"Humankind" by Rutger Bregman (2020)

"Though harmless in this instance, research shows that the effects of pluralistic ignorance can be disastrous -- even fatal.  Consider binge drinking.  Survey college students on their own, and most will say drinking themselves into oblivion isn't their favorite pastime.  But because they assume other students are big fans of drinking, they try to keep up and everyone winds up puking in the gutter."

Rutger Bregman is a Dutch historian and author.  He's written several books on the subject of making the world a better place.  He's often hailed for his "new ideas," though I'm not sure if the ideas expressed in Humankind are all that new.

Not to put words into the author's mouth, but I think the crux of his argument would go something like this: in the deepest, darkest heart of Western culture lives a disagreement between Hobbes and Rousseau over human nature, and in our favoring of one side of this disagreement over the other lie the beginnings of many modern problems.

What was this disagreement?  It was, primarily, a difference of opinion regarding human nature, and whether it's essentially good or essentially evil.  Hobbes, as is well known, believed that people are inherently selfish, and otherwise apt to do one another a bad turn, while Rousseau believed that people are inherently good, and best left to their own devices.  Hobbes regarded human institutions (i.e. his "leviathans") as a means of correcting for our sinful natures, while Rousseau viewed such institutions as largely unnecessary, and what's more stultifying with respect to what is good within us.

On the one hand you've got the "realist" point of view, while on the other the "idealist," though as Bregman emphasizes "realism" and "idealism" can mean very different things in the context of a more measured understanding of human nature.

So are humans essentially bad or good?  The author of this book asserts that they are good, and that a calculated response to this inherent goodness implies a rethinking of our institutions and how these institutions tackle societal ills.

I tend to agree with him.  I think that most people are good, at least from their own point of view, and very, very few people intentionally commit malice without extraordinary reasons for doing so.  In our click-driven society it's easy to form a pessimistic or "pragmatic" opinion of other human beings, but such a line of thinking is often more owing to the way in which information is presented to us, and to faults in our own psychology.

Did I need to read all 400 pages of Humankind to arrive at this conclusion?  No, but it was, to some extent, my conclusion already.  If YOU haven't arrived at this conclusion, maybe you could give it a look?

Related Entries:

"The Algorithm" by Hilke Schellmann (2024)

"The Hundred Years' War on Palestine" by Rashid Khalidi (2020)

"Korea: The Impossible Country" by Daniel Tudor (2012)

"Graveyard of the Pacific" by Randall Sullivan (2023)