Rutger Bregman on Human Nature and Hope

good for our well being. So if you'd like help working on any or all of those things, I've got a couple of spots that have just opened up in my one on one coaching practice. You can book a free thirty minute call to talk with me, no pressure, and we get to know each other at One you

Feed dot net slash coach. If you study some of the biggest atrocities in human history, the incredibly uncomfortable thing you'll see is that we quite often do the most terrible things in the name of friendliness, in the name of loyalty, because we do not want to let our friends down. YEA, welcome to the One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in garbage out or you are what

you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent

and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf than for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Rutger Bregman, one of Europe's most prominent young thinkers. The twenty seven year old historian and author has published four books on history, philosophy and economics. His book History of Progress was awarded the Belgian Liberals Prize for Best Nonfiction Book of two

thousand thirteen. Today, Rutger and Eric discuss his new book human kind A Hopeful History. Hi, Rutger, welcome to the show. Thanks thanks for having me. I'm so happy to have you on. Your book is called Humankind a Hopeful History, and it was a book I looked forward to reading and I loved reading every bit as much as I thought I would. And we're gonna talk all about it, but before we do, we're gonna start, like we always do,

with the parable. There's a grandfather talking with his granddaughter and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear and the right. Another stops and she thinks about it for a second. She looks up at her grandfather and she says, well, grandfather,

which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Look, it means a lot to me. Actually, it was central for me while I was writing this book. The book is about human nature, and the reason I wanted to write it is that in the past i would say fifteen to twenty years,

there's really been a silent revolution in science. So many scientists from so many different disciplines, anthropologists and psychologists and archaeologists, and sociologists have been moving from a quite cynical view of human nature, of who we are as a species, to a more hopeful view, and so I wanted to connect the dots and to show that something bigger is happening. But while I was writing it, I also realized that

it's not just an idea, it's not just a story. Right, we humans, we tend to become the stories that we tell ourselves. So when you talk about human nature, you can, on the one hand, have the scientific debate right, and you can can talk to all the experts what is human nature really like? But it's also the case that if we believe that, for example, all people are deep down just selfish, then how are we going to treat

each other? Well, we'll probably build a society with a lot of hierarchy and bureaucracy, and I think in the end will bring out the worst in each other. So your view of human nature also is a self affitting prophecy, and I think that's very much there in the Story of the Wolf, is that in a way it's up to us who do we want to be. So the second half of the book is really about that, you know, the first half I try to sort of convince people

that we're not so bad. And then in the second half, I asked the question, and what kind of society could we live if we start with the assumption that most people deep down are pretty decent. When I came across the parable in the book, I thought, that's perfect. And I think, you know, you used a word when you and I were getting ready to talk about being a consequentialist. And I love that word because I think it summarizes

to me what's really important about your book. Because we could get into endless debates about what is the exact nature of a human But if we started from a place we could agree on, I think we could look at human kind and if we looked at it somewhat objectively, we would say, oh boy, there's an awful lot of wonderful things that I see people do, and there's a lot of good and a lot of great out there. Oh oh, and there's yeah, there's also some some things

we don't feel real good about. So both those things are there. So given that to your point, what what do we do and what ways can we behave individually or collectively that is going to bring out more of the good parts of us and less of the bad parts. Yeah, there was a time when I was seventeen, eighteen years old when I was really obsessed with the question does God exist? Is their life after death? Right? As I guess so many people when they're at that age, they're

thinking about big questions of life. And for me, it was all about is this true? Is that true? Right? Is this a fact? Is that a fact? And if it's not true, then I should sort of dismiss that whole idea. I should dismiss, you know, the concept of religion. For example. Now a bit of context is important here, perhaps is that my father is a preacher, right, he's a Protestant minister. My mother is religious as well, she's also a Christian. So I really struggle with that when

I was seventeen and eighteen. You know, the way that ended up for me is that at some point I stopped believing in God and I thought, you know, I actually don't think there's life after death, and the meaning that there is in life has to be found here, you know, in this life on this planet. And then I basically stopped thinking about these religious questions for quite

a while. Then, as I became older and I was working in this book, I started to become interested in the same questions once again, but then in a different way. I wasn't so interested anymore in the question is this true or is that true? But I was more interested in what happens if people believe this, What happens if people believe that. I'm not sure if this is a saying in English, but you've got to judge tree, you know, and its fruits. You've got to look at what it

actually produces. That's the way I look at it right now. It's also the way I look at my parents. You know. Maybe I don't agree with them sort of about the exact contents of their religion, but then I look at what it means for them and how it moves them and how it enables them to do a lot of wonderful things for people in their lives and in their communities, etcetera. And that sounds I thinking religion can be quite wonderful,

you know. At the same time, there are all these books that were published with titles like how Religion Poisons Everything, etcetera. There was this group called the New Atheists, and people like Richard Dawkins were involved in that and I was like, you guys, got to meet my parents. You know, they're they're pretty wonderful. And so that's how I try to look at ideas and ideologies and religions right now is well, let's look what it means for people in practice. Right.

