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: [email protected]

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:44Chris Williamson?

  You've been breaking the internet a lot 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. And then you've done it recently with this real-life Lord of the Flies story that you've unearthed.

• 1:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it surprises me every time that it happens. I mean, I'm not doing it on purpose, but yeah, it's a very weird experience to go viral on a skill like that, right? You sort of have your phone and your Twitter mentions and you pay a visit to the toilet and you come back and it's like 3,000 new, right? It's really crazy.

• 1:26Chris Williamson?

  That's so cool, man. So why don't you tell us about, before we even get into your new book, 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.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  Sure. 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, 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 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 realized that I had to take it up against...

• 2:21Speaker 00

  You know, so many giants in science, in Western culture, in our literature, you name it. I mean, Western culture is just permeated with the idea that people are selfish. You know, it 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 plundering 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 sinners. You also find it with the Enlightenment philosophers. You would expect some break there, you know, between Orthodox Christianity and the Enlightenment philosophers.

• 3:06Speaker 00

  But if you actually look at the view of human nature, it's pretty similar. You know, David Hume, Thomas Hobbes, you know, the famous British philosopher, all having quite a cynical view of human nature. And then again, if you look at 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. And now, one of sort of the most 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 for school, right?

• 3:47Speaker 00

  This story about a couple of kids who are 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. And 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 civilized, nice kids from a good British boarding schools, but you give them freedom and this is 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?

• 4:32Speaker 00

  I had to write something about it. Even though it's fiction, it's often sort of used as nonfiction, right? So many people interpret the novel and say, oh, yeah, that's what kids are like in the end. So I asked myself the question, has it ever happened? 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, I tried to find out.

• 5:00Chris Williamson?

  Where do you start when you think, I wonder if there's been a real world lord of the fly? Cause you're, you're a historian by training and trade, right? And I always, as a non historian, Robert Green'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. Cause you can't, it's not like it's happening. You can't go out and find some history. You've got to like go back somehow.

• 5:26Speaker 00

  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 that's basically.

• 5:36Chris Williamson?

  Everyone got excited there. My eyes widened and now you've just shot into pieces.

• 5:42Speaker 00

  I'm sorry, no, but I mean, that's really where I started as a proper investigative journalist. I basically started Googling. So real lord of the flies, kids 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 want to know what kind of bizarre and nasty ideas these television makers have had in the past and still have.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  But then after a while, I stumbled upon an obscure blog 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? So has this really happened? Tonga is an island group in the Pacific Ocean. And yeah, that's basically when I started to try and fact check this story, whether it really happened. It's quite a difficult process actually, because 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.

• 6:55Speaker 00

  And you would really expect that if something like 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 if you want to have some success in your research. By accident, I had sort of typed in the 1960s while I was looking in an archive of Australian newspapers. It was pure accident. I thought I was looking in the 70s because supposedly it happened in 1977. But I was looking in the 60s and then I saw it, an article from the Australian newspaper, The Age, that said that in 1966, 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.

• 7:40Speaker 00

  So that the 1977, that was a typo. It was in reality 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 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 again, I was really lucky because I was about to promote my new book, 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 I think I've got something interesting.

• 8:23Chris Williamson?

  You've got a detour to make there. That's so cool, man. And 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?

• 8:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, this is 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 some point I was like, I couldn't believe it. I thought people are not going to believe me if I report this to them, right? So I kind of 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 Fly is is a story of hope and cooperation and resilience and friendship. These six kids lived for 15 months on an uninhabitant island.

• 9:18Chris Williamson?

  Five, five, zero.

• 9:21Speaker 00

  Five zero.

• 9:22Chris Williamson?

  Fifty, fifty months.

• 9:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, fifteen, sorry.

• 9:25Chris Williamson?

  Fifteen, yeah.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  This always happens as a Dutch man. I can't, never.

• 9:30Chris Williamson?

  It's okay. I will anglicize everything that you say, Rooker. It's fine. Fifteen, one five, over a year.

