It Could Happen Here - Humanity, the Good feat. Andrew
Episode Date: July 14, 2025Andrew talks with Gare about humankind’s better nature, despite self-fulfilling prophecies of selfishness and cruelty. Sources: Humankind by Rutger Bregman A Paradise Built In Hell by Rebecca&nb...sp;Solnit See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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This is an iHeart Podcast.
I knew I wanted to obey and submit, but I didn't fully grasp for the rest of my life what that meant.
For my iHeart Podcasts and Rococo Punch, this is The Turning, River Road.
In the woods of Minnesota, a cult leader married himself to 10 girls and forced them into a secret life of abuse.
But in 2014,
the youngest escaped. Listen to The Turning River Road on the iHeart radio app, Apple
podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Open AI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be, an aberration, a symbol
of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley. And I'm going to tell you why on my show, Better
Offline, the rudest show in the tech industry,
where we're breaking down why open AI,
along with other AI companies,
are dead set on lying to your boss
that they can take your job.
I'm also gonna be talking with the greatest minds
in the industry about all the other ways
the rich and powerful are ruining the computer.
Listen to Better Offline on the iHot Radio app,
Apple podcasts, wherever you happen to get your podcasts.
Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebene, the podcast where silence is broken and stories
are set free.
I'm Ebene and every Tuesday, I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that will challenge
your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you.
Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network.
Tune in on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
I'm Jeff Perlman.
And I'm Rick Jervis.
We're journalists and hosts of the podcast, Finding Sexy Sweat.
At an internship in 1993, we roomed with Reggie Payne, aspiring reporter and rapper who went
by Sexy Sweat. A couple of years ago, we seted with Reggie Payne, aspiring reporter and rapper who went by Sexy Sweat.
A couple of years ago, we set out to find him.
But in 2020, Reggie fell into a coma after police pinned him down and he never woke up.
But then I see my son's not moving.
So we started digging and uncovered city officials bent on protecting their own.
Listen to Finding Sexy Sweat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your
podcasts.
Hello, welcome to Good Appen here. I'm joined once again by Yerissa Davis. Hello.
Hello, hello. And recently I was reading through a photo book called Humans by Brandon Stanton. It features interviews of people on the streets
all over the world. He started off and he kind of became well known online for the Humans
of New York series. I'm not sure if you've heard of that.
Yeah, I think so.
Yeah, yeah. So he did that for a while and he ended up traveling to other parts of the
world and doing basically the same thing, just interviewing people on the street, getting
their insights, hearing their struggles, hearing their story.
And when I saw the book in the library, I just, I picked it up or decided to read it
through.
And it's really profound in a sense, you get a sense of the spectrum of humanity, of
what people are going through, of the highs and lows of the human experience.
I mean, it can make you laugh on one page and make you cry for the next page.
And seeing that variety of humanity reminded me of another book that I read and finished
recently, which is called Humankind, a Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
A friend of mine had given it to me because he said it had changed his whole view on the world. And so I wanted to talk about some of the concepts that I picked up
in that book, like the origins and critiques of veneer theory, why most people are actually
pretty decent, and the problems with some of the narratives of our wickedness.
In the next episode, I want to get into some of the reasons why people do bad and what we can do about it.
Sounds exciting. Because there is a lot of bad right now.
There is. There is. I mean, as we're on that stuff, I mean, what would you say is the most
common perspective you hear on humanity and human nature?
I don't know. Like there's, there between like this liberal humanist version and then this
Christian moralist version, I guess, like in the States right now.
But that's been going on for decades, if not centuries.
By liberal humanists and Christian moralists. I mean, I think I get a sense of what the Christian moralist vision is, right? That we are all sinful, destined for hell, need salvation. That vision of the story?
Yeah, yeah, more or less.
And the liberal humanist perspective is?
I mean, I don't know, like this forever search for like, what human rights are and like human decency. So we come up with like governments and rules to actually like govern over our morals as
a democratic process that continues to evolve over the course of like hundreds of years.
We're like you know on the moral arc of the universe just not fully you know there yet.
Yeah I've heard that perspective.
I think most commonly at least in my spaces I, I tend to hear the, you know, people are wicked,
people are sinful in religious cases, or people are violent, people are selfish.
