What is the nature of people? Are we good or evil? People throughout all of history have reflected deeply on these questions and recorded them in myriad philosophical and religious texts. More recently, since the age of enlightenment and the inauguration of the modern era, public intellectuals and scientists have weighed in, drawing from new-fashioned analytical tools to support their findings.

The reams of data concerning human nature are so incredibly vast and span so many incommensurate disciplines, from religious studies to moral and criminal psychology, to anthropology,  sociology, philosophy, and so on; that any hope of meaningful consolidation seems wishful. Yet, some conciliation is keenly desired.   

Anyone who has lived in the world has probably wondered what the most fundamental driving forces of peoples’ behaviour are: e.g., are we predominantly driven by self-centredness? Does true altruism even exist? If we believe that people are, at bottom, evil, how do we explain instances of incredible moral courage or altruistic behaviour in the world? If we believe the opposite, that people are fundamentally good, how do we explain despots and genocides, or for that matter, domestic abuse – physical and emotional – rape and murder?       

More than just a personal question, organisations at every level of complexity and authority would benefit from a better understanding of what kind of creature we are: bloodthirsty savages whose humanity would crack at the smallest disruption sans the veneer of civilisation, as many apocalyptic or disaster movies and books would have us believe; or closet angels with the potential to heal rifts among and within communities and build flourishing societies based on cooperation and giving?  

Rutger Bregman, a historian of Universal Basic Income (UBI) fame, has recently weighed in, drawing from history, philosophy, and social science, to argue that people are, for the most part, decent. While not exactly a ground-breaking claim, his perspective in his book Humankind runs counter to much of the doom-mongering narratives common among public intellectuals who write on this topic.

Hence, whatever our present thoughts are, Bregman’s contributions should be welcomed: Armed with ever more comprehensive models of human nature, individuals and organisations are well-positioned to create structures in all their spheres of influence that allow for the greatest possible flourishing for the greatest number.

Let us begin with the veneer theory. Some social scientists accept the notion that ‘civilisation is nothing more than a thin veneer that will crack at the merest provocation.’ Films and books like Lord of the Flies paint this pessimistic picture of people. There are, however, many counterexamples in real-life disaster or war time situations throughout history.

At the beginning of the Second World War, the Nazis planned to bomb the city of London to scare the British population and bring the country to its knees. Winston Churchill predicted that up to four million would flee the city. Others believed that the bombing would reveal people’s true nature: paralyzed by fear, they would be cowardly, panicked, and lose all semblance of humanity.

Over the next nine months, 80000 bombs were dropped and about 40000 people lost their lives, along with a million buildings. But, contrary to expectation, the people of London did not regress into hysterical savagery. Boys continued to play in the streets, shoppers went on shopping, policemen went on directing the traffic with supreme boredom, and cyclists continued to defy traffic laws. Few bothered to look up into the sky, even during air raid alarms. Shop owners even put up signs saying: ‘more open than usual.’ It turns out that the disaster brought out the best in the British people rather than the worst. They continued to demonstrate resilience, courage, humour and kindliness to each other.

Something similar was observed on the German side as well. The British military also believed that a country’s morale could be broken by bombing civilians. More than half of Germany’s towns and cities were destroyed as a result. Yet there were no signs of mass hysteria. The atmosphere in many bombed cities were steady and restrained. Neighbours helped each other. People pulled strangers out of the rubble and put out fires. Hitler Youth members tended to the homeless and the injured. And ironically, the bombings actually strengthened rather than injured the economy. German tanks multiplied by a factor of nine and fighter jets fourteen in that time.

In the September 11 attacks, thousands of people descended the stairs of the Twin Towers calmly and in orderly fashion, even though they knew their lives were in imminent danger. Eyewitnesses shared that people would step aside for the firefighters and the injured. Likewise, when Hurricane Katrina blew over New Orleans, 80 percent of homes were flooded and almost 2000 people lost their lives. The news reported roving gangs, looting, a sniper taking aim at rescue helicopters. In the Superdome shelter, it was also reported that two infants’ throats had been slit, and a seven-year-old had been raped and murdered.

Concerning the above, an historian wrote in the British newspaper: ‘Remove the elementary staples of organised, civilised life – food, shelter, drinkable water, minimal personal security – and we go back within hours to a Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all. […] A few become temporary angels, most revert to being apes.’ But months later, when thorough investigations were made to the goings on in New Orleans in the aftermath of the hurricane, researchers discovered that nothing of the sort occurred.

