When Things Fall Apart

Climate disaster, political unrest, random violence: Western society can often feel like what the filmmaker Werner Herzog calls "a thin layer of ice on top of an ocean of chaos and darkness." But is that actually true — or the way it has to be? Today on the show, what really happens when things fall apart. This episode originally published in 2023. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:23Speaker 01

  An old man says to his grandson, "There is a fight going on inside me."

• 0:30Speaker 01

  It's a terrible fight between two wolves.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  One is evil, angry, greedy, jealous, arrogant, and cowardly.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  The other is good, peaceful, loving, modest, generous, honest, and trustworthy.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  These two wolves are also fighting within you and inside every other person too.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  After a moment, the boy asks, "Which wolf will win?"

• 0:59Speaker 01

  The old man smiles, "The one you feed."

• 1:12Speaker 01

  What we assume in other people is what we get out of them.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  Our view of human nature tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we assume that people are fundamentally selfish, then that's how they will behave. If we assume that people are fundamentally decent, then maybe we can create a very different kind of society.

• 1:31Speaker 02

  This is Rutger Bregman.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  I'm a Dutch historian and I'm the author of the book Humankind: A Hopeful History.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  But this story doesn't start off hopeful.

• 1:42Speaker 03

  There's a very widespread assumption that human beings are basically selfish, brutal, barbarian.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  And this is author Rebecca Solnit.

• 1:51Speaker 03

  Cowardly, just sort of despicable, and that civilization is some sort of structural overlay that keeps us from realizing our true brutal natures, preventing us from doing what we would really do if we could do anything we wanted, which would be rape, loot, pillage, maraud, steal.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  And that idea, that if you take away civilization, that people are essentially evil, has been an easy sell.

• 2:18Speaker 04

  Introduce a little anarchy.

• 2:23Speaker 04

  Upset the established order and everything becomes chaos.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  So many of these Hollywood movies like Batman gives us a very simplistic view of how evil really works.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  The story of Batman has always been about the battle of good versus evil. The two wolves, Batman and the Joker.

• 2:46Speaker 04

  This city just showed you that it's full of people ready to believe in good. Until their spirit breaks completely.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  In the film The Dark Knight, the Joker tries to convince Batman that everyone, from the mayor to the people of Gotham, are all just out for themselves.

• 3:06Speaker 04

  I'll show you. When the chips are down, these civilized people, they'll eat each other.

• 3:16Speaker 04

  See, I'm not a monster.

• 3:19Speaker 04

  I'm just ahead of the curve.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Joker is really interesting. He's the quintessential stereotypical depiction of evil in our culture, I would say.

• 3:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  So the Joker believes that everybody is dark, selfish, maybe even a little evil, like how we really are, and Batman is good. These two sides are a trope as old as storytelling, an idea that plays into something called the thin veneer theory.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  Veneer theory is a very old idea that's deeply entrenched in Western culture. It goes like this: supposedly, our civilization is just a thin layer, just a thin veneer.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  And below that lies raw human nature.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  The theory basically says that humans, deep down, are fundamentally selfish. Or maybe even worse than that. Maybe we're even beasts or monsters.

• 4:32Rund Abdelfatah?

  And the only thing keeping us from eating each other is civilization. Basically, hierarchy, governments, law and order. And when that's taken away...

• 4:41Speaker 01

  Then, when something happens, you know, just a crisis, a natural disaster, maybe a war breaks out, then people show who they really are. Then that veneer, it cracks.

• 4:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  Civilization goes away.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  And, yes, our true human nature is revealed.

• 5:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is an idea that many of us accept as truth. But what if veneer theory doesn't actually hold up against scrutiny? What if it's a story we tell ourselves? What if it's just...

• 5:23Speaker 03

  Justifying shackles. Authoritarianism. Overlords. Justifying institutional violence. Bosses. Justifying inequality. Holding us all in place. Justifying lack of rights and freedoms. Hierarchies and social controls. Things fall apart. That is why you have prisons and you have laws, you have borders and you have standards. And the science, the evidence, the sociology doesn't really support that.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  The world can often feel like a cold, brutal place. If you turn on the news or scroll social media, you're probably going to see dark stories about things happening in the world. It can feel isolating and scary, and a lot of times, hopeless. It can be easy to believe that the only thing keeping us from total chaos is that thin veneer of civilization. But what if the thin veneer is what's causing the problem? A fragile shell, a cover that's actually preventing us from having a better world?

