Factually! with Adam Conover - Humankind’s Hopeful History with Rutger Bregman

Episode Date: February 3, 2021

Is humanity innately good or bad? Historian and author Rutger Bregman joins Adam to discuss his decidedly optimistic answer to this question. They discuss research showing that people are more likely to help each other during national disasters, the true story behind Kitty Genovese, and how the real-life Lord of The Flies had a very different ending. You can find Rutger Bregman’s book, Humankind: A Hopeful History, wherever books are sold. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Let's start with a light question. What is the nature of humanity? Are we good and honest fundamentally as a species or, left to our own devices, are we bad and deceitful? And I want to be clear, this is not just an exercise in airy philosophical toga think. I mean, it is, you know, a little bit. This is a question that goes back generations to the earliest philosophers who basically sat on white clouds and pontificated all day.

But in our reality today, our beliefs about the answers to these fundamental questions shape the decisions we make about how we build our society today. Think about it. If you imagine that the moment civilization is removed, everything descends into violence and chaos because humanity is fundamentally evil, well, you're going to want to prevent that breakdown by any means necessary, and you'd use the law to enforce it. And a lot of people do believe that, and they do act accordingly. But if, on the other hand, you believe that civilization is just a natural outgrowth of

our human propensity to cooperate and act altruistically, that humans at root are fundamentally good to each other, well, you'd probably think that we don't need the strong arm of the state to force us to work together. And you might support policies that line up with that, like, say, a restorative rather than a punitive approach to criminal justice. Let's get even more concrete. Imagine disaster preparedness, say. If you think humanity can't be trusted to help each other out in the event of a major storm, you might be inclined to ready the National Guard as soon as a storm arrives in order to stop potential looting. But if you believe that people will help each other at moments of crisis, well, then you would put resources in protecting people rather than

property. And this is not, again, an abstract question. Every time there is a major disaster, you see news reports of violence and looting. Yet there is also evidence that people actually become more altruistic after a natural disaster. So which one of these is right? Are we good or are we bad? Well, this debate is not new.

It is in fact thousands of years old, but it was reestablished in the early modern period of the 17th and the 18th century. You might have even learned about it in Philosophy 101. That's right. It's the Clash of the Titans. On one side, you've got the British bummer Thomas Hobbes, who describes the basic state of humans in nature as a, quote, war of all against all. Because he believed life was so buck-ass wild in the state of nature, we were all just braining each other with rocks and cutting down trees to sharpen into spears to gore each other. Well, what a king or queen needs to do in that case is to assert their power to

protect us from this hell of natural conflict. It doesn't matter how a sovereign comes into power, according to Hobbes. All that matters is that it can protect those who have consented to obey. But arguing from the opposite perspective, there's the Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He believed that humanity was good by nature, but only ended up being corrupted by society. Therefore, since people are good on their own without society, but, you know, we still need society for some things. their own without society. But, you know, we still need society for some things. Rousseau tried to describe a form of government that gave people its benefits without stomping on their freedom, which is not easy. But the beliefs of these two thinkers once again shaped the political systems that we have today. This is a case where philosophy is not abstract at all, but is part of our daily

lives, is threaded into the fabric of our reality. And policymakers today still make decisions based on where they come down on this fundamental disagreement. Well, today we have a guest who comes down hard on one side of the debate and for, I think, very good reason. Rutger Bregman is a Dutch historian and most recently the author of Humankind, A Hopeful History. historian, and most recently, the author of Humankind, A Hopeful History. He's absolutely one of the most fascinating thinkers working today in any medium in history, sociology, in anything. I love talking to him. Please welcome Rutger Bregman. Rutger, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me.

I followed your work for a while. It's really wonderful to finally have a chance to talk to you. Your new book, let's just jump right into it, is about the thesis is that humanity is essentially good. Is that correct? It's maybe a radical thesis. Yeah, I would say that most people deep down are pretty decent. Maybe. I mean, the question is obviously what is good? What is an actually good person?

So that's why I chose to use the word decent, which is sort of maybe... In German, my book is called Im Grunde Gut, which I really like. It's not exactly the same as fundamentally good. Not as saying that we're born good. We're not angels, obviously, right? We're capable of all kinds of really nasty things. But I would say that, yeah, the good is more

powerful on us than the bad. So you're talking about goodness, the kind of goodness where like, hey, if I, if I'm dying on the street, will someone come over and help me? Or if I, if I leave my umbrella and turn away for a second, is someone likely to steal it? Like that sort of general decency to each other, consideration and malice versus consideration. Yeah, or at least the opposite of selfishness. So in the book, I give this very simple example at the beginning. Imagine that you're in a plane that has just crashed and broken into two parts. There's fire, there's panic. And on planet A, everyone is

basically very selfish and people trample over the kids and the old people, etc. And everyone tries to get out as soon as possible. On planet B, people are, you know, willing to cooperate and they let the vulnerable people go out first, etc. And they're even willing to risk their own lives in the process. Now, the question is, what planet do we live on? What's really interesting here is that if you ask most people, they say, well, obviously we live on planet A. I mean, just look around, right? You can just follow the news. Any reasonably knowledgeable person will say, yes, we live on planet A. The interesting thing, though, is that scientists have been saying, basically since the 1950s, the opposite. That actually, in the vast majority of cases,

we live on planet B, you know, the cooperative planet where people really work together and that's not just a theory but it's based on hundreds and hundreds of case studies of indeed natural disasters for example earthquakes tsunamis or you know one very famous case obviously or infamous cases is um you know the the burning down of or the destruction of the Twin Towers, when also people literally said to each other, no, you go first, as they were going down the stairs. No, you go first. No, you go first. It's really unimaginable. But that is what people do.

Crises tend to bring out the best in us. Yeah, I've experienced that. I mean, even in my own small way, I've never been in the middle of a massive crisis, but I remember living in New York City when there was a massive blackout, which is, you know, as close as you can get to, or at least in the time I lived there, to that sort of emergency. And people quickly start helping each other. You know, every bodega puts, or, you know, someone who has a generator puts out a extension cord so people can charge their phones. You know, that was something that I remember very distinctly, that sort of basic aid to each other. I know Rebecca Solnit has written about how there's this probably about the same research that you have that.

Yeah, we have this myth that when there's a hurricane comes through that everyone starts smashing windows and, you know, because all the cops aren't coming around so I can just rob every bank. And so why not do it? But in reality, people immediately start helping each other. Yeah, absolutely. And the interesting thing here is that often the news gives you the opposite impression. So very often after, say, an earthquake or tsunami or flooding or something like that, the news is full of stories about looting and violence and people plundering, etc. And it's always, you know, a couple of weeks or months later when the researchers come in and the scientists come in and do the proper research,

they discover that these were just rumors that, you know, were somehow just spreading. And it's especially those at the top, you know for someone just spreading and it's especially those at the top you know the the people who with the responsibility to respond and to send in the emergency service for example they are especially vulnerable to this kind of cynical view of how humans behave and the classic example that indeed rebecca solnit has done great research here um is is what happened um after katrina yeah 2005 is that indeed they uh elites decided to send in the military basically that started shooting at innocent people yeah instead of sending in you know the emergency services etc and um it's it's a little bit as if as if those at the top

quite often when they think about how most humans behave they look in the mirror and they assume that they would behave like they themselves would behave which is quite selfish but that's not the case most people are pretty decent but yes power corrupts but most people aren't that powerful but but the uh those elites who are saying that those people in charge i mean to a certain extent they're just repeating what many or most people believe about humanity that uh and there are you know if i'm just looking for anecdotal cases of uh you know look that run counter to your thesis. I can find them. I live in Los Angeles.

It's a big city. You know, if I leave something valuable or something, frankly, even made of metal on the street corner, it's going to be gone in a couple hours, right? You know what I mean? Like there's that sort of element. I know.

