Speaker 1: One of the things we say at the One You
Speaker 1: Feed a lot is that there's no shortcut to lasting happiness. Right,
Speaker 1: We've got to do the work to improve our lives,
Speaker 1: but this can be really challenging to do without some support.
Speaker 1: Our lives are busy, there's a lot of things clawing
Speaker 1: at our attention, and we might have ways of working
Speaker 1: with our thoughts, emotions and behaviors that are not very
Speaker 1: good for our well being. So if you'd like help
Speaker 1: working on any or all of those things, I've got
Speaker 1: a couple of spots that have just opened up in
Speaker 1: my one on one coaching practice. You can book a
Speaker 1: free thirty minute call to talk with me, no pressure,
Speaker 1: and we get to know each other at One you
Speaker 1: Feed dot net slash coach. If you study some of
Speaker 1: the biggest atrocities in human history, the incredibly uncomfortable thing
Speaker 1: you'll see is that we quite often do the most
Speaker 1: terrible things in the name of friendliness, in the name
Speaker 1: of loyalty, because we do not want to let our
Speaker 1: friends down. YEA, welcome to the One You Feed. Throughout time,
Speaker 1: great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have.
Speaker 1: Quotes like garbage in garbage out or you are what
Speaker 1: you think ring true. And yet for many of us,
Speaker 1: our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
Speaker 1: self pity, jealousy or fear. We see what we don't
Speaker 1: have instead of what we do. We think things that
Speaker 1: hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
Speaker 1: just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent
Speaker 1: and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
Speaker 1: podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
Speaker 1: the right direction, how they feed their good wolf than
Speaker 1: for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Rutger Bregman,
Speaker 1: one of Europe's most prominent young thinkers. The twenty seven
Speaker 1: year old historian and author has published four books on history,
Speaker 1: philosophy and economics. His book History of Progress was awarded
Speaker 1: the Belgian Liberals Prize for Best Nonfiction Book of two
Speaker 1: thousand thirteen. Today, Rutger and Eric discuss his new book
Speaker 1: human kind A Hopeful History. Hi, Rutger, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Thanks thanks for having me. I'm so happy to have
Speaker 1: you on. Your book is called Humankind a Hopeful History,
Speaker 1: and it was a book I looked forward to reading
Speaker 1: and I loved reading every bit as much as I
Speaker 1: thought I would. And we're gonna talk all about it,
Speaker 1: but before we do, we're gonna start, like we always do,
Speaker 1: with the parable. There's a grandfather talking with his granddaughter
Speaker 1: and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside
Speaker 1: of us that are always at battle. One is a
Speaker 1: good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love,
Speaker 1: and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things
Speaker 1: like greed and hatred and fear and the right. Another
Speaker 1: stops and she thinks about it for a second. She
Speaker 1: looks up at her grandfather and she says, well, grandfather,
Speaker 1: which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 1: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 1: the work that you do. Look, it means a lot
Speaker 1: to me. Actually, it was central for me while I
Speaker 1: was writing this book. The book is about human nature,
Speaker 1: and the reason I wanted to write it is that
Speaker 1: in the past i would say fifteen to twenty years,
Speaker 1: there's really been a silent revolution in science. So many
Speaker 1: scientists from so many different disciplines, anthropologists and psychologists and archaeologists,
Speaker 1: and sociologists have been moving from a quite cynical view
Speaker 1: of human nature, of who we are as a species,
Speaker 1: to a more hopeful view, and so I wanted to
Speaker 1: connect the dots and to show that something bigger is happening.
Speaker 1: But while I was writing it, I also realized that
Speaker 1: it's not just an idea, it's not just a story. Right,
Speaker 1: we humans, we tend to become the stories that we
Speaker 1: tell ourselves. So when you talk about human nature, you can,
Speaker 1: on the one hand, have the scientific debate right, and
Speaker 1: you can can talk to all the experts what is
Speaker 1: human nature really like? But it's also the case that
Speaker 1: if we believe that, for example, all people are deep
Speaker 1: down just selfish, then how are we going to treat
Speaker 1: each other? Well, we'll probably build a society with a
Speaker 1: lot of hierarchy and bureaucracy, and I think in the
Speaker 1: end will bring out the worst in each other. So
Speaker 1: your view of human nature also is a self affitting prophecy,
Speaker 1: and I think that's very much there in the Story
Speaker 1: of the Wolf, is that in a way it's up
Speaker 1: to us who do we want to be. So the
Speaker 1: second half of the book is really about that, you know,
Speaker 1: the first half I try to sort of convince people
Speaker 1: that we're not so bad. And then in the second half,
Speaker 1: I asked the question, and what kind of society could
Speaker 1: we live if we start with the assumption that most
Speaker 1: people deep down are pretty decent. When I came across
Speaker 1: the parable in the book, I thought, that's perfect. And
Speaker 1: I think, you know, you used a word when you
Speaker 1: and I were getting ready to talk about being a consequentialist.
Speaker 1: And I love that word because I think it summarizes
Speaker 1: to me what's really important about your book. Because we
Speaker 1: could get into endless debates about what is the exact
Speaker 1: nature of a human But if we started from a
Speaker 1: place we could agree on, I think we could look
Speaker 1: at human kind and if we looked at it somewhat objectively,
Speaker 1: we would say, oh boy, there's an awful lot of
Speaker 1: wonderful things that I see people do, and there's a
Speaker 1: lot of good and a lot of great out there.
Speaker 1: Oh oh, and there's yeah, there's also some some things
Speaker 1: we don't feel real good about. So both those things
Speaker 1: are there. So given that to your point, what what
Speaker 1: do we do and what ways can we behave individually
Speaker 1: or collectively that is going to bring out more of
Speaker 1: the good parts of us and less of the bad parts. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there was a time when I was seventeen, eighteen years
Speaker 1: old when I was really obsessed with the question does
Speaker 1: God exist? Is their life after death? Right? As I
Speaker 1: guess so many people when they're at that age, they're
Speaker 1: thinking about big questions of life. And for me, it
Speaker 1: was all about is this true? Is that true? Right?
Speaker 1: Is this a fact? Is that a fact? And if
Speaker 1: it's not true, then I should sort of dismiss that
Speaker 1: whole idea. I should dismiss, you know, the concept of religion.
Speaker 1: For example. Now a bit of context is important here,
Speaker 1: perhaps is that my father is a preacher, right, he's
Speaker 1: a Protestant minister. My mother is religious as well, she's
Speaker 1: also a Christian. So I really struggle with that when
Speaker 1: I was seventeen and eighteen. You know, the way that
Speaker 1: ended up for me is that at some point I
Speaker 1: stopped believing in God and I thought, you know, I
Speaker 1: actually don't think there's life after death, and the meaning
Speaker 1: that there is in life has to be found here,
Speaker 1: you know, in this life on this planet. And then
Speaker 1: I basically stopped thinking about these religious questions for quite
Speaker 1: a while. Then, as I became older and I was
Speaker 1: working in this book, I started to become interested in
Speaker 1: the same questions once again, but then in a different way.
Speaker 1: I wasn't so interested anymore in the question is this
Speaker 1: true or is that true? But I was more interested
Speaker 1: in what happens if people believe this, What happens if
Speaker 1: people believe that. I'm not sure if this is a
Speaker 1: saying in English, but you've got to judge tree, you know,
Speaker 1: and its fruits. You've got to look at what it
Speaker 1: actually produces. That's the way I look at it right now.