• 6:37Rund Abdelfatah?

  On this episode of Throughline from NPR, how we've come to believe veneer theory and the stories that make us fear one another, and how it might be time to tell a different story, to feed the other wolf.

• 7:01Speaker 06

  Hi, my name is Grace Brown and I'm from Upland, Indiana. And you're listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 7:07Speaker 00

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• 7:12Speaker 04

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• 7:56Speaker 04

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• 8:31Speaker 06

  Part one. The weaker springs of human nature.

• 8:52Speaker 04

  To judge from the history of mankind, we shall be compelled to conclude that the fiery and destructive passions of war reign in the human breast with much more powerful sway than the mild and beneficent sentiments of peace.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  These are words from the Federalist Papers, a series of essays that argued in favor of the Constitution of the United States of America.

• 9:17Speaker 04

  And that to model our political systems upon speculations of lasting tranquility. is to calculate on the weaker springs of the human character.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  The essays paint a bleak picture of human nature that without government and civilization, people would hurt each other whenever the opportunity presented itself.

• 9:38Speaker 04

  A fondness for power is implanted in most men, and it is natural to abuse it when acquired.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  And this is actually something that the founding fathers really had in mind when they were designing the Constitution. We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union. And that's why they wanted to create this elaborate balance of power, because they believe that if they wouldn't have that veneer of civilization, that, you know, hell would break loose.

• 10:16Speaker 04

  One great error is that we suppose mankind is more honest than they are. Our prevailing passions are ambition and interest.

• 10:28Speaker 04

  Alexander Hamilton.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  Alexander Hamilton was one of the main authors of the Federalist Papers. He's been immortalized in recent years by Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical, and those were his words you've been hearing.

• 11:05Speaker 04

  A fondness for power is implanted in most men, and it is natural to abuse it when acquired.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  He's seen as an immigrant, an innovator, and a patriot. And while those things may be true, what's often left out of his story is that he was very pessimistic about human nature, and that wasn't exactly original or unique for his time.

• 11:27Rund Abdelfatah?

  He was articulating a very old view of human beings as fundamentally bad and in need of civilization to behave well. This idea shows up in societies all over the world, but in the West, where we're going to focus this episode, the idea was most prominently captured by one of Europe's most famous philosophers.

• 11:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  Thomas Hobbes.

• 11:53Speaker 03

  During the time, men live without a common power to keep them all in awe. They are, in that conditions, called war, and such a war as is of every man against every man.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  And he argued that, back in the state of nature, we lived lives that were, in his famous words, nasty, brutish, and short.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  In such condition, there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain. And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  It was only when we gave up our liberty and we appointed powerful ruler, that he called a leviathan, it was only then that we established peace. So yes, we lost our liberty, we gained security in return. That's the grand bargain that we made with the rise of civilization.

• 12:59Rund Abdelfatah?

  Thomas Hobbes thought a strong government was necessary to keep us from killing each other, from devolving into a state of mutual destruction. And if you look at the time and place he was born, it's easy to understand why he might have seen the world this way.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  Thomas Hobbes was an Englishman who lived during the civil wars, which were bloody and nasty in that country, and they're often blamed for shaping his political philosophy.

• 13:24Rund Abdelfatah?

  From 1642 to 1651, English elites fought each other in a series of wars over governance and religious freedom. Thomas Hobbes lived during these brutal, bloody wars. But author Rebecca Solnit argues that a deeper backdrop was that Thomas Hobbes lived in a very Christian society.

• 13:43Speaker 03

  In which one of the fundamental beliefs was that somehow we fell from grace, were kicked out of paradise, and were fallen and somehow had to be redeemed through Jesus and the church. So Christianity itself has, if not a thin veneer theory, at least a theory that human beings are kind of a mess that needs some cleanup work.

• 14:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  Hobbes's idea caught on quickly and influenced politicians and philosophers for generations, all the way up to Alexander Hamilton. He put into words long-held beliefs about human nature, and he did this at a time when Europeans were colonizing much of the earth and looking for justifications.

