The One You Feed - Rutger Bregman on Human Nature and Hope

Episode Date: July 2, 2021

Rutger Bregman is one of Europe’s most prominent young thinkers. A historian and author, Rutger has published several books on history, philosophy, and economics. His book, History of Progress, was awarded the Belgian Liberales Prize for best nonfiction book of 2013.In this episode, Eric and Rutger discuss his book Humankind: A Hopeful History, where they delve into the scientific, historical, and philosophical components of human nature.If you need help with or are looking for support in working with your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, check out The One You Feed Coaching Program. To learn more and to schedule a free 30-minute call with Eric, visit oneyoufeed.net/coachBut wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Rutger Bregman and I Discuss Human Nature, Hope, and …His book, Humankind: A Hopeful HistoryAsking the scientific questions and the philosophical questionsThe opposing theories of basic human natureEvolutionary biology and the survival of the friendliestCollective intelligence is what makes humans specialThe paradox of humans being the kindest and also the cruelest speciesHis rules for a realistic view of human nature: when in doubt, assume the bestThe broken systems that are created for the small percentage rather than the largest percentage of peoplePygmalion effect is the power of expectations; we become what we think we will becomeImportant distinctions between empathy and compassionUnderstanding that changing the world begins with changing ourselvesRutger Bregman Links:Rutger’s WebsiteTwitterFacebookIf you enjoyed this conversation with Rutger Bregman on Human Nature and Hope, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Deep Transformation with Spring WashamHow our Perception Creates Reality with John PerkinsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

One of the things we say at the One You Feed A Lot is that there's no shortcut to lasting happiness, right? We've got to do the work to improve our lives. But this can be really challenging to do without some support. Our lives are busy, there's a lot of things clawing at our attention, and we might have ways of working with our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that are not very good for our well-being. So if you'd like help working on any or all of those things, I've got a couple of spots that have just opened up in my one-on-one coaching practice. You can book a free 30-minute call to talk with me, no pressure, and we get to know each other at oneufeed.net slash coach. If you study some of the biggest atrocities in human

history, the incredibly uncomfortable thing you'll see is that we quite often do the most terrible things in the name of friendliness, in the name of loyalty, because we do not want to let our friends down. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear.

We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. Hey y'all, I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. This January, join me for our

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Our guest on this episode is Rutger Bregman, one of Europe's most prominent young thinkers. The 27-year-old historian and author has published four books on history, philosophy, and economics. His book, History of Progress, was awarded the Belgian Liberals Prize for Best Nonfiction Book of 2013. Today, Rutger and Eric discuss his new book, Humankind, A Hopeful History. Hi, Rutger. Welcome to the show. Thanks. Thanks for having me. I'm so happy to have you on. Your book is called Humankind, A Hopeful History, and it was a book I looked forward to reading, and I loved reading every bit as much as I thought I

would. And we're going to talk all about it, but before we do, we're going to start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather talking with his granddaughter and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second. She looks up at her grandfather and she says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Look, it means a lot to me. Actually, it was central for me while I was

writing this book. The book is about human nature. And the reason I wanted to write it is that in the past, I would say 15 to 20 years, there's really been a silent revolution in science. So many scientists from so many different disciplines, anthropologists and psychologists and archaeologists and sociologists have been moving from a quite cynical view of human nature, of who we are as a species, to a more hopeful view. And so I wanted to connect the dots and to show that something bigger is happening. But while I was writing it, I also realized that it's not just an idea. It's

not just a story, right? We humans, we tend to become the stories that we tell ourselves. So when you talk about human nature, you can on the one hand have the scientific debate, right? And you can talk to all the experts. What is human nature really like? But it's also the case that if we believe that, for example, all people are deep down just selfish, then how are we going to treat each other? Well, we'll probably build a society with a lot of hierarchy and bureaucracy. And I think in the end, we'll bring out the worst in each other. So your view of human nature also is a self-fulfilling prophecy. And I think that's very much there in the story of the wolf, is that in a way, it's up to us. Who do we want to be? So the second half of the book is really

about that. The first half, I try to sort of convince people that we're not so bad. And then in the second half, I ask the question, in what kind of society could we live if we start with the assumption that most people deep down are pretty decent? When I came across the parable in the book, I thought that's perfect. And I think, you know, you used a word when you and I were getting ready to talk about being a consequentialist. And I love that word, because I think it summarizes to me, what's really important about your book, because we could get into endless debates about what is the exact nature of a human. But if we started from a place we could agree on, I think we could look at humankind.

