Rutger Bregman, Humankind, A Hopeful History

A New Realism

• Contrary to Hitler’s belief and Gustavo Le Bob’s book, The Psychology of the Masses, crisis brought out the best in people, not the worst. There was no evidence of breakdown of morale when Hitler dropped 80,000 bombs on London alone over 9 months, killing over 40,000 people in UK.
• Reading the news has been scientifically proven to be a mental health hazard. People who read the news are more likely to distrust others, believe people are selfish, and think the world is getting worse. That’s because the news is about the exceptional. Negativity bias from our hunter-gatherer instincts causes us to tune in to the bad than the good. Also, availability bias leads us to think that something is relatively common if we can easily recall examples of it.?
• Powerful despots, dictators, governors and generals resort to brute force because they assume that the average Joe is ruled by self interest, just like them. But that is far from the truth as seen during crises like 9/11. Yet, a hopeful view of human nature threatens the powerful.

The real Lord of the Flies

• William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is said to have originated reality TV because it portrays humans as being selfish in a deserted island. But this requires much manipulation and has a self-fulfilling effect.
• Golding was a depressive alcoholic who “understood the Nazis” whereas a real-life Lord of the Flies incident of 6 shipwrecked Tongan boys turned out nothing like that - they in fact helped their friend heal a fractured limb.

The State of Nature

• While Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan describes humans as wicked and in need of an absolute ruler (“give us power or all is lost”), Jean-Jacques Rousseau declared that we’re all good in our heart of hearts and that it is “civilization” that ruins us. The whole science of economics is premised on Hobbes. Links to the debate on top down management vs empowered teams, and several other issues.?
• Rousseau, who was enormously influential in education, wrote that children should grow up free and unfettered because the “fruits of the earth belong equally to all, and the earth itself to nobody!”
• Social intelligence is a coincidental by-product of friendliness, as proven by an object choice test experiment on friendly silver fox who fared as well as human toddlers and better than chimpanzees in identifying where a banana was hidden when given clues. They did not learn this from humans because even 9-week old puppies could pass the test.?
• Social learning is what sets humans apart. Blushing is a social expression. So is having whites in the eye because it lets us follow the direction of people’s gaze, unlike all other primates who have melanin which tints the eye like wearing shades.
• 60% of US companies (e.g. Enron, Amazon, Uber), run on a Rank & Yank mechanism of greed inspired by Hobbes and Richard Dawkin’s pessimism (see The Selfish Gene, a book which inspired Enron’s founder during the 1970s-era called the ‘Me Decade’). Enron’s founder ended up in prison for massive accounting fraud.?
• Humans crave connection. It’s no wonder that lack of human contact is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes, and that having a pet lowers the chance of depression.
• The painful fact is that our social traits which make us the kindest species also make us the cruelest because we feel most affinity for people like us.
• But most people fear aggression (including soldiers) and will not of their own volition take a life. ~90% of American and French soldiers avoided firing by repeatedly double/triple-loading their musket guns (which is absurd because these guns are designed to discharge one ball at a time).
• In prehistoric politics, our nomadic ancestors were allergic to inequality. In what scientists call achievement-based inequality, power distinctions between people, if tolerated at all, were temporary and served a purpose. To keep members humble, society wielded shame as a weapon. Even boasting about a large kill, stockpiling and hoarding is frowned upon in today’s tribes. Those who developed a superiority complex were exiled or killed by the entire tribe who took shared responsibility. Throughout history, humour, mockery and gossip became other means to topple rulers in power.?
• The 1% only began oppressing the 99% at the end of the last ice age when humans began staying put. Farming used to be effortless until settlements grew denser. By this time, we had lost the knack of foraging and occasionally banded with strangers (ironically to make war when threatened by colonists and ravaged by illnesses). Infectious diseases began spreading when domesticated animals became a breeding ground for bacteria and viruses (through drinking their milk, bestiality practices, etc). The idea of a vengeful omnipotent god emerged in large settlements that developed the notion of sin and penance.
• What we hold up today as milestones of civilization - invention of money, development of writing and birth of legal institutions - started as instruments of oppression. Civilization brought much suffering only until recently when civil society improved due to vaccines for diseases, abolishment of slavery and drop in poverty levels. But really how sustainable is our civilized society? It’s perhaps too soon to tell, given the ecological crisis we are faced with.?
• The Easter Island myth of Long Ears and Short Ear clans cannibalising each other is fake. In fact, the inhabitants were friendly and welcoming but were seized for the slave trade and later came down with smallpox brought by their captors.