• 14:24Speaker 03

  Hobbes's idea that somehow you need authoritarian structures to control people corresponds really well to imperialism and colonialism, people who saw themselves as civilization imposing order on chaos.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  It's been strongly developed in Western culture. Since the dawn of civilization, obviously rulers have always looked for justifications of their power. And this has always been one of the most logical and straightforward explanations. Like, we need to be empowered to protect you from yourself.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  A hundred years after Thomas Hobbes published his famous book Leviathan, another philosopher came along, and his name was Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

• 15:21Speaker 03

  Civilization is an hopeless race to discover remedies for the evil it produces.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  And in almost every single way, he believed the opposite of what Hobbes had argued.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  Every man having been born free and master of himself, no one else may enter any pretext. Whatever subject him without is consent.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  According to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, our life in the state of nature was actually pretty good. We were quite healthy, we had lots of exercise, we had a varied diet, and it was pretty peaceful as well.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  But then, everything went wrong when we gave up our liberty.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  And we invented private property. And we settled down in villages and cities. And we created this thing called civilization.

• 16:18Speaker 03

  Human beings in a state of nature are pure and innocent and good, and society is what corrupts them.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  So according to Rousseau, civilization was not what has saved us, but it was our downfall.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  This big debate between Hobbes and Rousseau, it really lies at the heart of our biggest political discussions, between the realists and the idealists, between conservatives and progressives. You know, very often when we're debating each other on Twitter, it's basically Hobbes and Rousseau all over again.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  What is the essential nature of humanity? Are we inherently good or inherently bad? Are we more prone to being selfish individuals or helpful members of communities? Maybe the way we collectively answer these questions dictates how we structure our society.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Our theory of human nature has absolutely massive implications for pretty much everything. So just to give a couple of examples. Education. If you believe that kids are fundamentally lazy and selfish, then you need a quite hierarchical schooling system. But if you think that kids are naturally curious and creative, then maybe you don't need, you know, all that homework. Maybe you can just give kids the freedom to decide for themselves what they find interesting. If you are the CEO of a company, if you believe that your employees are fundamentally selfish, well, what are you going to do? You need a lot of bureaucracy, probably. Maybe you're going to place cameras to make sure that your employees don't steal equipment.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  If you believe that your employees are fundamentally cooperative and actually want to do what's best for the company, then maybe you can work in self-directed teams and you don't need all those managers. And you can actually rely on people's intrinsic motivation. So again and again and again, our view of human nature has pretty practical implications for how we live our lives.

• 18:29Speaker 03

  It's very useful to the authorities and people invested in those structures to believe in their own value and necessity. And essentially, it's a justification for hierarchy, for authority, for the violence that authorities impose, which is always justified as like, oh, we're bombing these people to prevent violence. The police are shooting these people to prevent violence. We're beating these people up to prevent disorder.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  And all of this brings us back to the essential debate.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  Who was right? Was Thomas Hobbes right? Or was Jean-Jacques Rousseau right? Was civilization our salvation? Or has it been our doom?

• 19:13Speaker 02

  The truth is, Hobbes and Rousseau were both kind of just making stuff up. They had very little evidence for their viewpoints. Modern science was in its infancy when they were alive. These were just ideas that popped into their heads. So for a long time, this was just a philosophical question. And there was not really a way to resolve the debate. But now that's different. Now we've got the evidence from modern anthropology, archaeology, and I think we can actually say who was more or less right.

• 19:49Rund Abdelfatah?

  Coming up, we revisit one of the most famous psychological experiments ever conducted and find out why we feed the wolf we feed.

• 20:03Speaker 03

  Hey, this is Bilal Dahtiri from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and you're listening to Through Life on NPR.

• 20:29Speaker 04

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• 20:51Speaker 00

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• 21:35Speaker 00

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• 21:51Speaker 03

  Part Two: Feeding the Wolf.

• 21:56Speaker 03

  As a psychologist, I have focused my career about understanding how ordinary people or good people get seduced to doing bad things, evil things, if you will.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  The voice you just heard is American psychologist Philip Zimbardo, speaking to a Dutch public broadcaster, VPRO, back in 2011.

• 22:17Speaker 03

  And I have focused on trying to understand the power of situations and systems to dominate individuals.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  Maybe you've never heard of him, but the study he conducted back in 1971 at Stanford University might ring a bell.

• 22:38Speaker 03

  These are not prisoners, and this is not a prison. They are college students, and they were part of an astonishing experiment.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  The Stanford Prison Experiment is the most famous experiment in the history of psychology, and it was done by a young psychologist named Philip Zimbardo, and he had a pretty simple idea. He recruited 24 students, and he said to 12 of them, "You're gonna be the guards," and to the other 12, "You're gonna be the prisoners." And so he put these prisoners in a fake prison in the basement of Stanford University.