Gunfire was actually popping relief valves on gas tanks. The people in the Superdome had died of natural causes as well as an overdose and one suicide. There was no official report of rape or murder. And the looting was done by people who were cooperating with each other, and the police, to survive and to give to others in need. In addition, boats all the way from Texas came to help save people from the waters. Hundreds of civilians banded together to form rescue squads. So, rather than being overrun by anarchy, it turned out that the city of New Orleans was flooded with courage and charity in her most desperate time. Contrary to the veneer theory, people are a lot more resilient and altruistic than it would have us believe.

‘My own impression is that elite panic comes from powerful people who see all humanity in their own image.’ 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.

Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell (2009)

Self-fulfilling prophecies are one explanation for why, anecdotally, we see so much evil in the world and in other people. Beliefs can have a psycho-somatic effect. If a doctor gives you pills for something, telling you that the pills are highly effective, chances are, you will feel better after taking them, even if the pills are placebo. This effect is not only limited to medication but even surgery. An article published in the British Medical Journal showed that fake operations for conditions like heartburn or back pain were just as effective for half of all patients as real ones.

The point is that our reality is partially constructed by our beliefs. If we believe that people, including ourselves, are at bottom selfish and cruel, that is how we will treat them and, because people mirror each others, how they will treat us. Unfortunately, this seems to be a common belief for many. A world values survey taken from the 1980s in almost one hundred countries reveals that, beyond friends and family, most people believe that other people, in general, cannot be trusted. But if, on the contrary, you and others believe that people can be trusted, you will act accordingly and living in a trusting world becomes your reality.

An old man says to his grandson: ‘There’s a fight going on inside me. It’s a terrible fight between two wolves. One is evil – angry, greedy, jealous, arrogant, and cowardly. The other is good – peaceful, loving, modest, generous, honest, and trustworthy. These two wolves are also fighting within you, and inside every other person too.’ After a moment, the boy asks, ‘Which wolf will win?’ The old man smiles. ‘The one you feed.’

Humankind

We do not live in a vacuum, and like much of our other beliefs, beliefs about the untrustworthiness of others comes from somewhere. One of those places is the news. While it is important to be an informed citizen, more and more studies show that the news is a mental health hazard. As Steven Pinker has so comprehensively pointed out in his recent book Enlightenment Now, the world has become richer, safer, and healthier than ever before. Yet, the news continues to home in on the exceptional, e.g., terrorist attacks, violent uprisings, and the like.

In a study that took place between 1991 and 2005, instances of violence, plane crashes and other similarly distressing events declined in real life, yet their rate of coverage increased in the news. It is no surprise, then, that people who follow the news are more likely to agree with the claim that ‘most people only care about themselves.’

Why does the news do this? Part of it is their revenue model, based, as it is, on attention and corresponding clicks and shares. So, while you might pay attention to a sensational report about a fresh outbreak of fighting somewhere in the world, you will not see or be interested in a reporter standing just about everywhere else and saying, ‘I’m standing here, where there is still no sign of war and never has been for millennia.’

News is to the mind what sugar is to the body 

Swiss Novelist

Not only in the media but in academic thought as well – which our future movers and shakers experience during their time in university – we see more nods at the inherent badness of people. Biological evolution allegedly tells us that people are at heart self-serving and hypocritical. Economics allegedly tells us that people are calculating robots intent on optimising personal gain. A study in the 1990s found that the longer people studied economics, the more selfish their outlook on life became.

The doctrine that humans are innately selfish has a hallowed tradition in the western canon. Great thinkers like Thucydides, Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Luther, Calvin, Burke, Bentham, Nietzsche, Freud and America’s Founding Fathers each had their own version of the veneer theory of civilisation

Humankind

For this can be said of men in general: that they are ungrateful, fickle, hypocrites

Niccolò Machiavelli

All men would be tyrants if they could

John Adams

We are descended from an endless series of generations of murderers

Sigmund Freud

Society has therefore been suffused with less than stellar beliefs about human nature. It is no wonder then that to stand up against this belief is to be met with torrential denial and opposition. Furthermore, to believe that people are – under the right conditions – decent is to overturn systems and institutions predicated on the assumption that people need to be reined in, restricted, and regulated: a company with intrinsically motivated employees has little need for certain kinds of managers, and a participatory democracy with engaged and responsible citizens have scant need for political careerists.

