2026
On kindness
Continued from previous post….
“You know, who tells the stories of a culture, really governs human behaviour. It used to be the parent, the school, the church, the community. Now it’s a handful of global conglomerates that have nothing to tell, but a great deal to sell.” George Gerbner
“If you can write a nation’s stories, you needn’t worry about who makes its laws. ” George Gerbner
Rutger Bregman’s book, Humankind: A Hopeful History, offers a more optimistic and probably more balanced story of our complex human nature in a time when the world is lurching towards more authoritarian regimes, division, intolerance, populism and fake news are on the rise, and new refugee crises and immigration waves are increasing nativist fears and hostility. Bregman explores the dichotomy of human nature as expounded by Jean Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes. He writes that “the opposing views of these two heavyweights are at the root of society’s deepest divides. I know of no other debate with stakes as high, or ramifications as far-reaching. Harsher punishments versus better social services, reform school versus art schools, top-down management versus empowered teams, old-fashioned breadwinners versus baby-toting dads – take just about any debate you can think of and it goes back, in some way, to the opposition between Hobbes and Rousseau.” According to Bregman we have, on the one hand, the dominant Hobbesian perspective that suggests that humans left on their own devices without control and surveillance are ultimately selfish and highly antagonistic, and on the other hand, Rousseau, who believed that it has been the structure of civilization that has fed greed, need for control, conflict and wars over territory. Bregman believes that Rousseau was right in that our human nature served us well prior to the establishment of sedentary, hierarchically structured societies. However, his book is not a sermon on the goodness of human nature; he makes it clear that we are complex creatures with a good side and a not-so-good side, and the question is which part do we choose to nurture and act from, what aspects of our human experiences do we want to prioritize, and what kind of narrative about human nature is reinforced socioculturally.
As I mentioned in the previous post, Bregman, through a multidisciplinary approach and real life examples from different parts of the world, explores how we can nurture our capacity for kindness and care for others to build a better and safer world, and how to use our species’ inherent sociability in positive ways. A growing number of thinkers and researchers have been exploring this tension between human sociability, on the one hand, and human propensity for selfishness, cruelty and violence, on the other. I read somewhere that both our evolutionary legacy as very social animals and our ability to transcend the limits that this legacy imposes on us are aspects of what it is to be human. Our species is a very social animal and we have inhibitions against killing and inflicting violence on others, but we can also understand the potential gain of killing and exploiting others, so we have over time developed practices to bypass our gut level inhibitions, like creating bombs and other weapons of destruction to kill from a distance, using fear and propaganda, tactics of conquer and divide, and culture to shape human nature and to incite populations to perform violence. Being cooperative on its own does not necessarily lead to pro-social or kind behaviour towards others, especially towards those considered members of out-groups.
Additionally, humans can cooperate to do harm and perpetrate atrocities, even while harboring good intentions, as history has shown us repeatedly. Bregman refers to psychologist Don Mixon, who when he repeated Milgram’s notorious experiment in the seventies noted that “In fact, people go to great lengths, will suffer great distress, to be good. People got caught up in trying to be good …” In other words, he explains, if you push people hard enough, if you poke and prod, bait and manipulate, many of us are capable of doing evil. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. But evil doesn’t live just beneath the surface; it takes immense effort to draw it out, and most importantly, it has to be disguised as doing good. Bregman examines WWII and the Holocaust and explores the reasons and circumstances that made participants act as they did, and shows us that cruelty, the lust for violence and chaos for most soldiers and civilians played little role, and he provides a discussion on the role that power and propaganda, loyalty to country, and mostly to friends and comrades, played in the decisions that ‘ordinary’ people and soldiers made, often with horrific consequences. He discusses the available literature on the Holocaust and concludes that “it wasn’t the work of humans suddenly turned robots, just as Milgram’s volunteers didn’t press switches without stopping to think. The perpetrators believed they were on the right side of history. Auschwitz was the culmination of a long and complex historical process in which the voltage was upped step by step and evil was more convincingly passed off as good. The Nazi propaganda mill – with its writers and poets, its philosophers and politicians – had had years to do its work, blunting and poisoning the minds of the German people…..”