It doesn't mean that the scientific question is uninteresting. Right. I devote you know, hundreds of phases in my book to that question. But we also got to look at the question, well, actually happens if we believe this or that? Yeah, And I think it's really interesting because I'm a big proponent of a philosophy you know, that's been called a lot of different things over time, but the Buddhism called it the middle way, you know, which says, look for

someplace besides the extremes. And and one place I've often thought about this is I see two. I see two religious views of the world. In the in the West, we have the doctrine of original sin, which carried out in certain Christian traditions. Basically is we are so broken and so bad that without God's help, there's nothing we can do. And then there's Buddhism, which sort of states

the opposite claim. It says, hey, underneath it all, we're all good, And like you, I've spent a lot of time looking at those two going I wonder which it is, And it's part of what has attracted me to the wolf parable, because the wolf parable you don't have to figure it out which is the original nature. I'm not entirely sure. I actually lean more towards we're good. Your book lays out a lot of evidence towards that. But but then again, as I said earlier, I think we

can see in humans both things are there. The capacity to good and evil is there. It's clearly there. So how do we bring about that? That's what I think your book does. But I do think that you bring up a fundamental question early on, where you're debating to philosophers Hobbes and Rousseau, and you're saying that you can think of no other debate with stakes as high or ramifications as far reaching as a debate between those two.

So lay out the stage for us there. There's a really old and incredibly influential idea in Western culture that scientists called veneer theory. Vneer theory is this notion that our civilization is just a thin veneer, just a thin layer and that below that lies raw human nature, which is, you know, not pretty deep down, we're just nasty and selfish. One of the philosophers who you know was most influential in sort of defending veneer theory was indeed Thomas Hobbes.

You could argue by the way that original sin, as you talked about, is also a form of aneer theory. But Thomas Hobbes was a philosopher in the seventies century British philosopher who argued that back in the state of nature, when we were still nomadic and to gatherers, and as you probably know, we've been nomadican to gatherers for the biggest part of our history, you know, for around of the time we've been on this planet. We roamed around

as hunter gatherers. And Thomas Hobbes thought that back then we lived lives that were, in his famous words, nasty, brutish, and short, and that we also engaged in some kind of what he called a war of all against all. Yes, people were free back then, but the consequences were terrible, right, because if people deep down into selfish and nasty and evil, then over asily if you give them freedom, the results will be horrible, and therefore he said, we gotta basically

give up our freedom. And at some point he also argued, we did that. We gave up our freedom and we got security in return. How did we do it well by appointing a Leviathan. This is sort of a concept named after a biblical sea monster. What he meant is that we basically appoint some really powerful people to keep us in check, elite kings, queens, princess princesses. Halbs argued that because we cannot trust each other, we need people at the top to control us. You know, it's a

very short summary, but that's basically his view. Jean Jacques Rousseau was a French philosopher who lived around a century later and argued the exact opposite. Basically, what he said is that in the state of nature, when we were

nomadican together as lives was actually pretty good. We were a relatively healthy society, was quite eguilitarian, and everything went wrong in the moment we settled down and when someone said, and this is a really famous passage in Rousseau's essay on the Origin of in Equality, where he argues that the moment the first person said, look, this piece of land here, that's mine, you know, and when people believe them or didn't say, you know, you're an idiot, go away.

You know, the land is well is everyone's possession. That's the moment when everything went wrong, you know, that's when we got indeed, hierarchy and elites and the patriarchy and all the terrible stuff and the diseases and the pandemics and wars. But we should never have given up our freedom.

So this is a fundamental opposition in Western philosophy. Hopes on the one hand, Rousseaux on the other hand, And for an incredibly long time, Rousseau has been dismissed as the naive, utopian, romantic French idiot, while Hobbs has often been described as the father of realism. Right, he had a pessimistic message, but at least he was realistic about what the world is really like. Well, maybe you see

where I'm going with this. What I try to argue in the book is that actually, all this time, Rousseau was the real realist. And if we look at the latest evidence we have from sociology, archaeology, anthropology, and you name it, it actually seems to be the case that a lot of the modern scientific evidence points in the direction that Rousseau was also trying to lead us to. So, um, yeah, that's sort of the state of the book. So the

whole book seeks to answer this question. So I always feel I sometimes ask questions in this role where I'm like, well, this is a dumb question because somebody spent four pages answering it and I'm asking them to answer it in two minutes. But could you give us just a sampling of some of the scientific evidence that you're seeing that says that, hey, Rousseau is more on the mark than Hobbs. I guess what I find the most exciting are the

developments in evolutionary anthropology or biology. Scientists have been asking themselves the question for an incredibly long time, what makes us special as a species? Why have we conquered the globe? Why not the in the end of thals or some of the other hominate species, Why not the chimpanzees in the bonobo? Is what makes us special as a species.

