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‘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)

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 Rudger 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 Rudger 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 Rudger Bregman (Page 63)

Homo economicus, it turns out, is not a human, but a chimpanzee. ‘The canonical predictions of the Homo economicus model have proved remarkably successful in predicting chimpanzee behaviour in simple experiments,’ Henrich noted dryly. ‘So, all theoretical work was not wasted, it was just applied to the wrong species.’

— Humankind by Rudger Bregman (Page 16)

There is a persistent myth that by their very nature humans are selfish, aggressive and quick to panic. It’s what Dutch biologist Frans de Waal likes to call veneer theory: the notion that civilisation is nothing more than a thin veneer that will crack at the merest provocation.4 In actuality, the opposite is true. It’s when crisis hits – when the bombs fall or the floodwaters rise – that we humans become our best selves. [..] Catastrophes bring out the best in people. I know of no other sociological finding that’s backed by so much solid evidence that’s so blithely ignored. The picture we’re fed by the media is consistently the opposite of what happens when disaster strikes. [..] ‘My own impression,’ writes Rebecca Solnit, whose book A Paradise Built in Hell (2009) gives a masterful account of Katrina’s aftermath, ‘is that elite panic comes from powerful people who see all humanity in their own image.’14 Dictators and despots, governors and generals – they all too often resort to brute force to prevent scenarios that exist only in their own heads, on the assumption that the average Joe is ruled by self-interest, just like them.

— Humankind by Rudger Bregman (Page 6)

Cynicism is a theory of everything. The cynic is always right.

— Humankind by Rudger Bregman (Page 11)

For the powerful, a hopeful view of human nature is downright threatening. Subversive. Seditious. It implies that we’re not selfish beasts that need to be reined in, restrained and regulated. It implies that we need a different kind of leadership. A company with intrinsically motivated employees has no need of managers; a democracy with engaged citizens has no need of career politicians.

— Humankind by Rudger Bregman (Page 19)

The unsolved problem is how to be oneself in contact with other people.

— Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté (Page 264)

When a person empathizes, he can understand another’s feelings and even share them, but he is conscious of himself as a separate individual, capable of taking independent and useful action. When he becomes identified, that boundary disappears. He reacts as if he was himself the victim. He feels the victim’s humiliation, his helpless rage, his shame. This is not a state of adult human fellow feeling from which he can act effectively: it is a state of memory. He is gripped by the past. [..] No conscious awareness is necessary for the encoding of implicit memory, or for its being triggered. A tone of voice or a look in another’s eyes can activate powerful implicit memories.

— Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté (Page 248 - 250)

If the child does not feel accepted unconditionally, he learns to work for acceptance and attention. When he is not doing this work, he feels anxious, owing to an unconscious fear of being cut off from the parent. Later—as an adult—when not doing something specific, he has a vague unease, the feeling that he should somehow be working. The adult has no psychological rest because the infant and child had never known psychological rest. He has a dread of rejection and an insatiable need to have his desirability and value affirmed by others. Being wanted becomes a drug. Self-esteem is preempted by its false shadow, contingent self-esteem. What one does and what others think of it take precedence over who one is.

— Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté (Page 244)

“It drives me nuts when someone asks me what my feelings are,” a student in his midtwenties said. “I have no idea what my feelings are. I’m lucky if I figure out what my feelings were hours or days after something happens, but I never know what they are.”

— Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté (Page 242)

The ADD adult is often a night owl. The origin of the propensity to stay up late is not clear, but I believe we can learn something from observing ADD children. A child with attention deficit disorder may be difficult to rouse in the morning, but in the evening there is no getting him off to bed. I believe the problem is separation anxiety, because I have seen the same child be much more cooperative about bedtime when he feels more secure emotionally. I noted curiously my own experience over the years that at the times when I felt less tension and anxiety about my relationship with my wife, I had less tendency to stay up late. Something in the ADD adult dreads going to bed and turning the light off. The fear is of being alone with one’s urgent mind for even a few short minutes. I used to read until the book would drop from my hands and would wake hours later, still wearing my glasses and the lamp still burning.

A contributing factor is that the distractible ADD mind does find it easier to focus when the noises and intrusions of the day have abated, and everyone else has gone to bed. Many adults have told me this is when they get their best work done, or when they feel at peace enough to read or to rest.

— Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté (Page 286)

“It’s a lot easier for a child to comply,” Gordon Neufeld points out, “when they know at least you understand what they experience.”

— Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté (Page 197)