Review: Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman

This is a fantastic read.

Bregman’s premise is that humans are a pretty decent species, and not the monsters that the media portrays through dodgy reporting and dubious science. The sections where he tears into widely reported examples of human selfishness and aggression – such as the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Milgram experiment, the self-destruction of Easter Island, Kitty Genovese’s murder (all of which I’d heard of and believed the established narratives) – was eye-opening and shocki...