However, Bregman demonstates that resistance is possible and can have positive outcomes. The participants in Milgram’s experiments, who managed to halt the experiment used “communication and confrontation, compassion and resistance,” more than the others. He also refers to the Danish resistance to cooperate with the Nazis during WWII, and as a result almost 99 per cent of Denmark’s Jews survived the war. He writes: “It’s a story of ordinary people who demonstrated extraordinary courage. And it shows that resistance is always worthwhile, even when all seems lost.” Historian Bo Lidegaard comments that the Danish Jews were protected by their compatriots’consistent engagement. Resistance sprang up from every quarter, and even the Danish police assisted where they could and refused to cooperate with the Nazis. Bregman comments that where mighty Germany was doped up on years of racist propaganda, modest Denmark was steeped in humanist spirit, and concludes that “the Danish exception shows that the mobilization of civil society’s humanism […] is not only a theoretical possibility,”
He presents literature that supports that unlike what action heroes in films would like us to believe, we are greatly inhibited against violence and killing. He refers to colonel and historian, Samuel Marshall, who found that only 15 to 25 per cent of soldiers had actually fired their weapons, and that at the critical moment, out of more than three hundred soldiers, he was able to identify only thirty-six who actually pulled the trigger. Soldiers who didn’t fire still stayed at their posts, they were courageous, loyal patriots, prepared to sacrifice their lives for their comrades, but still they failed to shoot. Bregman writes that over the last decades, proof that Colonel Marshall was right has been piling up. For instance, Lieutenant Colonel Lionel Wigram complained during the 1943 campaign in Sicily that he could rely on no more than a quarter of his troops, and General Bernard Montgomery, in a letter home wrote, ‘The trouble with our British boys is that they are not killers by nature,’ and later when historians began interviewing veterans of WWII, they found that more than half had never killed anybody, and most casualties were the work of a small minority of soldiers.
Similalry, less than 1 per cent of fighter pilots in the US Air Force were responsible for almost 40 per cent of the planes brought down, and most pilots, one historian noted: “never shot anyone down.” In the 1860s, French colonel Ardant du Picq discovered that when soldiers did fire their weapons, they often aimed too high, and this could go on for hours: two armies emptying their rifles over each other’s heads, while everyone scrambled for an excuse to do something else, and in his Spanish Civil War classic, Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell wrote: “In this war everyone always did miss everyone else, when it was humanly possible.” The last story that Bregman has chosen to tell is about the Christmas truce of 1914, when more than a hundred thousand soldiers laid down their arms. For a long time, he writes it was treated as a myth, but in 1981 a BBC documentary, Peace in No Man’s Land, made it apparent that it was not a myth and that two-thirds of the British front line alone, ceased fighting that Christmas. Similar, less known, truces have also taken place during other wars like the Spanish Civil War, the Boer Wars, the American Civil War, the Crimean War and the Napoleonic Wars.
More recently, writes Bregman, sociologist Randall Collins, who analysed hundreds of photographs of soldiers in combat, and, echoing Marshall’s estimates, calculates that only about 13 to 18 per cent fired their guns, and asserts that “The Hobbesian image of humans, judging from the most common evidence, is empirically wrong,….Humans are hardwired for […] solidarity; and this is what makes violence so difficult.” As for the methods used to boost an army’s firing ratio, Bregman writes that the American military worked on boosting its ‘firing ratio’, increasing the number of soldiers who actually shoot, but it came at a price. He comments that “If you brainwash millions of young soldiers in training, it should come as no surprise when they return with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as so many did after Vietnam. Innumerable soldiers had not only killed other people – something inside them had died, too.”
In this book Bregman takes us on a tour down history lane, from pre-history to the present day, using study findings and surveys, and a plethora of examples, to argue his points about the history of human nature. He takes us behind the scenes of major historical events to show us a slightly different reality or more holistic story than most of us have been taught at school. We travel back to pre-historical times, ancient civilizations, WWI and WWII, the Holocaust, the Enlightment period, Easter Island, South Africa, Alaska, Venezuela, Colombia, and elsewhere. For instance, Bregman tells us how ordinary citizens in Torres in Venezuela found an answer to some of the most urgent questions of our times, and where all residents were welcome, not only to debate issues, but to make real decisions about their municipality, and all the municipal investment budget was theirs to spend. He writes that a University of California study demonstrated that within ten years of the election of Julio Chávez as mayor, Torres had pulled off several decades’ worth of progress, clientelism was way down, the population was participating in politics like never before, new houses and schools were going up, new roads were being built and old districts were getting spruced up.