• 9:35Speaker 00

  Which is still quite impressive. Anyway, they lived there for fifteen months and 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 would go to the other side of the island. They would say, cool off a little and say sorry and and cooperate again. So yeah, that was really fascinating. And the guy who rescued them, Peter Warner, it was also sort of a larger-than-life kind of person in the sense that turns out 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.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  And when Peter was seventeen, 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 going to fish near Tonga. And that's how by pure accident, he found these, these six kids. And yeah, they're still friends up until this day. So I mean, the story gets even crazier. When I published this story in The Guardian, a short part of it, went completely viral and suddenly all of Hollywood wanted, you know, to have the rights to this story. So last week I had a Zoom call with the four survivors, six, there were six of them initially, but then now there are still four still alive.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  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 going to get the rights to this story. And so

• 11:10Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 11:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, we've only just sold the rights. It was a very strange experience. I was suddenly talking to all these top Hollywood directors, right? Who all wanted this story. But I felt, you know, I got a disgust with, with the others. And yeah, now it's going to go to the big screen.

• 11:29Chris Williamson?

  Bro, that's amazing.

• 11:31Speaker 00

  That's crazy, isn't it? I can't, it still feels a little bit surreal.

• 11:35Chris Williamson?

  Breaking the internet on the regular.

• 11:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:41Chris Williamson?

  What a story, man.

• 11:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a, I don't think I'll ever get that lucky again. 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 think I still like the novel and I 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.

• 12:18Chris Williamson?

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

• 12:22Speaker 00

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

• 12:27Chris Williamson?

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

• 12:33Speaker 00

  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. They're very smart in collecting rainwater as well.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  And at some point, actually, one of the six broke a lag, but they managed to heal that lag with traditional Tonga medicine. Yeah, it's really crazy.

• 12:55Chris Williamson?

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

• 13:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's the central idea. 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.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  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.

• 14:06Chris Williamson?

  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 fighting by day and pillaging by night. Is that kind of, do you think the unspoken reason for the current setup that we have?

• 14:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's sort of the all 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 70th century, he wrote that in the state of nature, when people were still nomadic hunter-gatherers, which we've been for 95% of our history, we had this war of all against all going on. And our lives were, in his words, nasty, brutish, and short. And then he made the argument that in order to overcome this, we sort of appointed what he called a leviathan, sort

• 15:10Speaker 00

  of an all-powerful ruler, so that we gave away our freedom, but we got security back, right? And yeah, that was basically his argument. Now, there was another guy a bit later, 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, egalitarian, healthy, 20, 30-hour work week, pretty relaxed, no war, is 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

• 15:51Speaker 00

  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, 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 been described as the realist, right, as the smart, rational guy, and Rousseau has been described as the crazy revolutionary, as the 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 archaeology...

• 16:31Speaker 00

  You sort of get the feeling that actually on most points Rousseau was right and Hobbes was wrong.

• 16:40Speaker 00

  So that indeed civilization can be described, the biggest part actually of what we call civilization, you know, of the last 10,000 years, in many ways it was actually a big disaster for most people.

• 16:53Chris Williamson?

  Tell us about the evolutionary basis that you've discovered that supports Rousseau's findings.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, so one of the most interesting new theories from evolutionary biology is called the self-domestication theory. So we all know, I think, what domestication is, right? You've got pigs, you've got cows and goats and whatever, right? 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.

• 17:30Speaker 00

  Now, what's interesting is that all these domesticated species have a list of specific traits. So for example, they've got thinner bones, 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 interesting. If you look at us, if you look at human beings and if you compare us to our ancestors, like other hominid 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.

• 18:13Speaker 00

  We're sort of, I like to call it homo puppy, we're sort of puppyish.

• 18:18Speaker 00

  And then the question becomes only bigger, right? How did we ever manage to conquer the globe while the Neanderthals are gone?

• 18:24Chris Williamson?

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

• 18:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, don't tell this to all the Jordan Peterson fans, but what evolutionary biology now has proven basically is that over the past thousands of years.

• 18:47Speaker 00

  Men have become more feminine, right? So, men have started to look more like women. And this is-

• 18:53Chris Williamson?

  I guess, sorry, that's comparative to how we either did look or would have looked had that not have happened. Obviously, men are looking at men now and going, "I look like a man, that looks like a woman," but the-

• 19:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. The difference used to be bigger. So, and you can look at other primates. If you look, for example, at chimpanzees or gorillas. Gorillas, I think, are a good example. You see these really striking differences between men and women. But actually, those differences have become smaller in human evolution. Now, there's another term for this in biology. And the 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 prehistory. Well, he wouldn't have done very well, because people wouldn't have liked him, probably. They didn't like narcissists, or people were a bit too arrogant.

