The Wellness Scoop - Human Kindness

Episode Date: May 12, 2020

Why should we believe in human goodness? Today we’re exploring the power of human kindness and why the theory that most people are governed by self-interest is possibly totally inaccurate. Our guest Rutger Bregman instead argues that history shows we are fundamentally altruistic and kind, it’s a refreshing, optimistic view of the world that we hope will give you a little hope.   Books Rutger Bregman, Humankind Hans Rosling, Factfulness – the book on why the world is getting better   A link to an article detailing more about the real Lord of the Flies: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Samsung Galaxy. Ever captured a great night video only for it to be ruined by that one noisy talker? With Audio Erase on the new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, you can reduce or remove unwanted noise and relive your favorite moments without the distractions. And that's not all. New Galaxy AI features like NowBrief will give you personalized insights based on your day schedule so that you're prepared no matter what. Buy the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra now at Samsung.com. Hi and welcome to the Deliciously Ella podcast with, Ella Mills. So we are often told that human beings are by nature selfish beings

and that we're all too often governed by self-interest. It's a belief that has seemingly sunk into Western thought and has been supported by the left and the right, by psychologists and philosophers from Freud to Machiavelli, writers and historians. But let's be totally honest, it's a depressing way of looking at the world. So when the book that today's episode is based on landed on my desk, I was pretty excited about it. And I knew that we needed to get the author on the podcast ASAP. So Rutger Bregman wants to change this narrative. And he wants to give us a new and let's be honest, much needed

perspective. Through a look at 200,000 years of human history, Rutger is here to put forward a refreshing new argument on human nature, that we should assume people are good. He believes there is real evidence to fundamentally believe in human kindness, and that this way of looking at the world can act as a foundation for achieving true change in our society, change that, let's be honest, we all want now more than ever. And when we think the worst in others, it can bring out the worst in them and the worst in our politics and the worst in our economics too. So what happens if we do the opposite? So welcome to the podcast. Thanks. Thanks for having me, Ella. So I saw that your book was described as a radical history of our innate capacity for kindness,

which is probably the best way you could describe any book. And I'm sure it's something that will really speak to our listeners, especially at the moment, because obviously, you know, it's particularly refreshing to have those positives and optimistic ways of looking at things to hold on to at the moment. So I wanted just, you know, to get started, could you give us a little bit of an overview? You know, what drew you to this topic? And what were the top level findings? Yeah, sure. So the exciting thing that has happened in the past 20 years, I'd say, is that scientists from really diverse disciplines, say anthropologists and archaeologists, but also sociologists and psychologists, have all moved from a quite cynical view of human nature

and the idea that deep down we're all selfish, to a much more positive, hopeful view of human nature and the idea that deep down we're all selfish to a much more positive, hopeful view of human nature. And I started to realize that this was going on in different disciplines. But then I also realized that they often don't know each from each other. So a couple of years ago, I was interviewing a psychologist. Her name is Marie Lindegaard. She's a Danish-Dutch psychologist. And she's done some brilliant work on what they call the bystander effect. You know, what happens when, you know, someone is, for example, drowning or someone's attacked in the street, and then the question is, do we actually help each other? And what millions of psychology students have learned, you know, for decades is that, well, no, people don't really help each other, especially if there are other people around, because then they think, you know,

it's not my responsibility and whatever. And this is what they call the bystander effect. So Marie Lindegaard was the first one who actually did what they call empirical research. She didn't rely on lab experiments, but she relied on CCTV footage, right? Because we've got so many cameras in cities these days. So she basically built a database full of videos of people who were actually being attacked in the street or drowning or whatever. And then the question is, again, you know, do people actually help each other? And she came at this astonishing finding that actually, in 90% of all cases, people help each other. So what we've been teaching students

for decades is utterly wrong. And she was telling me about this research. And then I said, you know what, I've just had this conversation with a biologist. His name is Franz de Waal, who said that actually, we've evolved, you know, this extraordinary capacity for empathy. And, and that also in biology, this view of human nature shifting. And she said to me, Oh, my God, it's happening there as well. And that's when I realized I got to write a book about this, sort of to connect all the dots. And so why do we take such a negative view of humanity? Like what was it that made us start believing the worst in each other? And it was really interesting because I was talking to my husband

about your book last night, and I was really enjoying reading it. And I was just giving him a few of the examples that you share that I'm sure we'll go through and about how we do assume that, you know, we don't necessarily think that we assume the worst in each other. But when you give some of the examples, he was like, Oh, yeah, I would have thought that too. And where is this come from? There are so many reasons. I think we have to start with the kind of information that we get every day, right? Most of us are, let's be honest, addicted to the news. And the news is mostly about, you know, the negative stuff, about sensationalist incidents that make you depressed.

