It Could Happen Here - Humanity, the Bad feat. Andrew

Episode Date: July 15, 2025

Andrew and Gare discuss the reasons why people justify doing bad things, from pleasing authority to narratives of necessary evil. Sources: Humankind by Rutger BregmanSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart podcast. Hello and welcome to K'rappan here. Last episode, I was joined by Yeris and Davis. Hello. Addy's here again, because we're going to get more into what we spoke about last time. Last episode, we painted a hopeful account of humanity's nature, courtesy of my reading of Rutger Bregman's Humankind, a Hopeful History.

So I've probably fed into the anarchist or utopian narrative a bit with that previous episode but the truth is that I'm not really being optimistic, I'm being realistic, but realism has been confused with cynicism for so long that even acknowledging both sides of the coin can be seen as overly utopian. People can be bad and we'll get into the why, but for whatever reason they are bad, that is why, as anarchists have consistently argued, nobody should have authority. Now, they will always be outliers and this explanation I'm about to share is not going to get into every unique case of badness, but we are going

to get into some of the reasons that people do bad and what we can do about it. As I said last episode, we took issue with this idea of civilization as a thin veneer and we put forward the premise that humans are mostly pretty decent. In fact, I didn't mention it last episode, but we don't even really like to kill each other, contrary to popular belief. Bregman actually shares that in World War II, studies show that many soldiers didn't shoot their weapons even in combat. Trained soldiers had a difficult time actually pulling the trigger and killing people. There are exceptions, as I said before, but in a lot of cases it's very difficult for people to actually kill.

Military strategies ended up changing once authorities realised this, and the training programs of soldiers was redesigned to overcome this resistance. But that reluctance to kill does also indicate that it takes some effort to overcome our general decency towards each other. Because most people, again most on all, are not natural born killers. So again, how do we do bad? You know, all sorts of atrocities have been carried out by humans, both in ancient and modern times. What do you think is the cause? Self preservation in some way, either physical or psychological. I'm not, I'm not an anthropologist.

I'm not a sociologist. Most of my experiences with people is both queer people and then looking at Nazis and like political extremists. So it's maybe not the best sample size for the general population. I think I tend to exist kind of on the perimeter of most human experience. But I probably some form of either psychological or physical self-preservation in my experience slash opinion. That's interesting. I didn't think of it. I think it comes close to what Breckman ends up getting into. But I think self-preservation, well, we'll get into that in a bit.

You know, it's difficult to square that with just how brutal some of these disasters have been, you know, these atrocities that have taken place around the world, organized systemic industrial cruelty, you know, things like the Holocaust. Totally. It's interesting because I think it's two paradoxical instincts that play off each other. There's this self-preservation and there's also, I believe, and I think a some version of the death drive. And I think those can interact in really odd ways. But I- The death drive?

Yeah. Like specifically like fascism and like, you know, you can see this in like the genocides of the 20th century and 21st century specifically, but no, like fascism as like a political embodying of the death drive, which is, I think, also an aspect. I think these things exist together in parallel while being paradoxical.

And that's what produces a lot of the incongruity around things like fascism. It is like an inherently paradoxical system. When you say self-preservation, are you just talking about on the individual level or are you saying like community self-preservation as well? Both, both, but also I think not even just physical but also like psychological, like being able to like continue, being able to continue existing as yourself either within a group of people or just you as an individual, like psychological things that you need to do to make yourself feel like you're in community or that you are safe or that you have meaning or that you have

purpose, as well as the physical aspects. And you're saying that that lends itself to atrocity. I think it can. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that actually is strikingly close to what Bregman ends up uncovering. Look at the reasons that people will talk about for like, why the genocide in Gaza is

like necessary, right? It is playing off both of those impulses. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, all sorts of genocides. When you hear the descriptions of them and this is what you hear of the people who perpetrated them, what their explanations or justifications were, you know, from the Holocaust to Rwanda to Palestine. Yeah. To Myanmar, you know, is deeply evil. And that's something we can look away from it. It really is difficult to square with the most humans, a decent thesis. When you look at how some of these societies, even the ordinary people, for

example, the citizen population of Israel, even the civilian population, even they are like disturbingly genocidal in their rhetoric. And so, you know, it's like, how do we reach that point? How do we get there? How does an ordinary human baby grow into that? It can happen to you. It can happen very easily. And I think it can happen in a short time span. And you can get out of it, I think, maybe not just as easily, but you can get out of it also in a fast time span. I think it's like the you are not immune to propaganda idea, you can get out of it. I think maybe not just as easily, but you can get out of it also in a fast time span. I think it's like the you are not immune to propaganda idea. You can look at like in Nazi Germany. Robert has talked about

