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Humankind rutger bregman5/17/2023 ![]() ![]() But if we can actually trust each other, if we do have the courage to move to a more realistic, hopeful view of human nature, then we can move to a very different kind of society as well - and build very different kinds of schools and democracies and workplaces. And in the second place, it's often used as a legitimization of hierarchy, because if we cannot trust each other, then we need them – we need the CEOs and the monarchs and the generals and the kings and you name it. It sort of gives you an excuse to do nothing. I'm just saying that we have to remember here that cynicism is, in the first place, it's a synonym for laziness. And if you've never been conned, then maybe you should ask yourself the question: Is my basic attitude to life trusting enough? I think it's more rational to say, OK, this is just going to happen a couple of times in my life that I'll be the victim of some confidence game. Do you really want to live your whole life distrusting other people? That price is way too high to pay. You know, human beings are just incredibly good compared to other species at cooperating on a skill that other species just can't. And it's, as I said, it's actually the reason why we have conquered the globe. I think it's rational to assume the best in other people because most people are pretty decent. But it can give us hope, because there are a lot of reasons for hope in this world today as well. So I'm not saying that journalism should all be happy. And I think that good journalism is also not only about the problems, but also about the solutions, and the people who are working on these solutions. So I think that good journalism helps you to zoom out, to focus on the structural forces that govern our lives. Maybe we have to make a distinction here between the news and journalism. So, yeah, there's a real mental health hazard here. You know, they've become cynical and depressed and feel anxious. And this is what you can see with people who, basically, just follow too much of the news. And you'll have a quite bleak view of human history and human nature. So if you watch and follow a lot of the news, at the end of the day, you know exactly how the world is not working. Well, the news is mostly about things that go wrong, right? It's about sensationalist incidents that happened today, instead of things that happen every day. On media raising misperception of risk, anxiety, contempt and hostility Both of these things are true at the same time. And 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 so had the biggest chance of passing on their genes to the next generation.īut then, on the other hand, we're also the cruelest species, right? We do things that other animals just don't – when you think about wars or ethnic cleansing or, you know, racism, discrimination, you name it. Right? Because on the one hand, biologists say we are one of the friendliest species in the animal kingdom. It's one of the ironies of writing a book about the power of human kindness is that you have to go on for hundreds of pages about all the dark chapters in our history. On thinking this way amid all of the discouraging news And I think that, if you zoom out a little bit during this pandemic, you see the same phenomenon. This happens again and again after natural disasters, after earthquakes and after floodings. And we get this explosion of altruism and cooperation. It's actually more than 700 case studies that show that, especially in times of crisis, we show our best selves. But in the first chapters of the book, I go over all the evidence of sociology that we have – and it's quite a lot. ![]() And that we really become quite horrible versions of ourselves. ![]() We often assume that during times of crises, the veneer that we call civilization cracks and that people reveal their true selves. You know, I think it's actually exactly the right time. On whether this is a good – or bad – time to make his argument "If we can actually trust each other, if we do have the courage to move to a more realistic, hopeful view of human nature, then we can move to a very different kind of society as well - and build very different kinds of schools and democracies and workplaces," Bregman tells NPR. Rutger Bregman begins his new book Humankind: A Hopeful History with what he calls this "radical idea" that most people deep down are pretty decent.īregman is a historian and writer for The Correspondent in the Netherlands and author of the previous bestseller Utopia for Realists. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Humankind Subtitle A Hopeful History Author Rutger Bregman, Elizabeth Manton, et al
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