July 14, 2025 • 25 mins
Andrew talks with Gare about humankind’s better nature, despite self-fulfilling prophecies of selfishness and cruelty.
Sources:
Humankind by Rutger Bregman
A Paradise Built In Hell by Rebecca Solnit
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
All the media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello and welcome. Take it up, and here I'm joined
once again.
Speaker 3 (00:09):
By yours Davias.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hello, Hello, Hello. And recently I was reading through a
photo book called Humans by Brandon Stanton. It features interviews
of people on the streets all over the world. He
started off and he kind of became well known online
for the Humans of New York series. I'm sure if
you've heard of that, Yeah, I think so, yeah, yeah,
(00:33):
So he did that for a while and he ended
up traveling at the parts of the world and doing
basically the same thing, just interviewing people on the street,
getting their insights, hearing their struggles, hearing their story. And
when I saw the book in the library, I just
I picked it up orroed it, decided to read it through.
And it's really profound in a sense, and you get
a sense of the spectrum of humanity, of what people
(00:54):
are going through, of the highs and lows of the
human experience, make you laugh on one page and make
you cry for the next page. And seeing that variety
of humanity reminded me of another book that I read
and finished recently, which is called Humankind Hopeful History by
(01:15):
Rutga Bregmant, a friend of mine, had given it to
me because he said it had changed his whole view
on the world. And so I wanted to talk about
some of the concepts that I picked up in that book,
like the origins and critiques of veneer theory, why most
people are actually pretty decent, and the problems with some
of the narratives of our wickedness. And the next episode,
(01:38):
I want to get into some of the reasons why
people do bad and what we can do about it.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Sounds exciting because there is a lot of bad right now.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Is there is? I mean, as on that stuff. I mean,
what would you say is the most common perspective you
hear on humanity and human nature?
Speaker 3 (02:00):
I don't know, Like there's there's this clash between like
this like liberal humanist version and then this like Christian
moralist version, I guess like in the States right now,
but that's been going on for decades, if not centuries.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
By liberal humanists on Christian I mean, I think I
get a sense of what the Christian moralist vision is right,
that we are all sinful, destined for hell any salvation,
that that version of the story, yeah, yeah, more or less,
and the liberal humanist perspective is I mean.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
I don't know, like this this this forever search for
like what human rights are and like human decency. So
we come up with like governments and rules to actually
like govern over our morals as a democratic process that
continues to evolve over the course of like hundreds of years.
We're like, you know, on the moral arc of the universe,
(02:54):
just not fully you know there yet.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Yeah, I've heard that perspective, I think most commonly and
decent in my spaces, I tend to hear the you know,
people are wicked, people are sinful in religious cases, or
people are violent, people are selfish, and that kind of
in that similar number of vein where we have these
systems in place to kind of check ourst simpulses, to
(03:18):
kind of keep us regulated and to keep society functioning.
And Bregman opens his book by discussing the idea of
civilization being a thin mask that covers our true savage instincts.
He calls it the veneer theory, and he spends the
rest of the book basically points it out all the
(03:39):
different errors in that judgment. I mean, he doesn't claim
that we're all good people, happy go lucky saying so
anything like that, But he does see it. For the
most part, most people are pretty decent, and I know
that clashes with all a lot of people are accustomed
to hearing, and there are some very notable exceptions. But
(04:01):
despite the efforts of elite to pain and purport a
different picture, there's actually a lot more leaning towards our decent,
if not good nature and the contrary. But of course,
of these kind of conversations, who are set to go
back to the debate between Thomas Hobbes and Sean jack
(04:21):
ersue we can't escape these guys. Hobbes, of course, had
the perspective in Leviathan, which was written in sixteen fifty one,
that in the absence of a strong central authority, human
beings would live in a condition of perpetual war, with
every man against every other man, a war of war
against all. As he would have put it so to him,
(04:44):
people are naturally self interested and driven by the desire
for power and survival, so without laws or a sovereign
to keep them in check, individuals would act purely on
their own instincts, lead into constant conflict over resources, safety,
and dominant life. In this state of nature would be
(05:04):
solitary for nasty, brutish, and short. A couple of years later,
a couple of decades later, Rousseau was writing in the
Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality among Men,
and he basically flipped Hobbs view on its head. He
believed that humans in the state of nature were peaceful, cooperative,
(05:25):
and guided by basic needs and compassion, and there was
a development of hierarchies and institutions that had led to inequality, jealousy,
and competition which basically corrupted human nature. In his words,
man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.
Do you take a side in this debate?
Speaker 3 (05:44):
By the way, er not to be the centrist option,
But I don't know. I think both these things play
into each other. I definitely don't believe in the idea
that like this state is the only thing that reigns
people in and stops them from doing a moral acts. Right,
It's the same thing as like without without God or
(06:06):
without the Bible, then everyone would just be like raping
and murdering it. Meanwhile, actual Christians obviously rape and murder
all the time anyway. But like, no, like this this
idea isn't the only thing that keeps you from becoming
this like, you know, savage, like inhuman monster. People can
be morally good without this this like religious notion. And
(06:28):
I think in some ways the state can also operate
as a religious notion to these people, where you know,
the police is the only thing that's keeping you from
becoming this like horrible monster who just hurts everyone around you.