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, referred to earlier, comes to the fore as an apt lesson in the nature of people when left to their own devices without a governing authority. The story of British schoolboys stranded on some island in the Pacific, some of whom end up killing each other, has been read the world over and treated as a textbook about the darkness of man’s heart. It won Golding the Nobel Prize, partly also because it echoed the 1960s zeitgeist, as people reflected on the horrific aftermath of the Second World War.

But would children behave like that in reality? Interestingly, we have anecdotal evidence to the contrary. In 1966, six teenaged boys were found on a deserted island in Polynesia by a fishing boat. They were students at a boarding school in Nuku‘alofa in the Capital of Tonga and had taken a boat to go fishing, only to fall asleep, drift for hours, and then be caught in a storm and eventually, after eight days, become stranded on a deserted island named ‘Ata for a year.       

‘Ata is considered uninhabitable, hence its deserted status. The boys, however, in their time on the island, had carved out a small commune with a food garden, a rainwater storage system, a gymnasium, a badminton court, and a permanent fire. Anyone who has gone camping or watched Survivor knows how hard it is to make fire from sticks and to sustain it. But that is what they did. They set up a roster to tend to each of their constructions and came up with effective means to manage conflict.

They sang with the help of a makeshift guitar and prayed each day and night. And when one of them broke his leg from slipping off a cliff, the others helped to set the leg back in place with sticks. When they were examined by a doctor soon after their rescue, they were found to be in peak physical condition, and the one boy’s leg had completely healed. Compared with the Lord of the Flies, this story is relatively unknown. Yet we learn from this real-life case that people do not necessarily ‘regress’ into savagery when left to their own devices in the absence of civilisation, but can develop friendship, loyalty, and hope.

Evolutionary theory is typically associated with great struggle, suffering, and pain. They are sometimes referred to as the engines of evolution. Applied, as they have been, to human affairs, they offer a dim view of our nature. But are we the conquerors of other now-extinct hominins and the world because we possess the most selfish genes? Relative to other animals, we are not that powerful – a chimpanzee could beat the crap out of us – nor are we that smart – even adult humans draw with or lose to our hairy cousins in intelligence tests for spatial understanding, calculation, causality, working memory and processing speed.

What about Machiavellian intelligence, the ability to weave webs of lies and manipulate others to achieve power and resources? Again, primates score better than humans at these tests. We are lousy liars – people who think they are good at it just have very forgiving or very trusting friends, if any. So, we are not powerful, smart, or cunning, relative to other living creatures. How then did we ‘win’ the competition of life?           

I think a lot of people naturally tend to assume that playing politics is going to get them a lot of benefits that I don’t think it’s going to get them, and that being honest is going to get them a lot of pain that I don’t think it’s going to get them. […] I’ve observed a lot of situations at big companies, where you can see this person acting as though they’re in Game of Thrones. And you come back in two years, and they just haven’t gotten anywhere. And you kind of assumed that they were going to win the Game of Thrones, because that’s what happens on TV. You know, the devious liar usually gets at least some kind of temporary victory somewhere in the plot, otherwise what’s the point of that character? But I’ve been very underwhelmed with how far these people get in real life. And people who are just really good at what they do, who are really honest all the time — I’ve seen them do really well. I don’t think it’s an absolute by any means, there are certainly exceptions. People who are dishonest are just way more obvious than they think they are. Everyone catches on to it really fast. They start suffering the costs really fast — faster than they probably think. And people who are honest become trusted, and that’s a big deal. It’s one of these things where I wonder if entertainment screws up our expectations, because in real life things are just way more boring. People trust trust-worthy people, and being trusted is really valuable.

Anonymous careers advice 80000 Hours

Paradoxically, it turns out that we ‘won’ by being the friendliest and most cooperative of our species. The behavioural trait of friendliness is correlated with certain physical characteristics in mammals, such as being smaller in size, having smaller, more youthful, and more feminine faces. The difference is particularly noticeable between domesticated and wild variants of certain closely related species such as wolves and dogs. In short, the dog is to the wolf what we are to our Neanderthal cousins:

And with this progress in friendliness and cooperative behaviour gave rise to a kind of skill that far surpasses the abilities of other animals, regardless of their intelligence: social learning through a deeper understanding of each other’s thoughts and emotions as well as through explicit instruction. To demonstrate how powerful this kind of social learning can be, imagine two populations of people, one filled with lone geniuses and the other filled with social people with middling intelligence. One in ten geniuses invents something that improves his or her station, like the wheel, or fire. But because these geniuses are not social, they only teach one other genius their invention.

