Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman is a book about how humans are inherently good and kind.
Too often, I’ve seen this notion brushed aside as naive, and part of what I love about this book is… it isn’t. At all. Bregman doesn’t shy away from humanity’s dark side – quite the contrary! He actively tackles it, presenting everything from the supposed savageness of our prehistoric ancestors, to Lord of the Flies, to the Stanford Prison Experiment, along with the more cynical perspectives on how or why they occurred – before systematically dismantling those arguments with dissenting evidence from other studies. A shocking amount of the former have turned out to be blatantly untrue, whether thanks to misconceptions or deliberately dishonest results. They only continue to circulate because they’ve already been taken as truth! Bregman also addresses events that definitely did happen, and disputes our assumptions about why, or how.
Beyond that, he goes on to offer examples of real-world institutions, be they schools, companies, or governments, that have based practices on the “optimistic” psychology to great success! I put “optimistic” in quotes because as he stresses over the course of the book, this mindset is realism. That is, what science has shown reflects reality. In a nutshell? Our evolutionary superpower is that we’re a social species, and so friendliness is a baked-in survival mechanism. One that we have to choose to honor, and one that we’re predisposed to.
These later sections especially are dear to me, because while it’s heartening to know that people are generally good, that part alone can leave you feeling a bit like my namesake – you know the truth, yes, but who’s listening? Knowing the ways this psychology has been applied – and in the process, revealed – makes the knowledge actionable. And as much as I admire the opposition-first formatting, it’s this part that I appreciate most. Because, to quote Ratatouille, “Change is nature… The part that we can influence.” And we hold the keys to influencing our perception of ourselves.