After Auschwitz

• The Stanford Prison Experiment is a hoax, as proven by archived notes and video recordings.?
• 56% of participants of Stanley Milgram’s famous shock experiment doubted the shocks were real and those who did believe it was real were inclined to call it quits. Also, participants in fact became more disobedient in following authority when the authority became overbearing in giving out order (i.e. “you have no choice but to go on”). Only prods invoking a scientific objective were effective (i.e. the experiment requires that you continue) because several subjects simply wanted to benefit science. Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmmann did evil because he believed he was doing good. Official commands were rarely issued and hence Nazi’s relied on their own creativity in a spirit of one-upmanship to get in Hitler’s good graces, manipulated by propaganda.?

Why Good People Turn Bad

• Camaraderie is the weapon that wins wars. German soldiers fought because of friendship, not ideology.?
• Infants choose nice puppets over mean ones but would choose mean puppets over nice ones if the mean puppets liked the same foods as them because of an aversion to the unfamiliar.?
• We feel empathy for people who are close to us but empathy is a hopelessly limited skill because we cannot empathize with everyone - it can be a misleading spotlight, just like the news.?
• Since empathy and xenophobia are two sides of the same coin, people can be ‘conditioned’ to do bad things like kill another human during war. But these people also return with post traumatic stress disorder, as seen after the Vietnam war.?
• The friendliest people rise to the top. But once they have power, they tend to become acquired sociopaths - more impulsive, self-centered, reckless, arrogant, ruder than average, and more shameless (i.e. no blushing). Machiavellian traits that arise from power disrupting the mental process of mirroring which plays a key role in empathy. These people also become more cynical, thinking that people are lazy and unreliable, needing supervision and censorship. Ironically, not having power has the opposite effect and it becomes self fulfilling. This is why women score higher on empathy. Prehistorically, humility was a required trait to get elected, but the shameless survive in modern mediacracies.
• God lost his job to bureaucrats. When checks and balances were imposed through the rule of law, religion was displaced as a Leviathan and adopted a friendlier stance. Hence it is not a coincidence that the largest concentrations of atheists reside in countries like Denmark or Sweden who have the most robust rule of law and trustworthy bureaucracies.?
• Enlightenment thinkers advocated for a nocebo where we are asked to act as though people are selfish even though they are not. But what if we did the opposite?