And that's because people probably assume it's junk or whatever. But, you know, the point being, you know, when you have a lot of people, we, in one place, we sort of assume the worst about what can happen. And we say, OK, we need to like sort of protect against what random people walking by might do to my thing that I've left out, if that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. We do.

We do lock our car doors. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And that's obviously also because quite small group of people who are thieves in this case can do a lot of damage. Of course. That is one of the tragedies is that the good may be, I don't know, in the majority, but the bad is stronger. Yeah, no, it's a good point.

Like, I do have that belief of, okay, if I leave something valuable, it'll be pinched. But I don't assume that everyone walking down the street is a thief and in fact if i did if i meet someone who who talks that way oh my god look they're all thieves around us oh my god this is a paranoid person yeah um so fair point yeah but let's give another example then please um that is you know still relevant for our lives today it's. It's not just about wars or natural disasters or something. It's the behavior of bystanders when something happens. Say someone has a heart attack or is attacked in the street. For a very long time, psychologists believed in this phenomenon

that is called the bystander effect. That in these cases, especially if you live in a big city, that people are apathetic and they don't help each other because they're like, you know, it's not my responsibility. And the most infamous case of this was the

killing of Kitty Genovese in the 60s. Right, the famous story. In New York, where supposedly 38 bystanders had seen it happen and didn't do anything. Now, what's really interesting here is that, well, the whole Kitty Genovese story turns out to be fake news. In reality, she died in the arms of one of her best friends. And actually, very few people had seen it happening. And at least two people had called the police, but the police didn't show up.

Because, you know, back then it was relatively standard for, well, it still is, obviously. It still happens a lot for men to beat their wives. But back then that wasn't really seen as an emergency. So it's a very different story. And also the research has actually gone in completely the other direction. very different story. And also the research has actually gone in completely the other direction. So this whole bystander effect, most of the research was just laboratory experiments. And as you know, there's probably been this crisis in psychology, the replication crisis. A lot of experiments that have been done can't be replicated. And now there's a new generation

of researchers that said, well, why don't we just look at CCTV footage? Because we live in these big cities today. We've got cameras everywhere. We don't have to do these experiments. We can just study how real people behave in the real world. Lundegaard, has done this and has built this huge data set with videos from Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Cape Town in South Africa, you know, quite different places. And she's shown that in 90% of all cases, 90%, people help each other. So that basically destroyed a whole research tradition. We could, like a whole library full of books could be thrown away because this is obviously

the most powerful evidence that you can have, how people behave in the real world. And that is, I think, a comforting message is that, no, we're not alone. If something happens on the streets and people see it happen, most of the time, most people will help you. And the more people see it happen, the more likely it is that someone will help you. Yeah. You know, this reminds me of like one of the weirdest things that ever happened to me. If I could tell a little random story, I was walking down the street in Los Angeles, you know, in sort of a bar district. I saw a guy in the middle of the street. He was passed out on his back and he had a $20 bill between his fingers. And I sort of, you know, walk by and I'm like, that's a little odd. I'm thinking about it. I

walk by these two girls and they're going, is that guy dead? Should we like, should we do something? And I said, okay, you know what? I wasn't gonna, but you know, thank you for my, I'll call 911. You know what I mean? I call 911. 911 tells me, well, have you tried talking to the man? I was like, oh, you're right. I should have just said, are you okay first? I go up to the guy. I say, are you okay? He immediately opens his eyes and goes, yeah, I'm fine. I'm doing okay. And gets up and walks away.

And I'm like, what the hell was this? What the hell was this guy doing? And the only explanation for what this was, in my opinion, is that he was running some kind of- It was an experiment. I think he was doing a social experiment. I think maybe he had a camera and he wanted to see if someone would take the 20 right because he was holding it like in between his fingers stretched out like it would

have been very easy to snatch it out you know and to his disappointment he seemed annoyed i think to his disappointment me and two other people tried to help him and ask if he was okay um and i have other you know uh i mean that's just a funny example. I've been in situations where, you know, again, crowded place, someone collapses on the subway, someone, I've been on a subway platform, someone jumped on the tracks, very scary situation. And immediately everyone's like, get up, we got to get off the tracks. You know what I mean? A mentally ill person who had jumped. So I think a lot of us have had that that experience of um when something bad happens in your vicinity you do kind of turn on a little bit oh my gosh i have to help i have that reaction i'm sure many other people do yeah yeah a good friend of mine

when he was a kid he did this experiment in amsterdam have you ever been to amsterdam no i would love to go you know there's this square, the Dam Square in the middle of the city. And what he did is he put a small table there and he had like, how do you say that? A little box. And he put all his savings in there. I think it was like 100 guilders. Like, I don't know, $50 or something at the time. For him, a lot of money.

He was like a kid of i don't know 12 years old and um he put a little note next to it and he said um you can take whatever you want of this money uh but at the end at the end of the day i'll be back uh and i'll donate everything that's in there to uh i don't know kids cancer research or something like that and ps uh you can also give a little bit or add a little bit of money of yourself if you want to. So he came back at the end of the day and there was like, I don't know, a thousand guilders in there or something like that.

Wow. Multiplied, applied by a lot. So he always thought we did story. Like, yes, post people are pretty decent. Obviously you have to give them the right nudges sometimes. But in this are ultimately good or decent, however you want to frame it, is also a bigger question in terms of philosophy, political science, how much individuals need to be protected from the group, how we govern ourselves as a species. And that question stretches back thousands of years. We've been having that debate. So I'd love to scope out

a little bit and talk about like that element of it. I mean, this is something that philosophers have been debating for millennia. Exactly. There's this really old theory in Western culture that scientists call veneer theory. And this is the idea that our civilization is just a thin veneer, just a thin layer, and that below that lies raw human nature, that deep down people are just selfish. Now, this theory comes back again and again and again in our culture. So you already see it among the ancient Greeks. You find it with Orthodox Christianity, you know, St. Augustine

talking about the idea of original sin, that we're all born as sinners. You find it with Orthodox Christianity, you know, St. Augustine talking about the idea of original sin, that we're all born as sinners. You find it with the Enlightenment philosophers of the 17th and the 18th century. You find it with the Darwinists or the social Darwinists, you know, the people who first thought about evolution theory. And I think it's also embedded at the heart of the capitalist system, right? Especially many economists in the 70s and the 80s said, well, people are just selfish and we need to deal with that and basically design our institutions around it. Or, you know, Gordon Gekko, who said greed is good. You know, just deal with it.

That's the way it is. So this idea, veneer theory, it comes back again and again and again and again it's a very powerful idea this is like a meta idea almost this is like a way of like people have this theory without even realizing it without giving it that name this is like a common way that philosophers have thought about humanity yeah and it's i've never put a name to it before that's like it is kind of an odd notion yeah Yeah. And people from the left to the right have been doing it. People who are, you know, stanchly atheist or are very religious have been doing it. It's really something that is pretty much everywhere. And I think it's wrong, you know? I think it's really wrong. I think there's very, very powerful evidence that we have right now from sociology and anthropology and biology and even economics that points in a different direction.

And that's the reason why I wanted to write this book, because I started to notice that so many scientists from all these diverse disciplines were moving to a more hopeful view of human nature. But as you know, academics are incredibly specialized these days. They know everything about their tiny field of study. And that's very important, the specialization. Obviously, I couldn't have written this book without these brilliant specialists. But sometimes someone needs to take a step back and see what's the bigger picture, right? And that's really exciting that something bigger has been happening here. And there's really a convergence in all these findings. Yeah. So what is the alternative to

veneer theory? I mean, because when you put it that way, veneer theory, the idea that civilization is just this little cover over some deeper, darker human nature of some description. That seems a little that does seem a little facile to me because civilization is what there's not been humanity without civilization. We have always organized ourselves socially in some way. It's clearly a deeper thing than that. So what is the alternative view that you present? It's clearly a deeper thing than that. So what is the alternative view that you present?