And that kind of in that similar level of vein where we have these systems in place
to kind of check our worst impulses, to kind of keep us us regulated and keep society functioning.
And Bregman opens his book by discussing the idea of civilization being a thin mask that
covers our true savage instincts.
He calls it the Veneer theory.
And he spends the rest of the book basically pointing out all the different errors in that
judgment. And he spends the rest of the book basically pointing out all the different errors in that judgement.
I mean he doesn't claim that we're all good people, happy-go-lucky, saints or anything
like that.
But he does say that for the most part, most people are pretty decent.
And I know that clashes with what a lot of people are accustomed to hearing.
And there are some very notable exceptions but despite the efforts of elites to
paint and report a different picture there's actually a lot more leaning towards our decent
if not good nature than the contrary. But of course these kind of conversations you always
have to go back to the debate between Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
We can't escape these guys.
Hobbes, of course, had the perspective in Leviathan, which was written in 1651, that
in the absence of a strong central authority, human beings would live in a condition of
perpetual war with every man against every other man. A war of all against all, as he
would have put it. Since to him people are naturally self-interested and driven by the
desire for power and survival, so without laws or a sovereign to keep them in check,
individuals would act purely on their own instincts, led into a constant conflict over resources, safety and dominance. Life in this state of nature would
be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
A couple decades later, Rousseau was writing in the Discourse on the Origin and Basis of
Inequality Among Men and he basically basically flipped Hobbes view on its head.
He believed that humans in the state of nature were peaceful, cooperative, and guided by
basic needs and compassion. And that it was the development of hierarchies and institutions
that had led to inequality, jealousy, and competition, which basically corrupted human
nature. In his words, man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.
Do you take a side in this debate, by the way?
Not to be the centrist option, but I don't know.
I think both these things play into each other.
I definitely don't believe in the idea that like, the state is the only thing that reigns
people in and stops them from doing a moral act.
It's the same thing as like without God or without the Bible, then everyone would just be like raping and murdering.
And meanwhile, actual Christians obviously rape and murder all the time anyway.
But like, no, this idea isn't the only thing that keeps you from becoming this savage, inhuman monster.
People can be morally good without this religious notion.
And I think in some ways the state can also operate as a religious notion to these people,
where the police is the only thing that's keeping you from becoming this horrible monster
who just hurts everyone around you.
But I also have my sympathies to the alternate side of that and I can see there's a great
deal of oppression and horrific violence that can only happen at scale under the organization
of a state.
So I will pick the annoying centrist option.
Yeah, I know that there are a lot of people who have this sense that, you know, the state
and the law is all that's standing between us and the purge of Mad Max or something like
that.
Sure, exactly.
So yeah, I don't think that Hobbes's over-generalization of human nature as inherently violent and
selfish holds up when you look at the diversity of human experience and human societies.
I mean, that's not to say that violence and conflict were absent in A World Without State,
but you know context matters, resources, environment, group size, all those things
would have played roles. I don't think that we should be accepting Rousseau's romantic light
either, so I guess I'm in the eccentric camp with you. The truth does seem to lie somewhere in that middle ground, that human nature is flexible
and that it's shaped by social, ecological and historical context.
Of course, getting in the weeds of humanity's origins is stimulating as an exercise, but
there's only so much we can know about the past for certain. What we can't know for
certain is the present, and what we've seen in the present is that when disaster strikes,
people have tended to help each other. In Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the official response was famously criticised for being
slow and disorganised. And yet despite media attempts to paint these people as looters
and thugs and all these different things, community members, neighbours, volunteers,
all stepped up to rescue people, to mobil food, shelter, and basic aid, to
expropriate where necessary to get people what they needed long before federal
agencies got on the scene. Similarly in a more recent occurrence after the
Cranfell Tower fire in the UK in 2017, the official channels had failed the
people of that tower.
Many died as a result.
Regulations that were supposed to protect people were not enforced or were absent.
And yet it was community members who sprang into action to provide water and shelter and
food and clothes and emotional support.
Even when the Twin Towers fell on September September 11th 2001, and this is an
example that Bregman actually spent some time talking about, people actually helped people
descend the stairwells in an orderly fashion. You know, they would say, you know, after
you going down the stairs and passersby would go in and help others to evacuate and assist the wounded long before the emergency services arrived.
