Humankind Book Summary - Humankind Book explained in key points

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Humankind summary

Name: Humankind
Rating: 4.6 (183 reviews)
Author: Rutger Bregman

Rutger Bregman

A Hopeful History

4.6 (183 ratings)

29 mins

Brief summary

Humankind by Rutger Bregman challenges the idea that humans are inherently selfish by presenting evidence of our altruistic behavior throughout history. This book provides a refreshing perspective on human nature that encourages empathy and community.

Topics

Anthropology The Human Condition

Table of Contents

Humankind
Summary of 9 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 9

What’s in it for me? A new picture of humanity.

Humans are innately bad. Just watch the news. We fight. We cheat. We murder and lie and steal. Our beastly natures are only held in check by government, with its laws and regulations, its punishments for every crime.

In such a world, it's the people who think only of themselves – the egoists among us – who get ahead. It's dog-eat-dog out there, and only the fittest will survive.

But wait a minute. Is that really the case? Or is this merely a story we've told ourselves for centuries, a lie so familiar that we mistake it for the truth?

If you look at the latest scientific findings, from archeology to criminology, you'll discover a completely different narrative. We are not bad. We are not selfish. And if you don't believe it, these blinks are here to tell you otherwise.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how British and German soldiers managed to celebrate Christmas together during World War I;
why news is a “nocebo”; and
what a Homo puppy is.

Crises like war don’t automatically make us barbarians.

Do you know what Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Winston Churchill, and Franklin Roosevelt have in common? Yes, all their names are splashed across history. But that’s not all. They were each influenced by the same book: The Psychology of the Masses, by the French author Gustave Le Bon.

In the book, Le Bon explains that in crises like war, the masses panic and gradually regress to their true nature, which is violent and selfish. In other words, when people fear for their lives, they become barbarians, concerned with nothing but their own well-being.

Hitler had Le Bon’s ideas in mind when he sent 348 Luftwaffe bombers to London in 1940. He believed that, in the rain of bombs, the people of London would become panicked and barbarous, aiding in their own overthrow.

What actually happened when the bombs began to fall must have come as a surprise.

The key message here is: Crises like war don’t automatically make us barbarians.

In the year before the German Luftwaffe's "Blitz," which killed more than 40,000 people in London alone and destroyed entire neighborhoods, the British public built emergency psychiatric wards in a desperate attempt to prepare for the anticipated panic.

But these facilities remained empty. Countless observers described how the British went about their daily lives more or less normally, even though air raids had long been underway. Children played, shoppers haggled, and trains continued to run. Londoners calmly drank their tea, despite windows bursting in the background, shattered by the detonation of bomb upon bomb.

Not only did Londoners remain unexpectedly calm – in many ways, they were psychologically and mentally better than ever before. Of course there was heartrending grief and deep mourning. But alcohol abuse decreased, and fewer people committed suicide. When it was all over, many Londoners even longed for wartime, because of the widespread camaraderie and solidarity it promoted. People helped each other out far more than they did under normal circumstances.

In short, the people of London defied Hitler’s expectations and disproved Le Bon’s theory.

The existential threat by no means brought out the worst in people. Rather, it made them less selfish. Contrary to Le Bon's thesis, the crisis of the Blitz strengthened British society in many respects. Hitler had achieved the exact opposite of his actual goal.

The idea persists that humans are, at bottom, selfish.

You’ve surely heard the slogan "Keep Calm and Carry On.” Nowadays, it’s emblazoned on countless T-shirts and cups, endlessly riffed on and satirized. But did you know it was originally developed by the British Ministry of Information to preserve British morale during the Second World War? Posters urging stoic endurance were printed by the million.

Today, many people believe that resilience is a quintessential part of the British character – and that Britons’ calmness during wartime was proof of this. But really, the trait is a human one. Countless other examples confirm that people don’t panic in the face of disaster, let alone regress to savage impulses. After the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers, for example, supposedly selfish New Yorkers routinely risked their own lives to save the lives of others. The crisis encouraged solidarity, not savagery.

News and fictional stories worsen our view of humanity’s nature.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re on the left or the right side of the political spectrum; almost everyone has a bleak outlook on humanity. But why do we see the world so negatively? Why do we think people are fundamentally egoistic? The answer can be found where most of us get our information: the news.

An event is usually only considered newsworthy if it is extraordinary – and, in most cases, that means extraordinarily disastrous. The news is a pageant of pain and misfortune: an attack here, a natural disaster there. You’ll never see a headline announcing that war was not declared in Europe today.