• 19:49Speaker 00

  And so, he would have quickly been expelled from the group, and he wouldn't have been able to survive on his own. Because in 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. 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. 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. People should keep that in mind when they eat bacon.

• 20:33Speaker 00

  But it's another, you know, piece of evidence that we're not that smart. We're also not very strong. I mean, I know some people are, and they 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 want to do a boxing match with one of those.

• 20:51Speaker 00

  I think, yeah, you'll regret that. So, the true superpower of human beings 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 with each other. And that is- What scientists now believe 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. Very different theory than sort of the more cynical ideas we had about our evolution a couple of decades ago.

• 21:26Chris Williamson?

  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 pig versus an infant makes sense, but a pig versus an adult human starts to look a little bit different. 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.

• 21:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:56Chris Williamson?

  And rather than being a freak savage in the strength department, or in the speed department, or in the endurance department, by having a broad cross-section, like an all rounder player on your team, you can actually be quite still a very, very effective and overly competitive up against those. But yeah, is that, is there something that maps onto that with regards to our skills and sort of how we work together?

• 22:23Speaker 00

  Well, I've got a really great example from the anthropologist Joseph Hendrik. So he sort of asks us to imagine 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 they want to come up with a new invention, say like fishing or something like that. They want to learn how to fish. Now, obviously, the geniuses have a much bigger

• 23:04Speaker 00

  chance of coming up with an invention, right? But they only share it with a couple of others, right? So that's, that's the problem there because they're, they're very smart, but they're not gonna, they only have like 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 how you should look 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 happens.

• 23:41Chris Williamson?

  That's cool. That's a cool. 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. Then we see civilization and we start to have all of these examples. So first off, what about when we go to war? We see people warring. We have these terrible crimes. We have things like the Holocaust and truly evil people. How does that map?

• 24:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. The big question, obviously, that hangs over a book like this. How can we ever explain all the great atrocities of our history? Because we're clearly not only the friendliest species, we're also the cruellest 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. 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.

• 24:48Speaker 00

  There are archaeological evidence, for example, for war before we became sedentary is very thin. Anthropologists have studied nomadic intergatherers and have found that they're actually quite peaceful, you know? 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. This is exactly what you find in the archaeological record. A really cool piece of evidence here is cave paintings. So if there 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 war against all.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  But we haven't found it. It's just not there. But then after we became sedentary, you see a lot of Guernicas, right? You see a lot of evidence for warfare in these paintings.

• 25:45Speaker 00

  The question is obviously why that it happened. It's still, I mean, it's still being discussed a lot. This is one of the great questions, obviously, about about our history. I think one important dynamic is that when people settle down, sort of collecting friends became less important and collecting possessions became more important, or collecting status.

• 26:10Speaker 00

  People could also at some point start to inherit those possessions. And so then there could arise status differences. We know that nomadic and togetherers are very egalitarian. They have leaders, but the cultural code is really to be humble, right? You have to be humble all the time. For example, if you if you've been hunting and 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 you come back to the camp and what you do is you say nothing, right? You just put the deer somewhere, you just gotta sit and it's like, and then someone comes up to you and it's like, oh, did you catch anything today? And you're like, oh, 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.

• 26:54Speaker 00

  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 Boris Johnson or Cummings, right? How could these people? Have they no shame, right? Why are they still there? 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, 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.

• 27:38Speaker 00

  Which I thought was amazing, right? That we're, 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. And all the other primates don't have that. 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, mafia members wearing shades, right? Or poker players wearing sunglasses.

• 28:17Speaker 00

  And for us, we sort of, again, we involuntarily give away our gazes, which helps to establish trust 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. And so this is, uh, this is one of the important mechanisms, I think, if you want to explain, you know, the more horrible and dark pages of human history. It is that power corrupts.

• 29:00Speaker 00

  It's sort of, if I want to summarize my book in one sentence, it would be something like, most people are pretty decent, but power corrupts.

• 29:08Chris Williamson?

  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're 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 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. 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?

• 29:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:52Chris Williamson?

  Um, if Donald Trump gets a, a argumentative question, and he's already being fairly vitriol back, like if he takes it to the degree that his innermost Logos says that you should do, you know, that might push you a little bit hard, but I man, it's a, it's a compelling case so far. 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. Talk to us about that.

