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So much harder, historians calculated after the war, that the average Wehrmacht soldier inflicted 50 per cent more casualties than his Allied counterpart.2
But ultimately, an army is only as strong as the ties of fellowship among its soldiers. Camaraderie is the weapon that wins wars.
‘Time and again,’ one sociologist noted in surprise, ‘we encountered instances when a man failed to act in accordance with his own self-interests [for fear of] letting the other guys down.’10
Psychologist Roy Baumeister calls the fallacious assumption that our enemies are malicious sadists ‘the myth of pure evil’. In reality, our enemies are just like us.
If there is any one characteristic that terrorists share, say experts, it’s that they’re so easily swayed. Swayed by the opinions of other people. Swayed by authority. They yearn to be seen and want to do right by their families and friends.12 ‘Terrorists don’t kill and die just for a cause,’ one American anthropologist notes. ‘They kill and die for each other.’13
‘What we find over and over again,’ said one of Hamlin’s colleagues, ‘is that babies will choose the individual who is actually mean [but similar to them] to the [nice] one who had the different opinion to themselves.’22
I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.39
If there’s one thing that ties these victims together, it’s that most were eliminated remotely. The overwhelming majority of soldiers were killed by someone who pushed a button, dropped a bomb, or planted a mine. By someone who never saw them, certainly not while they were half-naked and trying to hold up their trousers.
Most of the time, wartime killing is something you do from far away. You could even describe the whole evolution of military technology as a process in which enemy lines have grown farther apart. From clubs and daggers to bows and arrows, and from muskets and cannon to bombs and grenades. Over the course of history, weaponry has got ever better at overcoming the central problem of all warfare: our fundamental aversion to violence. It’s practically impossible for us to kill someone while looking them in the eyes. Just as most of us would instantly go vegetarian if forced to butcher a cow, most
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Innumerable soldiers had not only killed other people–something inside them had died, too.
This brings us to the next mystery. If Homo puppy is such an innately friendly creature, why do egomaniacs and opportunists, narcissists and sociopaths keep coming out on top? How can it be that we humans–one of the only species to blush–somehow allow ourselves to be ruled by specimens who are utterly shameless?
The individuals who rise to positions of power, Keltner found, are the friendliest and the most empathic.4 It’s survival of the friendliest.
It transpires that people in power display the same tendencies.10 They literally act like someone with brain damage. Not only are they more impulsive, self-centred, reckless, arrogant and rude than average, they are more likely to cheat on their spouses, are less attentive to other people and less interested in others’ perspectives. They’re also more shameless, often failing to manifest that one facial phenomenon that makes human beings unique among primates. They don’t blush.
They discovered that a sense of power disrupts what is known as mirroring, a mental process which plays a key role in empathy.11 Ordinarily, we mirror all the time. Someone else laughs, you laugh, too; someone yawns, so do you. But powerful individuals mirror much less. It is almost as if they no longer feel connected to their fellow human beings. As if they’ve come unplugged.
Tragically, not having power has exactly the opposite effect. Psychological research shows that people who feel powerless also feel far less confident. They’re hesitant to voice an opinion. In groups, they make themselves seem smaller, and they underestimate their own intelligence.14 Such feelings of uncertainty are convenient for those in power, as self-doubt makes people unlikely to strike back. Censorship becomes unnecessary, because people who lack confidence silence themselves. Here
Dacher Keltner calls this ‘the power paradox’. Scores of studies show that we pick the most modest and kind-hearted individuals to lead us. But once they arrive at the top, the power often goes straight to their heads–and good luck unseating them after that.
The reason is self-evident. If you ignore a bill or don’t pay your taxes, you’ll be fined or locked up. If you don’t willingly comply, the authorities will come after you. Money may be a fiction, but it’s enforced by the threat of very real violence.
For millennia, we picked the nice guys to be in charge. We were well aware even in our prehistoric days that power corrupts, so we also leveraged a system of shaming and peer pressure to keep group members in check.
