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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.
Catastrophes bring out the best in people. I know of no other sociological finding that’s backed by so much solid evidence that’s so blithely ignored.
the dynamic during disasters is almost always the same: adversity strikes and there’s a wave of spontaneous cooperation in response, then the authorities panic and unleash a second disaster.
‘My own impression,’ writes Rebecca Solnit, whose book A Paradise Built in Hell (2009) gives a masterful account of Katrina’s aftermath, ‘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.
super-addictive, and in no time everyone’s hooked. Scientists investigate and soon conclude that the drug causes, I quote, ‘a misperception of risk, anxiety, lower mood levels, learned helplessness, contempt and hostility towards others, [and] desensitization’.
That drug is the news.
the news is about the exceptional, and the more exceptional an event is–be it a terrorist attack, violent uprising, or natural disaster–the bigger its newsworthiness.
‘there seems to be none or even a negative relationship between news and reality.’
But the news–by which I mean reporting on recent, incidental and sensational events–is most common.
Our brains may account for just 2 per cent of our body weight, but they use 20 per cent of the calories we consume.
Every other primate, more than two hundred species in all, produces melanin that tints their eyes. Like poker players wearing shades, this obscures the direction of their gaze.
People are social animals, but we have a fatal flaw: we feel more affinity for those who are most like us.
Continually meeting new people meant continually learning new things, and only then could we grow smarter than the Neanderthals.44
It must have been quite a shock for these so-called savages to encounter such ‘civilised’ colonists. To some, the very notion that one human being might kidnap or kill another may even have seemed alien. If that sounds like a stretch, consider that there are still places today where murder is inconceivable.
Also taboo among hunter-gatherers was stockpiling and hoarding. For most of our history we didn’t collect things, but friendships.
For most of human history, then, men and women were more or less equal.
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
One, we now had belongings to fight over, starting with land. And two, settled life made us more distrustful of strangers.
Infectious diseases like measles, smallpox, tuberculosis, syphilis, malaria, cholera and plague were all unheard of until we traded our nomadic lifestyle for farming. So where did they come from? From our new domesticated pets–or, more specifically, their microbes.
The same with sexually transmitted diseases. Virtually unknown in nomadic times, among pastoralists they began running rampant. Why? The reason is rather embarrassing. 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.
Why did we exchange our nomadic life of leisure and good health for a life of toil and trouble as farmers?
Villages were conquered by towns, towns were annexed by cities and cities were swallowed up by provinces as societies all frantically scaled up to meet the inexorable demands of war. This culminated in the final catastrophic event so lamented by Rousseau. The birth of the state.
The very things we hold up today as ‘milestones of civilization’, such as the invention of money, the development of writing, or the birth of legal institutions, started out as instruments of oppression.
ancient Athens, the cradle of western democracy, two-thirds of the population was enslaved. Great thinkers like Plato and Aristotle believed that, without slavery, civilisation could not exist.
The word ‘barbarian’ was itself coined as a catch-all for anyone who didn’t speak ancient Greek.
That’s how our sense of history gets flipped upside down. Civilisation has become synonymous with peace and progress, and wilderness with war and decline. In reality, for most of human existence, it was the other way around.
Up until the French Revolution (1789), almost all states everywhere were fuelled by forced labour. Until 1800, at least three-quarters of the global population lived in bondage to a wealthy lord.53 More than 90 per cent of the population worked the land, and more than 80 per cent lived in dire poverty.54 In the words of Rousseau: ‘Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.’55
Only in the last two centuries–the blink of an eye–have things got better so quickly that we’ve forgotten how abysmal life used to be.
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.’
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.
not about obedience. They were about conformity.
Sadly, Stanley Milgram’s simplistic deductions (that humans submit to evil without thinking) made a more lasting impression than Hannah Arendt’s layered philosophy (that humans are tempted by evil masquerading as good).
Communication and confrontation, compassion and resistance.
Meta-analysis is research about research, meaning it analyses a large group of other studies.
the emergency is life-threatening (somebody is drowning or being attacked) and if the bystanders can communicate with one another (they’re not isolated in separate rooms), then there’s an inverse bystander effect. ‘Additional bystanders,’ write the article’s authors, ‘even lead to more, rather than less, helping.’
Lindegaard was one of the first researchers to ask why we think up all these convoluted experiments, questionnaires and interviews. Why don’t we simply look at real footage of real people in real situations? After all, modern cities are chock-a-block with cameras.
Evolutionary psychologists refer to this as a mismatch, meaning a lack of physical or mental preparation for modern times. The most familiar illustration is obesity: where as hunter-gatherers we were still slim and fit, these days more people worldwide are overweight than go hungry. We regularly feast on sugars and fats and salts, taking in far more calories than our bodies need. So why do we keep right on eating? Simple: our DNA thinks we’re still running around in the jungle. In prehistory it made good sense to stuff yourself anytime you stumbled on a heavily laden fruit tree. That didn’t
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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.’
The thing we need to understand is that most of these terrorist agents were not religious fanatics. They were the best of friends. Together, they felt a part of something bigger, that their lives finally held meaning. At last they were the authors of their own epic tale.
The harsh lesson is that toddlers are not colour-blind. Quite the reverse: they’re more sensitive to differences than most adults realise. Even when people try to treat everyone as equals and act as though variations in skin colour, appearance, or wealth don’t exist, children still perceive the difference. It seems we’re born with a button for tribalism in our brains. All that’s needed is for something to switch it
Terrorism experts and historians consistently point out that people in positions of power have distinct psychological profiles.
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.
If you’re powerful you’re more likely to think most people are lazy and unreliable. That they need to be supervised and monitored, managed and regulated, censored and told what to do.
Powerful people don’t have to justify their actions and therefore can afford a blinkered view.
But how does society decide who has the most merit? How do you determine who contributes most to society?
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. But 10,000 years ago it became substantially more difficult to unseat the powerful.
it’s tough to win an election without access to an aristocratic network of donors and lobbyists.
power causes people to lose the kindness and modesty that got them elected, or they never possessed those sterling qualities in the first place.
They have the ultimate secret weapon to defeat their competition. They’re shameless.