• 23:15Speaker 02

  Zimbardo and his team wanted to see what happened when people either became guards or prisoners. The prisoners' rights movement had started a decade before, and Zimbardo wanted to show how the US prison system was failing.

• 23:32Speaker 03

  There, they were led to a simulated prison block consisting of three small cells, a narrow hallway, and a closet designed for solitary confinement. This would be their entire world for two weeks.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  The experiment was filmed by Zimbardo and his research team, and on the first day, it was mostly uneventful. The students, playing prisoners, were taken and put into their cells. But then, on the second day of the experiment...

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Things began to unravel.

• 24:02Speaker 03

  There was a very sharp change in the whole nature of what was happening in that prison.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  There was a rebellion among the inmates.

• 24:12Speaker 03

  They refused to eat. They barricaded themselves in their cells. They started ripping off their numbers, started screaming out obscenities at the guards.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  And that was countered by the guards with fire extinguishers. And after that, the guards, you know, basically did all kinds of terrible things. They tried to break their subordinates.

• 24:28Speaker 03

  The guards then began to escalate their use of power. Some of them had prisoners clean out toilet bowls with their bare hands, to do things which were really degrading and humiliating. And the prisoners did it without complaining.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Just did it because this is what they had to do. And it was actually one inmate who really, you know, went ballistic. He started screaming, and I'm quoting here. "I mean, Jesus Christ, I'm burning up inside, don't you know? I want to get out. This is all fucked up inside. I can't stand another night. I just can't take it anymore."

• 25:01Speaker 01

  So that's one of the reasons that the Stanford Prison Experiment became so famous. Because if you just look at the video of it, it's very, very powerful. And you think, what happened to these guys?

• 25:20Speaker 01

  And the story, as it's been told for, well, half a century, was that these guards, they initially described themselves as hippies, pacifists, right? Who would never hurt a fly. But then in the context of being in that prison and being handed this power over the prisoners, they turned into monsters. So it's a very powerful illustration of veneer theory, right? These boys showed who they really were once they were in that situation.

• 25:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  The results of the Stanford Prison Experiment made it into almost all psychology textbooks. And its essential takeaway, that given the right context, human beings will be quick to act brutally, was often accepted uncritically.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  That's basically the story that's been told for decades and decades. It's incredibly famous in the United States, in Europe, in Asia. I recently visited Japan. Everyone knows about the Stanford Prison Experiment there as well.

• 26:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  But why was the conclusion of the study so easy to believe and accept? Well, according to Rutgers, it's because it provides, quote, "scientific evidence" for what Thomas Hobbes was arguing centuries before.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  The way I see it is that they were just telling a very old story with basically the same message. People deep down are just rotten. We are rotten to the core.

• 26:47Rund Abdelfatah?

  But when Rutgers was writing his book, Humankind: A Hopeful History, he wanted to find out whether anyone had actually really looked into the Stanford Prison Experiment. And that's when he

• 26:59Speaker 01

  stumbled upon this study published in French. It's a study by a sociologist called Thibault Le Teixeier.

• 27:06Rund Abdelfatah?

  Thibault Le Teixeier.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  The title in French is The History of a Lie.

• 27:12Rund Abdelfatah?

  It was first published in 2018.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  This is astounding. He was the first one to go into the archives of the Stanford Prison Experiment to study what really happened.

• 27:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  For the most part, Zimbardo's results were accepted. No one had gone into the source materials to investigate it further.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  There was the archival material that could be looked at.

• 27:32Rund Abdelfatah?

  Le Teixeier got on a plane and flew to California, went to Stanford, and did just that.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  And what he found was really, really shocking.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  Le Teixeier spent hours and hours looking through videos and documents that showed

• 27:47Speaker 01

  these students were being pressured all the time to behave as nasty and sadistic as possible.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  And they weren't all up for it. Some student guards said things like,

• 27:58Speaker 01

  if it were up to me, I would just, you know, sit here and play cards and make music together with the inmates.

• 28:04Speaker 03

  The guards then began to escalate their use of power.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  But that's obviously not the result that Philip Zimbardo wanted. And so he, together with one of his co-researchers, a man named David Jaffe, they basically pulled a huge amount of tricks to convince these students to start behaving in a really terrible way.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  David Jaffe, Zimbardo's co-researcher, also played the role of prison warden. In one of the recordings from the Stanford archives, you can hear him pushing one of the guards in the experiment to be tough on the inmates.