• 30:17Speaker 00

  Can I say one thing though, about, about

• 30:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 30:20Speaker 00

  Sort of the point you just made, because that's really interesting. Frans de Waal, you know, he's my fellow Dutchman. He's a primatologist and he's been studying chimpanzees and bonobos now for decades. And in the eighties, I believe, he wrote a book called Chimpanzee Politics, in which he described sort of all the politics of a zoo in the Netherlands. And he compared it to US Congress. And he made a very compelling case that, you know, we see more or less the same dynamic. Actually, Newt Gringrich, Gringrich, how do you pronounce that? Anyway, you know what I mean? 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?

• 31:03Chris Williamson?

  There's the playbook. There's the playbook there, fellas. That's what we're doing next.

• 31:07Speaker 00

  And, and there's quite some evidence that indeed sort of the, the standard sort of patriarchal leaders 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? It was clearly, she's like the nomadic and togetherer kind of leader. She, she, she

• 31:43Speaker 00

  constantly makes self-deprecating jokes, right? She makes fun of herself. She

• 31:49Speaker 00

  sort of has this more egalitarian leadership model, I think. Which also has its risks, right? Because 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 have you become successful? You must be great. In the Netherlands, if you're successful, we consider that a crime. Right? That's not, you have to apologize for being successful.

• 32:21Chris Williamson?

  I'm so sorry. I did a thing. You must be apologizing. I totally forgot you're number two on the Sunday Times bestseller list.

• 32:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, that's a very big.

• 32:32Chris Williamson?

  Congratulations. And at the same time, you're a terrible person. You should be very sorry. Exactly. You beat me to it.

• 32:38Speaker 00

  And I think actually, I mean, it's a really, 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 this is one of them. Now, to get back to your question, 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 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 of us like it.

• 33:21Speaker 00

  And food is the same thing, right? Our body immediately rewards us for eating something when we're hungry. 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 it would really be our evolutionary destiny to be killing other people, then why doesn't our nature reward us for killing other people? That's not what happens. In reality, violence is really, really difficult for most of us, especially when people are very close. So if you have to shove a bayonet or sort down someone, most of us just can't do it.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  If you look at the evidence that we have from big battles, like the Battle of Waterloo or the Battle of the Somme 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 become too close and it becomes clear that they have to fight with these bayonets, then most of the time, one of them remembers an urgent appointment somewhere else and just goes away, right? Because they just can't do it. Wow. 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.

• 34:47Speaker 00

  And we know from evidence from the Second World War, there's been this historian, American historian, who went with the troops in Europe and the Pacific and interviewed them afterwards. His name was S. L. A. Marshall. He wrote a book about this, "Men Against Fire." And he discovered 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. There's been quite some controversy around that figure. It seems as it was sort of more intuitive guess instead of like hard statistics.

• 35:27Speaker 00

  But we now have a lot of other evidence from, you know, modern sociologists who back up this finding. So most experts now also believe that actually, like the regularly, the standard drafted soldier, you know, just finds it's really hard to be violent. And this finding was taken very seriously by the US 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 started this whole program of brainwashing and conditioning their soldiers, so that sort of shooting becomes a standard reaction, sort of a Pavlov reaction. You do it immediately once you see a target that looks a little bit like a human being.

• 36:09Speaker 00

  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 other people, there were also many more cases of PTSD. So many of them came back. And they have 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. If you just push a button and have an explosion fire 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 more remorse for killing tens of thousands of people, you know, by pushing that button? He said, no, don't feel that.

• 36:54Chris Williamson?

  Was it the guy, the guy in the plane?

• 36:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. But imagine having to slaughter fifty thousand people with a knife.

• 37:01Chris Williamson?

  Five hands, yeah.

• 37:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Most people couldn't do that. It's just the same with, I mean, most people would be come vegetarian very quickly if they would have to kill their own cow before they 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 don't know, it's like sixty billion animals every year on the planet. And we've able to do, been able to do that by increasing the distance, right? We don't see it anymore. It's become, we're, 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.

• 37:46Speaker 00

  And that's a very important part in in 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? It needs a lot of propaganda and 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 our nature.

• 38:20Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting how all of these advances, all of these tactics are shortcutting a um compassion set point.

