Bertrand Russell to Oswald Mosley (1962)
lettersofnote.com
lettersofnote.com
I can't find a copy of the letter this is in response to which would provide more context. I believe it was an invitation of some sort.
Bertrand Russel was a prominent logician and philosopher, more or less invented types to solve a problem he was having with set theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell
Sir Oswald Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists.
This is a wonderful interview with him that gives a great sense of what he was all about:
• A Conversation with Bertrand Russell (1952) https://youtu.be/xL_sMXfzzyA
While young his grandfather told Bertrand about meeting Napoleon. Late in life Bertrand watched the moon landing on TV.
Obviously that two experiences that span more than one life time, but they are very far apart.
https://www.openculture.com/2022/05/philosopher-bertrand-rus...
> Jan 6/1962 Re nuclear disarmament and world government. BR is not inclined to agree or disagree with Mosley's views, but he does think that Mosley is "rather optimistic" in his expectations. BR provides criticism of his main two objections. (A polite letter.)
> Jan 11/1962 Mosley wants to lunch privately with BR about their differences.
These are basically all the letters exchanged with Mosley:
https://bracers.mcmaster.ca/bracers-basic-search?search_api_...
The letter written by Russell was preceded by a letter from Mosley (maybe trying to bait BR) on "the root differences between us" in December 1961 to which BR replied with two letters before Mosley tried to invite BR for a private lunch which prompted the letter of note response. I think this makes perfect sense, he initially engaged intellectually, but when invited to associate privately he strongly refuses.
The only letters that Russell personally wrote to Oswald were sent in January 1961.
For people who haven't encountered it yet, this problem is the famous "Russell's Paradox"[1], which can be stated as
Consider the set R, consisting of all sets S such that S is not an element of S.
Ie in set builder notation
R = {S : S ∉ S}
and then the paradox comes from the followup question. Is R an element of R? Because of course if it is in R, then it is an element of itself so it should not be. And if it's not in R, then it is not an element of itself, so it should be. This is a logical paradox along the same lines as the famous "The barber in this town shaves all men who do not shave themselves. Does he shave himself?"
In modern axiomatic set theory, Russell's paradox is avoided these days by the "axiom of regularity"[2] which prevents a set builder like "the set of all sets who are not members of themselves", so what I wrote above would not be accepted as a valid set builder for this reason by most people.
Russell proposed instead Type theory which got revived when computer science got going.
I'm not familiar with this one but is it misstated here? The barber doesn't only shave men who don't shave themselves. If he doesn't shave himself then he shaves himself and therefore can shave himself without contradiction. If he shaves himself he can shave himself without contradiction. Either way he shaves himself.
(Or maybe I'm just bad at logic)
> The barb in this town shaves all men who do not shave themselves. Does the barber shave themself?
Some stuff is online. Here’s a curated collection of some really interesting letters sent to him:
It is not entirely true that the usage has changed; I usually start my emails with this salutation, both to recipients close to me and those whom I do not know well. I address mailing lists with a simple "Dear all".
Nonetheless, this is the first time I have done so in a Hacker News post, and it shall probably be the last too.
Best wishes,
seabass
But it's so very seldom that I write a physical letter these days.
One other reason for using the 'Dear [name]' salutation is that you can demonstrate that you can spell someone's name correctly. It takes time and effort to get this detail right and there can be consequences when getting it wrong. If I write to Stephen with 'Dear Steven' then nothing might be said, but you know it will be noted, albeit momentarily. There is also a level of familiarity to get right. Stephen might be 'Steve' in everyday conversation with just his mother using 'STEPHEN' when he is in trouble.
My mother could not spell so I have a common name with an uncommon spelling. I am not too fussed about that, however, it acts like a check word of sorts. If someone goes to the effort of spelling my name correctly then they have passed the test and I know, from the first line, that I need to take them a bit more seriously than those that are unable to pass the test.
The only times I have tried to correct anyone is when it is to do with bureaucracy as that is needed if you want things like your banking to work. I certainly would not try and correct anyone else as I would not want anyone to feel bad for getting this minor detail wrong.