• 28:40Speaker 03

  But we really want to get you active and involved because the guards have to know that every guard is going to be what we call a tough guard.

• 28:49Speaker 02

  Jaffe tells the participant he has to be a tough guard, to which the participant responds, I'm not too tough. I'm not too tough.

• 28:57Speaker 03

  You have to kind of try and get it in you.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  Well, I don't, I don't know.

• 29:04Speaker 02

  This experiment was supposed to show that in a prison, guards would naturally begin to act sadistically towards prisoners. But when some of the students playing guards refused to treat prisoners badly, the experimenters appealed to their values.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  And so they said to the students, like, you're progressive, right? You want this. You also, you know, want the criminal justice system in the US to be reformed quite radically. So come on, play along with this. We need these results.

• 29:32Speaker 03

  It's really important for the workings of the experiment here, sir, because, um, because this, you know, whether or not we can make this thing seem like a prison, which is the aim of the thing,

• 29:50Speaker 03

  depends largely on the guard's behavior.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  If the subjects already sort of know, if they can guess what the point of the experiment is, then obviously the experiment is not very scientific. Then it's just a play that people are participating in. This is like the opposite of science. I asked Le Dextre for my book, if there's still something we can learn from the Stanford Prison Experiment. And he said, well, basically, everything that can go wrong in science, that's what we learn about it.

• 30:27Rund Abdelfatah?

  Philip Zimbardo passed away in October 2024. Before his death, he acknowledged that there were problems with the methodology of his study. But he defended the study's conclusions and said the experiment was a cautionary tale of what would happen to anyone if we underestimate the power of social roles and systemic structures.

• 30:49Speaker 02

  And how did this end up affecting Zimbardo's career?

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Oh, actually, he had a fantastic career. He became the head of the American Psychological Association.

• 30:59Speaker 03

  What makes people go wrong? Interestingly, I asked this question when I was a little kid. I want to share with you some ideas about the secret power of time in a very short.

• 31:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  These are some clips of Zimbardo giving talks on a range of topics. He's also played by Billy Crudup in the 2015 feature film about the Stanford Prison Experiment, which currently has an 84% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The experiment clearly has entertainment value. So 30 years after Zimbardo, another group of psychologists adapted the idea to television.

• 31:31Speaker 00

  In 2001, professors Alex Haslam and Steve Reicher set up another experimental situation involving men assigned to the roles of guards and prisoners. This experiment was filmed by the BBC.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  The BBC had an idea of creating a new reality television show. And they had heard about the Stanford Prison Experiment. They had seen the footage and they were like, this is great television, right? This should be great for ratings.

• 32:01Rund Abdelfatah?

  So they asked two psychology professors to replicate the Stanford Prison Experiment, which they would then turn into a reality TV show. This is Alex Haslam, one of those psychologists, speaking about the experiment.

• 32:13Speaker 03

  Whereas in Zimbardo's study, he didn't have much or any kind of ethical oversight of the project as a whole. In our study, we had an ethical committee onsite that was monitoring all aspects of the study and were explicitly there to ensure that we didn't have any of the kind of abuses of the form that were manifested in Zimbardo's study.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  So there would be no interference in the experiment. They would just leave the prisoners alone and watch what would happen.

• 32:42Rund Abdelfatah?

  The experiment took place over the course of nine days. Cameras were rolling the entire time. And they turned all that tape into four episodes of reality TV.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  I have watched the whole BBC prison experiment. I'll never get those hours back. It was the most boring thing I've ever seen. And nothing happens. It just goes on and on and on for hours. It's so incredibly boring.

• 33:05Rund Abdelfatah?

  Some prisoners escaped from their cells, but there was no abuse from the guards, no uprising.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  The fact is, the results of the Stanford Prison Experiment were not replicated. Without coaching from the people running the experiment, the guards didn't become abusive bullies. Still, despite the BBC show and La Techie's review, the Stanford Prison Experiment still persists as an example of thin veneer theory. The idea that without the constraints of civilization, humans would basically eat each other.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  Why do you think this study has been so persistent? Like, even though people have clearly debunked it, why do people still believe in it?

• 33:49Speaker 01

  It's just exciting. It's a fantastic, compelling story. Why do people binge-watch Game of Thrones? Why do we all love Succession? It's just, it's a fantastic story. It resonates with us on a very deep level.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  There's this concept in medicine, you know, the notion of a placebo. You know, you give someone a pill, and if only the person believes that that pill will cure him, then, you know, it may actually do.