Speaker 1: It's also the way I look at my parents. You know.
Speaker 1: Maybe I don't agree with them sort of about the
Speaker 1: exact contents of their religion, but then I look at
Speaker 1: what it means for them and how it moves them
Speaker 1: and how it enables them to do a lot of
Speaker 1: wonderful things for people in their lives and in their communities, etcetera.
Speaker 1: And that sounds I thinking religion can be quite wonderful,
Speaker 1: you know. At the same time, there are all these
Speaker 1: books that were published with titles like how Religion Poisons Everything, etcetera.
Speaker 1: There was this group called the New Atheists, and people
Speaker 1: like Richard Dawkins were involved in that and I was like,
Speaker 1: you guys, got to meet my parents. You know, they're
Speaker 1: they're pretty wonderful. And so that's how I try to
Speaker 1: look at ideas and ideologies and religions right now is well,
Speaker 1: let's look what it means for people in practice. Right.
Speaker 1: It doesn't mean that the scientific question is uninteresting. Right.
Speaker 1: I devote you know, hundreds of phases in my book
Speaker 1: to that question. But we also got to look at
Speaker 1: the question, well, actually happens if we believe this or that? Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think it's really interesting because I'm a big
Speaker 1: proponent of a philosophy you know, that's been called a
Speaker 1: lot of different things over time, but the Buddhism called
Speaker 1: it the middle way, you know, which says, look for
Speaker 1: someplace besides the extremes. And and one place I've often
Speaker 1: thought about this is I see two. I see two
Speaker 1: religious views of the world. In the in the West,
Speaker 1: we have the doctrine of original sin, which carried out
Speaker 1: in certain Christian traditions. Basically is we are so broken
Speaker 1: and so bad that without God's help, there's nothing we
Speaker 1: can do. And then there's Buddhism, which sort of states
Speaker 1: the opposite claim. It says, hey, underneath it all, we're
Speaker 1: all good, And like you, I've spent a lot of
Speaker 1: time looking at those two going I wonder which it is,
Speaker 1: And it's part of what has attracted me to the
Speaker 1: wolf parable, because the wolf parable you don't have to
Speaker 1: figure it out which is the original nature. I'm not
Speaker 1: entirely sure. I actually lean more towards we're good. Your
Speaker 1: book lays out a lot of evidence towards that. But
Speaker 1: but then again, as I said earlier, I think we
Speaker 1: can see in humans both things are there. The capacity
Speaker 1: to good and evil is there. It's clearly there. So
Speaker 1: how do we bring about that? That's what I think
Speaker 1: your book does. But I do think that you bring
Speaker 1: up a fundamental question early on, where you're debating to
Speaker 1: philosophers Hobbes and Rousseau, and you're saying that you can
Speaker 1: think of no other debate with stakes as high or
Speaker 1: ramifications as far reaching as a debate between those two.
Speaker 1: So lay out the stage for us there. There's a
Speaker 1: really old and incredibly influential idea in Western culture that
Speaker 1: scientists called veneer theory. Vneer theory is this notion that
Speaker 1: our civilization is just a thin veneer, just a thin
Speaker 1: layer and that below that lies raw human nature, which is,
Speaker 1: you know, not pretty deep down, we're just nasty and selfish.
Speaker 1: One of the philosophers who you know was most influential
Speaker 1: in sort of defending veneer theory was indeed Thomas Hobbes.
Speaker 1: You could argue by the way that original sin, as
Speaker 1: you talked about, is also a form of aneer theory.
Speaker 1: But Thomas Hobbes was a philosopher in the seventies century
Speaker 1: British philosopher who argued that back in the state of nature,
Speaker 1: when we were still nomadic and to gatherers, and as
Speaker 1: you probably know, we've been nomadican to gatherers for the
Speaker 1: biggest part of our history, you know, for around of
Speaker 1: the time we've been on this planet. We roamed around
Speaker 1: as hunter gatherers. And Thomas Hobbes thought that back then
Speaker 1: we lived lives that were, in his famous words, nasty, brutish,
Speaker 1: and short, and that we also engaged in some kind
Speaker 1: of what he called a war of all against all. Yes,
Speaker 1: people were free back then, but the consequences were terrible, right,
Speaker 1: because if people deep down into selfish and nasty and evil,
Speaker 1: then over asily if you give them freedom, the results
Speaker 1: will be horrible, and therefore he said, we gotta basically
Speaker 1: give up our freedom. And at some point he also argued,
Speaker 1: we did that. We gave up our freedom and we
Speaker 1: got security in return. How did we do it well
Speaker 1: by appointing a Leviathan. This is sort of a concept
Speaker 1: named after a biblical sea monster. What he meant is
Speaker 1: that we basically appoint some really powerful people to keep
Speaker 1: us in check, elite kings, queens, princess princesses. Halbs argued
Speaker 1: that because we cannot trust each other, we need people
Speaker 1: at the top to control us. You know, it's a
Speaker 1: very short summary, but that's basically his view. Jean Jacques
Speaker 1: Rousseau was a French philosopher who lived around a century
Speaker 1: later and argued the exact opposite. Basically, what he said
Speaker 1: is that in the state of nature, when we were
Speaker 1: nomadican together as lives was actually pretty good. We were
Speaker 1: a relatively healthy society, was quite eguilitarian, and everything went
Speaker 1: wrong in the moment we settled down and when someone said,
Speaker 1: and this is a really famous passage in Rousseau's essay
Speaker 1: on the Origin of in Equality, where he argues that
Speaker 1: the moment the first person said, look, this piece of
Speaker 1: land here, that's mine, you know, and when people believe
Speaker 1: them or didn't say, you know, you're an idiot, go away.
Speaker 1: You know, the land is well is everyone's possession. That's
Speaker 1: the moment when everything went wrong, you know, that's when
Speaker 1: we got indeed, hierarchy and elites and the patriarchy and
Speaker 1: all the terrible stuff and the diseases and the pandemics
Speaker 1: and wars. But we should never have given up our freedom.
Speaker 1: So this is a fundamental opposition in Western philosophy. Hopes
Speaker 1: on the one hand, Rousseaux on the other hand, And
Speaker 1: for an incredibly long time, Rousseau has been dismissed as
Speaker 1: the naive, utopian, romantic French idiot, while Hobbs has often
Speaker 1: been described as the father of realism. Right, he had
Speaker 1: a pessimistic message, but at least he was realistic about
Speaker 1: what the world is really like. Well, maybe you see
Speaker 1: where I'm going with this. What I try to argue
Speaker 1: in the book is that actually, all this time, Rousseau
Speaker 1: was the real realist. And if we look at the
Speaker 1: latest evidence we have from sociology, archaeology, anthropology, and you
Speaker 1: name it, it actually seems to be the case that
Speaker 1: a lot of the modern scientific evidence points in the
Speaker 1: direction that Rousseau was also trying to lead us to. So, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's sort of the state of the book. So the
Speaker 1: whole book seeks to answer this question. So I always
Speaker 1: feel I sometimes ask questions in this role where I'm like, well,
Speaker 1: this is a dumb question because somebody spent four pages
Speaker 1: answering it and I'm asking them to answer it in
Speaker 1: two minutes. But could you give us just a sampling
Speaker 1: of some of the scientific evidence that you're seeing that
Speaker 1: says that, hey, Rousseau is more on the mark than Hobbs.
