November 10, 2025 • 43 mins
Would a utopia be possible? Or does our innate tribalism and jealousy make perfect societies difficult to achieve? Do we secretly love hierarchies? Why are primate brains such excellent detectors of unfairness? Why do things become more desirable when we’re told we can’t have them? Did the church’s disavowal of first-cousin marriage lead to better politics? This week Eagleman talks with psychologist Paul Bloom about the (im)possibility of achieving societal utopias.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Would a utopia be possible and would it even be desirable?
Are we wired up with desires and preferences like tribalism
and jealousy that make perfect societies difficult to achieve?
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Do we love hierarchies?
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Why are primate brains such excellent detectors of unfairness?
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Do we actually like struggle?
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Did the Church's disavowal of first cousin marriages lead to
better politics? This week we'll talk with psychologist Paul Bloom
about the possibility slash impossibility of achieving societal utopias.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford, and in these
episodes we sail deeply into our three pound universe to
understand why and how our lives and.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Societies look the way they do.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Today's episode is about whether we humans yoked with our
brains and our psychologies, whether we will ever get to
a utopian society. Imagine a world where everyone has what
they need, no crime, no hunger, no injustice, a place
of peace and fairness and fulfillment. For as long as
(01:41):
we have been human, we have dreamed of such a place.
We've even given it a name utopia.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Now.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
The word utopia was coined by Thomas Moore in fifteen sixteen.
He described a fictional island society where private property didn't exist,
and where everyone worked and where everyone shared equally. But
even then he chose the word as a pun from
the roots ooh topos, which means no place. This was
(02:11):
his hint that such perfection might not exist anywhere or
any when. But this possibility of it not coming to
fruition has never stopped people from thinking about it and
working toward it, and often picking up arms to try
to achieve it. But again and again the road to
(02:31):
utopia gets off ramped by human nature.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
One historical example.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Of this comes from the French Revolution in seventeen eighty nine.
It was all about liberty and equality and fraternity, and
that's nothing but good stuff. It makes total sense to
be on board with that. The monarchy was overthrown, they
tossed out feudal privileges, they declared a new republic. But
by seventeen ninety two France was tearing itself apart. He
(03:01):
had royalists and moderates and radical factions. They were all
in the fight for dominance. And so out of this chaos,
in seventeen ninety three emerged the Committee of Public Safety,
which was an emergency body to protect the revolution from
enemies foreign and domestic, and its leading voice was Maximilian Robespierre.
(03:23):
He was known as the Incorruptible because of his unbending
devotion to revolutionary virtue.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
He believed all the.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Way down that the revolution had to be defended militarily,
of course, but also morally through purity unity. The destruction
of corruption. To him, terror was justice. So they made
revolutionary tribunals to accuse people of counter revolutionary activity. This
(03:58):
was anyone noble's clergy, political opponents, former allies, and what
was called the law of suspects made essentially everyone vulnerable
to arrest if they were showing insufficient enthusiasm for the revolution.
And as you remember from your history classes, the guillotine
(04:18):
became the symbol of the new order because it was
proposed as an egalitarian instrument of execution. So over the
next two years there were seventeen thousand executions, and at
least that many more who died in prisons or summary killings.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
So what the heck happened here?
Speaker 1 (04:36):
What Robespierre so desperately hoped for was what he called
a republic of virtue, where citizens would be motivated by
civic morality rather than self interest. But in practice, what
he thought of as virtue became enforced conformity. Anybody could
become a suspect. They could be labeled as corrupt, or aristocratic,
(04:59):
or insufficiently revolutionary. So what happened is the revolution, which
looked like it was aiming towards the utopia, quickly became
known as the Reign of Terror. Everyone was frantic and scared.
Revolutionaries turned on each other. A bunch of the early
leaders were sent to the guillotine by their former ally, Robespierre.
(05:22):
So by mid seventeen ninety four, everyone who knew Robespierre,
even as close allies, everyone was in fear for their lives.
So finally, in July of seventeen ninety four, he got
arrested and guillotined, and the Reign of Terror finally ended.
So this is just one of a gajillion examples where
the pursuit of moral purity and ideal justice slips into violence.
(05:47):
This is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union. The
original communist revolutionaries were so clear and bright eyed on
the utopia that they wanted to build. But between Lenin
and star there were an estimated one million political executions.
Both Lenin and Stalin believed they were creating a new
(06:08):
purified world and egalitarian utopia free from exploitation. But just
like with Robespierre, the pursuit of purity turned into the
destruction of perceived impurity. Just like the French Revolution, the
Soviet experiment began with a dream of equality and ended
(06:29):
in terror. In the thousands of cases like these, utopian
zeal plus human psychology, fear and rivalry and paranoia and tribalism,
this combination produces the opposite of paradise. Whenever movements aim
to purify human nature itself, they eventually turned the blade inward.
(06:54):
And this is where psychology and neuroscience become key parts
of the analysis, because at the center of every grand
political blueprint sets the human brain, a brain that evolved
in survival conditions, tuned for tribalism.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
For hierarchy, for rivalry.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
This has been a topic close to my heart for years,
and in fact, one of my short stories in my
book Some is exactly on this topic. So to set
the table for today's podcast. I'll read that story now.
This is called egalitaire. In the afterlife, you discover that
God understands the complexities of life.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
She had originally submitted to.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Peer pressure when she structured her universe like all the
other gods had, with a binary categorization of people into
good and evil. But it didn't take long for her
to realize that humans could be good in many ways
and simultaneously corrupt and mean spirited in other ways. How
was she to arbitrate who goes to heaven and who
(07:58):
to hell? Might not be possible. She considered that a
man could be an embezzler and still give to charitable causes.
Might not a woman be an adulteress, but bring pleasure
and security to two men's lives. Might not a child
unwittingly divulge secrets that splinter a family. Dividing the population
(08:21):
into two categories good and bad seemed like a more
reasonable task when she was younger, but with experience these
decisions became more difficult. She composed complex formulas to weigh
hundreds of factors and ran computer programs that rolled out
long strips of paper with eternal decisions, but her sensitivities
(08:42):
revolted at this automation, and when the computer generated a
decision she disagreed with, she took the opportunity to kick
out the plug and rage. That afternoon, she listened to
the grievances of the dead from two warring nations. Both
sides had suffered, both sides had legitimate grievances, both pled
(09:04):
their cases earnestly. She covered her ears and moaned in misery.
She knew her humans were multi dimensional, and she could
no longer live under the rigid architecture of her youthful choices.
Not all gods suffer over this. We can consider ourselves
lucky that in death we answer to a god with
(09:25):
deep sensitivity to the byzantine hearts of her creations. For months,
she moped around her living room in Heaven, head drooped
like a bulrush while the lines piled up. Her advisers
advised her to delegate the decision making, but she loved
her humans too much to leave them to the care
(09:46):
of anyone else. In a moment of desperation, the thought
crossed her mind to let everyone wait online indefinitely, letting
them work it out on their own. But then a
better idea struck her. Generous spirit. She I can afford it.
She would grant everyone, every last human a place in heaven.
After all, everyone had something good inside. It was part
(10:09):
of the design specifications. Her new plan brought back the
bounce to her gait, returned the color.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
To her cheeks.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
She shut down the operations in Hell, fired the devil,
and brought every last human to be by her side
in Heaven, newcomers or old timers, nefarious or righteous. Under
the new system, everyone gets equal time to speak with her.
