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Anyone wanting to read up on all the evils to be unleashed needed only one book: Psychologie des foules–‘The Psychology of the Masses’–by one of the most influential scholars of his day, the Frenchman Gustave Le Bon. Hitler read the book cover to cover. So did Mussolini, Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt.
According to an American observer, ‘the English get bored so much more quickly than they get anything else, and nobody is taking cover much any longer’.10
After the war ended, many British would yearn for the days of the Blitz, when everybody helped each other out and no one cared about your politics, or whether you were rich or poor.11
‘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.’13
On one night in Dresden, more men, women and children were killed than in London during the whole war.
Right up through the final months, Churchill maintained that the surest way to win the war was by dropping bombs on civilians to break national morale.
Military experts, unfortunately, were slow to catch on. Twenty-five years later, US forces would drop three times as much firepower on Vietnam as they dropped in the entire Second World War.26 This time it failed on an even grander scale. Even when the evidence is right in front of us, somehow we still manage to deny it. To this day, many remain convinced that the resilience the British people showed during the Blitz can be chalked up to a quality that is singularly British. But it’s not singularly British. It’s universally human.
What is truth? Some things are true whether you believe in them or not. Water boils at 100°C. Smoking kills. President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on 22 November 1963. Other things have the potential to be true, if we believe in them. Our belief becomes what sociologists dub a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you predict a bank will go bust and that convinces lots of people to close their accounts, then, sure enough, the bank will go bust.
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.
If we believe most people can’t be trusted, that’s how we’ll treat each other, to everyone’s detriment. Few ideas have as much power to shape the world as our view of other people. Because ultimately, you get what you expect to get. If we want to tackle the greatest challenges of our times–from the climate crisis to our growing distrust of one another–then I think the place we need to start is our view of human nature.
Cynicism is a theory of everything. The cynic is always right.
When our instinct is to trust those in our immediate communities, why does our attitude change when applied to people as a whole?
Why do we imagine humans are bad? What made us start believing in the wicked nature of our kind?
The news, according to dozens of studies, is a mental health hazard.23
mean world syndrome, whose clinical symptoms are cynicism, misanthropy and pessimism.
We’re living in the richest, safest, healthiest era ever.
What they found is that in times when immigration or violence declines, newspapers give them more coverage. ‘Hence,’ they concluded, ‘there seems to be none or even a negative relationship between news and reality.’27
availability bias. If we can easily recall examples of a given thing, we assume that thing is relatively common.
to stand up for human goodness is to stand up against a hydra–that mythological seven-headed monster that grew back two heads for every one Hercules lopped off. Cynicism works a lot like that. For every misanthropic argument you deflate, two more will pop up in its place. Veneer theory is a zombie that just keeps coming back.
to stand up for human goodness is to take a stand against the powers that be. For the powerful, a hopeful view of human nature is downright threatening. Subversive. Seditious. It implies that we’re not selfish beasts that need to be reined in, restrained and regulated. It implies that we need a different kind of leadership. A company with intrinsically motivated employees has no need of managers; a democracy with engaged citizens has no need of career politicians.
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 h...
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The Russian geneticist had a radical hypothesis. He suspected these cute features were merely by-products of something else, a metamorphosis that happens organically if over a sufficiently long period of time animals are consistently selected for one specific quality: Friendliness.
The more amiable foxes produced fewer stress hormones and more serotonin (the ‘happy hormone’) and oxytocin (the ‘love hormone’).
Dmitri Belyaev’s theory was that people are domesticated apes. That for tens of thousands of years, the nicest humans had the most kids. That the evolution of our species, in short, was predicated on ‘survival of the friendliest’.
the results supported the by-product theory and proved Brian wrong. The latest generation of friendly foxes was not only remarkably astute, but also much smarter than their aggressive counterparts. As Brian put it, ‘The foxes totally rocked my world.’
‘If you want a clever fox,’ he says, ‘you don’t select for cleverness. You select for friendliness.’30
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.
we have whites in our eyes. This unique trait lets us follow the direction of other people’s gazes. 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.
Scientists think the protruding ridge may have impeded communication, because we now use our eyebrows in all kinds of subtle ways.
People are social animals, but we have a fatal flaw: we feel more affinity for those who are most like us.
Oxytocin–which Lyudmila Trut’s cute Siberian foxes showed high levels of–makes us kinder, gentler, more laid-back and serene. It transforms even the biggest jerk into a friendly puppy. That’s why it’s often touted in mushy terms such as the ‘milk of human kindness’ and the ‘hug hormone’.
the effects of oxytocin seem limited to one’s own group.2 The hormone not only enhances affection for friends, it can also intensify aversion to strangers. Turns out oxytocin doesn’t fuel universal fraternity. It powers feelings of ‘my people first’.
‘We started off nasty,’ Pinker concurs with Hobbes.10 Biology, anthropology and archaeology all point in the same direction: humans may be nice to their friends, we’re cold-blooded when it comes to outsiders. In fact, we’re the most warmongering creatures on the planet.
But as Colonel Samuel Marshall continued to interview groups of servicemen, in the Pacific and later in the European theatre, he found that only 15 to 25 per cent of them had actually fired their weapons. At the critical moment, the vast majority balked. One
Most people, he wrote, have a ‘fear of aggression’ that is a normal part of our ‘emotional make-up’.16
loading a gun is the perfect excuse not to shoot it.
If it was true that we once inhabited a world of liberty and equality, why did we ever leave? And if nomadic foragers had no trouble removing domineering leaders, why can’t we seem to get rid of them now?
Göbekli Tepe (translated as ‘Potbelly Hill’) turns out to be the oldest temple in the world and an example of what scholars call a collective work event. Thousands of people contributed, and pilgrims came from far and wide to lend a hand. Upon its completion, there was a big celebration with a feast of roast gazelle (archaeologists found thousands of gazelle bones). Monuments like this one were not built to stroke some chieftain’s ego. Their purpose was to bring people together.19
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.
And this new practice of ownership meant inequality started to grow.
One, we now had belongings to fight over, starting with land. And two, settled life made us more distrustful of strangers. Foraging nomads had a fairly laid-back membership policy: you crossed paths with new people all the time and could easily join up with another group.26 Villagers, on the other hand, grew more focused on their own communities and their own possessions.
In their new families, these brides were viewed with suspicion, and only after presenting them with a son did women gain a measure of acceptance. A legitimate son, that is. It’s no accident that female virginity turned into an obsession. Where in prehistory women had been free to come and go as they pleased, now they were being covered up and tethered down. The patriarchy was born.
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.34
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.
Great thinkers like Plato and Aristotle believed that, without slavery, civilisation could not exist.
Colonists fled into the wilderness by the hundreds, whereas the reverse rarely happened.48 And who could blame them? Living as Indians, they enjoyed more freedoms than they did as farmers and taxpayers. For women, the appeal was even greater. ‘We could work as leisurely as we pleased,’ said a colonial woman who hid from countrymen sent to ‘rescue’ her.49 ‘Here, I have no master,’ another told a French diplomat. ‘I shall marry if I wish and be unmarried again when I wish. Is there a single woman as independent as I in your cities?’50
be more accurate to characterise those dark ages as a reprieve, when the enslaved regained their freedom, infectious disease diminished, diet improved and culture flourished.
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.
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.
Vaccines now save more lives each year than would have been spared if we’d had world peace for the entire twentieth century.