He devotes pages to show that more recent discoveries and research contradict all we thought we knew about Easter Island, and he compares the more effective and cheaper prison approach in Norway, which has the lowest recidivism rate in the world, and is based on a ‘principle of normality,’ better material conditions, respect, democracy and rehabilitation, and where prison guards (40% are women) complete a 2 year training course, to American prisons and prison system. He critically reassesses classical social psychology research on human nature, and unravels the stories behind well known social psychology studies conducted by people like Stanley Milgram, Philip Zimbardo, Muzafer Sherif, and others, whose studies have provided the basis for the argument that people are universally and inherently aggressive, antagonistic, selfish and uncaring [I briefly referred to these studies in recent posts on scapegoating, but did not go much into the critical evaluation of the theories and findings, nor the serious ethical concerns].
The chapters on social psychology studies are both interesting and revealing. I will refer to the Robbers Cave Experiment conducted by Muzafer Sherif. Gina Perry, an Australian psychologist, who wrote a book on Sherif’s work, delved into the archives of Sherif’s experiments and uncovered a story that contradicts everything in the textbooks. She discovered that Sherif had tried to test his ‘realistic conflict theory’ before in another summer camp in 1953, where he had also done his best to pit the boys against one another, Sherif had said that that experiment had to be suspended ‘due to various difficulties and unfavorable conditions.’ Perry tells us at that what had actually happened at this other forgotten summer camp was that soon after their arrival, the boys had all become friends, and when day three rolled around, the boys were split into two groups – the Panthers and the Pythons – and for the rest of the week the experimenters deployed every trick in the book to turn the two teams against each other; however, the boys weren’t fighting like Sherif’s ‘realistic conflict theory’ said they would, but instead remained friends, and eventually realised that they were being manipulated, especially, after one boy discovered a notebook containing detailed observations. Thus, the experiment was called off.
Bregman also examines a system of news that deceives us by zooming in on the exceptional, prioritises the worst in humanity, and where a biased selection of news, and a preference on violence and sensationalism is prominent because exceptional and bad news are more newsworthy and profitable than good news, and because it influences the masses’ perception of the world and reality in a certain way. George Gerbner was aware that those who tell the stories of a culture to some extent govern their behaviours. He wrote: “Fearful people are more dependent, more easily manipulated and controlled, more susceptible to deceptively simple, strong, tough measures and hard-line postures. … They may accept and even welcome repression if it promises to relieve their insecurities.” Bregman writes that George Gerbner (1919–2005) was the first to open up the field of research concerning the news, and also to coin a term to describe the phenomenon he found: mean world syndrome, whose symptoms are cynicism, misanthropy and pessimism. Many of George Gerbner’s ideas are still applicable today even if the avenues and the technologies through which we consume news and stories has changed and expanded.
Bregman tackles the legacy of William Golding’s novel The Lord of the Flies and compares it with a real life example of teenage boys, rescued in 1966 by Australian Captain Peter Warner, after being staranded on the small desert island of Ata near Tasmania for 15 months. Unlike the fictional boys from London the Tongan boys cooperated and took care of each other to ensure their collective survival. It’s an uplifting example but it might require we explore the reasons behind the two different outcomes, other than the fact that the first story was the mere product of a writer’s imagination. Could the different cultural values and ways of upbringing of the boys have played a significant role? Bregman writes, “Golding had the zeitgeist of the 1960s on his side, when a new generation was questioning its parents about the atrocities of the Second World War. Had Auschwitz been an anomaly, they wanted to know, or is there a Nazi hiding in each of us?” In his book Golding intimated the latter and created a best seller. The critic Lionel Trilling claimed that the novel “Marked a mutation in culture.” Bregman writes that Goldman had been an alcoholic, prone to depression, who while working as a teacher, once divided his pupils into gangs and encouraged them to attack each other. He further quotes Goldman who had said “I have always understood the Nazis, because I am of that sort by nature.” Bregman further wonders why the real story is unknown to people. He notes: “While the boys of Ata have been consigned to obscurity, William Golding’s book is still widely read.”
Bregman expands on the bystander effect and on what really happened the night Kitty Genovese was murdered. He writes that though the bystander effect is still taught in many textbooks, a meta-analysis that reviewed the 105 most important studies on the bystander effect from the past fifty years [including the first experiment by Latané and Darley with students] has shed new light on what bystanders do in emergencies. Firstly, the bystander effect exists when bystanders feel it makes more sense to let somebody else take charge or when they are afraid they might do the wrong thing or when they think there’s nothing wrong going on. However, if the emergency is life-threatening and if the bystanders can communicate with one another (they’re not isolated in separate rooms), then there’s an inverse bystander effect. And more bystanders, leads to more helping. Further more, Bregman refers to Danish psychologist, Marie Lindegaard, who was one of the first researchers to ask why researchers think up all these convoluted experiments, questionnaires and interviews instead of looking at real footage of real people in real situations? She showed, with real CCTV footage, that bystanders often do help and do take action. Bregman writes that we find that in 90 per cent of cases, people help each other out. He also asks us to consider the role of the press and the media in reimforcing a particular narrative about human nature, and why in the same years that activism began brewing in New York City, Martin Luther King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, millions of Americans began marching in the streets, and Queens counted more than two hundred community organisations, “the press developed an obsession with what it trumpeted as an epidemic of indifference.”