And if we looked at it somewhat objectively, we would say, oh, boy, there's an awful lot of wonderful things that I see people do. And there's a lot of good and a lot of great out there. Oh, oh, and there's Yeah, there's also some, some things we don't feel real good about. So both those things are there. So given that, to your point, what do we do and what ways can we behave individually or collectively that is going to bring out more of the good parts of us and less of the bad parts? Yeah. There was a time when I was 17, 18 years old, when I was really obsessed with the question, does God exist? Is there life after death, right? As I guess so many people when they're at that age, they're thinking about big questions of life. And for me, it was all about, is this true? Is there life after death? As I guess so many people, when they're at that age, they're

thinking about big questions of life. And for me, it was all about, is this true? Is that true? Is this a fact? Is that a fact? And if it's not true, then I should dismiss that whole idea. I should dismiss the concept of religion, for example. Now, a bit of context is important here, perhaps, is that my father is a preacher, right? He's a Protestant minister. My mother is religious as well. She's also a Christian. So I really struggled with that when I was 17 and 18. You know, the way that ended up for me is that at some point I stopped believing in God. And I thought, you know, I actually don't think there's life after death. And the meaning that there is in life has to be found here, you know, in this life on this planet. And then I

basically stopped thinking about these religious questions for quite a while. Then as I became older and I was working in this book, I started to become interested in the same questions once again, but then in a different way. I wasn't so interested anymore in the question, is this true or is that true? But I was more interested in what happens if people believe this? What happens if people believe that? I'm not sure if this is a saying in English, but you got to judge a tree, you know, on its fruits. You got to look at what it actually produces. That's the way I look at it right now. It's also the way I look at my parents, you know, maybe I don't agree with them sort of about the exact contents of their religion, but then i look at what it means for

them and how it moves them and how it enables them to do a lot of wonderful things for people in their lives and in their communities etc in that sense i think religion can be quite wonderful you know at the same time there were all these books that were published with titles like how religion poisons everything etc there was this group called the New Atheists, and people like Richard Dawkins were involved in that. And I was like, you guys got to meet my parents, you know, they're pretty wonderful. And so that's how I try to look at ideas and ideologies and religions right now is, well, let's look what it means for people in practice, right? Which doesn't mean that the scientific question is uninteresting, right? I devote, you know, hundreds of pages in my book to that question. But we also got to look at the question, what actually happens if we believe this or that? Buddhism called it the middle way, you know, which says look for someplace besides the extremes.

And one place I've often thought about this is I see two religious views of the world. In the West, we have the doctrine of original sin, which carried out in certain Christian traditions basically is we are so broken and so bad that without God's help, there's nothing we can do. And then there's Buddhism, which sort of states the opposite claim. It says, hey, underneath it all, we're all good. And like you, I've spent a lot of time looking at those two going, I wonder which it is. And it's part of what has attracted me to the wolf parable, because the wolf parable, you don't have to figure it out. Which is the original nature? I'm'm not entirely sure i actually lean more towards we're good your book lays out a lot of evidence towards that but that again as i said earlier i think we can see in humans both things are there the capacity for good and evil is there it's clearly there so how do we bring about that

that's what i think your book does But I do think that you bring up a fundamental question early on where you're debating two philosophers, Hobbes and Rousseau, and you're saying that you can think of no other debate with stakes as high or ramifications as far-reaching as the debate between those two. So lay out the stage for us there. There's a really old and incredibly influential idea in Western culture that scientists call veneer theory. Veneer theory is this notion that our civilization is just a thin veneer, just a thin layer, and that below that lies raw human nature, which is, you know, not pretty. Deep down, we're just nasty and selfish one of the philosophers who you know

was most influential in sort of defending veneer theory was indeed thomas hobbes you could argue by the way that original sin as you talked about is also a form of veneer theory but thomas hobbes was a philosopher in the 70s century british philosopher who argued that back in the state of nature when we were still nomadic hunter-gatherers, and as you probably know, we've been nomadic hunter-gatherers for the biggest part of our history, you know, for around 95% of the time we've been on this planet, we roamed around as hunter-gatherers. And Thomas Hobbes thought that back then we lived lives that were, in his famous words, nasty, brutish, and short. And that we also

engaged in some kind of what he called a war of all against all. Yes, people were free back then, but the consequences were terrible, right? Because if people deep down are just selfish and nasty and evil, then obviously if you give them freedom, the results will be horrible. And therefore, he said, we got to basically give up our freedom. at some point he also argued we did that we gave up our freedom and we got security in return how did we do it well by appointing a leviathan this is sort of a concept named after a biblical sea monster what he meant is that we basically appoint some really powerful people to keep us in check. Elites, kings, queens, princes, princesses. Hobbes argued that because we cannot trust each other,

we need people at the top to control us. It's a very short summary, but that's basically his view. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a French philosopher who lived around a century later and argued the exact opposite, basically. What he said is that in the state of nature, when we were nomadic intergatherers, life was actually pretty good. We were relatively healthy, society was quite egalitarian, and everything went wrong the moment we settled down.

And when someone said, and this is a really famous passage in Rousseau's essay On the Origin of Inequality, where he argues that the moment the first person said, look, this piece of land here, that's mine, you know, and when people believed him or didn't say, you know, you're an idiot, go away. You know, the land is everyone's possession. That's the moment when everything went wrong. You know, that's when we got indeed hierarchy and elites and the patriarchy and all the terrible stuff and the diseases and the pandemics and wars.

