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The wry humour, as expressed by shop owners who posted signs in front of their wrecked premises announcing: MORE OPEN THAN USUAL. Or the pub proprietor who in the midst of devastation advertised: OUR WINDOWS ARE GONE, BUT OUR SPIRITS ARE EXCELLENT. COME IN AND TRY THEM.7
‘British society became in many ways strengthened by the Blitz,’ a British historian later wrote. ‘The effect on Hitler was disillusioning.’
Crisis brought out not the worst, but the best in people. If anything, the British moved up a few rungs on the ladder of civilisation. ‘The courage, humor, and kindliness of ordinary people,’ an American journalist confided in her diary, ‘continue to be astonishing under conditions that possess many of the features of a nightmare.’
Hitler and Churchill, Roosevelt and Lindemann–all of them signed on to psychologist Gustave Le Bon’s claim that our state of civilisation is no more than skin deep. They were certain that air raids would blow this fragile covering to bits. But the more they bombed, the thicker it got. Seems it wasn’t a thin membrane at all, but a callus.
There is a persistent myth that by their very nature humans are selfish, aggressive and quick to panic. It’s what Dutch biologist Frans de Waal likes to call veneer theory: the notion that civilisation is nothing more than a thin veneer that will crack at the merest provocation.4 In actuality, the opposite is true. It’s when crisis hits–when the bombs fall or the floodwaters rise–that we humans become our best selves.
‘is that elite panic comes from powerful people who see all humanity in their own image.’14 Dictators and despots, governors and generals–they all too often resort to brute force to prevent scenarios that exist only in their own heads, on the assumption that the average Joe is ruled by self-interest, just like them.
A broad review carried out by the British Medical Journal comparing actual surgical procedures with sham surgery (for conditions like back pain and heartburn) revealed that placebos also helped in three-quarters of all cases, and in half were
Take a fake pill thinking it will make you sick, and chances are it will. Warn your patients a drug has serious side effects, and it probably will. For obvious reasons, the nocebo effect, as it’s called, hasn’t been widely tested, given the touchy ethics of convincing healthy people they’re ill. Nevertheless, all the evidence suggests nocebos can be very powerful.
If there’s one lesson to be drawn from the nocebo effect, it’s that ideas are never merely ideas. We are what we believe. We find what we go looking for. And what we predict, comes to pass.
‘a misperception of risk, anxiety, lower mood levels, learned helplessness, contempt and hostility towards others, [and] desensitization’.22
He also coined a term to describe the phenomenon he found: mean world syndrome, whose clinical symptoms are cynicism, misanthropy and pessimism. People who follow the news are more likely to agree with statements such as ‘Most people care only about themselves.’ They more often believe that we as individuals are helpless to better the world. They are more likely to be stressed and depressed.
But the news–by which I mean reporting on recent, incidental and sensational events–is most common. Eight in ten adults in western countries are daily news consumers. On average, we spend one hour a day getting our news fix. Added up over a lifetime, that’s three years.28
negativity bias: we’re more attuned to the bad than the good. Back in our hunting and gathering days, we were better off being frightened of a spider or a snake a hundred times too often than one time too few. Too much fear wouldn’t kill you; too little surely would. Second, we’re also burdened with an availability bias. If we can easily recall examples of a given thing, we assume that thing is relatively common.
Economists defined our species as the homo economicus: always intent on personal gain, like selfish, calculating robots.
In the 1990s, economics professor Robert Frank wondered how viewing humans as ultimately egotistical might affect his students. He gave them a range of assignments designed to gauge their generosity. The outcome? The longer they’d studied economics, the more selfish they’d become. ‘We become what we teach,’ Frank concluded.35
Third, to stand up for human goodness means weathering a storm of ridicule. You’ll be called naive. Obtuse. Any weakness in your reasoning will be mercilessly exposed. Basically, it’s easier to be a cynic. The pessimistic professor who preaches the doctrine of human depravity can predict anything he wants, for if his prophecies don’t come true now, just wait: failure could always be just around the corner. Or else, his voice of reason has prevented the worst. The prophets of doom sound oh so profound, whatever they spout.
