Humankind: Are We Good Or Evil? - Rutger Bregman - #181

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Howdy, friends, welcome back. My guest today is Rutger Bregman, bestselling author of Utopia for Realists, and today we are talking about his new book, Humankind, has the shocking revelation, the unbelievable hypothesis that is at our very core, human beings are actually quite nice. We're not these evil, malicious creatures that are trying to constantly get one over on each other, but actually we're, oh, look at that, I need to go and get some aerial active pods apparently. But yeah, we're quite nice deep down at our core and we're given a host of examples from history, including what happened when a bunch of Tongan boys were stranded on an island for 15 months and it did not turn into Lord of the Flies, how the British and Germans responded to their cities being bombed during World War II, the volume or lack of bullets that are fired out of guns by soldiers during war and a whole lot more. It's super interesting to see this different non-adversarial view of humanity looking at survival of the friendliest, not survival of the fittest. In other news, I fucked up on this podcast and I didn't turn my mic on, so the whole thing from my side is from the mic in the middle of my laptop, which actually isn't all that bad. And I don't know why I've got all of this kit because I definitely should just use my laptop. But yeah, I'm sorry about that. I didn't mean to do it. And it's only a mistake if you make it twice, right? That's the way it works. In other other news, the long-awaited ultimate life hacks list is finally completed. It has taken me nearly two months to finish this, but it is a complete compendium of every life hack we have ever featured on this show. That's over 200 ways to upgrade your existence. And I've finally finished it. And it will be available one week today. Monday, 15th of June, this will be available to download for free. I don't know if it's going to be free forever, but it definitely will be free next week. So set your watches, get ready for that. Monday, the 15th of June, we will be releasing the ultimate life hacks list, the definitive guide to how to upgrade your existence. Expect all of the information on how to get your copy on the intro before next Monday's podcast and on my socials at chriswillx. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Rutger Bregman.
You've been breaking the internet a lot over the last year. So last year at the Davos Conference, when you called out a bunch of billionaires, broke the internet, then you riled up Tucker Carlson and broke the internet again. And then you've done it recently with this real life Lord of the Flies story that you've unearthed.

**Rutger Bregman** (3:08)
Yeah, and it surprises me every time that it happens. I mean, I'm not doing it on purpose, but yeah. It's a very weird experience to go viral on a skill like that, right?
You sort of have your phone and your Twitter mentions and you pay a visit to the toilet and you come back and it's like 3,000 new, right? It's really crazy.

**Chris Williamson** (3:31)
That's so cool, man. So why don't you tell us about before we even get into your new book, Humankind, which is great. Why don't you tell us this real life Lord of the Flies story? That might be quite a cool way to start.

**Rutger Bregman** (3:42)
Sure.
So my new book is really about a sort of silent revolution that has taken place in science, right? So there are a lot of scientists now from very diverse disciplines in anthropology and sociology and psychology, you name it, who used to have a more cynical view of human beings, of who we are as a species, and are now actually more hopeful. You know, they're not saying that people are angels or anything, we're clearly not, but they argue that our true superpower as a species is actually our ability to cooperate and to be friendly to one another and to work together. So when I started writing this book, I realized that I had to take it up against, you know, so many giants in science, in Western culture, in our literature, you name it. I mean, Western culture is just permeated with the idea that people are selfish, you know, it goes back all the way to the ancient Greeks, the notion that our civilization is only a thin veneer, and that, you know, especially during a time of crisis, during a pandemic, for example, people become very nasty, and they start stealing and hoarding and blundering, and you name it. So this idea goes back all the way to the ancient Greeks, you find it with the Christian church fathers, you know, Orthodox Christianity, and the idea that we're born as sinners. You also find it with the Enlightenment philosophers, you would expect some break there, you know, between Orthodox Christianity and the Enlightenment philosophers. But if you actually look at the view of human nature, it's pretty similar, you know, David Hume, Thomas Hobbes, you know, the famous British philosopher, all having quite a cynical view of human nature. And then again, if you look at our current capitalist system, right, the central dogma seems to be people are just selfish and deal with it. That's just the way things are. Now, one of sort of the most famous manifestations of this idea in the 20th century was this novel Lord of the Flies, that, you know, especially people in the Anglo-Saxon world, in the US and the UK, you know, so many people have read it or were forced to read it for school, right? This story about a couple of kids who are in a crash of an airplane and end up on an uninhabited island. And at first they think like, oh, this is wonderful. This is lovely. We're going to have a good time here. And they try to set up a democracy of sorts, but it quickly breaks down. And at the end of the novel, like most of the kids have become animals, beasts, savages, and three of the kids are dead. And the message is really, here you have these civilized, nice kids from good British boarding schools, but you give them freedom and this is what you get, right? civilization is just a thin veneer. Now, for my book, I realized that I had to do something with Lord of the Flies, right? I had to write something about it. Even though it's fiction, it's often sort of used as nonfiction, right? So many people interpret the novel and say, oh yeah, that's what kids are like in the end. So I asked myself the question, has it ever happened? You know, has there ever been one instance of real kids shipwrecking on a real island and what would happen? So yeah, that's what I tried to find out.