Speaker 1: I guess what I find the most exciting are the
Speaker 1: developments in evolutionary anthropology or biology. Scientists have been asking
Speaker 1: themselves the question for an incredibly long time, what makes
Speaker 1: us special as a species? Why have we conquered the globe?
Speaker 1: Why not the in the end of thals or some
Speaker 1: of the other hominate species, Why not the chimpanzees in
Speaker 1: the bonobo? Is what makes us special as a species.
Speaker 1: And for a long time, we really like to believe
Speaker 1: that we're just really smart, Right, We've got these huge
Speaker 1: brains that consume an enormous amount of energy um, and
Speaker 1: that that's probably the case, you know, we're just geniuses
Speaker 1: compared to other animals. Well, it seems to be a
Speaker 1: lovely explanation, but the problem is is that if you
Speaker 1: do an intelligence test and you let a human toddler
Speaker 1: compete with a pig, for example, or a chimpanzee, and
Speaker 1: quite often the animals win, you know, there's there's really
Speaker 1: very limited evidence that individually we are so smart. I mean,
Speaker 1: collectively we are really smart. Right, we can produce wonderful things,
Speaker 1: like I'm using a microphone right now. That's incredible piece
Speaker 1: of technology, and looking at a screen, I have no
Speaker 1: clue what's going on in my computer at the moment.
Speaker 1: It's brilliant. But obviously individually, I have no idea. I
Speaker 1: can count to ten, but I couldn't have come up
Speaker 1: with the numerical system on my own. So individually humans
Speaker 1: are just really in put in, pretty much idiots basically.
Speaker 1: And so what evolutionary biologists now argue is that it's
Speaker 1: not our intelligence, but it's actually our friendliness that has
Speaker 1: made all the difference. And they even talk about the
Speaker 1: notion of survival of the friendliest and it really means
Speaker 1: what you think it means. So for millennia when we
Speaker 1: lived as Nomadican togethers, it was actually the friendliest among
Speaker 1: us who had the most kids and had the biggest
Speaker 1: chance of passing on their genes to the next generation.
Speaker 1: And because we sort of became better at co operating
Speaker 1: and living together, we started living in bigger societies, and
Speaker 1: we started learning from each other. And it's really this
Speaker 1: capacity of what what scientists called social learning that distinguishes
Speaker 1: from other animals. You know, we're just really really good
Speaker 1: at learning from each other. And that only happens, you know,
Speaker 1: if you're a little bit playful and if you're friendly enough,
Speaker 1: if you're this arrogant narcissist, then you're not going to
Speaker 1: learn much from other people. Right. So in the book,
Speaker 1: I make the comparisons with the Neanderthals. The Neanderthals were
Speaker 1: probably much smarder than us, right, we know they have
Speaker 1: bigger brains. In a way, you could argue that they
Speaker 1: were MacBook pros and where MacBook airs. But the difference
Speaker 1: is that we have WiFi, so we're connected to one another,
Speaker 1: and their WIFEI was not working all that well, right,
Speaker 1: And it's this connection that makes all the difference. Because
Speaker 1: intelligence is not about individuals. It's about what you learn
Speaker 1: from each other, what you can build collectively, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 1: So we have a lot of proof now in evolutionary
Speaker 1: anthropology that that is in the case that on a
Speaker 1: biological level you can see still in our bodies and
Speaker 1: in our DNA today that we actually are a product
Speaker 1: of survival of the friendliest. Yeah, that idea of a
Speaker 1: toddler not being smarter than a pig. Obviously, now as
Speaker 1: a fifty year old, I am hopefully a little smarter
Speaker 1: than a pig, right, I can I can read and
Speaker 1: do all sorts of things a pig can't do. And
Speaker 1: so what you're saying is it's it's the fact that
Speaker 1: that toddler has the capacity to learn from everyone around
Speaker 1: him and synthesize all the ideas that are coming from
Speaker 1: all the different people that allows that toddler to not
Speaker 1: read Maine at the level of a pig, but to
Speaker 1: grow far beyond. It is because of that social learning capacity,
Speaker 1: and that we are in essence reaping tens of thousands
Speaker 1: of years of that compounding benefit. Yes, exactly, exactly. We
Speaker 1: just get an incredible, huge inheritance basically from those who
Speaker 1: came before us, right, the language we speak, the buildings
Speaker 1: that we live in, the technologies that we use. If
Speaker 1: you think about where wealth comes from, you know, often
Speaker 1: there's this illusion that they're self made men and women
Speaker 1: who make a living on their own and create their
Speaker 1: own wealth. Wow, that's not We are so utterly dependent
Speaker 1: on other people and on the generations who came before us.
Speaker 1: Almost all wealth is created by by others and by
Speaker 1: by society in general. That's really fundamental, I think if
Speaker 1: you want to understand what makes humans special and what
Speaker 1: distinguishes from other animals, and as I said, you know,
Speaker 1: it's also in our biology. So one of the really
Speaker 1: striking facts that I discovered what was researching the book,
Speaker 1: is that we're pretty much the only animal in the
Speaker 1: animal kingdom with the ability to blush, Which is really strange, Right,
Speaker 1: Why would you involuntarily give away your feelings to someone else?
Speaker 1: What could the evolutionary advantage have been? How did that
Speaker 1: help us survive the ice age? You know? Why was
Speaker 1: blushing good for us as a species? And the answer
Speaker 1: that scientists now give is will blushing helps to establish trust.
Speaker 1: It's really hard to distrust or strongly dislike someone who's
Speaker 1: just there's something and daring about someone who's blushing, right,
Speaker 1: It really connects you to that person in a way.
Speaker 1: It's basically signed that I can feel shame and I
Speaker 1: care about what you think. And it's unique. It's something
Speaker 1: that Darwin, the father of evolutionary theory, already discovered in
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century. And he sent letters to oil of
Speaker 1: his context around the globe and he said, do people
Speaker 1: blush there as well? And do people blushed there as well?
Speaker 1: And they all send them letters back and say, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they do it here as well. And it's a unique
Speaker 1: human ability. Yeah, and I think this idea of survival
Speaker 1: of the friendliness is an interesting one. And then sort
Speaker 1: of flips it on its head, right because you quote
Speaker 1: someone who says, the mechanism that makes us the kindest species,
Speaker 1: this ultra social learning machines that we are, also makes
Speaker 1: us the cruelest species. Talk a little bit about how
Speaker 1: that works. Yeah, Obviously, when you write a book about
Speaker 1: human kindness or you try to make the case that
Speaker 1: people deep down are just decent, well, you've got to
Speaker 1: talk about the elephant in the room as well. We
Speaker 1: also seem to be the cruelest species in the animal Kingdom.
Speaker 1: We do horrible things that no other animal would ever
Speaker 1: dream of doing or ever come up with, you know,
Speaker 1: concentration camps, prisons, genocide, ethnic cleansing, ogswitech, you name it.
