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Humankind: Are We Good Or Evil? | Rutger Bregman | Modern Wisdom Podcast 181

Rutger Bregman is a historian & an author. It's a common-held view of humanity that humans are adversarial. Shaven chimps competing with each other for resources, held together by a veneer of politeness & society. Rutger disagrees and suggests that deep down humans might actually be quite nice. Expect to learn why soldiers don't fire their weapons in war, what happens when the real world Lord Of The Flies happens, how bombing a city doesn't weaken the inhabitants and much more... Sponsor: Get Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (Enter promo code MODERNWISDOM for 85% off and 3 Months Free) Extra Stuff: Buy Humankind - https://amzn.to/370ack5 Follow Rutger on Twitter - https://twitter.com/rcbregman Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom #rutgerbregman #humankind #society - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: modernwisdompodcast@gmail.com

Rutger BregmanguestChris Williamsonhost
Jun 8, 20201h 8mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 0:44

    Intro

    1. RB

      Throughout history, a cynical view of human nature has often been used by those in power to legitimize their power, right? Because if we cannot trust each other, then we need managers and CEOs and kings and monarchs and generals, right? Then we need to be kept in control. But if we can actually trust each other, if most people are pretty decent, that means that we maybe don't need them, and that we can move to a very different kind of society that is much more egalitarian, genuinely democratic, with very different kind of organizations, different kind of schools, different kind of prisons, democracies, et cetera, et cetera. So it has quite, yeah, big implications if you really think it through. (whooshing sound)

  2. 0:44 – 1:26

    Breaking the Internet

    1. RB

    2. CW

      You've been breaking the internet a lot-

    3. RB

      (laughs)

    4. CW

      ... over the last year. So last year at the Davos conference when you called out a bunch of billionaires, broke the internet. Then you riled up Tucker Carlson and broke the internet again.

    5. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    6. CW

      And then you've done it recently with this real life Lord of the Flies story that you've unearthed.

    7. RB

      Yeah. And it surprises me every time that it happens. Yeah, I mean, I'm not doing it on purpose but, uh-

    8. CW

      (laughs)

    9. RB

      ... yeah. It's a very weird experience to go viral on a skill like that, right? You, uh, sort of have your phone and your, your Twitter mentions, and then you pay a visit to the toilet and you come back and it's like 3,000 new-

    10. CW

      (laughs)

    11. RB

      ... right? It's really crazy.

  3. 1:26 – 5:00

    Humankind

    1. CW

      That's so cool, man. So why don't you tell us about, before we even get into your new book, Human- Humankind, which is great, why don't you tell us this real life Lord of the Flies story? That might be quite a cool way to start.

    2. RB

      Sure. Um, so my new book is really about a sort of silent revolution that has taken place in science, right? So there are a lot of scientists now from very diverse disciplines, uh, in anthropology and sociology and psychology and you name it, who used to have a more cynical view of human beings, of who we are as a species, and are now actually more hopeful. You know, they're not saying that people are angels or, or anything. We're clearly not. But they argue that our true superpower as a species is actually our ability to cooperate and to be friendly to one another and to work together. So when I started writing this book, I s- realized that I had to take it up against, you know, so many giants in science, in Western culture, in our literature, you name it. I mean, Western culture is d- just permeated with the idea that people are selfish. You know, this goes back all the way to the ancient Greeks, the notion that our civilization is only a thin veneer and that, you know, especially during a time of crisis, during a pandemic, for example, people become very nasty and they start stealing and hoarding and blundering and you name it. So this idea goes back all the way to the ancient Greeks. You find it with the Christian Church fathers, you know, Orthodox Christianity and the idea that we're born as, uh, sinners. You also find it with, uh, the Enlightenment philosophers. You would expect some break there, you know, between Orthodox Christianity and the Enlightenment philosophers. But if you actually look at the view of human nature, it's pretty similar. You know, David Hume, um, Thomas Hobbes, you know, the famous British philosopher, all having quite a cynical view of human nature. And then again, if you look at, um, our current capitalist system, right, the central dogma seems to be people are just selfish and deal with it. That's just the way things are. Um, now one of sort of the most, uh, famous manifestations of this idea in the 20th century was this novel Lord of the Flies that, you know, especially people in the Anglo-Saxon world, in the US and the UK, you know, so many people have read it or were forced to read it (laughs) for school, right? This story about a couple of kids who are in an, in a crash of an airplane and end up on an uninhabited island. And at first, they think like, "Oh, this is wonderful. This is lovely. Um, we're gonna have a good time here." And they try to set up a democracy of sorts, but it quickly breaks down. And at the end of the novel, like most of the kids have become animals, beasts, savages, and three of the kids are dead. And the message is really here you have these, um, civilized, uh, nice kids from a good British boarding schools, but you give them freedom and this is what, what you get, right? Civilization is just a thin veneer. Now for my book, I realized that I had to do something with Lord of the Flies, right? I had to write something about it. Even though it's, it's fiction, it's often sort of used as non-fiction, right? So many people interpret that novel and say, "Oh yeah, yeah. That's what kids are like in the end." So I asked myself the question, has it ever happeneded? You know, has there ever been one instance of real kids shipwrecking on a real island and what would happen? So yeah, that's, that's what I, uh, I tried to find out.

  4. 5:00 – 8:23

    Finding History

    1. CW

      Where do you start when you think, "I wonder if there's been a real world Lord of the Flies?" 'Cause you're, you're a historian by-

    2. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    3. CW

      ... training and trade, right?

    4. RB

      Yeah.

    5. CW

      And I always, as a non-historian, Robert Greene's been on this show, Ryan Holiday's just, just arrived in my inbox for later this year. And I'm fascinated by the process of finding history.

    6. RB

      Yeah.

    7. CW

      'Cause you can't... It's not like it's happening.

    8. RB

      Yeah.

    9. CW

      You can't go out and find some history. You've gotta, like, go back somehow.

    10. RB

      Well, you know, there's this fantastic website that I can really recommend and that's been very useful during my research and it's called Google. So (laughs) that's basically where-

    11. CW

      We all... Everyone got excited there.

    12. RB

      (laughs)

    13. CW

      My eyes widened and now you've just-

    14. RB

      I'm sorry. (laughs)

    15. CW

      ... shut it to pieces right there.