By contrast, in the middling group, one in a thousand invents something similarly useful, but they are ten times as social as the geniuses. Assuming that teaching someone else the invention fails about half the time for both groups, only one in five geniuses will ever learn how to make fire or travel on wheels, while 99.9 percent of the middling socialites will eventually be able to do those things. If both such groups were then living contemporaneously and surviving on shared resources, it should be clear which group would thrive and eventually out-survive the other.

Likewise, Neanderthals may have been more intelligent survival wise than homo sapiens, but we were better connected and could learn from each other, through apparatuses such as complex language and so on. The popular image of evolution as the survival of the ‘fittest’ might imply to those unfamiliar with the theory of evolution or who watch too many movies of a certain type that it is those who can physically or intellectually dominate others who win the game of life. By contrast, the reverse is true: the friendliest, most cooperative and the most communicative were in the best position to procreate and raise more offspring, which, incidentally, is the textbook definition of ‘fitness’ in evolutionary biology.   

Our capacity to have compassion for other human beings is keenly observed in some of the world’s biggest wars. Most soldiers from all corners of the American Civil War, the Second World War, and many other skirmishes chose not to fire their weapons or deliberately missed and only attempted to fire accurately when they were watched by a superior officer. Contrary to popular imagination and with a few exceptions, the history of warfare is the history of soldiers refusing to kill each other.

The same can be said for current and pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer or nomadic societies. Anthropological studies report that war and violence were rare: tribes preferred non-violent solutions to their conflicts. And they were incredibly social as well. The average Ache tribe member in Paraguay meets 1000 other people in his or her life as they continually swap members while foraging in different parts of the land. Additionally, cave paintings from prehistoric times feature people hunting only other animals. There is not a single depiction of war. Strange if war had been prevalent in those times.

Many hunter-gatherer societies were egalitarian as well. Leaders were temporary and chosen based on their knowledge and skills. These societies had powerful mechanisms to enforce egalitarianism through such familiar strategies as shame, humour, mockery, and gossip.  

We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle

!Kung Tribesman

Such tribes also typically had rules against stockpiling and hoarding resources. Their sharing mindset thus opened them up to incredible generosity toward European explorers.

When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone

Christopher Columbus

How then, did we move from the above model of social organization to more unequal hierarchical societies? According to Bregman, it probably began with the agricultural shift. As people settled into fixed places where the land was flowing with milk and honey, it started to make sense for people to ‘own’ things, i.e., land, animals, and even other human beings. As ownership became commonplace, so did inequality. People became more focused on their communities and possessions and hence more xenophobic.

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

Bregman

And then the first kings and monarchs appeared to help the people wage war to protect said property and land. In certain cases, such kings would have secured enough military might to prevent themselves from being toppled from within, thus ushering a new era different from when leaders were temporary and chosen based on their achievements.

These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen and to run before his chariots. And he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plough his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants. He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants. He will take your male servants and female servants and the best of your young men and your donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves.    

The Prophet Samuel warning the Israelites about their desire for monarchy in the Hebrew Bible

The first states like Uruk in Mesopotamia and Egypt were slave states. Ancient texts such as the Hebrew Bible paint such societies in a negative light. The invention of money, legal institutions, and writing, now considered milestones of civilisation, were, at the time, wielded as instruments of oppression: money was the most efficient means to levy taxes from people, legal codes detailed punishments for helping slaves to escape, and the earliest written texts were long lists of outstanding debts.    

Civilization 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

Bregman

Up until only recently, the above was the norm. Then, in the last two hundred years, things began to change. We eradicated most infectious diseases, abolished slavery, and reduced abject poverty to under 10 percent. We must not forget however, that the last century has also seen two world wars. How are we to explain the cruelty and barbarism of something like the holocaust if we believe that people are fundamentally good? High profile social psychological research purportedly revealing people’s cruel tendencies, like the Zimbardo prison experiment and Milgram shock machine, have since been exposed as flawed or exaggerated.

Even though these studies are problematic, they contain gems of truth explaining how people can be goaded into performing acts of pure evil. As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. People are most capable of doing evil if the evil is disguised as good. The Nazi war trials showed that a campaign of propaganda and leader worship that lasted for years leading up to the second world war led ordinary soldiers to believe that their actions were on the right side of history. So, the only way to get people to do bad things, like exterminating a whole people group, is to convince them that they are doing good things for which they will be admired by future generations.