But we should never have given up our freedom so this is a fundamental opposition in western philosophy Hobbes on the one hand Rousseau on the other hand and for an incredibly long time Rousseau has been dismissed as the naive utopian romantic french idiot While Hobbes has often been described as the father of realism, right? He had a pessimistic message, but at least he was realistic about what the world is really like. Well, maybe you see where I'm going with this. What I try to argue in the book is that actually all this time, Rousseau was the real realist. And if we look at the latest evidence we have from sociology,

archaeology, anthropology, and you name it, it actually seems to be the case that a lot of the modern scientific evidence points in the direction that Rousseau was also trying to lead us to. So, yeah, that's sort of the state of the book. So, the whole book seeks to answer this question. So, I always feel I sometimes ask questions in this role where I'm like, this is a dumb question because somebody spent 400 pages answering it and I'm asking them to answer it in two minutes. But could you give us just a sampling of some of the scientific evidence that you're seeing that says that, hey, Rousseau is more on the mark than Hobbes? I guess what I find the most exciting are the developments in evolutionary anthropology or biology. Scientists have been asking themselves the question for an

incredibly long time, what makes us special as a species? Why have we conquered the globe? Why not the Neanderthals or some of the other hominid species why not the chimpanzees or the bonobos what makes us special as a species and for a long time we really like to believe that we're just really smart right we've got these huge brains that consume an enormous amount of energy um and that that's probably the case you know we're just geniuses compared to other animals well it seems to be a lovely explanation but the problem is is that if you do an intelligence test and you let a human toddler compete with a pig, for example, or a chimpanzee, and quite often the animals win, you know,'m using a microphone right now that's incredible piece of technology and looking at a screen, I have no clue what's going on in my computer at the moment. It's brilliant. But obviously, individually, I have no idea. I can count to 10, but I couldn't have come up with a numerical system on my own. So individually,

humans are just really incompetent. We're pretty much idiots, basically. And so what evolutionary biologists now argue is that it's not our intelligence, but it's actually our friendliness that has made all the difference. And they even talk about the notion of survival of the friendliest. And it really means what you think it means. So for millennia, when we lived as nomadic intergatherers, it was actually the friendliest among us who had the most kids and had the biggest chance of passing on their genes to the next generation. And because we sort of became better at cooperating

and living together, we started living in bigger societies and we started learning from each other. And it's really this capacity of what scientists call social learning that distinguishes from other animals. You know, we're just really, really good at learning from each other. And that only happens, you know, if you're a little bit playful and if

you're friendly enough. If you're this arrogant narcissist, then you're not going to learn much from other people, right? So in the book, I made the comparison with the Neanderthals. The Neanderthals were probably much smarter than us, right? We know they have bigger brains. In a way, you could argue that they were MacBook pros and we're MacBook heirs. But the difference is that we have Wi-Fi, so we're connected to one another and their wi-fi was not working all that well right and it's this connection that makes all the difference because intelligence is not about individuals it's about what you learn from each other what you can build collectively etc etc so we have a lot of proof now in evolutionary anthropology that that is indeed the case, that on a biological level, you can see still in our bodies and in our DNA today that we actually are a product of survival of the friendliest. As a 50-year-old, I am hopefully a little smarter than a pig, right? I can read and do all sorts of things a pig can't do.

And so what you're saying is it's the fact that that toddler has the capacity to learn from everyone around him and synthesize all the ideas that are coming from all the different people that allows that toddler to not remain at the level of a pig, but to grow far beyond it is because of that social learning capacity. And that we are in essence reaping tens of thousands of years of that compounding benefit. Yes, exactly. Exactly. We just get an incredible huge inheritance basically from those who came before us, right? The language we speak, the buildings that we live in, the technologies that we use. If you think about where wealth comes from, you know, often there's this illusion that they're self-made men and women

who make a living on their own and create their own wealth. Well, that's not. We are so utterly dependent on other people and on the generations who came before us. Almost all wealth is created by others and by society in general. That's really fundamental, I think, if you want to understand what makes humans special and what distinguishes from other animals. And as I said, you know, it's also in our biology. So one of the really striking facts that I discovered while I was

researching the book is that we're pretty much the only animal in the animal kingdom with the ability to blush, which is really strange, right? Why would you involuntarily give away your feelings to someone else? What could the evolutionary advantage have been? How did that help us survive the ice age? You know, why was blushing good for us as a species? And the answer that scientists now give is well blushing helps to establish trust it's really hard to distrust or strongly dislike someone who's just there's something endearing about someone who's blushing right it really connects you to that person in a way it's basically a sign that i can feel shame and i care about what you think and it's unique it's something

that darwin the father of evolutionary theory already discovered in the 19th century and he sent letters to all of his contacts around the globe. And he said, do people blush there as well? And do people blush there as well? And they all send him letters back and say, yeah, yeah, they do it here as well. And it's a unique human ability. Yeah. And I think this idea of survival of the friendliness is an interesting one. And then it sort of flips it on its head, right? Because you quote someone who says, the mechanism that makes us the kindest species, this ultra social learning machines that we are,

also makes us the cruelest species. Talk a little bit about how that works. Yeah. Obviously, when you write a book about human kindness, or you try to make the case that people deep down are just decent, well, you got to talk about the elephant in the room as well. We also seem to be the cruelest species in the animal kingdom. We do horrible things that no other animal would ever dream of doing

or ever come up with. You know, concentration camps, prisons, genocide, ethnic cleansing, Auschwitz, you name it. I've never heard of a penguin or a koala or think of any other animal who do horrible stuff like that, right? So if you sort of say, well, I do not believe in veneer theory. I do not believe that people are deep down just nasty and evil and selfish and arrogant and violent.