Most people find her a little garrulous and over solicitous,
but she cannot be accused of not caring. The most
(10:41):
important part of her new system is that everyone is
treated equally. There is no longer fire for some and
harp music for others. The afterlife is no longer defined
by cots versus water beds, raw potatoes versus sushi, hot
water versus champagne. Every everyone is a brother to all,
(11:02):
and for the first time, an idea has been realized
that never came to fruition on earth.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
True equality.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
The Communists are baffled and irritated because they have finally
achieved their perfect society, but only by the help.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Of a god In whom they don't want to believe.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
The meritocrats are abashed that they're stuck for eternity in
an incentiveless system with a bunch of pinkos. The conservatives
have no penniless to disparage, the liberals have no downtrodden
to promote. So God sits on the edge of her
bed and weeps at night because the only thing everyone
(11:43):
can agree on is that they're all in hell. That
was the story Egalitaire from my book Some. So let's
get back to the human foibles that get in the
way of utopias. An important clue is that these aren't
learned behaviors. You can look at how predisposed we are
to tribalism, for example, by looking at children. An experiment
(12:07):
in the nineteen fifties took two groups of boys at
summer camp and randomly separated them and gave them different
team names, the Rattlers and the Eagles, and the psychologists
watched closely and measured how quickly this descended into tribal hostility,
hurling insults, raiding each other's cabins, burning each other's flags,
(12:28):
breaking into physical violence.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
You don't need.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Decades of history to divide two groups. The division can
happen in days or hours because group identity us versus them,
lives deep in our circuitry. And by the way, the
things that get in our way with building utopias aren't
limited to humans. You can see the general elements throughout
the animal kingdom. In one study, all Link in the
(12:54):
show notes, you have capuchin monkeys trained to do a
little task for a slice of queer, and they're perfectly
happy with that payment until they see the monkey next
to them get a nice, juicy grape which is better
for the same amount of work. And suddenly the cucumber
becomes an insult. The monkeys fling it back at the
(13:15):
researcher and pound.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
The cage in outrage.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
Because even for our cousins in the animal kingdom, they
are keenly attuned to others getting more than them. This
insults a very deep seated root of fairness. So what
does this mean when you have societies with millions of
humans and everyone is looking at their neighbors to see
if they feel anyone is getting something better than they are.
(13:42):
So the question I want to explore today is if
children fracture into tribes with just some labels and monkeys
riot when they feel like they're not getting enough, and
every adult human attempt at rebooting the system seems to
end up in a reign of terror and political executions.
What chance does utopia stand? Are humans fundamentally incompatible with
(14:06):
paradise or are these drives flexible and capable of being reshaped?
So this is what I want to explore today with
my guest psychologist, Paul Bloom.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
He has thought deeply about human.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Nature, our capacities for kindness and cruelty, our hunger for fairness,
our appetite for meaning. We're going to talk about whether
utopia is politically possible or do our flawed, ambitious, competitive
brains always going to get in the way, or are
there ways we might at least move in the right directions.
(14:42):
Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology at the University
of Toronto and Professor Emeritis at Yale. He's the author
of psych The Story of the Human Mind, and many
other influential books. So let's jump into this conversation at
the crossroads of psychology and society. So, Paul, almost all
(15:04):
thinkers have thought about the issue of utopia and whether
it's possible, and most political movements are trying to get
themselves in that direction. But you're a little less hopeful
about the possibility of reaching utopia because of human nature,
So tell us about that.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
So I find the idea of utopia really interesting. It's
not such a practical concern. I mean, if you and
I were to talk about the troubles of today, we
probably wouldn't settle on when we ever reach utopia or not.
We'll be talking about, you know, local improvements, and maybe
things suck in certain ways, let's it must make them better.
But Nick Monstrom said it really nicely describe utopias as
(15:44):
a thought experiment, as a way of exploring what we
want and what we're capable of. And I think the
idea of utopia is an excellent way to think about
human nature. And in particular, if you think deeply about utopia,
you'll come to see that certain aspects of our nature,
of human nature that make it untenable, that we are
(16:05):
not suited for a perfect world, that certain aspects of
how we are mean perfection will be forever out of reach.
It doesn't mean we can't make things better. It doesn't
mean near utopias aren't possible, but a perfect world unless
you radically reconfigure human nature so that we're not human anymore,
will be forever unattainable.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
And give us a sense of those facets of human
nature like self interest and envy.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
Yeah. Absolutely, Well take this particular case. In every utopia
people have thought of, there's some degree of equality and
a sort of mutual love where people care about everybody
else within this utopian community. You to see why that
would make sense. You think about tribes and families, and
they push against each other and our interests get torn apart.
(16:55):
And there are utopian thinkers, you know, such as Maw
who thought we simply dissolved these special ties now would
force people from different social classes to marry one another,
you know, taking away old choice and say well, this
will bring people together. A lot more benign example is
the Israeli kibbutz. When I was a teenager, I spent
a summer in the kibbutz in Israeli desert, and this
(17:17):
is a traditional kibbutz where their children were raised communally.
People have a baby, the baby was was sort of
given to sort of general daycare area where it would
be taken care of, and babies ended up ultimately knowing
who their biological parents were. But there was nothing, No
big deal was made of it. The idea would be
the bonds of family could easily be dissolved. Now his
experiment was a failure. The kibbutz was a failure. People
(17:40):
love their children, children love their parents. People have greater
ties to their siblings and their parents and their aunts
and uncles than they do to strangers. And there's every
indication that this is part of how we're wired up
to be. It's, to some extent it's evolutionary biology one
oh one, which is, you know, the forces that guided
(18:01):
the evolution of our desires and our preferences were highly
sensitive to whether or not other entities shared your gams.
You know. So parents love their children because parents who
don't didn't love their children, didn't reproduce as much as
parents who did, and that causes that the bonds of
family push against somebody who'd say, well, you just want
a good society. You want people to just care about
(18:22):
societies care about friends and strangers the same way. So
too with the bonds of friendship. So two of the
bonds of romantic love, and romantic love sets up other
problems like jealousy. If I'm really attracted to somebody and
I want them, if they don't choose to be with me,
it could be very painful for me. And if they
do choose to be with me, often I want them
(18:43):
to only choose to be with me, and they want
me to only be with them, and that could be
painful too. And in fact, every utopia has had problems
with sex. Either on the one extreme, either what they
say is no sex except for procreation, trying to make
a problem go away that way, or everybody has sex
with everybody else communal marriage, and those don't work out either.
(19:05):
So I mean, short version, human nature is messy.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
So we have things like tribalism, we have rivalry, and
your point is these are hardwired in and they are
adaptive generally, but they're also destructive to.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
The to the concept of a utopia.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
So your take is that a world without conflict or
competition would actually run counter to how our motivations work.
Speaker 3 (19:43):
So we talked a little bit about the bonds of
family and friendship and love. Another feature of our nature
is we are hierarchical beings. We are you know, ultimately primates,
and we care about how we stand relative to other people,
so you know, we want them. We don't want an
equal world, for instance. We want a world where merit
(20:05):
is corresponds to results, at least to some extent, and
so we chafe against pure equality. There's been a series
of studies that have been done, some of them from
my lab of children. And despite where you sometimes here,
we're not natural born egalitarians. If you work twice as
hard as me, even like a four year old things,
(20:26):
you should get more than me for your work. And
a situation where we if we were to get the
same would be you know, considered unfair. And this sort
of this idea that marriage should be rewarded again means
the ideal world from a psychological point of view is
an unequal one. But the unequal one leads to resentments
(20:49):
and frustration and so on. And you know, existing political
systems like communism and socialism and capitalism try to deal
with us through some complicated set of compromises. And I
think the compromises are kind of the best we're going
to get. It'll be kind of equal in this way
and unequal in this way. We'll reward in this way,
but not in this way. We'll set up limits in
this way, not in that way. But the idea of
(21:11):
a perfectly smooth world where we're all the same. Maybe
it could be imposed, but people be very unhappy with it.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
What's an example of a piece of legislation that finds
a compromise.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
Well, i'll say the tax system. So you can imagine
a tax system which treated the rich and poor identical.
The billionaire has to pay a percentage and the pauper
had to pay a percentage. That seems absurd. Just the
idea of sort of marginal utility would say that these
people should be treated differently. You should tax the millionaire more.
