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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 Rutger 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 Rutger 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 Rutger 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 Rutger Bregman (Page 253 - 254)

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

— Humankind by Rutger 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 Rutger 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 Rutger 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 Rutger 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 Rutger 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 Rutger Bregman (Page 203 - 207)

It can be no accident that the first archaeological evidence for war suddenly appears approximately ten thousand years ago, coinciding with the development of private property and farming. Could it be that at this juncture we chose a way of life for which our bodies and minds were not equipped? Evolutionary psychologists refer to this as a mismatch, meaning a lack of physical or mental preparation for modern times. The most familiar illustration is obesity: where as hunter-gatherers we were still slim and fit, these days more people worldwide are overweight than go hungry. We regularly feast on sugars and fats and salts, taking in far more calories than our bodies need.

— Humankind by Rutger Bregman (Page 198)

There was one journalist, a radio reporter named Danny Meenan, who was sceptical of the story about the disinterested bystanders. When he checked the facts, he found that most of the eyewitnesses thought they had seen a drunken woman that night. When Meenan asked the reporter at the New York Times why he hadn’t put that information in his piece, his answer was, ‘It would have ruined the story.’ So why did Meenan keep this to himself? Self-preservation. In those days, no lone journalist would get it into his head to contradict the world’s most powerful newspaper – not if they wanted to keep their job. [..] That’s right, Kitty’s murderer was apprehended thanks to the intervention of two bystanders. Not a single paper reported it. This is the real story of Kitty Genovese. It’s a story that ought to be required reading not only for first-year psychology students, but also for aspiring journalists. That’s because it teaches us three things. One, how out of whack our view of human nature often is. Two, how deftly journalists push those buttons to sell sensational stories. And, last but not least, how it’s precisely in emergencies that we can count on one another.

— Humankind by Rutger Bregman (Page 192 - 194)

Hannah Arendt, meanwhile, had a seat in the courtroom. ‘The trouble with Eichmann,’ she later wrote, ‘was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.’ In the years that followed, Eichmann came to stand for the mindless ‘desk murderer’ – for the banality of evil in each of us. Only recently have historians come to some very different conclusions. When the Israeli secret service captured Eichmann in 1960, he’d been hiding out in Argentina. There, he’d been interviewed by former Dutch SS officer Willem Sassen for several months. Sassen hoped to get Eichmann to admit that the Holocaust was all a lie fabricated to discredit the Nazi regime. He was disappointed. ‘I have no regrets!’ Eichmann assured him. [..] it’s patently obvious that Eichmann was no brainless bureaucrat. He was a fanatic. He acted not out of indifference, but out of conviction. Like Milgram’s experimental subjects, he did evil because he believed he was doing good. [..] ‘I never did anything, great or small, without obtaining in advance express instructions from Adolf Hitler or any of my superiors,’ Eichmann testified during the trial. This was a brazen lie. And his lie would be parroted by countless Nazis who professed that they were ‘just following orders’. Orders handed down within the Third Reich’s bureaucratic machine tended to be vague, historians have since come to realise. Official commands were rarely issued, so Hitler’s adherents had to rely on their own creativity. [..] historian Ian Kershaw explains that they ‘worked towards him’, attempting to act in the spirit of the Führer. This inspired a culture of one-upmanship in which increasingly radical Nazis devised increasingly radical measures to get in Hitler’s good graces. [..] The perpetrators believed they were on the right side of history. Auschwitz was the culmination of a long and complex historical process in which the voltage was upped step by step and evil was more convincingly passed off as good. [..] The Nazi propaganda mill – with its writers and poets, its philosophers and politicians – had had years to do its work, blunting and poisoning the minds of the German people. Homo puppy was deceived and indoctrinated, brainwashed and manipulated. Only then could the inconceivable happen. [..] For Arendt did in fact study parts of Sassen’s interviews with Eichmann during the trial, and nowhere did she write that Eichmann was simply obeying orders. [..] Arendt was openly critical of Milgram’s obedience experiments. [..] Arendt accused Milgram of a ‘naïve belief that temptation and coercion are really the same thing’. And, unlike Milgram, she didn’t think a Nazi was hiding in each of us. [..] Hannah Arendt was one of those rare philosophers who believe that most people, deep down, are decent.37 She argued that our need for love and friendship is more human than any inclination towards hate and violence. And when we do choose the path of evil, we feel compelled to hide behind lies and clichés that give us a semblance of virtue.

Eichmann was a prime example. He’d convinced himself he’d done a great deed, something historic for which he’d be admired by future generations. That didn’t make him a monster or a robot. It made him a joiner. Many years later, psychologists would reach the same conclusion about Milgram’s research: the shock experiments were not about obedience. They were about conformity. [..] But above all, I think what made Milgram famous was that he furnished evidence to support an age-old belief. ‘The experiments seemed to offer strong support,’ writes psychologist Don Mixon, ‘for history’s oldest, most momentous self-fulfilling prophecy – that we are born sinners. [..] Belief in humankind’s sinful nature also provides a tidy explanation for the existence of evil. When confronted with hatred or selfishness, you can tell yourself, ‘Oh, well, that’s just human nature.’ But if you believe that people are essentially good, you have to question why evil exists at all. It implies that engagement and resistance are worthwhile, and it imposes an obligation to act.

— Humankind by Rutger Bregman (Page 171 - 174)

In other words, if you push people hard enough, if you poke and prod, bait and manipulate, many of us are indeed capable of doing evil. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. But evil doesn’t live just beneath the surface; it takes immense effort to draw it out. And most importantly, evil has to be disguised as doing good.

— Humankind by Rutger Bregman (Page 170)

Communication and confrontation, compassion and resistance. [T]hese are trainable skills. Resistance just takes practice.

— Humankind by Rutger Bregman (Page 175)