But beyond propaganda, there is another arguably stronger factor at play: the camaraderie and friendship fostered among soldiers. Paradoxically, it was things like courage, loyalty, devotion, and solidarity that enabled the German soldiers to be considered the greatest fighting force of the war. This was discovered from the 150000-page transcript of conversations overheard by the US Secret Service at a German POW camp. The same can be said about the American soldiers:

In 1949, a team of sociologists published the results of a vast survey among some half million US war veterans, which revealed they had not been motivated primarily by idealism or ideology. An American soldier wasn’t fuelled by patriotic spirit any more than a British one was by democratic rule of law. It wasn’t so much for their countries that these men fought as for their comrades. So deep were these ties that they could lead to some peculiar situations. Servicemen would turn down promotion if it meant transferring to a different division. Many who were injured and sick refused leave because they didn’t want a new recruit to take their place. And there were even men who sneaked out of their infirmary beds to escape back to the front. ‘Time and again,’ one sociologist noted in surprise, ‘we encountered instances when a man failed to act in accordance with his own self-interests [for fear of] letting the other guys down.’  

Bregman

This applies even to terrorists. They do not kill and die for a cause, but for each other. Brothers were involved in the attack on the Twin Towers, the Boston Marathon bombings, and the Bataclan slaughter in Paris. A leaked IS poll showed that most of the ‘grunts’ knew nothing about the Islamic faith; they were just people who were recruited by acquaintances and friends, some of whom bought The Koran for Dummies just before embarking on their missions. These people were simply friends who believed that they were being inducted into something for which they could demonstrate their solidarity with each other. Such is the power of the in-group.

Studies on babies also bear out the truth about our groupishness. Many studies indicate that we are born ‘tribal.’ We do not like people that look or sound unfamiliar to us. And as we age, we tend to gravitate toward people who look and think like us. We have tools such as oxytocin to help us feel empathy toward such others. The problem with this kind of empathy, as you may have guessed, is that it is narrow and selective. It makes us care intensely about one thing at the cost of everything else. This is why charities often use pictures of lone children or a homeless family to encourage donations rather than give statistics numbering in the millions: the former is more effective at soliciting donations, even though, objectively, one child’s plight is insignificant compared with the plight of several million children. Unfortunately, our natural capacity for empathy just cannot extend that far.  

And the more we empathise with one group of people, the more we ignore or generalise others. Empathy and xenophobia are facets of the same pro-social instinct baked into our nature. Wartime statistics such as the causes of deaths of British soldiers in the Second World War bear this out:

• Other: 1%
• Chemical: 2%
• Blast, crush: 2%
• Landmine, booby trap: 10%
• Bullet, anti-tank mine: 10%
• Mortar, grenade, aerial bomb, shell: 75%

Many more soldiers are killed by impersonal or remote means than by direct ones. Just like how most people would go vegetarian if they had to kill and flay animals with their bare hands to acquire meat, soldiers have a natural aversion to killing other soldiers if their only methods were personal and direct, e.g., like stabbing, strangling, etc. Leaders are usually at a great distance from the enemy, and hence do not feel empathy and therefore have no qualms ordering others to kill. The leaders most guilty of heinous crimes against humanity also had distinct psychological profiles. Hitler and Goebbels were power-hungry paranoid narcissists. Other destructive leaders also exhibited manipulative and egocentric tendencies. But they are few and far between.

If people are mostly decent then, why do they allow such indecent people to assume positions of power over them? As mentioned, people who exhibit Machiavellian tendencies do not usually win the ‘game of thrones,’ especially in social contexts where people meet for the first time and are expected to be together for an extended period, like university dorm rooms or summer camps, as research has shown. Anyone who starts acting that way, i.e., like a devious manipulator or arrogant jerk, is quickly marginalized. By contrast, people who assume positions of influence, formal or no, are usually those who are the friendliest and the most empathetic.  

But something happens to people once they have power:

Similar observations were made about the psychological effect of having an expensive car. The more expensive the car, the ruder the road manners and the less likely the driver will stop for pedestrians who have the right of way. People in power seem to suffer from similar traits as those with acquired sociopathy, i.e., whose behavior changed because of physical trauma to the head – more impulsive, self-centered, reckless, arrogant, rude, less attentive to other people and their perspectives, etc. So, it turns out that having power exposes you to comparable brain damage as someone with acquired sociopathy.   