    16. RB

      I'm sorry. No. That, I mean, that's really where I started as a proper investigative journalist. I basically started Googling. So real Lord of the Flies, uh, kids s- shipwreck on an island, and I just tried to find out whether it ever happened. And the first results you get are all from like horrible reality television shows, right? There was one in the UK where they did this with children, like really horrible. They tried to set these kids up against each other, et cetera, et cetera. You don't wanna know what kind of bizarre and nasty ideas these television makers have had in the past and still have. Um-But then, after a while, I stumbled upon some obscure blog, uh, with an anecdote about, yeah, six kids that had supposedly shipwrecked on an island in 1977 near Tonga. So I was like, "God, is this true? Th- uh, has this really happened?" Tonga is an island group in the Pacific Ocean. And, um, yeah, that's basically when I started to try and fact-check this story, whether it really happened. It was quite a difficult process actually, because, uh, I, sort of, kept finding the same, sort of, paragraph, short paragraph about what had supposedly happened in 1977. But I couldn't find any article about it in the newspapers, in Australian newspapers, for example. And you would really expect that if something like s- that would really have happened, then there must be some article somewhere, right? Couldn't find it. But then I was just really lucky, this is also important, uh, if you wanna have some success in your research. Uh, by accident I had, sort of, typed, uh, in the 1960s, while I was looking in a, uh, an archive of Australian newspapers, it was a pure accident. I thought I was looking in the '70s because supposedly it happened in 1977, but I was looking in the, in the '60s and then I saw it, an article from the Australian newspaper, The Age, that said that in 1966, um, six Tongan kids had shipwrecked on the island of 'Ata, which is a bit to the south of Tonga, and they had been rescued by an Australian captain named Peter Warner. So that, the 1977, that was a typo, it was, in reality, it was 1966. And then I realized, I can maybe find these people, because if this really happened in 1966 then they might still be alive, right? They must be... The, the kids themselves were 13 to 15 years old at the time, so they might still be alive, and the captain, if I'm really, really lucky, he must be almost 90 now but maybe I can find him as well. So that's sort of how that started, and, um, again, I was really lucky because I was about to promote my new book, uh, well, sort of my previous book, Utopia for Realists, and I was about to go on a book tour in Australia. So I said to my publisher, I said, "You know what? I need a couple of days off because, uh-" (laughs)

    17. CW

      (laughs)

    18. RB

      "... I think I've got something interesting."

  5. 8:23 – 12:18

    The Lord of the Flies

    1. RB

    2. CW

      You had a detour to make there, that's so cool, man.

    3. RB

      Yeah.

    4. CW

      And so, uh, so serendipitous as well that you just happened to put the typo in that came up with the story that you needed at the time before you were about to fly there. Isn't it cool how the world, sort of, delivers stuff to us like that sometimes?

    5. RB

      Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, this is a, the kind of story that if, if it would be a fictional thing, right, if it would be a novel or a Hollywood movie, people would say, "Oh, that's so unrealistic. That is so sentimental. That is so naive. This is not how kids in real life would really behave." But, you know, as I started researching this story more and more, at- at some point I was like... I couldn't believe it. I thought, "People are not gonna believe me if I report this to them," right? "So I (laughs) gotta make sure that I collect the evidence in the right way." Because what did I find out is that actually the real Lord of the Flies is a story of hope and cooperation and resilience and friendship. These six kids lived for 50 months on an uninhabited island, basically-

    6. CW

      Five, 5-0.

    7. RB

      Five, zero. 50-

    8. CW

      50, 50 months.

    9. RB

      Yeah. No, 15, sorry.

    10. CW

      15, yeah.

    11. RB

      Yeah, it always... This (laughs) this always happens as a Dutch man, I, I can't d- never... (laughs)

    12. CW

      It's okay.

    13. RB

      I can never say 50-

    14. CW

      I will Anglicize everything that you say, Rutger, it's fine. 15, one-five-

    15. RB

      True, yeah.

    16. CW

      over a year.

    17. RB

      Which is still quite impressive. Anyway, um, they lived there for, for 15 months and, um, they did end up in fights every now and then, right? That happens. But then one would go to one side of the island and the other s- would go to the other side of the island. They would say, they'd cool off a little and say sorry and, and, uh, cooperate again. So, um, yeah, that was really fascinating and, like, the guy who rescued them, Peter Warner, he was also sort of a larger-than-life kind of person in the sense that, turns out, h- h- he, he is the son of Arthur Warner, who was, sort of, the biggest media rich person in the 1930s. He owned, like, the whole radio industry, and, uh, when Peter was 17 he ran away from home because he, in his words, he didn't want to fight people but he wanted to fight nature, so, like, for five years he was lost to his family. Then he came back and he said, "Okay, now I'm gonna fish near Tonga," and that's how, by pure accident, he found these, uh, these six kids. And, um, yeah, they're still friends up until this day. So, I mean, the story gets even crazier. (laughs) When I published this story in, uh, in The Guardian, uh, a short part of it, went completely viral and suddenly all of Hollywood wanted s- you know, to have the rights to this story. So last week I had a Zoom call with the four survivors, six s- there were six of them initially but they're now, they're still, four are still alive, and also with Peter Warner, the captain, who is also still alive. And so we had a Zoom call to decide together which big Hollywood studio was gonna get the rights to this story. And so we, uh-

    18. CW

      No way.

    19. RB

      Yeah, yeah. We've only just sold the rights, uh, it was a very strange experience. I was suddenly talking all, to all these top Hollywood directors, right, who all wanted this (laughs) story. Uh, but I felt, you know, I, I got a d- discussed this with, uh, uh, with the others and, uh, yeah, now it's gonna go, uh, to the big screen.

    20. CW

      Bro, that's amazing.

    21. RB

      (laughs) Yeah. That's crazy, isn't it? I, I can't, uh, it still feels a li- little bit surreal, uh-

    22. CW

      Breaking the internet on the regular.

    23. RB

      (laughs)

    24. CW

      (laughs)

    25. RB

      Yeah. But, I mean-

    26. CW

      That's the core of the story, man.

    27. RB

      Yeah, it's, uh, I, I don't think I'll ever get that lucky again, um, but it's a really, I mean, it's a real, it's a story that really deserves the attention, right? I'm not saying it's a scientific experiment or anything like that. The only thing I'm saying is that if millions of kids around the globe still have to read the fictional Lord of the Flies, which is fine, I mean, I, I think I still like the novel and I thi- still think that, you know, it's, um, it's good to think about it and you can interpret it in many different ways, but then let's also tell them about that one time that we know of that real kids shipwrecked on a real island.

  6. 12:18 – 12:56

    Have Fun

    1. CW

      ... and they had three rules. And the first rule was have fun.

    2. RB

      Yeah, yeah. And, uh, that was in the fictional Lord of the Flies-

    3. CW

      Yeah.

    4. RB

      Indeed. Um, and then the people of the flies, they actually-

    5. CW

      But they actually did it. But they, they actually did it, you know? They actually did the fun, they actually enjoyed their time there.

    6. RB

      Yeah. Well, I mean, there were hard times as well, right? Especially during the summer, there was a real drought, so they were very thirsty. But they're very smart in collecting rainwater as well. Um, and, uh, at some point, actually, one of the six broke a leg, but they managed to, uh, heal that leg with traditional Tongan medicine. Uh, yeah, it's, it's really crazy.

    7. CW

      Oh my

  7. 12:56 – 16:53

    The Central Idea

    1. CW

      God. Yeah. Well, I mean, I, I can't wait for the movie. I'm sure that everyone that's listening can't either. So, um, okay. The, the idea underpinning Humankind, your new book, is we're not quite as nasty as we might think.

    2. RB

      Yeah. That's the central idea.

    3. CW

      Cool.

    4. RB

      And, and it's, uh ... It may sound as a quite innocent idea, like, "Oh, this guy has written a book about human kindness. Isn't that nice?" But if you really think it through, it's a quite radical idea, a quite revolutionary idea. Um, because throughout history, a cynical view of human nature has often been used by those in power to legitimize their power, right? Because if we cannot trust each other, then we need managers and CEOs and kings and monarchs and generals, right? Then we need to be kept in control. But if we can actually trust each other, if most people are pretty decent, that means that we maybe don't need them, and that we can move to a very different kind of society that is much more egalitarian, genuinely democratic, with very different kind of organizations, different kind of schools, different kind of prisons, democracies, et cetera, et cetera. So it has quite, yeah, big implications if you really think it through.

