The Jordan Harbinger Show - 494: Rutger Bregman | Humankind: A Hopeful History

Episode Date: April 13, 2021

Rutger Bregman (@rcbregman) is a historian and author who has published five books on history, philosophy, and economics. His latest is New York Times bestseller Humankind: A Hopeful History. What We Discuss with Rutger Bregman: How crises like the London Blitz during WWII and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina tend to bring out the best in people rather than the worst. Why a crisis that forces us to isolate rather than connect with each other as a way to cope (like the COVID-19 pandemic) may make some of us behave counter to this tendency, but not most. The evidence that prevails against veneer theory -- the idea that humanity is only buffered from acting on its vilest and most selfish instincts by the thin veneer of civilization (perpetrated by those in power throughout human history). The negativity bias vs. contact theory: how we can counter the effects of past bad experiences with others by increasing our exposure to diversity. How a real-life Lord of the Flies incident disproved the thesis of William Golding's fictional counterpart and showed how six shipwrecked schoolkids cooperated to thrive on a remote island for more than a year. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/494 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up on the Jordan Harbinger show. Well, I like to call it the publicification of humanity. So you literally see that we look sort of kinder, friendlier than our ancestors. We've domesticated ourselves, just like, you know, dogs are domesticated wolves, basically. You know, they've been selected for a very long time for friendliness and tameness. And it's exactly the same process of domestication. We also see it with humans. And I think it's the secret of our success,

because it has enabled us to build something, this collective culture, this collective knowledge, that no other species has been able to do. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game, astronauts and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional four-star general Russian spy or a neuroscientist, and each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. If you're new to the show or you're looking for a

handy way to tell your friends about it, we have episode starter packs. Those are at Jordan Harbinger.com slash start. They are collections of your favorite episodes organized by popular topics. They can help you and or new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on the show. Again, Jordan Harbinger.com slash start is where you can find those and get started. And we love if you help other people get started with the show here as well. Today, many people have this view of humanity, that people are just going to do whatever they want, they're selfish, they're self-serving, they're primal, and on some of our worst days, we might actually believe this. But as you'll hear from our conversation today, it just isn't true. The science does not back this up. Rutger Bregman is a Dutch historian, and today,

he'll argue that us humans, we're fundamentally mostly decent. And if more of us would just realize this, it would be beneficial to everyone, to humankind, as a whole. Today we'll debunk some of the sacred cows of social science and show that humans, even devoid of structure, rules, and government are actually better to each other when left to our own devices. This was a really interesting conversation with a super sharp guest. I know you're really going to enjoy it. And if you're wondering how I managed to book all of these amazing authors and thinkers and creators every single week, it's because of my network and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course, they contribute to the course.

Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, here's Rutger Bregman. We have this view of humanity that people are going to do what they want. We're selfish, self-serving, primal, but this is, at least according to your book, not true. And look, I want to believe that. So we're on the same side here. I love the idea that people are not, this is like an Anne Frank thing, right? Like people really are good at heart, even though there's some horrible stuff that happens out there. the general population is not a bunch of trampled babies to get toilet paper because of the pandemic

folks. It's just that that's what we see. And we'll talk about the reason we have this bias. But first, in the prologue of the book, you give the example of the London Blitz, which actually says that crises bring out the best, not the worst in people. Can you tell us about that? It's a really fascinating story because basically everything is in there. You got to imagine that just before the start of the Second World War, many of the experts in the military believe that the war was going to be decided in the air, you know, by the bombers and the fighter planes. And that once the bombs would start falling on a big city like London, that people would go nuts, basically, that they would start to panic and that the military at some point couldn't really fight the enemy

anymore because they would have their hands full controlling the masses. So they were really, you know, preparing for this, setting a lot of up a lot of psychureatic hospitals, for example, in London just before the war. And this was also the strategy of the German military, by the way. They also thought, you know, if we just bombed the hell out of them, then we'll break their morale. Now, what's interesting is that what happened was pretty much the opposite. So as soon as the bomb started falling, it seems as there's some kind of, you know, strange serenity dawned on London. And there was actually an explosion of altruism and cooperation. the number of suicides actually went down. There's even some evidence that people, you know, after the war, missed this period in which it was basically everyone for everyone. And there were no distinctions between the left and the right and rich and poor, etc.

This obviously had to be explained. How could they be so resilient, these British people? And so what they came up was a cultural explanation. They said, you know, this is just our stiff upper lip. We are such a special people. We've got our dry humor, et cetera, et cetera. and that explains it. Now, in 1942, 1943, the British Air Clement had to decide what are we going to do with our planes, you know, the tide of the war is turning.

And now we can start bombing the Germans. You could have said, well, we'll try a different strategy, right? And some people high up in the government said, well, let's just bomb the railroads, let's bomb the industry, etc., the factories, where all their materials being produced. But they didn't really win the debate, the discussion. because other people said, no, no, no, we got to bump the German cities to German people because they have a much weaker moral character than we are, you know, they don't have the special British culture. If we just bump the hell out of them, it will be very easy to break German morale.

That's what they did. And, well, it didn't work. It didn't work. The same thing happened again, because it turns out it wasn't British culture. It was human nature. This is what people do. During times of crises, we tend to pull together. And in a way, it brings out the best in us.

So I think it's a hugely ironical, you know, part of the history of the Second World War because all these experts and politicians believe that average people couldn't handle it and that they would just start to panic. But really the opposite happened. The same thing, this is not quite the same, but it's very similar in Serbia when NATO was bombing them. I remember a lot of people telling me afterwards, like, you know, this sounds weird, but it was a great time because nobody really went to work,

unless you were in the military or something like that. A lot of people weren't in work, they weren't at school. So it was like, wake up, you're going to hang out with your friends, the news is going to be on or not, because it was always the same thing. Hey, we might get bombed by, today, whatever. Everyone hated Slobodan Milosevic, who was the dictator at that time. But it was like, go out, play cards. Oh, the power went out because we got bombed.

Well, all right, I mean, light a candle and bust out a fresh deck of cards and pull out a case of beer, because, you know, or the homemade, moonshine, Iraqia that they drink. And there's a lot of people that thought, like, this is probably one of the best times of my childhood was getting bombed by NATO, as weird as it sounds. Or like, but then even adults who were probably more scared than kids just because they're like in their 40s or even in their 50s, they were saying, you know, that was the time where we just, my mom was living with us because we didn't want her living alone

during a bombing. My dad was living with us because we didn't want him alone. And then all the grandkids were over here all the time. And we had all the food and all the family and everyone was hanging out. We knew we weren't going to get bombed. We live in a freaking house. And they were bombing houses. They were bombing the defense department down the miles away.

They really loved, in a weird way, that period of time where they were getting bombed. And, of course, they were thinking, and now we can stop thinking about Slobodon and how crappy he is. And we can start thinking about NATO and America and how bad they are because they're the ones who are launching freaking missiles at us. You know, it's hard to hate the guy who's saying stupid shit on TV. Like, that guy's the least of our problems. It's very strange, isn't it? All these Hollywood movies, they couldn't be more wrong. The same is true, by the way, for how people respond to natural disasters.

