"Cynicism such as one finds very frequently among the highly educated young men and women of [x] results from the combination of comfort with powerlessness. Powerlessness makes people feel that nothing is worth doing, and comfort makes the painfulness of this feeling just endurable. Throughout [y] the university student can hope for more influence upon public opinion than he can have in [x], but he has much less opportunity than in [x] of securing a substantial income. Being neither powerless nor comfortable, he comes a reformer or a revolutionary, not a cynic. The happiness of the reformer or revolutionary depends upon the course of public affairs, but probably even while he is being executed he enjoys more real happiness than is possible for the comfortable cynic."
Bertrand Russell
The above was written in 1930 comparing educated youths of the West and East - sociopolitically, the malaise of the West and purposefulness of the East. Almost 80 years on, this paragraph has struck me as somewhat the reverse, at least to the world that I understand now. Interesting, isn't it.
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