And for a long time, we really like to believe that we're just really smart, Right, We've got these huge brains that consume an enormous amount of energy um, and that that's probably the case, you know, we're just geniuses compared to other animals. Well, it seems to be a lovely explanation, but the problem is is that if you do an intelligence test and you let a human toddler compete with a pig, for example, or a chimpanzee, and quite often the animals win, you know, there's there's really

very limited evidence that individually we are so smart. I mean, collectively we are really smart. Right, we can produce wonderful things, like I'm using a microphone right now. That's incredible piece of technology, and looking at a screen, I have no clue what's going on in my computer at the moment. It's brilliant. But obviously individually, I have no idea. I can count to ten, but I couldn't have come up

with the numerical system on my own. So individually humans are just really in put in, pretty much idiots basically. And so what evolutionary biologists now argue is that it's not our intelligence, but it's actually our friendliness that has made all the difference. And they even talk about the notion of survival of the friendliest and it really means

what you think it means. So for millennia when we lived as Nomadican togethers, it was actually the friendliest among us who had the most kids and had the biggest chance of passing on their genes to the next generation. And because we sort of became better at co operating and living together, we started living in bigger societies, and we started learning from each other. And it's really this capacity of what what scientists called social learning that distinguishes

from other animals. You know, we're just really really good at learning from each other. And that only happens, you know, if you're a little bit playful and if you're friendly enough, if you're this arrogant narcissist, then you're not going to learn much from other people. Right. So in the book, I make the comparisons with the Neanderthals. The Neanderthals were probably much smarder than us, right, we know they have bigger brains. In a way, you could argue that they

were MacBook pros and where MacBook airs. But the difference is that we have WiFi, so we're connected to one another, and their WIFEI was not working all that well, right, And it's this connection that makes all the difference. Because intelligence is not about individuals. It's about what you learn from each other, what you can build collectively, etcetera, etcetera.

So we have a lot of proof now in evolutionary anthropology that that is in the case that on a biological level you can see still in our bodies and in our DNA today that we actually are a product of survival of the friendliest. Yeah, that idea of a toddler not being smarter than a pig. Obviously, now as a fifty year old, I am hopefully a little smarter than a pig, right, I can I can read and

do all sorts of things a pig can't do. And so what you're saying is it's it's the fact that that toddler has the capacity to learn from everyone around him and synthesize all the ideas that are coming from all the different people that allows that toddler to not read Maine at the level of a pig, but to grow far beyond. It is because of that social learning capacity, and that we are in essence reaping tens of thousands

of years of that compounding benefit. Yes, exactly, exactly. We just get an incredible, huge inheritance basically from those who came before us, right, the language we speak, the buildings that we live in, the technologies that we use. If you think about where wealth comes from, you know, often there's this illusion that they're self made men and women who make a living on their own and create their

own wealth. Wow, that's not We are so utterly dependent on other people and on the generations who came before us. Almost all wealth is created by by others and by by society in general. That's really fundamental, I think if you want to understand what makes humans special and what distinguishes from other animals, and as I said, you know,

it's also in our biology. So one of the really striking facts that I discovered what was researching the book, is that we're pretty much the only animal in the animal kingdom with the ability to blush, Which is really strange, Right, Why would you involuntarily give away your feelings to someone else? What could the evolutionary advantage have been? How did that help us survive the ice age? You know? Why was

blushing good for us as a species? And the answer that scientists now give is will blushing helps to establish trust. It's really hard to distrust or strongly dislike someone who's just there's something and daring about someone who's blushing, right, It really connects you to that person in a way. It's basically signed that I can feel shame and I care about what you think. And it's unique. It's something that Darwin, the father of evolutionary theory, already discovered in

the nineteenth century. And he sent letters to oil of his context around the globe and he said, do people blush there as well? And do people blushed there as well? And they all send them letters back and say, yeah, yeah, they do it here as well. And it's a unique human ability. Yeah, and I think this idea of survival

of the friendliness is an interesting one. And then sort of flips it on its head, right because you quote someone who says, the mechanism that makes us the kindest species, this ultra social learning machines that we are, also makes us the cruelest species. Talk a little bit about how that works. Yeah, Obviously, when you write a book about human kindness or you try to make the case that people deep down are just decent, well, you've got to

talk about the elephant in the room as well. We also seem to be the cruelest species in the animal Kingdom. We do horrible things that no other animal would ever dream of doing or ever come up with, you know, concentration camps, prisons, genocide, ethnic cleansing, ogswitech, you name it. I've never heard of a penguin or koala or think

of any other animal who do horrible stuff like that. Right, So if you sort of say, well, I do not believe in veneer theory, I do not believe that people are deep down just nasty and evil and selfish and arrogant and violent, then you have to come up with a different explanation, right, and then the mystery only becomes bigger. Now, what's so fascinating about this new development in biology is that some of these scientists that argue that the thing

that makes us successful is also our dark side. So humans are not just a product of survival of the friendliest, they're also incredibly group ish, right. We very much want to be part of a group. We just want to be light basically, and that is almost as important for us, or maybe even as important as food or sex, right,

or these other important things in life. Loneliness, for example, is similar to smoking fifteen cigarettes today in terms of the effects it has on your health again assigned by the way that we are not individuals, right, we we