So if you watch a standard disaster movie, it's all about, you know, again, people panicking and they start looting, they start plundering. They basically reveal who they really are, that deep down people are just nasty and selfish. And that when civilization disappears, which is only just a thin veneer anyway, we reveal, yeah, who we really are, which is just animals or moments. Monsters, beast. That's the same story that we've been told over and over again. The science of disasters actually says the opposite. So we now have more than 700 case studies done by sociologists from around the globe, and they've studied again and again in different countries, how people respond to an earthquake or a tsunami or a flooding or something like that. And again and again, you see the same phenomenon. People start cooperating on a massive scale. Again, from the left

to the right, rich, poor young, old. It's often the stories in the media that are very different, obviously, right? The stories in the media tend to focus on rumors about looting and plundering, and some of that is real. But it's a very small part of all of the behavior that is happening.

Right, so Hurricane Katrina comes to mind, right? It seems like it just started off. It was just chaos, and you see, like, all these people are spray painting houses, like, help me, there's a body inside, and kids are getting murdered, and there's rape gangs running around, and then it looks like,

you were sort of investigating this, and it's like, well, okay, maybe like one or two isolated cases of this, but otherwise the looting was, and I, this was in your own book, right? The looting was like people stealing water to give to people who didn't have water. It was less like, I need a bigger flat screen TV and more. Yeah. We don't have any food over here, and there's a grocery store that's empty. Let's go take all that food and give it away. And look, there will always be, you know, nasty, selfish people. I don't deny the existence of these. kind of people, but there are quite tiny minority, especially in those situations. Yeah. A wonderful book about this has been written by Rebecca Solnit called A Paradise Built in

Hell. I think the title says it all is that people really sort of miss this paradise after the disaster has ended. Many people describe it afterwards as one of the most wonderful periods of their lives, which is very weird and strange. But I think it says something fundamental about human nature. It says something about what our real superpower is as a species, which is that in times of crises, we can cooperate and work together. Do we see that COVID is any different, right? Like maybe bombings bring people together. The pandemic causes isolation. Because you talk about the bombing, you talk about Hurricane Katrina, but like COVID, we see people, not, I'm not wearing a mask. That's something, something freedom. I can't quite articulate it, but something, something freedom. And it's like,

hey, you're being really selfish here. Oh, well, you know what, F you, I'm going to cough on you, even though you have a baby in your hands? Or is that the news showing us the 0.1% of people that have completely lost their shit and should probably be in prison, the baby coffers, and everyone else is just kind of like, look, I don't want to wear a mask, I think it's kind of BS,

but I'm not going to make a big deal out of it. Like, are we just seeing the fringe of the fringe crazies out there? There's so much to say about this. The first thing, I think, to keep in mind, is that viruses are, in a way, attacking our very humanity itself. because we humans, we have evolved to connect with each other. We want to touch, hear, feel, see each other,

and we basically can't do that when there is a pandemic going on. So we have to deny a very fundamental part of who we are. That's the pro-social thing. That's the right thing to do. But it's obviously very hard, and it's completely understandable that people find it very hard, especially when you have to do it for months and months and months. Therefore, I think it's, to be honest, pretty impressive, actually,

that still billions of people around the globe quite radically changed their lifestyle to stop the virus from spreading further even though this was a threat they couldn't see they couldn't fully understand, but they still did it. I thought that was quite impressive and especially in the beginning of the pandemic,

obviously you saw a lot of phenomena that were quite similar to what happens after natural disaster, you know, people singing on the balconies in Italy and a huge amount of, you know, just small acts of kindness, people helping their neighbors, et cetera, et cetera. Obviously, quite a bit of that fades the way as it goes on and on and people are used to the situation. But still, I would say that

the headline of the pandemic has been cooperation. Also on the scientific front, by the way, I mean, it's just been amazing to see how quickly these scientists have developed all these highly effective vaccines. About the mask wearing, what you get, see there is obviously the tribal part of our nature. So I wouldn't say that people who say, oh, I don't believe in masks, or I, or even think that, you know, COVID is some kind of conspiracy or that's all fake, or it's just like the flu or whatever, that they're all evil or selfish people. Sure. No, they're just part of the other political team, I'd say.

And it's just a sign of how far polarization is gone. It's really the two sides of human nature. On the one hand, we've evolved to be one of the friendliest species in the animal kingdom with the ability to cooperate on a scale that pretty much no other animal can do. But on the other hand, we're incredibly groupish, we're incredibly tribal. We just want to be liked. We don't want to be left alone. We want to be part of our own group.

And if that means that we even threaten our own health by not wearing masks or not getting a vaccine, because that's what our group has decided to do, well, so be it. So I wouldn't say it's selfishness. It's really groupishness, what we see there. That's an interesting differentiation. In the book you talk about veneer theory, right? And this is the idea that you were talking about before. Correct me if I'm wrong, where humanity or society as, you know, I let the other person go in front of me

or the other person behind me in the line is in a hurry. I let them go, like, that all melts away as soon as there's lawlessness. And then I'm just like stabbing them in the parking lot with a sharp pencil for their toilet paper because there's no consequences for me. And as soon as that clicks, but that turns out to just be like, well, it just turns out to not be true. Yeah, Veneer theory is interesting because a lot of people believe it. And yet we believe it almost because we see some of it on the news.

But it's like, there's a part of us that wants to believe it, right? Why do we want to believe this? Or do we? Because that's what it really looks like. It looks like we want to believe that everyone is a totally. total POS, the second there's not guns aimed at us from authorities. Yeah, yeah. This is really one of the biggest questions that I, you know, I spent so much time thinking

about it. Why do we so often believe that most people are just selfish and nasty? I think there are basically four reasons. So the first most superficial reason is obviously the kind of information that we get every day, you know, what we call the news. The news is mostly about exceptions, about things that go wrong, corruption, violence, terrorism, et cetera. If you watch a lot of the news, then you get what.

But psychologists call mean world syndrome, where you get the feeling that the world is just a nasty place. And human nature is very dark, which is why I recommend that people stop consuming all this news, you know. If it was a drug, if someone would event the news today and, you know, was introduced or something, probably the government would say, well, no, we can't allow that because it has all these dangerous side effects. And, you know, it's not good for your health. But that's only sort of a superficial explanation. If you go a little bit deeper, then you find out that veneer theory actually, you know, has deep roots in Western culture, goes back all the way to the Asian Greeks, to see it as the Greek historian who already wrote about the plague in Athens or the civil war in Gertirat and had some very dark observations

about human nature. Or think about Christianity, orthodox Christianity, that was built on the idea that people are just sinners and that there's something called original sin. Or read the Enlightenment philosophers of the 17th and the 80th century. You would expect some kind of break between Christianity and the Enlightenment philosophers. But when you look at their view of human nature, it's actually quite similar. These philosophers also believe that people are fundamentally selfish. If you study the works of the founding fathers of the United States, it's also full of veneer theory. John Adams once wrote an essay with the title, All Men Would Be Tyrants if they could. And that's exactly what they had in mind when they were