Speaker 1: I've never heard of a penguin or koala or think
Speaker 1: of any other animal who do horrible stuff like that. Right,
Speaker 1: So if you sort of say, well, I do not
Speaker 1: believe in veneer theory, I do not believe that people
Speaker 1: are deep down just nasty and evil and selfish and
Speaker 1: arrogant and violent, then you have to come up with
Speaker 1: a different explanation, right, and then the mystery only becomes bigger. Now,
Speaker 1: what's so fascinating about this new development in biology is
Speaker 1: that some of these scientists that argue that the thing
Speaker 1: that makes us successful is also our dark side. So
Speaker 1: humans are not just a product of survival of the friendliest,
Speaker 1: they're also incredibly group ish, right. We very much want
Speaker 1: to be part of a group. We just want to
Speaker 1: be light basically, and that is almost as important for us,
Speaker 1: or maybe even as important as food or sex, right,
Speaker 1: or these other important things in life. Loneliness, for example,
Speaker 1: is similar to smoking fifteen cigarettes today in terms of
Speaker 1: the effects it has on your health again assigned by
Speaker 1: the way that we are not individuals, right, we we
Speaker 1: really really need each other. But then if you study
Speaker 1: some of the biggest atrocities in human history, the incredibly
Speaker 1: uncomfortable thing you'll see is that we quite often do
Speaker 1: the most terrible things in the name of friendliness, in
Speaker 1: the name of loyalty, because we do not want to
Speaker 1: let our friends down. So I've got one chapter in
Speaker 1: the book about what happened in with the German army
Speaker 1: and when it was clear the Germans were going to
Speaker 1: lose the war. At that very late moment in the war,
Speaker 1: the Germans were still fighting very ferociously, very hard, right,
Speaker 1: they were like basically fanatics, and the Allied psychologists couldn't
Speaker 1: understand it. You know, what was going on? Why why
Speaker 1: did they keep fighting when you know it's it's really
Speaker 1: clear they're gonna lose the war. We've already had D Day,
Speaker 1: the Russians are coming from the east. And then psychologists
Speaker 1: started interviewing prisoners of war. At first they thought that
Speaker 1: these soldiers must have been brainwashed, right, that they must
Speaker 1: be ideological fanatics or something like that. But the reality
Speaker 1: was that there was one incredibly powerful force driving them,
Speaker 1: which was comarades shaft, you know, comradeship. They were fighting
Speaker 1: for each other, for their friends. They were not all
Speaker 1: that ideologically motivated. Turned out, the German army command knew this,
Speaker 1: so they really try to keep friends together and not
Speaker 1: separate them because they knew that these soldiers, they had
Speaker 1: come through so much and they would take a bullet
Speaker 1: any time, you know, for their friends. And that was
Speaker 1: actually one of the main reasons why the Germans kept fighting,
Speaker 1: you know, which is obviously in a way it's it's
Speaker 1: a beautiful side of human nature, but it caused such
Speaker 1: immense suffering and tragedy at the same time. So that
Speaker 1: is one of the paradox is in my book. It's
Speaker 1: it's become a really paradoxical book in a way, much
Speaker 1: more paradoxical than I thought it would be when I
Speaker 1: started finding it. I think there is a lot of
Speaker 1: paradox in it because I think we in history and
Speaker 1: life is complicated, and I love that you really keep
Speaker 1: a lot of room open for this is what the
Speaker 1: evidence appears to be pointing to, and we only know
Speaker 1: so much, you know. It's sort of back to that
Speaker 1: idea about the new atheists, right The thing that rubbed
Speaker 1: me the most wrong about that was this belief that,
Speaker 1: like I know the answer, but none of us know
Speaker 1: the answer to whether there's a god out there or not,
Speaker 1: Like that is a question that we don't know. And
Speaker 1: so the people who insist that it's true and are
Speaker 1: very dogmatic about it appear to me to be as
Speaker 1: far off as the people who insist absolutely that there
Speaker 1: is not. Both of them. To me, I go and
Speaker 1: I think this gets back to and where I want
Speaker 1: to take the rest of this conversation, which is back
Speaker 1: or what are the consequences of this? So if I
Speaker 1: at least say, you know what, I'm willing to believe that,
Speaker 1: even if I just move halfway and I go, all right,
Speaker 1: you know what, I don't buy veneer theory. I don't
Speaker 1: think people are all bad. I don't think that left
Speaker 1: or own devices, everyone will look out for themselves and
Speaker 1: do awful things. I'm just going to move to the middle.
Speaker 1: The middle says, you know what, I believe people can
Speaker 1: have a really good nature to them. Let's say we
Speaker 1: get people that far. At the end of the book,
Speaker 1: you lay out some rules for you know, here's how
Speaker 1: you might conduct your life or or more specifically for you,
Speaker 1: what it's meant to you for how you want to
Speaker 1: conduct your life with this new I would say broader
Speaker 1: and you would say more realistic view of human nature.
Speaker 1: So let's talk what some of those are. And I
Speaker 1: think the first one is really important, which is when
Speaker 1: in doubt assume the best, well, just as a caveat.
Speaker 1: I must be honest. Initially I didn't want to write
Speaker 1: a self out book, right because I really believe that
Speaker 1: the promise of this idea lies on an institutional or
Speaker 1: structural level. Right. Humans are shaped and our behavior is
Speaker 1: shaped by, you know, the schools that we go to
Speaker 1: or the workplaces are you know, our democracies or our prisons,
Speaker 1: And a lot of the chapters are about that. What
Speaker 1: would a school look like if you assume that kids
Speaker 1: are naturally curious and playful and have intrinsic motivation? What
Speaker 1: would a workplace look like if you believe that you
Speaker 1: can just trust your employees and you don't need all
Speaker 1: these layers of management. What would a prison look like
Speaker 1: if you even trust the inmates and if you allow
Speaker 1: them to socialize with the guards, etcetera. And you know,
Speaker 1: they talk about the criminal justice system in Norway that
Speaker 1: is very counter and do that. They take it very
Speaker 1: far there, But it turns out they also have the
Speaker 1: lowest recidivism rate in the world, you know, the lowest
Speaker 1: chance that someone who's went to prison will commit another
Speaker 1: crime after here she gets out of prison. So I
Speaker 1: think that's the most important thing, is that we've got
Speaker 1: to look at sort of what are the institutional consequences here.
Speaker 1: But then again I also just couldn't resist because writing
Speaker 1: the book changed me. It changed my own life. When
Speaker 1: you start looking at other humans in a different way
Speaker 1: and you're just taking all this evidence that we have
Speaker 1: from all these disciplines, it just influences you because everything
Speaker 1: starts with your view of human nature, how you look
Speaker 1: at other people. And indeed, the first rule of life
Speaker 1: is when in doubt, assume the best. Very often we
Speaker 1: do the opposite right, very often, especially when there's a
Speaker 1: little bit of distance in the communication and we don't
Speaker 1: really know how to interpret what other people are saying
Speaker 1: to us. Then we're in doubt and we often assume
Speaker 1: the worst. Many people recognize this from I don't know,
Speaker 1: communicating on WhatsApp. Someone sends you a weird emoji and
Speaker 1: you're like I should interpret that what is that person
Speaker 1: thinking about me? And sometimes then you get a vicious
Speaker 1: cycle of distrust, right, and you assume the worst, and
Speaker 1: then you behave in a little bit of a nasty way,
Speaker 1: and then that other person will think that's that's not
Speaker 1: very friendly, and the relationship deteriorates. What I think you
Speaker 1: should do is when you're in doubt, you should always
Speaker 1: assume the best in other people. And I've got three
Speaker 1: reasons for it. In the first place, statistically, you'll be
Speaker 1: right most of the time. Most people are pretty decent,
Speaker 1: so you just have the best adlts if you assume
Speaker 1: the best. Secondly, your behavior could actually have positive consequences.
