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

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)

You've been breaking the internet a lot-

(laughs)

... 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.

Mm-hmm.

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

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

(laughs)

... 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-

(laughs)

... right? It's really crazy.

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.

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.