Humankind: A Hopeful History

by Rutger Bregman

So what is this radical idea? That most people, deep down, are pretty decent.

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.

‘Whatever the extent of the looting,’ a disaster researcher points out, ‘it always pales in significance to the widespread altruism that leads to free and massive giving and sharing of goods and services.’11

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 picture we’re fed by the media is consistently the opposite of what happens when disaster strikes.

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.

My argument is simply this: that we–by nature, as children, on an uninhabited island, when war breaks out, when crisis hits–have a powerful preference for our good side. I will present the considerable scientific evidence showing just how realistic a more positive view of human nature is. At the same time, I’m convinced it could be more of a reality if we’d start to believe it.

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

I looked down at the first page. ‘Life has taught me a great deal,’ it began, ‘including the lesson that you should always look for what is good and positive in people.’

The basic ingredients for the evolution of life are straightforward. You need: Lots of suffering. Lots of struggle. Lots of time.

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.

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.

It seems we have to face a painful fact. ‘The mechanism that makes us the kindest species,’ says Brian Hare, puppy expert, ‘also makes us the cruelest species on the planet.’1 People are social animals, but we have a fatal flaw: we feel more affinity for those who are most like us.

Most people, he wrote, have a ‘fear of aggression’ that is a normal part of our ‘emotional make-up’.

To understand that last point, you need to know 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.’

Homo puppy did everything it could to squash these tendencies. As a member of the !Kung put it: ‘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.

Franklin admitted that ‘No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.’47

In the words of Rousseau: ‘Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.’

There’s no reason to be fatalistic about civil society. We can choose to organise our cities and states in new ways that benefit everyone. The curse of civilisation can be lifted.

I’m often reminded of what a Chinese politician said in the 1970s when asked about the effects of the French Revolution of 1789. ‘It’s a little too soon to say,’ he allegedly responded.

For proof, we need only look to Easter Island. When the last tree was gone, the islanders reinvented farming, with new techniques to boost yields. 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.

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.

She argued that our need for love and friendship is more human than any inclination towards hate and violence. And when we do choose the path of evil, we feel compelled to hide behind lies and clichés that give us a semblance of virtue.

In reality, our enemies are just like us.

Not only can we do this, but we’re good at it. People are emotional vacuum cleaners, always sucking up other people’s feelings. Just think how easily books and movies can make us laugh or cry. For me, sad movies on flights are always the worst (I’m constantly pressing pause so fellow passengers won’t feel the need to comfort me).

War criminals like Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels are classic examples of power-hungry, paranoid narcissists.50 Al-Qaeda and IS leaders have been similarly manipulative and egocentric, rarely troubled by feelings of compassion or doubt.

If powerful people feel less ‘connected’ to others, is it any wonder they also tend to be more cynical? One of the effects of power, myriad studies show, is that it makes you see others in a negative light.

Due to the way power has traditionally been distributed, it’s mostly been up to women to understand men. Those persistent ideas about a superior female intuition are probably rooted in the same imbalance–that women are expected to see things from a male perspective, and rarely the other way around.

The selfish and the greedy would get booted out of the tribe and faced likely starvation. After all, nobody wanted to share food with those who were full of themselves.

That said, we also shouldn’t exaggerate such findings. Homo puppy is not a natural-born communist. We’re fine with a little inequality, psychologists emphasise, if we think it’s justified. As long as things seem fair. If you can convince the masses that you’re smarter or better or holier, then it makes sense that you’re in charge and you won’t have to fear opposition.

How? With myths. We learned to imagine kinship with people we’d never met. Religions, states, companies, nations–all of them really only exist in our minds, in the narratives our leaders and we ourselves tell. No one has ever met ‘France’ or shaken hands with ‘the Roman Catholic Church’. But that doesn’t matter if we sign on for the fiction.

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.

We prefer a pound of the worst kind of misery over a few ounces of shame or social discomfort.

That cuts them off from the real world. ‘There’s this notion that doers can’t think strategically,’ De Blok continues. ‘That they lack vision. But the people out doing the work are brimming with ideas. They come up with a thousand things, but don’t get heard, because managers think they have to go on some corporate retreat to dream up plans to present to the worker bees.’

De Blok sums up his philosophy like this: ‘It’s easy to make things hard, but hard to make them easy.’

‘You can’t teach creativity,’ writes psychologist Peter Gray, ‘all you can do is let it blossom.’11

It’s a generation that’s learning to run a rat race where the main metrics of success are your résumé and your pay cheque.

But where parents see disorder, kids see possibilities. Where adults can’t stand filth, kids can’t stand to be bored.

So maybe there’s an even bigger question we should be asking: What’s the purpose of education? Is it possible we’ve become transfixed on good grades and good salaries?

‘The opposite of play is not work,’ the psychologist Brian Sutton-Smith once said. ‘The opposite of play is depression.’

Democracies around the globe are afflicted by at least seven plagues. Parties eroding. Citizens who no longer trust one another. Minorities being excluded. Voters losing interest. Politicians who turn out to be corrupt. The rich getting out of paying taxes. And the growing realisation that our modern democracy is steeped in inequality.

Modern psychologists call it non-complementary behaviour. Most of the time, as I mentioned earlier, we humans mirror each other. Someone gives you a compliment, you’re quick to return the favour. Somebody says something unpleasant, and you feel the urge to make a snide comeback. In earlier chapters we saw how powerful these positive and negative feedback loops can become in schools and companies and democracies.

Contact. Nothing more, nothing less. The American scholar suspected that prejudice, hatred and racism stem from a lack of contact. We generalise wildly about strangers because we don’t know them. So the remedy seemed obvious: more contact.

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.

Because if we have a better memory for bad interactions, how come contact nonetheless brings us closer together? The answer, in the end, was simple. For every unpleasant incident we encounter, there are any number of pleasant interactions.24 The bad may seem stronger, but it’s outnumbered by the good.

‘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.

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’.