really really need each other. But then if you study some of the biggest atrocities in human history, the incredibly uncomfortable thing you'll see is that we quite often do the most terrible things in the name of friendliness, in the name of loyalty, because we do not want to let our friends down. So I've got one chapter in the book about what happened in with the German army and when it was clear the Germans were going to

lose the war. At that very late moment in the war, the Germans were still fighting very ferociously, very hard, right, they were like basically fanatics, and the Allied psychologists couldn't understand it. You know, what was going on? Why why did they keep fighting when you know it's it's really clear they're gonna lose the war. We've already had D Day, the Russians are coming from the east. And then psychologists

started interviewing prisoners of war. At first they thought that these soldiers must have been brainwashed, right, that they must be ideological fanatics or something like that. But the reality was that there was one incredibly powerful force driving them, which was comarades shaft, you know, comradeship. They were fighting for each other, for their friends. They were not all

that ideologically motivated. Turned out, the German army command knew this, so they really try to keep friends together and not separate them because they knew that these soldiers, they had come through so much and they would take a bullet any time, you know, for their friends. And that was actually one of the main reasons why the Germans kept fighting, you know, which is obviously in a way it's it's a beautiful side of human nature, but it caused such

immense suffering and tragedy at the same time. So that is one of the paradox is in my book. It's it's become a really paradoxical book in a way, much more paradoxical than I thought it would be when I started finding it. I think there is a lot of paradox in it because I think we in history and life is complicated, and I love that you really keep a lot of room open for this is what the evidence appears to be pointing to, and we only know

so much, you know. It's sort of back to that idea about the new atheists, right The thing that rubbed me the most wrong about that was this belief that, like I know the answer, but none of us know the answer to whether there's a god out there or not, Like that is a question that we don't know. And so the people who insist that it's true and are very dogmatic about it appear to me to be as far off as the people who insist absolutely that there

is not. Both of them. To me, I go and I think this gets back to and where I want to take the rest of this conversation, which is back or what are the consequences of this? So if I at least say, you know what, I'm willing to believe that, even if I just move halfway and I go, all right, you know what, I don't buy veneer theory. I don't think people are all bad. I don't think that left or own devices, everyone will look out for themselves and do awful things. I'm just going to move to the middle.

The middle says, you know what, I believe people can have a really good nature to them. Let's say we get people that far. At the end of the book, you lay out some rules for you know, here's how you might conduct your life or or more specifically for you, what it's meant to you for how you want to conduct your life with this new I would say broader and you would say more realistic view of human nature.

So let's talk what some of those are. And I think the first one is really important, which is when in doubt assume the best, well, just as a caveat. I must be honest. Initially I didn't want to write a self out book, right because I really believe that the promise of this idea lies on an institutional or structural level. Right. Humans are shaped and our behavior is shaped by, you know, the schools that we go to or the workplaces are you know, our democracies or our prisons,

And a lot of the chapters are about that. What would a school look like if you assume that kids are naturally curious and playful and have intrinsic motivation? What would a workplace look like if you believe that you can just trust your employees and you don't need all these layers of management. What would a prison look like if you even trust the inmates and if you allow them to socialize with the guards, etcetera. And you know, they talk about the criminal justice system in Norway that

is very counter and do that. They take it very far there, But it turns out they also have the lowest recidivism rate in the world, you know, the lowest chance that someone who's went to prison will commit another crime after here she gets out of prison. So I think that's the most important thing, is that we've got to look at sort of what are the institutional consequences here. But then again I also just couldn't resist because writing

the book changed me. It changed my own life. When you start looking at other humans in a different way and you're just taking all this evidence that we have from all these disciplines, it just influences you because everything starts with your view of human nature, how you look at other people. And indeed, the first rule of life

is when in doubt, assume the best. Very often we do the opposite right, very often, especially when there's a little bit of distance in the communication and we don't really know how to interpret what other people are saying to us. Then we're in doubt and we often assume the worst. Many people recognize this from I don't know, communicating on WhatsApp. Someone sends you a weird emoji and you're like I should interpret that what is that person

thinking about me? And sometimes then you get a vicious cycle of distrust, right, and you assume the worst, and then you behave in a little bit of a nasty way, and then that other person will think that's that's not very friendly, and the relationship deteriorates. What I think you should do is when you're in doubt, you should always assume the best in other people. And I've got three reasons for it. In the first place, statistically, you'll be

right most of the time. Most people are pretty decent, so you just have the best adlts if you assume the best. Secondly, your behavior could actually have positive consequences. If someone really doesn't mean well, but you still react in a positive way, well, I could actually have some positive consequences. This is a phenomenon that has been described in psychology very often, you know, nonconformative behavior, basically like

turning the other cheek. Right, It's very hard to stay angry or or stay nasty if someone just responds in a kind way. The third reason, and maybe that's the most important one, is even if someone is just a calm artist, you know, and it's just trying to rip you off. Basically, I think in a way you should accept it, because if you never want to be called