I think what's most exciting is what's been happening in evolutionary anthropology. So for a very long time, when people thought about evolutionary theory, they quickly became a little bit pessimistic. You probably know the book by Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, that was published in the 70s. Very important book and that I can still recommend. I loved that book when I read it in college. An often misunderstood book. Absolutely. It's a masterpiece. It really is, about the role of genes in the evolution of species.

But in the first few editions of the book, there was this line about that we probably need to teach our kids altruism and generosity because they are born selfish. And that really sort of rhymed, how do you say that, with the zeitgeist. It was sort of the me decade, zeitgeist um it was sort of the me decade uh yeah according to time magazine and um individualism was on the ride on the rise and especially in the 80s and the 90s i mean cynicism was sort of avant-garde back then i think um and um that was sort of the standard interpretation that people had of evolutionary theory was sort of a pessimistic interpretation, is that people are, again, born selfish, and that's just the way evolution works. There's now a new generation of researchers

that pretty much says the opposite. So one guy is called Brian Hare. He talks about survival of the friendliest, with exactly that title, which means that for millennia, it was actually the friendliest among us who had the most kids and had the biggest chance of passing on their genes to the next generation. Nice guys finish first. And that only changed a relatively short time ago when we became sedentary, when we settled down and started building villages and cities around 10,000 years ago.

Now, 10,000 years sounds like a long time ago, but actually for historians who like to look at the bigger picture, it's not that long ago, actually, because we've been around for, what is it, 300,000 years? Yeah. So the biggest part of our history, we lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers in societies that were, together is in societies that were, according to the evidence we have, relatively peaceful, egalitarian, and also quite healthy, by the way. We didn't have infection diseases like COVID-19 because we didn't live too close to other animals. A lot less people to catch disease from. Well, especially animals. So infection diseases are the product of often domestication, right? Because we just live too close to our animals. I mean, factory farming is also a big cause of a lot of these new diseases that are here every few years.

That was basically the case for a very long part of our history. And then we made the biggest mistake we ever made. There's literally a paper with that title by Jared Diamond, the geographer. He's one of my favorite writers. He's written the book Guns, Germs and Steel. It's from the end of the 90s. Anyway, he calls the invention of agriculture, and I would include, by the way, settling down, becoming sedentary with that. He calls it the biggest mistake in all of human history, because that inaugurated the era of warfare, inequality, violence, infection diseases,

plagues, you name it. We should never have done it. Yeah, I've read this argument in a few places. I've also heard it described as the agriculture trap. And it's a really interesting because, you know, the way it's always been presented to us is that agriculture is the beginning of civilization and the moment at which everything got better. correct me, but I love to sketch it out and then you fill in the blanks, is that, you know, basically these grasses and other plants took advantage of us in a way, figured out that as, you know, as much as anything evolutionary can be said to figure anything out, a way for us to propagate them by planting them massively. And in exchange, we were able to massively increase our populations, but at the expense of our quality of life. Because now people live a lot less. People started life expectancy went down and the actual labor required.

Like it's a lot less pleasant to farm wheat or rice or what have you than it is to, you know, live a hunter gatherer lifestyle. Yeah, absolutely. And this is not just true about agriculture, but it's true for almost all the milestones of civilization. So, think about the invention of writing. Was that a great thing that suddenly everyone started to read poetry or something like that? Yes! No, actually, writing was mainly bureaucracy to keep track of debts, mainly, so that you can see who owned what amount of slaves, for example. Slavery is also a really civilized or modern phenomenon here.

Another example is, well, the invention of cities, obviously, is that people started living too close to one another, so cities became petri dishes, basically, for the development of diseases. Money is another great example. People often believe in this myth that we just invented money out of convenience because you have two cows and I have one goat and, you know, it's hard to trade. So probably money is more useful. Absolutely not the case. You know, I'm reading David Graeber's book about that right now. Well, there you go. There you go. Then you already know it. But for your listeners, you know, money was an invention of the state and it, because it really, um, helped to, um,

to, to pay for wars, uh, and to raise armies and, um, uh, and helped you to collect taxes, basically. Now, as you know, I'm quite fond of taxation, especially when it's about taxing the rich. I think it's a great idea. But for the biggest part of our history, taxes were incredibly unjust, you know, mainly paid by the poor and mainly used to finance horrible wars. Yeah, what strikes me about so many of those stories, the truth about the birth of agriculture, the truth about the birth of money,

is that we get the truth about these things once we start listening to anthropologists. Like David Graeber, his book on debt, is like economists have made up this myth about where money came from. But as an anthropologist, I can tell you that it didn't fucking happen. We've gone and looked at every society. This never once has, you know,

barter turned into money, right, et cetera. And once you actually, I love the approach of, you know, when you actually go and look at the way humans organize societies, once we give up our sort of, you know, more facile assumptions about this is how it works, a lot of our edifice of what we've built mentally of how we think human society is organized kind of crumbles once you look at how it actually is organized, once you actually listen to

anthropologists, sociologists, historians, people like that. I think that's a really, really great point. And I think it goes to the heart of what makes history so powerful and what makes it the most subversive of all the sciences, of all the social sciences. It just shows us that things can be different and that there's nothing inevitable about the way we structured our society and economy right now. It can all change. change. It also teaches us to distrust theory. So one example from my other book is about what happens when bankers go on strike. Now, as you know, the economists will tell us, well, bankers are very important. They have a lot of human capital. They've went to great universities. They're very smart. They're very productive. They contribute a lot to GDP. So if they go on strike, that's terrible. That's a disaster. But my approach as a historian is to think, well, did it ever happen? Do we have a natural experiment of bankers going on strike? Turns out we have. In Ireland in the 1970s, bankers were angry that their wages were not keeping up with inflation. So they said, you know what? We'll go on strike and then you'll see just how important we are.

Right. And the strike lost for six months and nothing much happened. Is this like the bank tellers or is this the stock brokers? No, no, no. The whole financial system, you know? Wow.

People couldn't access their bank accounts for six months and they had to invent their own money. That's what they did. Wow. So the pub owners became the new bankers, actually, because there's one historian who later wrote that, you know, if you sell liquids to people, you probably know something about their liquidity as well.

They started writing these IOUs on pieces of toilet paper and on packs of cigar boxes, etc. And that worked out pretty well. Most Irish people don't remember it because it didn't really have a big impact on society. The economy just kept growing, et cetera. Now, another example of this that I have in this book about sort of let's just look what really happens is this Lord of the Flies story.

You know, Lord of the Fl flies, the very famous novel. I wanted, I was going to tee you up to talk about this. You wrote an article about this a few months ago, I believe. Yeah. Please, please tell us this story.

It's fascinating. Well, I guess most of us have at least heard about Lord of the flies or maybe we're forced to read it in school or something like that. It's this very famous novel by william golding about kids that end up on an island and they got a pig head they smashed the kids glasses uh very scary i read it in seventh grade uh i remember how cheap the paper of the paperback was it was like just copies of lord of the flies were just like floating around my middle school

like you just go to the bathroom there'd be one on the floor they were all over the place yeah yeah yeah it's and it's a classic example of veneer theory here you have kids who are well educated well behaved you know very nice good british boarding school kids but you give them freedom you put them on an uninhabited island and let them build their own society and chaos yeah murder violence the savage comes out in each and every one of them and the message there and yeah the message there is if we if we don't have civilization if we remove that thin veneer the which is civilizing us and and keeping us nice and stopping us from murdering each other once you you remove civilization, people go nuts and they start tearing out each other's throats

and braining each other with coconuts. Yeah. Or that basically we have to choose between freedom and security. We can't have both. You know, you can have freedom, but that's going to be a war of all against all. Or you can have security, but then you won't be able to make your own choices

because you need the police, army, powerful rulers, CEOs, monarchs, you name it. That's basically the idea. Now, again, I thought as a historian, well, maybe we can just see if it has ever happened, maybe. Maybe there's been a case sometime in old world history where real kids shipwrecked on an island. It would be interesting to see. So, yeah, I started on this journey. Obviously, you know, first typed in on Google, kids shipwrecked on island, real life Lord of the Flies. And, well, first found an obscure blog that told this story that supposedly had happened on Tonga, which is an island group in the Pacific Ocean.