So people acted and prioritized helping others, even in a disaster scenario.
And yet, what do we see in dystopian fiction, in apocalyptic fiction?
You see people just like driving around shooting guns in the air, you see the purges, you see the mad mass, you see the zombie apocalypse scenarios.
In Rebecca Solnit's book, A Paradise Built in Hell, she found that disasters peeled back
the layers of society and revealed the empathy, cooperation, and care at humanity's core.
She noted that when disaster strikes is when people most often reveal the better natures.
And yet those negative narratives tend to have more sway in the popular imagination.
No, and this is like so true. I remember in 2020 during the wildfires on the West Coast,
the anarchist response was to set up these like giant like mutual aid centers for people fleeing
from the fire. You know, like not like other anarchists, just like regular people fleeing from the fire
could get necessities and figure out housing.
Meanwhile, right-wing militias were setting up checkpoints, monitoring to make sure Antifa
wasn't raiding people's homes as they were fleeing from the fire.
So these were the two options.
You had anarchists actually helping the people
who were fleeing from this horrific fire and setting up massive aid distribution centers.
Meanwhile, right-wing militias were pulling people over at gunpoint, making sure Antifa wasn't up to
any shenanigans. And similar stuff happened last year during Hurricane Helene on the
East Coast where you had a whole bunch of like Southeast anarchists in the
Appalachians do mutually disaster response. Meanwhile right-wing militias
were spreading rumors about like FEMA fraud and all of all of this crazy stuff
not actually helping anybody but it was anarchists doing a large amount of the actual water distribution
and medical assistance on the ground as the federal response was delayed and insufficient.
Yeah, I mean, I was aware of the anarchist efforts during these disasters,
but I didn't know about that situation with the right-wing militias setting up checkpoints.
That's not shocking, but still wild, you know?
Yeah. No, it's so funny because those are the people, you know, claiming that, you know,
without the government, we would have the purge. The anarchists would just go around
doing all kinds of crazy crimes. And yet when things actually happen, their attempts to
like deputize them as like their own police force actually creates those conditions. Meanwhile,
anarchists are the ones actually helping people.
Exactly, exactly.
And yet, despite these situations, these things happen again and again.
We still have these popular narratives.
You don't know the narrative I see referenced all the time.
Lord of the Flies.
Yes, of course, of course.
All the time, right.
It's basically become a cultural shorthand
for the idea that people are just savage at heart.
That this veneer of civilization
is the only thing keeping us in check.
I mean, these days I do see people joking
that it's because those were British boys.
So true, actually, so true.
But while I get the joke,
I think it's also important to remember that people are taking
this work of fiction as if it's an anthropological study.
Yeah.
When it's just something that a guy made up as an analogy for, you know, the situation
during World War II.
I think it's also good to remember that the British are people too.
I have a British coworker, so, you know, we have to show them a little bit of human dignity.
Exactly. Exactly.
People embrace this story because it confirms what they want to believe in this climate of cynicism.
But Bregman actually tells a story in the book about a true instance of when a shipwreck of young boys occurred. Of course,
they weren't British boys, they were Tongan boys as in from the country of Tonga. So in
1965, six Tongan boys were stranded on a remote island for over a year. And rather than descending
into violence, they survived through cooperation. They built a garden, they shared duties,
they didn't do any human sacrifices,
they created a rotor system to get things done,
they resolved conflicts.
When people were in conflict, they would go on time out,
they would put each other on time out
and go on opposite sides of the island
until the cooler heads prevailed.
They figured out ways to deal with their conflicts,
to organize themselves without authority and without chaos. But the problem is that these fictional narratives become
so powerful, instead of the real ones, that they have a similar effect to the placebo
effect. In fact, it's the placebo effect's evil twin, the nocebo effect. Now I'd heard
about the placebo effect before and I'm sure you have as well,
but for those who don't know, it's basically where someone's health actually improves after
receiving what's basically a dummy treatment, like a sugar pill or fake surgery or saline
injection. The body heals itself because the mind of the person believes it's being healed.
The mind turns that trust into medicine.
I mean that's just that's amazing to me even now and they'll quite understand how it works yet but
it's still really cool. But there's another dimension to the placebo effect that I hadn't
heard about before but it makes intuitive sense I suppose. It's called the nocebo effect and
Bregman is the one who introduced me to that concept.