in your whole life, what do you do. Well, You've got to distrust pretty much all the strangers that you ever meet, right, You've got to live your whole life distrusting most of the people. I'm not willing to pay that price. So what I've said to myself is I just accepted that I'll be calmed a couple of times in my life. And if now people tell me that they've never been called, then I always tell them, you've got to see a therapist. You know, your basic attitude

to life is not trusting enough. That's very different from the way I used to think about it. Very often, when people are the victim of some kind of scam, they feel the shame right that they've been stupid, that they've been naive. And what I'm saying to them is, look, you should not be ashamed of your own humanity. It is deep within your own biology and here d NA. You know you've evolved to trust other people, and you

should never be ashamed of that. The cost of believing the worst in people so that you protect yourself, that cost is to me, like you said, I'm not willing to pay it. It's a huge cost. I used to see this in a A. I'm a recovering alcoholic addic, and I would see people come early into a A. There's a lot of trust that you have to have there. You're trusting in a program, you're trusting in a sponsor, you're sharing things you know, and people would be very distrustful.

And you know, I just used to say, like, the benefits of trusting are that you get your whole life back, you recover and you live this wonderful life. Yes, maybe you tell somebody something in confidence and they share it. Okay, yep, it happens. That price is so small compared to the cost of not trusting, which is basically for an alcoholic or an addict, is you're going to go back out, you might very well die. When we paint it that starkly and addicts sort of amplifies all these things, we

can see it really clearly. But if we de escalate that to more of a normal situation, it's still the same cost, you know, which is that believing the worst in people takes a huge psychological cost. It's also true for a forgiveness. If you look at the literature on forgiveness, it's very interesting that the people who've thought about this deeply emphasized over and over again is that you forgive someone, and in the first place, you do it for yourself

because you want to liberate yourself. In a way, for giving someone is a selfish act, right, because you do not want to be imprisoned anymore. You do not want to be helped back by that thing other person is done to you. I think that's a very powerful way of looking at it. What you said also reminds me of what we do as a society. When policy makers are politicians write a law, they think about the one

percent instead of right. So I think about the whole welfare system, where the benefit system in the Western world, we've created these systems where poor people have to prove over and over again that they're really depressed enough, that they're really sick enough, that they're a hopeless case who will never get anything done in their lives. And once they've proved that on and of forms and in enough interviews with government officials, then maybe at the end of

the day will give them a little bit of assistance. Right. But then we've already created a form of dependency and depression. Right if you go through that process, you'll feel absolutely miserable, and sure you're you're not going to find a job anytime soon because the whole system made you miserable. What would happen if we just give people guarantee basic income, which is I think one of the really exciting new ideas out there. Just give people a monthly grant that's

enough to pay for your basic needs, food, shelter, education, clothing. Well, a couple of people will probably waste it, you know, there's some evidence that around one of people will waste it on I don't know, drugs, alcohol, watch Netflix all day, etcetera. But are we gonna base our laws, procedures, and institutions, you know, on them on their behavior or are we going to look at the who will take this venture

capital and do great things with it? And again, you know, this is not just based on my belief or how I would like people to be, but there's an enormous amount of evidence. You know, we've had a lot of experiments, especially in the United States, by the way, that was used to be a pioneer here in the seventies and the eighties there were a huge basic income experiments in the US that showed convincingly that if you just trust people, if you invest in them, you'll get a huge return

on the investment. But please look at how most people behave, and do not base your whole laws and you know, and your whole society on that small minority. Before I did this, I was in UH software entrepreneurship and I used to joke that about the time I wanted to leave the company was about the time when we got an HR department. And this is not against HR people.

HR people are wonderful, But what starts to happen is that exactly what you said, we start writing a bunch of rules to deal with the one or two percent that are really problematic, and those rules then constrict everybody

else who's going to behave in a better way. It's not that you don't have to have ways of coping with, yes, the one or two percent, but to mold the whole system to that to prevent that one little bad outcome to me is kind of I think what you're getting at with so much of the book is that we go way out of our way to make sure that you know, the bad apple doesn't get part of his apple.

I mean, I'm screwing analogies all of here. But you know, taking it back to the personal level, is that same idea of if I designed my whole life like you said, to avoid getting conned so that nobody ever gets one over on me, that's a bad outcome. And then I think the second piece that you talked about, and I wanted to kind of hit it, is this sort of Pygmalion effect, is that how you pronounce it. Share a little bit about what that is, because I think that

and its opposite are really powerful and important ideas here. Well, it's basically the scientific proof for the wolf story. It was a scientist named Albert Rosenau who that some extraordinary research in the nineties sixties. What he did is he had rats, basically, and he had them in two cages, and on front of one of the cages was a sign that said, here are some really smart, super super intelligent rats. And then in front of the other, the second cage, there was a sign that said these are

some standard dom lab rats. And then he asked his students, okay, can you take the rats out of their cages one by one? And put them in this maze and then see how long it will take them to find the exit of the maze. And what was really um well, in a way not very surprising, is that it turned out that the super smart intelligent rats were much quicker. Right, students put them in there and they clocked, and they indeed turned out they were much faster when they were

looking for the exit of the maze. But then Rosenthal the scientists set to his students that you know what, actually, these are all just standard lab rats. You know, there was nothing spacial about the super smart rats at all. But then the question was, but the results were real right in theory, super smart rats were much faster, They did find the exit of the maze much fosters that

the question was what was going on here? And Rosenthal had real difficulty when he was trying to publish his work because most scientifical journals would not accept it because they said it couldn't have been true, right, that didn't happen because you know, these labs were all just standard lab rats. It took a while, but at some point Rosenthal realized what had happened. It was the power of expectations.