On the flip side, a system that entirely confiscated the
(21:46):
money of the rich would also discourage the accumulation of wealth,
discourage businesses, discouraged creation. So what you have in most society,
isn't it a progressive tax system? So and so you know,
the poor pay nothing. Are five percent and as ten
percent and it is fifteen percent, and and nobody's happy
with us because well everybody says, oh, it should be
(22:07):
higher here or lower here. And I certainly have no
ideal solution. But the point is, there isn't going to
be an ideal solution, just some sort of rough and
ready compromise. So too with the balances between individual freedom
and the safety of other people. So every society is
going to have some constraints on free speech. You know,
you can't you can't threaten to kill somebody. You can't
(22:28):
do insider trading, you can't blackmail people or extort people
if it gets too onerous. And political speeches block people
push back, and most so many of our political debates
right now struggle with as the margins you know, right now,
right now in the United States, you know, some people
want flag burning band either business or flag burning speech.
(22:49):
We shouldn't we shouldn't ban it. Yeah, my point isn't
the same thing, but these particular debates. But to say
this is our fate, we are, oh, he's going to
be arguing at these at these basic things because there's
no optimal solution.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
So, Paul, you and I did a podcast a while
ago when we talked about loneliness and the question of
whether if somebody isn't working at all the painful stuff
about relationships, maybe they won't get better at them, and
maybe that will actually be a disservice to them. By
the same token. I think you feel that if all
(23:23):
struggle were removed in let's say a utopia of the
future where AI and machines and other things could take
care of everything for us, we would lose something about
meaning in our lives.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
Tell us your take on that we would.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
I wrote about this in my books The Sweet Spot,
where I argued that there's an optimal level of struggle,
of difficulty that's important for a meaningful and good life.
And then Nick Mostron recently wrote a book on utopia
where you took up this issue and talked about a
possible sort of post scarcity world where we have everything
we need. We have all the food we need, all
the shelter we need, anything we want that have, and
(24:00):
so there need not be any struggle. Maybe there'll be
no disease by then. And I have two thoughts of this.
One thought is that that would be a boring world,
a frustrating world, one that we would find we will
lead to an wi and misery. We like struggle, I mean,
too much struggle is miserable, but too little struggle is
(24:21):
bad too, And so the first thought is that world
will be terrible. The second thought is a world with
no conflict and no struggle is not I think possible,
because maybe we'll have enough food and maybe we'll have
enough shelter, enough resources. But you know, there will always
(24:42):
be a case as long as we're people that somebody
will love somebody and they won't love them back. There
will always be the case so long as we're people
that you will want an award, a prize and honor
and I will want it too, and there's just one
to go around.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
And to follow up on that point.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
Your view, also, I think is that inequality is structurally unavoidable,
because even if you had a society where everyone had everything,
people will seek new markers of status and distinction.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
That's true.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
I mean we see this in sort of artificial societies
like communes or even academic departments where everyone is an
assistant professor and was a full professor. The people jockey
for a position, a jockey for status. I could easily
imagine a world, and I think it would be a
nice world where the status didn't translate into access for
resources that we desperately need. You know, where you know
(25:35):
either you will have enough food, eat our eye will
but not both. Much better to avoid such a world.
But we're never going to have a world where everybody
gets to matter of respect they think they deserve, because
many of us at certain times think we deserve more
respect than other people. So you know, if you want
your voice to be heard, you want to have sway
(25:56):
over things and to be maximum respected, and I want
this two and so too for the five other people
around us. There is a clash and some things, some
resources like respect, love, often sexual attraction, friendship, are inherently limited.
And so in some way the worry that we have
(26:18):
that oh what do we do with a world of
no conflict? How will we survive? It isn't going to
happen because there will always be some sort of conflict.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
And so your view is that the competition for recognition
and influence and prestige is always going to reintroduce hierarchy
and undermine this utopian ideal.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
Yeah, I gave a talk on utopia for the first
time in this wonderful festival in Wales called How the
Light Gets In And they have a little poster that
they put up saying this is our festival and everything,
and they list all the names of the luminaries who
are presenting at the festival and I was fifteenth on
(26:58):
a list, so it's things like that, you know. Now,
now the people in front of me were like you
Jaijack and Steven Pinker a great name, so you know,
it's fine. But still I think everybody on that list
would have said, I kind of like to be first
or second or third. And that's a tiny example, but
(27:19):
so much of life is like that. You know.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
I just heard a routine from Sarah Silverman, the comedian,
and she she said that she checked into a hotel
and the person said, wow, Sarah Silverman, you're in my
top four comedians. And she immediately felt like, okay, well
that means I'm number four then, right, because that was
you wouldn't have phrased it that way, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
And you see this in kids. You know, I've seen
kids and I had to have two sons and they
were little. You know, I've seen them fight over a sock,
you know, because you know, they were playing a socks
they could have each played with, but they each wanted
that sock. You know, one of one kids jumps onto
a chair that kind of wants to sit in the
same chair. Certainly they're fighting for her parents' attention. And
(28:01):
this is you know, this is just how people work,
and you know I. So we're never going to have this,
this frictionless world. Back to the idea of friction, back
to the idea of some sort of suffering a conflict.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
I don't think this is some sort of horrible fate.
Speaker 3 (28:17):
I think it's just part of our lot, that that
by a time you know, you and I, you know,
pass away, we will have had our share of disappointments,
of unrequited love, of awards, we didn't receive honors we
felt we deserved, and we didn't get moments of lack
of respect. But you know, if we're lucky, we've also found,
you know, occasional flashes of true love and surprise honors
(28:39):
and and winning the you know it. It's this again,
this messiness is what we're condemned to, but it's not
a terrible fate.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
Here's a question.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
So history often shows that attempts at utopia end in authoritarianism.
Let's think, you know, communism in the twentieth century or something.
How would did you tie that to psychology.
Speaker 3 (29:03):
I think the move to authoritarianism comes because we not
only have preferences. It's not only true to say I
want to be able to spend time with my children.
I want to be able to marry somebody who I
love and who loves me. I want to be free
to sell things to people who want to buy them
from me. I want to be free to have property.
Not only that, but we also have an appetite for
(29:26):
what you can call autonomy, even for his own sake.
We want to be able to within the limits possible,
get our way, and we don't like constraints on it.
There's actually a really interesting body of work in social
psychology that finds that if you tell people you can't
do something, all of a sudden, it becomes immensely desirable.
(29:47):
I mean, the classic case of this is Eve, you know,
in the Garden of Eden, doing the one thing she
was told she couldn't do. There's any incredible human about that.
You know, if I told you, David, don't press that button,
I demand you don't, resident you will find yourself an
urge press that button. And so this urge for autonomy,
sometimes for perversity, is within I think all of us,
(30:09):
to different degrees, and then you need to just you know,
a state needs to stomp it down. And if a
state wants to tell you you can love who you
want to love, You can't live where you want to live,
you can't say what you want to say. Well, they
often have to use force because people will, in an
ideal world not quietly go along with us, and so
(30:30):
utopian ideas typically end up. You know, honestly, I end
up in concentration camp, stand up with mass starvation because
because people are not suited for the utopian plans and
all push back.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
Now you're not opposed to seeking progress in societies affect
you very much for that. So tell us how you
balance that in your head about utopia. Maybe impossible, but
we should be making progress.
Speaker 3 (30:57):
I think you should certainly make progress. And you know,
to some extent I will. I'll conceive the obvious, which
is progress often involves force. If you say, well, here's
our new law, and the new law says such and so,
and it gives people more freedom and more rights. But
people may violate law, and in order to do that,
(31:19):
to stop them violent law, you might need to provide force.
You know, there's no just thing as a voluntary tax system.
I'm a believer in free speech, and I think if
somebody comes to campus and they're invited to give a talk,
they should be able to give a talk uninterrupted. But
that means that somebody might have to threaten, or to punish,
or even drag away people who would violently protest against them.
(31:43):
You're not going to find a decent war without the
possibility of force, even in the simplest infantiations. I think
that ideas of change, I think there's all sorts of
waste this world could be better, all sorts of ways
of this world has been better. You know, just take
a simple example of marriage to gay people. Seems to
be something that has had a million pluses and turned
(32:05):
out to have almost no minuses besides some people being
unhappy with it. But I think we want to be
very conscious about having changes that go too much against
the way people are having. Changes for instance, that that
you know, try to destroy ties of family, ties of love,
ties of friendship, even tribal ties. I think, for instance,
(32:27):
people of the same ethnicity who feel a kinship towards
their ethnicity, I don't think the States should try to
sort of stop them from the States should try to
stop people from worshiping or from practicing their sort of
communal customs. I think that runs deep, and if you
underestimate how deep it runs, often you end up with
kind of a terrible rebellious population, all sorts of trouble.