designing the constitution of the United States because they believe there had to be some kind of balance of power, right? All these selfish people needed to keep each other in check because that was the only way you were going to have stability. Now, we move on a little bit in time, and you look at the 19th century and the rise of evolutionary theory, which quickly became social Darwinism, again, you know, survival of the fittest, which was interpreted by a lot of people as survival of the nastious. Then we have the rise of capitalism. And I think at the heart of capitalism is again the idea that people are just selfish or, as Gordon Gecko said, greed is good, right? So from the Asian Greeks to the Orthodox Christians to the Enlightenment philosophers,

to the capitalists, from the left to the right, from the religious to the atheist, again and again and again and again the same idea, people are just selfish. Now, we've got to go even deeper because then the question is, why did they come up with the same idea again and again and again? Right. Yeah, if it's not true, what's the deal, right? Yeah, exactly. I would say the most fundamental reason why the idea is, it comes back again and again, is that it's in the interest of those in power. Because if people cannot trust each other, if they believe that deep down most people are

just selfish and nasty, then someone needs to be in control. Then we need hierarchy. Then we need kings and queens and presidents and CEOs and managers, etc. To control all those selfish people. Because the alternative would be some kind of war of all against law, right? So I guess that's the most fundamental reason. And lastly, why are we so vulnerable to this? Why, as individuals, do we often believe it?

Or do we fall for the stories that our leaders often tell us? Well, it's the negativity bias. This is something that has been proved over and over again in psychology, is that the negative is just stronger than the positive, man. It just has a bigger impact on us. There's one psychologist, what's his name, Roy Biomaster, who says that, you know, for every bad event, you need like at least four positive events.

to sort of counterbalance that. For me personally, it's like, it's like 10 to 1, right? I get 10 to 5-star reviews and they're like, this podcast is great. He has the best guest, such a good interviewer. And then I get one, two-star and the person's like, this guy interrupts all the time like you just did with Rutgers. You know, I don't like Jordan. He's a dipshit.

And I'm like, guys, did you see the reviews today? And they're like, yeah, it's so great. You know, isn't our work fulfilling? And I go, that POS said I interrupted a lot. And I did just right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he's not wrong. But still.

I was giving very long answers. but you're also very big questions. It's all right. Maybe I should listen to the negative feedback. Maybe they're right. They are, obviously. I can't even shut up now. Look.

Well, it's something that people will recognize indeed in their own lives. This is sort of the power of the negative. But you see it in politics. You see it in the media. Yeah, it's something we're susceptible to. I've got one chapter in my book about context theory, which is a relatively old theory from psychology, developed in the 1950s,

about what we can do against hate and prejudice and racism. And the simple answer is, well, contact. If people just meet each other and, you know, become friends, then that's the best medicine we have. That sounds obvious maybe, but everything is obvious once you know the answer. So you've got to do the actual research. And scientists have done that. Now we've got more than 500 studies.

Again, from around the globe that indeed show, yes, contact works pretty well if you want to counter prejudice and racism and hate. But there's one interesting thing. If people have a negative experience with someone from another group, that obviously has a much bigger impact on what they think about that group, right? If you are, say, a Dutch guy living here in the Netherlands and you have a negative experience like a Moroccan young guy or something, someone robs you on the street,

obviously that's going to have a bigger impact than all these small acts of kindness that you experience with other people with a Moroccan background. Now, why then does context still work? Well, researchers have said, it still works because the number of positive interactions that people have, once they live in more diverse environments, vastly outnumber the negative interactions. So yeah, it's the only way the good can win with an overwhelming majority, basically. And luckily, often it does exactly that. I like, by the way, that you didn't take a self-help angle with this book.

By the way, we're the number one showing self-help today, which is kind of funny. But there is too much self-help out there right now, and I agree. I agree. There's like a lot of introspection, but too little outrospection, which is kind of what we're trying to do with some of your work here, right? You know, I'm not necessarily against self-help about, against looking into a mirror and trying to improve yourself. Of course. I didn't take it that way, right? No, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would say, though, that I'm actually working on a, on a bit of a self-help book right now. But if I would write a self-help book, it would not be about how to live a happier life or how to live a more successful life or how to live a more mindful life or something like that, but how to live a more

difficult life, you know, how to make life more difficult for yourself. Because to be honest, it's going to be a bestseller, man. Yeah, yeah. How to make your life even harder than it is now. Yeah, yeah, that's because that's basically where progress comes from. It comes from people who are willing to make life difficult for themselves. It's progress often starts with people who are first dismissed, this unreasonable and unlikable and difficult and unrealistic. And then their ideas, years and practices start moving towards the center. So if it is true that we are living in a time of extraordinary crises all happening at the same time, you know, what we're doing to the planet, what's the state of our democracy,

you name it, then that means this era asks more of us as individuals as well. And there's a tendency among the rights. People on the right always say, well, we got to talk about individual character, right? And then David Brooks write another book about it. I don't know, the Rote Two Character, blah, blah, blah. And it always feels to me as that they're trying to distract from the structural forces, you know, the inequality, the tax evasion, et cetera. No, no, no, we don't want to talk about tax evasion. We want to talk about, I don't know, Plato and ethics or something like that.

You need to be stoic when people are taking the money that you pay in taxes and spending it on their jets. Be resolute in the face of that. And that's so annoying, isn't it? It's so annoying. But on the other hand, what I also find annoying is all these people on the left and all these progressives. who go on for hours and hours about Shell and Unilever and tax evasions and Bill Gates and billionaires, but you never really want to look in the mirror, right? A couple of months ago, I was actually a little bit longer ago.

This was a couple of years ago. Here in the Netherlands, I was in Amsterdam at sort of like a fancy party for writers, you know, organized by a very high-profile publisher here. There were all these writers writing about inequality and tax evasion and about climate change and blah, blah, blah, all these progressive people. And then dinner arrived. And I noticed I was like literally the only vegetarian I could see. And yeah, those are moments for me that like sometimes that makes me very right wing.

That makes me want to, I don't know, want to buy copies of road to character and, you know, show it. Yeah. You're about to iron rand everybody over there. Yeah, exactly. Tell me about the Lord of the Fly or the real life Lord of the Fly story, right? because this is absolutely incredible. First of all, the story itself is incredible. And secondly, I think Lord of the Flies is what everyone points to when we think, like,

well, humans left to their own device. Well, Lord of the Flies. And it's like, well, yeah, a fictional work, right? First of all, second of all, well, yeah, you tell it. Yeah. Well, this is a great example of veneer theory. After the Second World War, people obviously have to deal with the question, why did we do this? You know, how has humanity been capable of such atrocities?

genocide in a way we've never seen before on an industrial scale. Now, obviously, the easiest explanation that people had was, again, veneer theory. It was the explanation that people had always used to explain bad behavior. So there was a real demand out there for someone to write a book in a creative way where veneer theory was once again used to basically explain the horrors of the Second World War. And I think that's what William Golding did with Lord of the Flies. He wrote it in 1956, a book about children that shipwreck on an island. Or actually, it's often an airplane that crashes anyway. They end up on the island.