And after that, I devoted about a year of my life to this story because it took a lot of time. But I managed to really confirm that it did happen. And I traveled to Australia to track down a couple of the boys who are now 70 years old, by the way. Wow. They're not really boys anymore. But they were 13 to 15 years old back then, and they survived for one and a half years on an uninhabited island. Wow. And they're still the best of friends up until today. Four of them are still alive,

and especially the captain who rescued them, he's a wonderful man named Peter Warner, and one of the boys um mano they're still soulmates today you know but the ones they murdered on the island are dead right the ones who are alive are the winners and they killed a bunch of other boys while they were on the island that's the story isn't it no i'm sorry you know if this would be a if this would be a hollywood film and it's going to be a ho film, by the way, but if it would be, say, a fictional Hollywood film, people would say, this is so unrealistic. This is so naive. Come on.

These kids, you know, they just stay friends. And when they have fights, they impose this timeout, and then one of them goes to one side of the island, the other goes to the other side of the island, cool off for a little bit, come back and say sorry. Highly unrealistic. But yeah, it really happened, I'm afraid. So in reality, it was what? They created a nice little world for themselves? It was not violent? It was friendly and peaceable?

Yeah. In Dutch, we like to say that it was a it's a very wet story how they say that it's a very what does that mean uh i don't know it's sort of like a very um sentimental story but but in this case uh as i said yeah it really happened. So at first, obviously, they had to find food as soon as possible. So they ate raw eggs, et cetera, and birds that they could find. Or by the way, I should start with the fact that they drifted for eight days

and almost dying of hunger and thirst when they ended up on the island. But anyway, then they sort of, yeah, they built their own mini society there. So they worked in teams to be on the island. But anyway, then they sort of, yeah, they built their own mini society there. So they worked in teams, two to be on the lookout for ships, two to tend to the garden and two to cook. They always, you know, started with singing songs in the morning and also before they went to sleep, they built their own hut.

I mean, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that all kids would be able to survive on an island like that. And a lot of their cultural knowledge as Tongans was obviously very important. It's an island nation. People grow up with the sea there. But I am saying that if millions of kids around the globe are still forced to read lord of the flies in school right then maybe they also deserve to know about the one time in all of world history where real kids shipwrecked on a real

island because that's a very different story yeah Yeah. And they might have a much more optimistic view of humanity if they did or if they did hear that story. Well, we have to take a really quick break. I've got so many more questions for you, but we'll be right back with more Rutger Bregman. Okay, we're back with rucker bregman so we have this idea that humanity is cruel and mean to each other we need civilization to protect us you argue fundamentally that that's wrong or you know the story from the lord of the flies is wrong i. I almost said Lord of the Rings. That story is also wrong. But let me ask, though, you did talk about, let's talk more about, you know, as a historian, the, you know, the long sweep of human history. You talked about how,

you know, rulers arising would, you know, horribly tax their, you horribly tax their subjects, et cetera, slavery, these sort of things arising. And it does occur to me like those are also a product of human civilization. And I don't know, isn't there a possibility of committing an error of saying, okay, well, when humans are really left to their own devices, hunter gatherers before, you know, money and before agriculture, the boys on the, on the desert Island, that's real humanity. And then, you know, when, uh, you know, when we get money in slavery, all that's, that's fake humanity. That's something else. Um, when aren't these things all humanity and, and how do we then begin to weigh, you know, the light versus the dark? I think that's a really good point.

You know, I devote one chapter to the history of war in the book. And for a long time, people thought that war has basically been with us since forever. But now archaeologists actually think the opposite. That war is a quite recent invention that indeed starts with the moment people start settling down and invent agriculture and they start living in these groups. And you get these in-group, out-group tendencies. Also, the developing hierarchies are important here. Now, obviously, these were all possibilities already latent within human nature. I like to see them as what

evolutionary anthropologists call a mismatch. So an example that everyone knows of a mismatch is fast food, right? We are just not designed or we've not evolved to be able to withstand fast food, McDonald's, sugar, etc. We've evolved to be attracted to it, right? To find it delicious, but in fact, too delicious in a way that is ultimately detrimental to us. Yeah. And that was fine if you lived on the savannah or in the jungle and you would, say, encounter a tree that was full of fruits. Then it made sense, also evolutionary, to just eat all the fruits. Because then you would save something for later, basically, and store that in your body.

But if you're surrounded with delicious food all day, then we haven't evolved for that. And I think you can look at many atrocities in human history in the same way. That doesn't mean that it's not human, that they're not products of human nature, but in a way, it's also all about the context in which we've ended up. Now, two things are important here, two sort of dark sides, I think, of human nature. On the one hand, it's our groupish tendencies. So yes, we've evolved to be friendly, but mostly towards those who are close to us. So people that we can see, hear, feel that are part of our own group. We've really been designing for face-to-face contact. We can look one another in the eyes, for example.

We have very unique eyes with white sclera um so that we can track each other gazes all the other primates the chimpanzees and the bonobos and you name it they've got dark around their irises so they can't really see what they're looking at they're a little bit like mafiosi wearing shades uh while we just give away our our gazes to everyone and also and i thought this was really fascinating. We are the only species or pretty much the only species in the whole animal kingdom with the ability to blush, involuntarily give away our feelings to those around us in order to establish trust.

But as you know, that only works in face-to-face context. And as we all know from from twitter once people become anonymous and you know they they start to behave yeah twitter is the ultimate sunglasses where your your natural ability to read emotion out off of each other yeah it's a very incredibly inhuman environment it's basically designed for inhuman behavior yeah Because so many of the things that, yeah, makes it, you know, helps us to cooperate are simply not there. So that's one really important thing, this sort of these groupish tendencies and also the role that distance plays is that if the distance increases, people start to behave

quite a bit nastier. And the second thing is the fact that power corrupts. I think that's really important. We now have a lot of evidence, especially from psychology, and historians would agree here, by the way, because there's so many examples in history, that power is like this drug. There's even evidence from brain scans now that it impacts the regions in your brain that are involved with feelings of empathy or with mirroring other people. But it doesn't really work anymore with people who are more powerful. They're somehow disconnected from the rest of the society. Their social Wi-Fi isn't really working anymore. Yeah. And that is, I think, also an explanation for many of the bad behavior that we see throughout history.