But I also have my sympathies to the like alternate
side of that, and I can see there's a great
deal of oppression and horrific violence that can only happen
at scale under the organization of a state. So I
(06:52):
will pick the annoying centrisce option.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Yeah, I know that there are a lot of people
who have the sense that, you know, the state and
the laws all that's standing between us and the purge
or mad Max or something like that. Sure, exactly, So, yeah,
I don't think that Hobbes's over generalization of human nature
as inherently violent and selfish holds up when you look
at the diversity of human experience and human societies. I mean,
(07:20):
that's not to say that violence and conflict were absent
in a world out state, but you know, context matters. Resources, environment,
group size. All those things would have played roles. I
don't think that we should be accepting Rousseau's romantic light either,
So I guess I'm in the centris to count with you.
The truth does seem to lie somewhere in that middle ground,
(07:42):
that human nature is flexible and then it's shaped by social, ecological,
and historical contexts. What's getting the weeds of humanity's origins
(08:02):
is stimulating as an exercise. But there's only so much
we can know about the past for certain. What we
can't know for certain is the present, And what we've
seen in the present is that when disaster strikes, people
have tended to help each other. In Hurricane Katrina in
two thousand and five, the official response was famously criticized
(08:24):
for being slow and disorganized, and yet despite media attempts
to pain these people as looters and thugs and all
these different things, community members, neighbors, volunteers all stepped up
to rescue people, to mobilize food, shelter, and basic aid,
to expropriate when necessary to get people what they needed,
(08:45):
long before federal agencies gone on the scene. Similarly, in
a more recent occurrence, after the cranfelt tower fire in
the UK in twenty seventeen. The official channels had failed
the people of that tour many diet as a result.
Regulations that were supposed to protect people were not enforced
(09:07):
or were absent. And yet it was community members who
sprang into action to provide water and shelter and food
and clothes and emotional support even when the Twin Tours
fell on Stement eleven, two thousand and one. And this
is an example that brag when I actually spent some
time talking about people actually helped people descend the stairwells
(09:30):
in an orderly fashion. You know, they would say, you know,
after you going down the stairs, and passers by would
go in and help others to evacuate and assist the
wounded law before the emergency services arrived. So people acted
and prioritized helping others even in a disaster scenario. And
(09:50):
yet what do we see in dystopia and fiction. In
apocalyptic fiction, you see people just like driving around shooting
guns in the air. You see the purge, you see
them the ceiling, zombie apocalypse scenarios. In Rebecca Solnitt's book,
A Paradise Built in Hell, she found that disasters peeled
back the layer as a society and revealed the empathy, cooperation,
(10:13):
and ka at humanities core. She noted that when disaster
strikes is when people most often reveal the better natures,
and yet those negative narratives tend to have more suite
in the popular imagination.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
No, and this is like so true. I remember in
twenty twenty, during the wildfires on the West Coast, the
anarchist response was to set up these like giant, like
mutual aid centers for people fleeing from the fire, you know,
like not like other anarchists, just like regular people fleeing
from the fire could get necessities and figure out housing. Meanwhile,
(10:47):
right wing militias were setting up checkpoints, monitoring to make
sure Antifa wasn't you know, like raiding people's homes as
they were fleeing from the fires. Like these were the
two options you had. You had, you had anarchists actually
helping the people who were who were fleeing from this
horrific fire and setting up like massive, massive like aid
(11:07):
distribution centers. Meanwhile right wing militias were pulling people over
at gunpoint making sure Antifa wasn't up to any shenanigans
and similar stuff happened last year during Hurricane Helene on
the East Coast, where you had a whole bunch of
like Southeast anarchists in the Appalachians do mutual a disaster response. Meanwhile,
(11:30):
right wing malicious were spreading rumors about like FEMA fraud
and all of all of this crazy stuff, not actually
helping anybody. But it was anarchists doing a large a
large amount of the actual water distribution and like medical
assistance on the ground as the federal response was delayed
and insufficient.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Yeah, I mean, I was aware of the anarchist efforts
during these disasters, but I wasn't. I didn't know about
that situation with the right wing militias setting up checkpoints.
That's shocking but still wild, you know.
Speaker 3 (12:02):
Yeah, No, it's so funny because those are the people,
you know, claiming that, you know, without the government we
would have the purge, anarchists would just go around doing
all kinds of crazy crimes. I get when things actually happen,
their attempts to like deputize them as like their own
police force actually creates those conditions. Meanwhile, anarchists are the
ones actually helping.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
People exactly exactly, and yet despite these situations, these these
things happen again and again. We still have these popular narratives.
You don't know, the narrative I see referenced all the
time Lord of the Fliers.