Power also disconnects. And this disconnect makes those in power more cynical about the motivations of others. Studies show that people in power are more likely than average to view 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

Bregman

Such is the paradox of power. In most social organisations throughout human history, and unless those prospective leaders were particularly good at hiding their negative traits, we do choose modest and kind-hearted leaders, leaders who are generous, brave, wise, charismatic, fair, impartial, reliable, tactful, and strong. But once they arrive at the top, power often gets into their heads. In the past, when power did get into leaders’ heads, they were quickly and easily removed from their position and, if serious enough, would get booted from the tribe and face starvation.  

But the attendant rise in inequality that came along with the first settlements enabled the first kings and chieftains to find ways to justify their privileged position, from claiming divine right to acquiring the military power to defend the settlement such that they could no longer be easily toppled. In today’s capitalist world, inequality is similarly justified with another idea: merit. Unfortunately, dishing out rewards and privilege based on merit is problematic.   

How does society decide who has the most merit? How do you determine who contributes most to society? Bankers or bin men? Nurses or the so-called disruptors who’re always thinking outside the box? The better the story you spin about yourself, the bigger your piece of the pie. In fact, you could look at the entire evolution of civilisation as a history of rulers who continually devised new justifications for their privileges

Bregman

It is those in power who determine what is meritorious. Combine that with power’s corrupting effects and we can begin to see why inequality worsens rather than improves despite our best efforts. Giving people monetary rewards or incentives to motivate them to contribute ‘meritoriously’ to society, in fact, often has the opposite effect. Carrots and sticks do not work to build intrinsic motivation, and it is intrinsic motivation that is the primary driver of positive change.

Numerous studies show that financial incentives – which assume people are chiefly motivated by the accumulation of wealth – decrease intrinsic motivation and causes people to cut corners or slack off. Heavy-handed management – which assumes that most people are incompetent or unethical – also reduces the intrinsic motivation of workers at the front line. But it does not have to be this way:

A great example is FAVI, a French firm that supplies car parts. When Jean-François Zobrist was appointed its new CEO in 1983, FAVI had a rigid hierarchy structure and still did things the old-fashioned way. Work hard, you’ll get a bonus. Clock in late, your wages will be docked. From day one, Zobrist imagined an organisation in which not he, but his staff made the decisions. Where employees felt it their duty to arrive on time (and where you could be certain that if they didn’t, they had a good reason). […] His first act as CEO was to brick up the huge window that let management keep an eye on the whole shop floor. Next he binned the time clock, had the locks taken off the storage rooms and axed the bonus system. Zobrist split the company into ‘mini-factories’ of twenty-five to thirty employees and had them each choose their own team leader. To these he gave free rein to make all their own decisions: on wages, working hours, who to hire, and all the rest. Each team answered directly to their customers. Zobrist also decided not to replace the firm’s old managers when they retired, and cut out the HR, planning and marketing departments. FAVI switched to a ‘reverse delegation’ method of working, in which teams did everything on their own, unless they themselves wanted to call in management. This may sound like the recipe for a money-guzzling hippy commune, but in fact productivity at FAVI went up. The company workforce expanded from one hundred to five hundred and it went on to conquer 50 per cent of the market for transmission forks. Average production times for key parts dropped from eleven days to just one. And while competitors were forced to relocate operations to low-wage countries, the FAVI plant stayed put in Europe

Bregman

While cutting out over-the-top financial incentives and heavy-handed management might not be a suitable solution for all organisations, they rely on a fundamental truth about people: nothing stirs action better than the simple intrinsic desire to do it. Find people who want to do the job – not for money, prestige, or to meet someone’s expectations – but because they want to do it. More CEOs would have faith in their companies, more academics would be thirsting for knowledge, more teachers would care for their students, more therapists their patients, and more bankers the services they offer.

What does this radical notion of intrinsic motivation and attendant trust look like when applied to schools? Probably a lot less tutoring and academics and a lot more play. Play is a deep-seated instinct in our and many other animals’ nature. Through unstructured, non-competitive play, we learn to communicate, cooperate, and make compromises. It is fantastic for physical and mental well-being. The young in all hunter-gatherer cultures play in mixed groups, male and female, old and young. Things, however, changed, with the dawn of civilisation and especially the industrial era, when education and labour constituted a child’s day. Things reverted back once child labour was banned in Europe and North America, and children began once again to frolic in their respective neighbourhoods or communes.