(32:49):
So I'm all for human progress. I just think and
maybe this is that's that's the liberal progressive side. The
conservative side is is don't push too much again the
way people are.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
I want to come back to this issue about in
groups and outgroups. You may know that we did these
studies in my lab a while ago where you're in
the brain scanner fMRI and you see six hands arrayed
on the screen, and the computer randomly picks one of
those hands, and you see it gets stabbed.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
With a syringe needle.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
And so what happens is your brain has an empathy response. Essentially,
your pain matrix lights up. It's not your hand getting stabbed,
but nonetheless you have this reaction of lighting up these
pain networks as though it maybe it was your hand.
That's presumably the neural basis of empathy. But what we
did then is added a one word label to each
(33:55):
hand Christian, Jewish, Muslim, scientologist, Hindu, atheist. And now the
goes around, picks a hand, you see the handget stabbed,
and the question is depending on what your in group is,
how do you feel about the out groups? And it
turns out across all religions, everyone cares more about their
in group. This very fast neural response, this first neural
(34:18):
response is much larger if you see your in group
get stabbed, and much smaller when you see a member
of your outgroup get stabbed. And by the way, this
was true for atheists as well. They cared more when
they see an atheist's hand gets stabbed. So it's not
even an indictment of religion. It's just about in groups
and out groups. And so what's cool is that people
can have all kinds of cognitive layers on top of
(34:41):
that so that they can still continue to do the
right thing in their societies. But fundamentally we're yoked with
that kind of bias.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
Yeah, I love that work. I'm familiar with our word.
Just similar study showing more of a reaction if you're
white to seeing a white hand stab and a black
hand stab, and vice versia if you're black. There's some
studies in Europe with soccer fans where you know, you
watch somebody be shocked and if they're a member of
a different soccer team, are a fan of a different
soccer team, you feel pleasure instead of instead of pain.
(35:13):
In some way, I take that as a challenge to
what I just said. So I said that you kind
of have to accept human nature as it is, but
I think there are times where you do have to
push back a little bit, and our tremendously strong favoring
in group kind of has to go a little bit.
In a healthy democratic society, it's really good for people
(35:35):
of one ethnicity to care about people from another ethnicity.
It's really good, you know, for the atheists to care
about the religious person, for the Catholic to care about
a Protestant, and so on. And I wouldn't be so
conservative as I say, well, Lise, are natures to care
about our own, so leave it alone. I think to
some extent societies will push towards some sort of cosmopolitanism.
(35:58):
So I would draw a distinction. I would grow have
a stinction when me caring about my fellow Canadians way
more than Americans, which is I think something which you
should sort of try to tap down. Maybe you could
try to try to ameliorate a little bit versus me
caring about my children versus other people's children, where I
think to some extent, you have to take that kind
(36:19):
of as a given. You'd want to construct a good
society and more lang which it, except we are stuck
with that and we cannot mess with that. So some
parts of human nature are sort of so tightly weaved
in that you just you know, you should take it
as a premise. Other parts and you're you're, and you're
good to point us out. You may want to push
(36:39):
back on a bit.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
You know, we often do this in legislation. This in
some sense represents our longest term thinking. So for example,
anti discrimination housing laws is a way of saying, look,
we get it, we know that you like people who
look like you better, but we're going to establish us
as a rule in our society that you can't do
that anymore.
Speaker 3 (36:59):
That's right, I mean. Joe Henrich made the argument in
this wonderful book The Weirdest People in the World that
one of the great moral revolutions of our time of
human history happened when the Church disavowed cousin marriage. And
as a result of this, it rippled through and all
of a sudden the bounds of family became less salient
(37:22):
in our political culture, and people became more individualistic, less
less kin less blood related, and then the world was
transformed as a result. And right now we have you know,
I say you shouldn't push back upon the bounds of family,
but we do in a little bit. We have anti
nepotism laws. If I'm looking for a research assistant to hire,
(37:45):
I can't hire my wife, are my sons or my cousin,
you know? And I think those are good lots. And I
think we accept that in the realm of the sort
of world of the market and world of universities, these
kinship bonds should not matter.
Speaker 1 (37:58):
And so your view as a psychologist is that the
point is not to give up on moving in the
direction of a utopia, but instead to replace utopian dreams
with reforms that are achievable given the way we are
given our wiring.
Speaker 3 (38:12):
That's a beautiful way of putting, I mean, a sort
of even more sort of constructive way of putting. It
is people who want to make the world a better place,
and we should all be such people as we embark
on this project. We should think deeply about human nature.
That'll tell us what changes will come easy. It'll tell
us what changes will be difficult, but worthwhile, and what
(38:34):
changes we shouldn't even try to go near. And I
think that that's really useful.
Speaker 1 (38:43):
That was my conversation with Paul Bloom. So where does
that leave us. If there's one very critical lesson from history,
it's that grand designs for perfection tend to unravel. Utopia
is very often kernel into dystopias. We've seen that all
throughout history, where paradises very quickly become prisons. And this
(39:04):
is because the human brain, for all its massive success,
gives a tricky foundation for building heaven on Earth. But
the hope that I think Paul and I both share
is that maybe a close study of psychology, combined with
a close read of history can carry forward the seeds
(39:25):
of progress. In other words, the right way to move
in the direction of utopia isn't to try to erase
human drives, but instead figure out how to channel them.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
So let me just say a couple of things. First.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
It's important to note that these instincts we have are
often double edged. For example, I told you at the
beginning about the experiment of dividing summer camp kids into
teams and watching them polarize. But the thing to note
is that the same grouping reflex. This team reflex is
what binds neighbors in the communities. The capacity for division
(40:03):
is also the capacity for belonging. It's double edged and
it always has been. And that leads us to a
deeper question, which is how can you take our tribal instincts,
which probably aren't going away, and find ways to widen
the circle of what counts as us. As I've talked
about in other episodes, I think the Internet actually gives
(40:25):
us a powerful tool to do this, because the algorithms,
if programmed correctly, can complexify relationships by surfacing the things
that we have in common. And some years ago I
wrote about this in an article in The Economist called
does your brain care about other people? It depends, And
(40:46):
that article was all about how our brains are predisposed
for in groups and outgroups. And one of the things
this does is make it very easy for governments to
leverage propaganda. But as it turns out, one of the
most effective things we can do as a society is
to learn the basic tricks of propaganda. For example, calling
(41:08):
the other group of people animals or viruses or insects
or anything other than other humans what propaganda does is
it dials down particular networks in our brain that are
involved in understanding other people, and that makes violent polarization
(41:29):
much easier, because now you're taking up arms against some
group that your brain has come to view as subhuman. So,
as I said, the way to get societal immunity against
this basic psychological trick is to put it on the
table as.
Speaker 2 (41:44):
Part of our education, so that the next.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
Time you hear a muckraker or pundit or official say
these things like there are a bunch of animals, you.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
Can immediately see through the magic trick instead of falling
for it.
Speaker 1 (42:01):
Now zooming back out, I want to note that when
we look at the long arc of history and we
see massive declines in poverty and rises in literacy and
fewer wars between great powers, we can see that something
is working directionally. It's very imperfect, but things are on
the timescale of decades or centuries working, and given the
(42:24):
brains were yoked with this may be the best we
can do. The lesson that surfaces from psychology and history
is that utopia is probably not a destination but a direction.
I mentioned at the outset that Thomas Moore coined the
word utopia from the root words which mean no place utopia.
(42:44):
That was pretty prescient. Margaret Atwood put it this way,
Utopia is not one place, but many, always receding ahead
of us. And I would say that's the point of
today's episode. We're probably never going to reach it, but
the point is the endless act of reaching. So without
(43:07):
being delusional, let's keep making progress, building up a world
where tomorrow is just a little kinder, a little fairer,
and even more abundant than today. Go to eagleman dot
com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.