Speaker 3 (12:37):
Yes, of course, of course.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
All the time. Right. It's basically become a cultural shorthand
for the idea that people are just savage at heart,
that this Veneo civilization is the only thing keeping us
in checked. I mean, these days I do see people
joking that it's because those were British boys.
Speaker 3 (12:55):
So true, actually, so true.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
But well, I get that.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
You.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
I think it's also important to remember that it's like
people are taking this work of fiction as if it's
an anthropological study, yeah, when it's just something that a
guy made up as an analogy for, you know, the
situation during World War Two.
Speaker 3 (13:14):
I think it's also good to remember that the British
are people too. I have a British co worker, so
you know, we have to we have to show them
a little bit of human human dignity exactly exactly.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
People embrace the story because it confirms what they want
to believe in this climate of cynicism. But Ragman actually
tells a story in the book about a true instance
of when a shipwreck of young boys occurred. Of course
there't They weren't British boys. There were Tonguan boys as
and from the country of Tonga. So in nineteen sixty five,
(13:49):
six Tonguan boys we were stranded on a remote island
for over a year, and rather than descended into violence,
they survived through cooperation. You know, they built a garden,
they shared duties. They didn't do any human sacrifices, you know,
they created a rotor system to get things done. There
resolved conflict. When people were in conflict, they would go
(14:09):
on time out. They put each other on timeout and
go on opposite sides of the island until the you know,
cooler heads prevailed. The figure out ways to deal with
their conflicts, to organize themselves without authority and without chaos.
But the problem is that these fictional narratives become so
powerful instead of the real ones, that they have a
(14:30):
similar effect to the placeboy effect. In fact, it's the
Placeboy effects evil twin the no Sea Boy effect. Now,
I'd heard about the place boy effect before, and I'm
sure you have as well. But for those who don't know,
it's basically where someone's health actually improves after receiving what's
basically a dummy treatment like a sugar pill or a
(14:50):
fake surgery or a saline injection. The body heals itself
because the mind of the person believes it's being healed.
The mind in that trust into medicine. I mean, that's
just that's amazing to me even now, and they'll quite
understand how it works yet, but it's still really cool.
But there's another dimension to the placebo effect that I
(15:12):
hadn't heard about before, but it makes intuitive sense. I
suppose it's called the no Seaboy effect. And Bregman is
the one who introduced me to that concept. So the
no Seaboy effect is where instead of belief heal and you,
it's belief that makes you sick. So people experience real pain,
real symptoms, and even real illness, not because there's an
(15:34):
actual physical cause, but because in their minds they expect
to be harmed. So their minds to that fear of
harm into actual harm and injury. And there was one
case study that he used where a child had drunk
a coke and photo was poisoned and then just created
this mass hysteria almost with dozens of children in hospitals
(15:56):
with headaches and nausea and pradic attacks because they drank.
Go to the point where Coca Cola actually had to
recall all of those drinks even though tests had showing
that there was nothing in the drinks that we're making
people sick, but theirs bodies still responded as if there
was because they believed they heard the story, they heard
about it, they saw what happened to others, and they
(16:16):
believed it would happened to them. And that's the no
super effect in action, right, So we get the concept.
So Bregmun actually stretched these concepts beyond the field of medicine,
(16:36):
and he basically made the points that what if these
contents are abate into how we view each other? You know,
so what if I believe that people are selfish, cruel
and violent by nature? Actually makes it so, you know,
if you expect the worst from people, you'll act on that.
You know, you might be colder or more defensive and
(16:57):
more likely to punish or preemptal. And what happens as
a result is that, you know, people pick up on
that energy, they're spawning kind they withdraw, they retaliate, and
then that cycle ends up feeding itself and to the belief.
That negative belief becomes a social reality, a self fulfilling prophecy.
So we end up building institutions that are based on
(17:19):
that cynical expectation. We design policies that are based around
the punishment we are, train ourselves to see strangers as
threats rather than as neighbors. And then when we have
a fallout, as when that prophecy is fulfilled by our
own actions, we can then say, well, see I was right.
You know, people are awful. But what we don't see
(17:40):
is that our expectations and the systems we build around
those expectations are part of what ends up making it
that way. I think an easy example to going to
is with prison right. People expect criminals to act like animals,
to act like monsters, to beasts, and so they create prisons,
and in those prisons treat them like animals, monsters and beasts,
(18:04):
and people respond to that. You know, you treat people
like animals, they're going to behave like animals. So then
the question that Bragmann poses is what happens if we
decide to treat people like their good you know, trusting
their intentions, leaning into care, and building our systems around
the assumption that most people are decent. So how do
(18:25):
we make that leave? I said before that you know,
we don't really necessarily need to go into the past
to see how people behave in the present, but it's
a good idea to get a sense of how we evolved. Right.
A lot of people have a brutal perception of human evolution.