quote unquote the little Nazis, the regular Germans who ended up participating in becoming Nazis. And you are not immune from that and that can happen as a response to a whole bunch of traumatic impulses as well. Whereas I think people now even use like politics just to, you're like this like idea of politics as permission to be like an overtly cruel person to other people, either like in your life or online, right? You will, you will use, use various political

topics and that gives you permission to unleash unmitigated hostility against people that you now perceive as being like immoral or you perceive as being like ontological enemies. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, there were particular studies that were undertaken in the 20th century that are often used to sort of explain that, you know, after the fall of Nazi Germany and the post-World War II era, people were seeking explanations for atrocity and so some experiments were done and are now pointed to as explanations for how this could have taken place. You know, so one particular experiment that's really well known is the Stanford prison experiment, right?

This idea that you take random students and give them a position of power and they become sadistic gods. You know, it proves just how thin the vanilla of civilization really is or really the evil that civilization could empower. But at least for that particular experiment, the reality was never so straightforward. You know, the gods were literally coached and encouraged to be cruel. You know, they were actually put in on performances. The prisoners were also expected to perform.

So rather than being like an actual scientific experiment, it was more like guided theater. I mean, it inadvertently becomes an interesting experiment in like humans desired to like, please authority, right? Exactly. Exactly. To like, perform to the expectations of the people who are actually running this experiment. And how capable you are of falling into these roles under like under that paradigm. Exactly. I mean, you see that in Nazi Germany as well. A lot of the people were doing things to please the Fuhrer.

You know, like they didn't necessarily know, or there was a lot of wiggle room, from what I've read, to interpret the Fuhrer's wishes. Yeah. As people who wanted to rank up and rise up in the in the organization, but interpret things in a way that they would presume would please Hitler and his desires. Moving towards the fear, yeah. Exactly, exactly. That's the name of the phenomenon. So, I mean, when the Sanford Prison Experiment, when people tried to recreate the experiment

for television even, it made for pretty boring TV because it was bad science in the first place. It's not something that people do naturally. It's what they do when they are pushed, when they are prodded, you know, when certain expectations are set up. It's kind of similar with this other famous experiment that Breguin talks about, which is the Stanley Milchram's obedience experiment, where volunteers were told to administer increasingly painful electric shocks to a stranger just because a guy in a lab coat told them to. Just like another instance of, you know, are we doing these things just to please authority, even to the point of murder? Because you know the the dial of the electric shock

Was deadly after a certain point and you could hear the screams of the other victim Of course, they were fake screams, but you know the participants could hear them But what Breitman ended up uncovering is that most of the participants wouldn't fall on the orders blindly They were following the orders. Yes, but they were doing it because they believed that they were doing something good. Something good for the good of science. That even if the shocks were uncomfortable, that it wasn't something they wanted to do, there was a noble sacrifice in the name of progress. Even so, the participants weren't indifferent. They were distressed, they were shaken, they were sweating, they were begging to check on the learner. But they also said things like, he agreed to be in the experiment, you know,

or this will help science, right? Or, I don't want to do this, but I have to. The man in the lab court who was telling them to continue, please continue, please continue, he was calm, he was professional. And also even how the nudges that he used were framed made a difference. So if he was directly ordering them and telling them you have to do this, surprisingly people would actually be more likely to resist a direct order framed in that way for such an experiment. But a more subtle nudge is like, no, what science, the experiment requires this, the experiment needs to do this.

A little more subtle, it tended to get people to continue. you know, science, the experiment requires this, you know, the experiment needs to do this. A little more subtle, it tends to get people to continue. And the people who were interviewed who did take it up to those higher voltages, they said they did it because they believed they were contributing to scientific development. So it's really this misguided belief in a higher cause that also contributes to atrocity. It's very easy to get this idea that, oh, you know, that those are just monstrous people. You know, we have this idea in pop culture that these, the Nazis are like cartoonish monsters. They are monstrous, but they are monstrous people. You know, they are, at the end of the day, people who do evil with the belief that they are doing good The very next sense I know that there was some Who you know recanted or who knew what they were doing wrong, but they had other pressures that were pushing them in that direction, right?

