Houston Southard
a name that looks so fake you'll care just as little to learn it's not
RutGer Bregman - Humankind: A hopeful history
If you grew up reading Lord of the Flies, you probably grew up believing - as most do - that humans left to their own devices fall into anarchy and chaos. Rutger takes umbrage with the contemporary view that humans are selfish without civilized structure, a view postulated and propagated by the writings of Hobbes and Rousseau in the 18th century.
Instead of pulling on fiction, Rutger breaks down the real life Lord of the Flies, a group of six boys off the coast of Tonga who stole a boat and were shipwrecked by a storm on an uninhabited island for 15 months. When found, rescuers observed the mini society they'd created, organized with rules for productivity and punishment to sustain a fair living amongst them.
With a big dose of projection bias, I'm not big on the Steven Pinker style optimism that paints humans as inherently good, but Rutger makes a strong case about how propping up the dominant view of humans as self-interested is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Milgram's shock studies on obedience. Zimbardo's prison experiments. A closer look at two of the most influential 20th century psychologists that have pushed our understanding of human nature toward one of sheer self-interest fall apart when scrutinized. Zimbardo's data was largely falsified. Milgram's confederates were in on the game. Real life case studies of each tear down the idea that people default to deviance.
For centuries, philosophers and psychologists created a picture of mankind in a dark light. It's a good parable. Our species evolved as it has out of conviction, not correctness, and when the most convincing voices look for and propagandize what they're looking for, they find it, and their findings become the zeitgeist.
Leadership favors confidence and charisma over competence. If you were to peek under the cranial hood of any world or business leader, the scans you'd see would be indecipherable from those with brain damage.
Rutger's whole premise is akin to missing the trees for the forest in a media maelstrom of sensationalism which isn't at all reflective of our people as a whole, and when cynicism is just a fancy word for laziness, he manages to give the jaded, even me, some hope.