Speaker 1: If someone really doesn't mean well, but you still react
Speaker 1: in a positive way, well, I could actually have some
Speaker 1: positive consequences. This is a phenomenon that has been described
Speaker 1: in psychology very often, you know, nonconformative behavior, basically like
Speaker 1: turning the other cheek. Right, It's very hard to stay
Speaker 1: angry or or stay nasty if someone just responds in
Speaker 1: a kind way. The third reason, and maybe that's the
Speaker 1: most important one, is even if someone is just a
Speaker 1: calm artist, you know, and it's just trying to rip
Speaker 1: you off. Basically, I think in a way you should
Speaker 1: accept it, because if you never want to be called
Speaker 1: in your whole life, what do you do. Well, You've
Speaker 1: got to distrust pretty much all the strangers that you
Speaker 1: ever meet, right, You've got to live your whole life
Speaker 1: distrusting most of the people. I'm not willing to pay
Speaker 1: that price. So what I've said to myself is I
Speaker 1: just accepted that I'll be calmed a couple of times
Speaker 1: in my life. And if now people tell me that
Speaker 1: they've never been called, then I always tell them, you've
Speaker 1: got to see a therapist. You know, your basic attitude
Speaker 1: to life is not trusting enough. That's very different from
Speaker 1: the way I used to think about it. Very often,
Speaker 1: when people are the victim of some kind of scam,
Speaker 1: they feel the shame right that they've been stupid, that
Speaker 1: they've been naive. And what I'm saying to them is, look,
Speaker 1: you should not be ashamed of your own humanity. It
Speaker 1: is deep within your own biology and here d NA.
Speaker 1: You know you've evolved to trust other people, and you
Speaker 1: should never be ashamed of that. The cost of believing
Speaker 1: the worst in people so that you protect yourself, that
Speaker 1: cost is to me, like you said, I'm not willing
Speaker 1: to pay it. It's a huge cost. I used to
Speaker 1: see this in a A. I'm a recovering alcoholic addic,
Speaker 1: and I would see people come early into a A.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of trust that you have to have there.
Speaker 1: You're trusting in a program, you're trusting in a sponsor,
Speaker 1: you're sharing things you know, and people would be very distrustful.
Speaker 1: And you know, I just used to say, like, the
Speaker 1: benefits of trusting are that you get your whole life back,
Speaker 1: you recover and you live this wonderful life. Yes, maybe
Speaker 1: you tell somebody something in confidence and they share it. Okay, yep,
Speaker 1: it happens. That price is so small compared to the
Speaker 1: cost of not trusting, which is basically for an alcoholic
Speaker 1: or an addict, is you're going to go back out,
Speaker 1: you might very well die. When we paint it that
Speaker 1: starkly and addicts sort of amplifies all these things, we
Speaker 1: can see it really clearly. But if we de escalate
Speaker 1: that to more of a normal situation, it's still the
Speaker 1: same cost, you know, which is that believing the worst
Speaker 1: in people takes a huge psychological cost. It's also true
Speaker 1: for a forgiveness. If you look at the literature on forgiveness,
Speaker 1: it's very interesting that the people who've thought about this
Speaker 1: deeply emphasized over and over again is that you forgive someone,
Speaker 1: and in the first place, you do it for yourself
Speaker 1: because you want to liberate yourself. In a way, for
Speaker 1: giving someone is a selfish act, right, because you do
Speaker 1: not want to be imprisoned anymore. You do not want
Speaker 1: to be helped back by that thing other person is
Speaker 1: done to you. I think that's a very powerful way
Speaker 1: of looking at it. What you said also reminds me
Speaker 1: of what we do as a society. When policy makers
Speaker 1: are politicians write a law, they think about the one
Speaker 1: percent instead of right. So I think about the whole
Speaker 1: welfare system, where the benefit system in the Western world,
Speaker 1: we've created these systems where poor people have to prove
Speaker 1: over and over again that they're really depressed enough, that
Speaker 1: they're really sick enough, that they're a hopeless case who
Speaker 1: will never get anything done in their lives. And once
Speaker 1: they've proved that on and of forms and in enough
Speaker 1: interviews with government officials, then maybe at the end of
Speaker 1: the day will give them a little bit of assistance. Right.
Speaker 1: But then we've already created a form of dependency and depression.
Speaker 1: Right if you go through that process, you'll feel absolutely miserable,
Speaker 1: and sure you're you're not going to find a job
Speaker 1: anytime soon because the whole system made you miserable. What
Speaker 1: would happen if we just give people guarantee basic income,
Speaker 1: which is I think one of the really exciting new
Speaker 1: ideas out there. Just give people a monthly grant that's
Speaker 1: enough to pay for your basic needs, food, shelter, education, clothing. Well,
Speaker 1: a couple of people will probably waste it, you know,
Speaker 1: there's some evidence that around one of people will waste
Speaker 1: it on I don't know, drugs, alcohol, watch Netflix all day, etcetera.
Speaker 1: But are we gonna base our laws, procedures, and institutions,
Speaker 1: you know, on them on their behavior or are we
Speaker 1: going to look at the who will take this venture
Speaker 1: capital and do great things with it? And again, you know,
Speaker 1: this is not just based on my belief or how
Speaker 1: I would like people to be, but there's an enormous
Speaker 1: amount of evidence. You know, we've had a lot of experiments,
Speaker 1: especially in the United States, by the way, that was
Speaker 1: used to be a pioneer here in the seventies and
Speaker 1: the eighties there were a huge basic income experiments in
Speaker 1: the US that showed convincingly that if you just trust people,
Speaker 1: if you invest in them, you'll get a huge return
Speaker 1: on the investment. But please look at how most people behave,
Speaker 1: and do not base your whole laws and you know,
Speaker 1: and your whole society on that small minority. Before I
Speaker 1: did this, I was in UH software entrepreneurship and I
Speaker 1: used to joke that about the time I wanted to
Speaker 1: leave the company was about the time when we got
Speaker 1: an HR department. And this is not against HR people.
Speaker 1: HR people are wonderful, But what starts to happen is
Speaker 1: that exactly what you said, we start writing a bunch
Speaker 1: of rules to deal with the one or two percent
Speaker 1: that are really problematic, and those rules then constrict everybody
Speaker 1: else who's going to behave in a better way. It's
Speaker 1: not that you don't have to have ways of coping with, yes,
Speaker 1: the one or two percent, but to mold the whole
Speaker 1: system to that to prevent that one little bad outcome
Speaker 1: to me is kind of I think what you're getting
Speaker 1: at with so much of the book is that we
Speaker 1: go way out of our way to make sure that
Speaker 1: you know, the bad apple doesn't get part of his apple.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm screwing analogies all of here. But you know,
Speaker 1: taking it back to the personal level, is that same
Speaker 1: idea of if I designed my whole life like you said,
Speaker 1: to avoid getting conned so that nobody ever gets one
Speaker 1: over on me, that's a bad outcome. And then I
Speaker 1: think the second piece that you talked about, and I
Speaker 1: wanted to kind of hit it, is this sort of
Speaker 1: Pygmalion effect, is that how you pronounce it. Share a
Speaker 1: little bit about what that is, because I think that
Speaker 1: and its opposite are really powerful and important ideas here. Well,
Speaker 1: it's basically the scientific proof for the wolf story. It
Speaker 1: was a scientist named Albert Rosenau who that some extraordinary
Speaker 1: research in the nineties sixties. What he did is he
Speaker 1: had rats, basically, and he had them in two cages,
Speaker 1: and on front of one of the cages was a
Speaker 1: sign that said, here are some really smart, super super
Speaker 1: intelligent rats. And then in front of the other, the
Speaker 1: second cage, there was a sign that said these are
Speaker 1: some standard dom lab rats. And then he asked his students, okay,
Speaker 1: can you take the rats out of their cages one
Speaker 1: by one? And put them in this maze and then
Speaker 1: see how long it will take them to find the
Speaker 1: exit of the maze. And what was really um well,
Speaker 1: in a way not very surprising, is that it turned
Speaker 1: out that the super smart intelligent rats were much quicker. Right,
Speaker 1: students put them in there and they clocked, and they
Speaker 1: indeed turned out they were much faster when they were
Speaker 1: looking for the exit of the maze. But then Rosenthal
Speaker 1: the scientists set to his students that you know what, actually,
Speaker 1: these are all just standard lab rats. You know, there
Speaker 1: was nothing spacial about the super smart rats at all.