And at first, they try to build a democracy of sorts. They try to work together. But very quickly, human nature takes over. The kids turn into savages, reveal who they really are. And at the end of the novel, three of them are dead. And they've, you know, basically turned into monsters. And that's the story that we've been telling to millions and millions of children. from around the globe since

1956, basically, for decades. It's been one of the most influential stories in British and American culture, but also in other European countries. It's been incredibly influential. I would say that, you know, especially for the British political clause, people, you know, in parliament there,

or especially in the government, who went to boarding schools, etc. Lord of the Flies is their world for you. That is how they look at the world. So for this book, I just asked myself a very, very, very, simple question. Here we have a novel, so that's fiction, has it ever really happened? Because that would be interesting. Right. Sure. Can we find one story of real kids who shipwrecked

on a real island sometime? And how did they behave? Turns out that scientifically this is hard to do, so most parents wouldn't, you know, agree to dump their kids on an island just for the... You just got the timing wrong. You know, you got to ask them like a week or two before Christmas when they're being horrible or maybe a week or two after Christmas. And it's like, you're... You would have so many kids locked in the back of a truck, like take them. Throw them on the island. I'll be back in two months. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anyway, I had to rely on sort of a natural experiment. I thought, Mel, maybe this happened sometime by accident. So as a proper investigative journalist, I obviously started Googling. And after a couple of hours, I found this obscure blog where story was told that supposedly in 1977, there were six Scott kids near Tonga, which. which is an island grip in the Pacific Ocean, who didn't like school. There were students at a boarding school, who borrowed a boat and then said, you know what, we're going to go on an adventure.

They ended up in a storm already on the first night, drifted for eight days, then shipwraxed on this uninhabited island and supposedly survived there for more than a year by staying friends. That's the story that I found on this block. And I was obviously very excited about it. I thought, oh, this is wonderful. I wrote a short article about it myself, shared it with readers. And then all these readers responded very skeptically in the set, come on, Rodger.

You know, you can do better than this. Do you actually believe this happened? You know, there's no source here. It's just a story on the internet. You just want to believe that humans are pretty decent. Are you working on a new book? You know, this is a material for any of them? Anyway, they didn't believe it.

And I thought, oh, okay, that's fair. I got to do some more research here. So, yeah, I devoted basically a year of my life on this story. And after a lot of research in the archives, I found out that actually it didn't happen in 1977. That was a typo. By accident, I discovered that it happened in 1966. And, yeah, I found an article, a short article in a newspaper, Australian newspaper, The Age, that said that, yeah, indeed, six kids have been found.

And they had survived for more than a year on the silent near Tonga. And then I thought, well, maybe they're still alive. Sure. It's 50 years later. and they were around 14, 15 years old at the time. But, you know, they should still be alive. If I'm lucky, I can track them down. So, yeah, that's basically what I did.

It took a lot of time, but I managed to find one of them in Australia, and one of them lives in the United States. And I also managed to find the captain who sort of found them after 15 months. Wow. And, you know, together they told me the story of the real Lord of the Flies. And I can assure you, if this would be a fictional novel, or a Hollywood movie, people would say, you know, this is incredibly unrealistic. That would never happen.

Please allow me to barf. It's a way too romantic. Kids would never, never behave like that. This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Rutger Bregman. We'll be right back. Now back to Rutger Bregman on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Well, it's funny, right, because they put a fire, they made a fire, right, a rescue fire. It kept going for like the whole year, or I mean, maybe it went out, but they relit it.

You know, they kept it going. Yeah. They had all these different dynamics of how they could, if somebody got mad, they had to go to the other side of the island, they come back, they apologize, everything's better because they realized they had this overarching goal of survival. What I thought was funny is they built water collection, but also they built a gym on this impossible to inhabit island. And I thought this is funny because I'm like, I can imagine these teenage guys being like,

look, we need food, we need water, but we got to start doing squats because I want to be jacked a. F. when I get off the aisle. Like, I want to come back and be ripped. And they were, they were, you know, the doctor who examined them after they came back was really astonished to see how healthy they were and how muscular they were. It was really bizarre. You know, one of the kids actually fell down one of the cliffs and broke a lap, but the other five cared for him really well, you know, and they also applied some traditional medicine. That was really important that they had this knowledge. So, yeah, they were basically fine. That's why I hesitate to say that they were rescued by this captain because they were not really rescued. They were picked up.

I mean, they were bored witless. They'd get me wrong. They really wanted to leave the island. They also had their own betment on court. They had made a sort of guitar and, you know, started writing a lot of songs and that kind of thing. But in almost every single way, the real Lord of the Flies is the opposite of the fictional Lord of the Flies. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying this is some kind of scientific experiment, you know, if you would drop me on an island or if you would have dropped me on an island when I was, was 15, you know, I don't think my highly specialized knowledge of Red of Earth 2 or Command to Conquer Games or, I don't know, age of empires,

you know, that was not going to help me to survive, probably. No. But I am saying that if millions of kids around the globe are still forced, well, basically forced to read Lord of the Flies in school, then can we please also tell them about the one time in all world

history that we know of, a real kids shipwrecked on a real island, because that's a totally different story. Reality TV would have us think that people are just horrible once the rules are out. That would prove veneer theory. But now it seems like maybe that's just what happens when the cameras are on, right? And you talk about this in the book. You give some examples of just how much prodding from a TV producer is actually required

to routinely create negative drama, mistreat one another. And you have shows like the real world where it's like, oh, people are just being real. But I know people who've been on that show, producers for that show, and they're like, all right, What are we going to do? They're not really doing anything. Get them really drunk. And then we want to do this thing where it looks like Stacey's trying to get with Tracy's man and we're going to like take him out of the equation so that he can't clarify that

there's nothing going on. And then we're just going to put the girls together outside doing something that they both hate so that it just kicks off, make sure the cameras are rolling, right? It takes like, you have to construct this chess board to get people to be pissed off with each other or you have nothing on TV. Nobody wants to watch people garden and have fun over drinks for 13 or 30 seasons. Yeah. You know, I have a lot of respect for these producers of reality television because it's incredibly hard.

You know, they're working with humans and humans tend to be relatively nice and friendly to people. So it's really hard work to bring out the worst in them. You've got to deceive them. You've got to lie to them. You've got to give them a lot of alcohol, et cetera. And then maybe something small happens that you can take out of context and then feed to someone else. And then maybe you can get something going. But sometimes it goes horribly wrong.

Actually, two years ago, there was a season of Temptation Island. Do you have that? We do. I'm sure I've seen it. Like, I'm sure I've seen like the advertisements. It sounds like I don't know what it is though or anything. No. It's basically like couples going to an island and they're being seduced by seducers who are

like really handsome men and girls, et cetera. That's the idea. And then can they resist the temptation? Anyway, it turns out that, yeah, they really can. And quite often that, yeah, nothing really happens. And so there was this particular season where, you know, everyone on Twitter was incredibly angry at the producers of Temptation Island because it was the most boring season ever.

It was like, are they going to start fucking already? This is like, I'm wasting my time watching this. What is this? I want to watch other people's relationships fall apart so I can feel better about myself. What is the taking so long? Yeah, exactly. No, that makes sense. I love the fact that, I mean, look, even on regular reality TV, they show the trailer and you're like,

whoa, that looks pretty juicy. And then you watch the full clip, which is still contrived bullshit. And you're like, oh, that was it. Eh, whatever. I mean, you're right. It does take a lot of poking and prodding and setting up with a playboard here. You mentioned that humans may have evolved to become more social. You talked about how we possibly survived an ice age because we developed the ability to work together.

