Humankind: A Hopeful History

by Rutger Bregman

‘Man will become better when you show him what he is like.’

‘The Psychology of the Masses’

Twenty-five years later, US forces would drop three times as much firepower on Vietnam as they dropped in the entire Second World War.

That most people, deep down, are pretty decent.

‘My own impression,’ writes Rebecca Solnit, whose book A Paradise Built in Hell (2009) gives a masterful account of Katrina’s aftermath, ‘is that 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.

A company with intrinsically motivated employees has no need of managers; a democracy with engaged citizens has no need of career politicians.

But don’t worry, he assured us. Anarchy can be tamed and peace established – if we all just agree to relinquish our liberty. To put ourselves, body and soul, into the hands of a solitary sovereign. He named this absolute ruler after a biblical sea monster: the Leviathan. Hobbes’ thinking provided the basic philosophical rationale for an argument that would be repeated thousands, nay, millions of times after him, by directors and dictators, governors and generals … ‘Give us power, or all is lost.’

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’.

Human beings, it turns out, are ultrasocial learning machines. We’re born to learn, to bond and to play.

Is it any wonder, then, that loneliness can quite literally make us sick? That a lack of human contact is comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day?39 That having a pet lowers our risk of depression?40 Human beings crave togetherness and interaction.

we feel more affinity for those who are most like us.

But it gets even stranger. Some twelve thousand muskets were double-loaded, and half of those more than triple. One rifle even had twenty-three balls in the barrel – which is absurd. These soldiers had been thoroughly drilled by their officers. Muskets, they all knew, were designed to discharge one ball at a time. So what were they doing? Only much later did historians figure it out: loading a gun is the perfect excuse not to shoot it. And if it happened to be loaded already, well, you just loaded it again. And again.25

‘The Hobbesian image of humans, judging from the most common evidence, is empirically wrong,’ Collins asserts. ‘Humans are hardwired for […] solidarity; and this is what makes violence so difficult.’29

(Incidentally, few tribes are more ‘contaminated’ than the Yanomami. In exchange for their help, Chagnon handed out axes and machetes, then concluded that these people were awfully violent.)37

Take the following account recorded in 1492 by a traveller on coming ashore in the Bahamas. He was astonished at how peaceful the inhabitants were. ‘They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword … and [they] cut themselves out of ignorance.’ This gave him an idea. ‘They would make fine servants … With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.’1

In the vast reaches of the Pacific Ocean, for example, lies a tiny atoll called Ifalik. After the Second World War, the US Navy screened a few Hollywood films on Ifalik to foster goodwill with the Ifalik people. It turned out to be the most appalling thing the islanders had ever seen. The violence on screen so distressed the unsuspecting natives that some fell ill for days. When years later an anthropologist came to do fieldwork on Ifalik, the natives repeatedly asked her: was it true? Were there really people in America who had killed another person?2

Also taboo among hunter-gatherers was stockpiling and hoarding. For most of our history we didn’t collect things, but friendships. This never failed to amaze European explorers, who expressed incredulity at the generosity of the peoples they encountered. ‘When you ask for something they have, they never say no,’ Columbus wrote in his log. ‘To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone.’6

And most importantly, evil has to be disguised as doing good.

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 indoctrinated, brainwashed and manipulated. Only then could the inconceivable happen.

‘In my experience, managers tend to have very few ideas. They get their jobs because they fit into a system, because they follow orders. Not because they’re big visionaries. They take some “high-performance leadership” courses and suddenly think they’re a game changer, an innovator.’

‘What you get with all these MBA programmes is people convinced they’ve learned a convenient way to order the world.

‘That lets you say: See, you need me to master that complexity.’ Could it be that’s also driving a big part of our so-called ‘knowledge economy’

In the US, working mothers spend more time with their kids today than stay-at-home mothers did in the 1970s.

‘It’s really very simple,’ explains Bastøy’s warden, Tom Eberhardt. ‘Treat people like dirt, and they’ll be dirt. Treat them like human beings, and they’ll act like human beings.’3

At the end of their 2018 article, the economists tallied the costs and benefits. A stay in a Norwegian prison, according to their calculations, costs on average $60,151 per conviction – almost twice as much as in the US. However, because these ex-convicts go on to commit fewer crimes, they also save Norwegian law enforcement $71,226 apiece. And because more of them find employment, they don’t need government assistance and they pay taxes, saving the system on average another $67,086. Last but not least, the number of victims goes down, which is priceless.

We need to realise it’s okay that we’re all different – there’s nothing wrong with that. We

can build strong houses for our identities, with sturdy foundations. Then we can throw open the doors.

‘When you give to the needy, sound no trumpet …’ Jesus warned during the Sermon on the Mount, and ‘when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret’.21