Then you have to come up with a different explanation, right? And the mystery only becomes bigger. Now, what's so fascinating about this new development in biology is that some of these scientists that argue that the thing that makes us successful is also our dark side so humans are not just a product of survival of the friendliest they're also incredibly groupish right we very much want to be part of a group we just want to be light, basically. And that is almost as important for us, or maybe even as important as food or sex, right? Or these other important things in life.

Loneliness, for example, is similar to smoking 15 cigarettes a day in terms of the effects it has on your health. Again, a sign, by the way, that we are not individuals, right? We really, really need each other. But then if you study some of the biggest atrocities in human history the incredibly uncomfortable thing you'll see is that we quite often do the most terrible things in the name of friendliness in the name of loyalty because we do not want to let our friends down so i've got one chapter in the book about what happened in 1944 and 1945

with the German army and when it was clear the Germans were going to lose the war. At that very late moment in the war, the Germans were still fighting very ferociously, very hard, right? They were like basically fanatics and the Allied psychologists couldn't understand it. You know, what was going on? Why do they keep fighting when, you know, it's really clear they're going to lose the war. We've already had D-Day. The Russians are coming from the east. And then allied psychologists started interviewing prisoners of war. At first, they thought that these soldiers must have been brainwashed, right? That they must be ideological fanatics or something like that. But the reality was that there was one incredibly powerful force driving them, which was kameradschaft, you know, comradeship.

They were fighting for each other, for their friends. They were not all that ideologically motivated, it turned out. The German army command knew this. So they really tried to keep friends together and not separate them. Because they knew that these soldiers, they had gone through so much. And they would take a bullet any time, you know, for their friends. And that was actually one of the main reasons why the germans kept fighting you know which is obviously in a way it's it's a beautiful side of human nature but it caused such immense suffering and tragedy at the same time so that is one of the paradoxes in my book it's it's become a really

paradoxical book in a way much more paradoxical than I thought it would be when I started finding it. I think there is a lot of paradox in it because I think we and history and life is complicated. And I love that you really keep a lot of room open for this is what the evidence appears to be pointing to. And we only know so much, you know, it's sort of back to that idea about the new atheists, right? The thing that rubbed me the most wrong about that was this belief that like, I know the answer. Like, none of us know the answer to whether there's a God out there or not.

Like, that is a question that we don't know. And so the people who insist that it's true and are very dogmatic about it appear to me to be as far off as the people who insist absolutely that there is not. Both of them, to me, I go, eh. And I think this gets back to and where I want to take the rest of this conversation, which is back to what are the consequences of this? So if I at least say, you know what, I'm willing to believe that even if I just move halfway and I go, all right,

you know what, I don't buy veneer theory. I don't think people are all bad. I don't think that left to our own devices, everyone will look out for themselves and do awful things. I'm just going to move to the middle. The middle says, you know what, I believe people can have a really good nature to them. Let's say we get people that far. At the end of the book, you lay out some rules for, you know, here's how you might conduct your life or more specifically for you, what it's meant to you for how you want to conduct your life with this new, I would say, broader, and you would say more realistic view of human nature. So let's talk what some of those are. And I think the first one is really important,

which is when in doubt, assume the best. Well, just as a caveat, I must be honest, initially, I didn't want to write a self-help book, right? Because I really believe that the promise of this idea lies on institutional or structural level, right? Humans are shaped and our behavior is shaped by, you know, the schools that we go to or the workplaces or, you know, our democracies or our prisons. And a lot of the chapters are about that. What would a school look like if you assume that kids are naturally curious and playful and have intrinsic motivation? What would a workplace look like if you believe that you can just trust your employees and you don't need all these layers of management?

What would a prison look like if you even trust the inmates, and if you allow them to socialize with the guards, etc.? And, you know, they talk about the criminal justice system in Norway, that is very counterintuitive, they take it very far there. But it turns out they also have the lowest recidivism rate in the world, you know, the lowest chance that someone who's went to prison will commit another crime after he or she gets out of prison. So I think that's the most important thing is that we got to look at sort of what are the institutional consequences here. But then again, I also just couldn't resist because writing the book changed me. It changed my own life. When you start looking at other humans in a different

way and you just take in all this evidence that we have from all these disciplines, it just influences you because everything starts with your view of human nature how you look at other people and indeed the first rule of life is when in doubt assume the best very often we do the opposite right very often especially when there's a little bit of distance in your communication and we don't really know how to interpret what other people are saying to us then we're in doubt and we often assume the worst. Many people recognize this from, I don't know, communicating on WhatsApp. Someone sends you a weird emoji and you're like, how should I interpret that? What is that person thinking about

me? And sometimes then you get a vicious cycle of distrust, right? And you assume the worst and then you behave in a little bit of a nasty way, and then that other person will think, oh, that's not very friendly, and the relationship deteriorates. What I think you should do is, when you're in doubt, you should always assume the best in other people. And I've got three reasons for it. In the first place, statistically, you'll be right most of the time. Most people are pretty decent, so you just have the best odds if you assume the best. Secondly, your behavior could actually have positive consequences. If someone really doesn't mean well, but you still react in a positive way, well, it could actually have some positive consequences.