And there's even a term for this within psychology. They call it mean world syndrome. So people who watch too much of the news, they become more cynical, they become more anxious, they become more depressed. So that's sort of the first step to, you know, a bit more mental health is just avoid the news, stop following the news, they become more cynical, they become more anxious, they become more depressed. So that's sort of the first step to, you know, a bit more mental health is just avoid the news, stop following the news, right? Which doesn't mean you should stop following journalism, because I mean, I think good journalism helps us to better understand the world, but sort of the news that only focuses on the exceptions, really skews your view of human

nature. But I think it's sort of a deeper reason for sort of this negative view of human nature. But I think a sort of deeper reason for sort of this negative view of human nature is it's a legitimization of power, right? Of those in power. Because if we cannot trust each other, then we need them, then we need hierarchy, then we need generals and managers and CEOs and kings and queens and you name it. Because otherwise, you know, we would be tearing each other apart and there would be some kind of war of all against all. But if we can actually trust each other, if most people are pretty decent, then we can govern our own lives and we can compromise and then we don't need all this inequality and all these hierarchies, etc.

So those in power have understood this for a long time. They know that it may seem like a very warm nice oh this guy has written a book about human kindness well actually it's a really dangerous idea it's a subversive idea because if you really think it through it means that we got to revolutionize our whole society yeah so there's there's two things i want to pick up on then because it's you know it's funny it's sort of what I thought when I started reading the book I thought oh this is gonna be really nice it will give loads of people you know inspiration it's lovely to hear lovely stories and then actually as you start to get into it as you said it's actually it's kind of really there's a huge

amount of food for thought in there but they had those two things I wanted to pick up on there was one little study that I picked out of the book that really struck me as being particularly interesting and what you said on the news front which which was that, you know, our kind of susceptibility to doom and gloom, and that there was a study done by Dutch sociologists who were analysing fear around plane crashes and the reporting of plane crashes, and that between 1991 and 2005, when they were looking at this, the number of plane accidents actually dropped, but the media attention consistently grew. So the findings of their study showed that as a result, people grew increasingly fearful of something that was

increasingly safe. Yeah, yeah. This is often the dynamic that you see in the news, you know, as something becomes more exceptional. You know, I think terrorism is a pretty great example here. I mean, terrorism is horrible, absolutely horrible. But as it becomes statistically more unlikely to happen, it will shock us more, right? Because it will be more exceptional. So it will be more newsworthy. And so people will be more afraid of it. Not many people know that actually in the 1970s, there were way more terrorist attacks, mostly by leftist radicals than there were, you know, in the past 10 to 15 years.

But back then it was sort of, it was more common, right? People were almost more used to it. So this is sort of the weird irony of the news is that as things get better, we often think that they get worse. When you ask people the question, how's the world done, you know, in the past 20 to 30 years, most people say, well, you know, it's deteriorated, our health has deteriorated, we're poorer than ever, etc. Well, actually, if you zoom out a little bit, we've seen a lot of progress, you know, child mortality has gone down, extreme poverty has gone down. We've seen some really good things. But you don't really get that from the news, because it really focuses on the negative.

Yeah, no, it's really interesting that my father-in-law was just reading a book on exactly that. And the names completely escaped me. But it was exactly that it was a book showing like all the incredible things that have happened in the last couple of decades, which feel counterintuitive exactly to how lots of people perceive things to be at the moment and so one of the things that I found the most interesting and I'd love us to kind of get stuck into because I think it really taps into what we were saying a couple of minutes ago about our kind of fear that yeah lack of trust of each other and that you know if we don't have kind of order the world world will descend into chaos. And so much of this stems from just a kind of long held belief. But there was a very interesting chapter on the book,

