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It’s when crisis hits – when the bombs fall or the floodwaters rise – that we humans become our best selves.
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.
Cynicism is a theory of everything.
The news, according to dozens of studies, is a mental health hazard.
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!
Two years after Richard Dawkins published his bestseller about egoistic genes, concluding that people are ‘born selfish’, here was an unknown Russian geneticist claiming the opposite. 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’.
What dogs are to wolves, we are to Neanderthals.
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.
‘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 have been easy to convince people that land or animals – or even other human beings – could now belong to someone. After all, foragers had shared just about everything.
Only once we settled in one place did things begin to fall apart, he thought, and that’s just what the archaeology now shows. Rousseau saw the invention of farming as one big fiasco, and for this, too, we now have abundant scientific evidence.
We domesticated animals such as cows and goats and started drinking their milk. This turned towns into giant Petri dishes for mutating bacteria and viruses.
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.
‘There’s a failure to recognise that not only problems but also solutions can grow exponentially,’ Professor Boersema told me. ‘There’s no guarantee they will. But they can.’
In other words, the Holocaust wasn’t the work of humans suddenly turned robots, just as Milgram’s volunteers didn’t press switches without stopping to think. The perpetrators believed they were on the right side of history. Auschwitz was the culmination of a long and complex historical process in which the voltage was upped step by step and evil was more convincingly passed off as good. The Nazi propaganda mill – with its writers and poets, its philosophers and politicians – had had years to do its work, blunting and poisoning the minds of the German people. Homo puppy was deceived and
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humans are tempted by evil masquerading as good).
Belief in humankind’s sinful nature also provides a tidy explanation for the existence of evil. When confronted with hatred or selfishness, you can tell yourself, ‘Oh, well, that’s just human nature.’ But if you believe that people are essentially good, you have to question why evil exists at all. It implies that engagement and resistance are worthwhile, and it imposes an obligation to act.
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.37 The bright spotlight we shine on our chosen few makes us blind to the perspective of our adversaries, because everybody else falls outside our view.38
You can also drug your soldiers to dull their natural empathy and antipathy towards violence. From Troy to Waterloo, from Korea to Vietnam, few armies have fought without the aid of intoxicants, and 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).44
That might also help explain why women tend to score higher than men on empathy tests. A large study at Cambridge University in 2018 found no genetic basis for this divergence, and instead attributed it to what scientists call socialisation.15 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.
In reality, bonobos are an altogether different creature. In Chapter 4 we saw that these apes have domesticated themselves, just like Homo puppy. The female of the species seem to have been key to this process, because, while not as strong as the males, they close ranks any time one of their own gets harassed by the opposite sex. If necessary, they bite his penis in half.19 Thanks to this balance of power, bonobo females can pick and choose their own mates, and the nicest guys usually finish first.
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
‘Never let yourself be diverted by what you wish to believe.’
Things like friendship, love, trust and loyalty become true precisely because we believe in them.
And when we adopt one another’s bad ideas – thinking them to be ideas everybody around us holds – the results can be downright disastrous.
when tulip mania hit Holland in January 1637, and a single tulip bulb briefly sold for more than ten times the annual wage of a skilled craftsman, only to become all but worthless days later.
Interviewer: How do you motivate your employees? Jos: I don’t. Seems patronizing.
Managers tend to band together. They set up all kinds of courses and conferences where they tell each other they’re doing things right.’
If you treat employees as if they are responsible and reliable, they will be.
When kids engage in this kind of play, they think for themselves. They take risks and colour outside the lines, and in the process train their minds and motivation. Unstructured play is also nature’s remedy against boredom. These days we give kids all kinds of manufactured entertainment, from the LEGO® Star Wars Snowspeeder™, complete with detailed assembly instructions, to the Miele Kitchen Gourmet Deluxe with electronic cooking sounds.
Boredom may be the wellspring of creativity. ‘You can’t teach creativity,’ writes psychologist Peter Gray, ‘all you can do is let it blossom.’11
Where adults can’t stand filth, kids can’t stand to be bored.
The question is not: can our kids handle the freedom? The question is: do we have the courage to give it to them?
Or take the rise of the advertising industry, which has plastered unsightly billboards all over cities across the world. If someone sprays your house with graffiti, we call it vandalism. But for advertising you’re allowed to deface public space and economists will call it ‘growth’.
Mark Twain figured that out as early as 1867, observing that ‘travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness’.39
We can’t take on the big until we have a handle on the small.