    5. CW

      So the rules and the bureaucracy and the laws are there to protect us from our own primitive nature and to stop us just slinging feces at each other in the street, and, and fighting by day and-

    6. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    7. CW

      ... pillaging by night. Is that kind of, do you think, the, the, um, unspoken r- reason for the current setup that we have?

    8. RB

      Yeah. I think that's sort of the old legitimization of the way we've organized things. You know, there's this British philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, that's probably one of the most influential political philosophers we've ever had. And in the 17th century, he wrote that in the state of nature, when people were still nomadic hunter, hunter-gatherers, which we've been for 95% of our history, um, we had this war of all against all going on, and our lives were, in his words, "nasty, brutish, and short." Um, and then he made the argument that in order to overcome this, we sort of appointed what he called a Leviathan, sort of a, an all-powerful ruler, so that we gave away our freedom, but we got security back, right? And, uh, yeah, that was basically his argument. Now, there was another guy at the, at the... a bit later, uh, the Frenchman, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who basically made the opposite argument. He said, "No, no, no. Nomadic hunter-gatherers, they were awesome." You know, they lived these fantastic lives, uh, egalitarian, healthy, 20, 30-hour work week, pretty relaxed, uh, no wars, peaceful. You know, pretty good. But then they came up with civilization. They settled down, they became sedentary, and they started to become farmers and live in cities and villages, et cetera, and it was a total disaster, right? So they got infection diseases, they got wars, they got hierarchy, they got patriarchy, they got ... And that was basically Rousseau's argument, is that civilization is the disease, that is actually the problem, and we should go, or at least try to go back to the state of nature if at all possible. Now, usually, Hobbes has, has been described as the realist, right? As the smart, rational guy. And Rousseau has been described as the crazy revolutionary, as the, uh, romantic idealist. But what really struck me while I was researching this book is that if you go deep into the latest evidence we have from anthropology and archeology, you sort of get the feeling that actually on most points, Rousseau was right and Hobbes was wrong. Um, so, uh, that indeed, civilization can be described ... The, the biggest part, actually, of what we call civilization, you know, the, over the last 10,000 years, in many ways it, it was actually a big disaster for most people.

  8. 16:53 – 18:25

    Self Domestication Theory

    1. RB

    2. CW

      Tell us about the evolutionary basis-

    3. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    4. CW

      ... that you've discovered that supports Rousseau's findings.

    5. RB

      Yeah. So, um, one of the most interesting new theories from evolutionary biology I- is called the self-domestication theory. So we all know, I think, what domestication is, right? Uh, you've got pigs, you've got cows and goats and whatever, right, uh, that have all been domesticated, which means that compared to their wild ancestors, they've become tamer, right, more friendly, and they can sort of work with people or be enslaved by people. That's practically what it means. Um, now, what's interesting is that all these domesticated species have a list of specific traits. So for example, they've got s- thinner bones, uh, smaller brains, and most importantly, they just look a bit more childish, right? We even know sort of which genes are associated with the domestication syndrome, as they call it. And now it gets really interested- interesting. If you look at us, if you look at human beings, and if you compare us to our ancestors, like other hominin species who lived 50,000 years ago, we look really domesticated. So we have thinner bones, we have smaller brains, and we look childish compared to our ancestors. Compared to Neanderthals, we're sort of, I like to call it Homo puppy. We're sort of puppyish. Um, and-... then the question becomes only bigger, right? How did we ever manage to conquer the globe while the Neanderthals are gone, right?

    6. CW

      If

  9. 18:25 – 21:26

    More Feminine Traits

    1. CW

      we're this domesticated, infantile ... I think you mention in the book as well that y- you actually have more feminine traits that go across the board as well, is that right?

    2. RB

      Yeah, yeah.

    3. CW

      Oh.

    4. RB

      Don't, don't tell this to all the Jordan Peterson fans, but what evolutionary biology now has proven basically is that over the past, uh, thousands of years, um, men have become more feminine, right? So men have started to look more like women. And this is-

    5. CW

      B- I guess, sorry, that's comparative to how we either did look or would have looked had that not have happened.

    6. RB

      Yes.

    7. CW

      So obviously men are looking at men now and going, "I look like a man, that looks like a woman." But the-

    8. RB

      Yeah.

    9. CW

      ... um ...

    10. RB

      The, the difference used to be bigger. So, and you can look at other, uh, primates. If you look for example at chimpanzees or gorillas. Gorillas are, is I think a good example. You see these really striking differences between men and women. But actually, the- those differences have, have become smaller in human evolution. Now, there's a- another term for this in biology, and they- biologists call it survival of the friendliest, which means that for thousands of years, it was actually the friendliest among us who got the most kids. So imagine Donald Trump in pre-history. Well, he wouldn't have done very well because people wouldn't have liked him probably, uh, they didn't like narcissists or people who were a bit too arrogant. And so he would've quickly been expelled from the tr- from the group and he wouldn't have been able to survive all on his own. Because in p- in the, our deep history, in the Stone Age, having friends was much more important than having possessions. You know, you needed friends to survive. And how do you get friends? Well, not by being a jerk, right? You have to be a bit friendly. Uh, that's, that's only logical. So the theory from biologists now is that what makes human beings special is not so much that we're very smart. I mean, we're clearly not. We've, as I said, we've got smaller brains compared to our ancestors, so on an individual level, we're not very smart. And if you do an intelligence test and let a human toddler compete with a pig, then often the pig wins. Uh, we, people should keep that in mind when they eat bacon. Uh, but it's, it's another, you know, piece of evidence that we're not, not that smart. We're also not very strong. I mean, I know some people are and they, they, uh, put a lot of effort in that at the gym. But on average, you know, compared to a gorilla or a chimpanzee, you know, you really don't wanna do a boxing match with, with one of those. Um, I think, uh, yeah, you'll regr- you'll regret that. Um, so the true superpower of human beings is, is not, you don't see it on an individual level, but on a group level. We're just really good at learning from each other, at cooperating from each other, w- with each other. And, um, that is what scientists now believe is the, is the reason why we conquered the globe and we managed to come up with all these inventions and built pyramids and built spaceships, et cetera, et cetera. Um, very different theory than sort of the more cynical ideas we had about our evolution a couple of decades ago.

  10. 21:26 – 23:40

    Cooperation

    1. RB

    2. CW

      Our adaptability to different climates, our ability to use tools and things like that, is that, does that map onto this somehow? Is that enhanced by the cooperation or ... Because, you know, a, a pig versus an infant makes sense, but a pig versus an adult human starts to look-

    3. RB

      Yeah.

    4. CW

      ... a little bit different.

    5. RB

      Yeah.

    6. CW

      And you don't need to be perhaps as strong as a gorilla if the tasks you're doing don't require that level of strength. They just require the minimum viable level of strength in order to complete those tasks.

    7. RB

      Yeah, yeah.

    8. CW

      And rather than being a freak savage in the, um, strength department or in the speed department or in the endurance department, by having a broad cross-section, like an al- uh, the all-arounder player on your team, you can actually be quite still a very, very effective and overly competitive up against those.