This is a phenomenon that has been described in psychology very often, you know, non-conformative behavior. Basically like turning the other cheek, right? It's very hard to stay angry or stay nasty if someone just responds in a kind way. The third reason, and maybe that's the most important one, is even if someone is just a con artist, you know, and it's just trying to rip you off, basically, I think in a way you should accept it. Because if you never want to be conned in your whole life, what do you do? Well, you got to distrust pretty much all the strangers that you ever meet, right? You got to live your whole life distrusting most of the people. I'm not willing to pay that price.

So what I've said to myself is I just accept it, that I'll be conned a couple of times in my life. And if now people tell me that they've never been conned, then I always tell them, you got to see a therapist. You know, your basic attitude to life is not trusting enough. That's very different from the way I used to think about it. Very often when people are the victim of some kind of scam, they feel this shame, right? Yes. That they've been stupid, that they've been naive. And what I'm saying to them is, look, you should not be ashamed of your own humanity. It is deep within your own biology and your DNA.

You know, you've evolved to trust other people and you should never be ashamed of that. Hey y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves,

and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. So a little bit of past, present, and future, all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you

and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park.

Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really.

Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The cost of believing the worst in people so that you protect yourself, that cost is, to me, like you said, I'm not willing to pay it. It's a huge cost. I used to see this in AA. I'm a recovering alcoholic know, and people would be very distrustful. And, you know, I just used to say like the benefits of trusting are that you get your whole life back, you recover and you live this wonderful life. Yes. Maybe you tell somebody something in confidence and they share it. Okay. Yep. It happens. That price is so small compared to the cost of not trusting, which is basically for an alcoholic or an addict is you're going to go back out.

You might very well die. When we paint it that starkly, an addict sort of amplifies all these things. We can see it really clearly. But if we de-escalate that to more of a normal situation, it's still the same cost, you know, which is that believing the worst in people takes a huge psychological cost. It's also true for forgiveness. If you look at the literature on forgiveness, it's really interesting that the people who've thought about this deeply emphasize over and over again is that you forgive someone and in the first place you do it for yourself because you want to liberate yourself. In a way, forgiving someone is a selfish act right because you do not

want to be imprisoned anymore you do not want to be held back by that thing that other person has done to you i think that's a very powerful way of of looking at it what you said also reminds me of what we do as a society when policymakers or politicians write a law they think about the one percent instead of the 99 right so think about the 1% instead of the 99%, right? So think about the whole welfare system or the benefit system. In the Western world, we've created these systems where poor people have to prove over and over again that they're really depressed enough, that they're really sick enough, that they're a hopeless case who will never get anything done in their lives. And once they've proved that on enough forums and in enough interviews with government officials,

then maybe at the end of the day, we'll give them a little bit of assistance, right? But then we've already created a form of dependency and depression, right? If you go through that process, you'll feel absolutely miserable. And sure, you're not gonna find a job anytime soon because the whole system made you miserable. What would happen if we just give people a guaranteed basic income, which is, I think,

one of the really exciting new ideas out there. Just give people a monthly grant that's enough to pay for your basic needs, food, shelter, education, clothing. Well, a couple of people will probably waste it. You know, there's some evidence that around 1-2% of people will waste it on, I don't know, drugs, alcohol, watch Netflix all day, etc. But are we going to base our laws, procedures and institutions, you know, on them, on their behavior? Or are we going to look at the 98% who will take this venture capital and do great things with it? And again, you know, this is not just based on my belief or how I would like people to be, but there's an enormous amount of evidence. You know, we've had a lot of experiments, especially in the United States, by the way, that used to be a pioneer here in the 70s and the 80s. There were huge basic income experiments in the US that showed convincingly that if you just trust people, if you invest in them, you'll get a huge return on the investment.

them, you'll get a huge return on the investment. But please look at how most people behave and do not base your whole loss and your whole society on that small minority. Before I did this, I was in software entrepreneurship. And I used to joke that about the time I wanted to leave the company was about the time when we got an HR department. And this is not against HR people. HR people are wonderful. But what starts to happen is that exactly what you said, we start writing a bunch of rules to deal with the one or 2% that are really problematic. And those rules then constrict everybody else who's going to behave in a better way. It's not that you don't have to have ways of coping with, yes, the one or 2%, but to mold the whole system to that, to prevent that one little bad outcome, to me is kind of, I think, what you're getting at with so much of the book,

is that we go way out of our way to make sure that, you know, the bad apple doesn't get part of his apple. I mean, I'm screwing analogies all up here, but, you know, taking it back to the personal level is that same idea of if I design my whole life, like you said, to avoid getting conned so that nobody ever gets one over on me, that's a bad outcome. And then I think the second piece that you talked about, and I wanted to kind of hit it, is this sort of Pygmalion effect. Is that how you would pronounce it? Share a little bit about what that is, because I think that and its opposite are really powerful and important ideas here. Well, it's basically the scientific proof for

the wolf story. It was a scientist named Albert Rosenthal who did some extraordinary research in the 1960s. What he did is he had rats, basically, and he had them in two cages. And in front of one of the cages was a sign that said, here are some really smart, super, super intelligent rats. And then in front of the other, the second cage, there was a sign that said these are some standard dumb lab rats. And then he asked his students, okay, can you take the rats out of their cages one by one and put them in this maze and then see how long it will take them to find the exit of the maze? And what was really, well, in a way, not very surprising, is that it turned out that the super smart intelligent rats were much quicker, right? Students put them in there and they clocked and they indeed turned out they were much faster

when they were looking for the exit of the maze. But then Rosenthal, the scientist, said to his students that, you know what, actually, these are all just standard lab rats. There was nothing special about the super smart rats at all. But then the question was, but the results were real, right? In theory, super smart rats were much faster. They did find the exit of the maze much faster. So the question was, what was going on here?

