INTERVIEW WITH RUTGER BREGMAN
Bregman is a Dutch thinker and writer. In his new book, Humankind, he argues that neoliberalism has convinced us that we are innately selfish and cruel, but lots of evidence suggests the opposite: that most of us are decent and well-meaning. This switch of perspective has pretty big implications for public policy.
He argues that for most of our history, we lived in small tribes, which were ruled by shame i.e. if you did things against the interests of others, you risked being shunned, which was pretty likely to lead to you dying, because an individual could not survive on his own. So friendliness and cooperation were essential. He contrasts this with the strange societies we have built where a narcissist can become the most powerful man on Earth and shamelessness can be a positive attribute, at least in a politician.
He also cites SLA Marshall’s findings, after the Second World War, that only about 20% of American soldiers actually fired their weapons at the enemy. The rest, Marshall argued, simply couldn’t do it because killing others goes against something fundamental in our nature. Similarly Bregman dismisses the famous Stanford prison experiment, claiming there is evidence that its lead scientist, Philip Zimbardo, deliberately skewed the set up to encourage cruelty.
The book comes with an endorsement by Yuval Noah Harari, author of multi-million-selling Sapiens, one of my favourite ever books. Bregman is such an engaging, unstuffy and likeable interviewee, I listened to it twice.