Humans aren’t evil by nature.

Is the heartwarming case of the real Lord of the Flies an anomaly – an uplifting exception to the disheartening rule? Or is there actually something that determines whether we behave well or badly when cut off from society?

Thinkers have grappled with this question for centuries. The seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes assumed that humans in their natural state are “bad” – they behave only in their own self-interest. He believed that without a state, rules, and laws, humanity would be in a constant “war of all against all.” As we have seen, this worldview is still prevalent today.

Human evolution isn't about survival of the fittest, but survival of the friendliest.

And so the question remains: How did we really live and behave before we became civilized – that is, before we settled down and began to cultivate land about ten thousand years ago? To answer this question, why not turn to the archivists of the Stone Age – the artists who painted fact and fiction, history and myth, across that age-old canvas, the cave wall?

Cave paintings offer insight into the lives of our nomadic ancestors. But no cave paintings from the nomadic period have been discovered that depict violence or wars. Hunting scenes, however, are depicted often – so the violent deaths that skeletal remains exhibit don’t necessarily testify to human violence. They could just as easily have resulted from conflicts with animals.

Civilization turned humans violent.

So we’ve determined that the Hobbesian worldview can’t be true. How, then, did Homo puppy become violent in the first place? Because – and this is the elephant in the room – it can’t be denied that we are, despite our puppyish features and dispositions, capable of committing violent acts.

Let’s consider the history of philosophy once again. Nearly one hundred years after Hobbes concluded that human nature is base and barbarous, the French Romantic philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau reached the opposite conclusion. In his view, humanity isn’t innately evil and corrupt. It’s fundamentally good, but was corrupted by civilization.

Our capacity for empathy also has a dark side.

Maybe all these arguments seem pretty logical to you. Science is only substantiating what many have believed all along – that humans are essentially good and would prefer to do others no harm. But how do we square this with history’s atrocities, such as the Holocaust?

Well, the answer to this is hidden in another question – a question that Allied scientists asked themselves in 1944: How could it be that even in the face of immediate defeat, German soldiers continued to fight? In fact, research revealed that German Wehrmacht soldiers fought almost twice as effectively as Allied soldiers. Even their desertion rate was close to zero. This puzzled the Allied researchers. Just what was going on with the Nazis?

Humans avoid violence whenever possible, even in life-or-death situations.

Empathy is double-edged: it cuts two ways. It ensures that we fight for our family, friends, and neighbors. But it also enables us to kill for them. When it’s a matter of life and death on the battlefield, we depart from our friendly disposition and resort to violence – or so we often assume.

But this assumption is also false. We don’t suddenly become barbarians on the battlefield. Even in extreme situations like war, when face-to-face with the enemy, humans generally find it very difficult to pull the trigger and kill another person.

We need a new, more realistic view of humanity.

As we’ve seen, war did not occur until we became civilized. The theory that the veneer of civilization falls away as soon as we’re in crisis mode is simply wrong. We often don't even become violent when violence might make sense, like during wartime. So we’re really not as bad as we think. And if we can internalize this, we may be able to develop a new and better society.

However, if we continue to assume that people will only behave morally under threat of punishment, then there will, of course, be consequences. More and more of the population will need to be locked away – as we see in the United States, where inmates are often crammed into cage-like cells and may be let out for only one hour per week. We need to pause and ask ourselves, Does such treatment truly rehabilitate people convicted of crimes? Does it really promote moral behavior?

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What is Humankind about?

Humankind (2020) is an optimistic study of its namesake. For centuries, the message seemed to be carved in stone: Humans are evil by nature, and only the veneer of civilization keeps us from terrorizing and murdering each other. The author Rutger Bregman aims to dispel that prejudice and reveal that our essential nature is peaceful and friendly. Perhaps humanity – as recent discoveries from disciplines like archeology and criminology suggest – is actually much less selfish than we think.

Best quote from Humankind

Empathy and xenophobia go hand in hand. Theyre two sides of the same coin.

—Rutger Bregman

Who should read Humankind?

Optimists
Pessimists
Anyone in need of good news

About the Author

Rutger Bregman, born in the Netherlands in 1988, proves that a historian can also be a best-selling author. In his 2017 book Utopias for Realists, Bregman made the case for a universal basic income, open borders, and a 15-hour workweek. He’s also known for ruffling feathers at the World Economic Summit in Davos, in 2019, where he called out billionaires for tax avoidance.

Categories with Humankind

Philosophy Society & Culture Psychology

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