    9. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    10. CW

      But yeah, is that, is, is there something that maps onto that with regards to our skills and, and sort of how we work together?

    11. RB

      Well, I've got a really great example from the anthropologist Joseph Henrich. Um, so he, he sort of asks us to imagine a, a planet where there are two sort of hominid species, and the one are called the geniuses, they're really smart on an individual level, but they're not very social, right? They don't have many friends. And the others are called the copycats. They're not very smart. In fact, they're a bit dumb. But they just can't stop talking and they talk about everything, you know, with everyone and they have a lot of friends. Now, imagine that, uh, they wanna come up with a new invention, say like fishing or something like that. They wanna learn how to fish. Now obviously, the geniuses have a much bigger chance of coming up with it- invention, right? But they only share it with a couple of others, right? So they, that's, uh, that's the problem there, because they're, they're very smart but they're not gonna, th- they only have two or three friends. Now, if you have a copycat species where most people are really stupid but one of them comes up with something brilliant, you can be sure that very quickly everyone knows how to fish. And that's, that's how you should look at, uh, at human evolution and what makes us so special. It's not that one, on an individual level so special, but we just can't resist sharing everything we know with everyone all the time. That's what

  11. 23:40 – 29:08

    War

    1. RB

      happens.

    2. CW

      That's cool. That's a co- I, I like that example. So, there is some evolutionary basis for the fact that we are cooperative rather than adversarial, that we are good rather than bad.

    3. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    4. CW

      Then we see civilization and we start to have all of these examples. So-

    5. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    6. CW

      ... first off, what, what about when we go to war? We see people warring, we have these terrible crimes, we have things like the-

    7. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    8. CW

      ... the Holocaust and truly evil people. How does that map?

    9. RB

      Yeah. The big question obviously that hangs over a book like this, how can we ever explain all the great atrocities of, of our history? Because we're clearly not only the friendliest species, we're also the cruelest species in the animal kingdom. We do things that other animals just-... they wouldn't have the nerve, they wouldn't have the imagination to be so horrible, right? Like ethnic cleansing and genocides and the Holocaust and you name it. It's like singularly human to do these kind of things. Um, so the interesting thing here is that if you again look at the, sort of the whole curve of our history, what you see is that for thousands of years, people hardly waged any wars. So it didn't really happen. The ar- archaeological evidence, for example, for war before we became sedentary is very thin. Uh, anthropologists have studied nomadic hunter-gatherers and have found that they're actually quite peaceful. You know? Um, but then we settled down and we started living in villages and cities, and groups started forming and you start to get this in-group, out-group behavior. And this is really where the history of warfare begins. Uh, this is exactly what you find in the archaeological record. Uh, a really cool piece of evidence here is, uh, cave paintings. So if there re- was really a war of all against all going on in the Stone Age, then you would expect that at some point, some Picasso of the Stone Age would have said, "You know what, I'm gonna make my Guernica, you know, of this, uh, of, of this war all against all." But we haven't found it. It's just not there. But then after we became sedentary, you, you see a lot of Guernicas, right? You see a lot of evidence for, um, uh, warfare in these paintings. Um, the question is obviously why did it happen. Um, it's, it's still, I mean, it's still being discussed. Uh, a lot. This is one of the great questions obviously about, about our history. I think, uh, one important dynamic is that when people settled- settled down, sort of collecting friends became less important and collecting possessions became more important, or collecting status. Um, people could also at some point start to inherit those possession, and so then there could arise status differences. We know that nomadic hunter-gatherers are very egalitarian. They have leaders, but the cultural code is really to be humble, right? You have to be humble all the time. Um, for example, if you, if you've been hunting and, uh, you come back and you, let's imagine you're a really good hunter and you come back with like an awesome deer or something like that. And then, then you come back to the camp and what you do is you say nothing, right? You just put the deer somewhere, you're just gonna, gonna sit and it's like ... And then someone comes up to you and says, "Oh, did you catch anything today?" And you're like, "Oh, no, no, no, not really, no, it was a bad day." And then that person would know, you know, today is, we're gonna eat very well tonight. Uh, so humbleness was really sort of prerequisite. But then everything started to change. From, we went from survival of the friendliest to survival of the shameless. Which I still think, I mean, you can see that operating still today in politics, right? If you, if you ask the question, how can people like Bolsonaro in Brazil, or, uh, well, Boris Johnson or Cummings, right? How can these people ... H- have they no shame, right? Why are they still there? Um, and, and it turns out that now we have created a society where shamelessness can actually be an advantage. It's really interesting that human beings have, uh, we have the most expressive faces in the, in the animal kingdom. So we're one of the very few that have the ability to blush, which I thought was amazing, right? That we're, uh, that we have this sort of evolutionary advantage that we can give away our feelings involuntarily to other people. Now, why do we do this? Because it helps to establish trust. Also if you look at our eyes, it's also really special actually, our eyes have white around the irises, which means that we can follow each other's gazes. Um, all the other primates don't have that. Uh, there are more than 200 primate species in total, and all of them have dark around their eyes here, right? They're like mafia players, uh, mafia, uh, members wearing shades, right? Or poker players, uh, wearing, wearing sunglasses. Um, for us, we sort of, again, we involuntarily give away our gazes, which helps to establish trust, um, between us. Now, where I'm going with this, think about those who are in powerful positions. They don't blush anymore. Right? It's almost as if they've become disconnected from society. And you can also see this in brain scans, for example. Put "powerful people" in a brain scan and you'll see that the regions that are involved with empathy, they don't really work that well anymore. Um, so this is, uh, this is one of the important mechanisms, I think, if you want to explain, you know, the, the more horrible and dark pages of human history. It is that power corrupts. It's, it's sort of, if I- w- want to summarize my book in, in one sente- sentence, it would be something like, most people are pretty decent, but power

  12. 29:08 – 30:17

    Power Corruption

    1. RB

      corrupts.

    2. CW

      (laughs) Okay. I get it. I think, um, something that I would consider to do with people in positions of power, especially those that are in the public eye, which every person in a position of power is now, given that we've got-

    3. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    4. CW

      ... always on communication. Um, I would say that a politician who overly showed their emotions, if Donald Trump was talking about how challenging these times were going to be over the, the pandemic lockdown and he had a single tear rolling down his face, I don't think that that would be an effective strategy, even if that is truly what he felt.

    5. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    6. CW

      So I do think that there has to be a level of game playing where they have to dampen down some of those emotions, you know?

    7. RB

      Yeah. Yeah.

    8. CW

      Um, if Donald Trump gets a, a, a argumentative question and he's already being fairly vitriol back, like if he takes it to the degree that his inner most logos says that-

    9. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    10. CW

      ... he should do, you know, that might push it a little bit hard. But, man, it's a, it's a compelling case so far.

    11. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    12. CW

      Let's move on to, you, you looked at some fascinating stuff to do with war, the way that soldiers behave, and, and stuff to do with that.

    13. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    14. CW

      Talk to us

  13. 30:17 – 38:20

    Chimpanzee Politics

    1. CW

      about that.

    2. RB

      Can I say one thing though about, about-

    3. CW

      Yeah. Yeah.