• 34:23Speaker 02

  We become the wolf we feed.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  We humans, we become the stories that we tell ourselves. Our stories are never just stories. They are self-fulfilling prophecies.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  What happens when the stories we tell ourselves actually impact real-life situations? What can we learn when we look at events where the thin veneer of civilization is removed? During war or natural disasters? How do human beings actually respond to each other when things fall apart? Coming up, we revisit one of the greatest natural disasters in US history and look behind its headlines.

• 35:16Speaker 06

  I'm Yvette Allison-Herman. I'm in Long Beach, California, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 35:31Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Jerry. Noticing your car insurance rate creep up even without tickets or claims? You're not alone. That's why there's Jerry. Jerry handles the legwork by comparing quotes side by side from over 50 top insurers, so you can confidently hit buy. No spam calls, no hidden fees. Jerry even tracks rates and alerts you when it's best to shop. Drivers who save with Jerry could save over $1,300 a year. Don't overpay. Download the Jerry app or visit jerry.ai/NPR today. This message comes from the Natural Resources Defense Council. It's easy to look at what's happening to the environment and think, what can one person really do?

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• 36:54Speaker 03

  Part Three. When the elites panic. Every person is hereby ordered to immediately evacuate the city of New Orleans, or if no other...

• 37:09Speaker 03

  The strongest part of the hurricane yet, and you can see.

• 37:12Speaker 04

  Completely horizontally, you cannot even look in a northward direction.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  Waters from Lake Pontchartrain broke through a levee. I need someone out here, ma'am, I'm gonna die in this paddock. New Orleans is called the big bowl. We will die here. Pray for me, help. I have to pray for everybody, even myself. Poor people were left to their own devices in a city that everyone knew was gonna flood. Much of New Orleans is below sea level. The levees were gonna break. When Katrina breached the levees that held the water back, the bowl was swamped. It was gonna be a disaster. People were on their own.

• 37:47Speaker 04

  The water is starting rising in the attic, ma'am. Sunrise cannot come soon enough. Phone lines are down. Water stopped running.

• 37:54Speaker 03

  Apocalyptic.

• 37:55Speaker 04

  The sewer system is backed up. Is everything we feared.

• 38:07Speaker 03

  Immediately after that happened, the US media and a lot of government officials, including the then mayor, the governor of Louisiana, began repeating these disaster myths.

• 38:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  Disaster myths. This is something author Rebecca Solnit talks about in her book, A Paradise Built in Hell, which focuses on how people respond during disasters. She started writing this book shortly after Hurricane Katrina. She wanted to know what really happens when the thin veneer of civilization is gone. Are we really helpless? Are we lawless? Do we need authority to survive? Who are we? Police tried to keep the city from descending into complete chaos.

• 38:51Speaker 03

  A city that is in a virtual state of anarchy tonight. Shots have been fired. There were reportedly rapes. Small children being raped and killed. And sheer anarchy. People running around with guns. Some considerable violence, we are told there.

• 39:09Rund Abdelfatah?

  The news coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was dark. It gave the impression of a total apocalypse.

• 39:16Speaker 03

  They sent refrigerator trucks to the Superdome, the sports arena in which a lot of people took shelter because they decided there were 200 corpses in there because they decided there'd been some kind of mass murder rampage. Thousands of evacuees sought refuge in that shelter of last resort, only to be subjected to an unspeakable breakdown of law and order. Money no longer existed. Banks were not open. Credit cards didn't work. ATM machines didn't work. There were no storekeepers with a few exceptions. And so people were going into pharmacies to get diapers and medicine. People were going into stores to get food and water. People who'd swum through toxic things and became part of portraying the stranded

• 39:59Speaker 03

  victims as monsters who needed to be controlled. Except they had an extra layer of racial bias.

• 40:08Speaker 03

  Quickly, news reports were saturated with a lasting image of Katrina, the looter. Looters are running free. Mass looting. Looting has long been... Looting in New Orleans. Looters free for all.

• 40:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  Three gentlemen just climbed into the broken window of this mini-mart here. If you see a black family, it says they're looting. See a white family, it says they're looking for food. They represent a frightening breakdown of law and order.

• 40:34Rund Abdelfatah?

