Most people were bad and not to be trusted. Growing up, I thought the exact opposite. Most people, deep down, are really good people who care about others and want to help everyone and treat each other fairly. Humankind: A Hopeful History is the book equivalent of that overly optimistic person.Īuthor Rutger Bregman is certain the human species is inherently good. If you're one of those people, well, maybe you can learn to tone it down a bit when you find yourself living in the real world with other human beings. I don't know about you, but those kinds of people are just far too optimistic for me. Oh, your arm fell off? No worries, you have another! Oh, your second arm fell off too? Well, just think of all the fun you're going to have learning how to use your feet to open doors, feed yourself, and wipe your own ass! Or that really annoying person who always urges you to look on the bright side. You know that person who's always so happy no matter what? Maybe it's the colleague who is bright and cheery at 8:00 every Monday morning when everyone else is struggling just to open their eyes and get their third cup of coffee down? Bregman presents this idea with his signature wit and frankness, once again making history, social science and economic theory accessible and enjoyable for lay readers. The ultimate goal of Humankind is to demonstrate that while neither capitalism nor communism has on its own been proven to be a workable social system, there is a third option: giving "citizens and professionals the means (left) to make their own choices (right)." Reorienting our thinking toward positive and high expectations of our fellow man, Bregman argues, will reap lasting success. In place of these, he offers little-known true stories: the tale of twin brothers on opposing sides of apartheid in South Africa who came together with Nelson Mandela to create peace a group of six shipwrecked children who survived for a year and a half on a deserted island by working together a study done after World War II that found that as few as 15% of American soldiers were actually capable of firing at the enemy. Bregman systematically debunks our understanding of the Milgram electrical-shock experiment, the Zimbardo prison experiment, and the Kitty Genovese "bystander effect." With Humankind, he brings that mentality to bear against one of our most entrenched ideas: namely, that human beings are by nature selfish and self-interested.īy providing a new historical perspective of the last 200,000 years of human history, Bregman sets out to prove that we are in fact evolutionarily wired for cooperation rather than competition, and that our instinct to trust each other has a firm evolutionary basis going back to the beginning of Homo sapiens. If one basic principle has served as the bedrock of bestselling author Rutger Bregman's thinking, it is that every progressive idea - whether it was the abolition of slavery, the advent of democracy, women's suffrage, or the ratification of marriage equality - was once considered radical and dangerous by the mainstream opinion of its time. From the author of Utopia For Realists, a revolutionary argument that the innate goodness and cooperation of human beings has been the greatest factor in our success
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