• 38:32Chris Williamson?

  Or an empathy set point, I suppose, is, you know, you think the people that are listening, imagine that a 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.

• 38:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:51Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 38:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:58Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 39:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:07Chris Williamson?

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

• 39:50Chris Williamson?

  that the vast majority of people out there, we need to be kept safe from bad actors. And there's 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. Despite having never seen that nature within myself. So there was just a part of me that presumed, well, yeah, that's you. That's your experience. Plus the people around me, like mum and dad and my friends and blah, blah, blah. But I was, I'd just kind of taken it for granted. I'd been delivered this grand narrative from somewhere that had become a part of me and then

• 40:30Chris Williamson?

  started to like emerge out of me, where I thought, well, yeah, no, but like, look, look at, look at all of the evidence, you know, look at all of this stuff that goes on. And I think that that's been the, the, the biggest insight that I took away from this was that. The description of the type of nature of a person written in humankind is significantly closer to my experience of the world. Does that make sense?

• 41:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, that way, the message of the book is very simple. Other people are just like you.

• 41:07Chris Williamson?

  You should have changed it. You should have changed it. Other people are just like you.

• 41:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, you're probably not a monster, so they're probably not a monster either. Right? It's the weird thing is that it's relatively easy to assume the best in those who are close to you. You know, as you said, your friends, your neighbors, your colleagues. But then, as the distance increases again, we start to have these very weird assumptions about other people. So my previous book was about the idea of giving everyone a universal basic income, right? Completely eradicating poverty, giving everyone some venture capital to start a new company, move to a different job, right? And that idea is all about trust. It's about trusting other people. The most important objection people have against it is, oh, those other people, they're wasted. Right?

• 41:56Speaker 00

  They'll, they'll buy drugs and alcohol, they'll, they'll stop working, etc. And then I would also always ask them, but what would you do with the basic income? And they will come up with all these wonderful ideas and dreams and like, oh, this is interesting, blah, blah. And then I ask them, but what will other people do? Oh, other people, yeah. Oh, but then we got to talk about nature.

• 42:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, this distrust of the other.

• 42:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And I think it's important that we, yeah, start moving to a more realistic view of human nature. It's hard, it's hard because it's, this cynicism is deeply, deeply embedded in our culture. And we live in a, in a world where we have this whole information system called the news that on a daily basis bombards us with horrible stuff about other people, right? About corruption, about crime, about violence. So if you watch a lot of the news, at the end of the day, you know exactly how the world doesn't work because you've only been hearing about all these exceptions and you have a very cynical and bleak view of humanity. So you gotta stop there, you know, stop following the news. But then you go deeper and you've got this whole Western culture, you know, we talked about this,

• 43:01Speaker 00

  goes back all the way to the Asian Greeks, who have this cynical view of human nature. And then it's also in the interest of those in power for us to be cynical, because then we legitimize their position, because then they'll say, yeah, and that's why you need us. And then at the deepest level, we've got the problem of our own negativity bias. Right? And this is the psychological term negativity bias. Human beings just focus more on the negative than on the positive. It's a fact about us. Evil for us is stronger than good. And there's probably some evolutionary reason for that. It's probably, you know, if you were an American together, it was probably smart to be afraid once too often, instead of not afraid enough for a spider or a snake or something like that.

• 43:45Speaker 00

  But now, in this world, where, as I said, we're being bombarded with all kinds of horrible stories, this negativity bias is really holding us back. And I mean, it's the same with, you probably experienced, if, experienced it, if you get like 10 compliments for your podcast, it's like, that's nice. But then you get one piece of criticism, right? And that's what, what keeps it.

• 44:08Chris Williamson?

  Wipes it out, yeah.

• 44:09Speaker 00

  It's the, um. It's just more powerful.

• 44:12Chris Williamson?

  I can't remember 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, because you'd love him. Um, he gave me this example for neonatalism. He gave me this, 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 worldviews. But you've hit the nail on the head there, that we would much sooner not be in pain than experience a bit of pleasure. Pain is so much more disproportionately bad. So, okay, so I, you know, I think that's a.

• 44:53Chris Williamson?

  A strange and world depending but realistic and 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 what's the implications for this?

• 45:13Speaker 00

  Okay, so what I think we got to start doing is to 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-

• 45:33Chris Williamson?

