Humanity, the Good feat. Andrew

getting their insights, hearing their struggles, hearing their story. And when I saw the book in the library, I just I picked it up orroed it, decided to read it through. And it's really profound in a sense, and you get a sense of the spectrum of humanity, of what people are going through, of the highs and lows of the human experience, make you laugh on one page and make

you cry for the next page. And seeing that variety of humanity reminded me of another book that I read and finished recently, which is called Humankind Hopeful History by Rutga Bregmant, a friend of mine, had given it to me because he said it had changed his whole view on the world. And so I wanted to talk about some of the concepts that I picked up in that book, like the origins and critiques of veneer theory, why most people are actually pretty decent, and the problems with some

of the narratives of our wickedness. And the next episode, I want to get into some of the reasons why people do bad and what we can do about it.

And Bregman opens his book by discussing the idea of civilization being a thin mask that covers our true savage instincts. He calls it the veneer theory, and he spends the rest of the book basically points it out all the different errors in that judgment. I mean, he doesn't claim that we're all good people, happy go lucky saying so anything like that, But he does see it. For the most part, most people are pretty decent, and I know that clashes with all a lot of people are accustomed

to hearing, and there are some very notable exceptions. But despite the efforts of elite to pain and purport a different picture, there's actually a lot more leaning towards our decent, if not good nature and the contrary. But of course, of these kind of conversations, who are set to go back to the debate between Thomas Hobbes and Sean jack

ersue we can't escape these guys. Hobbes, of course, had the perspective in Leviathan, which was written in sixteen fifty one, that in the absence of a strong central authority, human beings would live in a condition of perpetual war, with every man against every other man, a war of war

against all. As he would have put it so to him, people are naturally self interested and driven by the desire for power and survival, so without laws or a sovereign to keep them in check, individuals would act purely on their own instincts, lead into constant conflict over resources, safety, and dominant life. In this state of nature would be

solitary for nasty, brutish, and short. A couple of years later, a couple of decades later, Rousseau was writing in the Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality among Men, and he basically flipped Hobbs view on its head. He believed that humans in the state of nature were peaceful, cooperative, and guided by basic needs and compassion, and there was a development of hierarchies and institutions that had led to inequality, jealousy,

and competition which basically corrupted human nature. In his words, man is born free and everywhere he is in chains. Do you take a side in this debate?

all the time anyway. But like, no, like this this idea isn't the only thing that keeps you from becoming this like, you know, savage, like inhuman monster. People can be morally good without this this like religious notion. And I think in some ways the state can also operate as a religious notion to these people, where you know, the police is the only thing that's keeping you from becoming this like horrible monster who just hurts everyone around you.

But I also have my sympathies to the like alternate side of that, and I can see there's a great deal of oppression and horrific violence that can only happen at scale under the organization of a state. So I will pick the annoying centrisce option.

in a world out state, but you know, context matters. Resources, environment, group size. All those things would have played roles. I don't think that we should be accepting Rousseau's romantic light either, So I guess I'm in the centris to count with you. The truth does seem to lie somewhere in that middle ground, that human nature is flexible and then it's shaped by social, ecological, and historical contexts. What's getting the weeds of humanity's origins

is stimulating as an exercise. But there's only so much we can know about the past for certain. What we can't know for certain is the present, And what we've seen in the present is that when disaster strikes, people

have tended to help each other. In Hurricane Katrina in two thousand and five, the official response was famously criticized for being slow and disorganized, and yet despite media attempts to pain these people as looters and thugs and all these different things, community members, neighbors, volunteers all stepped up to rescue people, to mobilize food, shelter, and basic aid, to expropriate when necessary to get people what they needed,

long before federal agencies gone on the scene. Similarly, in a more recent occurrence, after the cranfelt tower fire in the UK in twenty seventeen. The official channels had failed the people of that tour many diet as a result. Regulations that were supposed to protect people were not enforced or were absent. And yet it was community members who sprang into action to provide water and shelter and food and clothes and emotional support even when the Twin Tours

fell on Stement eleven, two thousand and one. And this is an example that brag when I actually spent some time talking about people actually helped people descend the stairwells in an orderly fashion. You know, they would say, you know, after you going down the stairs, and passers by would go in and help others to evacuate and assist the wounded law before the emergency services arrived. So people acted and prioritized helping others even in a disaster scenario. And

yet what do we see in dystopia and fiction. In apocalyptic fiction, you see people just like driving around shooting guns in the air. You see the purge, you see them the ceiling, zombie apocalypse scenarios. In Rebecca Solnitt's book, A Paradise Built in Hell, she found that disasters peeled back the layer as a society and revealed the empathy, cooperation,

and ka at humanities core. She noted that when disaster strikes is when people most often reveal the better natures, and yet those negative narratives tend to have more suite in the popular imagination.