So the no sebo effect is where instead of belief healing you,
it's belief that makes you sick.
So people experience real pain, real symptoms and even real illness,
not because there's an actual physical cause,
but because in their minds they expect to be harmed so their minds turn that fear of harm
into actual harm and injury. There was one case study that he used where a child had drunk a coke
and thought it was poisoned and then just created this mass hysteria almost with dozens of children
in hospitals with headaches and nausea and pralic they drank coke. To the point where Coca Cola actually had to recall all of those drinks,
even though tests had shown that there was nothing in the drinks that were making people sick.
But their body still responded as if it was.
Because they believed, they heard the story, they heard about it,
they saw what happened to others and they believed it would happen to them.
And that's the Nocebo Effect in action. Right, so we get the concept.
So Bregman actually stretched these concepts beyond the field of medicine
and he basically made the points that what if these concepts are baked
into how we view each other?
So what if our belief that people are selfish and cruel and violent by nature actually makes
it so?
If you expect the worst from people, you'll act on that.
You might be colder or more defensive or more likely to punish or preempt betrayal. And what happens as a result is that people pick up on that energy,
they respond in kind, they withdraw, they retaliate,
and then that cycle ends up feeding itself.
And so the belief, that negative belief becomes a social reality,
a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So we end up building institutions that are based on that cynical expectation.
We design policies that are based around punishment.
We train ourselves to see strangers as threats rather than as neighbours.
And then when we have a fallout, as when that prophecy is fulfilled by our own actions,
we can then say, well, see, I was right, you know, people are awful.
But what we don't see is that our expectations and the systems we build around those expectations
are part of what ends up making it that way.
I think an easy example to point to is with prison, right?
People expect criminals to act like animals, to act like monsters, to beasts.
And so they create prisons, and then those prisons treat them like animals,
monsters and beasts.
And people respond to that.
You treat people like animals,
they're going to behave like animals.
So then the question that Bregman poses
is what happens if we decide to treat people
like they're good,
trusting their intentions,
leaning into care and building our systems around the assumption
that most people are decent.
So how do we make that leap?
I said before that we don't really necessarily need to go into the past to see how people
behave in the present, but it's a good idea to get a sense of how we evolved.
A lot of people have a brutal perception of human evolution.
They draw comparisons between us and chimpanzees.
First of all, they ignore Bonobos entirely and also ignoring the fact that we are our
own species with our own evolutionary history.
People have a very cynical and honestly insulting like view of like the cavemen of
our past.
But our histories are actually pretty soft.
In fact, Bregman argues in favour of something called self-domestication theory, which has
a little bit of anthropological and evolutionary biological back in.
And so the basic claim of this theory is that the reason homo sapiens survived and other ancient humans didn't isn't because we were the strongest or
the smartest or the most cunning, but because we were friendlier. That we
evolved to be more social, cooperative, playful and trusting. Self-domestication
theorists basically compare humans as puppies to the other homo species as
wolves. That we
domesticate ourselves to become less aggressive, our faces softened, our bodies
became less robust, and our openness and friendliness allowed us to build
relationships, to build groups, to raise children communally, and to survive. And
so if we accept our theory, we acknowledge that and build that into our foundation that
we did evolve our capacity to be kind, that it is something that is within our humanity,
that is not a fragile gloss over savagery or a morality that's given to us by religion
or law, then we can basically become who we're capable of becoming.
We can create systems that allow us to develop that.
And this sounds really optimistic.
This sounds really happy-go-lucky and woo woo woo.
And we are going to get into some of the darker chapters of our humanity in the next episode.
But I wanted to wrap this one up by unpacking the death of Catherine Kitty Genovese in 1964. It's another example
Le Bregman refers to in his book and it's one of the classic case studies that
was used for a long time to illustrate the apathy and cold-heartedness of
humanity. Because the New York Times, which as we all know is a reputable and
trustworthy institution, the New York Times claimed that she was stabbed in the street while 38
neighbors looked on and did nothing.
Right.
This was the quintessential story that was used to say, you know,
look at that bystander effect.
Humans just don't care.
You know, there was used as an example of apathy, of urban decay, of everything wrong with us.
But the story was wrong. The reporters built up this story and it was wrong.