And Rosenthal had real difficulty when he was trying to publish his work because most scientific journals would not accept it because they said it couldn't have been true right that didn't happen because you know these labs were all just standard lab rats it took a while but at some point rosenthal realized what had happened it was the power of expectations so the students took out the rats and there was something in the way they handled the really smart rats, you know, with a kind of expectation like, you can do that. You're super awesome. You're super smart.

You know, find the exit. Right. And that made the difference. He called this the Pygmalion effect. It's named after some Greek myth. And since then, you know, it's been proved time and time again in many, many different contexts. The most important context, by the way, is in schools. many different contexts. The most important context, by the way, is in schools. So researchers have shown that if you tell teachers that there are certain kids with, I don't know, extraordinary

ability, even if that is not true, but the teachers don't realize that, that indeed these students will start to do much better on all kinds of standardized tests. It's the power of expectations. The teachers will start to treat them in a way they expect a lot of them. We humans, we are the stories that we tell ourselves. We become what we think what we will become. It's so important also, you know, for people in management, for in schools to understand that their expectations, they're not just expectations, you know, they influence the real world.

And also for the worse, you know, it's one of the poisonous way in which racism does it works. You know, the tyr the real world. And also for the worse, you know, it's one of the poisonous way in which racism does it works. You know, the tyranny of low expectations. People really behave less well if you expect less of them. It was really one of the most important findings of psychology in the 20th century, where we now have a huge amount of evidence for it. Yeah, it's so amazing.

It's amazing that that translates to the way a rat is handled, that it can sort of be that implicit, you know, whereas when we get into human relationships, we are far more direct. It's what we say, you know, it's how we look at people. It's a very direct thing. And there's some quote, and we'll never get it right, but it's one of my favorites. And I don't even remember who said it, but it was something along the lines of, it's always good to believe the best in people. They're more likely to act that way because of it. Yeah.

Just even in an argument with somebody we care about, if we can reorient in that argument to like, well, all right, this is a person I care about. This is someone I love. They want to be happy, just like I do. And it's difficult, right? So we got to admit it's difficult. It's difficult when we try to do it with those who are close to us, you know, with our friends and our family members. And, you know, I have some sometimes arguments with my wife where I behave in a way that's not really in line with my book, I must admit. So, but then it becomes even more difficult when we think about the strangers, the people who are farther away from us, right? It sometimes becomes very counterintuitive.

I mentioned the criminal justice system in a place like Norway, where they have prisons, you know, maximum security prisons. And people locked up there have done terrible things, you know, murderers, rapists. But still, the prisoners get the freedom to socialize with the guards, to make music. They've got their own music studio. They've got their own music label that is called Criminal Records. They really get a chance, basically, to improve themselves. And to be honest, when I first started studying it, it just felt wrong to me. It was like, but come on, these people have done horrible things. And what will the victims

or the parents of the victims think about this? But then I started looking at the results. You know, as I mentioned, the scientific evidence convincingly shows that it really, really works. It's also, by the way, much cheaper because American prisons are often universities for crime, right? People go in there for a small drug offense and they come out as hardened drug criminals or, you know, people who never get a proper job again and pay taxes. So that's very weird. You know, you have these really expensive institutions funded by taxpayers that basically create more crime. So you can turn it around, but it's difficult. So you need to muster all your self-control.

There's one interview I saw with a father who lost his son in the terrorist attacks of Breivik. You'll remember this in 2011 when some right-wing fanatic murdered dozens of teenagers with some kind of political camp the text of Breivik. You'll remember this in 2011, when some right-wing fanatic murdered, you know, dozens of teenagers with some kind of political camp on an island in Norway. And it was horrific. And the interviewer asked the dad, you know, you want the death sentence, right, for this guy. You want to torture him and murder him, etc. But you want vengeance, right? And it was an incredibly moving moment because the dad said, well, look, I have thought about

that quite a bit, but I don't want to sink to that level. I'm so much better than that. And I agree with the prime minister of Norway, who at the time said, when the attacks happened, we're going to respond with more openness, with more transparency and more democracy. And that's how we'll defeat this evil ideology. It's difficult, but it's really worth it. Let's talk about temper your empathy, train your compassion. These are two words that are often used synonymously, but they don't necessarily mean the same thing.

Talk about empathy versus compassion in this case and why we want to develop one over the other. So people have obviously different definitions, but when I use the word empathy, what I mean is this capacity that humans have, and also quite a few other animals have, by the way, is to imagine ourselves in someone else's shoes, is to really feel on an emotional, mental level, what other people are feeling. And a lot of people think that empathy is the solution to so many of our problems, right? on an emotional, mental level, what other people are feeling. And a lot of people think that empathy is the solution to so many of our problems, right? President Obama talked about that, you know, when he was asked, what do we do against xenophobia and racism?