But you also mentioned that we may have evolved to become more cute, which I think is funny, because I can definitively say that I am less cute as time goes on. What am I doing wrong? Yeah, this is what science is called self-domestication theory. For a very long time, researchers have been asking the question, what makes us special as a species? Why have we conquered the globe? Why not the Neanderthals or the bonobos or the chimpanzees?

What is it really that distinguishes us from these other animals? For a long time, we like to believe that we are just very smart. We've got these huge brains that take up around 20% of the energy, that we consume. So, yeah, maybe that's it. But then you do intelligence test and you let a human toddler of around two years old compete with a pig or a chimpanzee.

And then quite often the animals win, which is a bit uncomfortable. So it's really hard to argue that on an individual level, people are that smart. Actually, if we think about what we can and what we have and what we do and what we know, we mostly got it from other people, right? I'm using technology right now and I have no idea, no clue how it works. It couldn't make it on my own.

Actually, people are incredibly incompetent in most respects of their lives. We've just learned to rely on others, you know, that we can just work together in big groups. And we've got this thing that scientists call cumulative culture, language, for example. You know, we don't invent our own languages. It's something that's just developed and passed on generation to generation. That's it, really. That's what distinguishes us from other animals. scientists talk about survival of the friendliest, which means that for millennia 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.

And there's really striking evidence for that. If you look at the archaeological record, for example, and you compare skeletons, human skeletons, you know, of homo sapiens from 50,000 years ago, 40,000 years ago, 30, 20, 10,000 years ago, what you see is the, well, I like to call it the publicification of humanity. So you literally see that we look sort of kinder, friendlier than our ancestors. We've domesticated ourselves, just like, you know, dogs are domesticated wolves, basically. You know, they've been selected for a very long time for friendliness and tameness. And it's exactly the same process of domestication. We also see it with humans. And I think it's the secret of our success

because it has enabled us to build something, this collective culture, this collective knowledge, that no other species has been able to do. Further, you mentioned in the book that primitive societies didn't fight wars as often as we think, right? We kind of have this image, or I kind of have this image that, like, primitive societies are running around and they run into another group in the savannah picking fruit off of the berry things,

and it's like, all right, everybody pick up rocks and smash these people and kill them and, like, take their baskets. But it's not necessarily, that's not really supported by science necessarily. No. And it seems like there's also some evidence that early civilization may have been even more egalitarian, less macho BS, aggressive types were not

necessarily rewarded. Episode 28 of this show, I did an episode with James Fallon. He's a researcher about psychopaths and psychopathy. And one thing he mentioned was that since some societies nowadays are so dysfunctional, such as many in the United States, like urban centers, South America, you look at Honduras, Guatemala, like there's some serious, serious problems there were like gang, it's almost just gang warfare, you know, gang life, that nature in those areas is actually selecting for psychopaths who can be brutal and can protect their partners and their offspring from violence. But that this may not have been slash probably wasn't the case in primitive societies. Yeah, it probably was the opposite. So anthropologists have studied

hundreds of nomadic intergatherer societies from around the globe. And obviously you see a huge amount of differences. So the culture of, I don't know, hunters in the jungle in Brazil is going to be very different from the culture of people who live in the desert in Namibia or people who live in the tundra or, you know, live in the ice. It's all going to be very different. But there are also striking, striking similarities. One of the most striking similarity is that they tend to have these egalitarian cultures. Humbleness is very important for leaders. There are leaders, so especially if you are simply better at something, you know, you're a better storyteller or you're a better hunter, than people think that it makes sense that you basically lead. But leadership is temporary. And

again, humbleness is prerequisite. So being a narcissist or being arrogant is potentially lethal, actually. The group can really crack down on you then. People don't like you. You're being expelled. And yeah, being expelled is basically a death sentence because you can't survive on your own in a self-environment. So this is what anthropologists call a reverse dominance hierarchy, and it's pretty much the opposite of the political system that we have today. In a reverse dominance hierarchy, well, it's an actual democracy, right? It's the people who control the leaders instead of the other way around. It was in that kind of political environment that we spent most of our time, basically, as a species. You know, 95% of our history, we were nomadic intergatteras. In that period of

history, there was all this evolutionary pressure. And in that period of our history, friendliness actually helped you to survive. You know, the friendly people got more kids. Nice guys finished first. And it's so striking that you can still see this within our own DNA and in our own bodies today. So, for example, one pretty fascinating thing about humans is that we are the only species in the whole animal kingdom with the ability to blush. We involuntarily give away our feelings to other members of our species in order to establish trust. Now, you can ask the question, why do we blush? How could there ever have been an evolutionary advantage to just give away our feelings when we don't actually want to do that? Well, the reason is it works on a group level. It helps us

to trust each other. And obviously, then if you think about where we are right now and think about some of our leaders, and we can't really imagine them blushing anymore. No, blush proof. Exactly. And it's more like survival of the shameless instead of survival of friendliest. Yeah, it's a real indictment of the thing that we call democracy today, but it's just, I would say, an elective aristocracy where the only thing we're allowed to do is to pick her own aristocrats, but that's pretty much it. We've come very far from our original political system. The book further explains how humans transition from hunting and gathering to farming, what we call now civilization, and you do a really good job debunking robber's cave, the Stanford Prison

experiment, the Milgram Shock experiments, which people have heard of where, like, they thought they were shocking someone else, and it turned out to be fake, and they're like, the experiment must continue, right? So if you're familiar with those and you're thinking, wait, what about the Stanford Prison Experiment? What about all these people who are shocking others? Turns out, you know, maybe these aren't so reliable. I don't want to get too in the weeds on this. But one thing I will say is the Kitty Genovese murder, which is this bystander effect, right? This woman supposedly was running around a neighborhood, and I think, was it Brooklyn? Queen.

This is decades. Queens. Yeah. Running around, she was stabbed a bunch of times, like over two hours and nobody did anything and nobody called the police and it's just illustrates how people are so callous and there's this bystander effect where if nobody's doing anything about something, then nobody will do anything to help someone in need. I'd like to dig into this a little bit because this story is so horrible and people do point

to this and go, look, I mean, this one. and was murdered. Look how terrible civilization slash America slash New York really is, right? Let's poke some holes in this. Yeah. I used to believe in this as well. So I had read books by Malcolm Gladwell, for example, who gives the example of Giddy Genevese. I've read the papers by some psychologists who've tried to build a whole theory indeed of the bystander effect on it. I really thought it was true. But it turns out that almost everything about this whole field of research and the story itself is completely wrong. So if you look at Kitty Genovese, the New York Times had a story two weeks after the murder. Initially, didn't really give it

attention, but then two weeks after the homicide, there was a story that supposedly 37 people had witnessed it and, well, basically did nothing. We now know that in reality, Kitty Genevies died in the arms of one of her best friends, Sophie Farrar, who, yeah, was really angry at the media, but, you know, didn't give the story they wanted to hear. She recently passed away, by the way. These 37 people, that was just the list of people who were interviewed by detectives. But the vast majority of them were asleep when it happened. They didn't hear anything.