As well as the salutation there is the way we close a message. As well as the standard 'Yours sincerely/Yours faithfully/Best wishes/Kind regards' there are interesting variants that people use.
The former British Prime Minister John Major used 'Yours ever', which I have not seen anyone else use.
Just for the lols, I might start my HN messages with 'To whom it may concern'. Not really. But I am glad that the people that don't use salutations have won. In the early days of email and the web, a considerable amount of bytes were wasted with salutations and, more notably, signatures.
Until next time,
Theodores
> kthxbye is the pinnacle of English's advancement, shortening All correct, Thank you, God be with you. into seven lowercase letters.
> Bertrand Russell, one of the great intellectuals of his generation, was known by most as the founder of analytic philosophy
That title is usually attributed to Gottlob Frege (in particular his 1884 book "Grundlagen der Arithmetik", and his 1892 paper "Über Sinn und Bedeutung") who directly influenced Bertrand Russell, Rudolph Carnap, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who all later became large influences on analytic philosophy themselves. Frege is most known for the invention of modern predicate logic.
"He credited his acumen to his family goddess, Namagiri Thayar (Goddess Mahalakshmi) of Namakkal. He looked to her for inspiration in his work[111] and said he dreamed of blood drops that symbolised her consort, Narasimha. Later he had visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes.[112] He often said, "An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God."
"While asleep, I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood, as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing."
—Srinivasa Ramanujan
"The limitations of his knowledge were as startling as its profundity. Here was a man who could work out modular equations and theorems... to orders unheard of, whose mastery of continued fractions was... beyond that of any mathematician in the world, who had found for himself the functional equation of the zeta function and the dominant terms of many of the most famous problems in the analytic theory of numbers; and yet he had never heard of a doubly periodic function or of Cauchy's theorem, and had indeed but the vaguest idea of what a function of a complex variable was..." - G. H. Hardy
Thinking completely outside of our post-WWI bubble, history has been far more brutal in the past. This is the anomaly. Taken as a whole, human history has been full of genocide, slavery, brutality.
When somebody misrepresents "survival of the fittest" in the way that the 20th century fascists did, and embark on mass extermination "for the good of the world" (in their warped view), citing the fairly recent Darwinian view of evolution, isn't it better to tackle these views head on, for the benefit of those who haven't the inclination or the ability to think it through themselves?
What I see nowadays is a complete lack of curiosity. Nobody wants to try to understand why people "go bad", they just want to put them in the bin. That only works if those "bad" people are a minority.
Also, when the "good" people stop engaging in debate with the "bad" people, there's a danger of creating a dogmatic society. Looking at Christianity in the middle ages, and extremely confident sense of your own rightness can lead to atrocities too.
Sorry, probably nonsense, boarding a flight, not paying full attention to my post
Fascism sounds great. It has terrific marketing. It's like cigarettes, awesome product apart from the bit where it kills people. Including people who never consumed the product.
I agree. Celebrating a dressed up "I don't want to talk to you" note is a bit silly.
It's simple. If I'm good (and I am), and if you disagree with me, you're bad. What's to talk about? Stop yapping.
Ironically this letter is the opposite of that idea. BR is opposed to fascism on such a fundamental level that he sees no point in engaging with it's chief proponent, Mosley, at all.
For example, with the idea of "survival of the fittest" claiming that some genes are better than others and we should prioritise them sounds simple enough to some poeple, but explaining all the ways in which that's not only wrong but dangerous to the human race is nuanced and by then people stopped listening. Then the populist claims you're an elitist and the debate is over.
But I understand your concern it's a difficult topic to tackle.
> SEE?
as if the letter's current relevance is obvious. Are they implying Russell, a noted pacifist incarcerated for anti-war activism during the Great War, would have endorsed Kirk's assassination? Or is this about the protests in the UK?