So the students took out the rats, and there was something in the way they handled the really smart rats, you know, with a kind of expectation, like you can do that, you're super awesome, you're super smart, you know, find the exit right, and that made the difference. He called this the Pygmalion effects. It's named after some Greek myth. And since then, you know, it's improved time and time again in many, many different contexts. The most important context,

by the way, is in schools. So researchers have shown that if you tell teachers that there are certain kids with you know, I don't know, extraordinary ability, even if that is not true, but the teachers don't realize that that. Indeed, these students will start to do much better on all kinds of standardized tests. It's the power of expectations. The teachers will start to treat them in a way they expect a lot of them. We humans, we are the stories that we tell ourselves. We become what we think

what we will become. It's so important also, you know, for people in management, for in schools to understand that there are expectations. They're not just expectations, you know, they influence the real world. And also for the worst. You know, it's one of the poisonous way in which racism does it works, you know, the tyranny of low expectations. People really behave less well if you expect less of them.

It was really one of the most important findings of psychology in the twentieth century, where we now have a huge amount of evidence for Yeah, it's so amazing. It's amazing that that translates to the way a rat is handled, that it can sort of be that implicit, you know, whereas when we get into human relationships, we are far more direct. It's what we say, you know, it's how we look at people. It's a very direct thing. And there's some quote and will never get it right, but

it's one of my favorites. And I don't even remember who said it, but it was something along the lines of it's always good to believe the best in people. They're more likely to act that way because of it. Just even in an argument with somebody we care about, if we can reorient in that argument to like, well, all right, this is a person I care about, this is someone I love. They want to be happy just like I do. And it's difficult, right, So we gotta

admit it's difficult. It's difficult when we try to do it with those who are close to us, you know, with our friends and our family members, and you know, I have some sometimes arguments with my wife where I behave in a way that's not really in line with my book, I must admit so. But then it becomes even more difficult when we think about the strangers, the people who are farther away from us, right, it sometimes

becomes very counterintuitive. I mentioned the criminal justice system in a place like Norway where they have prisons, you know, maximum security prisons, and people looked up there have done terrible things, you know, murderous rapists. But still the prisoners get the freedom to socialize with the guards, to make music. They've got their own music studio, they've got their own music label that it's called Criminal Records. They really get

a chance basically too, of themselves. And to be honest, when I first started studying it, it just felt wrong to me. It was like, come on, these people have done horrible things, and what will the victims or the parents of the victims think about this? But then I started looking at the results. You know, as I mentioned the scientific evidence convincingly shows that it really really works. It's also, by the way, much cheaper because American prisons

are often universities for crime. Right, people go in there for a small drug offense and they come out as hard and drug criminals or you know, people who never get a proper job again and pay taxes. So that's very weird. You know, you've had these really expensive institutions funded by taxpayers that basically create more crimes. So you can turn it around, but it's difficult, so you need to muster all your self control. Is one interview I saw with a father who lost his son in the

terrorist at texts of Bravick. You'll remember this in two thousand and eleven, when some right wing fanatic murdered you know, dozens of teenagers with some kind of political camp on on an island in our way, and it was it was terrific, and the interviewer asked the dad, you know, you want the death sentence right for this guy. You want to torture him and murder him, etcetera, but you

want vengeance right. And it was credibly moving moment because the dad said, well, look, I have thought about that quite a bit, but I don't want to sink to that level. I'm so much better than that. And I agree with the Prime Minister of Norway who at the time said, when the attacks happened, we're going to respond with more openness, with more transparency and more democracy, and that's how will defeat this evil ideology. It's difficult, but

it's really worth it. Let's talk about temper your empathy, train your compassion. These are two words that are often used synonymously, but they don't necessarily mean the same thing. Talk about empathy versus compassion in this case, and why we want to develop one over the other. So people have obviously different definitions. But when I use the word empathy, what I mean is this capacity that humans have and also quite a few other animals have. By the way,

is to imagine ourselves in someone else's shoes. Is to really feel, on an emotional mental level what other people are feeling. And a lot of people think that empathy is the solution to so many of our problems. Right. President Obama talked about that, you know, when he was asked what do we do against cenophobia and racimsm and he said, as as so many people say, well, we need more empathy. Right, we got to imagine what it's

