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As the Lebanese statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb dryly notes, ‘We are not rational enough to be exposed to the press’.
‘News is to the mind what sugar is to the body.’30
Prone to depression. A man who, as a teacher, once divided his pupils into gangs and encouraged them to attack one another. ‘I have always understood the Nazis,’ Golding confessed, ‘because I am of that sort by nature.’ And it was ‘partly out of that sad self-knowledge’ that he wrote Lord of the Flies.5
As media scientist George Gerbner summed up: ‘[He] who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behaviour.’28
The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, how many wars, how many murders, how many misfortunes and horrors, would that man have saved the human species, who pulling up the stakes or filling up the ditches should have cried to his fellows: Be sure not to listen to this imposter; you are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth itself to nobody!
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’.
Great thinkers like Plato and Aristotle believed that, without slavery, civilisation could not exist.
Until 1800, at least three-quarters of the global population lived in bondage to a wealthy lord.
In the words of Rousseau: ‘Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.’
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.
There was no war, no famine, no eating of other people. Deforestation didn’t make the land inhospitable, but more productive. There was no mass slaughter in or around 1680; the real decline didn’t begin until centuries later, around 1860. And foreign visitors to the island didn’t discover a dying civilisation–they pushed it off the cliff.
Too many environmental activists underestimate the resilience of humankind.
‘It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.’ Anne Frank (1929–45)
In the decades since the experiment, millions of people have fallen for Philip Zimbardo’s staged farce.
This is the real story of Kitty Genovese. It’s a story that ought to be required reading not only for first-year psychology students, but also for aspiring journalists. That’s because it teaches us three things. One, how out of whack our view of human nature often is. Two, how deftly journalists push those buttons to sell sensational stories. And, last but not least, how it’s precisely in emergencies that we can count on one another.
‘Terrorists don’t kill and die just for a cause,’ one American anthropologist notes. ‘They kill and die for each other.’
Just as empathy misleads us by zooming in on the specific, the news deceives us by zooming in on the exceptional.
The sad truth is that empathy and xenophobia go hand in hand.
Money may be a fiction, but it’s enforced by the threat of very real violence.
Studies show that between 4 and 8 per cent of CEOs have a diagnosable sociopathy, compared to 1 per cent among the general population.37
‘So we have to be idealists in a way, because then we wind up as the true, the real realists.’ Viktor Frankl (1905–97)
In 1959, the BBC asked Russell what advice he would give future generations. He answered: When you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed, but look only and solely at what are the facts.
hand. I went back to have a look at the interviews Jos de Blok has given. They soon had me grinning: Interviewer: Is there anything you do to motivate yourself? Steve Jobs reportedly asked himself in the mirror each morning: What would I do if this were my last day? Jos: I read his book too, and I don’t believe a word of it.1 Interviewer: Do you ever attend networking sessions? Jos: At most of those things, nothing happens aside from everybody reaffirming everybody else’s opinions. That’s not for me.2 Interviewer: How do you motivate your employees? Jos: I don’t. Seems patronizing.3
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Taylorism lives on in timesheets, billable hours and KPIs, in doctor pay-for-performance programmes and in warehouse staff whose every move is monitored by CCTV.
when you turn healthcare into a market, you end up with piles of paperwork.
Edward Deci, the American psychologist who flipped the script on how we think about motivation, thought the question should no longer be how to motivate others, but how we shape a society so that people motivate themselves. This question is neither conservative nor progressive, neither capitalist nor communist. It speaks to a new movement–a new realism. Because nothing is more powerful than people who do something because they want to do it.
In the US, working mothers spend more time with their kids today than stay-at-home mothers did in the 1970s.
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.’
All too often, the sharing economy turns out to be more like a shearing economy–we all get fleeced.
‘If you are to punish a man retributively you must injure him. If you are to reform him you must improve him. And men are not improved by injuries.’ George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
In the US, 60 per cent of inmates are back in the slammer after two years, compared to 20 per cent in Norway.
Sadly, untold companies, schools and other institutions are still organised around a myth: that it’s in our nature to be locked in competition with one another.
empathy can be a bad guide: the simple fact is we’re not always good at sensing what others want. All those managers, CEOs, journalists and policymakers who think they do are effectively robbing others of their voice. This is why you so seldom see refugees interviewed on TV. This is why our democracy and journalism constitute mostly one-way traffic. And this is why our welfare states are steeped in paternalism.
the ‘Platinum Rule’, was nicely summed up by George Bernard Shaw. ‘Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you,’ he advised. ‘Their tastes may be different.’9
remember that cynicism is just another word for laziness.
Brian Hare, The Genius of Dogs. Discovering the Unique Intelligence
Peter Gray, ‘Why Zimbardo’s Prison Experiment Isn’t in My Textbook’, Psychology Today (19 October 2013).
Quoted in Noam Chomsky, ‘What is the Common Good?’, Truthout (7 January 2014).
Hans Rosling, Factfulness. Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World–and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (New York, 2018).
The One Best Way. Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (Cambridge, 2005),
David Van Reybrouck, Against Elections. The Case for Democracy (London, 2016).