People who've actually read Russell will recall many instances of him saying things that today would get you [flagged] [dead] on HN or dogpiled on Bluesky. For example, note here how he, like Voltaire, takes for granted that Islam is inherently more violent than Christianity due to its theology of martyrdom promising eternal, carnal paradise to those who die in its service:
https://www.panarchy.org/russell/ideas.1946.html
> Then came Islam with its fanatical belief that every soldier dying in battle for the True Faith went straight to a Paradise more attractive than that of the Christians, as houris [e.g., 72 virgins] are more attractive than harps.
First an example of a notable figure, known precisely because of the habitual strength of his reasoning, refusing to engage an opponent because of the repugnance of the opponent's values and insincerity of the opponent's participation.
Second despite the (clearly evident elsewhere) power of Russell's reasoning, his justification is exclusively emotional. He feels strongly about this and he stands by what he feels. He does not attempt to downplay this motivation or launder it through reason or rhetoric.
And the dots, for me, remain unconnected. Are you suggesting Kirk represented such a radical, rightward departure from the Christian conservatism of (for example) Pat Robertson--a fixture of late 20th century American politics--that Mosley is a reasonable point of comparison?
Are you making a point about the protests in Britain, and not realizing that "refusal to engage," at least on immigration, is a major, if not the primary, reason why far right parties have risen in Europe and why Trump is in the White House again?
This letter tries to "unpack" its point of view rather than reply succinctly. But you're right that LLMs do not do it that clearly.
Your second paragraph says nothing.
The letter in question here doesn't have a sentence that is irrelevant to Russells perspective. That's succinct, not "the minimum amount of words communicating anything that might roughly align with a view".
The sentences he writes to explain why he doesn't consider further correspondence fruitful seem genuinely thoughtful to me, they're not fluff or pointless pleasantries for code reasons.
He writes like he assumes good faith, then explains why he thinks that exactly this attempt won't be fruitful, giving a good-faith argument for why Oswald should consider further correspondence fruitless, unless he changes his whole political ideology.
That's a lot more than just "I don't want to talk to you and I think badly of you"
Removing those words makes the text more difficult to understand, not easier.
It's more that journalism and in other context though, it is good writing style to "not bury the lede", i.e. put the main point upfront. It's a writing choice, not a language feature.
I wasn't claiming to be succinct.
> The sentences he writes to explain why he doesn't consider further correspondence fruitful seem genuinely thoughtful to me
I agree, and I don't say otherwise. I still though don't agree that someone else should characterise the piece as "succinct" because of that thoughtfulness. These are different qualities of writing, are they not?.
> The letter in question here doesn't have a sentence that is irrelevant to Russells perspective.
Yes, it's a good concise argument, to third parties who read it. I see that. It's a different thing to a succinct reply to Mr Mosley - that is what the words "in some ways" mean in the comment above.
"F off" has exactly zero semantic meaning (unless you actually believe this is a literal expression). Without context, it barely even has emotional meaning.
It's no less or more a spontaneous expression of emotion than yelling some curse word when you step on a piece of Lego.
I don't think that's relevant. There are many ways to say no within few words - "No." is a complete sentence, "No thank you." is a polite one, "Get lost" has the semantic meaning that you want. etc.
The rest is not actually a reply to Mr Mosley, it seems more intended for other audiences such as us. Appeals to introspection not action, is not language that the fascists appreciate or even understand.
Don't get me wrong, there are many things to like about that thoughtful text. I just don't characterise it as "a succinct reply".
I can only guess this is noteworthy due to the parties corresponding because it isn't very interesting outside of that.
I understood the posting to be a subtweet-style comment on that.
I sure hope it's just bots...
> The left is weak
When you say that young men see appeal in group identity, are you suggesting that 'the left' isn't one? From my observations of online discourse, it is far more common to see people claim that identity than anything else.
Put another way, the left wing, particularly in the US has a single, holistic philosophy with very little tolerance for anyone who doesn't support every aspect of it and the young generation cannot see how that vision can substantially improve their lives.
You even said it yourself
>traditional values and group identity in opposition to individualist and technocratic norms.
What on earth does that have to do with facism? Not a personal criticism, to be clear, just a general observation.
People who vehemently disagree are supposed to and should have open dialogue, not elaborate letters of visceral moral rage. Without dialogue you are left with only force.