like to be that other person. And for a long time I also believe that indeed empathy is the answer. But I changed my mind. If you now look at some of the latest scientific evid and there's one really important book written by Paul Bloom, a psychologist. It's a funny title. It's called Against Empathy, And what he shows in the book is that empathy is not some light that lights up the whole world and lets you see

everything clearly. Now, it's more like a spotlight. It's a searchlight that helps you to focus on one person or one group while the rest of the world fades into the background. Why is it problematic? Because we just give too much attention then to that one person in one group. If you think about the Middle East, for example, what's the problem in the Middle East? Well, in many ways, there's too much empathy there and not enough compassion, not

more distance, rational compassion. Right where people try to zoom out a little bit. What happens. The Palestinians commit an attack and there are victims on the Israeli side, and there's obviously a lot of empathy for the victims. And then We also know this from you know, quite a few studies, is that people who feel more empathy, they

want more vengeance. So there's an attack from the Israelis and the Palestinians and there are again a lot of casualties, and people feel a lot of empathy for the victims, and he goes on and on and on. Right, So the problem there is not a lack of empathy. People feel an enormous amount of empathy for the victims, enormous and that's why they want action. What happened after nine eleven in the US, you know, it was like a tsunami of empathy, and we all know what happened after that.

What we need here is something different, And what scientists have shown is is that there's a really distinct phenomenon that we call compassion. We can even see it in the brain, right, So when people feel compassion, a different part of the brain lights up. One of the ways to explain it is when you think about parenting. Right, So, as a parent, when your kid is afraid of the dark, you don't want to feel empathy, right. You don't want to imagine yourself in the kid's shoes. You don't want

to be afraid of the dark as well. Right, you just wanna sit next to the kid and come for the kid and say, look, it's fine, you know, you don't have to worry about that. You know, Look, there are no monsters underneath your bad We can just check it out. Let's say, here, see no monster at all. And that's more the compassionate approach. It's more distant, it's a bit more rational as well. You care about the person and you want to help, right, So it's it's

also about love. You don't allow yourself to be swept away by the suffering and the fair and the feelings of someone else. Right, you recognize that, Look, what you feel is what you feel, and I recognize it, and I see you, and I want to help you with it, but it's not what I feel. Right. I think that's a much wiser approach. And you mentioned Buddhism early in our conversation. I think that a lot of Buddhism is about trying to develop your compassion instead of your empathy. Yep.

And I often think about this distinction, and I sometimes wonder whether empathy isn't a less developed form of compassion. What I mean by that is maybe it's a maybe it's a stage we have to have. It's a developmental stage. I have to be able to imagine, oh, other people feel like I feel. I have to be able to put myself in somebody else's shoes. So maybe it's a developmental stage. But as far as I develop, it becomes

very problematic. So you know, maybe I develop then into more compassion, which is where I don't have to be in empathy all the time in order to still care about other people. Yeah, yeah, maybe empathy indeed could be the stepping stone, but it can also distract us from the bigger picture. I think you often see this with the way we treat our animals. So if I torture a chicken in my backyard and my neighbor sees it, and he's a rout girl, this is crazy. I'm going

to call the police. Well, they'll lock me up, right, because it's pretty horrible to torture a chicken. But if there are hundreds of thousands, or well actually hundreds of millions of chickens locked up and they're you know, killed when they're forty days old, and they prefer food with pain killers because they're actually in pain all the time, well, we call it agro business. We we just call it. Well, that's just the way it is, and we're completely disconnected

from the process. I often think that if people have to just watch a short video of what they eat, of what's on their plate, they wouldn't be able to eat it anymore. In that case, they don't feel the empathy because the distance is too great. We can feel a huge amount of empathy for someone who's in the news right a girl has fallen down well, and the whole country is obsessed with the question is she going

to make it right? And we're all going to send money and dolls, et cetera to the family, and we're going to support them, and there's a crowdfund and millions come in. But at the same time, you know, we know, or we should know, that more to thirty million kids die every year from easily preventable causes like malaria and measles and diarrhea, and we also know what the solutions are.

You know, you can just donate not all that much money to a highly effective charity such as Against Malaria Foundation, and you know that statistically speaking, I mean, you're going to say lives with that. But we don't do that because we don't feel it. Right, there's no identifiable victim. In many ways when we talk about those issues, empathy

is not going to help us, right, We need something different, right. Yeah, That whole issue of distance is such a big thing, is that, you know, what we simply would not tolerate in front of us, we are willing to tolerate at a distance. And your book actually points out a out of examples of that. You know, we think, well, soldiers are all trained to kill, but that it's relatively hard

to train somebody to want to kill somebody. And the more close up that combat is, say a bayonet versus pushing a button on a drone across the world, it's totally different. You know, one's relatively easy to do, the others really hard to do. Is one of the best kept secrets of psychology actually is that humans find it

incredibly hard to kill someone else. There was American historian military man who discovered during the Second World War when he was allowed to travel on the Pacific Front and also in Europe and do a lot of group interviews with soldiers just after you know, they have been in a combat situation. What he discovered his name was Samuel Marcel. Was that only of soldiers actually fired their guns. Most couldn't do it. You know, these were just soldiers who

had just been drafted. They had I don't know, six seven weeks of training. There were not natural born kill They couldn't do it. They came up with excuses when when the moment was there and they really had to pull the trigger, they couldn't do it. And this was not unique. You know, historians and psychologists have found a huge amount of evidence that this has happened all the time in war. Only with the rise of professional armies, you know that do a lot of conditioning and brainwashing,

that phenomenon started to disappear. Then what happened, obviously you can clearly see this in the case of Vietnam, is that soldiers who had received training, conditioning sort of like puffle of conditioning training right where they learned them to shoot instinctively at targets. Well, the soldiers who then kill someone else often kill something within themselves as well, so they become traumatized by they develop PTSD, which is very strange.