But from the 1980s, individualism and the culture of achievement grew, and parents increasingly feared for their children’s grades. The result, as Bregman put it, has turned education into “something to be endured. A new generation is coming up that’s internalising the rules of our achievement-based society. It’s a generation that’s learning to run a rat race where the main metrics of success are your résumé and your pay cheque. A generation less inclined to colour outside the lines, less inclined to dream or to dare, to fantasise or explore. A generation, in short, that’s forgetting how to play.”     

But in a school that encourages more play and less structure, parents may worry about bullying. Such worries, however, while legitimate, should be laid to rest. Bullying is a big problem in schools, and some believe that it is an unfortunate quirk of our nature. Scores of sociological research, however, begs to differ. Bullying is most prevalent in a specific kind of environment, where (1) people live in the same place and are subject to an authority; (2) activities are carried out together at the same time; (3) activities are scheduled from one hour to the next, and (4) there is a system of explicit, formal rules enforced by an authority. Prisons, nursing homes for the elderly (a bully researcher once called nursing home Bingo “the devil’s game”), and schools (e.g., British boarding schools), fit this pattern, and these places are where we see the lion’s share of bullying.

By contrast, schools that are more unstructured and mixed across years and ability levels, like Agora in the Netherlands, do not experience much bullying if at all. The problem with such schools, of course, is that they do not cater to and therefore cannot meet standardized testing criteria and hence would not receive government funding to open. Such schools are therefore rare.

But, taking a deeper and broader picture of education, we may ask: what is its purpose?

In 2018 two Dutch economists analysed a poll of twenty-seven thousand workers in thirty-seven countries. They found that fully a quarter of respondents doubt the importance of their own work. Who are these people? Well, they’re certainly not cleaners, nurses, or police officers. The data show that most ‘meaningless jobs’ are concentrated in the private sector – in places like banks, law firms and ad agencies. Judged by the criteria of our ‘knowledge economy’, the people holding these jobs are the definition of success. They earned straight As, have sharp LinkedIn profiles and take home fat pay cheques. And yet the work they do is, by their own estimation, useless to society. Has the world gone nuts? We spend billions helping our biggest talents scale the career ladder, but once at the top they ask themselves what it’s all for. Meanwhile, politicians preach the need to secure a higher spot in international country rankings, telling us we need to be more educated, earn more money and bring the economy more ‘growth’.

Bregman

Education, tied as it will be, to a capitalistic and meritocratic society, will reflect its values, merits, and its flaws. So, until societies themselves begin to value intrinsic rather than extrinsic goods, i.e., champion and reward the creativity, talents, and passions of people unhindered by the unquestioned accumulation of wealth, power, status, or other similar markers of achievement, it is not likely for such schools to flourish.

What about prisons? Halden and Bastøy are prisons in Norway that do not fit the usual mould. Guards do not carry weapons. They are tasked with making friends with the inmates, who have access to amenities normally accessible to people who aren’t in prison, like music studios, libraries, kitchens, etc. It seems like the country’s drug dealers, murderers, and sex offenders have been rewarded with a luxury resort. But the idea behind this strange practice is that offenders should be prepared, as far as possible, for a normal life, so that they can assimilate back into normal society after they leave and not re-offend.

The proof is in the pudding: Norway’s recidivism rate is the lowest in the world. And such practices are also cheaper in the long run. The prison system pays for itself more than two times because even though the initial conviction is costly compared with traditional prison systems, low recidivism and high employment rates for ex-offenders more than make up for it. By contrast, in the last fifty years, the number of people incarcerated in the US has grown more than 500 percent, and many have to live in inhumane conditions. Such individuals have proven dangerous when released back to society.

The vast majority of us become exactly who we are told we are; violent, irrational, and incapable of conducting ourselves like conscious adults

former California prison inmate

People have the capacity for compassion and empathy, even toward their supposed enemies. In the First World War, on the eve of Christmas 1914, British soldiers at the trenches outside the town of La Chapelle-d’ Armentieres heard a carol sung in German from across no man’s land. They replied with their own carol, and soon, soldiers from both nations sung together in Latin. In other places, soldiers from across enemy lines came together to share tobacco, exchange gifts, laugh, chat, and take group photographs. A joint burial service was held in a village in northern France with soldiers from both sides present, and enemy soldiers elsewhere promised to meet up in London or Munich after the war. In total, two-thirds of the British front line stopped fighting on Christmas day.