There are many explanations people's behavior and all sorts of situations Well, a lot of people they thought that they were contributing to the right thing It's not that they didn't care but that they were taught to the right thing. They thought they didn't care but that they were taught to care in the wrong direction. The bad guys don't think that they're bad guys. And whether we're talking about the Nazis of the past or the Zionists of today, they construct these elaborate narratives to frame themselves as the righteous ones. You know as far as the Nazis are concerned they are purging Germany of a serious threat

to their well-being and the safety of their future and all that stuff. Red designers today, you ask them, even though they're pariahs of the world at this point, you ask them why they believe that this must continue and they will say, you know, we have to defend ourselves, we have a right to defend ourselves, yadda yadda yadda. There are true believers within these groups, you know, who are able to commit some of the worst acts. Committed ideologues who boast of their atrocities, who express no remorse, who take pride in their role. And people reach that point of ideology through a process of radicalization.

You know, we look at the 10 stages of genocide, I think is the framework people have used before, to point out how a segment of a population can become a target of genocide. It's not like one day you wake up and it's just like, oh, we're gonna genocide this group of people. It's a process. You know, first you start off with classification,

you create a separate group of people, a separate category of person. You make them signify themselves in some way. You have carry ID cards or some kind of insignia on their clothing or whatever. They begin to face discrimination of some kind. The discrimination is ramped up through dehumanizing language. You compare them to vermin, to rodents, to disease, and that's just the thing and we're going to get to that. But part of how you get people who would otherwise be caring or compassionate about their fellow human is through distance, right? So the people who were most bloodthirsty tend to be very far from the front lines. You know, people who are most bloodthirsty tend to be very far from the front lines.

You know, people who are demanding that World War I continue, for example, they were very far from the actual fighting. Versus at the actual front lines of World War I, you had soldiers playing football together during Christmas. That's a separate story. But you create distance, you either create physical distance or you create psychological distance and dehumanization is one of the ways you create psychological distance.

You distance people from seeing their fellow human being as a human being. Segregation is another way of creating that distance, which then lends itself to dehumanization, comparing people to women, to animals, anything other than human as another step in dehumanization and getting people to women, to animals, anything other than human as another step in humanization and getting people to separate themselves from the people. And then they create specific groups the next stage to create specific groups and organizations to enforce discriminatory policies. You further broadcast the propaganda to polarize population.

And then, well, step seven, eight, nine, and 10 go from actually preparing the removal or relocation of people to the persecution, the extermination of the group, and finally the denial that such a crime ever could. So that process, it can take years, it can take decades, but it's something that can turn even the most regular person into a virulent proponent of genocide if they are not fastidious in their opposition to any such language, especially in the early stages. Because they get fed this steady stream of propaganda of how their actions are justified.

Their loyalty to their in-group becomes tested by their willingness to engage in those harmful actions. They stay with that group, they'll do whatever they're told is good, even if it leads to other people being hurt. And it just creates an evil. But it's an ordinary evil. It's an evil that is convinced of its virtue. It is wrapped up in ideology and social conformity. Because humans are social creatures and it drives us to cooperate. But that sociality can be narrowed down to just our in-group. And that's where Bregman actually gets into an interesting point about empathy. Because we tend to see empathy as a positive thing. And it can be. But as Bregman notes, drawn from psychologist Paul Bloom's work, empathy can also make us

partial, irrational, and even cruel because it can narrow our focus to those people who are like us and ignore others. That's why soldiers can fight and kill other people because they feel empathy for their in-group, their homeland citizens or their comrades in arms. Their loyalty and affection for the people they care about supersedes the lives of the people that they don't care about. Now, of course, when I look at systems and we're talking about this, because I don't think that this hijacking of empathy is inevitable.

You know, nationalism, propaganda, these things play a role in how people end up being separated in this way, in groups and out groups. But you know there is also indications that in-group and out-group separation can occur even in the absence of a state. So it is something we have to be continuously vigilant of. Another aspect of a systemic analysis or approach is looking at how our position within society also shapes how we operate, how we treat people, how we think, and how we act. Bregman cites neuroscience research that demonstrates how authority literally changes how we think and how we act. Bregman cites neuroscience research that demonstrates how authority literally changes how we think. Powerful people become less empathetic and are more likely to see others as tools rather than independent people.