You know, they truck comparisons between us and chimpanzees, or
(18:47):
you know, they make it see first of all like
nordn bernobles entirely and also ignoring the fact that we
are our own speecies with our own evolutionary history. You know,
people have are very cynical and honestly insultant, like view
of the cave men of our past. But our histories
are actually pretty soft. In fact, Bragman argues in favor
(19:08):
of something called self domestication theory, which has a little
bit of anthropological and evolutionary biological back in. And so
the basic claim of this theory is that the reason
Homo sapiens survived and other ancient humans didn't isn't because
we were the strongest, or the smartest, or the most
cun in or because we were friendlier, that we evolve
(19:30):
to be more social, cooperative, playful, and trust in self.
Domestication theorists basically compare humans as puppies to the other
homo species as wolves, that we domesticate ourselves to become
less aggressive or faces softened, our bodies became less robust,
and our openness and friendliness allowed us to build relationships,
(19:53):
to build groups, to raise children, community, and to survive.
And so if we accept our theory we had not
that and build that into our foundation, that we did
evolve our capacity to be kind, that it is something
that is within our humanity, that it's not a fragile
gloss over savagery or a morality that's given to us
by religional law. Then we can basically become who were
(20:16):
capable of becoming, you know, we can create systems that
allow us to develop that. And this sounds really optimistic,
This sounds really happy, go lucky and woo. And we
are going to get into some of the darker chapters
of our humanity in the next episode. But I wanted
to wrap this one up by back in the Death
(20:37):
of Catherine Kitty Genevieves in nineteen sixty four. It's another
example that Breckman refers to in his book, and it's
one of the classic case studies that was used for
a long time to illustrate the apathy and cold heartness
of humanity. Because the New York Times, which as we
all know, is a reputable and trustworthy institution, The New
(21:00):
York Times claimed that she was stabbed in the street
while thirty eight neighbors looked on and did nothing. Right.
This was the quintessential story that was used to say,
you know, look at that bystanding effect. Humans just don't care,
you know. There was used as an example of apathy,
of urban de kay, of everything wrong with us. But
(21:23):
the story was wrong. The reporters will help this story
and it was wrong. I mean, yes, she was murdered,
but people did try to help. Someone called the police,
but this wasn't a time before nine one one, so
it was yet to call like the local station, and
then the response process was a bit slow. One neighbor
actually rushed out and held her as she died, held
(21:46):
her in their arms. So the press spun this story
as like some bleak tale, and the few of psychology
ate it up because it was part of a trend
at the time to create this perception of humanity, but
the real story was a lot more hearing, a lot
more human. I mean, it was messy and somebody still
(22:09):
murdered her. But this this idea of the byastounding the
fact that has been so inflated. A lot of the
key studies that have been used as examples of them
have been chipped away at over time, and that's one
of the main stories that has been pretty thoroughly debunked
at this point. So I like where Bregman's been going.
But we've glossed over the dark side, you know, the
(22:32):
shadow of our humanity. You know, even he acknowledges in
this book that we do bad stuff as well. So
the next episode we are gonna wade into that. But
how you're feeling about humanity so far.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
I think I actually do have an underlying optimism like
beneath how I move around in the world, which is
which is kind of odd considering the sort of stuff
I do for work, but it is it is true,
and I think part of that is what just keeps
me going. I don't know, like, yeah, I've I've I've
certainly been around my fair share of like doomers and nihilists,
(23:09):
over the years, and at the very least those people
don't seem to be very happy and don't seem to
be enjoying life, and sometimes it's hard to enjoy life, absolutely,
but I think I think you need to be able
to find a place for yourself within a world that
has like evil as a almost inherent component and find
(23:31):
your way either through that, sometimes around that, but oftentimes
through it. And I think that's I mean, that's that's
just been a part of like growing up. We're certainly
growing up in like a weird time, but I think
that's kind of always been true, like that that was
true one hundred years ago. So I don't know, I
part of me and maybe this is just over the optimistic,
(23:53):
but but part of me continues to resist being a
doomer despite all of the bad news that is trying
to infiltrate my brain at all times, which is which
is a very profitable industry, right, I mean, that's somewhat
kind of what this show is, right. It kind of
does play into those instincts for sure, which is which
is something that like we critique amongst ourselves often and
(24:16):
we try to always find that balance as well. But
but yeah, like the doom cycle is like a A
is a huge industry, and there's there's people that absolutely
want you to always be panicking all the time. Yeah,
and that drives consumer choices, that drives AD revenue, right.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
I mean Bregman puts forward a very compellent argument in
the book actually that the news is a public health
asset totally.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Yeah, no, like absolutely, and like I have to keep
up with the news all the time, and I don't
think it affects me that much anymore. And certainly in
you know, doing a daily news show, we try to
be very selective in the things that we cover. We
don't cover everything all the time. We try to cover
the things that, like our hosts feel is both like
within their wheelhouse and people who listen to the show
(25:01):
should know about write certain things that you might not
be hearing about in like a mainstream news. But no,
the news has a massive thing spiritual evil to it
as well. There is there is a sinister undercurrent to
like the news, like as like an industry indeed, and
that's something that we are also always like butting up against.