And he said, as so many people say, well, we need more empathy, right? We got to imagine what it's like to be that other person. And for a long time, I also believed that indeed empathy is the answer. But I changed my mind. If you now look at some of the latest scientific evidence, there's one really important book written by Paul Bloom, a psychologist. It's a funny title. It's called Against Empathy. And what he shows in the book is that empathy is not some light that lights up the whole world and lets you see everything clearly. No, it's more like a spotlight. It's a searchlight that helps you to focus on one person or one group while the rest of the world fades into the background. Why is it problematic? Because we just give too much

attention then to that one person or one group. If you think about the Middle East, for example, what's the problem in the Middle East? Well, in many ways, there's too much empathy there and not enough compassion, not more distant, rational compassion, right? Where people try to zoom out a little bit. What happens? The Palestinians commit an attack and there are victims on the Israeli side. And there's obviously a lot of empathy for the victims. And then we also know this from, you know, quite a few studies is that people who feel

more empathy, they want more vengeance. So there's an attack from the Israelis and the Palestinians. And there are, again, a lot of casualties. And people feel a lot of empathy for the victims. And it goes on and on and on, right? So the problem there is not a lack of empathy. People feel an enormous amount of empathy for the victims. Enormous. And that's why they want action. What happened after 9-11 in the US? You know, it was like a tsunami of empathy. And we all know what happened after that. What we need here is something different. And what scientists have shown us is that there's a really distinct phenomenon that

we call compassion. We can even see it in the brain, right? So when people feel compassion, a different part of the brain lights up. One of the ways to explain it is when you think about parenting, right? So as a parent, when your kid is afraid of the dark, you don't want think about parenting, right? So, as a parent, when your kid is afraid of the dark, you don't want to feel empathy, right? You don't want to imagine yourself in the kid's shoes. You don't want to be afraid of the dark as well, right? You just want to sit next to the kid and comfort the kid and say, look, it's fine, you know? You don't have to worry about

that. You know, look, there are no monsters underneath your bed. We can just check it out. Let's see. Yeah, see, no monster at all. And that's more the compassionate approach. It's more distant. It's a bit more rational as well. You care about the person you want to help, right? So it's also about love. You don't allow yourself to be swept away by the suffering and the fear and the feelings of someone else, right? Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love.

So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves, and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. It's a little bit of past, present, and, all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Recognize that look, what you feel is what you feel. Apple Podcasts, or compassion instead of your empathy. Yep. And I often think about this distinction, and I sometimes wonder whether empathy isn't a less developed form of compassion. What I mean by that is maybe it's a stage we have to have. It's a developmental stage. I have to be able to imagine, oh, other people feel like I feel. I have to be able to put myself in somebody else's shoes. So maybe it's a developmental stage, but as far as I develop, it becomes very problematic. So, you know, maybe I develop then into more compassion, which is where I don't have to be in empathy all the time in order to still care about other people.

Yeah, yeah. Maybe empathy indeed could be the stepping stone, but it can also distract us from the bigger picture. I think you often see this with the way we treat our animals. So if I torture a chicken in my backyard and my neighbor sees it and he says, Rutger, this is crazy. I'm going to call the police. Well, they'll lock me up, right? Because it's pretty horrible to torture a chicken. But if there are hundreds of thousands or, well, actually hundreds of millions of chickens locked up and they're, you know, killed when they're 40 days old and they prefer food with painkillers because they're actually in pain all the time. Well, we call it agro business. We just call it, well, that's just the way it is. And we're completely disconnected from that process. I often think that if people have to just watch a short video of what they eat,

of what's on their plate, they wouldn't be able to eat it anymore. In that case, they don't feel the empathy because the distance is too great. We can feel a huge amount of empathy for someone who's in the news, right? A girl has fallen down a well, and the whole country is obsessed with the question, is she going to make it, right? And we're all going to send money and dolls, et cetera, to the family and we're going to support them. And there's a crowdfund

and millions come in. But at the same time, you know, we know, or we should know, that more than 40 million kids die every year from easily preventable causes like malaria and measles and diarrhea. And we also know

what the solutions are. You know, you can just donate not all that much money to a highly effective charity such as the Against Malaria Foundation. And you know that statistically speaking, I mean, you're going to save lives with that. But we don't do that because we don't feel it, right? There's no identifiable victim. In many ways, when we talk about those issues, empathy is not going to help us, right? We need something different. Right. Yeah, that whole issue of distance is such a big thing is that, you know, what we simply would not tolerate in front of us, we are willing to tolerate at a distance.

And your book actually points out a lot of examples of that. You know, we think, well, soldiers are all trained to kill, but that it's relatively hard to train somebody to want to kill somebody. And the more close up that combat is, say a bayonet versus pushing a button on a drone across the world, it's totally different. You know, one's relatively easy to do. The other is really hard to do. It's one of the best kept secrets of psychology, actually, is that humans find it incredibly hard to kill someone else.