I will add a personal story of a recent incident that happened to me in the street that perhaps supports the fact that bystanders are likely to show concern and step in to help. A few days ago I was walking along a narrow pavement, with several other people and a couple of chairs outside shops. I was in a hurry, so I momentarily stepped down the pavement to move ahead of those walking at a slower pace. At the point where I stepped down there were motorbikes parked behind me. And then the next thing I saw was a man on a motorcycle backing up towards me without slowing down, and I realised he was ignoring my presence. I called out to alert him to my presence, but he kept moving towards me. Then a woman on the pavement, who saw what was going on called out to him in a louder voice, but he ignored her, too. Meanwhile, I was trapped between the motorcycle behind me and his vehicle. He stopped just in time, and when the woman confronted him, telling him that he almost ran into me, he shrugged his shoulders and said I was standing on the road. He made no attempt to apologise, while also keeping his helmet on so that I would not see his face.
Also, Bregman explores how people respond in crises. For instance, the bombing of cities in London and Germany did not demoralize or turn most civilians into self-interested beasts; rather it generally increased community spirit and solidarity. He looks at the behaviour of civilians during the blitz in London, where the German expectations [based on Gustave Le Bon’s famous book in which he describes how people respond to crises, and in which he asserts that “man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization’. Panic and violence erupt, and we humans reveal our true nature…” (cited in Bregman)] of the local population becoming demoralized were totally confounded by the Londoners, who displayed ‘blitz spirit,’ and became more incentivized. The same was true of the German civilians after their cities were bombed by the British, where for instance, in bombed cities the tank production soared relative to cities that were not attacked.
He also explores other crises like natural disasters, and points out [and also provides evidence to support this claim], that most people don’t become monsters. The Katrina hurricane in the USA, writes Bregman, didn’t see New Orleans overrun with self-interest and anarchy. The hurricane, he writes, “confirmed the science on how human beings respond to disasters. Contrary to what we normally see in the movies, the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware has established that in nearly seven hundred field studies since 1963, there’s never total mayhem. It’s never every man for himself. People don’t go into shock; they stay calm and spring into action.” He also quotes Enrico L. Quarantelli, a disaster researcher, who points out that “Whatever the extent of the looting, it always pales in significance to the widespread altruism that leads to free and massive giving and sharing of goods and services.” In her account of Katrina’s aftermath, Rebecca Solnit, writes that the truth is that elite panic comes from powerful people who see all humanity in their own image.
Bregman also reminds us that historically the most terrible events and the worst atrocities have been orchestrated and organised by elites or a small number of people, with a lot of power and control of resources and information. In his book, On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It [see older posts: November 8th and 24th, 2023], David Livingstone Smith explores the mechanisms of the human psychology that makes us vulnerable to being able to view whole groups of people as subhuman creatures, and how this innate human propensity has been throughout history exploited by elites, governments, political leaders, and generally, those with power and influence, when they stand to gain. Bregman reminds us that we need to weigh this against the millions of people across history that in general act with courage, kindness and concern for others and try to abstain from causing harm. He also points out that few ideas have as much power to shape the world as our view of other people, and that if we are convinced to believe that most people can’t be trusted, that’s how we’ll treat each other, to everyone’s detriment.
Bregman discusses many more topics like our evolutionary history, the power of expectation and the Pygmalion effect vs the Golem effect, carrots and sticks and motivation, democracy and economic systems, contradictions in Enlightenment thought, Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), Machiavelli’s influence, leadership, the gatekeeping of people and the design of ingenious ideologies to justify why some individuals ‘deserve’ more authority, status, or wealth than others, and why some should be deprived of access to decent education, health care, employment, and other social goods protected by the constitution, at least in democracies, the corruption of power and psychological profiles of people in positions of power, as viewed by experts and historians. Concerning power he refers to research by Dacher Keltner [and others], who has also studied the effects of power once people have it, Findings suggest that power corrupts and people in power display similar tendencies [they tend to be more impulsive, self-centred, reckless, arrogant, shameless and rude than average, less attentive to other people and less interested in others’ perspectives, less capable of mirroring others, as if they no longer feel connected to their fellow human beings, more prone to seeing others in a negative light, etc.].
