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In truth, it’s the cynic who’s out of touch. In truth, we’re living on Planet A, where people are deeply inclined to be good to one another. So be realistic. Be courageous. Be true to your nature and offer your trust. Do good in broad daylight, and don’t be ashamed of your generosity. You may be dismissed as gullible and naive at first. But remember, what’s naive today may be common sense tomorrow.

— Humankind by Rudger Bregman (Page 379)

Snipers much more often belong to the 1 to 2 per cent of soldiers who are psychopaths and have no natural aversion to killing. See Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity. A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists (Princeton, 2008), p. 372.

— Humankind by Rudger Bregman (Page 379)

Many soldiers who fought in the First and Second World Wars were also traumatised; however, Vietnam was comparatively much more traumatic. Of course, other factors were also to blame (such as the chilly reception Vietnam vets received on their return), but all the evidence suggests that the biggest was how the soldiers were conditioned to kill. Three recent studies among 1,200 veterans of Vietnam, 2,797 of Iraq and 317 of the Gulf War have shown that soldiers who killed (enabled by their conditioning) are at a substantially higher risk of PTSD.

— Humankind by Rudger Bregman (Page 379)

‘If you make a film about a man kidnapping a woman and chaining her to a radiator for five years – something that has happened probably once in history – it’s called searingly realistic analysis of society. If I make a film like Love Actually, which is about people falling in love, and there are about a million people falling in love in Britain today, it’s called a sentimental presentation of an unrealistic world.’ Richard Curtis

— Humankind by Rudger Bregman (Page 379)

Education has become something to be endured. A new generation is coming up that’s internalising the rules of our achievement-based society. It’s a generation that’s learning to run a rat race where the main metrics of success are your résumé and your pay cheque. A generation less inclined to colour outside the lines, less inclined to dream or to dare, to fantasise or explore. A generation, in short, that’s forgetting how to play.

— Humankind by Rudger Bregman (Page 286)

De Blok has a very different take on things. He sees his employees as intrinsically motivated professionals and experts on how their jobs ought to be done. ‘In my experience, managers tend to have very few ideas. They get their jobs because they fit into a system, because they follow orders. Not because they’re big visionaries. They take some “high-performance leadership” courses and suddenly think they’re a game changer, an innovator.’

‘What you get with all these MBA programmes is people convinced they’ve learned a convenient way to order the world. You have HR, finance, IT. Eventually, you start believing that a lot of what your organisation is accomplishing is down to you. You see it with loads of managers. But subtract management and the work continues as before – or even better.’

— Humankind by Rudger Bregman (Page 272)

‘The opposite of play is not work,’ the psychologist Brian Sutton-Smith once said. ‘The opposite of play is depression'

— Humankind by Rudger Bregman (Page 294)

philosopher Ivan Illich said decades ago: ‘School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.’

— Humankind by Rudger Bregman (Page 294)

In 1959, the BBC asked Russell what advice he would give future generations. He answered: When you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed, but look only and solely at what are the facts.

‘Never let yourself be diverted by what you wish to believe.’

— Humankind by Rudger Bregman (Page 253 - 254)

In this world, it’s survival of the shameless.

— Humankind by Rudger Bregman (Page 240)

Isn’t it power that makes us short-sighted? Once you arrive at the top, there’s less of an impetus to see things from other perspectives. There’s no imperative for empathy, because anyone you find irrational or irritating can simply be ignored, sanctioned, locked up, or worse. Powerful people don’t have to justify their actions and therefore can afford a blinkered view. That might also help explain why women tend to score higher than men on empathy tests. A large study at Cambridge University in 2018 found no genetic basis for this divergence, and instead attributed it to what scientists call socialisation. Due to the way power has traditionally been distributed, it’s mostly been up to women to understand men.

— Humankind by Rudger Bregman (Page 228)

powerful people feel less ‘connected’ to others, is it any wonder they also tend to be more cynical? One of the effects of power, myriad studies show, is that it makes you see others in a negative light. If you’re powerful you’re more likely to think most people are lazy and unreliable. That they need to be supervised and monitored, managed and regulated, censored and told what to do. And because power makes you feel superior to other people, you’ll believe all this monitoring should be entrusted to you.

— Humankind by Rudger Bregman (Page 227)

Just as most of us would instantly go vegetarian if forced to butcher a cow, most soldiers become conscientious objectors when the enemy gets too close.

Aside from long-range weapons, armies also pursue means to increase psychological distance to the enemy. If you can dehumanise the other – say, by portraying them as vermin – it makes it easier to treat the other as if they are indeed inhuman. [..] You can also drug your soldiers to dull their natural empathy and antipathy towards violence. From Troy to Waterloo, from Korea to Vietnam, few armies have fought without the aid of intoxicants, and scholars now even think Paris might not have fallen in 1940 had the German army not been stoked on thirty-five million methamphetamine pills (aka crystal meth, a drug that can cause extreme aggression). [..] And so we’re finding ways to root out our innate and deep-seated aversion to violence. In modern armies, comradeship has become less important. Instead we have, to quote one American veteran, ‘manufactured contempt’ [..] The American military also managed to boost its ‘firing ratio’, increasing the number of soldiers who shoot to 55 per cent in the Korean War and 95 per cent in Vietnam. But this came at a price. If you brainwash millions of young soldiers in training, it should come as no surprise when they return with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as so many did after Vietnam. Innumerable soldiers had not only killed other people – something inside them had died, too.

[..]

Terrorism experts and historians consistently point out that people in positions of power have distinct psychological profiles. War criminals like Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels are classic examples of power-hungry, paranoid narcissists.

— Humankind by Rudger Bregman (Page 219 - 222)

It’s no mystery why terrorists act together: brutal violence is frightening. As much as politicians talk about ‘cowardly acts’, in truth it takes a lot of nerve and determination to fight to the death. ‘It’s easier,’ one Spanish terrorism expert points out, ‘to take that leap accompanied by someone you trust and love.’

— Humankind by Rudger Bregman (Page 208)

By early 1944 there was one conundrum that had scientists stumped. Why did the Germans continue to fight so hard? Why weren’t more of their soldiers laying down their arms and conceding defeat?

Most experts agreed that the Germans were in essence possessed. This explained their desertion rate that approached zero, and why they fought harder than the Americans and the British. So much harder, historians calculated after the war, that the average Wehrmacht soldier inflicted 50 per cent more casualties than his Allied counterpart. [..] For weeks Morris interviewed one German captive after another. He kept hearing the same responses. No, it wasn’t the draw of Nazi ideology. No, they didn’t have any illusions that they could still somehow win. No, they hadn’t been brainwashed. The real reason why the German army was capable of putting forth an almost superhuman fight was much simpler.

Kameradschaft. Friendship

‘Nazism begins ten miles behind the front line,’ scoffed one German prisoner, whereas friendship was right there in every bunker and trench. The military commanders were well aware of this, and, as later historians discovered, used it to their advantage. Nazi generals went to great lengths to keep comrades together, even withdrawing whole divisions for as long as it took new recruits to form friendships, and only then sent everyone back into the fray. [..]

Tactics, training, ideology – all are crucial for an army, Morris and his colleagues confirmed. But ultimately, an army is only as strong as the ties of fellowship among its soldiers. Camaraderie is the weapon that wins wars. [..] Psychologist Roy Baumeister calls the fallacious assumption that our enemies are malicious sadists ‘the myth of pure evil’. In reality, our enemies are just like us.

— Humankind by Rudger Bregman (Page 203 - 207)