And if they hear it something, they thought, you know, this is just the bar that is on the corner of the street. There was noise in that street, you know, basically every night. There was always something going on. There were only two people who really noticed what was going on. One of them was probably a neo-Nazi, and he didn't do anything. The other one was actually a really good friend of Kitty Genevese, but it's really a tragedy because back then it was incredibly dangerous to be gay and call the police. You know, the police back then was, you know, basically kicking and bunching gays all the time.

And he was drunk as well. And so he just didn't know what to do. He witnessed it, and I thought, you know, I can't call the police on my own because then they'll kick the hell out of me. And so he wasted too much time and then warned a neighbor, a neighbor, which was Sophie Farrar, and then she called the cops, et cetera.

It's very different from 37 people heard it and did nothing. Right. Like I started this in law school and it was like people saw it and closed the curtains and closed the windows. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They were screaming, help me, help me. And people like pretended they didn't hear and turn the TV up. And it's just all bullshit. It's really bizarre, you know, at some point people started writing that there was one couple who just, you know, opened the window and put two chairs in front of the window and then dimmed the light for a better view. I mean, it's total fake news, but somehow this became incredibly famous and it ended up in all the psychology textbooks.

If you study psychology anywhere in the world today, you know, there's still a pretty big chance that they'll teach you about kitty jennaby's. I'm getting emails from, you know, psychology PhDs regularly say, oh, I didn't know that. Now, what's even more interesting is that this whole research into the bystander effect, that people supposedly don't do anything when there's an emergency going on, someone's a tax industry, someone's a drowning, because they think, you know what, it's not my responsibility, other people are around here, they can interfere, I don't have to do anything. That was based on laboratory experiments, which are, as you know, not the most reliable forms of research.

Psychology has had a real crisis in the past 10 years, you know, basically. amount of landmark studies have gone down, the marshmallow studies and the, what is it? Indeed, the Stanley Milgram experiment, the Stanford Prison Experiment. It's basically all these hugely famous psychology experiments that ended up in all these pop scientific books that we all love, you know, I'm afraid it's basically all wrong. And it turned out to, right, it turned it to be reality TV where it's like, hey, we're doing this fake prison thing and look at the guards being sadistic. And meanwhile, then you go and dig in. And it's like, it was boring and nothing was happening because everybody was just being normal and the prisoners were being treated well.

And they're like, no, no, no, no, do something terrible and then like make this guy miss his exam. And so the guy has to fake sick. And they're like, look, he's sick and no one cares. And it's like, no, no, you're making people do this because your results are otherwise, you know, it doesn't support your conclusion and you're trying to get tenure or whatever. Yeah. It's really unbelievable how crappy all that science has been and how influential it's been. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest Rutger Bregman.

We'll be right back. Thanks for listening to and supporting the show. I know it's got to be pretty easy with great guests like this, right? You just, this is what, this is what I love doing the show because of conversations like this. But I got mouths to feed. I got a new one now, 20 months old. So if you want to help support the show, please consider doing so. We put all the deals, all the discounts on one page.

Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals is where those are at. Please do consider supporting those who support us. Don't forget, we've got worksheets for today's episode. If you want some of the drills and exercises talked about during the show, those are all in one easy place right there in the worksheets. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. Now for the conclusion of our episode with Rutger Bregman. We want to believe it, right?

So when we see the prison experiment, we go, of course people are terrible. And we go, we see the Kitty Genevese thing. And we go, see, look how dangerous it is. Look how terrible people are. And it goes back to what you talked about earlier, where it's like, we want to believe that people are crappy because it fits into the narrative and the people in power, look, it's really hard to justify having a strong central authority and taking away people's freedoms if you go, well, you know, when we have freedoms, people don't really abuse them. And, you know,

maybe we don't have to lock everything up that's not nailed down because people will steal it. You know, no, we need you to buy security. And we need you to buy the idea that we have to have a strong central, possibly even authoritarian state because otherwise you're going to get eaten by your neighbors. And it's like, or everything will be fine. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's not going to be fine. Look at this terrible thing that maybe didn't happen that we're going to say happened, right? Yeah. Look at this science that's total bullshit that we're going to make really influential. Yeah. And then we go, oh, okay, that totally makes sense. And I kind of understand this, right? Because we've all seen examples of the bystander effect in action, possibly even in our real life.

But also, so many people, we find that, look, I've seen. seen people having heart attacks on the streets of New York, and there are dozens of people, and most of them are like, what can I do? Okay, I'm calling the police, you do CP. I mean, I've seen that happen over and over and over again. I've seen car accidents where everyone stops, gets out, runs over, and what you're finding is that you're arguing over, what should we do? Should we move them? And, you know, tell someone with first aid experience says, don't move them, they're injured. You find people, like, there's too many people helping. First responders, they have to get people to back up and move out of the way.

Some of them are gawking, fair, but most of the time, it's like there's too many people trying to help and not everyone is qualified. It's not, oh, look, there's a kid in the road. Well, I didn't see that. I don't want to deal with that. You know, we rarely see that. And when we do, it's on the news and then you find out later it's a bunch of BS for whatever the 1960s version of clicks were for Kitty Genovese, right?

By far the most important study on the bystander effect was very recently published. It's a study done by Marie Lindigart. She's a Danish psychologist and some of her colleagues. And what she basically did is say, hey, we've relied on all these laboratory experiments for decades. Why don't we look at how people behave in the real world? We've got cameras everywhere these days. There's CCTV cameras in all the big cities we've got them. So she started building this huge database with videos from Cape Town in South Africa, London, Copenhagen in Denmark, and also in Amsterdam.

Build a database of, I don't know, what is it, like $1,500,000, $1,000. videos by now. And then she just started counting because these were all videos of incidents, right? People especially being attacked and do then other bystanders help? Do they interfere? Did they try to calm the situation? And so she arrived at the magical number. She found the exact percentage in which people interfere and help each other. And it turns out it's 90 percent, 90 percent. In 90 percent of all cases, people help. They do something. So yes, there are apathetic bystanders, it exists, but that's only 10%. It's in 90% of cases, people help each other.

And it also turns out that if there are more people who see something bad happening, it's actually more likely that you'll be helped because people find supporting each other. You know, it's the total opposite of what we've been told for such a long time. So all these textbooks, you know, I can basically throw them in the garbage bin. It's totally wrong. There's a lot of really interesting and uplifting stories in the book. And of course, you know, this is your selection, but we talk about how when we

we expect more from people, they rise to the occasion. And of course, we talk about how when we expect little from people, we can actually damage their performance. That's a whole different show, probably. But there's one story that you end the book with, which is particularly interesting that I'd never heard, which is a World War I, there's Germans, the English, and probably some other groups here, and they're in Trent. This is trench warfare, right? It's like, by all accounts, as bad as it gets, hell on earth, every account of this is just like, it's the worst. And there's dead people screaming for three days for help and you can't get to them and they're you know it's just awful but the story is that during christmas right that the germans and the english are singing and they're sharing tobacco and

they're celebrating and that to me was really shocking and i almost couldn't wrap my head around it because these are guys that are going to be asked to shoot each other stab each other cut each other up front with knives at any moment but right now they're just in trenches and they're sharing the one bottle of wine that some guy had in his pack. Well, look, the big question that hangs over a book like this is obviously, if humans are really so nice and friendly and decents, as you argue, then what about all the wars? Yeah. All the genocides, all the atrocities.

