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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 Rudger 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 Rudger Bregman (Page 170)

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

— Humankind by Rudger Bregman (Page 175)

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 Rudger 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 Rudger 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 Rudger Bregman (Page 103)

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

— Humankind by Rudger 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 Rudger 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 Rudger 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 Rudger 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 Rudger Bregman (Page 93)

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

— Humankind by Rudger 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 Rudger Bregman (Page 82)