Lord of the Flies. And I'd imagine that most of our listeners have read it. It feels like a kind of compulsory part of education almost. But there was a really interesting thing about how the publication of that kind of tapped into the zeitgeist of the 60s and the questioning of all the atrocities of World War II. And it kind of created this view of society that, you know, what would happen if we were left to our own devices would be absolutely horrendous. But as you know, biologists have said that there's no shred of evidence for that. And in actual fact, you kind of went on this brilliant journey to discover a real life example of Lord of the Flies, which I doubt anyone's probably ever heard of. And it actually shows the polar opposite. It shows lifelong friendship,

daily song, you know, a fire that didn't go out for more than a year through teamwork and no tyranny at all. And could you tell us all a little bit more about that i mean lord of the flies is one of the most famous and influential novels of the 20th century right so the author william golding he received a nobel prize for it and and the swedish committee said you know there was no one that had given us such a vivid realistic depiction of human nature, right? And I mean, I remember reading it when I was, I don't know, I think I was 16 or 17 years old. And back then, it felt a little bit like growing up, you know, like a coming of age experiments, like no more Harry Potter for me, no more Little Princes on Prairies or whatsoever. But this is like a real book about how children

would actually behave. So for those who haven't read the novel, what happens is that there's an air crash. Still happened a lot, I guess, in those days. Airplane crash. And these kids shipwreck on an island. And then they just have to survive on their own. And at first they think, oh, this is wonderful news. This is great. And they sort of try to start up a democracy of sorts.

But it doesn't really work. They end up in fights. And it gets worse and worse and worse. And at the end of the novel, three of the kids are dead. And so the message of the novel was, look, this is what happens. Civilization is just a thin veneer. So even if you have these well-behaved, nice British boys from a good boarding school, then still, if you leave them on an uninhabited island, they become monsters, animals, because that's inside each of us. And I really must admit,

I used to sort of believe that. I thought, yeah, that's probably realistic. It was only while I was doing more research for this book that I thought, you know, has this ever actually happened, or could we do a scientific experiment to just drop kids on an island and see what happened? So you ask around, you know, among your friends who already have kids. And, well, I found very few parents who were willing to drop their kids on an island. So I thought, you know, I got to find a natural experiment, you know, that it somehow happened by accident. And, yeah, then after a long journey, I discovered that it actually did happen once. I found in an old archive in a newspaper, an Australian newspaper called The Age,

that said that in 1966, six kids had been rescued from a small island called Etta near Tonga, which is an island group near Australia. And supposedly they had survived there for 18 months and they had been rescued by a captain named Peter Warner. So then I thought I got to find these people and see if they're still alive. I had to go over to Australia for a book tour to promote my previous book, Utopia for Realists. And I thought, you know, I could just kind of find and see if I can track them down. And, yeah, I discovered that Peter Warner, the captain who rescued them, is now almost 19 years old. But, you know, he was still alive. And he was still best friends with a man called Mano Toto, now 70 years old.

And he was actually one of the original Lord of the Flies kids. So together they could tell me the story of what actually really happened. And you know what? If this would be a Hollywood movie, people would say, that is so naive, you know, that is so sentimental. This is not how kids would actually behave. You know, they would say, this is worse than love actually. But actually it did happen that way.

So the real Lord of the Flies is a story of friendship. It's a story of cooperation. It's a story of loyalty. Sometimes the kids ended up in fights at that island. But then just one of the kids would go to one side of the island and the other side would go to the other side of the island. They would cool off a little bit, cry a little, come back and say sorry. And that's how they kept going for months and months i was just really blown away by this

extraordinary story of human resilience and that they actually made it in the end and i mean even more fascinating is that they stayed friends for decades ever after they started working for peter the captain who who found them and discovered them and And yeah, 50 years later, they were still friends and drinking beers together. So yeah, it's almost in every way the opposite of the novel. It's absolutely fascinating. And I think it was really insightful. And then you related that to the other situation in which we often kind of now view people sort of trapped together outside of the rest of the world. and what happens is a kind of big brother type reality tv situation yeah which again is you know you're really quick to

point out like isn't actually reality because you know the producers are trying to make quote unquote interesting engaging tv and in order to do that you know you need characters that are going to ride each other up the editing is very very clever in order to kind of show certain things you know if you take a 24-hour day and edit it into 30 minutes you can show anything you want basically you know you can always portray things in a certain way and so again it kind of just sort of confirms this negativity bias that we have towards it but it's not necessarily again reflective of of actual human nature exactly well this is the thing that the makers of reality television discovered around 20 years ago, you know, when Big Brother started, you know,