What about the Holocaust? How do you explain that? And that's one of the ironies of writing a book like this is if you have to go on for hundreds and hundreds of pages about all the dark chapters in human history. And it turns out that it's sort of two sides of the same coin. So on the one hand, we're the friendliest species in the animal kingdom. On the other hand, we're also the groupiest. You know, we really want to be part of a group.

As we talked about the beginning of our conversation, we're very tribal. This dynamic often plays out in history. In the Batman movies, you've got the Joker, right? Who's just a sadist and who just enjoys violence for violence's sake. He just wants to watch the world burn. I'm not saying those people don't exist. There are people who are genuinely sadistic, but it's very, very rare. Most violence is committed in the name of comradeship or a friendship

because you don't want to let your own group down because you actually often find it hard to do it, but you're just loyal to your own. One chapter in the book is about the German soldiers during the Second World War who kept fighting and fighting and fighting. And the Allied psychologists couldn't understand it. Why were they still fighting in 1945 when it was clear they were going to lose the war? Turns out it was comradeship, comradeship.

That's what they discovered when they interviewed. when they interviewed prisoners of war. They were not fighting for Nazi ideology. They were fighting because they didn't want to let their friends down. And exactly the same phenomenon, obviously, you see in the First World War. I think the role of distance is incredibly interesting. So distance is, to my mind, really at the heart of the root of evil, basically, is that we as a species, we've evolved for face-to-face interaction.

We want to see here, Dutch, etc. And then when we actually see each other, when we can look, one another in the eyes, it's much easier to trust one another. We also have unique eyes, by the ways, so I can see what you're looking at right now. I can see you're looking at the camera. I can see you're looking at your screen, probably. I can track your gaze, basically. If you were a Champon Sea, I couldn't do that.

If you're a bonobo, it would be very hard. All the other primates, they've got dark around their irises. You know, they've got dark scler, as they call it. They're a little bit like mafiosi wearing shades. But we, we humans, we involuntarily give away our gays. But that is really something that especially works. If you can look one another in the eye, now when the distance increases, when also technologies get better, so you don't have a bayonet or a sword anymore, but you have an artillery device where you can just push a button and kill a lot of people far away, then it becomes much easier to commit terrible crimes. Indeed, if we look at the First World War, probably around 80 to 90 percent of all casualties were caused by artillery fire, not by bayonets.

military historians have studied, you know, what happened after, or during the Battle of the Somme, for example, in the First World War, also the Battle of Waterloo. Turns out that less than 1% of all victims were victims of bayonet wounds. Most bayonets throughout history have never been used because psychologically most people can't do it, especially if you're just a normal drafted soldier, you know, you just have another job in your real life and now you're suddenly at the front and you have. have a bayonet in your hand and you're supposed to shove it down to someone else's body, you can't do it. Really, the vast majority of people can't do it. You have to be conditioned and brainwashed, et cetera, and maybe then you can. But it's really, really hard, actually, to be violent, which is, again, something where all these Hollywood movies are totally wrong.

Because violence, we are capable of it, but most of us find it quite hard. And if we do it, if we kill someone else, then often we destroy something within ourselves as well. I mean, all these soldiers who come back from Vietnam, for example, with PTSD, because they've killed someone else, they've developed this trauma. Yeah, it really shows us that distance, I think, is at the heart of evil. And now what's so amazing and so bizarre about this period in the first World War is that these soldiers are so close to one another. You know, sometimes just 50 meters apart, and it's Christmas. And they hear the singing on the other side, and they recognize the melody, they recognize the tune.

And they start singing together. They realize something very simple and very fundamental is that, hey, these guys are exactly like us, you know? They've got kids at home. They've got a wife at home. They've got their own life. And we're stuck here because our leaders wanted us to wait some war with some geopolitical stupid reason or something like that. What are we doing here? Let's just have a good time.

And that's what they start doing. And actually, it starts spreading like a pandemic. So it really spreads around the front. And the leaders get really, really nervous. So they really have to do everything in their power to stop this peace from spreading further. And it was something that during the whole first World War, there was always the danger lurking of peace breaking out among the troops because they absolutely hated the war. There's one historian who describes it as like an iceberg that peace is this iceberg that always threatens to, you know, come out on, yeah, pop up, et cetera. And again, it's the opposite of how we've learned to look at these things, right?

That war is in our nature, that we're natural-born killers, et cetera, et cetera. I think that in reality, it's pretty much the opposite. As we wrap here, I got to ask about bullying, right? Because that's something that's taken front and center. And I worry about it, right? My kid is smaller than other kids who are even younger than him. He's only 20 months old. It's probably going to fix itself.

My wife is small and I'm not. So it'll sort of sort of sort itself out here. But bullying, obviously, it does happen. It happens. it's pretty severe, it happens online, it's pretty devious and psychological and horrible in a lot of cases. What about bullying? I mean, it's hard to ignore this like really obvious facet of kids being just absolute trash to one another. This is a really, really great question. I used to think that bullying is just a tragic but inevitable part of childhood. That this is just what kids or at least

some kids do to one another. Then I started, you know, really dive into the research. It turns out that bullying is actually a quite specific phenomenon that is the product of quite specific institutional circumstances. So sociologists have noticed that bullying especially tends to happen in so-called total institutions. Now, total institutions are environments where there are strict rules. There's a strict hierarchy. You can't get away like a prison. That's the best example of a total institution. And we know that a huge amount of bullying takes place in prisons. You know, there's probably nowhere as much bullying as in prisons. You weren't in middle school with me, but yes, continue.

Well, that's the other thing I wanted to talk about. Obviously, there are quite a few schools, especially more traditional schools, that are pretty much like a prison. You can't get away. With boarding schools, you have to stay there all year. There's a strict hierarchy. People are sorted, right, according to academic level or according to their age, etc. But that's obviously a highly artificial environment.

Another example is a nursing home, right? So we also know that in these traditional nursing homes where, again, people can't get away. There's a pecking order among the elderly. And again, we see a lot of bullying. Now, once you realize that, that it happens in quite specific, in a way, artificial environments, right? We've created these environments. We've created these schools where we've said, okay, all the kids of 11 years old go here, all the kids of 12 years old go here, all the kids of this SAT score go here. blah, blah, blah, you select it all, right? And then you have this hierarchy. Then you have this curriculum that is imposed stop down. Doesn't have to be this way. You can design a school in a totally different way. And for my book, I visited one school that mixes all the ages, mixes all the backgrounds, right? And you get a totally different dynamic.

More like a hunter-gatherer environment, basically. We know that, you know, we talked about the similarities and the differences in hunter-gatherer cultures, mostly differences, but also striking similarities. one of them is this egalitarian political culture. The other thing is how they raise their kids. Incredible amount of freedom. All the kids of all the ages and all the different characters and backgrounds, they all play together and learn from each other.