There was an American historian, military man, who discovered during the Second World War, when he was allowed to travel on the Pacific front and also in Europe and do a lot of group interviews with soldiers, just after they had been in a combat situation, what he discovered, his name was Samuel Marshall, was that only 15 to 25 percent of soldiers actually fired their guns. Most couldn't do it. You know, these were just soldiers

who had just been drafted. They had, I don't know, six, seven weeks of training. There were not natural born killers. They couldn't do it. They came up with excuses. When the moment was there and they really had to pull the trigger, they couldn't do it. And this was not unique. You know, historians and psychologists have found a huge amount of evidence that this has happened all the time in war. Only with the rise of professional armies, you know, that do a lot of conditioning and brainwashing, that phenomenon started to disappear. Then what happened, obviously, you can clearly see this in the case of Vietnam, is that soldiers who had received training conditioning sort of like pavel of conditioning training right where they learn them to shoot instinctively at targets well the soldiers who then kill someone else often kill something within themselves as well

so they become traumatized by it they develop ptsd which is very strange right if you assume that humans are natural born killers, that we're killer apes, right? To go back to this veneer theory, then why would we become traumatized by killing someone else, right? We should enjoy it, just like sex and eating food, right? There should be some kind of evolutionary reward. But to the contrary, actually, we damage something within ourselves, which suggests to me that even though we're capable in certain situations, highly complex situations of doing horrific things, it's not exactly what we're born to do. Because we also kill and destroy something in ourselves.

That's really well said. And I think it's true. I think circling all the way back to where we started with the wolf theory is these different things can get fed. We can choose to feed them. But to your point, our cultural institutions and our culture does a lot of the feeding for us. I think if we were to summarize a lot of what you're saying in the book, is that it's our structures, it's our institutions, it's our way of doing things that is feeding the bad wolf, which makes us think that the bad wolf is what is naturally

there. When in reality, if you fed the good wolf consistently and all the time, and if that's what our societies and our institutions and our culture was set to do, we'd see a very different view of humanity and that we need to start really trying to feed that better part of ourselves consistently and believe in it and see it. You know, before the conversation, we talked about the situation in America right now, you know, that you've become disillusioned in many ways and that you're pessimistic and maybe even a little bit desperate for the future of the country, right? And then I think that's, especially, you know, before the election and also, you know, from my perspective here in Europe,

it's like, is the country going to hold? How far can this go? Is there some point when it breaks, when something really snaps? I think it's helpful to remember that, yes, there's an incredibly, call it a poisonous system that every day in so many ways brings out the worst in people. But it's the system, right? And that can change because it has been created by people, so it can also be changed by people it's not necessarily the people themselves so those people who you disagree with on the other side in so many ways they're just like you you know they've got the same human nature yeah and they have the same instincts deep down they just live in a different world in a different context and we got to try and build bridges etc maybe it's a bit of a cliche, what I'm saying here. But I think

it's still incredibly important to remember that, that in the end, we're so, so similar to one another. I agree. I mean, there's a teaching from Buddhism that influenced me so strongly, which was just recognize that everybody underneath wants to be happy like you are. And so then at that point, if I can orient that way towards somebody, then what we're debating is strategies. I'm not seeing them as fundamentally different than me. I'm seeing the strategies they're employing. Okay, we can debate those. But underneath, we are people. And I do, even despite what I was saying beforehand, about some of the frustrations I've seen in the US about like mask wearing and some of that. I still do believe in the genuine goodness of most people. I really believe it's there. And

the question is just how do we cultivate it? How do we cultivate it in ourselves? And how do we cultivate it in others? Yeah, absolutely. There's a saying from Nelson Mandela that I really love. He once said that it's easier to change the world than to change yourself. So if you can change yourself, then changing the world is a piece of cake. Yeah, yeah. My background, maybe some people would see me as some kind of, I don't know, loony leftist or like a progressive. I don't know. I personally see myself as someone who tries to combine ideas, you know, from both conservatives and progressives.

Something like basic income, for example, is both quite left wing and right wing idea. It's both about freedom and about equality. So there's a tendency among people who are on the left or progressives, right, that they often dismiss the importance of self-help and individual change. They say, no, we got to talk about Amazon and Jeff Bezos and the evil system and the structure, right? And they got to pay their taxes. And we got to talk about inequality and blah, blah, blah. We got to talk about the big things and don't talk about the individual because that's neoliberal or something like that. And to be honest, I used to

believe that as well. But again, as I've become older and I've looked at some of the people I really, really admire, you know, some of the people who really changed the course of world history. What I see is that they first changed themselves and then they changed the world, right? Martin Luther King. Today, Greta Thunberg, one of the most effective climate activists of our time. She first became a vegan, then she convinced her parents to buy solar panels, then she convinced her parents to buy an electric car, then she convinced her mother to stop flying around the world. And she's a famous opera singer, her mother. So that was basically her job, but she convinced her mother to stop doing that. She did all of that and only then she started protesting in front of Swedish parliament. So the political is personal

and the personal is political. If you can change yourself, you can change the world. That is a beautiful place for us to wrap up. Thank you so much, Rutger, for coming on the show. I enjoyed this conversation. I highly recommend the book. We'll have links in the show notes to the book and where you can find more about Rutger. Thanks so much. Thanks, man. Really enjoyed this. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support.

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