  The news about the violence and the looting was greatly exaggerated at the highest levels, including by the city's mayor and police chief. Most of the horrific violence at the Superdome, the reports of dozens of murders and rapes, was actually a myth. Many of the stories of brutality at the Superdome were debunked. Instead, what was happening was thousands of people waiting days to be evacuated with limited food, water, and medical supplies.

• 41:08Speaker 02

  The truth is, there was violence that was happening during Katrina's aftermath. But it wasn't being committed by the people being blamed by the elites.

• 41:17Speaker 03

  In New Orleans today, a federal jury convicted five current and former police officers in the shooting deaths of unarmed civilians six days after Hurricane Katrina. There had been a lot of violence by the police, by white supremacists. If you had to shoot somebody, you had to shoot somebody. Who were the monsters? It was people who thought they were somehow divinely ordained, Allah Hobbs, to govern over the rest of us.

• 41:47Speaker 02

  Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher, the Leviathan, remember him?

• 41:52Speaker 03

  I have one message for these hoodlums. They were the governor who said that she had troops and they were locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will. The mayor who fell apart. Negan had taken bribes worth half a million dollars both before Katrina and after Katrina. The Bush era FEMA also failed profoundly. Five days after Katrina hit, much-needed federal assistance had yet to reach New Orleans.

• 42:30Speaker 02

  Bad collaboration between the federal and local governments meant that rescues were delayed, and even the basics like food and water or medical supplies were running short.

• 42:40Speaker 03

  So many people who were exactly those people who were supposed to be the damn thin veneer turned out to be the wild dogs, the callous people.

• 42:58Speaker 02

  It's the elites who are supposed to help, they're the ones who panic.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  It's the elites who are watching the situation unfold from a distance, you know, from behind their screens. They've got their theory of human nature. They're big believers often in veneer theory, so they get very worried.

• 43:20Speaker 03

  The elites decide the rest of us are going to behave badly, which justifies their own violence, their own power grabs, their own selfishness.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  Rebecca Sonnet says while the elites panicked, the people on the ground in New Orleans, most of whom were black, actually did the opposite.

• 43:40Speaker 03

  What I focused on was the pro-social stuff, the incredible things people did to rescue and take care of each other, the incredible way people, within hours, didn't become marauding hordes, but became spontaneous communities of mutual aid and care.

• 44:04Speaker 03

  At first, it was, I'm just helping me and mine.

• 44:09Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Malik Rahim. Rebecca interviewed him for her book, and so we reached out too.

• 44:16Speaker 03

  And I'm from New Orleans, Community Care, Algiers, Louisiana.

• 44:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  Algiers Point, where Malik lives, is a neighborhood in New Orleans that became infamous for white vigilantes that would patrol the streets during Katrina, claiming to shoot looters.

• 44:34Speaker 03

  One of my neighbors came by my house crying. And I said, "Man, what's wrong with you?" He told me, he said, "Man, listen, they was about to kill me around the corner." I said, "What?" He was telling me to run.

• 44:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  An investigation by reporters found that at least 11 black men were shot in the days following the hurricane. A ProPublica report says, quote, "The shooters, it appears, were all white."

• 45:00Speaker 03

  New Orleans was on the verge of a racial war. And a racial war that as a Black, I knew we couldn't win.

• 45:09Rund Abdelfatah?

  Malik remained in his house after the storm, and he had help from a friend to stay safe. They'd stand guard on Malik's front porch, watching all this desperation, this violence from white supremacists, this lack of action from the government unfold. And they got to talking about social movements.

• 45:27Speaker 03

  We was discussed why so many social movement start off with such vigor and end in such despair. You know, reason is because they had lost what they had in common, that common ground that brought them together.

• 45:47Rund Abdelfatah?

  Common Ground. That's the collective Malik and his friends started after those conversations at his house. They stepped in to fill the needs of the community, needs that were not met by the government. They worked in a city where tens of thousands were stranded without an evacuation plan, with no running water or electricity. In the face of immense difficulty, they banded together and built.

• 46:13Speaker 03

  People had lost hope, and that's what Common Ground came down and did. We restored hope by teaching civic responsibility.

• 46:22Speaker 02

  Common Ground started by providing rescues and basic aid to anyone they could. They created health clinics, shelters, mobile street medics, a whole network of mutual aid made up of all kinds of volunteers. The kind of mutual aid that Malik helped make popular as a Black Panther. The kind of mutual aid that has existed in Black communities for generations before Katrina.