Join the weekly discussions on my substack, and check out
(43:30):
and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of
each episode and to leave comments until next time. I'm
David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.
Would a utopia be possible and would it even be desirable?
Are we wired up with desires and preferences like tribalism
and jealousy that make perfect societies difficult to achieve?
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Do we love hierarchies?
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Why are primate brains such excellent detectors of unfairness?
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Do we actually like struggle?
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Did the Church's disavowal of first cousin marriages lead to
better politics? This week we'll talk with psychologist Paul Bloom
about the possibility slash impossibility of achieving societal utopias.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford, and in these
episodes we sail deeply into our three pound universe to
understand why and how our lives and.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Societies look the way they do.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Today's episode is about whether we humans yoked with our
brains and our psychologies, whether we will ever get to
a utopian society. Imagine a world where everyone has what
they need, no crime, no hunger, no injustice, a place
of peace and fairness and fulfillment. For as long as
(01:41):
we have been human, we have dreamed of such a place.
We've even given it a name utopia.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Now.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
The word utopia was coined by Thomas Moore in fifteen sixteen.
He described a fictional island society where private property didn't exist,
and where everyone worked and where everyone shared equally. But
even then he chose the word as a pun from
the roots ooh topos, which means no place. This was
(02:11):
his hint that such perfection might not exist anywhere or
any when. But this possibility of it not coming to
fruition has never stopped people from thinking about it and
working toward it, and often picking up arms to try
to achieve it. But again and again the road to
(02:31):
utopia gets off ramped by human nature.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
One historical example.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Of this comes from the French Revolution in seventeen eighty nine.
It was all about liberty and equality and fraternity, and
that's nothing but good stuff. It makes total sense to
be on board with that. The monarchy was overthrown, they
tossed out feudal privileges, they declared a new republic. But
by seventeen ninety two France was tearing itself apart. He
(03:01):
had royalists and moderates and radical factions. They were all
in the fight for dominance. And so out of this chaos,
in seventeen ninety three emerged the Committee of Public Safety,
which was an emergency body to protect the revolution from
enemies foreign and domestic, and its leading voice was Maximilian Robespierre.
(03:23):
He was known as the Incorruptible because of his unbending
devotion to revolutionary virtue.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
He believed all the.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Way down that the revolution had to be defended militarily,
of course, but also morally through purity unity. The destruction
of corruption. To him, terror was justice. So they made
revolutionary tribunals to accuse people of counter revolutionary activity. This
(03:58):
was anyone noble's clergy, political opponents, former allies, and what
was called the law of suspects made essentially everyone vulnerable
to arrest if they were showing insufficient enthusiasm for the revolution.
And as you remember from your history classes, the guillotine
(04:18):
became the symbol of the new order because it was
proposed as an egalitarian instrument of execution. So over the
next two years there were seventeen thousand executions, and at
least that many more who died in prisons or summary killings.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
So what the heck happened here?
Speaker 1 (04:36):
What Robespierre so desperately hoped for was what he called
a republic of virtue, where citizens would be motivated by
civic morality rather than self interest. But in practice, what
he thought of as virtue became enforced conformity. Anybody could
become a suspect. They could be labeled as corrupt, or aristocratic,
(04:59):
or insufficiently revolutionary. So what happened is the revolution, which
looked like it was aiming towards the utopia, quickly became
known as the Reign of Terror. Everyone was frantic and scared.
Revolutionaries turned on each other. A bunch of the early
leaders were sent to the guillotine by their former ally, Robespierre.
(05:22):
So by mid seventeen ninety four, everyone who knew Robespierre,
even as close allies, everyone was in fear for their lives.
So finally, in July of seventeen ninety four, he got
arrested and guillotined, and the Reign of Terror finally ended.
So this is just one of a gajillion examples where
the pursuit of moral purity and ideal justice slips into violence.
(05:47):
This is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union. The
original communist revolutionaries were so clear and bright eyed on
the utopia that they wanted to build. But between Lenin
and star there were an estimated one million political executions.
Both Lenin and Stalin believed they were creating a new
(06:08):
purified world and egalitarian utopia free from exploitation. But just
like with Robespierre, the pursuit of purity turned into the
destruction of perceived impurity. Just like the French Revolution, the
Soviet experiment began with a dream of equality and ended
(06:29):
in terror. In the thousands of cases like these, utopian
zeal plus human psychology, fear and rivalry and paranoia and tribalism,
this combination produces the opposite of paradise. Whenever movements aim
to purify human nature itself, they eventually turned the blade inward.
(06:54):
And this is where psychology and neuroscience become key parts
of the analysis, because at the center of every grand
political blueprint sets the human brain, a brain that evolved
in survival conditions, tuned for tribalism.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
For hierarchy, for rivalry.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
This has been a topic close to my heart for years,
and in fact, one of my short stories in my
book Some is exactly on this topic. So to set
the table for today's podcast. I'll read that story now.
This is called egalitaire. In the afterlife, you discover that
God understands the complexities of life.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
She had originally submitted to.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Peer pressure when she structured her universe like all the
other gods had, with a binary categorization of people into
good and evil. But it didn't take long for her
to realize that humans could be good in many ways
and simultaneously corrupt and mean spirited in other ways. How
was she to arbitrate who goes to heaven and who
(07:58):
to hell? Might not be possible. She considered that a
man could be an embezzler and still give to charitable causes.
Might not a woman be an adulteress, but bring pleasure
and security to two men's lives. Might not a child
unwittingly divulge secrets that splinter a family. Dividing the population
(08:21):
into two categories good and bad seemed like a more
reasonable task when she was younger, but with experience these
decisions became more difficult. She composed complex formulas to weigh
hundreds of factors and ran computer programs that rolled out
long strips of paper with eternal decisions, but her sensitivities
(08:42):
revolted at this automation, and when the computer generated a
decision she disagreed with, she took the opportunity to kick
out the plug and rage. That afternoon, she listened to
the grievances of the dead from two warring nations. Both
sides had suffered, both sides had legitimate grievances, both pled
(09:04):
their cases earnestly. She covered her ears and moaned in misery.
She knew her humans were multi dimensional, and she could
no longer live under the rigid architecture of her youthful choices.
Not all gods suffer over this. We can consider ourselves
lucky that in death we answer to a god with
(09:25):
deep sensitivity to the byzantine hearts of her creations. For months,
she moped around her living room in Heaven, head drooped
like a bulrush while the lines piled up. Her advisers
advised her to delegate the decision making, but she loved
her humans too much to leave them to the care
(09:46):
of anyone else. In a moment of desperation, the thought
crossed her mind to let everyone wait online indefinitely, letting
them work it out on their own. But then a
better idea struck her. Generous spirit. She I can afford it.
She would grant everyone, every last human a place in heaven.
After all, everyone had something good inside. It was part
(10:09):
of the design specifications. Her new plan brought back the
bounce to her gait, returned the color.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
To her cheeks.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
She shut down the operations in Hell, fired the devil,
and brought every last human to be by her side
in Heaven, newcomers or old timers, nefarious or righteous. Under
the new system, everyone gets equal time to speak with her.