    4. RB

      ... sort of the point you just made? Because it's really interesting. Frans de Waal, you know, he's my, a fellow Dutchman, he's a primatologist, and he's been studying chimpanzees and bonobos now for decades. And in the '80s, I believe, he wrote a book called Chimpanzee Politics-

    5. CW

      (laughs)

    6. RB

      ... in which he described sort of-... all the politics of a zoo in the Netherlands, and he compared it to U.S. Congress. And he made a very compelling case that, you know, you, we see more or less the same dynamic. Uh, actually, Newt Gingrich? Gingrich? How do you pronounce that? Anyway, you know who I mean. Uh, the American politician, he saw, he gave, like, a lot of copies to his colleagues in Congress because he was like, "Yeah, yeah, this is, this is what we do." You know? "We're just like the chimpanzees." Yeah.

    7. CW

      That's the playbook. That's the playbook there, fellas.

    8. RB

      Exactly. Exactly.

    9. CW

      That's what we're doing next.

    10. RB

      And, and there's quite some evidence that indeed, sort of the, the standard sort of patriarchal leaders, uh, behave a little bit like a chimpanzee, or that we often trust leaders who have deeper voices or are longer, et cetera, that we tend to think they're better leaders or something like that. I don't think this is inevitable though. I, I think there's also a real alternative or a different model of leadership. If you look at the extraordinary popularity right now of someone like Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand, right? She's clearly... She's like the nomadic and together kind of leader. She, she to- she, uh, constantly makes self-depreciating jokes, right? She makes fun of herself. She, um, sort of has this more egalitarian leadership model, I think. Um, which also has its risks, right? Because, uh, as I said, power corrupts, so it's often hard to keep it going like that. You, you need to have this egalitarian culture. What's interesting, by the way, I, I often think that there's a big difference between American culture and, and Dutch culture, you know, where I'm from. Is because American culture, if you're successful, then it's like, "Ooh, cool. Wow. How, how have you become successful? You must be great." In the Netherlands, if you're successful, we consider that a crime, right? That's not... (laughs) You have to apologize for being successful. (laughs)

    11. CW

      I'm so sorry. I did a thing.

    12. RB

      (laughs) Yeah. Yeah.

    13. CW

      You must be apologizing. I totally forgot. You're number two on the Sunday Times bestseller list.

    14. RB

      Yeah, yeah. That's a, that's a very big-

    15. CW

      Congratulations. Congratulations, and at the same time, you're a terrible person.

    16. RB

      I'm sorry. (laughs)

    17. CW

      You should be very sorry. (laughs) Exactly.

    18. RB

      Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    19. CW

      You beat me to it. (laughs)

    20. RB

      And I think actually, I mean, it's a really ... It may, it may sound a bit ridiculous, but it's actually really healthy because, yeah, as I said, you know, power corrupts. So, there needs to be some kind of control mechanisms and, um, this is one of them. Now, uh, to get back to your question, uh, how people behave during wars. Because again, this is, this is a question that I have to come back again and again in my book. How can people do all these kind of horrible things, right? If we've really evolved to be friendly, then why can we so, can we be so violent? Now, the interesting thing here is that we obviously like things like sex, right? You don't have to explain that to anyone why sex is fun or nice, at least most, most of us like it, and food is the same thing, right? Our body immediately rewards us for eating something when we're hungry, you know? It just feels good. Now, what's interesting with violence is that it's actually different. We know from a huge amount of evidence that soldiers who've killed in wars often come back with PTSD. You know, they're traumatized, which is strange, you know? If, if it would really be our evolutionary destiny to be killing other people, then why doesn't our nature reward us for killing other people? It's, that, that's not what happens. In reality, si- uh, violence is really, really difficult for most of us, especially when people are, are very close. So, if you have to shove a bayonet or a sword down someone, most of us just can't do it. If you look at the evidence that we have from, um, big battles like the Battle of Waterloo or the Battle of the Somme, uh, during the First World War, almost none of the wounds were caused by bayonets. You know, there's one historian who writes that, as soon as two armies approach each other and they come, become too close and, and it becomes clear that they have to fight with these bayonets, then most of the time, one of them re- remembers an urgent appointment somewhere else and just goes away, right? Because they just can't do it.

    21. CW

      Wow.

    22. RB

      Now, it becomes already easier if you can actually shoot at the enemy, right? So, if you have some distance. This is a really important innovation in warfare. But then still most people can't do it. Um, we know from, uh, evidence from the Second World War, there's been this historian, American historian who went with the troops in Europe and the Pacific, uh, and interviewed them afterwards. His name was S.L.A. Marshall. He wrote a book about this, Men Against Fire. And he discovered, uh, that the majority of the soldiers didn't shoot. They couldn't do it. They, or they, they sort of shot over, over the enemy and they didn't actually aim for them. His estimate was that only 15 to 25% of soldiers actually shot. Uh, there's been quite some controversy around that figure. It seems as if it was sort of more an intuitive guess instead of, like, hard statistics. But we now have a lot of other evidence from, you know, modern sociologists, um, who back up this finding. So, most experts now also believe that actually, uh, like, the regularly just standard drafted soldier, you know, just finds this really hard to be violent. And this finding was taken very seriously by the U.S. military, because after the Second World War, they were, like, very worried, like, "Oh, our soldiers are not doing their job," right? "They have to shoot at the enemy and they're not doing it." So, what they did is they, uh, started this whole program of brainwashing and conditioning their soldiers, uh, so that sort of shooting becomes a standard reaction, sort of a Pavlov reaction. You do it immediately once you see a, uh, a target that looks a little bit, uh, like a human being. And so then the firing rate went up in the Korean War and also in the Vietnam War. But obviously because more soldiers started killing, uh, other people, they, there were also many more cases of PTSD. So, many of them came back, uh, a- and they had not only killed someone else but also killed something inside themselves. Now, obviously the most, um, simple reason to overcome this is to use tools like artillery, right? If you just push a button and have an explosion far away, uh, that's doable. Or just drop an atomic bomb on a city. Uh, the, the, the person who did this on-... I think Hiroshima or Nagasaki was once interviewed and asked, you know, "Do you have any moral remorse for killing tens of thousands of people, you know, by pushing that button?" He said, "No. Don't feel that."

    23. CW

      Was it the guy, the guy in the plane?

    24. RB

      Yeah, exactly.

    25. CW

      Wow.

    26. RB

      But imagine having to slaughter 50,000 people with a knife, I mean-

    27. CW

      By hand, yeah.

    28. RB

      Most people... Yeah, exactly. Most people couldn't do that.

    29. CW

      (laughs)

    30. RB

      It's just the same with... I mean, most people would become vegetarian very quickly if they would have to kill their own cow before they w- could have a steak, right? Most people couldn't do it. Um, but we've enabled this huge meat industry where billions of animals are killed every year. I s- I don't know, it's like 60 billion animals every year in, on the planet. And we've able to d- been able to do that by increasing the distance, right? We don't see it anymore. It's become, we're d- Yeah, it's, it's not, it's not real anymore in that way. And this is really the, the history of military technology; increasing the distance, increasing the distance. So, that's sort of like the physical distance, but you can also increase the psychological distance and that's a very important part in, in, uh, ethnic cleansing and genocides, is what happens is that, um, um, uh, human beings have the ability to dehumanize others, right? And to look at them and not see people, but see things. This is a process that takes quite a lot of time, right? You, it needs a lot of propaganda and, oh, a lot of horrible and nasty stuff. But we've seen it happening quite a few times in history. And then, also things are possible that are just, uh, yeah, really, really horrible and, and are really the dark side of our, of

  14. 38:20 – 44:13

    Shortcutting Compassion Empathy

    1. RB

      our nature.