Even now, though any citizen can run for public office, it’s tough to win an election without access to an aristocratic network of donors and lobbyists. It’s not surprising that American ‘democracy’ exhibits dynastic tendencies–think of the Kennedys, the Clintons, the Bushes.
Can it be a coincidence that the largest concentrations of atheists are to be found in countries like Denmark or Sweden? These nations also have the most robust rule of law and most trustworthy bureaucracies.6 In countries like these, religion has been displaced. Much as mass production once sidelined traditional craftspeople, God lost his job to bureaucrats.
Historians point out that if the Enlightenment gave us equality, it also invented racism. Eighteenth-century philosophers were the first to classify humans into disparate ‘races’.
And then came the bloodiest conflict in history. The Holocaust unfolded in what had been a cradle of the Enlightenment. It was effectuated by an ultra-modern bureaucracy, in which management of the concentration camps was tasked to the SS Main ‘Economic and Administrative’ Department. Many scholars have thus come to regard the extermination of six million Jews as not only the height of brutality, but of modernity.
handled the ‘bright’ rats–the ones of which they had higher expectations–more warmly and gently. This treatment changed the rats’ behaviour and enhanced their performance. In the wake of his experiment, a radical idea took root in Rosenthal’s mind; a conviction that he had discovered an invisible yet fundamental force. ‘If rats became brighter when expected to,’ Rosenthal speculated in the magazine American Scientist, ‘then it should not be farfetched to think that children could become brighter when expected to by their teachers.’
Teachers gave the group of ‘smart’ pupils more attention, more encouragement and more praise, thus changing how the children saw themselves, too. The effect was clearest among the youngest kids, whose IQ scores increased by an average of twenty-seven points in a single year. The largest gains were among boys who looked Latino, a group typically subject to the lowest expectations in California.3
While condemning these acts in their own minds, perpetrators fear they’re alone and therefore decide to go with the flow. After all, if there’s one thing Homo puppy struggles with, it’s standing up to the group. We prefer a pound of the worst kind of misery over a few ounces of shame or social discomfort.
A major study among 230,000 people across 142 countries revealed that a mere 13 per cent actually feel ‘engaged’ at work.17 Thirteen per cent. When you wrap your brain around these kinds of figures, you realise how much ambition and energy are going to waste.
‘The simpler the billing, the greater the emphasis on actual care,’ he explains. ‘The more complicated the billing, the more players will search for loopholes in the system, increasingly tipping the balance towards accounting departments until they’re the ones defining care.’
If you treat employees as if they are responsible and reliable, they will be. He even wrote a book about it, subtitled: L’entreprise qui croit que l’homme est bon. Translation: ‘The company that believes people are good.’ 5
a diminishing ‘internal locus of control’ among children, meaning they increasingly feel their lives are being determined by others. In the US, this shift has been so seismic that in 2002 the average child felt less ‘in control’ than 80 per cent of kids did in the 1960s.4
curiosity and powers of imagination?10 Boredom may be the wellspring of creativity. ‘You can’t teach creativity,’ writes psychologist Peter Gray, ‘all you can do is let it blossom.’11
What’s more, no other species enjoys a childhood as long as Homo puppy. Play gives meaning to life, wrote the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga back in 1938. He christened us Homo ludens–‘playing man’. Everything we call ‘culture,’ said Huizinga, originates in play.14
Everybody lives in the same place and is subject to a single authority. • All activities are carried out together and everybody does the same tasks. • Activities are rigidly scheduled, often from one hour to the next. • There is a system of explicit, formal rules imposed by an authority.
Bullying is practically non-existent at unstructured schools like Agora. Here, you can take a breather whenever you need one: the doors are always open. And, more importantly, everyone here is different. Difference is normal, because children of all ages, abilities and levels intermingle.