  How does that happen? Yeah.

• 45:35Speaker 00

  Well, I imagine you have sort of a workplace. I think the financial sector is a good example of that. Sort of the city of London. That's like this war of all against all, right? And most relations there are nasty, brutish and short. It's very competitive and everyone expects that from everyone. So that's sort of what you get out of people.

• 45:56Speaker 00

  Now, if you turn it around, and in my book I give a couple of examples that do that, of organizations that do that.

• 46:03Speaker 00

  You can have a very different kind of organization. So one example is an organization called Birtsorg in the Netherlands, which translates as Neighborhood Care. Now, what they did, they started in 2006 with a seemingly crazy idea. 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. 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, etc. And the idea was then that that would improve healthcare, but it really didn't.

• 46:46Speaker 00

  So this company started and initially insurance insurers didn't want to finance it, etc. But they went ahead anyway. And now it's one of the biggest organizations in the Netherlands in healthcare with 15,000 employees. And the really interesting thing is that they deliver healthcare now, according to independent observers, at 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 they do this? Well, it's all about trusting people to to do their job on their own, right? Because nurses-

• 47:22Speaker 00

  Can really have this powerful intrinsic motivation, right? They don't do this kind of work because they want to become rich or, or you know, are looking for the status or anything, but they really want to help other people. So if you trust them to do that, and if you say, okay, you work in a team where you can decide for yourself who you want to hire, what kind of additional education you need, what times you're going to 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.

• 47:56Chris Williamson?

  That I'm going to 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 going to have scheduling conflicts and all this sort of stuff. Um, so the Malthusian trap, this kind of race to the bottom and, and the, the diluting down of all of this sort of stuff. How would you? It, it sounds great. You know, it's, it, it intellectually it makes sense, but there will be a lot of people listening that like, well, yeah, that's, that's all well and nice in this ideal utopia, which doesn't, which doesn't exist. And the people that try and do the good version of humanity are just going to get outcompeted

• 48:41Chris Williamson?

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

• 48:48Speaker 00

  Hmm hmm. Well, the examples that I'm talking about are not small, right? As I said, the company I just talked about is 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.

• 49:13Speaker 00

  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 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, 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 yeah, you need to change a lot of your assumptions there before you can make it work. I think the problem is not so much skill, but it's more hierarchy. That's really the problem. Because if you have those at the top, then what they want to do is they want to be in control.

• 49:57Speaker 00

  And what do you need if you want to be in control? Well, you need to start measuring things, right? You want to have, in education, for example, you want to have standardized tests so that you can know how the kids are doing, if they're learning anything. Where you're using a very narrow definition of learning, obviously, because, I mean, there's so many things that you can't measure, right? If someone is becoming more creative, how are you ever going to measure that? So obviously, if you have a hierarchical school system with standardized tests, then, you know, you're not going to educate your kids to be creative. I mean, this is all the kind of effects that you have if you have a traditional way of thinking. If you move to a different kind of thinking, I think you can rely more on what psychologists call intrinsic motivation, right?

• 50:41Speaker 00

  So they always make this distinction between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. Extrinsic is you do something because you have to or because you want the money or you want the status or the prestige or you do it for your LinkedIn profile or because your boss says you got to do it. And intrinsic motivation is because you want to, right? Because you're just curious, because you're just creative. You want to 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 hierarchy and on money and those kind of things,

• 51:27Speaker 00

  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 stocking jobs that they hate, right? So many smart people wasting their talent. I always, I sometimes give, this happens very rarely, but 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.

• 52:11Speaker 00

  And you could be thinking about the cure for cancer and you could be, you know, helping us get to Mars or whatever, right? Build a flying car and look what you're doing. It's such a tragedy.

• 52:21Chris Williamson?

  Was it 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?

• 52:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's actually a former Facebook employee who said that. I'm gonna put on the light by the way.

• 52:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, hit the light, man. Hit it, you're in the pitch black now.

• 52:44Chris Williamson?

  I was just wandering over there. I'm just gonna keep on talking. This can be a monologue podcast now.

• 52:50Speaker 00

  Is that better?

• 52:51Chris Williamson?

  Ah, looks lovely, man. Full beam. But yeah, that thing, there's a lot of my buddies working PPC, cost per click, Facebook ads, funnels, retargeting market and stuff like that.

