The-Conquest-of-Happiness-by-Bertrand-Russell

The old have been executed, starved, exiled, or in
some other way disinfected, so that they cannot, as
in every Western country, compel the young to
choose between doing harm and doing nothing. To
the sophisticated Occidental the faith of the young
Russian may seem crude, but, after all, what is
there to be said against it? He is creating a new
world; the new world is to his liking; the new
world will almost certainly, when created, make
the average Russian happier than he was before the
Revolution. It may not be a world in which the
sophisticated Western intellectual would be happy,
but the sophisticated Western intellectual does not
have to live in it. By any pragmatic test, therefore,
the faith of young Russia is justified, and to
condemn it as crude can have no justification
except on a basis of theory.
In India, China, and Japan, external circumstances
of a political sort interfere with the happiness of
the young intelligentsia, but there is no such
internal obstacle as exists in the West. There are
activities which appear important to the young,