In children, the correlation between seeing violent images and aggression in adulthood is stronger than the correlation between asbestos and cancer, or between calcium intake and bone mass.26
Blushing, said Charles Darwin, is ‘the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions’.
‘These tamer foxes,’ Lyudmila later wrote, ‘seemed to be resisting the mandate to grow up.’
He suspected, he said, that the changes in these foxes had everything to do with hormones. The more amiable foxes produced fewer stress hormones and more serotonin (the ‘happy hormone’) and oxytocin (the ‘love hormone’). And one last thing, Dimitri said in closing. This didn’t apply only to foxes. The theory ‘can also, of course, apply to human beings’.
‘If you want a clever fox,’ he says, ‘you don’t select for cleverness. You select for friendliness.’
Human beings, it turns out, are ultrasocial learning machines. We’re born to learn, to bond and to play. Maybe it’s not so strange, then, that blushing is the only human expression that’s uniquely human. Blushing, after all, is quintessentially social–it’s people showing they care what others think, which fosters trust and enables cooperation.
Humans, in short, are anything but poker-faced. We constantly leak emotions and are hardwired to relate to the people around us. But far from being a handicap, this is our true superpower, because sociable people aren’t only more fun to be around, in the end they’re smarter, too.
Our distant ancestors knew the importance of the collective and rarely idolised individuals. Hunter-gatherers the world over, from the coldest tundras to the hottest deserts, believed that everything is connected. They saw themselves as a part of something much bigger, linked to all other animals, plants and Mother Earth. Perhaps they understood the human condition better than we do today.38 Is it any wonder, then, that loneliness can quite literally make us sick? That a lack of human contact is comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day?39 That having a pet lowers our risk of
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Turns out oxytocin doesn’t fuel universal fraternity. It powers feelings of ‘my people first’.
Fortunately our family tree has more branches. Gorillas, for example, are far more peaceable. Or, better yet, bonobos. These primates, with their attenuated neck, fine-boned hands and small teeth, prefer to play the day away, are as friendly as can be and never completely grow up.
‘Bar charts and numeric tables depicting percentages […] convey an air of scientific objectivity,’ Fry writes. ‘But in this case it is all an illusion.’41
The violence on screen so distressed the unsuspecting natives that some fell ill for days. When years later an anthropologist came to do fieldwork on Ifalik, the natives repeatedly asked her: was it true? Were there really people in America who had killed another person?2 So at the heart of human history lies this mystery. If we have a deep-seated, instinctive aversion to violence, where did things go wrong? If war had a beginning, what started it?
something about prehistoric politics. Basically, our ancestors were allergic to inequality. Decisions were group affairs requiring long deliberation in which everybody got to have their say. ‘Nomadic foragers,’ established one American anthropologist on the basis of a formidable 339 fieldwork studies, ‘are universally–and all but obsessively–concerned with being free from the authority of others.’3
That is, they had the ability to get a given job done. Scientists refer to this as achievement-based inequality.
‘We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle.’6 Also taboo among hunter-gatherers was stockpiling and hoarding. For most of our history we didn’t collect things, but friendships. This never failed to amaze European explorers, who expressed incredulity at the generosity of the peoples they encountered. ‘When you ask for something they have, they never say no,’ Columbus wrote in his log. ‘To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone.’7
This was one of the ways we humans domesticated ourselves: aggressive personalities had fewer opportunities to reproduce, while more amiable types had more offspring.
Sexual equality was also manifest in parenting. Men in primitive societies spent more time with their children than many fathers do now.11 Child-rearing was a responsibility shared by the whole tribe: infants were held by everybody and sometimes even breastfed by different women. ‘Such early experiences,’ notes one anthropologist, ‘help explain why children in foraging societies tend to acquire working models of their world as a “giving place”.’12 Where modern-day parents warn their children not to talk to strangers, in prehistory we were raised on a diet of trust.
