Humankind

05 May, 2023

My review of Humankind, by Rutger Bregman.

An amazing book that could be subtitled "How to finally see human nature as positive, backed with facts". It debunks many popular theories that we often take for granted (eg. the Milgram experiment), and offers a fresh (& IMO much needed) perspective on our society. To be combined with Utopia for Realists for more concrete ideas.

TL;DR

• Human evolution favored friendliness and cooperation over intelligence or strength. Humans are inherently social.
• The history of civilization is basically a history of violence.
• "Empathy and xenophobia are the two sides of the same coin". We’re inherently social and helpful, but we also prefer helping our kin. Social contact between different groups leads to less racism and extremism.
• Power corrupts: Leadership often leads to emotional detachment.
• Trust-based management works: Companies and societies with trust, autonomy, and hands-off management foster greater motivation and success.

Notes

We have been lied about "human nature"

• When confronted to a harsh environment or in extreme situations, people tend to help each other rather than being egoistic (cf The Real Lord of the Flies).
• The trait that differentiates us from other species, and allowed us to survive the Neanderthal, is not strength not intelligence, but rather our ability to learn from each other (cf Genuises and Copycats)
• We are to Neanderthal what dogs are to wolves: Homo Puppy. The gene that has been selected through our evolution is friendliness.
• +80% of soldiers throughout history never shot a bullet, by fear of killing someone. That’s why we developed weapons with longer and longer ranges (drones now allow us to kill blindly).

It was not chaos before civilization

• Before the agricultural revolution, human hunter-gatherers were mostly a peaceful species.
• Only at the end of the last Ice Age (15,000 BC) with the agricultural revolution, private property -and thus, wars, diseases, and slavery- begins (cf Sapiens: Agriculture is the biggest fraud of history).
• We’ve been living into a prosperous age for 80-200 years at maximum. For most human history since the Agricultural Revolution, we’ve lived miserably.
• The history of civilization is basically a history of violence.

Studies don't tell the whole picture

• More often than not, so-called "historical truths" are juste fake: the fall of Eastern Island as depicted by Jared Diamond, the Stanford Prison and Milgram experiments, the death of Catherine Susan Genovese… the people who tell the story often have a biased interest in the results.
• What the Stanford Prison and Milgram experiments actually show is that people can do evil when they are under harsh pressure or when they are convinced they are doing good.
• Contrary to what we believe, in 90% of the cases bystanders intervene when witnessing a dangerous situation for someone else (cf. Almost Everything you Think you Know about the Bystander Effect is Wrong - Marie Lindegaard)

What human nature really is

• "Empathy and xenophobia are the two sides of the same coin". We’re inherently social and helpful, but we also prefer helping our kin.
• Soldiers fight above all for their comrades, and not for some ideology.
• Power corrupts: it changes our relation to others from a chemical perspective, making us less sensitive to shame. Machiavellian principles don’t help to reach power at all, but are very useful to keep it.
• Most religions were used as a political tool (cf. Marcel Gauchet & monotheism in empires)
• The Pygmalion Effect: Treat people the way you want them to behave. The opposite is also true (the Golem effect): treat someone as untrustworthy, and she will behave like one.

How to nudge society towards better models

• There are examples of companies where trust and hands-off management actually work (cf. Buurtzorg, FAVI. "There is nothing more powerful than people who do something because they want to do it".
• "The question shouldn’t be how to motivate others, but rather how we shape a society so that people motivate themselves" - Edward Deci.
• To change society as a whole, it starts in the schoolyards. Unfortunately, we no longer allow children to play, we train them to fit society’s constraints (cf. Homo Ludens)
• There are also examples of cities (eg. Porto Alegre) were measures such as participatory budgeting allowed to drastically improve the involvement of citizens in political life.
• In Governing the Commons, Elinor Olstrom showed multiple examples that an efficient management of shared resources is indeed possible, thanks to communication between parties (contrary to The Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin, and to what capitalism argues).
• There are prisons in Norway (eg. Halden, Bastøy where prisoners are treated like regular citizens -except for the outside walls. They have a 50% lower recidivism rate. Contrary to the American approach (25% of criminals worldwide are in American cells), community policing (assuming most folks are decent, and close to citizens) works very well.
• “Drinking tea with terrorists” is not an image: rather than putting them into jail, some cities in Dutchland started to offer massive support and care to youngsters who had enrolled to Syria. This led to a huge decrease of enrolments.
• Contact is what allows us to better live with strangers or members of different communities: people for mixed neighbourhoods are far less prone to racism or extreme votes. Contact takes time, yet it works.
• On December 1914, many groups of English soldiers mingled with Germans to celebrate Christmas. They even stayed friends after that! So much that on both sides, command was issued not to celebrate with the enemy again.

10 rules to live by

1. When in doubt, assume the best
2. Think win-win scenarios
3. Ask more questions (“Do not do to others as you would that they should do to you. Their tastes may be different” - George Bernard Shawn)
4. Temper your empathy, train your compassion
5. Try to understand the other, even if you don’t get where they’re coming from
6. Love your own as others love their own: everybody else has people they care about, just like you do
7. Avoid the news: read in-depth analysis instead
8. Don’t punch Nazis - it only strengthens their ideology
9. Don’t be ashamed to do good, and to say it out loud
10. Be realistic: our human nature is not as flawed as we are told to think