one of the great Dutch expert products that we're all so proud of. So what they discovered is that if you put people in, you know, one building or an uninhabited island or, you know, some kind of golden cage, and you let them do whatever they want nothing happens you know nothing happens they just drink tea together they have a good time together they play cards it's it's terrible for ratings it's terrible television right so what you got to do is you got to set them up against each other you got to lie to them you got to deceive them you got to do try and pull all these tricks and then maybe something small happens that you can take out of context and then show it and then blah blah blah

and then something happens but it's still sometimes it goes horribly wrong right so we had in in the netherlands we had a season of temptation island i think two years ago where basically nothing happened and people were really complaining that people were too nice to each other and it was really boring it very much reminds me of um of this, one of the other classics of social psychology that many of your listeners probably know is the Stanford prison experiment that happened in the 70s. Where they locked up a group of students in a sort of a fake prison in the basement of Stanford University. And there was a group that was made into guards and a group made into prisoners. And here again, the story was, oh, look, here are these really well-behaved, nice, pacifist, hippie students.

But then just a couple of days being a guard and they show this horribly sadistic behavior. But actually, here again, if you look at what actually happened behind the scenes, it very much looks like reality television yes absolutely and i think it's something that has picked up time and time again that experiment yeah it's uh it's still being taught to psychology students around the globe it's almost in every psychology textbook it goes viral every now and then but so how do you explain because again you know for people who are familiar with that they'll know and then people who aren't you know basically very smart stanford students who were part of this experiment became tyrannical monsters including

the postgrad that was supervising it and how how do you explain that how did these students who were just volunteering for an interesting experiment turn into monsters in less than a week yeah yeah so the standard story that philip zimbardo who you know who did the research has always told is that it was just the context so they were in this context where they were given this power over other human beings and that that brought out the worst in them, right? Because half of them were the guards, right? And half of them were the inmates.

Exactly, exactly. And what we didn't know until just two or three years ago, when a French sociologist published this book called The Lie of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Well, what we didn't know is that actually, Philip Zimbardo, the researcher, specifically instructed the guards to be as sadistic as possible from day one. So they knew very well that that was sort of the goal of the experiment.

Then many of the guards, you know, who were just nice, average human beings, said, no, I don't want to do that. I'm not, of course, I'm not going to be horrible to the prisoners. I just want to have a good time here. Let's play cards and, I don't know, play a bit of music or something like that. But then Zimbardo said, no, no, no, you can't do that because I need these results for my study. And if I can show that people behave horribly in prisons, then we can go to the press and then we can make the case that we need to reform the whole prison system, right? And you are a hippie liberal leftist thinker, right? I mean, you want

this, so please cooperate here. And so that's what happened. A couple of the guards went along with his sort of play, his theater. And yeah, later, Philip Zimbardo told a very different kind of story. And that ended up in all the science textbooks. It's a pretty bizarre story. Now, the interesting fact is that they once replicated, you know, did another version of the experiment. Years later, for the BBC, those were two different psychologists. And these psychologists said, OK, let's do this experiment again, but let's not interfere. Let's just see what happens, right?

So you've got a group of guards. You've got a group of prisoners. Let's put them in this fake prison and let them just govern their own affairs. But, you know, I have seen this show, sort of the BBC prison experiment. It was, I think, 2002. I will never get those hours back. It's the most boring reality show ever. Nothing, nothing happens.

It's, you know, already in the first episode, there ever nothing nothing happens it's you know already in the first episode there's a guard that says you know how can't we just talk about this and maybe you know drink a beer together and at the end of the show you know in the fourth or fifth episode they're all sitting together in the cantina and and just drinking tea and playing cards it's really horrible it goes on it's very boring but you know that's what you get if you do not mislead people and set them up against each other yeah it's interesting you say that at the beginning actually that part of the reason that potentially we start to get this kind of skewed view of the way that each other are is that actually so much of what we talk about and so much of what we read

about or watch is about the exceptional and actually like the mundane is actually what makes up most of our lives and it's so boring that we don't talk about it and as yeah yeah that skews things a bit and there was another completely fascinating example that you included I guess it just kind of when you start to put them all together you start to think like I guess it begs the question first of all like why do we want to report this in such a kind of skewed way if that's not the reality is it just because it's a better read you know it's more interesting as you said it's a bit boring to read that someone drunk tea but there was an incredible example on easter island and i wondered if you could tell us a little bit about that as well sure well here again you have sort of the standard story and you have the new story that is coming out of science. So the standard story is a story about this very remote civilization in the middle of the ocean that basically destroyed itself.

