Russell's visitor from another planet, are Plato's allegory of the cave in philosophy and Schrödinger's cat in quantum mechanics.
Today, due to the high influx and popular influence of alternate history and pop science videos found on the internet, many have found the 2,500 year old tradition of thought experiments to have lost considerable weight.
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