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making the moai should really be seen as a collective work event, much like the construction of the temple complex at Göbekli Tepe more than ten thousand years ago (see Chapter 5). Or more recently on the island of Nias, west of Sumatra, where in the early twentieth century as many as 525 men were observed to drag a large stone statue on a wooden sled. No doubt endeavours like these could have been carried out more efficiently, but that wasn’t the point. These were not prestige projects dreamed up by some megalomaniacal ruler. They were communal rituals that brought people together.

— Humankind by Rutger Bregman (Page 126)

‘In following the history of civil society,’ Rousseau remarked, ‘we shall be telling also that of human sickness.’ [..] Virtually unknown in nomadic times, among pastoralists they began running rampant. Why? The reason is rather embarrassing. When humans began raising livestock, they also invented bestiality. Read: sex with animals. As the world grew increasingly uptight, the odd farmer covertly forced himself on his flock. [..] And that’s the second spark for the male obsession with female virginity. Apart from the matter of legitimate offspring, it was also a fear of STDs. Kings and emperors, who had entire harems at their disposal, went to great lengths to ensure their partners were ‘pure’. Hence the idea, still upheld by millions today, that sex before marriage is a sin. [..] In the very same years that Rousseau was writing his books, Franklin admitted that ‘No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.’ He described how ‘civilised’ white men and women who were captured and subsequently released by Indians invariably would ‘take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods’. Colonists fled into the wilderness by the hundreds, whereas the reverse rarely happened. And who could blame them? Living as Indians, they enjoyed more freedoms than they did as farmers and taxpayers. For women, the appeal was even greater. ‘We could work as leisurely as we pleased,’ said a colonial woman who hid from countrymen sent to ‘rescue’ her. ‘Here, I have no master,’ another told a French diplomat. ‘I shall marry if I wish and be unmarried again when I wish. Is there a single woman as independent as I in your cities?’ [..] That’s how our sense of history gets flipped upside down. Civilisation has become synonymous with peace and progress, and wilderness with war and decline. In reality, for most of human existence, it was the other way around. [..] But is civilisation all bad? Hasn’t it brought us many good things, too? Aside from war and greed, hasn’t the modern world also given us much to be thankful for? Of course it has. But it’s easy to forget that genuine progress is a very recent phenomenon. Up until the French Revolution (1789), almost all states everywhere were fuelled by forced labour. Until 1800, at least three-quarters of the global population lived in bondage to a wealthy lord. More than 90 per cent of the population worked the land, and more than 80 per cent lived in dire poverty. In the words of Rousseau: ‘Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.’

— Humankind by Rutger Bregman (Page 104 - 110)

Settled life exacted an especially heavy toll on women. The rise of private property and farming brought the age of proto-feminism to an end. Sons stayed on the paternal plot to tend the land and livestock, which meant brides now had to be fetched for the family farm. Over centuries, marriageable daughters were reduced to little more than commodities, to be bartered like cows or sheep. In their new families, these brides were viewed with suspicion, and only after presenting them with a son did women gain a measure of acceptance. A legitimate son, that is. It’s no accident that female virginity turned into an obsession. Where in prehistory women had been free to come and go as they pleased, now they were being covered up and tethered down. The patriarchy was born.

— Humankind by Rutger Bregman (Page 103)

Genesis 3: ‘By the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread.’

— Humankind by Rutger Bregman (Page 103)

The advent of settlements and private property had ushered in a new age in the history of humankind. The 1 per cent began oppressing the 99 per cent, and smooth talkers ascended from commanders to generals and from chieftains to kings. The days of liberty, equality and fraternity were over.

— Humankind by Rutger Bregman (Page 102)

But those who became too arrogant or greedy ran the risk of being exiled. And if that didn’t work, there was one final remedy. Take the following incident which occurred among the !Kung. The main figure here is /Twi, a tribe member who was growing increasingly unmanageable and had already killed two people. The group was fed up: ‘They all fired on him with poison arrows till he looked like a porcupine. Then, after he was dead, all the women as well as the men approached his body and stabbed him with spears, symbolically sharing the responsibility for his death.’ Anthropologists think interventions like this must have taken place occasionally in prehistory, when tribes made short work of members who developed a superiority complex. This was one of the ways we humans domesticated ourselves: aggressive personalities had fewer opportunities to reproduce, while more amiable types had more offspring.