And the most wonderful thing that you see in these schools, I think, I mean, it's been proved over and over again, is bullying basically disappears. You don't get bullying in these kind of diverse settings. It doesn't make sense anymore because everyone is, weird, right? If you have a class of 30 pretty much similar kids and then one kid is a little bit different, well, everyone starts bullying that kid. But if all the kids are different, you know, they have different ages, they've got different backgrounds, they've got different curiosities, etc.

Then bullying doesn't really make sense anymore. Yeah. Because everyone's weird. Right. Weird is normal. And it's like, which weirdo are we going to pick on today? Well, shoot, even I'm, maybe I'm the weirdo now. Maybe I'm the different one. I'm the only one who's thinking about pushing people down the stairs because of the shorts they're wearing, right? Maybe it's my fault. Look, I find it interesting. and I loved the book. I thought it was great. It's a nice long read that debunks a lot of the most famous psychology studies in history that shape many people's views of humanity and human nature. I hope you're happy with yourself, young man. You've ruined a lot of people's life's work. They were making a lot of money on some bullshit, right? There's a lot of speaking fees and teaching

positions that have been earned on the backs of those studies that you have found to be largely not accurate. But I've never been so glad to change my mind about so many things at once, especially when it comes to human nature, would you say that it's safe to say that social science has proven and frank, correct, that deep down humans really are good at heart? Yeah, I think that's the right way to phrase it, good at heart. I wouldn't say that we're angels. Clearly we're not, right?

Clearly we're not, yeah. And we're capable of the most horrific things. In a way, you could say that we're one of the cruelest species in the animal kingdom. You know, I've never heard of pandas, you know, who commit genocide to get on a, and a against koalas or something like that. Yeah. So, I mean, that's absolutely clear. But if you ask the question, what makes us special, what distinguishes, you know, why have we conquered

the globe? It's our capacity to work together. It's our friendliness. It's this deep yearning that we all have for connection. Loneliness is similar to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, you know? It's like a real mental health hazard. We can't live without each other. That is something to build on.

It's a good message for all of us. Rutger Bregman, thank you very much. I love this one. one. I appreciate your time. I don't know what time it is there. But again, thank you for matching your shirt to the wall. I really think that was, you didn't have to go the extra mile, but I appreciate it. Yeah. Yeah, I really thought very deeply about that one. Clearly. Thanks, man. I really enjoyed it. I've got some thoughts on this episode, but before I get into that, here's what you should check out next on the Jordan Harbinger show. Anytime you catch yourself comparing yourself to others,

you have to stop and say, that's what I'm doing. Don't do that. Oh, God. Easier. said than done. Yeah, I know, but although you, once you know that, the knowledge is power. I was just at a bachelor party, and some of my friends were like, oh, man, some of our friends, they just became, like, high school teachers. And I was like, well, let me stop you right there. You know how happy those people are? They figured out what they wanted to do when they were, like, 24. They got married to somebody they'd been dating for a while. They had kids well before age 30. They're satisfied with what they're doing in a lot of ways. They have way more free time than you and I. We cannot sit back and drive. We're wired in a way that we're always dissatisfied.

They're wired in a way where that is fine. I'm jealous of that on many levels. One in six Americans have actually stopped talking to a family member because of the election. That's pretty scary. It's almost one in five now. Yeah. Politics has become super, you know, hyper attenuated in our culture where it's taken on this outsized role and importance to assume ad hominem. Is this what you were saying?

It's like, Jordan made this joke on Instagram. So therefore, I know it's residing in the depths of his heart. I bet you he bears animus toward some racial. group. So wildly, but that's exactly what we're talking about. Motive attribution asymmetry on the basis of ad hominem. Don't be that guy. 93% of us wish the country were more united.

You're part of the problem when you do that. So I got a win, win, win proposition for our listeners and viewers today. Number one is I'm going to make you more persuasive. I'm going to make you happier. And I'm going to start a social movement in your heart in a tiny little way to bring our country together. And that's answering hatred

with love as much as you We can. For a great discussion and how we can bridge the divide in our relationships, our country, and even within our families, check out episode 211 with Arthur Brooks here on the Jordan Harbinger Show. I really enjoyed this one. You know, we can put ourselves into the shoes of others, but only one at a time. We can't put ourselves into the shoes of 100 people or a million other people. And this is an interesting point from the book that can really lead us to dehumanizing larger groups as a whole,

but not necessarily the individual. and it reminds me of this documentary where this Muslim journalist visits a, basically a white supremacist sort of clan group, and a bunch of guys quit the group after she studies them and visits them because they liked her personally, and they couldn't reconcile their beliefs. Their beliefs of hatred for the whole group versus their genuine affection for this one gal who came in and learned from them and was shooting with them as quite an interesting documentary. I don't have to dig that one up and recommend it.

Rutger also has some commandments from the book, and a few of them I'll go through right here. One, when in doubt, assume the best. And I know that sounds naive, but he was very persuasive in the book, right? Because it is more realistic to trust people initially, instead of not trusting them initially. You get feedback if you're wrong when you trust someone, right? If you trust someone and you shouldn't, they screw you over, you're wrong, you learn from it. If you trust someone and they don't screw you over, great. But if you never trust anyone, you'll never know, nor actually gain the benefit of having trusted them in the first place.

So that's interesting, right? because yes, we can protect ourselves by never trusting, but then we don't experience the upside at all. So we just have to accept that we will occasionally be cheated, and that's fine. And that mirrors something from my friend Maria Konnikova, who's also been on the show. She's one of the world's foremost experts on con artists and con men. And she actually said, look, the idea here is not to not trust anymore. The idea here is to realize that some people are going to milk the system and screw you over, but it's still better. You still have more upside from trusting others and giving others the benefit of the doubt. Another one of these commandments avoid the news,

probably don't need to explain that too much, but it does highlight the bad people. It breaks people into groups, right? Elites and immigrants and liberals and right-wing crazies and all that stuff, right? It really does divide us. It doesn't do much for you, and it heightens that negativity bias and just sharpens it so much. And look, I know some of you are going, oh, you didn't debunk everything. Look, yes, there's stuff in the book. And I know we can't really debunk science, even bad science, with anecdotal evidence and stories. But in many, Anyways, we are the stories we tell ourselves, and we can make things better by examining those stories and making sure they're not only accurate, but they reflect the way we actually want

to live and how we want to build our society. Big thank you to Rutger Bregman for coming on the show today. The book is called Human Kind. Links to that will be in the show notes. And please use our website links if you buy this book or any book from any guest here on the show. That stuff adds up. It helps support the show.

Worksheets for this episode are in the show notes. transcripts are in the show notes. There's a video going up on our YouTube channel of this interview. Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube is where that's at. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram or just hit me on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using systems and tiny habits over at our six minute networking course. That course is free. It's over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. I'm teaching you to dig the well before you get thirsty. Most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course, they contribute to the come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong.

This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, J. Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who's into the social science or believes that humans are fundamentally bad or maybe they take the opposite viewpoint. They need a little support. Look, if you found this interesting, please share it. I hope you find something great in every episode of the show. Share the show with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen. And we'll see

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