So, I mean, we all know that sort of the fascinating statues that are on on Easter Island, right? These huge monoliths, you know, these huge heads, really amazing. When the European explorers discovered this civilization, it wasn't clear how they made these huge statues. It wasn't clear how they could do it because there were no trees on the island. All the trees were gone and probably you would need trees to at least transport them or to erect them. So they couldn't understand how they did it. But then later, researchers discovered that actually, at some point, the island was full of trees. There were a lot of trees. But then maybe they had cut all the trees down.

And that's how sort of Easter Island became sort of a metaphor for our own future. So a lot of environmentalists have said, look at Easter Island. That is what we're doing to our own future. So a lot of environmentalists have said, look at Easter Island. That is what we're doing to our own planet right now. These Easter Island people, they cut down all the trees and that meant that they had less food to access. They couldn't make these beautiful statues anymore. Their civilization declined. It ended up in a civil war. Then they became cannibals. They started eating each other. So when the first European explorers came there, they discovered basically a dying civilization. And that's the message then. This is the same thing that we're doing to the planet right now,

you know, with climate change and the extinction of species, etc. And again, you know, I must admit, I used to believe this story. So, you know, I've previously written another book, luckily only published in Dutch, you know, where I tell this whole story, you know, the cynical version of the story. But while researching this book, I discovered that actually the scientific consensus had shifted quite a bit and that in reality, the Easter Island people were much more resilient. So, yes, I mean, the trees did go, but probably not because they cut all the trees down, but probably because of a plague of rats. And that's something much harder to do anything about it. But then after that, they still had a quite prosperous society. But somehow archaeologists and other researchers have so often and for so long wanted to depict them as these horrible savage people. Well, actually, if you go back to the original reports of the first explorer who discovered Easter Island,

it was a Dutch guy, and you read that report, and I went to the library to read it, and he's talking about pretty nice and friendly people who offer him a lot of food, who are not hungry. I mean, why would you offer someone else food if you're hungry yourself, right? So again, a very, very different story. I think the real story of Easter Island is, you know, a story of resiliency, of cooperation, etc. And I'm not saying that that is, you know, going to be our future as well. I mean, I am personally really worried, obviously, about climate change and the extinction of species. But I'm just saying that there is still a lot of hope and human beings are not

necessarily some kind of virus that have to destroy everything in their way that's not that's not the case yeah i mean you said yourself that you went to do a kind of a study on it and that when a scientist betrays humans and human beings as kind of homicidal primates the media are very quick to seize onto their work and there's a huge amount of coverage on it and then you found kind of in reverse when another colleague argues the reverse we scarcely listen and it's not really being picked up on and so as a result this kind of fascination with horror and spectacle and an interesting story yeah creates a kind of misled view but then i'm sure and you you and you talk about this in the book, because I'm sure there's a huge number of people listening and who'd be reading the book or

thinking about what you're proposing and saying, look, I understand this. There are really good examples and you're right. Maybe perhaps sometimes we do sometimes portray people in a way that's not necessarily correct. But then at the same time, God, we've done some horrific things as human beings. And, you know, how do you explain Auschwitz, genocide, you know, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot? You know, if you've got a kind of systematic merger of six million Jews in World War II, you know, how do you explain that without saying that as human beings, we, you know, we can be pretty terrible is even kind of almost too soft a word for what we're talking about there yeah well this is obviously the big question of all of our history right on the one hand we are one of the most friendliest species in the animal kingdom we're for example the only species in the animal kingdom that blush which is i think a really peculiar fact about us you know why would you why would you blush why would you sort of

involuntarily give away your feelings to other people? I mean, the answer is it really helps us to cooperate. But then on the other hand, I mean, we're the cruelest species as well. I've never heard of a penguin that says, oh, let's look up another group of penguins and exterminate them all, right? Like wars and genocides and ethnic cleansing. These are all singularly human crimes. So that is the irony, I think, of writing a book like this, is that if you want to argue that most people are pretty decent or have evolved to work together, then you have to also go on for hundreds and hundreds of pages about the dark chapters in our history, because that question only becomes more origin, right? How do you explain it? Now, obviously, I cannot pretend to give like a short, snappy answer to such a big question,