‘Serial monogamists’ is how some biologists describe us. Take the Hadza in Tanzania, where the lifetime average is two or three partners, and women do the choosing.13 Or take the mountain-dwelling Ache in Paraguay, where women average as many as twelve husbands in a lifetime.14 This large network of potential fathers can come in handy, as they can all take part in child-rearing.15
Scientists now hypothesise that on those rare occasions when rulers did rise to power they were soon toppled.21 For tens of thousands of years we had efficient ways of taking down anyone who put on airs. Humour. Mockery. Gossip. And if that didn’t work, an arrow in the backside.
More importantly, people’s possessions grew. What was it Rousseau had to say about this? ‘The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, “This is mine”’–that’s where it all started to go wrong. It couldn’t have been easy to convince people that land or animals–or even other human beings–could now belong to someone. After all, foragers had shared just about everything.24 And this new practice of ownership meant inequality started to grow. When someone died, their possessions even got passed on to the next generation. Once this kind of inheritance came into
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When humans began raising livestock, they also invented bestiality. Read: sex with animals. As the world grew increasingly uptight, the odd farmer covertly forced himself on his flock.34 And that’s the second spark for the male obsession with female virginity. Apart from the matter of legitimate offspring, it was also a fear of STDs. Kings and emperors, who had entire harems at their disposal, went to great lengths to ensure their partners were ‘pure’. Hence the idea, still upheld by millions today, that sex before marriage is a sin.
Seeking to explain the catastrophes suddenly befalling us, we began to believe in vengeful and omnipotent beings, in gods who were enraged because of something we’d done.
Not being built for this kind of work, our bodies developed all kinds of aches and pains. We had evolved to gather berries and chill out, and now our lives were filled with hard, heavy labour.
The real story of Easter Island is the story of a resourceful and resilient people, of persistence in the face of long odds. It’s not a tale of impending doom, but a wellspring of hope.
For TV producers, the experiment exposed a harsh truth: if you leave ordinary people alone, nothing happens. Or worse, they’ll try to start a pacifist commune.
‘The slavish obedience to authority,’ writes Gina Perry, ‘comes to sound much more like bullying and coercion when you listen to these recordings.’
‘Whether all of this ballyhoo points to significant science or merely effective theater is an open question,’ he wrote in his personal journal in June 1962. ‘I am inclined to accept the latter interpretation.’
In other words, if you push people hard enough, if you poke and prod, bait and manipulate, many of us are indeed capable of doing evil. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. But evil doesn’t live just beneath the surface; it takes immense effort to draw it out. And most importantly, evil has to be disguised as doing good.
Eichmann was a prime example. He’d convinced himself he’d done a great deed, something historic for which he’d be admired by future generations. That didn’t make him a monster or a robot. It made him a joiner. Many years later, psychologists would reach the same conclusion about Milgram’s research: the shock experiments were not about obedience. They were about conformity.
Belief in humankind’s sinful nature also provides a tidy explanation for the existence of evil. When confronted with hatred or selfishness, you can tell yourself, ‘Oh, well, that’s just human nature.’ But if you believe that people are essentially good, you have to question why evil exists at all. It implies that engagement and resistance are worthwhile, and it imposes an obligation to act.
1. Talk to the victim. 2. Remind the man in the grey lab coat of his responsibility. 3. Repeatedly refuse to continue.
I read the working title: ‘Almost Everything You Think You Know About the Bystander Effect is Wrong.’ Lindegaard scrolls down and points to a table. ‘And look, here you can see that in 90 per cent of cases, people help each other out.’ Ninety per cent.
One, how out of whack our view of human nature often is. Two, how deftly journalists push those buttons to sell sensational stories. And, last but not least, how it’s precisely in emergencies that we can count on one another. As we look out across the water in Amsterdam, I ask Ruben Abrahams if he feels like a hero after his dip in the canal. ‘Nah,’ he shrugs, ‘you’ve got to look out for each other in life.’
It can be no accident that the first archaeological evidence for war suddenly appears approximately ten thousand years ago, coinciding with the development of private property and farming. Could it be that at this juncture we chose a way of life for which our bodies and minds were not equipped? Evolutionary psychologists refer to this as a mismatch, meaning a lack of physical or mental preparation for modern times.