This is not new information per se. The environments that powerful people are in both shapes them and are shaped by them. The saying has long gone that power people are in both shapes them and are shaped by them. The saying has long gone that power corrupts in absolute power corrupts absolutely. And spaces like Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Washington DC, corporate boardrooms and all the other upper echelons of government. They divorce rulers and authorities from ordinary people. They insular spaces that keep them from being challenged or being grounded by the impact of their actions on others. So powerful people don't have to care. And I think such hierarchies are attractive to people who are already inclined to do bad,

even if they believe that they're doing good. The authoritarians, the supremacists, the abusers, they are attracted to those positions. But even good intention people could lose themselves in authority too. Because authorities as a whole, existing in this bubble that rewards their worst instincts, end up further shaping the system around their worst instincts, around distrust, selfishness, exploitation, and so on. To reward themselves and their patterns of behavior, and thus through the social, nocivo effect, people end up fulfilling that expectation created by the system. I guess my only comment here is that these systems are not just exclusive to

like state power or like corporate authority. These same mechanisms reproduce themselves in all sorts of social arrangements, including like radical politics and frankly, especially radical politics. You can see it's a lot with groups, whether they're communists, whether they're anarchists, whether they're, I don't know, social democrats probably have this problem. Uh, but no, like specifically like in anarchist scenes, you see this happen constantly. It is almost funny how much these things just get natively recreated. And like in group out group dynamics are always are always a big issue. I mean, like you can also point to the

the book cultish, which explains how American culture is pretty defined by like cult like tendencies, not saying that every single group is a cult, but cult dynamics play into a large part of everyday American life. And that's both good and bad. Sometimes being an occult is fun until it's not very fun. So these dynamics themselves are not necessarily, you know, bad, but there's something to be like mindful of. Yeah, exactly. So in being mindful of it, you know, that's an aspect of it. You know, we have to find solutions to this epidemic of badness of Behaviours being reinforced by these systems that are causing harm to people and harm to the world and so

What I always advocate for in ways big and small, I wouldn't call it the one solution to everything, but it does encompass a lot. But it's just understanding and taking on a dynamic social revolutionary approach to change, you know, from the efforts you do to confront the existing system, to stand up against it, but also the things that you do to confront the existing system, to stand up against it, but also the things that you do to put forward an alternative, to put forward and to practice alternatives. So one of the things that we can do is to create

or to perpetuate a positive and trusting take on human decency, to create that social placebo effect that can shape how people treat each other for the better. But that can be boiled down to just be nicer to each other. So there's more to be done than that, of course, on the systems front, we also have to change how we educate each other in radical spaces and also in terms of how we raise children. We have to organize alternative economic systems and alternative social arrangements that get us in the habit of trust, of trusting people's freedom, of practicing freedom, and also of emphasizing greater intrinsic motivation in people as well. You know, a lot of our society is built around control and mechanisms of control through extrinsic forms of motivation, you know, like punishments and prisons and grades and bonuses

and wages, all the different things that are meant to keep us going here and now. But I think a system that more leans into intrinsic motivation is something that we should be working toward. You know, that people do things for their own sake, for reasons that we are driven by, that I think is far more sustainable long term and more fulfilling long term than considering to be stuck with the punishments and rewards that come from outside. Yes, we have to develop a revolutionary consciousness that is also very much grounded in people's intrinsic motivation to have their needs met, to pursue their interests, to care for others. And that is where I think we'll assist efforts long term because you can create all these

bonuses and incentives externally, but I don't think it's something that will last. There are experiments with a greater emphasis on intrinsic motivation, not even necessarily radical experiments we see, but Bregman actually looks at examples of schools that don't have grades or fixed curriculums, and that companies that don't have managers that are run entirely by employees. I mean, anarchists have been known about these, but he emphasizes that the people in these environments thrive because they've been trusted to direct themselves. They can bring out the best in themselves because they've been given the room to do so. And spaces like free schools and maker spaces

and cooperatives, they give us the room to develop our cooperation and creativity. And of course, the system is not gonna stand by as these transformations take place. It might tolerate or even celebrate some, like the examples that Bregman had looked at, but those are always gonna be treated as exceptions. And the second you try to make them the norm, I think you're going to face some real challenges.

Because ordinary people want these things, but the rulers don't. It's like the example that I had brought up earlier, you know, the famous 1914 Christmas truce during World War I, where British and German soldiers put down their guns, they sang songs, they played football, but eventually the high command cracked down on these truces. The fraternisation of people who were different from each other was a threat to the war machine because these systems are invested in maintaining hostility and division and so we have to consciously and openly stand up against hostility and division to build systems that bring out the best in people. I don't think that a hopeful view of human nature should be seen as

utopian. As I said earlier, it's realistic. Cynicism is not realism. They're not the same thing. Having hope is not being that you are completely deluded of the dark side or dark aspects of humanity and humanity's possibilities. But it means that you don't limit yourself to that outcome, that you challenge that narrative and that you seek to do better and to create something better. That's really what I care about. And that's all I have to share. All power to all the people. Peace. listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. This is an iHeart Podcast.