-Our next guest is a best-selling
author and historian.
His book "Humankind: A Hopeful History"
is out in paperback now.
Please welcome to the show Rutger Bregman, everyone.
♪♪ [ Cheers and applause ]
♪♪
Welcome to the show, Rutger. -Thanks. It's great to be here.
-You are our first Dutch historian
in the history of the show.
We are honored to have you.
I believe you are a very famous Dutch historian
in your home country.
I became aware of you when you were at --
Is it the economic forum in Davos?
-Yeah, the World Economic Forum.
-The World Economic Forum in Davos.
You were on stage in a room full of very wealthy people.
-Mm-hmm. -They had obviously invited you.
You did not charge the stage.
You were an invited speaker.
And I became aware of you because you said some things
that the people in the room did not respond very well to.
Let's just take a quick look at that clip.
-Almost no one raises the real issue of tax avoidance, right?
And of the rich just not paying their fair share.
I mean, it feels like I'm at a firefighters conference
and no one's allowed to speak about water.
This is not rocket science.
I mean, we can talk for a very long time about
all these stupid philanthropy schemes.
We can invite Bono once more, but come on.
We got to be talking about taxes.
That's it -- taxes, taxes, taxes.
All the rest is [bleep], in my opinion.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-It did not go over well.
Obviously, you must have had some expectation
it wouldn't go over well when you were saying it.
-You know, for some reason, they haven't invited me back.
-That was your last Davos. [ Laughter ]
-I was wondering, was it something I said?
[ Laughter ]
-That happened, and you wrote this book,
and I had an expectation based on that.
"Oh, here's a guy who points out what's wrong,"
especially with things such as income inequality,
but you actually wrote a book about how humankind is better
than we all give it credit for,
and that human beings, at their core, are decent.
What led you to want to write a book about this topic?
-Well, look, this is really a book for those who have lost
their faith in humanity,
and I think there are quite a few of us today.
You could summarize it as a 400-page treatise on
anthropology and sociology and philosophy and archaeology
in which I'm trying to make the case
that Ted Lasso is actually right,
that he's the realist.
He has a very realistic take on human nature
and that most people, deep down, are pretty decent.
-And one of the things I thought when I was reading it,
was this a hard sell to publishers?
Because it does strike me that a lot of the books that you see
and a lot of the books you hear about are about
what's wrong with things.
And at the core, you're writing optimistically
that more is right than wrong.
-Yeah, exactly.
I'm a historian, and if you study history,
it's mostly about wars, wars, more wars,
and if there's not a war, then we call it the interbellum,
right, the period in between wars.
So yes, it was a hard sell.
There's this really old theory in Western culture that says
that our civilization is just a thin layer, just a thin veneer,
and that below that lies raw human nature,
that supposedly, people, deep down, are just selfish.
And that idea comes back again and again, you know,
in our philosophy, in our culture, in our movies,
in our plays, in our novels.
In the book, I talk about "Lord of the Flies," for example,
this book that we were all forced to read in high school.
So not very optimistic about human nature.
So it's deeply embedded in our culture.
-There's a fascinating chapter in the book where you actually
do some research and you try to wonder what actually
would have happened in a "Lord of the Flies" situation,
and you found, basically, a story where this happened,
where some kids were shipwrecked and the opposite happened.
They became a very functional group of kids who had to survive
for a great, long time without any adult supervision.
-I was just wondering whether it had ever really happened, right?
Because you can write a novel, but it would be so interesting
to find out what really happens when you drop
kids on an uninhabited island.
It turns out that it's difficult to do a scientific experiment
like that. [ Laughter ]
Most parents are not easily convinced
to volunteer their kids.
But then I looked at
whether there's ever been a natural experiment,
and it turned out that it did happen in 1965.
There were six kids from Tonga,
which is an island group in the Pacific Ocean,
who were bored with school.
They didn't like the school meals.
They thought it was pretty boring.
They said, "Well, let's go on an adventure."