I also think there might be an argument here about the systems that we build in our civilization. You know, that we, you know, especially now, our entire civilization is these massive systems that we barely understand. You know, that's why everybody who works for, you know, a company like Exxon or Google could be a good person in their personal life and, you know, could even, you know, respond when they hear about the bad things their company does and say, oh, yeah, no, I agree. Oh, I'm really worried about that. say, oh, yeah, no, I agree. Oh, I'm really worried about that. But the system that, you know, they have collectively built and participated in is so large and, you know, does bad things that are almost inhuman in a way. I'm thinking again about just because I'm reading David Graeber's book about how, you know, debt interpersonally is just, oh, like you said, with the pub owner, you know what I mean? Like, it's just a little IOU is like, yeah, sure, I'll give you some milk

and just remember later, you know, you know, I'll need something from you. And it's a very human thing, but that's a far cry away from what a credit card company does, you know, which is the same concept, but in this immense systematized way that, that is like, our humanity is lost in that transition to something massive. There are very few genuine evil people in this world. So, for example, the Joker in Batman, he has, you know, those people are very, very rare who just enjoy watching the world burn. What you see in history is actually that most evil is perpetrated in the

name of the good yeah or in the name of indifference now but what you see a lot is that uh comradeship or loyalty or friendship are abused or or somehow are our tools um i've got one chapter in the book about german soldiers during the second world war who kept fighting, you know, fanatically in 1944 and 1945, when it was clear they were going to lose the war. And the Allied psychologists, they just couldn't understand it. You know, why are they fighting? They're going to lose. What's the point? prisoners of war and they discovered that they were not these soldiers sort of the average wehrmacht soldiers were not ideological maniacs but they were just fighting for their friends

they didn't want to have their friends down um and that doesn't i mean that's not meant as a justification of anything it's an explanation um but it's yeah it's really important to keep in mind because so often we, we misunderstand the bad things that happen in our society by saying, oh, those are bad people, you know, who do bad things because they are bad. Yeah. It's very often the opposite. Well, okay. You've, I mean, every word you say, you know, helps convince me of your thesis of, you know, the truth about humanity versus the story that we're told. But what are the results of the false story that we've all lived with, of the Lord of the Flies version?

What are the ways that we have built our society on that mistake? And what do you suggest we do differently? What changes about our society once we have adopted your view you know there's this thing that reality is the thing that's still there even when you stop believing in it which i've always liked but on the other side there are also ideas or stories that once you believe in them, they can become true. Self-fulfilling prophecies. So, for example, if people believe that a bank goes bankrupt, then it will probably go bankrupt. People will withdraw their money and then, boom, there it goes.

Theories of human nature are a bit like that. You know, they can be placebos that cure people because, you know, you believe that most people are decent and, you know, that's what you assume in other people. And you start designing your whole society around it and then building your democracy or schools and workplaces around it. And it turns out, hey, people are decent if that's what you assume in them. But if you have a society a society you know just theoretically where everyone has to read lord of the flies and you teach people from a very early age that you know most other people are selfish and that you have to be very wary uh of of strangers especially yeah um and that everything you know the things that are most important in life

are money and status and you name it, and building a good CV or having a good resume on LinkedIn, blah, blah, blah. If you build that kind of society, then yeah, you're going to get different behavior. So basically the second half of my book is an argument for saying, well, let's turn this around. You know, if we start with a different view of human nature, that's not some innocent self-help idea about, ooh, the power of kindness. No, it's a genuinely revolutionary idea. You can do things radically different. You can build very different kind of schools, very different kind of workplaces. You can do democracy in a completely different way. You can even build prisons where the guards socialize with the prisoners and where you get the lowest recidivism rate, you know, the lowest chance that someone will commit another crime

once he or she gets out of prison, because these prisons genuinely make better people. That's the criminal justice system of Norway that I'm describing here, by the way. So it's not just some theory here, but it has real world profound implications for basically everything we do. Yeah. I often think about something that stuck with me for my whole life is I remember being in a restaurant in my teens. And you know, when you're, when you're most likely to have thoughts of stealing things and i was like oh you could just leave the restaurant you know and not pay like there's

no restaurant guards against that versus you know when you go to at least in america you go to the cvs and they keep the razor blades behind uh lot glass because they're worried you're going to steal them right or you go to a store where everything has an alarm on it. There's no restaurant that behaves similarly, that that has some sort of system to make sure you don't dine and dash. And that's because they I think something about eating culture makes us understand that people are extremely unlikely to do that. Like the social pressure is what stops us from doing it or just, yeah, what decent person would do such a thing?

And I think about how much less pleasant it would be to eat at a restaurant if they did have that protection. If they were to put in some scenario of you have to pay before you get the food, well, then fast food restaurants do do that. But if every restaurant operated that way or had some, you're locked in until you go to the cashier and pay them in some way,

it would ruin the experience. And there's like a. I don't know, our when we think about people so negatively, it does. We end up building systems that are punitive and unpleasant and make things worse for everybody. Yeah. Yeah. This is one of the reasons why I believe that Scandinavian countries or European countries in general are actually richer than, say, the US or Brazil as well, simply because of the social capital. If you have societies where most people trust each other, you can have so much more efficiency. Because if people don't trust each other, what you need is bureaucracy, lawyers, security, all that kind of thing. And that's just an

incredible waste. So a huge part of GDP in the US is security service, lawyers, corporate lawyers, et cetera, et cetera, which is basically the things you need to pay for if you don't trust each other. Now, if you actually do trust each other and are willing to, you know, basically allow some collateral damage and say, okay, you know, we're going to be ripped off a couple of times, but we just accept that because the alternative is just a price we're not willing to pay, then you're all better off. Trust is the most important, most valuable thing that a society can have. And this is also why I think, you know, there are good reasons to be, I mean, there are

many reasons, obviously, to be a bit pessimistic about the state of America today. But sort of the longer, most powerful argument is, I think, these polls where you see that the amount of people in the US that says, I believe that most people can be trusted, that on average, you know, most people are fine, has been going down, down, down since the 50s. What is it at? Do you know? It's now, I think, around 30%. And it used to be higher than 50%. If you look at Scandinavian countries, it's around 70%.

So in the Netherlands here, it's also around 70%. Now, that doesn't mean that people are more selfish in the US. Don't get me wrong. It's absolutely not the case. If you, for example, do these experiments with, I mean, people, you know, you drop wallets and you test if people bring them back. You know, it's not that Americans are more egoistic or anything like that. It's just you have this, what researchers call the values perception gap, we, we say about ourselves that we think cooperation and compassion are very important. We just believe we're the only ones. Yeah. We say those other people,

you know, they're actually selfish, but I'm compassionate. You know, I, I think it's important to help other people. Um, so that's, that's, uh, that's a real challenge, um, to sort of change perceptions there because, you know, it could really influence behavior as well. Yeah, it's another example of the perception creating the reality. I do want to ask you, though, this is maybe just slightly adjacent to the topic, but, you know, when we're comparing ourselves to Scandinavian countries or you're in the Netherlands, another, another country that I think people use as, uh, as a positive example. I visited Norway a few years ago. Um, and a beautiful country. My ancestors are actually from, or I have ancestors from Norway. So I felt very at home. I was like, oh, it's drizzly. This is great. Like, I like the temperature. This is clearly the climate I was made for. is great. Like, I like the temperature. This is clearly the climate I was made for. But I also had the sense I was like, this whole country is like visiting like my rich friend's house. You know what I mean? Like they have so much oil money, right? There's like, there's a lot of, there's a lot of stuff there where it's like, oh, we should all live like this, but we all can't

afford it. There's like a, there's like like a a privilege almost in terms of the way that the you know the the socioeconomic conditions of the country and i understand yeah with the wallet tests uh for example i've heard of these experiments where they drop a wallet and see how many people return them that it's not like there's something different in the culture of america or you know our our innate goodness as people but is there you know when we're making those comparisons is there not something about, when we're making those comparisons, is there not something about the countries that we should be taking into account about?

Yeah. So if I would talk about the cultural differences between sort of the Nordic European countries, and I would include the Netherlands here, with the UK and especially obviously with the US, you know, I wouldn't emphasize the oil money or the social security or universal healthcare, et cetera. These are all important.