(25:24):
Well on on that optimistic.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Note, yeah, until next time, we'll follow it to all
the people peace.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
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All the media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello and welcome. Take it up, and here I'm joined
once again.
Speaker 3 (00:09):
By yours Davias.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hello, Hello, Hello. And recently I was reading through a
photo book called Humans by Brandon Stanton. It features interviews
of people on the streets all over the world. He
started off and he kind of became well known online
for the Humans of New York series. I'm sure if
you've heard of that, Yeah, I think so, yeah, yeah,
(00:33):
So he did that for a while and he ended
up traveling at the parts of the world and doing
basically the same thing, just interviewing people on the street,
getting their insights, hearing their struggles, hearing their story. And
when I saw the book in the library, I just
I picked it up orroed it, decided to read it through.
And it's really profound in a sense, and you get
a sense of the spectrum of humanity, of what people
(00:54):
are going through, of the highs and lows of the
human experience, make you laugh on one page and make
you cry for the next page. And seeing that variety
of humanity reminded me of another book that I read
and finished recently, which is called Humankind Hopeful History by
(01:15):
Rutga Bregmant, a friend of mine, had given it to
me because he said it had changed his whole view
on the world. And so I wanted to talk about
some of the concepts that I picked up in that book,
like the origins and critiques of veneer theory, why most
people are actually pretty decent, and the problems with some
of the narratives of our wickedness. And the next episode,
(01:38):
I want to get into some of the reasons why
people do bad and what we can do about it.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Sounds exciting because there is a lot of bad right now.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Is there is? I mean, as on that stuff. I mean,
what would you say is the most common perspective you
hear on humanity and human nature?
Speaker 3 (02:00):
I don't know, Like there's there's this clash between like
this like liberal humanist version and then this like Christian
moralist version, I guess like in the States right now,
but that's been going on for decades, if not centuries.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
By liberal humanists on Christian I mean, I think I
get a sense of what the Christian moralist vision is right,
that we are all sinful, destined for hell any salvation,
that that version of the story, yeah, yeah, more or less,
and the liberal humanist perspective is I mean.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
I don't know, like this this this forever search for
like what human rights are and like human decency. So
we come up with like governments and rules to actually
like govern over our morals as a democratic process that
continues to evolve over the course of like hundreds of years.
We're like, you know, on the moral arc of the universe,
(02:54):
just not fully you know there yet.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Yeah, I've heard that perspective, I think most commonly and
decent in my spaces, I tend to hear the you know,
people are wicked, people are sinful in religious cases, or
people are violent, people are selfish, and that kind of
in that similar number of vein where we have these
systems in place to kind of check ourst simpulses, to
(03:18):
kind of keep us regulated and to keep society functioning.
And Bregman opens his book by discussing the idea of
civilization being a thin mask that covers our true savage instincts.
He calls it the veneer theory, and he spends the
rest of the book basically points it out all the
(03:39):
different errors in that judgment. I mean, he doesn't claim
that we're all good people, happy go lucky saying so
anything like that, But he does see it. For the
most part, most people are pretty decent, and I know
that clashes with all a lot of people are accustomed
to hearing, and there are some very notable exceptions. But
(04:01):
despite the efforts of elite to pain and purport a
different picture, there's actually a lot more leaning towards our decent,
if not good nature and the contrary. But of course,
of these kind of conversations, who are set to go
back to the debate between Thomas Hobbes and Sean jack
(04:21):
ersue we can't escape these guys. Hobbes, of course, had
the perspective in Leviathan, which was written in sixteen fifty one,
that in the absence of a strong central authority, human
beings would live in a condition of perpetual war, with
every man against every other man, a war of war
against all. As he would have put it so to him,
(04:44):
people are naturally self interested and driven by the desire
for power and survival, so without laws or a sovereign
to keep them in check, individuals would act purely on
their own instincts, lead into constant conflict over resources, safety,
and dominant life. In this state of nature would be
(05:04):
solitary for nasty, brutish, and short. A couple of years later,
a couple of decades later, Rousseau was writing in the
Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality among Men,
and he basically flipped Hobbs view on its head. He
believed that humans in the state of nature were peaceful, cooperative,
(05:25):
and guided by basic needs and compassion, and there was
a development of hierarchies and institutions that had led to inequality, jealousy,
and competition which basically corrupted human nature. In his words,
man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.
Do you take a side in this debate?
Speaker 3 (05:44):
By the way, er not to be the centrist option,
But I don't know. I think both these things play
into each other. I definitely don't believe in the idea
that like this state is the only thing that reigns
people in and stops them from doing a moral acts. Right,
It's the same thing as like without without God or
(06:06):
without the Bible, then everyone would just be like raping
and murdering it. Meanwhile, actual Christians obviously rape and murder
all the time anyway. But like, no, like this this
idea isn't the only thing that keeps you from becoming
this like, you know, savage, like inhuman monster. People can
be morally good without this this like religious notion. And
(06:28):
I think in some ways the state can also operate
as a religious notion to these people, where you know,
the police is the only thing that's keeping you from
becoming this like horrible monster who just hurts everyone around you.
