![]() ![]() Surprisingly, the risks of trusting people tends to be rewarded, and this is the most convincing case for the goodness of human beings. One view is threatened by freedom, trust, play, and open-endedness, while the other view aims to nurture all those things. Through his sociological and historical tour, Bregman shows how the opposite sides of the debate provide foundations for drastically different approaches to education, work, management of employees, treatments of crime, and types of prison. ![]() In addition to the first task (challenging the veneer theory), Bregman’s second task is to make a case for his own position, that “most people, deep down, are pretty decent.” (p. If you’ve been too trusting, eventually you find out.īut if you decide not to trust someone, you’ll never know if you’re right. … if your faith in someone is misplaced the truth will surface sooner or later. Like the handful of anonymous internet trolls that are responsible for almost all the vitriol on Twitter and Facebook.įinally, there is the problem of asymmetric feedback, which Bregman describes as follows. We’re lured into thinking that a small, hate-mongering minority reflects all humankind. When we hole up in our own trenches, we lose sight of reality. Witnessing an act of injustice, a brutal conflict, a crime, can have a drastic and deep impact on what we think. Moreover, the observations that confirm the negative view tend to be more salient, more attention-grabbing, than observations that are inconsistent with it. If I don’t like my neighbors, then I keep my distance from them and that distance ensures that my dislike of them continues. It keeps itself distant from concrete facts, from people and their actions. The negative view, unfortunately, has a decisive advantage over its competition. Nor does he hesitate to openly revise his previous positions. The author does not hesitate to question established authorities (and pseudo-authorities). This is one of the most significant contributions of this book, showing how the “evidence” is often distorted by an existing veneer theory. None of the pieces of evidence look the same after his investigations. He discovers new information about each case, finding its ambiguities and inconsistencies. The artifacts, furthermore, are shallow and easily lifted, hence described as a “veneer.” Challenging the veneer theory isn’t easy, because it has received support from a variety of sources and has become part of our common sense: works of fiction defend it, e.g., Lord of the Flies, historical case studies seem to confirm it, e.g., history of Easter Island, not to mention the evils of World War 2, and the famous demonstrations of psychologists following WW2, e.g., the Robber Cave experiment, the Stanford prison experiment, Milgram’s obedience experiments, and so forth.īregman patiently re-visits each of these sources, each case study, each demonstration, with a fresh perspective, and he questions whether they can convincingly tell us that human nature is evil. ![]() First, he challenges the belief that human nature is essentially evil, the “veneer theory,” which holds that any human goodness is accidental, temporary, unreliable, and an artifact of civilization. The First Taskīregman’s work in this book consists of two complementary tasks. What both (the positive and the negative) views have in common is that they can both serve as self-fulfilling prophecies. Whereas negative views lead to caution, distance, distrust, thinking and acting based on stereotypes, positive views are associated with courage, contact, learning about each other, and trust. He makes a careful case that our beliefs about human nature have real consequences. It is also about our beliefs about human nature, what informs our beliefs and what those beliefs lead to. Rutger Bregman’s recent book, Humankind: A Hopeful History (translated by Elizabeth Manton & Erica Moore) is a book about human nature. ![]()
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