But the main difference I would emphasize is, in Sweden, they call it Jantelagen, the law of Jante. In the Netherlands, we call it Hayfield culture. It's this social phenomenon where basically success is seen as a crime. We don't have that here. You know, the humble brag is, for example, very important in the Netherlands. I had a bit of success with my books in the netherlands and that's it puts you in a very difficult situation because you know because it's very it's very hard what to say because people start to distrust you very quickly and

this reminds me by the way of um the political system of nomadic intergatherers you know there's been a really interesting research here uh where it turns out that nomadic intergaterers. There's been a really interesting research here where it turns out that nomadic intergaterers from around the globe have this system called the reverse dominance hierarchy, which basically means that their political system is a pyramid, but then on top, right? So, turn around. So the group controls the leaders and the leaders have to be incredibly humble. Humble is their, you know, it's an absolute political prerequisite. So imagine Donald Trump in prehistory, he wouldn't have survived for long. You know, wouldn't be passed out of the group, died alone. And you need friends in order to survive because, you know,

if you didn't have friends, then you didn't have food in the long run. Now this humbleness, it went really far. So there's this one description of an anthropologist who studied a tribe in Namibia, where he heard about the story of how successful hunters are supposed to behave. Well, imagine you had a great kill, you know, it was a really successful day and you come back to the camp, what do you do? Well, you say nothing. You know, you sit silently at the fire and someone comes up and asks, well, did you catch anything today? And you say, oh no, no, not really. It wasn't very successful today. And then that person knows tonight's going to be a feast. Awesome.

So, and that attitude, I see that in Norwayway i see it in sweden in denmark in the netherlands there's this social law of that successful people basically have to shut up and if they don't then we'll make sure they will and i think that's a it's um sometimes a lot of a lot of times europeans point at the us and say well look you have got the silicon valley there and they've got many more successful companies because they don't have this repressive cultural phenomenon where people look down on success. But to be honest, if I look at the state of democracy here and compare it to the US, I think I'm willing to accept the bargain. You know, the U.S.? Yeah. I think I'm willing to accept the bargain.

Well, I'm curious about, I'm surprised this is the first time that we've brought up their names. But, you know, a lot of the dialogue that we're having here between these two ideas, you know, is emblematic. And, you know, the works are like, you know, Thomas Hobbes and Rousseau, right? It's like those comparisons. These ideas have deep roots. I'm curious if there are ways in which the negative view of humanity, in your view, has been built into our political structure

in even deeper ways. You were talking about prisons, but in terms of just our, yeah, I mean, our more fundamental structures or ideas about society. Sure. Well, I can give a lot of examples. I think we just got to look at our institutions first.

So schools, for example. Most schools still rely on the idea that you need to put knowledge into the brains of kids and they're organized in a quite hierarchic way with classrooms and teachers. And the kids have to do homework and then they get graded for that. You know, this is all sort of the standard things that we associate with school. Can you do that differently? Yeah, you can. You know, there are some radical schools out there that have abolished homework, abolished most of the hierarchy. There are even some like radically democratic schools where, you know, the students can, you know, decide who they want to hire as teachers, for example.

And it turns out that these schools work pretty well with good results and they produce healthy individuals. In almost every single way, they're the opposite of what you think when you say the word school, but it still works. Same is true for the workplace. So the standard workplace is this pyramid again, you know, with the manager who has a plan and then he has sub-managers and then at the bottom you have the people who do the actual work. Can you do it differently? Yes. There are more and more examples now of companies and organizations that have basically abolished management. I've got one example in my book of by far the most successful healthcare organization in the Netherlands.

It's an organization called Neighborhood Care. And they have now 15,000 employees, all in self-directed teams who decide for themselves who they want to hire, what kind of additional training they need, their schedule, everything, basically. And it's, as I said, it's highly successful and they deliver higher quality healthcare at a cheaper cost. Because, you know, if you actually start trusting people, then you can get rid of a lot of the bureaucracy and the management that often doesn't really have anything. So you can do you can just look at basically we talked about prisons you can also do democracy in a completely different way

if you think that citizens are not just these selfish apathetic people who just want to watch television cnn fox news and be angry um then you can move to a society where maybe the citizens can become the politicians you know yeah and you don't have career politicians anymore but you go back to the original greek idea of what a democracy is where in in ancient athens they um randomly selected citizens from the population to be politicians so most people would be politician once or twice in their lifetime. Or you could do what they call participatory budgeting, which has been a very successful movement since the 1980s, where basically people from the left to the right, rich, poor, young, old, come together to decide, you know, basically what they're going to spend the money on.

And the fascinating thing here is that if you give people that freedom, if you give them the opportunity to talk to experts, to have good knowledge, and to bridge that political divide, it works. The big problem is that it's incredibly boring. It's incredibly boring. It sounds like a lot of meetings is what you're describing.

Well, that's, I mean, Oscar Wilde once said that the whole problem with socialism is that it takes too many evenings. No, but this, I mean, this is not socialism, obviously. It's democracy. And it works, but television doesn't like it. News media don't like it because it's basically people drinking coffee around the table and having reasonable discussions yeah it's the opposite of reality television and as you know i mean the the whole challenge in the in the beginning of reality television that is now i don't know what is it 20 years old uh or actually the real world of mtv goes goes longer but the

challenge for the producers of reality television has always been to make people behave in nasty ways, right? And they know that if you don't do anything, if you just leave people alone and govern their own affairs, it's going to be so boring. Nothing happens, you know?

They're just going to have a cup of tea. The number of times I'm watching The Bachelor and I'm like, oh, the producers gave that girl a lot of wine and then they said you go over there and you talk to stacy and you tell her she said talk some shit about you and you go talk to her right now they have to instigate that shit it doesn't happen by itself yeah true yeah yeah yeah well what you're talking about is just sort of how fundamentally better systems you can build when you have a more positive view of humanity in any way. That like with schools, one of the things I learned in my own work is that, you know, people just love to learn. They just genuinely enjoy it. It's fun. the things i learned in my own work is that you know people just love to learn uh they just genuinely enjoy it it's fun they like it if you make it fun and you make it just you know you you

make it go down easily enough they will gravitate towards it and come back that's why people are listening to this podcast right now is because they love to learn and us just talking about these difficult issues is something that they fucking enjoy. That's it. And school, yeah, the school system I was raised in is based on the opposite premise, which is that children don't want to do it and you have to make them do it and you have to monitor them to see if they do it, et cetera. Same thing you're talking about with a workplace.

It's, you know, do you have to, or do you assume your employees are going to slack off and you have to like be standing there with a stick? Or do you assume that they can make good decisions that they they're motivated simply by the love of of doing a good job and, you know, that they can self-organize in a way? And, yes, the same thing with democracy. I mean, I'm really I've you know, we previous guest we had on the show, woman named Nithya Raman, who ran for city council here in Los Angeles, ran a really revolutionary campaign. And her campaign was premised on just trying to engage people and tell people who don't ever think about local politics. Hey, guess what? There's this position called city council person. It's really important. Your vote is very powerful for it. And let's have some meetings.

Let's let's talk together about what we need. Like, you know, let's do it in a real community focused way. And no one had literally ever done this before in Los Angeles. And it was massively successful. Like literally every other politician had been, oh, let me just get a couple endorsements. I'll send out a lot of mailers because that's the only way to get my name out there. You know, I'll send I'll spend a million dollars on mailers versus, hey, let's have neighbors having conversations. And that turned out to be more successful. So, I mean, what you're describing is your view, when put into practice, wins in all these arenas

because you end up with more effective systems. Yeah, it's the power of expectations, you know. There's this old famous study done by a researcher named bob rosenthal in the 60s so um what he did is uh he had a school where kids were asked to do a simple intelligence test and then they gave the results to the teachers and said you know these are the real promising kids you know who are really smart. According to our findings, you know, maybe you don't see that right now, but they have the most potential to develop. And those others, well, not so much. In reality, this was just fake. They just randomly chose these supposedly, you know, promising kids and set that to their kids. In

reality, there was nothing. But it turned out a year later that indeed these supposedly promising kids had uh much better results because you know the power of expectations teachers treated them differently they were like you know i i expect so much more of you and i'm and that is just something you see that in education but obviously i mean you see it everywhere. It's one of the ways I think that racism does its terrible work. It's the power of low expectations where you say, you know, I don't expect much of you. And the terrible tragedy here is that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don't expect much of people around you, then you're not going to see much.