Speaker 1: But then the question was, but the results were real
Speaker 1: right in theory, super smart rats were much faster, They
Speaker 1: did find the exit of the maze much fosters that
Speaker 1: the question was what was going on here? And Rosenthal
Speaker 1: had real difficulty when he was trying to publish his
Speaker 1: work because most scientifical journals would not accept it because
Speaker 1: they said it couldn't have been true, right, that didn't
Speaker 1: happen because you know, these labs were all just standard
Speaker 1: lab rats. It took a while, but at some point
Speaker 1: Rosenthal realized what had happened. It was the power of expectations.
Speaker 1: So the students took out the rats, and there was
Speaker 1: something in the way they handled the really smart rats,
Speaker 1: you know, with a kind of expectation, like you can
Speaker 1: do that, you're super awesome, you're super smart, you know,
Speaker 1: find the exit right, and that made the difference. He
Speaker 1: called this the Pygmalion effects. It's named after some Greek myth.
Speaker 1: And since then, you know, it's improved time and time
Speaker 1: again in many, many different contexts. The most important context,
Speaker 1: by the way, is in schools. So researchers have shown
Speaker 1: that if you tell teachers that there are certain kids
Speaker 1: with you know, I don't know, extraordinary ability, even if
Speaker 1: that is not true, but the teachers don't realize that that. Indeed,
Speaker 1: these students will start to do much better on all
Speaker 1: kinds of standardized tests. It's the power of expectations. The
Speaker 1: teachers will start to treat them in a way they
Speaker 1: expect a lot of them. We humans, we are the
Speaker 1: stories that we tell ourselves. We become what we think
Speaker 1: what we will become. It's so important also, you know,
Speaker 1: for people in management, for in schools to understand that
Speaker 1: there are expectations. They're not just expectations, you know, they
Speaker 1: influence the real world. And also for the worst. You know,
Speaker 1: it's one of the poisonous way in which racism does
Speaker 1: it works, you know, the tyranny of low expectations. People
Speaker 1: really behave less well if you expect less of them.
Speaker 1: It was really one of the most important findings of
Speaker 1: psychology in the twentieth century, where we now have a
Speaker 1: huge amount of evidence for Yeah, it's so amazing. It's
Speaker 1: amazing that that translates to the way a rat is handled,
Speaker 1: that it can sort of be that implicit, you know,
Speaker 1: whereas when we get into human relationships, we are far
Speaker 1: more direct. It's what we say, you know, it's how
Speaker 1: we look at people. It's a very direct thing. And
Speaker 1: there's some quote and will never get it right, but
Speaker 1: it's one of my favorites. And I don't even remember
Speaker 1: who said it, but it was something along the lines
Speaker 1: of it's always good to believe the best in people.
Speaker 1: They're more likely to act that way because of it.
Speaker 1: Just even in an argument with somebody we care about,
Speaker 1: if we can reorient in that argument to like, well,
Speaker 1: all right, this is a person I care about, this
Speaker 1: is someone I love. They want to be happy just
Speaker 1: like I do. And it's difficult, right, So we gotta
Speaker 1: admit it's difficult. It's difficult when we try to do
Speaker 1: it with those who are close to us, you know,
Speaker 1: with our friends and our family members, and you know,
Speaker 1: I have some sometimes arguments with my wife where I
Speaker 1: behave in a way that's not really in line with
Speaker 1: my book, I must admit so. But then it becomes
Speaker 1: even more difficult when we think about the strangers, the
Speaker 1: people who are farther away from us, right, it sometimes
Speaker 1: becomes very counterintuitive. I mentioned the criminal justice system in
Speaker 1: a place like Norway where they have prisons, you know,
Speaker 1: maximum security prisons, and people looked up there have done
Speaker 1: terrible things, you know, murderous rapists. But still the prisoners
Speaker 1: get the freedom to socialize with the guards, to make music.
Speaker 1: They've got their own music studio, they've got their own
Speaker 1: music label that it's called Criminal Records. They really get
Speaker 1: a chance basically too, of themselves. And to be honest,
Speaker 1: when I first started studying it, it just felt wrong
Speaker 1: to me. It was like, come on, these people have
Speaker 1: done horrible things, and what will the victims or the
Speaker 1: parents of the victims think about this? But then I
Speaker 1: started looking at the results. You know, as I mentioned
Speaker 1: the scientific evidence convincingly shows that it really really works.
Speaker 1: It's also, by the way, much cheaper because American prisons
Speaker 1: are often universities for crime. Right, people go in there
Speaker 1: for a small drug offense and they come out as
Speaker 1: hard and drug criminals or you know, people who never
Speaker 1: get a proper job again and pay taxes. So that's
Speaker 1: very weird. You know, you've had these really expensive institutions
Speaker 1: funded by taxpayers that basically create more crimes. So you
Speaker 1: can turn it around, but it's difficult, so you need
Speaker 1: to muster all your self control. Is one interview I
Speaker 1: saw with a father who lost his son in the
Speaker 1: terrorist at texts of Bravick. You'll remember this in two
Speaker 1: thousand and eleven, when some right wing fanatic murdered you know,
Speaker 1: dozens of teenagers with some kind of political camp on
Speaker 1: on an island in our way, and it was it
Speaker 1: was terrific, and the interviewer asked the dad, you know,
Speaker 1: you want the death sentence right for this guy. You
Speaker 1: want to torture him and murder him, etcetera, but you
Speaker 1: want vengeance right. And it was credibly moving moment because
Speaker 1: the dad said, well, look, I have thought about that
Speaker 1: quite a bit, but I don't want to sink to
Speaker 1: that level. I'm so much better than that. And I
Speaker 1: agree with the Prime Minister of Norway who at the
Speaker 1: time said, when the attacks happened, we're going to respond
Speaker 1: with more openness, with more transparency and more democracy, and
Speaker 1: that's how will defeat this evil ideology. It's difficult, but
Speaker 1: it's really worth it. Let's talk about temper your empathy,
Speaker 1: train your compassion. These are two words that are often
Speaker 1: used synonymously, but they don't necessarily mean the same thing.
Speaker 1: Talk about empathy versus compassion in this case, and why
Speaker 1: we want to develop one over the other. So people
Speaker 1: have obviously different definitions. But when I use the word empathy,
Speaker 1: what I mean is this capacity that humans have and
Speaker 1: also quite a few other animals have. By the way,
Speaker 1: is to imagine ourselves in someone else's shoes. Is to
Speaker 1: really feel, on an emotional mental level what other people
Speaker 1: are feeling. And a lot of people think that empathy
Speaker 1: is the solution to so many of our problems. Right.
