 Bertrand Russell Quotes 366 |
Broadly speaking, we are in the middle of a race between human skill as to means and human folly as to ends. Given sufficient folly as to ends, every increase in the skill required to achieve them is to the bad. The human race has survived hitherto owing to ignorance and incompetence; but, given knowledge and competence combined with folly, there can be no certainty of survival. Knowledge is power, but it is power for evil just as much as for good. It follows that, unless men increase in wisdom as much as in knowledge, increase of knowledge will be increase of sorrow.
Source： Bertrand Russell: The Impact of Science on Society, 1952, chap.7: Can a scientific society be stable?
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Objectives often have hidden objectives in addition to the stated objectives. Many stated objectives are 'noble', but quite often there are hidden objectives that benefit some people but cause great harm to others. For example, one needs to consider what the hidden purpose of arms expansion is, or what the hidden purpose of Abenomics was. In many cases, the problem tends to be overlooked because the majority of people are not affected and only some people are affected (e.g. only people in Okinawa suffer from the US military bases, and only some people living in depopulated areas suffer from the nuclear accident).
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