    2. CW

      It's interesting how all of these advances, all of these tactics are shortcutting a, um, compassion set point, or an empathy set point, I suppose. It is... You know, you think the people that are listening, imagine that, uh, conscription happened in whatever country you're in tomorrow and you got called up. You could have all the training in the world; "I know how to clean the rifle, I know how to run, I know how to pack my bag, I can dig a foxhole, I can send up a flare, I can do all this sort of stuff."

    3. RB

      Yeah.

    4. CW

      At no point during that does it get around the fact like, "I don't want to kill someone. I have no desire to kill someone."

    5. RB

      Yeah. Yeah.

    6. CW

      And just because they're on what is essentially like, the other team, like, "We're red team and they're blue team," that's kind of what it is.

    7. RB

      Mm-hmm. Yeah.

    8. CW

      There is a... It doesn't surprise me. Although it's shocking, it's also not surprising. It's logical in a, in a way. Um, and I think this is... Having read Humankind, this is kind of my key insight regarding my own life, and I think a lot of people that are listening will have this as well.

    9. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    10. CW

      Which is that my own experience of the world is that of someone who is mostly kind. Like, I fuck up sometimes like we all do, and I do-

    11. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    12. CW

      ... reprehensible stuff that I'm embarrassed about and blah, blah, blah.

    13. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    14. CW

      But for the most part, you know, they're not big transgressions. I have no desire to do most of the nasty things that hit the news. Um, and yet, I believed that the vast majority of people out there, we need to be kept safe from bra- uh, bad actors.

    15. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    16. CW

      And th- there's a, this just huge undercurrent, underclass of people, whatever it is, that are just ready to rise up and pillage and rape and do all this sort of stuff-

    17. RB

      Yeah.

    18. CW

      ... despite having never seen that nature within myself. So, there was just a part of me that presumed, "Well, yeah, that w- that's you, that's your experience, plus the people around me like Mom and Dad and my friends and blah, blah, blah."

    19. RB

      Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

    20. CW

      But I was... I'd just kind of taken it for granted. I'd been delivered this grand narrative from somewhere that had emer- become a part of me and then started to like, emerge out of me-

    21. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    22. CW

      ... where I thought, "Well, yeah, I know, but like, lo- look at, look at all of the evidence, you know? Look at all of this stuff that goes on."

    23. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    24. CW

      And I think that, that's been the, the, the biggest insight that I took away from this was that-

    25. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    26. CW

      ... the description of the type of nature of a person written in Humankind is significantly closer to my experience of the world.

    27. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    28. CW

      Does that make sense?

    29. RB

      Yeah. I mean, (laughs) th- th- in that way, the message of the book is very simple. Other people are just like you.

    30. CW

      (laughs)

  15. 44:13 – 47:57

    Implications for Society

    1. CW

      who it was, it was Alex O'Connor, guy behind Cosmic Skeptic podcast, who I'm gonna put you in touch with once we finish actually, 'cause you, you'd love him. Um, he gave me this example, uh, for neonatalism, he gave me this-

    2. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    3. CW

      ... this justification for it, which was that 100 units of suffering are so much worse than 100 units of pleasure. And when you then take that to its nth degree in a total utilitarian approach, then you can end up with these kind of quite weird s- uh, world views. But you've hit-

    4. RB

      Yeah.

    5. CW

      ... the nail on the head there. That we would much sooner not be in pain than experience a bit of pleasure.

    6. RB

      Yeah.

    7. CW

      Pain is so much more disproportionately bad. So, okay, so I've, you know, I think that's a, a strange and world-upending, but r- realistic and e- easy enough to understand from a personal experience perspective view of human nature, but if that's the case, like let's say that we are kind, what-

    8. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    9. CW

      ... what's the implications for this?

    10. RB

      Okay. So, what I think we gotta start doing is to, uh, implement this theory of human nature in our society. Because what you assume is what you get. If you assume that most people are selfish, then you'll design all your schools and your democracies and your workplaces around that idea, and I think you'll bring out the worst in other people. So imagine-

    11. CW

      How does that happen, yeah. Tell, tell us.

    12. RB

      Well, imagine you have sort of a workplace, I think the financial sector is a good e- example of it, sort of the city of London, um, that's like this w- war of all against all, right? And most relations there are nasty, brutish, and short. Uh, it's very competitive, and, um, everyone expects that from everyone, so that's sort of what you get out of people. Um, now, if you turn it around, and in my book I give a couple of examples that do that, uh, o- of organizations that do that, um, you can have a very different kind of organization. So one example is, uh, uh, an organization called Buurtzorg in the Netherlands-

    13. CW

      (laughs)

    14. RB

      ... which translates as "neighborhood care." Now, what they did, they started in 2006 with a seemingly crazy idea, uh, they ditched all the managers, they work only in self-directed teams of 12 to 30 nurses, and they only deliver one product, which is called "care," that's what they do, they deliver care. Um, now, at first this was almost illegal in the healthcare system of the Netherlands at the time, because they had just introduced so-called market forces and everything had to become more competitive and cheaper, et cetera. And the idea was then that that would improve healthcare, but it really didn't. So, this company started and initially insurance, insurers didn't want to finance it, et cetera, but they went ahead anyway. And now it's one of the biggest organizations in the Netherlands in healthcare, with 15,000 employees. And, um, the really interesting thing is that they deliver healthcare now, according to independent observers, at, um, a cheaper cost and of higher quality for, for clients, and that they also pay higher salaries to, to their employees. So it's like win, win, win, win. And how did they do this? Well, it's all about trusting people to, to do their job on their own, right? Because nurses can really have this powerful intrinsic motivation, right? They don't do this kind of work because they wanna become rich or, or, you know, or looking for the status or anything, but they really wanna help other people. So if you trust them to do that, and if you say, "Okay, you'll work in a team where you can decide for yourself who you wanna hire, what kind of e- additional education you need, what times you're gonna work this week and next week, et cetera," um, it's actually incredibly powerful and empowering. Um, that is sort of an example of the direction we can move in if we actually start trusting other people.

    15. CW

      That,

  16. 47:57 – 52:23

    Trusting Others

    1. CW

      I'm gonna guess, is enabled by the small groups. If you push into a particularly large business, you're not going to be able to coordinate activities sufficiently well, you're gonna have scheduling conflicts and all this sort of stuff.

    2. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    3. CW

      Um, so the Malthusian trap, this kind of race to the bottom and, and th- the diluting down of all of this sort of stuff, how would you... It, it sounds great. You know-

    4. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    5. CW

      It sound, it, it, intellectually, it makes sense, but there will be a lot of people listening that are like, "Well yeah, that's, that's all well and nice in this ideal utopia which doesn't-"

    6. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    7. CW

      "... which doesn't exist. And the people that try and do the good version of humanity are just gonna get out-competed-"

    8. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    9. CW

      "... by the people that are prepared to play the game more effectively and sacrifice virtue for value."