A New Realism

• The Pygmalion effect is where beliefs we are devoted to - whether true or imagined - can come to life and effect real change. Resembles the placebo and the opposite is the Golem effect. High expectations can be a powerful tool.?
• Pluralistic ignorance leads to bubbles that can be disastrous, even fatal (e.g. binge drinking). Our ideas (e.g. cynical view) of human nature can be like this.?
• Ants can get trapped crawling in spirals if they lose their pheromone trail. Like hatred, trust can be contagious. Trust often begins with someone unrealistic, even na?ve enough to dare to go against the flow (i.e. managers with total faith in their staff, teachers who give kids free rein to play, etc.)
• Jos de Blok, famous for his >14,000-staff home healthcare organization Buurtzorg and named Employer of the Year in Netherlands, dismissed managing as bullshit, doesn’t believe Steve Jobs and networking sessions, or having distant goals.?
• The capitalists relied on carrots/money and the communists relied on sticks/punishment. But we don’t believe people motivate themselves and tend to think other people lack motivation, not us (external incentives bias).
• Those who log hours or are paid by the hour are less inclined to volunteer and put a value on all their time. Undermined intrinsic motivation. Hence Jos de Blok successfully runs his organization by giving each team maximum autonomy to plan their schedule, employ workers, have their own training budget, and have their own coach to turn to.?
• Skill and competence can become leading values, not revenue or productivity. Nothing is more powerful than people who do something because they want to do it.?
• Today, kids are spending increasingly less time outside, parents spend much more time supporting their kid, but much less opportunity is left for the kind of spontaneous play that the most intelligent creatures engage in.
• Agora is a school with no classes and classrooms, but run with incredibly talented students with a sense of community, high expectations and weekly coaching to guide them. Bullying is a quirk in unstructured Agora, as opposed to being endemic in competitive institutions where everyone is subject to the same authority, does the same tasks, are rigidly scheduled and have a system of explicit formal rules.
• What if there is a constructive, conscientious citizen inside each of us? Julio Chavez, who won the Venezuelan elections in Torres, promised to hand over power to the citizens if he were elected, and he kept his word. A government by citizens instead of public servants. With real participatory budgeting (not sham ones to rubber stamp decisions already made), the population was participating in politics like never before, new roads and districts were built, and corruption went down. Citizen politicians engage in calm and deliberative dialogue instead of juicy debates.
• Elinor Ostrom formulated a set of design principles for successful commons, like a minimum level of autonomy, effective monitoring system, with several characteristics shaped by local context. She advocated for institutional diversity which recognizes that markets sometimes work best and state control works best at other times. She eventually won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics.?

The Other Cheek

• Non-complementary behaviour refers to giving someone the other cheek when they slap you. Norway’s Halden prison in Oslo is such a place. To them, prison is not about preventing bad behaviour but bad intentions, because 90% of prisoners are released to become someone’s neighbour. Hence guards are taught to make friends with inmates rather than patronize and humiliate them. Recidivism rate is hence 50% lower.?
• To reconcile sworn enemies, give them more contact. People who live in diverse communities (and talk to them) more often identify with all of humanity.
• What if propaganda not only sows discord but can bring people together? To encourage Colombian guerrilla fighters to lay down their arms, ad agency MullenLowe used Christmas lightings and messages/photos from family to make it seem like the whole nation was looking for a child lost in the jungle (as opposed to a criminal). They purposely exaggerated the number of people willing to give these criminals a second chance, so that it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy.?
• It isn’t sentimental or na?ve to believe in peace and forgiveness. The more you give, the more you have.?

Ten rules to live by

• Bregman isn’t a fan of self-help genre because he feels we’re living in an age of too much introspection and too little outrospection. Our main task is to build different institutions, not to climb a career ladder or visualize a way to wealth.?

1. When in doubt, assume the best. Combat negativity bias and asymmetrical feedback. In the rare case that someone is mean, have a non-complementary response of turning the other cheek. Accept and account for the fact that you will occasionally be cheated.
2. Think in win-win scenarios. Forgiving liberates yourself to live.
3. Ask more questions. We’re not always good at sensing other people’s wants.
4. Temper your empathy, train your compassion. Empathy saps energy but compassion is energizing because it is constructive and controlled. This is why Matthieu Richard, a Buddhist monk with legendary command of his thoughts after meditating for 50,000 hours, was a wreck when asked to empathize with Romanian orphans while attached to a brain scan. Instead, when he was asked to feel for them instead of with them, he called up feelings of warmth, concern and care. Meditation can train compassion. Exercise the mind just like the body.
5. Try to understand the other, even if you don’t get where they are coming from. Cherish people who raise unpleasant subjects that make you uneasy, because they are key to progress.?
6. Love your own as others love their own. Evil does it’s work from a distance - it lets us rant at strangers on the internet, bypasses a soldier’s aversion to violence, led to slavery and the Holocaust. Distend strangers also have families they love. They are every bit as human as we are.
7. Avoid the news (and social media). It skews your view of the world. Instead, read a more nuanced Sunday paper or in-depth feature writing.
8. Don’t punch Nazis. Offer an outstretched hand to those who expect disgust and outrage.
9. Come out of the closet. Don’t be ashamed to do good. You need courage to extend a hand.?
10. Be realistic. It’s time for a new view of humankind where people are not cynics.