they were fleeing from the fires. Like these were the two options you had. You had, you had anarchists actually helping the people who were who were fleeing from this horrific fire and setting up like massive, massive like aid distribution centers. Meanwhile right wing militias were pulling people over at gunpoint making sure Antifa wasn't up to any shenanigans and similar stuff happened last year during Hurricane Helene on the East Coast, where you had a whole bunch of

like Southeast anarchists in the Appalachians do mutual a disaster response. Meanwhile, right wing malicious were spreading rumors about like FEMA fraud and all of all of this crazy stuff, not actually helping anybody. But it was anarchists doing a large a large amount of the actual water distribution and like medical assistance on the ground as the federal response was delayed and insufficient.

they survived through cooperation. You know, they built a garden, they shared duties. They didn't do any human sacrifices, you know, they created a rotor system to get things done. There resolved conflict. When people were in conflict, they would go on time out. They put each other on timeout and go on opposite sides of the island until the you know, cooler heads prevailed. The figure out ways to deal with their conflicts, to organize themselves without authority and without chaos.

But the problem is that these fictional narratives become so powerful instead of the real ones, that they have a similar effect to the placeboy effect. In fact, it's the Placeboy effects evil twin the no Sea Boy effect. Now, I'd heard about the place boy effect before, and I'm sure you have as well. But for those who don't know, it's basically where someone's health actually improves after receiving what's basically a dummy treatment like a sugar pill or a

fake surgery or a saline injection. The body heals itself because the mind of the person believes it's being healed. The mind in that trust into medicine. I mean, that's just that's amazing to me even now, and they'll quite understand how it works yet, but it's still really cool. But there's another dimension to the placebo effect that I hadn't heard about before, but it makes intuitive sense. I suppose it's called the no Seaboy effect. And Bregman is

the one who introduced me to that concept. So the no Seaboy effect is where instead of belief heal and you, it's belief that makes you sick. So people experience real pain, real symptoms, and even real illness, not because there's an actual physical cause, but because in their minds they expect to be harmed. So their minds to that fear of

harm into actual harm and injury. And there was one case study that he used where a child had drunk a coke and photo was poisoned and then just created this mass hysteria almost with dozens of children in hospitals with headaches and nausea and pradic attacks because they drank.

Go to the point where Coca Cola actually had to recall all of those drinks even though tests had showing that there was nothing in the drinks that we're making people sick, but theirs bodies still responded as if there was because they believed they heard the story, they heard about it, they saw what happened to others, and they believed it would happened to them. And that's the no super effect in action, right, So we get the concept.

So Bregmun actually stretched these concepts beyond the field of medicine, and he basically made the points that what if these contents are abate into how we view each other? You know, so what if I believe that people are selfish, cruel and violent by nature? Actually makes it so, you know, if you expect the worst from people, you'll act on that. You know, you might be colder or more defensive and

more likely to punish or preemptal. And what happens as a result is that, you know, people pick up on that energy, they're spawning kind they withdraw, they retaliate, and then that cycle ends up feeding itself and to the belief. That negative belief becomes a social reality, a self fulfilling prophecy. So we end up building institutions that are based on that cynical expectation. We design policies that are based around the punishment we are, train ourselves to see strangers as

threats rather than as neighbors. And then when we have a fallout, as when that prophecy is fulfilled by our own actions, we can then say, well, see I was right. You know, people are awful. But what we don't see is that our expectations and the systems we build around those expectations are part of what ends up making it that way. I think an easy example to going to

is with prison right. People expect criminals to act like animals, to act like monsters, to beasts, and so they create prisons, and in those prisons treat them like animals, monsters and beasts, and people respond to that. You know, you treat people like animals, they're going to behave like animals. So then the question that Bragmann poses is what happens if we decide to treat people like their good you know, trusting their intentions, leaning into care, and building our systems around