Yeah, I experienced that. I, in my own schooling, was put into a quote gifted and talented class. I don't know what criteria that was based on. There were smarter kids than me at the school, probably because I was also diagnosed with ADD and I was very impulsive, disruptive kid. And they're like, maybe we put him in a special class. He'll do a little better. But it meant a lot to me. It meant a lot to me that I was like, oh, they're like, oh, you're in this special this special class, this special teacher who like took us a little more seriously as adults and as thinkers, you know. And that was something that, you know, I found I found inspiring. And that's to me when literally every student would have benefited from that? And there were students at the school who had the opposite experience, who were tracked into the vocational classes, you know, which were treated at the time, not that they should have been, but they were treated at the time as being negative. Yeah. And once you really get this, because obviously this is a simple idea that's still very easy to forget.

So once you really get this, it's also, you know, in your personal life, quite amazing to experience what you can do with it. Yeah. You know, just, how do you call it? You know, kill them with kindness or the power of, you know, non-conforming behavior where someone opposes you with distrust. I have this sometimes with my emails is that I get these incredibly angry emails and then I send them, you know, a short, you know, relatively nice email back. And people are often totally shocked by it. Like, oh, God, he responds relatively nice. And God, I'm so ashamed of myself sorry i do this all the time i go into my dms on the various services and people write ah you're so full of shit and i can and i say oh thank you for watching the show uh why do you feel

that way and they immediately they immediately get so nice. Yeah. That's because at first you were just abstract. You weren't a real person. There was a huge amount of distance between you and that person. And then suddenly you're an actual human being. And they're like, God, but I don't want to be nasty to actual human beings. But yeah, it's a real tragedy as well right that because i mean we live in a big world with more than seven billion people and um if you look at so many of the terrible

things that happen to humans and animals by the way because if you think about factory farming i think i mean most of us couldn't eat a single piece of meat if we had to see a video of of the life of that particular animal before we could take our first bite. Right. We just couldn't do it. But this distance, you know, this whole system that that just makes it abstract for us. Yeah. That enables the atrocity. So, yeah. Well, look, I could talk to you for a thousand years.

We should come in for a landing at some point. So I'd love to end by talking about some of your bigger proposals, your bigger policy proposals. I mean, a few years ago, you wrote a book called Utopia for Realists, your other book that you mentioned earlier. And, you know, that you, for instance, talked about helped popularize the idea of universal basic income, other policy proposals. I'm curious how those fit into this view and what other sort of similar, you know, if you could go advise the new Biden administration or go speak before the UN and get your policy proposals enacted, what are they? Okay, so the biggest thing or the most important thing for the Biden administration right now is to be bold and aggressive. Because you've basically got only two years and you've really got to show people substantial results. You know, that make an actual difference in their lives.

If you compare that to, say, the Obama administration, back then, Democrats were very enamored by, I mean, the sophisticated science of nudging, for example, making small changes in, I don't know, the description of a policy or a letter of the fiscal authorities to people. And that would, you know, change the world. If they go that direction again, then, you know, they're going to be, I think, destroyed two years from now. And then they probably deserve that as well. No, you really need to go big and bold. And the good news is that there are really exciting new ideas out there.

And that's very different from, say, 10, 12 years ago. You know, after the financial crash of 2008, everyone knew what they were against. After the financial crash of 2008, everyone knew what they were against. Against the austerity, against the establishment, against growth, against everything. But it wasn't really clear what they were for. That's very different. I think especially in America, it's pretty clear what needs to be done, right? Yeah.

Whether you talk about universal health care or poverty alleviation, a guaranteed basic income, ambitious climate policy. I mean, it's all pretty clear. And I think it's all grounded in basically a more hopeful view of human nature. Actually, already the money that people received during the pandemic is grounded in this more hopeful view of human nature, isn't it? Yeah.

Because people got 600 and now they're they're going to get more right what is it another 1400 um the assumption here is that people are not going to spend it on drugs or alcohol but they're going to use it to pay for food or you know for education or whatever so the fact that and and it has already worked um and the only thing that i'm saying is that it shouldn't be incidental, but it should be structural. So an incredibly rich country like the US should basically abolish poverty. And it should have done that decades ago. It's more than rich enough.

Yes, there will be some lazy people who do nothing. But who cares? You know, why focus on the lazy people? It doesn't matter. There's lazy rich people, too, who also do nothing. Oh, there are way more lazy people among doesn't matter there's lazy there's lazy rich people too who also do nothing oh there are way more lazy people among the rich you know because you know that's their biggest form of income is basically rent seeking you know they've got their properties and they just collect the rents that's it that's the the highest form of laziness that's by the way the

reason why i am in favor of a tax of laziness. Wealth taxes are taxes on laziness because they force people to actually work for their money, you know, and do maybe an essential job or something like that. Anyway, a universal basic income or a guaranteed basic income is grounded in this more hopeful view of human nature is that people want to contribute.

You know, they want to be part of society. They want to contribute to the common good. And again, we don't have to theorize here. For my book, Utopia for Realists, I looked at basically all the evidence we have. Turns out that actually it's an incredibly American idea. It was Richard Nixon who almost implemented it in the 1970s.

It didn't happen back then because Democrats loved the idea of a basic income, but they wanted a higher basic income. So they voted against Nixon's proposal because they thought, you know, there's going to be another time and then we'll pass it. Didn't happen. Very sad story. But yeah, back then there were these huge income, basic income experiments in the US. You know, thousands of people received it. So they just wanted to test how people would use the money, whether they would stop working.

And it was very successful. And I think it really also, I don't know, I think it works with the, I don't know, all the standard American ideas around, you know, the American dream, opportunity, venture capital for the people, et cetera. It's the ultimate marriage of left-wing and right-wing thinking, because you get freedom and security at the same time. You know, you get the freedom to decide for yourself what you want to do with your life. It gives you some venture capital. Or in Silicon Valley, they call it,

fuck you money. You know, the freedom to say no. And now only the rich have fuck you money where they say, no, I'm not going to do that. And I would love to live in a society where everyone has that freedom. Everyone can say, you know what? I'm not going to take this shitty job because I got enough money to live for another week or another month while I go find another job. They're not forced into the bad choice. And then people ask me, yeah, but Rutger, if everyone has a basic income, who's going to do my laundry? Who's going to wash my dishes? And then I'm like, well, you're going to start paying people who do that right now a living wage or more than that. And if you don't want to do that, you're going to do it yourself. Well, let me ask you this about UBI had the uh one of the founders of the organization give

directly on the show um which uh you know talked about this idea of people using cash in the most efficient way um and they're also doing uh uh basically ubi trial um i i believe by you know giving giving cash to folks um one of the things we talked about though is that you know that whole effective altruism movement a lot of it comes from extremely wealthy people who are asking the question, how do I give my money away as efficiently as possible? Right. It comes from one of the Facebook co-founders is one of the big people in this movement and has donated a huge amount of money to give directly. And a criticism I've heard of UBI on the left is that it's, you know, it's very popular among the Silicon Valley folks because, hey, this is a way that we can keep the economy moving, make sure that the lower classes have enough money to keep buying our shit without us having to, you know, pay that much more in taxes. Right. We don't need to pay for infrastructure or things like that.

We can just, hey, give out a couple hundred bucks a month. That's cheaper for us. And it means they have to keep spending money on things like that. We can just, hey, give out a couple hundred bucks a month. That's cheaper for us. And it means they have to, you know, keep spending money on things that we make. And as someone who's very critical of wealth, I mean, I've obviously saw your clip at Davos where you're telling off the billionaires. Wonderful.