Most people find her a little garrulous and over solicitous,
but she cannot be accused of not caring. The most
(10:41):
important part of her new system is that everyone is
treated equally. There is no longer fire for some and
harp music for others. The afterlife is no longer defined
by cots versus water beds, raw potatoes versus sushi, hot
water versus champagne. Every everyone is a brother to all,
(11:02):
and for the first time, an idea has been realized
that never came to fruition on earth.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
True equality.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
The Communists are baffled and irritated because they have finally
achieved their perfect society, but only by the help.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Of a god In whom they don't want to believe.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
The meritocrats are abashed that they're stuck for eternity in
an incentiveless system with a bunch of pinkos. The conservatives
have no penniless to disparage, the liberals have no downtrodden
to promote. So God sits on the edge of her
bed and weeps at night because the only thing everyone
(11:43):
can agree on is that they're all in hell. That
was the story Egalitaire from my book Some. So let's
get back to the human foibles that get in the
way of utopias. An important clue is that these aren't
learned behaviors. You can look at how predisposed we are
to tribalism, for example, by looking at children. An experiment
(12:07):
in the nineteen fifties took two groups of boys at
summer camp and randomly separated them and gave them different
team names, the Rattlers and the Eagles, and the psychologists
watched closely and measured how quickly this descended into tribal hostility,
hurling insults, raiding each other's cabins, burning each other's flags,
(12:28):
breaking into physical violence.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
You don't need.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Decades of history to divide two groups. The division can
happen in days or hours because group identity us versus them,
lives deep in our circuitry. And by the way, the
things that get in our way with building utopias aren't
limited to humans. You can see the general elements throughout
the animal kingdom. In one study, all Link in the
(12:54):
show notes, you have capuchin monkeys trained to do a
little task for a slice of queer, and they're perfectly
happy with that payment until they see the monkey next
to them get a nice, juicy grape which is better
for the same amount of work. And suddenly the cucumber
becomes an insult. The monkeys fling it back at the
(13:15):
researcher and pound.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
The cage in outrage.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
Because even for our cousins in the animal kingdom, they
are keenly attuned to others getting more than them. This
insults a very deep seated root of fairness. So what
does this mean when you have societies with millions of
humans and everyone is looking at their neighbors to see
if they feel anyone is getting something better than they are.
(13:42):
So the question I want to explore today is if
children fracture into tribes with just some labels and monkeys
riot when they feel like they're not getting enough, and
every adult human attempt at rebooting the system seems to
end up in a reign of terror and political executions.
What chance does utopia stand? Are humans fundamentally incompatible with
(14:06):
paradise or are these drives flexible and capable of being reshaped?
So this is what I want to explore today with
my guest psychologist, Paul Bloom.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
He has thought deeply about human.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Nature, our capacities for kindness and cruelty, our hunger for fairness,
our appetite for meaning. We're going to talk about whether
utopia is politically possible or do our flawed, ambitious, competitive
brains always going to get in the way, or are
there ways we might at least move in the right directions.
(14:42):
Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology at the University
of Toronto and Professor Emeritis at Yale. He's the author
of psych The Story of the Human Mind, and many
other influential books. So let's jump into this conversation at
the crossroads of psychology and society. So, Paul, almost all
(15:04):
thinkers have thought about the issue of utopia and whether
it's possible, and most political movements are trying to get
themselves in that direction. But you're a little less hopeful
about the possibility of reaching utopia because of human nature,
So tell us about that.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
So I find the idea of utopia really interesting. It's
not such a practical concern. I mean, if you and
I were to talk about the troubles of today, we
probably wouldn't settle on when we ever reach utopia or not.
We'll be talking about, you know, local improvements, and maybe
things suck in certain ways, let's it must make them better.
But Nick Monstrom said it really nicely describe utopias as
(15:44):
a thought experiment, as a way of exploring what we
want and what we're capable of. And I think the
idea of utopia is an excellent way to think about
human nature. And in particular, if you think deeply about utopia,
you'll come to see that certain aspects of our nature,
of human nature that make it untenable, that we are
(16:05):
not suited for a perfect world, that certain aspects of
how we are mean perfection will be forever out of reach.
It doesn't mean we can't make things better. It doesn't
mean near utopias aren't possible, but a perfect world unless
you radically reconfigure human nature so that we're not human anymore,
will be forever unattainable.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
And give us a sense of those facets of human
nature like self interest and envy.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
Yeah. Absolutely, Well take this particular case. In every utopia
people have thought of, there's some degree of equality and
a sort of mutual love where people care about everybody
else within this utopian community. You to see why that
would make sense. You think about tribes and families, and
they push against each other and our interests get torn apart.
(16:55):
And there are utopian thinkers, you know, such as Maw
who thought we simply dissolved these special ties now would
force people from different social classes to marry one another,
you know, taking away old choice and say well, this
will bring people together. A lot more benign example is
the Israeli kibbutz. When I was a teenager, I spent
a summer in the kibbutz in Israeli desert, and this
(17:17):
is a traditional kibbutz where their children were raised communally.
People have a baby, the baby was was sort of
given to sort of general daycare area where it would
be taken care of, and babies ended up ultimately knowing
who their biological parents were. But there was nothing, No
big deal was made of it. The idea would be
the bonds of family could easily be dissolved. Now his
experiment was a failure. The kibbutz was a failure. People
(17:40):
love their children, children love their parents. People have greater
ties to their siblings and their parents and their aunts
and uncles than they do to strangers. And there's every
indication that this is part of how we're wired up
to be. It's, to some extent it's evolutionary biology one
oh one, which is, you know, the forces that guided
(18:01):
the evolution of our desires and our preferences were highly
sensitive to whether or not other entities shared your gams.
You know. So parents love their children because parents who
don't didn't love their children, didn't reproduce as much as
parents who did, and that causes that the bonds of
family push against somebody who'd say, well, you just want
a good society. You want people to just care about
(18:22):
societies care about friends and strangers the same way. So
too with the bonds of friendship. So two of the
bonds of romantic love, and romantic love sets up other
problems like jealousy. If I'm really attracted to somebody and
I want them, if they don't choose to be with me,
it could be very painful for me. And if they
do choose to be with me, often I want them
(18:43):
to only choose to be with me, and they want
me to only be with them, and that could be
painful too. And in fact, every utopia has had problems
with sex. Either on the one extreme, either what they
say is no sex except for procreation, trying to make
a problem go away that way, or everybody has sex
with everybody else communal marriage, and those don't work out either.
(19:05):
So I mean, short version, human nature is messy.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
So we have things like tribalism, we have rivalry, and
your point is these are hardwired in and they are
adaptive generally, but they're also destructive to.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
The to the concept of a utopia.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
So your take is that a world without conflict or
competition would actually run counter to how our motivations work.
Speaker 3 (19:43):
So we talked a little bit about the bonds of
family and friendship and love. Another feature of our nature
is we are hierarchical beings. We are you know, ultimately primates,
and we care about how we stand relative to other people,
so you know, we want them. We don't want an
equal world, for instance. We want a world where merit
(20:05):
is corresponds to results, at least to some extent, and
so we chafe against pure equality. There's been a series
of studies that have been done, some of them from
my lab of children. And despite where you sometimes here,
we're not natural born egalitarians. If you work twice as
hard as me, even like a four year old things,
(20:26):
you should get more than me for your work. And
a situation where we if we were to get the
same would be you know, considered unfair. And this sort
of this idea that marriage should be rewarded again means
the ideal world from a psychological point of view is
an unequal one. But the unequal one leads to resentments
(20:49):
and frustration and so on. And you know, existing political
systems like communism and socialism and capitalism try to deal
with us through some complicated set of compromises. And I
think the compromises are kind of the best we're going
to get. It'll be kind of equal in this way
and unequal in this way. We'll reward in this way,
but not in this way. We'll set up limits in
this way, not in that way. But the idea of
(21:11):
a perfectly smooth world where we're all the same. Maybe
it could be imposed, but people be very unhappy with it.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
What's an example of a piece of legislation that finds
a compromise.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
Well, i'll say the tax system. So you can imagine
a tax system which treated the rich and poor identical.
The billionaire has to pay a percentage and the pauper
had to pay a percentage. That seems absurd. Just the
idea of sort of marginal utility would say that these
people should be treated differently. You should tax the millionaire more.
On the flip side, a system that entirely confiscated the
(21:46):
money of the rich would also discourage the accumulation of wealth,
discourage businesses, discouraged creation. So what you have in most society,
isn't it a progressive tax system? So and so you know,
the poor pay nothing. Are five percent and as ten
percent and it is fifteen percent, and and nobody's happy
with us because well everybody says, oh, it should be
(22:07):
higher here or lower here. And I certainly have no
ideal solution. But the point is, there isn't going to
be an ideal solution, just some sort of rough and
ready compromise. So too with the balances between individual freedom
and the safety of other people. So every society is
going to have some constraints on free speech. You know,
you can't you can't threaten to kill somebody. You can't
(22:28):
do insider trading, you can't blackmail people or extort people
if it gets too onerous. And political speeches block people
push back, and most so many of our political debates
right now struggle with as the margins you know, right now,
right now in the United States, you know, some people
want flag burning band either business or flag burning speech.
