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Lindemann had already decided that strategic bombing was a sure bet, and mere facts were not about to change his mind.
Katrina, in short, didn’t see New Orleans overrun with self-interest and anarchy. Rather, the city was inundated with courage and charity.
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.
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.
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
preached that life is one great battle ‘of man against man and of nation against nation’.38 The philosopher Herbert Spencer sold hundreds of thousands of books on his assertion that we should fan the flames of this battle, since ‘the whole effort of Nature is to get rid of [the poor]–to clear the world of them, and make room for better’.39
But not for a second did I think to doubt Golding’s view of human nature.
When I read it in high school, I wondered why they were making us read a book about our lives. My school felt like LotF
As he continued on his way to where his innocent friend was incarcerated, he understood ‘that man is naturally good, and that it is from these institutions alone that men become wicked’.
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.
This is a truth as old as the hills. 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
When a seventeenth-century missionary warned a member of the Innu tribe (in what is now Canada) about the dangers of infidelity, he replied, ‘Thou hast no sense. You French people love only your own children; but we all love all the children of our tribe.’16
Consider the Old Testament, where the Prophet Samuel warns the Israelites of the dangers of accepting a king. It is one of the most prescient–and sinister–passages in the Bible:
we’ve stamped out most infectious diseases. Vaccines now save more lives each year than would have been spared if we’d had world peace for the entire twentieth century.56
Official commands were rarely issued, so Hitler’s adherents had to rely on their own creativity. Rather than simply obeying their leader, historian Ian Kershaw explains that they ‘worked towards him’, attempting to act in the spirit of the Führer.33 This inspired a culture of one-upmanship in which increasingly radical Nazis devised increasingly radical measures to get in Hitler’s good graces.
Interesting. There's another leader known for not issuing explicit orders, he hates when people take notes.....
Denmark during the Second World War. It’s a story of ordinary people who demonstrated extraordinary courage. And it shows that resistance is always worthwhile, even when all seems lost.
In a few short days, more than seven thousand Danish Jews were ferried in small fishing boats across the Sound separating Denmark from Sweden.
‘It is the only case we know,’ she wrote, ‘in which the Nazis met with open native resistance, and the result seems to have been that those exposed to it changed their minds. They
One thing is certain: a better world doesn’t start with more empathy. If anything, empathy makes us less forgiving, because the more we identify with victims, the more we generalise about our enemies.
scholars now even think Paris might not have fallen in 1940 had the German army not been stoked on thirty-five million methamphetamine pills (aka crystal meth, a drug that can cause extreme aggression).
Vietnam recruits were immersed in boot camps that exalted not only a sense of brotherhood, but also the most brutal violence, forcing the men to scream ‘KILL! KILL! KILL!’ until they were hoarse.
But then in part two of the study, subjects got to drive a snazzy Mercedes. This time, 45 per cent failed to stop for the pedestrian. In fact, the more expensive the car, the ruder the road manners.7 ‘BMW drivers were the worst,’ one of the other researchers told the New York Times.8 (This study has now been replicated twice with similar results.)9
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. And because power makes you feel superior to other people, you’ll believe all this monitoring should be entrusted to you.
self-doubt makes people unlikely to strike back. Censorship becomes unnecessary, because people who lack confidence silence themselves.
Here we see a nocebo in action: treat people as if they are stupid and they’ll start to feel stupid, leading rulers to reason that the masses are too dim to think for themselves and hence they–with their vision and insight–should take charge.
Due to the way power has traditionally been distributed, it’s mostly been up to women to understand men.
women are expected to see things from a male perspective, and rarely the other way around.
Money may be a fiction, but it’s enforced by the threat of very real violence.
what if our negative ideas about human nature are actually a form of pluralistic ignorance? Could our fear that most people are out to maximise their own gain be born of the assumption that that’s what others think? And then we adopt a cynical view when, deep down, most of us are yearning for a life of more kindness and solidarity?
Every now and then families, organisations, even entire countries seem to get caught in these kinds of spirals. We keep going around in circles, assuming the worst about each other. Few of us move to resist and so we march to our own downfall.
Trumpism
Because nothing is more powerful than people who do something because they want to do it.
you talk to a man in a language he understands,’ Mandela explained, ‘that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.
Mandela’s superpower lay elsewhere. 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’.
After Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, it became clear that all too often we still live in our own bubbles. Two sociologists even showed that ‘the racial and ethnic isolation of Whites at the zip-code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support’.
The secret behind the whole campaign? The rebels aren’t seen as monsters, but as ordinary people. ‘We aren’t searching for a criminal,’ Juan explains, ‘but for a child, missing in the jungle.’18
They decided to pretend all of Colombia would welcome returning rebels with open arms, hoping to spark off a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Even so, this story is one of hope. What the Colombian ad team witnessed was the same infectious power of kindness seen a hundred years earlier. When peace spread like an epidemic that Christmas in 1914, few soldiers were immune. One of the rare exceptions was a stiff-necked twenty-five-year-old corporal in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, who declared that ‘Such things should not happen in wartime.’ His name was Adolf Hitler.23
When we hole up in our own trenches, we lose sight of reality. We’re lured into thinking that a small, hate-mongering minority reflects all humankind.
The wonderful fact is that we live in a world where doing good also feels good. We like food because without food we’d starve. We like sex because without sex we’d go extinct. We like helping because without each other we’d wither away. Doing good typically feels good because it is good.
Understanding the other at a rational level is a skill. It’s a muscle you can train.
evil does its work from a distance. Distance lets us rant at strangers on the internet. Distance helps soldiers bypass their aversion to violence. And distance has enabled the most horrifying crimes in history, from slavery to the Holocaust.
But choose the path of compassion and you realise how little separates you from that stranger. Compassion takes you beyond yourself, until those near and dear are no more or less significant
Just like bombing the Middle East is manna for terrorists, punching Nazis only reinforces extremists. It validates them in their worldview and makes it that much easier to attract new recruits.
Every good deed is like a pebble in a pond, sending ripples out in all directions. ‘We don’t typically see how our generosity cascades through the social network,’ noted one of the researchers, ‘to affect the lives of dozens or maybe hundreds of other people.’26
Kindness is catching. And it’s so contagious that it even infects people who merely see it from afar. Among the first psychologists to study this effect was Jonathan Haidt,
Haidt calls this emotion ‘elevation’.
