Did you know that the murders and rapes and free-for-all violent chaos in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina didn't actually happen, and that the consistent pattern during major disasters is for people to go out of their way to help each other, for the news media to falsely report murder and mayhem, and for authorities who imagine most people are like themselves to send in armed troops to create a second disaster?
Did you know that the Lord of the Flies is a story made up by a disturbed Nazi afficionado and depicts the opposite of various real-world cases in which kids have treated each other with great kindness?
Did you know that the Stanford prison experiment was a complete fraud that had originated as a test of the prisoner students' reactions to the guard students' sadistic actions, which had been carefully directed, and that the thing was later falsely reported as a test of the guard students who were falsely depicted as having engaged in spontaneous cruelty when left to their own devices?
Did you know that the earlier Robbers' Cave experiment was equally fraudulent and followed an even earlier attempt in which subjects had been insufficiently manipulated and had insisted on being kind to each other as the good people also were in a later attempt to recreate the Stanford experiment without scripting and directing the cruelty?
Did you know that the Milgram experiment also showed nothing like what is claimed, that only 56% believed the shocks were real, that the majority of those quit and refused to administer the shocks, that those who did believe they were shocking people and continued to do so said they were doing so to help science and to hopefully cure diseases that only those lines of persuasion worked on them, whereas ordering people to administer the shocks resulted in universal disobedience?
Did you know that the people of Easter Island did not consume themselves out of a habitat, turn violent, or kill or eat each other, that in fact they were in good shape when Europeans arrived but did not survive being kidnapped into slavery or the arrival of a new disease.
Did you know that the great wisdom of the Tragedy of the Commons is a lie, that 38 people did not watch Kitty Genovese be attacked and stand by and do nothing to help her, and that the clever strategy of broken windows policing does not work and was kickstarted by the same fraudster behind the Stanford prison charade?
Did you know that along with pretty much everything else in the book Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature got the murderous character of indigenous hunter-gatherer groups wildly wrong, that the Yanomami were not the killers weve been told, that war is a rarity that was not a common part of human existence for the vast bulk of that existence, and that various societies have been studied to whose members the very concept of murder was almost incomprehensible?
Did you know that for most of our species' existence our ancestors led lives that were egalitarian, healthy, leisurely, playful, and full of friendship and cooperation?
The above are some of the corrections to popular beliefs discussed and documented in Rutger Bregman's book Humankind: A Hopeful History. Whether theres any utility or justification for being hopeful, whether we have a good chance of dealing with the nuclear or climate or disease dangers, is not really established by this book. And I continue to insist with Sartre that humans can choose to do whatever they want, completely regardless of whether it's what other humans have tended to do or not. But what this book does as well as anything Ive ever seen is debunk, for those who depend on past behaviors, the pervasive claim that humans are generally evil and hiding it with a veneer of civilization.
Bregman calls our species homo puppy because in comparison with Neanderthals we seem to have domesticated ourselves, to have selected for the survival of the friendliest in the way that selecting the friendliest wolves can result in friendly dogs. Our species has been out of place, Bregman argues, since the agricultural revolution. We didn't evolve for oligarchy, hard work, private property, and standing armies. How we deal with the mess we've made of things remains to be seen. But whether we tell people that they can obviously choose how to behave, or join Bregman in telling them that people are basically good and decent, or join with the nightly television news in telling people that evil and cynicism are the norm, definitely matters.
It matters because, as Bregman argues, of the Placebo, Nocebo, Pygmalion, and Golem effects. If you tell someone that they are being cured, they tend to be cured. If you tell someone that they are being made ill, they tend to grow ill. The same applies to telling them that they are kind and generous and that these are admirable and beneficial traits, or telling them the opposite. If you study economics and learn that people are bizarrely selfish, you tend to become more selfish. Similarly the Pygmalion and Golem effects - if you tell people to expect others to be trustworthy or nefarious, they will behave as if that is how other people are. And those expectations will impact those other people.
So, if we're going to insist that people must be, more or less, like they've been, and our choices are either that they've been as kind and generous as the facts suggest (that our survival has depended not just on cooperation but on being terrible liars and naturally self-sacrificing friends to others) or to believe the lies of the evil tales and phony experiments, let's go with the facts. Bregman suggests how to apply this approach to corporations, schools, local government, criminal justice, bigotry, and war. Applying it to the entire field of mass-killing would, I think, require dropping the notion of the inherently evil enemy, and abolishing militaries.
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