the assumption that most people are decent. So how do we make that leave? I said before that you know, we don't really necessarily need to go into the past to see how people behave in the present, but it's a good idea to get a sense of how we evolved. Right. A lot of people have a brutal perception of human evolution. You know, they truck comparisons between us and chimpanzees, or you know, they make it see first of all like nordn bernobles entirely and also ignoring the fact that we

are our own speecies with our own evolutionary history. You know, people have are very cynical and honestly insultant, like view of the cave men of our past. But our histories are actually pretty soft. In fact, Bragman argues in favor of something called self domestication theory, which has a little

bit of anthropological and evolutionary biological back in. And so the basic claim of this theory is that the reason Homo sapiens survived and other ancient humans didn't isn't because we were the strongest, or the smartest, or the most cun in or because we were friendlier, that we evolve to be more social, cooperative, playful, and trust in self.

Domestication theorists basically compare humans as puppies to the other homo species as wolves, that we domesticate ourselves to become less aggressive or faces softened, our bodies became less robust, and our openness and friendliness allowed us to build relationships, to build groups, to raise children, community, and to survive.

And so if we accept our theory we had not that and build that into our foundation, that we did evolve our capacity to be kind, that it is something that is within our humanity, that it's not a fragile gloss over savagery or a morality that's given to us by religional law. Then we can basically become who were capable of becoming, you know, we can create systems that allow us to develop that. And this sounds really optimistic,

This sounds really happy, go lucky and woo. And we are going to get into some of the darker chapters of our humanity in the next episode. But I wanted to wrap this one up by back in the Death of Catherine Kitty Genevieves in nineteen sixty four. It's another example that Breckman refers to in his book, and it's one of the classic case studies that was used for a long time to illustrate the apathy and cold heartness

of humanity. Because the New York Times, which as we all know, is a reputable and trustworthy institution, The New York Times claimed that she was stabbed in the street while thirty eight neighbors looked on and did nothing. Right. This was the quintessential story that was used to say, you know, look at that bystanding effect. Humans just don't care, you know. There was used as an example of apathy, of urban de kay, of everything wrong with us. But

the story was wrong. The reporters will help this story and it was wrong. I mean, yes, she was murdered, but people did try to help. Someone called the police, but this wasn't a time before nine one one, so it was yet to call like the local station, and then the response process was a bit slow. One neighbor actually rushed out and held her as she died, held

her in their arms. So the press spun this story as like some bleak tale, and the few of psychology ate it up because it was part of a trend at the time to create this perception of humanity, but the real story was a lot more hearing, a lot more human. I mean, it was messy and somebody still murdered her. But this this idea of the byastounding the

fact that has been so inflated. A lot of the key studies that have been used as examples of them have been chipped away at over time, and that's one of the main stories that has been pretty thoroughly debunked at this point. So I like where Bregman's been going. But we've glossed over the dark side, you know, the shadow of our humanity. You know, even he acknowledges in this book that we do bad stuff as well. So

the next episode we are gonna wade into that. But how you're feeling about humanity so far.

me going. I don't know, like, yeah, I've I've I've certainly been around my fair share of like doomers and nihilists, over the years, and at the very least those people don't seem to be very happy and don't seem to be enjoying life, and sometimes it's hard to enjoy life, absolutely, but I think I think you need to be able to find a place for yourself within a world that has like evil as a almost inherent component and find your way either through that, sometimes around that, but oftentimes

through it. And I think that's I mean, that's that's just been a part of like growing up. We're certainly growing up in like a weird time, but I think that's kind of always been true, like that that was

true one hundred years ago. So I don't know, I part of me and maybe this is just over the optimistic, but but part of me continues to resist being a doomer despite all of the bad news that is trying to infiltrate my brain at all times, which is which is a very profitable industry, right, I mean, that's somewhat kind of what this show is, right. It kind of does play into those instincts for sure, which is which is something that like we critique amongst ourselves often and

we try to always find that balance as well. But but yeah, like the doom cycle is like a A is a huge industry, and there's there's people that absolutely want you to always be panicking all the time. Yeah, and that drives consumer choices, that drives AD revenue, right.

be hearing about in like a mainstream news. But no, the news has a massive thing spiritual evil to it as well. There is there is a sinister undercurrent to like the news, like as like an industry indeed, and that's something that we are also always like butting up against. Well on on that optimistic.