At most schools, just when a student finds their flow, the bell rings for the next class. Could there be a system more rigged to discourage learning?
Drummen compares it to caged chickens at battery farms: ‘A couple years ago I bought some off a farmer. When I let them out in my yard, they just stood there for hours, nailed to the spot. It took a week before they found the courage to move.’
In 2018 two Dutch economists analysed a poll of twenty-seven thousand workers in thirty-seven countries. They found that fully a quarter of respondents doubt the importance of their own work.
Judged by the criteria of our ‘knowledge economy’, the people holding these jobs are the definition of success. They earned straight As, have sharp LinkedIn profiles and take home fat pay cheques. And yet the work they do is, by their own estimation, useless to society.
It’s like the philosopher Ivan Illich said decades ago: ‘School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.’39
It’s an urgent question. ‘The opposite of play is not work,’ the psychologist Brian Sutton-Smith once said. ‘The opposite of play is depression.’41 These days, the way many of us work–with no freedom, no play, no intrinsic motivation–is fuelling an epidemic of depression. According to the World Health Organization, depression is now the number one global disease.42 Our biggest shortfall isn’t in a bank account or budget sheet, but inside ourselves. It’s a shortage of what makes life meaningful. A shortage of play.
But now I understand: this is a journey back to the beginning. Agora has the same teaching philosophy as hunter-gatherer societies. Children learn best when left to their own devices, in a community bringing together all ages and abilities and supported by coaches and play leaders.43 Drummen calls it ‘Education 0.0’–a return to Homo ludens.
Producers felt the debates were too calm, too thoughtful, too sensible, and much preferred the kind of confrontational entertainment we call ‘politics’.
‘I figure, you know, if you treat people right, you can only hope that they treat you right. It’s as simple as it gets in this complicated world.’
Life in many institutions is at best barren and futile, at worst unspeakably brutal and degrading. […] the conditions in which they [inmates] live are the poorest possible preparation for their successful reentry into society, and often merely reinforce in them a pattern of manipulation or destructiveness.9
The result was a quota system in which officers felt pressured to issue as many fines and rack up as many citations as possible. They even began fabricating violations.
Only now, years after reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book, have I come to realise the broken windows theory is underpinned by a totally unrealistic view of human nature. It’s yet another variant on veneer theory. It made police in New York treat ordinary people like potential criminals: the smallest misstep could supposedly be the first on a path to far worse. After all, our layer of civilisation is tenuously thin. Officers, meanwhile, were being managed as though they possessed no judgement of their own. No intrinsic motivation. They were drilled by their superiors to make their departments look
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In the US, the average police training programme lasts just nineteen weeks, which is unthinkable in most of Europe. In countries like Norway and Germany, law enforcement training takes more than two years.
Individuals released from these kinds of institutions are a genuine danger to society. ‘The vast majority of us become exactly who we are told we are,’ says one former California prison inmate: ‘violent, irrational, and incapable of conducting ourselves like conscious adults.’57
Contact engenders more trust, more solidarity and more mutual kindness. It helps you see the world through other people’s eyes. Moreover, it changes you as a person, because individuals with a diverse group of friends are more tolerant towards strangers. And contact is contagious: when you see a neighbour getting along with others, it makes you rethink your own biases.
‘Then I ran the numbers,’ she wrote in 2014. ‘I was shocked.’25 More than 50 per cent of the nonviolent campaigns were successful, as opposed to 26 per cent of the militant ones. The primary reason, Chenoweth established, is that more people join nonviolent campaigns. On average over eleven times more.26 And not just guys with too much testosterone, but also women and children, the elderly and people with disabilities. Regimes just aren’t equipped to withstand such multitudes. That’s how good overpowers evil–by outnumbering it.
What made him one of the greatest leaders in world history, observes journalist John Carlin, is that ‘he chose to see good in people who ninety-nine people out of a hundred would have judged to have been beyond redemption’.29