This spontaneous peace was not a one-off event. Similar things happened in the Spanish Civil War, the Boer Wars, the American Civil War, the Crimean War, and the Napoleonic Wars. They demonstrate the power of proximity in building mutual trust and solidarity:

The greater the distance from the front lines, the greater the hate. On the home front – in government offices and newsrooms, in living rooms and pubs – hostility towards the enemy was immense. But in the trenches, soldiers developed a mutual understanding. ‘After our talk,’ one British soldier wrote in a letter home, ‘I really think a lot of our newspaper reports must be horribly exaggerated.’

Humankind

Given then, that people are mostly decent, especially under the right conditions, what are some rules we can live by to bring out the best in ourselves and others? The first thing we can do is to assume the best about other people’s intentions when in doubt. And in those rare cases when you are screwed over by someone with malicious intentions or someone in power, accept that it is a small price to pay for the luxury of being a trusting person and having the courage to trust others. Have compassion for people in power, their very position puts them at considerable risk of brain damage, i.e., if they are behaving like sociopaths, they probably can’t help it. If you yourself are in a position of power, combat this trend by choosing to be actively conscious about the needs and perspectives of others. Care for their welfare, initiate and sustain good relations with them, and solicit honest and constructive feedback from them. In the long run, such a life is far happier and more rewarding than a life of chronic distrust, even if you never get conned.

The second thing is to imagine win-win scenarios. Many big influences in our life tell us that we must compete with each other to eke out a living, to get our way, and to be happy. But the truth is that it is the absence of competition that ekes out the best deal for everyone. In zero-sum competitions, everyone, even winners, must pay a hefty price. This is part of the reason why the entrepreneur Peter Thiel once said that ‘competition is for losers.’ By contrast, we can create and sustain systems where everyone wins, like for example, when intrinsic goods are valued above extrinsic ones and when the economic pie is grown and distributed accordingly, i.e., not tied to some artificial notion of extrinsic merit. Prepare to be surprised by joy, since we live in a world where doing good feels good.

The third thing we can do is upgrade the golden rule. Doing unto others as you wish they do to you only makes sense if everyone has the same aspirations and desires. They do not. We should instead seek to understand others better and figure out the good things that they want to have and to do and give them the freedom to pursue those things. In other words, do unto others as they wished to have done to them. This is the platinum rule, and it usually manifests in our world as participatory democracies, employee-led teams, and self-directed educational journeys, all of which require a lot more communication and engagement across established hierarchies than the current status quo.

The fourth thing we can do is distinguish between empathy and compassion. While empathy makes us feel a victim’s suffering and therefore exhausts us, compassion motivates us to act. Temper the first and cultivate the second.

The fifth thing is to speak up about injustice and encourage others to do so as well:

History teaches that progress often begins with people […] whom others feel to be preachy or even unfriendly. People with the nerve to get on their soapbox at social occasions. Who raise unpleasant subjects that make you uneasy. Cherish these people, because they’re the key to progress.

Bregman

The sixth thing we can do is acknowledge that the same love that drives us drives other people as well. We have limits to our compassion. We play favourites and are biased toward those who are more like us. These are the same inward-looking drives that make our enemies seem so detestable. Understanding this might help us apprehend them more clearly and therefore have compassion toward them and their actions. It is no coincidence that religious figures such as the Buddha and Jesus left their families or encouraged their followers to do so, i.e., so that they could expand their circle of compassion toward countless others, including those who aren’t much like them.  

The seventh thing we can do is avoid online or television news and social media. The news generalises people and zooms in on sensational stuff of the worst kind. Likewise, social media, powered by an attention economy, feeds off our negative emotions to drive clicks and shares. To keep up to date with the news, read in-depth features written by thoughtful and responsible people from publications like the Economist or a good print newspaper. The eighth thing we can do is choose not to be cynical. Being fed clickbait news from social media might tempt us to hopelessness, but cynicism is lazy. It absolves us from the responsibility of doing something about the things we see wrong around us and discovering that we were wrong about a lot of things too.

Finally, the last thing we can do is to not be ashamed of doing good. Living in a society where it is assumed that people are ruled by self-interest might deter people from doing good and being honest about it. Studies have shown that people invent selfish motives for their altruistic actions when conversing with others for fear of being thought of as sanctimonious. There is, however, a difference between flaunting one’s good deeds, as some people love to do in an insincere and ineffectual way on social media, and just being honest about the intentions behind one’s actions. People are surprised by honest acts of generosity and are more likely to pay it forward with generous acts of their own. The ripple effects they create have the potential to positively impact countless others. So, if you’re doing good, just be honest about it.