But I also have my sympathies to the like alternate
side of that, and I can see there's a great
deal of oppression and horrific violence that can only happen
at scale under the organization of a state. So I
(06:52):
will pick the annoying centrisce option.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Yeah, I know that there are a lot of people
who have the sense that, you know, the state and
the laws all that's standing between us and the purge
or mad Max or something like that. Sure, exactly, So, yeah,
I don't think that Hobbes's over generalization of human nature
as inherently violent and selfish holds up when you look
at the diversity of human experience and human societies. I mean,
(07:20):
that's not to say that violence and conflict were absent
in a world out state, but you know, context matters. Resources, environment,
group size. All those things would have played roles. I
don't think that we should be accepting Rousseau's romantic light either,
So I guess I'm in the centris to count with you.
The truth does seem to lie somewhere in that middle ground,
(07:42):
that human nature is flexible and then it's shaped by social, ecological,
and historical contexts. What's getting the weeds of humanity's origins
(08:02):
is stimulating as an exercise. But there's only so much
we can know about the past for certain. What we
can't know for certain is the present, And what we've
seen in the present is that when disaster strikes, people
have tended to help each other. In Hurricane Katrina in
two thousand and five, the official response was famously criticized
(08:24):
for being slow and disorganized, and yet despite media attempts
to pain these people as looters and thugs and all
these different things, community members, neighbors, volunteers all stepped up
to rescue people, to mobilize food, shelter, and basic aid,
to expropriate when necessary to get people what they needed,
(08:45):
long before federal agencies gone on the scene. Similarly, in
a more recent occurrence, after the cranfelt tower fire in
the UK in twenty seventeen. The official channels had failed
the people of that tour many diet as a result.
Regulations that were supposed to protect people were not enforced
(09:07):
or were absent. And yet it was community members who
sprang into action to provide water and shelter and food
and clothes and emotional support even when the Twin Tours
fell on Stement eleven, two thousand and one. And this
is an example that brag when I actually spent some
time talking about people actually helped people descend the stairwells
(09:30):
in an orderly fashion. You know, they would say, you know,
after you going down the stairs, and passers by would
go in and help others to evacuate and assist the
wounded law before the emergency services arrived. So people acted
and prioritized helping others even in a disaster scenario. And
(09:50):
yet what do we see in dystopia and fiction. In
apocalyptic fiction, you see people just like driving around shooting
guns in the air. You see the purge, you see
them the ceiling, zombie apocalypse scenarios. In Rebecca Solnitt's book,
A Paradise Built in Hell, she found that disasters peeled
back the layer as a society and revealed the empathy, cooperation,
(10:13):
and ka at humanities core. She noted that when disaster
strikes is when people most often reveal the better natures,
and yet those negative narratives tend to have more suite
in the popular imagination.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
No, and this is like so true. I remember in
twenty twenty, during the wildfires on the West Coast, the
anarchist response was to set up these like giant, like
mutual aid centers for people fleeing from the fire, you know,
like not like other anarchists, just like regular people fleeing
from the fire could get necessities and figure out housing. Meanwhile,
(10:47):
right wing militias were setting up checkpoints, monitoring to make
sure Antifa wasn't you know, like raiding people's homes as
they were fleeing from the fires. Like these were the
two options you had. You had, you had anarchists actually
helping the people who were who were fleeing from this
horrific fire and setting up like massive, massive like aid
(11:07):
distribution centers. Meanwhile right wing militias were pulling people over
at gunpoint making sure Antifa wasn't up to any shenanigans
and similar stuff happened last year during Hurricane Helene on
the East Coast, where you had a whole bunch of
like Southeast anarchists in the Appalachians do mutual a disaster response. Meanwhile,
(11:30):
right wing malicious were spreading rumors about like FEMA fraud
and all of all of this crazy stuff, not actually
helping anybody. But it was anarchists doing a large a
large amount of the actual water distribution and like medical
assistance on the ground as the federal response was delayed
and insufficient.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Yeah, I mean, I was aware of the anarchist efforts
during these disasters, but I wasn't. I didn't know about
that situation with the right wing militias setting up checkpoints.
That's shocking but still wild, you know.
Speaker 3 (12:02):
Yeah, No, it's so funny because those are the people,
you know, claiming that, you know, without the government we
would have the purge, anarchists would just go around doing
all kinds of crazy crimes. I get when things actually happen,
their attempts to like deputize them as like their own
police force actually creates those conditions. Meanwhile, anarchists are the
ones actually helping.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
People exactly exactly, and yet despite these situations, these these
things happen again and again. We still have these popular narratives.
You don't know, the narrative I see referenced all the
time Lord of the Fliers.
Speaker 3 (12:37):
Yes, of course, of course.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
All the time. Right. It's basically become a cultural shorthand
for the idea that people are just savage at heart,
that this Veneo civilization is the only thing keeping us
in checked. I mean, these days I do see people
joking that it's because those were British boys.