• 53:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. 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. I'm 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, I mean, it's also, 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 two years ago is that a really big and important study came out from two Dutch economists who, who looked at a huge poll that had been done among like

• 53:49Speaker 00

  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

• 54:34Speaker 00

  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. Now, if you then look at the jobs that maybe don't add as much of value, it's like people working in finance, or in marketing, or consultancy, or whatever. And remember, it's not me saying it, it's people themselves saying it about their own job.

• 55:05Chris Williamson?

  Facts don't care about people's feelings, right? You don't worry about that.

• 55:08Speaker 00

  Okay, okay. No, but I mean, people can listen to this and like, this guy's a historian. That's like the definition of bullshit. So it's important that people can decide that for themselves, I think. This term, by the way, bullshit job, is an academic term coined by the anthropologist David Craver. So it's a real academic thing right now.

• 55:31Chris Williamson?

  That's the official, official term. I love it. I mean, the recent relevant elephant in the room is the pandemic. 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, so eight years back until World War II. And one of the reasons that there was a slow onset of lockdown in the UK was because of fears of backlash from the proletariat in the street just ripping shit off the walls. And we haven't, we, you know, in homage to the...

• 56:12Chris Williamson?

  Hypothesis that you are putting forward here, we haven't seen the rioting, we haven't seen the misbehavior. Just before we started, it's just as well that we did start five minutes late because it was the 8pm, get your pots and pans out and smash seven shades of shit out of them for the NHS thing that was going on. So, you know, we haven't, we haven't seen that and that is happening right now, right? This very second. Everyone listening has experienced it.

• 56:41Speaker 00

  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, where 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. So there were a lot of psychiatric field hospitals set up at the last moment and all kinds of emergency measures taking were taken. Then the bombs did start falling in September 1940 and, and

• 57:24Speaker 00

  didn't happen, you know, there was no mass panic. Actually, it was the opposite. Sort of the keep calm and carry on mentality. I really had a, had a good time sort of reading all these anecdotes from back then and all the lovely British jokes. 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 like, our spirits are excellent, come in and try them. I mean, those kinds of jokes.

• 58:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, man, it's, um, we're watching it unfold, you know, I,

• 58:10Chris Williamson?

  That story at the beginning as well is absolutely fascinating where there was kind of this weird conspiracy thing which had occurred which then legitimised British bombing of Dresden and other places and like in one night in Dresden was the same tonnage of bombs that was dropped across an entire year and that was justified by some army commander that basically couldn't find anything to back up what he thought. It feels like there is this huge conspiracy that's been occurring since the beginning of human history to make us believe that inherently we're quite adversarial and mean.

• 58:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I wouldn't describe it as a conspiracy because elites are not smart enough for conspiracy in general, right? They're not smart enough to coordinate that kind of thing. But it is something that sort of, 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. So indeed, what happened again in the Second World War is that Frederick Lindemann, who was the best friend of Churchill, he was the guy who had to do research into the effects of the bombing on Britain. And what the scientists found

• 59:27Speaker 00

  again and again is that, you know, there was no breakdown of morale at all. Actually, there was some evidence that the cities 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 Germany 10 times as heavily, it's going to be awesome, you know, it's gonna, we're gonna break the German.

• 59:52Chris Williamson?

  It's gonna be awesome.

• 59:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. I don't know if he used that word.

• 59:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:00:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, 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 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, that the war, you know, wouldn't, would have been shorter,

• 1:00:45Speaker 00

  like six months shorter or something like that. It's pretty incredible.

• 1:00:48Chris Williamson?

  That's mad. What a story, man. So I want to finish off. You give ten rules to live by at the end of the book. Do you have a, do you have a favorite?

• 1:00:59Speaker 00

  Oh, that's a good question. You know, I should first say that I didn't want to 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. 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? By our prisons, by the way our democracy is organized, is organized. So I think it really starts there. We shouldn't expect too much of individuals. But then again, I couldn't resist. I thought, you know, there are probably some rules for life that I can come up with if we take this view of human nature seriously. So the rule that I start with is quite simple.

• 1:01:41Speaker 00

  It's when in doubt, assume the best. And 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? 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 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. I know, I'm getting also weird emojis, right? And this is how relationships sometimes break down, right? How people end up in fights because of this kind of miscommunication

• 1:02:25Speaker 00

  and 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 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-complimentary effects. This is 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. It's a... I've got one example in my book, which is, 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.