(22:49):
We shouldn't we shouldn't ban it. Yeah, my point isn't
the same thing, but these particular debates. But to say
this is our fate, we are, oh, he's going to
be arguing at these at these basic things because there's
no optimal solution.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
So, Paul, you and I did a podcast a while
ago when we talked about loneliness and the question of
whether if somebody isn't working at all the painful stuff
about relationships, maybe they won't get better at them, and
maybe that will actually be a disservice to them. By
the same token. I think you feel that if all
(23:23):
struggle were removed in let's say a utopia of the
future where AI and machines and other things could take
care of everything for us, we would lose something about
meaning in our lives.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
Tell us your take on that we would.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
I wrote about this in my books The Sweet Spot,
where I argued that there's an optimal level of struggle,
of difficulty that's important for a meaningful and good life.
And then Nick Mostron recently wrote a book on utopia
where you took up this issue and talked about a
possible sort of post scarcity world where we have everything
we need. We have all the food we need, all
the shelter we need, anything we want that have, and
(24:00):
so there need not be any struggle. Maybe there'll be
no disease by then. And I have two thoughts of this.
One thought is that that would be a boring world,
a frustrating world, one that we would find we will
lead to an wi and misery. We like struggle, I mean,
too much struggle is miserable, but too little struggle is
(24:21):
bad too, And so the first thought is that world
will be terrible. The second thought is a world with
no conflict and no struggle is not I think possible,
because maybe we'll have enough food and maybe we'll have
enough shelter, enough resources. But you know, there will always
(24:42):
be a case as long as we're people that somebody
will love somebody and they won't love them back. There
will always be the case so long as we're people
that you will want an award, a prize and honor
and I will want it too, and there's just one
to go around.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
And to follow up on that point.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
Your view, also, I think is that inequality is structurally unavoidable,
because even if you had a society where everyone had everything,
people will seek new markers of status and distinction.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
That's true.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
I mean we see this in sort of artificial societies
like communes or even academic departments where everyone is an
assistant professor and was a full professor. The people jockey
for a position, a jockey for status. I could easily
imagine a world, and I think it would be a
nice world where the status didn't translate into access for
resources that we desperately need. You know, where you know
(25:35):
either you will have enough food, eat our eye will
but not both. Much better to avoid such a world.
But we're never going to have a world where everybody
gets to matter of respect they think they deserve, because
many of us at certain times think we deserve more
respect than other people. So you know, if you want
your voice to be heard, you want to have sway
(25:56):
over things and to be maximum respected, and I want
this two and so too for the five other people
around us. There is a clash and some things, some
resources like respect, love, often sexual attraction, friendship, are inherently limited.
And so in some way the worry that we have
(26:18):
that oh what do we do with a world of
no conflict? How will we survive? It isn't going to
happen because there will always be some sort of conflict.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
And so your view is that the competition for recognition
and influence and prestige is always going to reintroduce hierarchy
and undermine this utopian ideal.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
Yeah, I gave a talk on utopia for the first
time in this wonderful festival in Wales called How the
Light Gets In And they have a little poster that
they put up saying this is our festival and everything,
and they list all the names of the luminaries who
are presenting at the festival and I was fifteenth on
(26:58):
a list, so it's things like that, you know. Now,
now the people in front of me were like you
Jaijack and Steven Pinker a great name, so you know,
it's fine. But still I think everybody on that list
would have said, I kind of like to be first
or second or third. And that's a tiny example, but
(27:19):
so much of life is like that. You know.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
I just heard a routine from Sarah Silverman, the comedian,
and she she said that she checked into a hotel
and the person said, wow, Sarah Silverman, you're in my
top four comedians. And she immediately felt like, okay, well
that means I'm number four then, right, because that was
you wouldn't have phrased it that way, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
And you see this in kids. You know, I've seen
kids and I had to have two sons and they
were little. You know, I've seen them fight over a sock,
you know, because you know, they were playing a socks
they could have each played with, but they each wanted
that sock. You know, one of one kids jumps onto
a chair that kind of wants to sit in the
same chair. Certainly they're fighting for her parents' attention. And
(28:01):
this is you know, this is just how people work,
and you know I. So we're never going to have this,
this frictionless world. Back to the idea of friction, back
to the idea of some sort of suffering a conflict.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
I don't think this is some sort of horrible fate.
Speaker 3 (28:17):
I think it's just part of our lot, that that
by a time you know, you and I, you know,
pass away, we will have had our share of disappointments,
of unrequited love, of awards, we didn't receive honors we
felt we deserved, and we didn't get moments of lack
of respect. But you know, if we're lucky, we've also found,
you know, occasional flashes of true love and surprise honors
(28:39):
and and winning the you know it. It's this again,
this messiness is what we're condemned to, but it's not
a terrible fate.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
Here's a question.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
So history often shows that attempts at utopia end in authoritarianism.
Let's think, you know, communism in the twentieth century or something.
How would did you tie that to psychology.
Speaker 3 (29:03):
I think the move to authoritarianism comes because we not
only have preferences. It's not only true to say I
want to be able to spend time with my children.
I want to be able to marry somebody who I
love and who loves me. I want to be free
to sell things to people who want to buy them
from me. I want to be free to have property.
Not only that, but we also have an appetite for
(29:26):
what you can call autonomy, even for his own sake.
We want to be able to within the limits possible,
get our way, and we don't like constraints on it.
There's actually a really interesting body of work in social
psychology that finds that if you tell people you can't
do something, all of a sudden, it becomes immensely desirable.
(29:47):
I mean, the classic case of this is Eve, you know,
in the Garden of Eden, doing the one thing she
was told she couldn't do. There's any incredible human about that.
You know, if I told you, David, don't press that button,
I demand you don't, resident you will find yourself an
urge press that button. And so this urge for autonomy,
sometimes for perversity, is within I think all of us,
(30:09):
to different degrees, and then you need to just you know,
a state needs to stomp it down. And if a
state wants to tell you you can love who you
want to love, You can't live where you want to live,
you can't say what you want to say. Well, they
often have to use force because people will, in an
ideal world not quietly go along with us, and so
(30:30):
utopian ideas typically end up. You know, honestly, I end
up in concentration camp, stand up with mass starvation because
because people are not suited for the utopian plans and
all push back.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
Now you're not opposed to seeking progress in societies affect
you very much for that. So tell us how you
balance that in your head about utopia. Maybe impossible, but
we should be making progress.
Speaker 3 (30:57):
I think you should certainly make progress. And you know,
to some extent I will. I'll conceive the obvious, which
is progress often involves force. If you say, well, here's
our new law, and the new law says such and so,
and it gives people more freedom and more rights. But
people may violate law, and in order to do that,
(31:19):
to stop them violent law, you might need to provide force.
You know, there's no just thing as a voluntary tax system.
I'm a believer in free speech, and I think if
somebody comes to campus and they're invited to give a talk,
they should be able to give a talk uninterrupted. But
that means that somebody might have to threaten, or to punish,
or even drag away people who would violently protest against them.
(31:43):
You're not going to find a decent war without the
possibility of force, even in the simplest infantiations. I think
that ideas of change, I think there's all sorts of
waste this world could be better, all sorts of ways
of this world has been better. You know, just take
a simple example of marriage to gay people. Seems to
be something that has had a million pluses and turned
(32:05):
out to have almost no minuses besides some people being
unhappy with it. But I think we want to be
very conscious about having changes that go too much against
the way people are having. Changes for instance, that that
you know, try to destroy ties of family, ties of love,
ties of friendship, even tribal ties. I think, for instance,
(32:27):
people of the same ethnicity who feel a kinship towards
their ethnicity, I don't think the States should try to
sort of stop them from the States should try to
stop people from worshiping or from practicing their sort of
communal customs. I think that runs deep, and if you
underestimate how deep it runs, often you end up with
kind of a terrible rebellious population, all sorts of trouble.