• 46:49Speaker 02

  Common Ground would end up helping thousands of people. Malik says this includes some of those white vigilantes.

• 46:56Speaker 03

  I seen one of those vigilantes had to bring his mother to our health clinic. And our health clinic went from being the Panther clinic to a hippie clinic to just a clinic.

• 47:10Rund Abdelfatah?

  Malik and his colleagues in Common Ground didn't turn anyone away. It wasn't us against them, and chaos didn't have to reign.

• 47:19Speaker 03

  When you start exposing those myths, then people start coming together. And when they start coming together, then they start sharing and understand that the only way we're going to survive this is as if we do it together.

• 47:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  Malik says Common Ground started with just a few people, then grew to dozens within a week, then to thousands.

• 47:45Speaker 03

  There's nothing more noble than saving life as we know it.

• 47:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  Malik and Rebecca both talk about how disasters like Hurricane Katrina are a window into what really happens when the thin veneer goes away. It's a window into what is possible when humanity is put to the test.

• 48:05Speaker 03

  We're going to always be hit with disasters. But a disaster don't mean that it have to destroy hope. Without hope, this world will never be a better place. What was amazing for me is over and over and over again, this extraordinary joy shown out of people's faces, came out of their accounts because they'd found something that's missing in the disaster of everyday life. When everyday life is alienating, is meaningless, is commodified, is fragmented, they'd found a deep sense of immediacy, of social connection, of purposefulness. That's something I think we crave all the time.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  We've got hundreds and hundreds of studies done by sociologists and anthropologists since the 1960s. And time and time again, they've shown that actually what you get in a crisis situation is an explosion of altruism. So people start helping each other on a massive scale. It's not all about the war of

• 49:13Speaker 03

  Each against each about the selfish gene and the struggle for survival. In so many ways, at so many levels, throughout evolution, throughout life on Earth, you see collaboration, cooperation, often even between species as well as within species. And we know that's what it takes to survive.

• 49:55Speaker 02

  Today, it's really easy to believe that we live on a thin veneer of society. We're constantly being bombarded by bad news, by an onslaught of apocalyptic foreshadowing. It's become trendy to joke about the coming end of the world. And of course, this isn't completely unfounded. Climate change is an existential threat. There's misinformation, runaway capitalism. But really, who does it serve when we're all swimming in this toxic soup of pessimism, hopelessness, and despair? Which wolf in us does it feed? Is this way of thinking gonna make things better or paralyze us and keep things just the way they are?

• 50:41Speaker 01

  I've always believed in the power of utopian thinking. Every milestone of civilization, the end of slavery, democracy, equal rights for men and women, these were all utopian fantasies once, until they happened. That's why I think that history is actually the most subversive discipline of all the social sciences, because history shows us that things can be different. They don't have to be this way. We can change them. We have to believe in the power of hope. If you believe in hope, if you're actually hopeful for the future, then you know you gotta do something.

• 51:17Speaker 02

  I grew up in the 1990s, an era where popular culture promoted indifference. It was hip to not care. It was a way of showing everyone that you see people clearly for what they are: bad. But what if that was wrong? What if seeing the world for what it is means being optimistic about humanity? What if optimism is actually what's punk rock?

• 52:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah.

• 52:05Speaker 02

  I'm Ramtin Arablouei. And you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 52:10Rund Abdelfatah?

  This episode was produced by me.

• 52:12Speaker 02

  And me and? Lawrence Wu. Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Yolanda Sangweni.

• 52:18Speaker 03

  Casey Minor. Kristina Kimm. Devon Kadyama. Olivia Chalkody.

• 52:23Speaker 02

  Yordonos Tisfazion. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel.

• 52:28Rund Abdelfatah?

  Thank you to Neil Strickland, J.C. Howard, and LaRonde LaSablier for their voiceover work.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  Thanks also to Micah Ratner, Rachel Seller, Taylor Ash, Tamar Charney, and Anya Grunman.

• 52:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  This episode was mixed by Josh Newell and Robert Rodriguez. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes Anya Mizani.

• 52:51Speaker 02

  Naveed Marvi. Cho Fujiwara. A quick note for this episode. When we originally reported this story a few years ago, we reached out to Professor Philip Zombardo to talk about the Stanford Prison Experiment, but he said he was unable to do the interview.

• 53:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at [email protected].

• 53:15Speaker 02

  Thanks for listening.

• 53:20Speaker 04

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.