    10. RB

      Hmm. Hmm. Well, the examples that I'm talking about are not small, right? As I said, the company I just talked about has 15,000 employees. If you look at other models, uh, for example, the idea of having a participatory democracy-... where citizens are not just these people who sit on a couch, watch television, and vote every three or four years or something like that, and, and become really angry. (laughs) Um, but you can actually also have a model where average citizens are involved and are randomly selected to become a politician themselves every now and then. And, um, this doesn't get a lot of attention in the press, but we've had huge experiments. In Latin America, for example, there's a city called Porto Alegre, uh, where they've been doing this ever since the 1980s on a very, very big scale with tens of thousands of people involved. I think it is entirely possible. But, um, yeah, you need to change a lot of your assumptions there, uh, before it, before you can make it work. I think the problem is not so much skill, but it's more, uh, hierarchy that's, that's really the problem. Because if you have those at the top, then what they wanna do is, they, they wanna be in control. And what do you need if you wanna be in control? Well, you need to start measuring things, right? You wanna have... In education, for example, you wanna have standardized tests so that you can know how the kids are doing, if they're learning anything. Well, you're using a very narrow definition of n- learning, obviously. Because, I mean, there's so many things that you can't measure, right? If someone is becoming more creative, how are, how are you ever gonna measure that? So obviously, if you have a hierarchical school system with standardized tests, then, you know, you're not gonna educate your kids to be creative. I mean, this is all the kind of effects that you, that you have if you have a traditional, uh, way of thinking. If you move to a different kind of thinking, um, I think you can rely more on what psychologists call intrinsic motivation, right? So this, they, they always make this distinction between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. Extrinsic is you do something because you have to, b- or because you want the money or you want the, the status or the prestige or you do it for, for your LinkedIn profile, or because your boss says you gotta do it. And intrinsic motivation is because you, because you want to, right? Because you, you're just curious, because you're just creative, uh, you, you, you wanna learn something. And one of the most important findings of psychology in the past couple of decades has been that these two forms of motivation are both powerful, but they don't add up, right? They actually detract from each other. You can't... If you rely more on extrinsic motivation, right, more on, on, um, hierarchy and on money and those kind of things, um, then people lose their intrinsic motivation. At some point they don't really know why they're doing what they're doing anymore. Now, if you focus more on intrinsic motivation, then people sort of lose interest in the other thing. And I think that's actually the, the direction we should be going as a society. Because one of the great tragedies of our time is that there are so many people stuck in jobs that they hate, right? So many smart people wasting their talent. I always, I sometimes give... This happens very rarely, but I, I sometimes give talks to bankers. And I always say to bankers, "Look, guys, you're way too smart to be a banker. Right? It's just a big tragedy that you're doing this. You're creating these destructive financial products that don't add anything to society and you know it. And you could be thinking about the cure for cancer. And you could be, you know, helping us get to Mars or, or whatever, right? Build a flying car and look what you're doing. It's such a tragedy."

    11. CW

      Was it, um,

  17. 52:23 – 55:43

    Public vs Private Sector

    1. CW

      an interview that I heard with you where you said, "It's a tragedy that some of the greatest minds of our time have been spent working out how to get people to click on ads"?

    2. RB

      Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

    3. CW

      (laughs)

    4. RB

      That's, that's actually a, a former Facebook employee who said that.

    5. CW

      (laughs)

    6. RB

      I'm gonna put on the light, by the way. It's gonna be-

    7. CW

      Yeah, hit the light, man. Hit it, hit it.

    8. RB

      (laughs)

    9. CW

      You're in the, you're in the pitch black now. Um, it's just wandering over there. I'm just gonna keep on talking. This can be a monologue podcast now.

    10. RB

      Is that better?

    11. CW

      Ah, looks lovely, man. Full-

    12. RB

      Okay.

    13. CW

      ... full beam. Um, but yeah, that, uh, that thing, there's a, a lot of my buddies work in, uh, PPC, cost per click, Facebook ads, funnels, retargeting, marketing, stuff like that.

    14. RB

      Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    15. CW

      And I-

    16. RB

      And I'm not saying, I'm not saying that it's all useless. I'm just saying that we should listen to those people who talk about their own jobs and say, "You know what? My job is not very valuable. Uh, I'm just-"

    17. CW

      Hey, man, I, I, I-

    18. RB

      "... writing reports that no one's ever gonna read. I am coming up with these stupid products." And it's, it's, it's just sad. It's really sad. It's, uh, I mean, it's, it's also, uh, I think a reason why we need to rethink sort of the value of the public sector versus the private sector. So what has happened, uh, two years ago is that a, a really big and important study came out from two Dutch economists who f- who looked at a huge pool that had been done among like 30,000 people in 40 countries. And they discovered that around 25% of the modern workforce thinks his or her own job is socially meaningless, doesn't add anything of value to society. They also discovered that these jobs are often, you know, they have high salaries. So you have people with beautiful LinkedIn profiles, good salaries, but still at the end of the day, they think their job is useless. And most interestingly, there are four times as many socially meaningless jobs in the private sector as in the public sector, which is sort of counterintuitive, right? People often think that, "Oh, the government is so wasteful and they come up with all these jobs that don't need to exist. Come on, only entrepreneurs create real jobs." But if we think about it for a bit longer, it starts to make sense, because a lot of jobs in education and healthcare, they're government jobs, right? And they're clearly useful. If you look at all these lists from the so-called vital professions, right, that have been published during the pandemic, so many governments have done that with the vital and essential workers, many of them are actually public jobs. Um, now, if you then look at the jobs that maybe don't add as much of value, it's, uh, like people working in finance or marketing or consultancy or whatever, and, uh, remember, it's not me saying, it's people themselves saying it about their own job.

    19. CW

      Facts don't care about people's feelings, Rogier. Don't worry about that.

    20. RB

      (laughs) Okay. Okay. Um, no, but I mean, people can listen to this and like, "This guy's a historian. That's like the definition of bullshit." (laughs)

    21. CW

      (laughs)

    22. RB

      So, uh, um, it's important that people can decide it for th- for themselves, I think. Um, the, the, this term by the way, bullshit job, is an academic term coined by the, uh, anthropologist David Graeber. So, uh, it's a real academic thing right now (laughs) .

    23. CW

      That's the official-

    24. RB

      (laughs) .

    25. CW

      ... official term.

    26. RB

      Official.

    27. CW

      I love it. I love it.

    28. RB

      Title in academic-

    29. CW

      Well, I mean, the, the, uh, recent relevant elephant in the room-

    30. RB

      Mm-hmm.

  18. 55:43 – 58:10

    Pandemic

    1. CW

    2. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    3. CW

      It is the fact that we have gone through biggest thing to happen for a generation, probably for nearly, you know, 60 years or whatever, sort of se- eight years back until World War II. And, um, one of the reasons that there was a slow onset of lockdown in the UK was because of fears of backlash from the, the proletariat in the street-

    4. RB

      Yeah.