Men in primitive societies spent more time with their children than many fathers do now. Child-rearing was a responsibility shared by the whole tribe: infants were held by everybody and sometimes even breastfed by different women. ‘Such early experiences,’ notes one anthropologist, ‘help explain why children in foraging societies tend to acquire working models of their world as a “giving place”
[..] we were raised on a diet of trust.

— Humankind by Rutger Bregman (Page 96 - 97)

‘Nomadic foragers,’ established one American anthropologist on the basis of a formidable 339 fieldwork studies, ‘are universally – and all but obsessively – concerned with being free from the authority of others.’

— Humankind by Rutger Bregman (Page 95)

He was astonished at how peaceful the inhabitants were. ‘They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword … and [they] cut themselves out of ignorance.’ This gave him an idea. ‘They would make fine servants … With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.’ Christopher Columbus – the traveller in question – lost no time putting his plan into action.

— Humankind by Rutger Bregman (Page 93)

‘War does not go forever backwards in time,’ says renowned anthropologist Brian Ferguson. ‘It had a beginning.’

— Humankind by Rutger Bregman (Page 92)

Prompted by these findings, scholars began revisiting assumptions about other wars as well. Such as the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg at the height of the American Civil War. Inspection of the 27,574 muskets recovered afterwards from the battlefield revealed that a staggering 90 per cent were still loaded.24 This made no sense at all. On average, a rifleman spent 95 per cent of the time loading his gun and 5 per cent firing it. Since priming a musket for use required a whole series of steps (tear open the cartridge with your teeth, pour gunpowder down the barrel, insert the ball, ram it in, put the percussion cap in place, cock back the hammer and pull the trigger), it was strange, to say the least, that so many guns were still fully loaded. But it gets even stranger. Some twelve thousand muskets were double-loaded, and half of those more than triple. One rifle even had twenty-three balls in the barrel – which is absurd. These soldiers had been thoroughly drilled by their officers. Muskets, they all knew, were designed to discharge one ball at a time. So what were they doing? Only much later did historians figure it out: loading a gun is the perfect excuse not to shoot it. And if it happened to be loaded already, well, you just loaded it again. And again.

— Humankind by Rutger Bregman (Page 82)

And that depressing book The Selfish Gene? It fit right in with 1970s-era thinking – a time hailed as the ‘Me Decade’ by the New York magazine. In the late 1990s, an avid Richard Dawkins fan decided to put his take on Dawkins ideas into practice. Rather than making him feel pessimistic, the book inspired CEO Jeffrey Skilling to run an entire corporation – the energy giant Enron – on the mechanism of greed. Skilling set up a ‘Rank & Yank’ system for performance reviews at Enron. A score of 1 placed you among the company’s top performers and gave you a fat bonus. A score of 5 put you at the bottom, a group ‘sent to Siberia’ – besides being humiliated, if you couldn’t find another position within two weeks you were fired. The result was a Hobbesian business culture with cut-throat competition between employees. In late 2001 the news broke that Enron had been engaging in massive accounting fraud. When the dust finally settled, Skilling was in prison. These days, 60 per cent of the largest US corporations still employ some variation of the Rank & Yank system.

— Humankind by Rutger Bregman (Page 71)

Human beings, it turns out, are ultrasocial learning machines. We’re born to learn, to bond and to play. Maybe it’s not so strange, then, that blushing is the only human expression that’s uniquely human. Blushing, after all, is quintessentially social – it’s people showing they care what others think, which fosters trust and enables cooperation.

— Humankind by Rutger Bregman (Page 69)

Two years after Richard Dawkins published his bestseller about egoistic genes, concluding that people are ‘born selfish’, here was an unknown Russian geneticist claiming the opposite. Dmitri Belyaev’s theory was that people are domesticated apes. That for tens of thousands of years, the nicest humans had the most kids. That the evolution of our species, in short, was predicated on ‘survival of the friendliest’.

— Humankind by Rutger Bregman (Page 63)