You know, yeah, but you're a UBI proponent. I'm curious how you tackle that argument. Yeah, I think this is such a destructive tendency among the left is that they say, oh, but wait a minute, Elon Musk likes the idea as well, then it must be crap. Right. And they stop thinking about it. I mean, obviously there are different versions of UBI and there are some versions that are probably bad. So if you would finance the whole thing with just say a value added tax, which is a highly regressive tax, especially the poor and the middle class pay, then maybe it's not going to prove enough. Now, I would obviously finance it in a way that it will reduce inequality. I think it's actually great news that a lot of people in Silicon Valley or tech elites are now talking more and more about that instead of tax avoidance or tax evasion.

I think it's also good news that there are billionaires or millionaires, more and more multimillionaires out there who say, you know what, I'm very rich and I'm grateful for what's been given to me, you know? And I acknowledge that I am rich because of the investments in many ways that society and the taxpayers did for me. So please text me, you know? I want to pay back. The sad thing is obviously, though, that they're in the minority. So everyone loves Bill Gates, and indeed, bill gates is a blessing to humanity you know the day bill gates was born was a wonderful day for humanity i mean he's probably he saved millions of lives just in his fight against diseases like malaria but you know there are hundreds and hundreds of billionaires who are not like bill gates sadly um so anyway i

think that we shouldn't be too, you can believe different things at the same time, right? You don't have to choose. So philanthropy, for example, you know, great. You know, if people want to give money to good causes, wonderful. But please don't use philanthropy as a way to distract people from your own corrupt business model and the fact that you're not paying your employees a living wage and that you're destroying their environment. That's what I wanted to say in Davos, you know, two years ago when I was there. Basically, you guys are all hypocrites

because you use philanthropy as a distraction tool. That doesn't mean I'm against philanthropy. No, what Bill Gates is doing is great, I think. But he's the exception, I'm afraid. Yeah, I mean, I'm of two minds about I think, as you say, I believe both things simultaneously. And yeah, I you know, when it comes to Bill Gates and this is a little bit off the topic, but, you know, there are billionaires who are like, I am giving away all my money, but they're giving it away in that way. Oh, I'm giving it to folks direct. I'm giving it to give directly. Right. They're not giving it to the organizations that are working for the systemic change that would take away even more of their money and the way the money of all their friends, you know, and there's a little bit of a conflict there. It's not going to doesn't mean I'm going to say,

Bill Gates, stop saving all those malaria lives. But I think you're right about getting in the way of actual progress with that argument. I'll put it differently. I think in a just society, billionaires don't exist. I think billionaires are what they call a policy failure. Because it's simply, it cannot be true that you are so brilliant that you deserve a billion dollars or you don't that's just not the case you're not that special i do believe that some people are more talented than others and some people produce more wealth but actually most of i mean this is the essence of what it means to be human is that we are fundamentally interdependent and that individually we are highly incompetent. We can do almost nothing, right?

Yeah. You know, I'm using technology right now that I don't really understand. A camera, a microphone. I'm eating food that I can't prepare on my own. I travel around in a car that I have hardly any clue how it works, you know, we are so incredibly incompetent and we rely on the other people all the time. And that is what makes us powerful. That is especially, this is our big superpower, this interdependence, that we rely on the traditions and the knowledge and the inventions of those who came before us. So this whole idea, you know, of people deserving to be a billionaire, I mean, philosophically and morally, it doesn't make sense to me at all. I do think there's room for inequality.

And I also think that some amount of inequality is probably best for all of us. I don't believe in communism where you share everything. But I think the burden of proof is on the rich. They should come up with really powerful proof that actually this inequality benefits even the very poor. And if you just walk around for, I don't know, for 50 minutes in Los Angeles, you see more homeless people than you find if you drive around for, I don't know, 30 days in Norway or in Sweden or whatever. So it's really unjustifiable, I think. And that's, yeah, I think we should basically abolish billionaires and probably half billionaires as well, because it's just, it cannot be true that they are so important that

they deserve all of this. Yeah. I mean, some people, some people are smarter than other people. Some people are more productive than other people. Nobody, Bill Gates is not millions of times more smart and productive than the average person walking around Los Angeles. You know, he's, he's good at some things that other people aren't good at, but not to such and such a degree.

Um, exactly. Well, let's see. Let's take, let's take us home here. Um, He's good at some things that other people aren't good at, but not to such and such a degree. Exactly. Well, let's see. Let's take us home here. Like, what, is there a dimension of your argument that you feel people can carry around in their daily lives? Is there a part of it that affects our daily behavior? I mean, we're talking about big structural changes. UBI, obviously, is a massive structural change one which has become oddly plausible to a degree i i wouldn't have expected uh that you know people are really

seriously considering it in a a pleasant surprise that it is um but just in terms of our of our daily behavior is there uh something that your argument gives us to take away yeah well look i absolutely hate self-help books i think they're they're one of the diseases of our times uh and it's it's maybe the best summary of uh of particularly american capitalism is this belief that you can change nothing except yourself. And I would rather start changing with our institutions and our structures, and then maybe at the end of the day we'll change ourselves a bit as well. Anyway, I must admit that I still couldn't resist,

because I'd been working on this book for five or six years, and I just started to notice that it did change me in a way. So I couldn't resist. And I wrote like these 10 rules for life, if you believe. Well, you know, if you had titled the book that, it might have been even bigger. I think there was a pretty big book with that name by, I forget the guy's name. I think he, something happened to him. I don't know where he went. Okay, okay. Anyway, what's the first rule for life if you believe that most people are pretty decent? I think it is when in doubt, assume the best. So often we do the opposite, right?

When we communicate with other people, especially when there's some distance in the communication, say we're using WhatsApp and someone sends you an emoji of a smiling piece of shit, right? And you're like, you know the emoji that I'm like a smiling... Exactly. Well, how do you interpret that?

It's very hard. And then what people do often is they, when there's some doubt, they assume the worst in others, which I think we shouldn't do for three reasons. In the first place, because statistically, most people are pretty decent. So it's just the odds are better if you assume the best. In the second place, even if people don't really mean well, then your positive response can have, you know, the non-complementary effect. So people can actually start behaving to you in a nice way if you do that, because, you know, you just sort of break the cycle. How do you say that? And then in the third place,

even if there are some professional con artists out there who just want to rip you off, who want to con you, et cetera, I think you should just accept it. Just accept that you will be conned a couple of times in your life. You know, there will be moments in your life that you'll be like, oh my God, I was so stupid. And you will feel ashamed. But when you feel that shame, be proud. Because actually, it's a sign that you're psychologically healthy. And if you've never been conned, then you should see a therapist.

Because probably your attitude to life is not trusting enough. And there's something wrong with you amen to that that is that that is very beautiful that's very beautiful and the the acceptance of having that positive view of humanity entails a certain acceptance of of loss to some degree of of being of accepting the accepting the, the, the occasional counterexample and furtherance of the, of the greater truth. Yeah. It's just a price that we should be willing to pay.

It's worth it. It really is. Well, thank you Rutgers so much for coming on the show. This has been a really fantastic conversation. I can't thank you enough. Thanks man. I really enjoyed it.

Well, thank you once again to Rutger Bregman for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. I appreciate all you folks for listening. That is it for us this week on Factually. I want to thank our producers, Kimmy Lucas and Sam Roudman, our engineer, Andrew Carson, Andrew WK for our theme song, The Fine Folks at Falcon Northwest for building me the beautiful custom gaming PC that I use to record this podcast and that I stream on at twitch.tv slash Adam Conover. You can find me at Adam Conover wherever you get your social media. If you have a question you would like me to answer, if you just want to give some feedback on the show, please give us a rating wherever you subscribe. But also you can send us an email at factually at adamconover.net. You can find all

my other shit on the internet at adamcounover.net as well. And that's it for us this week. We'll see you next time on Factually. Thank you so much for listening. That was a Hate Gum podcast.