• 1:03:06Speaker 00

  It was a guy who was being robbed in the subway and by a young guy with a knife. And he said, like, your money or your life? And he said, okay, here, you have my money. 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. And the robber was like, huh, that's weird, that's weird. That's weird. And then the guy said, you know what? My favorite restaurant is around the corner here. So we just go there together and just talk about it. So they went there and they had a lovely night and a good discussion about life.

• 1:03:47Speaker 00

  And then it was the end of the night and the bill came for the food they had. And so the man who had just been robbed said, you know, you've got my wallet. So maybe you can pay.

• 1:04:03Speaker 00

  And, and, and, you know, they became friends. And it's, it's this very sentimental example of just the power of non-complimentary, eh, non-complimentary, right? Non-complimentary behavior. Now you can say, yeah, but there are still nasty people out there, right? There are still professional con men who will just try to rip you off. There are sociopaths, there are psychopaths. What about them? Well, I came to realize that we should accept some amount of collateral damage in our lives. Right? Because if you really want to, never want to be ripped off, never in your life, then you have to distrust other people all the time. You can only trust those close to you and then you have to distrust all those strangers. That price is way too high to pay.

• 1:04:46Speaker 00

  So what I think, the rational thing to do is to have a very trusting attitude to other people in general and just accept that you'll be ripped off a couple of times in your life. You know, it's a reasonable, rational price to pay. And so if you are, I don't know, thirty, forty years old, fifty years old, and you've still never been ripped off, you've never been conned, you should really ask yourself, what's wrong with me? You know? You should maybe visit a therapist because your basic attitude to life is not trusting enough. Right? It should be something that you're, I mean, you can be proud of being ripped off a couple of times and being conned a couple of times.

• 1:05:25Chris Williamson?

  It's an interesting way to look at it, man. I think, um, it's a little bit like putting a trade on or being a trader and consistently making small positive wins throughout your life. Conceding the fact that your current trading strategy will mean that you have a few fairly medium-sized losses here and there, but hopefully they won't be too frequent. Hopefully they won't be too catastrophic and you just keep on going. Man, I think, um,

• 1:05:52Chris Williamson?

  I think the main challenge people are going to have in swallowing the, the ideas in humankind is going to be Getting past first the societal programming, but also, as you mentioned, this sort of negativity default that we have, it's fitness enhancing. There's a lot of anxiety at the moment. People are cautious about opening up. They don't want to feel silly when they try and do something nice to someone, you know, someone's like being mean to you and you, it's seen as a little bit wimpy, you turn the cheek. So there's more societal stuff coming in. But we're memetic creatures, man, you know, like the more nice that we can be, the more nice those around us can be. And this is why particularly I love this project. I love the podcast that I have,

• 1:06:36Chris Williamson?

  because it connects me with people who think the things that I think about the world, which is that they want to understand themselves, they want to understand the world around them. And that's awesome. I'm like, look, that's rising tide, all ships. Let's keep, let's keep going, you know, like tsunami time. Man, I, I really, I really think the fact that it's number two on the Sunday Times bestseller list as well is something that you should be incredibly proud of and embarrassed by, obviously, at the same time. Dude, I'm, I'm super, super happy for you. I think it's got a beautiful message. So people want to, people want to check it out, check out the book, find you online, where they go?

• 1:07:14Speaker 00

  Oh, they can just Google it, I guess.

• 1:07:16Chris Williamson?

  That secret website from the start. Well, humankind, a hopeful history will be linked in the show notes below on Amazon, Rutger's Twitter, which is disproportionately massive after going viral like five times in the last year. He's got this huge, this huge like Twitter influencer sized following online after completely smashing the internet from the, for the last 12 months. All of that will be linked in the show notes below. Rutger, man, it's been, it's been awesome. Thank you so much for your time.

• 1:07:46Speaker 00

  Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this.

• 1:08:05Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company foreme of the explosion on our rig.

• 1:08:08Speaker 03

  On October 2nd.

• 1:08:09Speaker 02

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:08:14Speaker 03

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:08:22Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:08:26Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:08:29Speaker 04

  I'm not the first there.

• 1:08:30Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.