I mean, yes, she was murdered, but people did try to help. Some had called the police,
but this was in a time before 911. So it was, you had to call like the local station and then the response process was a bit slow.
One neighbor actually rushed out and held her as she died, held her in their arms. So the press
spun this story as like some bleak tale and the field of psychology ate it off because
it was part of a trend at the time to create this perception of humanity.
But the real story was a lot more hearing, a lot more human, I mean it was messy, and
somebody still murdered her.
But this idea of the bystander effect that has been so inflated, a lot of the key studies
that have been used as examples of them have been chipped away at over time.
And that's one of the main stories that has been pretty thoroughly debunked at this point.
So I like where Brightman's been going, but we've glossed over the dark side, you know,
the shadow of our humanity.
You know, even he acknowledges in this book that we do bad stuff as well.
So the next episode we are going to wade into that.
But how are you feeling about humanity so far?
I think I actually do have an underlying optimism
like beneath how I move around in the world, which is which is kind of odd,
considering the sort of stuff I do for work.
But but it is it is true.
And I think part of that is what just keeps me going.
I don't know. Yeah, I've certainly been around my fair share of do-mers and nihilists over the years.
And at the very least, those people don't seem to be very happy and don't seem to be enjoying life.
And sometimes it's hard to enjoy life, absolutely. But I think you
need to be able to find a place for yourself within a world that has like evil as an almost
inherent component and find your way either through that, sometimes around that, but oftentimes
through it. And I think that's just been a part of growing up.
We were certainly growing up in a weird time, but I think that's kind of always been true.
That was true a hundred years ago.
So I don't know.
Part of me, and maybe this is just overly optimistic, but part of me continues to resist being a doomer
despite all of the bad news that is trying to infiltrate my brain at all times.
Which is a very profitable industry, right?
I mean, that's somewhat kind of what this show is, right?
It kind of does play into those instincts.
For sure.
Which is something that we critique amongst ourselves often, and we try to always find that balance as well.
But yeah, the doom a is a huge industry.
There's there's people that absolutely want you to always be panicking all the time.
Yeah. And that drives consumer choices that drives ad revenue.
Right. I mean, Regman puts forward a very compelling argument in the book, actually,
that the news is a public health hazard.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And like, I have to keep up with the news all the time.
And I don't think it affects me that much anymore.
And certainly in, you know, doing a daily news show, we try to be very selective in
the things that we cover.
We don't cover everything all the time.
We try to cover the things that like our hosts feel is both like within their wheelhouse
and that people who listen to the show should
know about certain things that you might not be hearing about in mainstream news.
But no, the news has a massive, I think, spiritual evil to it as well.
There is a sinister undercurrent to the news as an industry.
Indeed.
And that's something that we are also always butting up against.
Well, on that optimistic note.
Yeah, until next time.
All forward to all the people.
Peace. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us
out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions.
Thanks for listening.
I knew I wanted to obey and submit, but I didn't fully grasp for the rest of my life
what that meant.
For iHeart podcasts and Rococo Punch, this is The Turning, River Road.
In the woods of Minnesota, a cult leader married himself to 10 girls and forced them into a
secret life of abuse.
But in 2014, the youngest escaped.
Listen to The Turning, River Road on the iHeRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your
podcasts.
Open AI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be, an aberration, a symbol
of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley.
And I'm going to tell you why on my show, Better Offline, the rudest show in the tech
industry, where we're breaking down why open AI along with other AI companies are dead
set on lying to your boss that they can take your job.
I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other
ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer.
Listen to Better Offline on the iHot Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you happen to
get your podcasts.
Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebene, the podcast where silence is broken and stories
are set free.
I'm Ebene, and every Tuesday, I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that will
challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you.
Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network.
Tune in on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
I'm Jeff Perlman.
And I'm Rick Jervis.
We're journalists and hosts
of the podcast, Finding Sexy Sweat.
At an internship in 1993, we roomed with Reggie Payne,
aspiring reporter and rapper who went by Sexy Sweat.
A couple of years ago, we set out to find him.
But in 2020, Reggie fell into a coma
after police pinned him down and he never woke up.
But then I see my son's not moving.
So we started digging and uncovered city officials bent on protecting their own.
Listen to Finding Sexy Sweat on the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is an iHeart Podcast.