And they "borrowed" a boat and then ended up in a storm already
on the first night, drifted for eight days, and then shipwrecked
on this island, and survived there for 50 months.
And you know, if this would have been a Hollywood movie,
people would say, "Oh, this is so sentimental, so naive.
This is worse than 'Love, Actually.'"
[ Laughter ] But it really happened.
They survived by staying friends, by working together.
It's an example of what some scientists call
"survival of the friendliest."
-Obviously, you don't gloss over the fact that there have been --
our history's full of atrocities,
from war to other things.
And how do you reconcile that with your core thesis?
-It's one of the ironies, obviously, if you write a book
about human decency, is that you have to go on for
hundreds of pages about all the dark chapters in human history.
Obviously, there's no simple, single explanation.
What I do try to point out is that the joker,
it does exist, right?
Those kind of people do exist, but they're very rare,
the kind of people who just enjoy being sadistic
and enjoy hurting other people.
But they're a really small minority.
Most people who are on the wrong side of history actually believe
they're doing the right thing, you know?
Very often, we can do terrible things in the name of loyalty,
in the name of friendship, in the name of comradeship, right?
And that is the dark truth about us, right?
Sometimes I wonder, how will the historians of the future
look back on us, right?
Because we may be doing some things today
that are really bad, just as we can look back on,
say, the Middle Ages and think torture was bad,
slavery was really bad, et cetera.
But maybe today, we're doing some really bad stuff as well.
-Well, I hope I'm not around for that reckoning.
[ Laughter ]
I want to tie back to what we said in the beginning.
Obviously, the people in the audience at Davos
is a perfect example.
They were there to talk about
how to make the world a better place.
-Mm-hmm.
-And yet they reacted negatively to the idea that
paying your fair share is probably the quickest way
to solve a lot of problems. -Mm-hmm.
-Were you surprised that they didn't see that disconnect?
-Well, look, the short summary of the book would be
most people are pretty decent, but power corrupts.
Power is this incredibly dangerous drug
that often makes you less empathetic.
A lot of people think that the world is ruled by selfish,
evil global elites or whatever, but if you actually go to Davos
and you meet these people,
you realize that the truth is much more disturbing.
You go there and they turn out to be pretty friendly, right?
They just don't see the issue.
They arrive in their private jets and then watch
a David Attenborough movie about how we're wrecking the planet
and they're like, "Ooh, this is really bad,"
and then they go back in their private jet.
So I think that's much more disturbing because if it would
be a conspiracy, you can just roll it up,
but this goes much deeper.
-So, I feel like I've ended on a negative point,
and I really don't want to do that because the book put me
in such a good mood and made me so optimistic.
So I want to give you one last chance to say something nice.
[ Laughter ] -Okay, I will.
-I feel like I cornered you into a really bad place.
-It often happens. -Yeah.
-What you assume in other people is what you get out of them.
So if we assume that most people are just selfish,
then that's the kind of world we're going to create.
If we turn it around, I think we can move to
a radically different kind of world.
If you assume that most kids are naturally curious and creative,
we can build very different kind of schools.
I've got one chapter in the book
about the criminal justice system in Norway.
It's pretty astounding.
So, these criminals have the freedom to socialize
with the guards, to watch movies,
to build a bit of an education.
They've got their own band, actually.
They've got their own music label,
which is called Criminal Records.
-There you go. -In almost every single way,
it doesn't look like a prison.
But then you look at the recidivism rate,
the chance that someone will commit another crime
once he or she gets out of prison.
And it's nowhere as low as in Norway.
So it is counterintuitive.
It sounds a little bit, I don't know -- How do you say that?
Naive, but if you look at the facts behind it, it works.
-Alright. Well, there we go.
I think that's a very nice way to leave this,
which is we should all look for the best in other people,
and maybe they'll deliver on it.
And thanks so much for being here.
I really appreciate it.
You guys, that's Rutger Bregman.
"Humankind: A Hopeful History" is really wonderful.
It's out in paperback now.