Speaker 1: President Obama talked about that, you know, when he was
Speaker 1: asked what do we do against cenophobia and racimsm and
Speaker 1: he said, as as so many people say, well, we
Speaker 1: need more empathy. Right, we got to imagine what it's
Speaker 1: like to be that other person. And for a long
Speaker 1: time I also believe that indeed empathy is the answer.
Speaker 1: But I changed my mind. If you now look at
Speaker 1: some of the latest scientific evid and there's one really
Speaker 1: important book written by Paul Bloom, a psychologist. It's a
Speaker 1: funny title. It's called Against Empathy, And what he shows
Speaker 1: in the book is that empathy is not some light
Speaker 1: that lights up the whole world and lets you see
Speaker 1: everything clearly. Now, it's more like a spotlight. It's a
Speaker 1: searchlight that helps you to focus on one person or
Speaker 1: one group while the rest of the world fades into
Speaker 1: the background. Why is it problematic? Because we just give
Speaker 1: too much attention then to that one person in one group.
Speaker 1: If you think about the Middle East, for example, what's
Speaker 1: the problem in the Middle East? Well, in many ways,
Speaker 1: there's too much empathy there and not enough compassion, not
Speaker 1: more distance, rational compassion. Right where people try to zoom
Speaker 1: out a little bit. What happens. The Palestinians commit an
Speaker 1: attack and there are victims on the Israeli side, and
Speaker 1: there's obviously a lot of empathy for the victims. And
Speaker 1: then We also know this from you know, quite a
Speaker 1: few studies, is that people who feel more empathy, they
Speaker 1: want more vengeance. So there's an attack from the Israelis
Speaker 1: and the Palestinians and there are again a lot of casualties,
Speaker 1: and people feel a lot of empathy for the victims,
Speaker 1: and he goes on and on and on. Right, So
Speaker 1: the problem there is not a lack of empathy. People
Speaker 1: feel an enormous amount of empathy for the victims, enormous
Speaker 1: and that's why they want action. What happened after nine
Speaker 1: eleven in the US, you know, it was like a
Speaker 1: tsunami of empathy, and we all know what happened after that.
Speaker 1: What we need here is something different, And what scientists
Speaker 1: have shown is is that there's a really distinct phenomenon
Speaker 1: that we call compassion. We can even see it in
Speaker 1: the brain, right, So when people feel compassion, a different
Speaker 1: part of the brain lights up. One of the ways
Speaker 1: to explain it is when you think about parenting. Right, So,
Speaker 1: as a parent, when your kid is afraid of the dark,
Speaker 1: you don't want to feel empathy, right. You don't want
Speaker 1: to imagine yourself in the kid's shoes. You don't want
Speaker 1: to be afraid of the dark as well. Right, you
Speaker 1: just wanna sit next to the kid and come for
Speaker 1: the kid and say, look, it's fine, you know, you
Speaker 1: don't have to worry about that. You know, Look, there
Speaker 1: are no monsters underneath your bad We can just check
Speaker 1: it out. Let's say, here, see no monster at all.
Speaker 1: And that's more the compassionate approach. It's more distant, it's
Speaker 1: a bit more rational as well. You care about the
Speaker 1: person and you want to help, right, So it's it's
Speaker 1: also about love. You don't allow yourself to be swept
Speaker 1: away by the suffering and the fair and the feelings
Speaker 1: of someone else. Right, you recognize that, Look, what you
Speaker 1: feel is what you feel, and I recognize it, and
Speaker 1: I see you, and I want to help you with it,
Speaker 1: but it's not what I feel. Right. I think that's
Speaker 1: a much wiser approach. And you mentioned Buddhism early in
Speaker 1: our conversation. I think that a lot of Buddhism is
Speaker 1: about trying to develop your compassion instead of your empathy. Yep.
Speaker 1: And I often think about this distinction, and I sometimes
Speaker 1: wonder whether empathy isn't a less developed form of compassion.
Speaker 1: What I mean by that is maybe it's a maybe
Speaker 1: it's a stage we have to have. It's a developmental stage.
Speaker 1: I have to be able to imagine, oh, other people
Speaker 1: feel like I feel. I have to be able to
Speaker 1: put myself in somebody else's shoes. So maybe it's a
Speaker 1: developmental stage. But as far as I develop, it becomes
Speaker 1: very problematic. So you know, maybe I develop then into
Speaker 1: more compassion, which is where I don't have to be
Speaker 1: in empathy all the time in order to still care
Speaker 1: about other people. Yeah, yeah, maybe empathy indeed could be
Speaker 1: the stepping stone, but it can also distract us from
Speaker 1: the bigger picture. I think you often see this with
Speaker 1: the way we treat our animals. So if I torture
Speaker 1: a chicken in my backyard and my neighbor sees it,
Speaker 1: and he's a rout girl, this is crazy. I'm going
Speaker 1: to call the police. Well, they'll lock me up, right,
Speaker 1: because it's pretty horrible to torture a chicken. But if
Speaker 1: there are hundreds of thousands, or well actually hundreds of
Speaker 1: millions of chickens locked up and they're you know, killed
Speaker 1: when they're forty days old, and they prefer food with
Speaker 1: pain killers because they're actually in pain all the time, well,
Speaker 1: we call it agro business. We we just call it. Well,
Speaker 1: that's just the way it is, and we're completely disconnected
Speaker 1: from the process. I often think that if people have
Speaker 1: to just watch a short video of what they eat,
Speaker 1: of what's on their plate, they wouldn't be able to
Speaker 1: eat it anymore. In that case, they don't feel the
Speaker 1: empathy because the distance is too great. We can feel
Speaker 1: a huge amount of empathy for someone who's in the
Speaker 1: news right a girl has fallen down well, and the
Speaker 1: whole country is obsessed with the question is she going
Speaker 1: to make it right? And we're all going to send
Speaker 1: money and dolls, et cetera to the family, and we're
Speaker 1: going to support them, and there's a crowdfund and millions
Speaker 1: come in. But at the same time, you know, we know,
Speaker 1: or we should know, that more to thirty million kids
Speaker 1: die every year from easily preventable causes like malaria and
Speaker 1: measles and diarrhea, and we also know what the solutions are.
Speaker 1: You know, you can just donate not all that much
Speaker 1: money to a highly effective charity such as Against Malaria Foundation,
Speaker 1: and you know that statistically speaking, I mean, you're going
Speaker 1: to say lives with that. But we don't do that
Speaker 1: because we don't feel it. Right, there's no identifiable victim.
Speaker 1: In many ways when we talk about those issues, empathy
Speaker 1: is not going to help us, right, We need something different, right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: That whole issue of distance is such a big thing,
Speaker 1: is that, you know, what we simply would not tolerate
Speaker 1: in front of us, we are willing to tolerate at
Speaker 1: a distance. And your book actually points out a out
Speaker 1: of examples of that. You know, we think, well, soldiers
Speaker 1: are all trained to kill, but that it's relatively hard
Speaker 1: to train somebody to want to kill somebody. And the
Speaker 1: more close up that combat is, say a bayonet versus
Speaker 1: pushing a button on a drone across the world, it's
Speaker 1: totally different. You know, one's relatively easy to do, the
Speaker 1: others really hard to do. Is one of the best
Speaker 1: kept secrets of psychology actually is that humans find it
Speaker 1: incredibly hard to kill someone else. There was American historian
Speaker 1: military man who discovered during the Second World War when
Speaker 1: he was allowed to travel on the Pacific Front and
Speaker 1: also in Europe and do a lot of group interviews
Speaker 1: with soldiers just after you know, they have been in
Speaker 1: a combat situation. What he discovered his name was Samuel Marcel.