(32:49):
So I'm all for human progress. I just think and
maybe this is that's that's the liberal progressive side. The
conservative side is is don't push too much again the
way people are.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
I want to come back to this issue about in
groups and outgroups. You may know that we did these
studies in my lab a while ago where you're in
the brain scanner fMRI and you see six hands arrayed
on the screen, and the computer randomly picks one of
those hands, and you see it gets stabbed.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
With a syringe needle.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
And so what happens is your brain has an empathy response. Essentially,
your pain matrix lights up. It's not your hand getting stabbed,
but nonetheless you have this reaction of lighting up these
pain networks as though it maybe it was your hand.
That's presumably the neural basis of empathy. But what we
did then is added a one word label to each
(33:55):
hand Christian, Jewish, Muslim, scientologist, Hindu, atheist. And now the
goes around, picks a hand, you see the handget stabbed,
and the question is depending on what your in group is,
how do you feel about the out groups? And it
turns out across all religions, everyone cares more about their
in group. This very fast neural response, this first neural
(34:18):
response is much larger if you see your in group
get stabbed, and much smaller when you see a member
of your outgroup get stabbed. And by the way, this
was true for atheists as well. They cared more when
they see an atheist's hand gets stabbed. So it's not
even an indictment of religion. It's just about in groups
and out groups. And so what's cool is that people
can have all kinds of cognitive layers on top of
(34:41):
that so that they can still continue to do the
right thing in their societies. But fundamentally we're yoked with
that kind of bias.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
Yeah, I love that work. I'm familiar with our word.
Just similar study showing more of a reaction if you're
white to seeing a white hand stab and a black
hand stab, and vice versia if you're black. There's some
studies in Europe with soccer fans where you know, you
watch somebody be shocked and if they're a member of
a different soccer team, are a fan of a different
soccer team, you feel pleasure instead of instead of pain.
(35:13):
In some way, I take that as a challenge to
what I just said. So I said that you kind
of have to accept human nature as it is, but
I think there are times where you do have to
push back a little bit, and our tremendously strong favoring
in group kind of has to go a little bit.
In a healthy democratic society, it's really good for people
(35:35):
of one ethnicity to care about people from another ethnicity.
It's really good, you know, for the atheists to care
about the religious person, for the Catholic to care about
a Protestant, and so on. And I wouldn't be so
conservative as I say, well, Lise, are natures to care
about our own, so leave it alone. I think to
some extent societies will push towards some sort of cosmopolitanism.
(35:58):
So I would draw a distinction. I would grow have
a stinction when me caring about my fellow Canadians way
more than Americans, which is I think something which you
should sort of try to tap down. Maybe you could
try to try to ameliorate a little bit versus me
caring about my children versus other people's children, where I
think to some extent, you have to take that kind
(36:19):
of as a given. You'd want to construct a good
society and more lang which it, except we are stuck
with that and we cannot mess with that. So some
parts of human nature are sort of so tightly weaved
in that you just you know, you should take it
as a premise. Other parts and you're you're, and you're
good to point us out. You may want to push
(36:39):
back on a bit.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
You know, we often do this in legislation. This in
some sense represents our longest term thinking. So for example,
anti discrimination housing laws is a way of saying, look,
we get it, we know that you like people who
look like you better, but we're going to establish us
as a rule in our society that you can't do
that anymore.
Speaker 3 (36:59):
That's right, I mean. Joe Henrich made the argument in
this wonderful book The Weirdest People in the World that
one of the great moral revolutions of our time of
human history happened when the Church disavowed cousin marriage. And
as a result of this, it rippled through and all
of a sudden the bounds of family became less salient
(37:22):
in our political culture, and people became more individualistic, less
less kin less blood related, and then the world was
transformed as a result. And right now we have you know,
I say you shouldn't push back upon the bounds of family,
but we do in a little bit. We have anti
nepotism laws. If I'm looking for a research assistant to hire,
(37:45):
I can't hire my wife, are my sons or my cousin,
you know? And I think those are good lots. And I
think we accept that in the realm of the sort
of world of the market and world of universities, these
kinship bonds should not matter.
Speaker 1 (37:58):
And so your view as a psychologist is that the
point is not to give up on moving in the
direction of a utopia, but instead to replace utopian dreams
with reforms that are achievable given the way we are
given our wiring.
Speaker 3 (38:12):
That's a beautiful way of putting, I mean, a sort
of even more sort of constructive way of putting. It
is people who want to make the world a better place,
and we should all be such people as we embark
on this project. We should think deeply about human nature.
That'll tell us what changes will come easy. It'll tell
us what changes will be difficult, but worthwhile, and what
(38:34):
changes we shouldn't even try to go near. And I
think that that's really useful.
Speaker 1 (38:43):
That was my conversation with Paul Bloom. So where does
that leave us. If there's one very critical lesson from history,
it's that grand designs for perfection tend to unravel. Utopia
is very often kernel into dystopias. We've seen that all
throughout history, where paradises very quickly become prisons. And this
(39:04):
is because the human brain, for all its massive success,
gives a tricky foundation for building heaven on Earth. But
the hope that I think Paul and I both share
is that maybe a close study of psychology, combined with
a close read of history can carry forward the seeds
(39:25):
of progress. In other words, the right way to move
in the direction of utopia isn't to try to erase
human drives, but instead figure out how to channel them.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
So let me just say a couple of things. First.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
It's important to note that these instincts we have are
often double edged. For example, I told you at the
beginning about the experiment of dividing summer camp kids into
teams and watching them polarize. But the thing to note
is that the same grouping reflex. This team reflex is
what binds neighbors in the communities. The capacity for division
(40:03):
is also the capacity for belonging. It's double edged and
it always has been. And that leads us to a
deeper question, which is how can you take our tribal instincts,
which probably aren't going away, and find ways to widen
the circle of what counts as us. As I've talked
about in other episodes, I think the Internet actually gives
(40:25):
us a powerful tool to do this, because the algorithms,
if programmed correctly, can complexify relationships by surfacing the things
that we have in common. And some years ago I
wrote about this in an article in The Economist called
does your brain care about other people? It depends, And
(40:46):
that article was all about how our brains are predisposed
for in groups and outgroups. And one of the things
this does is make it very easy for governments to
leverage propaganda. But as it turns out, one of the
most effective things we can do as a society is
to learn the basic tricks of propaganda. For example, calling
(41:08):
the other group of people animals or viruses or insects
or anything other than other humans what propaganda does is
it dials down particular networks in our brain that are
involved in understanding other people, and that makes violent polarization
(41:29):
much easier, because now you're taking up arms against some
group that your brain has come to view as subhuman. So,
as I said, the way to get societal immunity against
this basic psychological trick is to put it on the
table as.
Speaker 2 (41:44):
Part of our education, so that the next.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
Time you hear a muckraker or pundit or official say
these things like there are a bunch of animals, you.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
Can immediately see through the magic trick instead of falling
for it.
Speaker 1 (42:01):
Now zooming back out, I want to note that when
we look at the long arc of history and we
see massive declines in poverty and rises in literacy and
fewer wars between great powers, we can see that something
is working directionally. It's very imperfect, but things are on
the timescale of decades or centuries working, and given the
(42:24):
brains were yoked with this may be the best we
can do. The lesson that surfaces from psychology and history
is that utopia is probably not a destination but a direction.
I mentioned at the outset that Thomas Moore coined the
word utopia from the root words which mean no place utopia.
(42:44):
That was pretty prescient. Margaret Atwood put it this way,
Utopia is not one place, but many, always receding ahead
of us. And I would say that's the point of
today's episode. We're probably never going to reach it, but
the point is the endless act of reaching. So without
(43:07):
being delusional, let's keep making progress, building up a world
where tomorrow is just a little kinder, a little fairer,
and even more abundant than today. Go to eagleman dot
com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.
Join the weekly discussions on my substack, and check out
(43:30):
and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of
each episode and to leave comments until next time. I'm
David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.
Host
David Eagleman
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