Although Bregman covers a lot of historical and cultural terrain in his book, which is about 496 pages, it isn’t possible to discuss every angle of this complex and broad topic. There are bound to be omissions or areas he has overlooked or only very briefly referred to. Also, a book cannot contain everything, and the focus here seems to be mostly on Western philosophical and scientific views and narratives of humankind. This is probably due to space, personal expertise and knowledge, and the writer’s selection of focus. Also, he mostly addresses the male narrative, so at times it reads as an analysis on mankind rather than the whole of humanity. It would have been interesting if he had woven more threads of women’s experience across time into his analysis. Positioning women more extensively in the book could have provided more arguments for kindness and a culture of care, and also, shed light on other issues like violence against women and children. Bregman, however, is aware of gendered violence, exploitation and inequality because there are relevant comments, like when he notes: ‘marriagable daughters were reduced to little more than commodities (p.103)….where in prehistory women had been free to come and do as they pleased, now they were being covered up and tethered down,” or in the chapter where he discusses the murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964 and the bystander effect. Yet he does not delve enough into the implications that women’s experience across time might have on his theory of human’s inherent decency.
Also, while discussing the doctrine in the western canon, and referring to the ideas of thinkers like Thucydides, Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Luther, Calvin, Burke, Bentham, Nietzsche, Freud, America’s Founding Fathers, Herbert Spencer, and others, who each had their own version of the veneer theory of civilization, he mentions, for instance, that the philosopher Herbert Spencer sold hundreds of thousands of books on his assertion that “the whole effort of Nature is to get rid of [the poor] – to clear the world of them, and make room for better,” and further comments that the strangest of all is that these thinkers were hailed as realists, while dissident thinkers were ridiculed. Ηe refers to feminist Emma Goldman, whose struggle for freedom and equality, earned her a lifetime of slander and contempt. Bregman quotes Goldman, who wrote: “Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! …. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature.”
In a review of the book, David Livingstone Smith, mentioned below, has critiqued Bregman’s use of the depth metaphor, the common idea of being decent deep down, which implies that when a characteristic is deep it is also an innate feature of the human psyche, and more real than other more surface aspects. In other words, we have a deep essence or nature beneath our learning and cultural influences, which is known as psychological essentialism. Smith claims that psychologists and cognitive anthropologists argue that we have a disposition to think about living things, including human beings, in an essentialist way, and suggests that we need to be careful to avoid the essentialist bias from distorting our understanding. Additionally, essentialism often neglects to take into account socioeconomic, cultural and individual differences.
However, the points made above don’t change the fact that the book is definitely worth reading even if one does not agree with all the ideas. It is packed with information and a lot of research. Additionally, it is very readable and imbued with the writer’s sense of humor, it offers a different and more optimistic narrative, and above all, Bregman raises questions and examines alternative ways of structuring society, bringing to light how things could be done differently, using examples and stories from different parts of the world. Bregman demonstates that viewing the world and humanity from a different and less cynical angle could allow for different kinds of solutions to the many serious problems we are facing today concerning society, democracy, the natural environment, poverty, war and conflict. It may be a fact that there is plenty of evil, violence and injustice in the world and humans can behave in sickenly greedy, stupid and cruel ways; however, it would be somewhat delusional to believe that this is all there is or this is all that’s possible. If this were the only reality, as a species we would not have come as far as we have, nor would we have achieved such an increase in the world population, nor would societies function to the degree that they do, despite the existing many dysfunctions, inequalities and injustices.
To conclude, aside from all the theoretical discussions, research findings, historical conclusions, and different views on human nature, one does not need to be very educated or clever to understand that a world devoid of kindness, caring for others and compassion, would be a terrible and unsafe world for everyone, even those with a lot of power and resources. Also, I don’t think there are many people on the planet that like being the recipients of maltreatment, violence, exclusion, injustice, dire lack, cruelty or simple disrespect and unkindness, so it’s safe to assume that at some level we all value goodness and kindness, at least when it concerns how others treat us. Maybe then it’s essential that we reconsider the consequences of our short and long term choices not only in our micro environments, but also on a planetary level, as well as, the narratives of human nature that we want to adopt and propagate.