Speaker 1: Was that only of soldiers actually fired their guns. Most
Speaker 1: couldn't do it. You know, these were just soldiers who
Speaker 1: had just been drafted. They had I don't know, six
Speaker 1: seven weeks of training. There were not natural born kill
Speaker 1: They couldn't do it. They came up with excuses when
Speaker 1: when the moment was there and they really had to
Speaker 1: pull the trigger, they couldn't do it. And this was
Speaker 1: not unique. You know, historians and psychologists have found a
Speaker 1: huge amount of evidence that this has happened all the
Speaker 1: time in war. Only with the rise of professional armies,
Speaker 1: you know that do a lot of conditioning and brainwashing,
Speaker 1: that phenomenon started to disappear. Then what happened, obviously you
Speaker 1: can clearly see this in the case of Vietnam, is
Speaker 1: that soldiers who had received training, conditioning sort of like
Speaker 1: puffle of conditioning training right where they learned them to
Speaker 1: shoot instinctively at targets. Well, the soldiers who then kill
Speaker 1: someone else often kill something within themselves as well, so
Speaker 1: they become traumatized by they develop PTSD, which is very strange.
Speaker 1: Right if you assume that humans are natural born killers,
Speaker 1: that were killer apes, right, and to go back to
Speaker 1: this veneer theory, then why would be become traumatized by
Speaker 1: killing someone else? Right, we should enjoy it, just like
Speaker 1: sex and eating food. Right, there should be some kind
Speaker 1: of evolutionary reward. But to the country, actually, we damage
Speaker 1: something within ourselves, which suggests to me that even though
Speaker 1: we're capable, in certain situations, highly complex situations, of doing
Speaker 1: horrific things, it's not exactly what we're born to do,
Speaker 1: because we also kill and destroy something in ourselves. That's
Speaker 1: really well said, and I think it's true. I think,
Speaker 1: circling all the way back to where we started with
Speaker 1: the wolf theory is these different things can get fed.
Speaker 1: We can choose to feed them. But to your point,
Speaker 1: our cultural institutions and our culture does a lot of
Speaker 1: the feeding for us. I think if we were to
Speaker 1: summarize a lot of what you're saying the book is
Speaker 1: that it's our structures, it's our institutions, it's our way
Speaker 1: of doing things that is feeding the bad wolf, which
Speaker 1: makes us think that the bad wolf is what is
Speaker 1: naturally there, when in reality, if you fed the good
Speaker 1: wolf consistently and all the time, and if that's what
Speaker 1: our societies and our institutions and our culture was set
Speaker 1: to do, we'd see a very different view of human entity,
Speaker 1: and that we need to start really trying to feed
Speaker 1: that better part of ourselves consistently and believe in it
Speaker 1: and see it. You know, before the conversation we talked
Speaker 1: about the situation in America. Right now you know that
Speaker 1: you've become the solution to many ways, and that you're
Speaker 1: bessimistic and maybe even a little bit desperate for the
Speaker 1: future of the country, right And then I think that's
Speaker 1: especially you know, before the election, and also you know
Speaker 1: from my perspective here in Europe is like is the
Speaker 1: country going to whole? How far can this go? Is
Speaker 1: there at some point when it breaks, when something really snaps.
Speaker 1: I think it's helpful to remember that, Yes, there's an
Speaker 1: incredibly called it a poisonous system that every day in
Speaker 1: so many ways, brings out the worst in people. But
Speaker 1: it's the system, right, and that can change because it
Speaker 1: has been created by people, so it can also be
Speaker 1: changed by people. It's not necessarily the people themselves. So
Speaker 1: those people who you disagree with on the other side
Speaker 1: in so many ways, they're just like you. They've got
Speaker 1: the same human nature and they have the same instinct
Speaker 1: deep down, they just live in a different world in
Speaker 1: a different context, and we got to try and build bridges, etcetera.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's a bit of a cliche what I'm saying here,
Speaker 1: but I think it's still incredibly important to remember that
Speaker 1: that in the end, we're so so similar to one another.
Speaker 1: I agree. I mean, there's a teaching from Buddhism that
Speaker 1: influenced me so strongly, which was just recognized that everybody
Speaker 1: underneath wants to be happy like you are. And so
Speaker 1: then at that point, if I can orient that way
Speaker 1: towards somebody, then what we're debating as strategies, I'm not
Speaker 1: seeing them as fundamentally different than me. I'm seeing the
Speaker 1: strategies they're employing. Okay, we can debate those, but underneath,
Speaker 1: we are people. And I do even despite what I
Speaker 1: was saying beforehand about some of the frustrations I've seen
Speaker 1: in the US about like mask wearing and some of that,
Speaker 1: I still do believe in the genuine goodness of most people.
Speaker 1: I really believe it's there, and the question is just
Speaker 1: how do we cultivate it? How do we cultivate it
Speaker 1: in ourselves and how do we cultivated in others? Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1: There's a saying from Nelsone Dela that I really love.
Speaker 1: He once said that it's easier to change the world
Speaker 1: than to change yourself. So if you can change yourself,
Speaker 1: then changing the world is piece of cake. Ye. My background,
Speaker 1: maybe some people would see me as some kind of
Speaker 1: van and a looney leftist or like a progressive. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I personally see myself as someone who tries
Speaker 1: to combine ideas, you know, from both conservatives and progressive
Speaker 1: Something like basic income, for example, is both quite left
Speaker 1: wing and about right wing idea. It's it's both about
Speaker 1: freedom and about equality. So there's a tendency a wrong
Speaker 1: people who are on the left or progressive right that
Speaker 1: they often dismissed the importance of self help and individual change.
Speaker 1: They say, no, we've got to talk about Amazon and
Speaker 1: Jeff Bezos and the evil system and the structure right,
Speaker 1: and they got to pay their taxes, and we gotta
Speaker 1: talk about inequality and blah blah blah. We got to
Speaker 1: talk about the big things and don't talk about the
Speaker 1: individual because that's neoliberal or something like that. And to
Speaker 1: be honest, I used to believe that as well. But
Speaker 1: again as I've become older, and I've looked at some
Speaker 1: of the people I really really admire, you know, some
Speaker 1: of the people who really changed the course of world history.
Speaker 1: What I see is that they first changed themselves and
Speaker 1: then they changed the world. Right Martin Luther King today
Speaker 1: great at Thunberg, one of the most effective climate activists
Speaker 1: of our time. She first became a vegan, then she
Speaker 1: convinced the parents to buy solar panels. Then she convinced
Speaker 1: their parents to buy an electric car. Then she convinced
Speaker 1: her mother to stop flying around the world. And she's
Speaker 1: the famous opera singer her mother, so that was basically
Speaker 1: her job. But she hu means her mother stuffed doing that.
Speaker 1: She did all of that and only then she started
Speaker 1: protesting in front of Swedish Parliament. So the political is
Speaker 1: personal and the personal is political. If you can change yourself,
Speaker 1: you can change the world. That is a beautiful place
Speaker 1: for us to wrap up. Thank you so much Rutger
Speaker 1: for coming on the show. I enjoyed this conversation. I
Speaker 1: highly recommend the book. Will have links in the show
Speaker 1: notes to the book and where you can find more
Speaker 1: about Rutger. Thanks so much. Thanks man. Enjoy this If
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