but maybe a beginning of the answer lies in this theory that biologists have. And they're saying that actually, we have evolved to be friendly and to cooperate, right? They literally talk about survival of the friendliest, which means that for millennia, it was actually the friendliest among us who had

the most kids and then had the biggest chance of passing on their genes to the next generation. Now, again, that sounds very nice, but if you think it through a little longer, there's a dark side to that as well. Sometimes friendliness is actually the problem in our society. If you look at the history of progress, so often progress has come from those who are unfriendly. I've just finished reading this wonderful book by Helen Lewis, a British journalist who's written this great history of feminism in Great Britain, and it's called Difficult Women. I think the title says it all. Progress comes from those who are willing to be difficult, who are willing to be unfriendly and nasty and go against the status quo, right? And sometimes actually our willingness to be friendly or

sort of that we want to be liked and want to be part of a group can actually be the problem. I try to show in the book that so often those things that we tend to see as really positive, like comradeship or loyalty, are also implicated in our worst crimes. I think one of the best examples here is the German army during the Second World War. That was a really incredibly effective fighting force. And the Allied psychologists just couldn't understand, you know, why were they still fighting in 1944 and still fighting in 1945? You know, it seemed like they were maniacs or, you know, ideologically brainwashed. But then they started interviewing prisoners of war.

And all these Germans kept saying to them, you know, I'm not fighting for some grand ideology. I'm fighting for my friends, for my comrades. I don't want to let them down, right? And I'm obviously not saying that ideology is not important. And especially for, you know, the leaders, people like Hitler and Goebbels and you name it, ideology is very important, you know, and their horrible anti-Semitic fantasies and you name it. But for the average food soldier, comradeship, you know,

just not wanting to let your friends down was probably more important. And this is a dark truth about us, is that so often we do horrible things in the name of the good, right? Because we just want to help our friends or something like that. And then we just end up in these cycles that go on and on and on. So this is, I think, the great paradox of this book is that in the first place, I argue that human beings have evolved to be friendly, but then sometimes that's exactly the problem. a young girl and I think there were 33 witnesses and the attacker came back three 37 I'm sorry yeah the attacker came back three times and these 37 witnesses watched the whole thing and it took like two hours or something for someone even to call the police and is there a connection between

the two there how do you kind of explain that again in kind of putting forward the fact that human beings are innately good yeah well this is another one of those really famous findings of the of the 60s so in the you have the stanford prison experiment you got the lord of the flies novel that became really popular back then and there was also this really famous horrible homicide of of a woman called kitty jennavees it happened at the beginning of the 60s in New York. And so the story was at the time, reported in the New York Times, that supposedly 37 people had watched her, you know, being stalked by her assailant in the streets

in a very nice neighborhood, Koo Gardens, you know, that had like nice upper middle-class homes. And no one had done anything. 37 people had sort of seen it happen. There was even one couple, the newspaper reported that had opened the window, put two chairs in front of the window, switched off the light so that they could see better what was going on and done nothing. You know, it's a horrible, horrible story of urban apathy and just people leaving each other alone. And again, this is in a story that became incredibly famous, you know, so many magazines, TV shows,

documentaries were devoted to it. Generations of psychology students have been taught the story. But the same thing here happened is that researchers went back into the archives and tried to sort of piece together what actually happened, what really happened. And they discovered that actually the vast majority of these so-called witnesses had no idea what was going on. They thought it was just, you know, some drunk people making a little bit of noise, which was not a strange thing to think because there was a pub on the corner of the of the street and in reality we now know kitty genevese didn't die alone but she actually died in the arms of one of her best friends

who went down there endangering her own life she didn't know if if the attacker was still there but still did that did that but she was written out the story because it didn't fit sort of the cynical narrative there's one new york Times journalist who later literally said, you know, it would have ruined the story if I would have included details like that. So now the latest findings, as I talked about earlier, into the bystander effect, you know, how people actually behave when they see something happening in the street, is very much the opposite. In the vast majority of cases, people actually help each other. And so what's your kind of fundamental takeaway from all of this? I know you say that there are three things that you think people should know before you kind of start to explore this new view, which is that standing up for human goodness is standing up