Speaker 3 (12:55):
So true, actually, so true.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
But well, I get that.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
You.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
I think it's also important to remember that it's like
people are taking this work of fiction as if it's
an anthropological study, yeah, when it's just something that a
guy made up as an analogy for, you know, the
situation during World War Two.
Speaker 3 (13:14):
I think it's also good to remember that the British
are people too. I have a British co worker, so
you know, we have to we have to show them
a little bit of human human dignity exactly exactly.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
People embrace the story because it confirms what they want
to believe in this climate of cynicism. But Ragman actually
tells a story in the book about a true instance
of when a shipwreck of young boys occurred. Of course
there't They weren't British boys. There were Tonguan boys as
and from the country of Tonga. So in nineteen sixty five,
(13:49):
six Tonguan boys we were stranded on a remote island
for over a year, and rather than descended into violence,
they survived through cooperation. You know, they built a garden,
they shared duties. They didn't do any human sacrifices, you know,
they created a rotor system to get things done. There
resolved conflict. When people were in conflict, they would go
(14:09):
on time out. They put each other on timeout and
go on opposite sides of the island until the you know,
cooler heads prevailed. The figure out ways to deal with
their conflicts, to organize themselves without authority and without chaos.
But the problem is that these fictional narratives become so
powerful instead of the real ones, that they have a
(14:30):
similar effect to the placeboy effect. In fact, it's the
Placeboy effects evil twin the no Sea Boy effect. Now,
I'd heard about the place boy effect before, and I'm
sure you have as well. But for those who don't know,
it's basically where someone's health actually improves after receiving what's
basically a dummy treatment like a sugar pill or a
(14:50):
fake surgery or a saline injection. The body heals itself
because the mind of the person believes it's being healed.
The mind in that trust into medicine. I mean, that's
just that's amazing to me even now, and they'll quite
understand how it works yet, but it's still really cool.
But there's another dimension to the placebo effect that I
(15:12):
hadn't heard about before, but it makes intuitive sense. I
suppose it's called the no Seaboy effect. And Bregman is
the one who introduced me to that concept. So the
no Seaboy effect is where instead of belief heal and you,
it's belief that makes you sick. So people experience real pain,
real symptoms, and even real illness, not because there's an
(15:34):
actual physical cause, but because in their minds they expect
to be harmed. So their minds to that fear of
harm into actual harm and injury. And there was one
case study that he used where a child had drunk
a coke and photo was poisoned and then just created
this mass hysteria almost with dozens of children in hospitals
(15:56):
with headaches and nausea and pradic attacks because they drank.
Go to the point where Coca Cola actually had to
recall all of those drinks even though tests had showing
that there was nothing in the drinks that we're making
people sick, but theirs bodies still responded as if there
was because they believed they heard the story, they heard
about it, they saw what happened to others, and they
(16:16):
believed it would happened to them. And that's the no
super effect in action, right, So we get the concept.
So Bregmun actually stretched these concepts beyond the field of medicine,
(16:36):
and he basically made the points that what if these
contents are abate into how we view each other? You know,
so what if I believe that people are selfish, cruel
and violent by nature? Actually makes it so, you know,
if you expect the worst from people, you'll act on that.
You know, you might be colder or more defensive and
(16:57):
more likely to punish or preemptal. And what happens as
a result is that, you know, people pick up on
that energy, they're spawning kind they withdraw, they retaliate, and
then that cycle ends up feeding itself and to the belief.
That negative belief becomes a social reality, a self fulfilling prophecy.
So we end up building institutions that are based on
(17:19):
that cynical expectation. We design policies that are based around
the punishment we are, train ourselves to see strangers as
threats rather than as neighbors. And then when we have
a fallout, as when that prophecy is fulfilled by our
own actions, we can then say, well, see I was right.
You know, people are awful. But what we don't see
(17:40):
is that our expectations and the systems we build around
those expectations are part of what ends up making it
that way. I think an easy example to going to
is with prison right. People expect criminals to act like animals,
to act like monsters, to beasts, and so they create prisons,
and in those prisons treat them like animals, monsters and beasts,
(18:04):
and people respond to that. You know, you treat people
like animals, they're going to behave like animals. So then
the question that Bragmann poses is what happens if we
decide to treat people like their good you know, trusting
their intentions, leaning into care, and building our systems around
the assumption that most people are decent. So how do
(18:25):
we make that leave? I said before that you know,
we don't really necessarily need to go into the past
to see how people behave in the present, but it's
a good idea to get a sense of how we evolved. Right.
A lot of people have a brutal perception of human evolution.