Right if you assume that humans are natural born killers, that were killer apes, right, and to go back to this veneer theory, then why would be become traumatized by killing someone else? Right, we should enjoy it, just like sex and eating food. Right, there should be some kind

of evolutionary reward. But to the country, actually, we damage something within ourselves, which suggests to me that even though we're capable, in certain situations, highly complex situations, of doing horrific things, it's not exactly what we're born to do, because we also kill and destroy something in ourselves. That's really well said, and I think it's true. I think, circling all the way back to where we started with the wolf theory is these different things can get fed.

We can choose to feed them. But to your point, our cultural institutions and our culture does a lot of

the feeding for us. I think if we were to summarize a lot of what you're saying the book is that it's our structures, it's our institutions, it's our way of doing things that is feeding the bad wolf, which makes us think that the bad wolf is what is naturally there, when in reality, if you fed the good wolf consistently and all the time, and if that's what our societies and our institutions and our culture was set to do, we'd see a very different view of human entity,

and that we need to start really trying to feed that better part of ourselves consistently and believe in it and see it. You know, before the conversation we talked about the situation in America. Right now you know that you've become the solution to many ways, and that you're bessimistic and maybe even a little bit desperate for the future of the country, right And then I think that's especially you know, before the election, and also you know from my perspective here in Europe is like is the

country going to whole? How far can this go? Is there at some point when it breaks, when something really snaps. I think it's helpful to remember that, Yes, there's an incredibly called it a poisonous system that every day in so many ways, brings out the worst in people. But it's the system, right, and that can change because it has been created by people, so it can also be changed by people. It's not necessarily the people themselves. So those people who you disagree with on the other side

in so many ways, they're just like you. They've got the same human nature and they have the same instinct deep down, they just live in a different world in a different context, and we got to try and build bridges, etcetera. Maybe it's a bit of a cliche what I'm saying here, but I think it's still incredibly important to remember that that in the end, we're so so similar to one another.

I agree. I mean, there's a teaching from Buddhism that influenced me so strongly, which was just recognized that everybody underneath wants to be happy like you are. And so then at that point, if I can orient that way towards somebody, then what we're debating as strategies, I'm not seeing them as fundamentally different than me. I'm seeing the strategies they're employing. Okay, we can debate those, but underneath,

we are people. And I do even despite what I was saying beforehand about some of the frustrations I've seen in the US about like mask wearing and some of that, I still do believe in the genuine goodness of most people. I really believe it's there, and the question is just how do we cultivate it? How do we cultivate it in ourselves and how do we cultivated in others? Yeah, absolutely. There's a saying from Nelsone Dela that I really love. He once said that it's easier to change the world

than to change yourself. So if you can change yourself, then changing the world is piece of cake. Ye. My background, maybe some people would see me as some kind of van and a looney leftist or like a progressive. I don't know. I personally see myself as someone who tries to combine ideas, you know, from both conservatives and progressive Something like basic income, for example, is both quite left wing and about right wing idea. It's it's both about

freedom and about equality. So there's a tendency a wrong people who are on the left or progressive right that they often dismissed the importance of self help and individual change. They say, no, we've got to talk about Amazon and Jeff Bezos and the evil system and the structure right, and they got to pay their taxes, and we gotta talk about inequality and blah blah blah. We got to talk about the big things and don't talk about the

individual because that's neoliberal or something like that. And to be honest, I used to believe that as well. But again as I've become older, and I've looked at some of the people I really really admire, you know, some of the people who really changed the course of world history. What I see is that they first changed themselves and then they changed the world. Right Martin Luther King today great at Thunberg, one of the most effective climate activists

of our time. She first became a vegan, then she convinced the parents to buy solar panels. Then she convinced their parents to buy an electric car. Then she convinced her mother to stop flying around the world. And she's the famous opera singer her mother, so that was basically her job. But she hu means her mother stuffed doing that. She did all of that and only then she started protesting in front of Swedish Parliament. So the political is

personal and the personal is political. If you can change yourself, you can change the world. That is a beautiful place for us to wrap up. Thank you so much Rutger for coming on the show. I enjoyed this conversation. I highly recommend the book. Will have links in the show notes to the book and where you can find more about Rutger. Thanks so much. Thanks man. Enjoy this If what you just heard was helpful to you. Please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast.

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