against the mythical monster Hydra. So the heads will keep coming back. It's taking a stand against the powers that be and that it's being happy to weather a storm of human ridicule. You know, people thinking you are being naive by dismissing these sorts of examples. You know, there's this wonderful quote from Richard Curtis, the director of Love Actually, which is secretly one of my favorite films. I'm not ashamed to admit that. But, you know, he once said in an interview, and I really loved it. I think it really sums up,

you know, what I'm trying to say with this book. So I'm just going to quote it. He said, if you make a film about a man kidnapping a woman and chaining her to a radiator for five years, something that has happened probably once in history, it's called searingly realistic analysis of society. If I make a film like Love Actually, which is about people falling in love, and there are about a million people falling in love in Britain today, it's called a sentimental presentation of an unrealistic world. So this happens all the time.

If you believe in human goodness and human kindness, you're branded as an idealist, as naive, as whatever. Well, actually, I think that it's the cynic who is really naive. It's the cynic who has an unrealistic, unscientific view of human nature. And that actually, if we move to a more realistic view of who we really are, we can change a lot in our society and make it a much better place. Because in the end, you know, what we assume in each other, what we assume in other people is so often what we get out of them. If we assume that most people are selfish and then design our society around that, you know, our schools, our democracies, workplaces, you name it, then that's exactly what we'll get. You know,

you'll create the kind of people that your theory presupposes. But if you assume that most people are actually by nature altruistic, empathetic, you know, want to work together, I think you can have a much better society. Thank you so much for your time today. And we normally leave each episode with kind of three to five sort of take homes for the listeners, things that you would want them to remember from what you've been doing and what you've been learning. And I wondered if you would be happy to share those with us. Sure, sure. So I closed the book with an epilogue in which I sort of asked the question, what is sort of the personal implication of all of this? Because I mean, I must admit, I'm not a huge fan of the self-help genre, right? I think that often we need to change our society first before we can change our own lives, because

it's so hard to, I don't know, live a better life if you're poor or if you're pressed for time or whatsoever. So maybe we need to eradicate poverty first and all those kinds of things, right? So it's really all about building different institutions. But then at the same time, I mean, there are some important personal implications of a more positive, hopeful view of human nature. So I thought, you know what, I'm just going to come up with a list of sort of rules for life if you believe in the good of humanity. And I think the first and most important one that I came up with for myself, you know, at least that I'm trying to take seriously in my own life, is when in doubt, assume the best in other people. Because so often, we don't really know what the intentions of other people are. I mean, communication can be hard quite often, right? And then you have a conversation on, I don't know, social media or WhatsApp, and then you're thinking about, how should I interpret that emoji? And so often we interpret things in a negative way, right? We assume that people

mean something bad. And actually, most of the time, that's wrong, because most people are pretty decent. And then you can say, yeah, but Rutger, but what if people actually do have bad intentions? Well, then still, I think it's good to assume the best because there's this fascinating phenomenon in psychology, which they call non-complementary behavior. If someone acts in a horrible way to you and you act in a nice way to that person, then actually you can bring out the best in the other person, right? Because human interaction is often about mirroring, right? We imitate each other all the time. Then you could still say, yeah, but there are psychopaths out there, right? There are like professional liars and con men and you name it. I mean, you can't

just trust anyone, right? Because then at some point, you'll be the victim of a horrible fraud or something like that. And then I say, yeah, but maybe that's the price you should be willing to pay. Because what's the alternative? Do you really want to live your whole life being distrustful of everyone around you? Then sure, then you'll never be conned, right? Then you'll never be the victim of some fatherless scheme whatsoever. But that's just a too high price to pay. So I think you should just accept the fact that a couple of times in your life, you'll be the victim of a terrible con, right? You'll be ripped off, that happens. But that is a reasonable, realistic price to pay for a whole life where you can trust most of the people around you, right? And so if you've

never been conned, then maybe you should ask yourself the question, is my basic attitude to life trusting enough? So I think that is sort of an important rule for life that I'm trying to live by. When in doubt, assume the best in other people. Brilliant. Well, thank you so, so much for joining us. And thank you guys all so much for listening. I will put all the details of the book in the show notes below. It's just called Humankind, A Hopeful History. And yeah, if anyone's got a bit of extra time, possibly at the moment, for spending many more evenings at home, then it a very very very fascinating read otherwise thank you so much for joining us we so appreciate it and i hope everyone has a lovely day

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