You know, they truck comparisons between us and chimpanzees, or
(18:47):
you know, they make it see first of all like
nordn bernobles entirely and also ignoring the fact that we
are our own speecies with our own evolutionary history. You know,
people have are very cynical and honestly insultant, like view
of the cave men of our past. But our histories
are actually pretty soft. In fact, Bragman argues in favor
(19:08):
of something called self domestication theory, which has a little
bit of anthropological and evolutionary biological back in. And so
the basic claim of this theory is that the reason
Homo sapiens survived and other ancient humans didn't isn't because
we were the strongest, or the smartest, or the most
cun in or because we were friendlier, that we evolve
(19:30):
to be more social, cooperative, playful, and trust in self.
Domestication theorists basically compare humans as puppies to the other
homo species as wolves, that we domesticate ourselves to become
less aggressive or faces softened, our bodies became less robust,
and our openness and friendliness allowed us to build relationships,
(19:53):
to build groups, to raise children, community, and to survive.
And so if we accept our theory we had not
that and build that into our foundation, that we did
evolve our capacity to be kind, that it is something
that is within our humanity, that it's not a fragile
gloss over savagery or a morality that's given to us
by religional law. Then we can basically become who were
(20:16):
capable of becoming, you know, we can create systems that
allow us to develop that. And this sounds really optimistic,
This sounds really happy, go lucky and woo. And we
are going to get into some of the darker chapters
of our humanity in the next episode. But I wanted
to wrap this one up by back in the Death
(20:37):
of Catherine Kitty Genevieves in nineteen sixty four. It's another
example that Breckman refers to in his book, and it's
one of the classic case studies that was used for
a long time to illustrate the apathy and cold heartness
of humanity. Because the New York Times, which as we
all know, is a reputable and trustworthy institution, The New
(21:00):
York Times claimed that she was stabbed in the street
while thirty eight neighbors looked on and did nothing. Right.
This was the quintessential story that was used to say,
you know, look at that bystanding effect. Humans just don't care,
you know. There was used as an example of apathy,
of urban de kay, of everything wrong with us. But
(21:23):
the story was wrong. The reporters will help this story
and it was wrong. I mean, yes, she was murdered,
but people did try to help. Someone called the police,
but this wasn't a time before nine one one, so
it was yet to call like the local station, and
then the response process was a bit slow. One neighbor
actually rushed out and held her as she died, held
(21:46):
her in their arms. So the press spun this story
as like some bleak tale, and the few of psychology
ate it up because it was part of a trend
at the time to create this perception of humanity, but
the real story was a lot more hearing, a lot
more human. I mean, it was messy and somebody still
(22:09):
murdered her. But this this idea of the byastounding the
fact that has been so inflated. A lot of the
key studies that have been used as examples of them
have been chipped away at over time, and that's one
of the main stories that has been pretty thoroughly debunked
at this point. So I like where Bregman's been going.
But we've glossed over the dark side, you know, the
(22:32):
shadow of our humanity. You know, even he acknowledges in
this book that we do bad stuff as well. So
the next episode we are gonna wade into that. But
how you're feeling about humanity so far.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
I think I actually do have an underlying optimism like
beneath how I move around in the world, which is
which is kind of odd considering the sort of stuff
I do for work, but it is it is true,
and I think part of that is what just keeps
me going. I don't know, like, yeah, I've I've I've
certainly been around my fair share of like doomers and nihilists,
(23:09):
over the years, and at the very least those people
don't seem to be very happy and don't seem to
be enjoying life, and sometimes it's hard to enjoy life, absolutely,
but I think I think you need to be able
to find a place for yourself within a world that
has like evil as a almost inherent component and find
(23:31):
your way either through that, sometimes around that, but oftentimes
through it. And I think that's I mean, that's that's
just been a part of like growing up. We're certainly
growing up in like a weird time, but I think
that's kind of always been true, like that that was
true one hundred years ago. So I don't know, I
part of me and maybe this is just over the optimistic,
(23:53):
but but part of me continues to resist being a
doomer despite all of the bad news that is trying
to infiltrate my brain at all times, which is which
is a very profitable industry, right, I mean, that's somewhat
kind of what this show is, right. It kind of
does play into those instincts for sure, which is which
is something that like we critique amongst ourselves often and
(24:16):
we try to always find that balance as well. But
but yeah, like the doom cycle is like a A
is a huge industry, and there's there's people that absolutely
want you to always be panicking all the time. Yeah,
and that drives consumer choices, that drives AD revenue, right.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
I mean Bregman puts forward a very compellent argument in
the book actually that the news is a public health
asset totally.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Yeah, no, like absolutely, and like I have to keep
up with the news all the time, and I don't
think it affects me that much anymore. And certainly in
you know, doing a daily news show, we try to
be very selective in the things that we cover. We
don't cover everything all the time. We try to cover
the things that, like our hosts feel is both like
within their wheelhouse and people who listen to the show
(25:01):
should know about write certain things that you might not
be hearing about in like a mainstream news. But no,
the news has a massive thing spiritual evil to it
as well. There is there is a sinister undercurrent to
like the news, like as like an industry indeed, and
that's something that we are also always like butting up against.
(25:24):
Well on on that optimistic.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Note, yeah, until next time, we'll follow it to all
the people peace.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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