    5. CW

      ... just ripping shit off the walls. And we haven't... We, you know, uh, in homage to the hypothesis that you're putting forward here, we haven't-

    6. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    7. CW

      ... seen the rioting, we haven't seen the misbehavior. We're, uh... Just before we started, it's just as well that we did start five minutes late-

    8. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    9. CW

      ... because it was the 8:00 PM get your pots and pans out and smash seven shades-

    10. RB

      (laughs)

    11. CW

      ... of shit out of them, um, for the NHS thing that was going on.

    12. RB

      Yeah.

    13. CW

      So, you know, we haven't, we haven't seen that. And that is happening right now, right now.

    14. RB

      Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

    15. CW

      This very second. Everyone listening has experienced it.

    16. RB

      Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's just history repeating itself. I start the book with the example of Great Britain at the eve of the second World War wherein also the elites, including Churchill, believed that people wouldn't be able to handle the bombing war, you know? And they were really afraid that once the Germans would start bombing London and other cities, that people would go nuts, that they would panic, they would start looting, they would, you know, have mental breakdowns and all that kind of stuff. Um, so there were a lot of psychiatric field hospitals set up at the, at the last moment, and all kinds of emergency measures taking, uh, were, were, were taken. Then the bombs did start falling in September 1940, and, and it didn't happen, you know? There w- there was no mass panic. Actually, it was the opposite, uh, sort of the keep calm and carry on mentality. Uh, I, I really had a, had a good time sort of, uh, reading all these anecdotes from back then, um, and all the, the lovely British jokes. Uh, so what happened a lot is that, for example, a restaurant was bombed or a pub was bombed, and then the owner would put a sign outside that says, "More open than usual," right? Or, or-

    17. CW

      (laughs)

    18. RB

      (laughs) ... uh, like, uh, "Our spirits are ex- excellent. Come in and try them." I mean, th- those kind of jokes, like, like-

    19. CW

      (laughs) Yeah. Yeah, man.

    20. RB

      Yeah, yeah.

    21. CW

      It's, um... We're watching it unfold, you know? I, I,

  19. 58:10 – 1:08:05

    Conspiracy

    1. CW

      it's a, the, the f- that story at the beginning as well is absolutely fascinating, where there was kind of this weird conspiracy thing which had occurred which then legitimized British bombing of-

    2. RB

      Yeah.

    3. CW

      ... Dresden and other places. And, like, in one night in Dresden was this, was the same tonnage of bombs that was dropped across an entire year.

    4. RB

      Yeah.

    5. CW

      And that was-

    6. RB

      Yeah.

    7. CW

      ... justified by some army commander that basically couldn't find anything to, uh-

    8. RB

      Yeah.

    9. CW

      ... back up what he thought... It is a, it feels like-

    10. RB

      Yeah.

    11. CW

      ... there is this huge conspiracy-

    12. RB

      Yeah.

    13. CW

      ... that's been occurring since the beginning of human history to make us believe that inherently we're quite adversarial and, and mean.

    14. RB

      Yeah. Well, I wouldn't, I wouldn't describe it as a conspiracy, because elites are not smart enough for conspiracy in gener- uh, conspiracies in general, right? They're not smart enough to coordinate that kind of thing. But it is something that sort of, uh, how do you say, that organically happens again and again, because it's in the interest of elites to spread cynical stories about who we are as a species. Uh, so indeed, what happened, uh, again in the second World War is that Frederick Lindemann, who was th- the best friend of Churchill, he was, um, uh, the guy who had to do research into the effects of the bombing on Britain. And what the scientists found again and again is that, you know, there was no breakdown of morale at all. Actually, there was some evidence that the cities were, who were bombed really hard actually had more resilience, and that their war production was going up. But then Lindemann didn't like the conclusion, and so he said to Churchill, "You know what? Bombing is really effective. And if we just bomb Germans, Germany ten times as heavily, it's gonna be awesome, you know? It's gonna, we're gonna break the German spirit."

    15. CW

      (laughs) It's gonna be awesome (laughs) .

    16. RB

      Yeah. Yeah. And, and-

    17. CW

      (laughs)

    18. RB

      ... I don't, I don't know if you use that word.

    19. CW

      Yeah, I know (laughs) .

    20. RB

      (laughs) But, um, um, yeah, the, it's gonna, it's gonna be really effective. And so that's what they did, and they did drop ten times as many bombs on Germany. And then later, after the war, British scientists, uh, went to Germany to study effects of the bombing, and they found the exact same thing, that the cities who had suffered the most also had increased wartime production compared to the cities who were not bombed as heavy. So there are even historians now who believe that if there had been no bombing war, or if the airplanes had been used to bomb strategic targets like railroads and industry and factories, um, that the war, you know, wouldn't, would've been, uh, shorter, like six months shorter or something like that. S- it's pretty incredible.

    21. CW

      That's mad. What a story, man. So, uh, I wanna finish off. You give ten rules to live by-

    22. RB

      Yeah.

    23. CW

      ... at the end of the book.

    24. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    25. CW

      Do you have a, do you have a favorite?

    26. RB

      Oh, this is a good question. You know, I should first say that I didn't wanna write a self-help book, you know? I'm not, I'm not really into self-help, maybe because I'm not really good at it either (laughs) .

    27. CW

      (laughs)

    28. RB

      But I really believe that sort of a different world starts with building different kind of institutions. People are shaped by institutions, by the schools we, we go to, by the workplaces where we work, right? Uh, by our prisons, by the way our democracy is organized, is organized. So I think it really starts there.... we, we shouldn't expect too much of individuals. But then again, I couldn't resist. I thought, you know, uh, there are probably some rules for life that I can come up with if we take this view of human nature seriously. So, uh, the rule that I start with is, is quite simple. It's, um, when in doubt, assume the best. Um, very often, we do the opposite, you know? If, if you're communicating with someone else, and especially when there's some distance in the communication, let's say you're on WhatsApp and you get all these emojis and you're like, "What does that emoji mean?" Right? And you start interpreting. And then often, we quickly have our doubts about other people's intentions. Even though we don't have solid evidence that they really mean something in a nasty way, we, we quickly start to do this. And then we adjust our behavior, we become a little bit less friendly, and then the other person also starts thinking, "Oh, that's weird. Now I'm getting also weird emojis." Right? And this is how relationships sometimes break down, right? How, how people end up in fights, because of this kind of miscommunication where people are assuming the worst in each other. Now, I think we should turn it around. When in doubt, always assume the best. Why do you do, need to do that? In the first place, because most people are pretty decent, so most of the time, you'll be right. It's just a good guess. In the second place, because your behavior can have non-complementary effects. Uh, this is a psychological term. So if someone is, like, really being nasty and you act in a nice way to that person, then you can sort of break the circle, right? It's very hard to stay nasty to someone who's, like, being nice, who's turning the other cheek.

    29. CW

      (laughs)

    30. RB

      Uh, it's, uh... I've got one example in my book, which is a... I mean, this is a very sentimental example, but I'm gonna tell it anyway. This happened, like, I don't know, 10, 20 years ago in New York. It was a guy who was being robbed, uh, in the, in the, in the subway and, um, uh, by a, by a young guy with a knife. And he said, like, uh, "Your money or your life." And he said, "Okay, here, you have my money." Th- and the guy was about to go away, the robber was about to go away, and then the man who, you know, who'd been attacked said, "Wait a minute, don't you want my coat as well? You know, it's quite cold."

Episode duration: 1:08:05

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